The Son

  Campbell thinks tonight will be worse than last. His men are outnumbered fifty to one. “They’ve been talking about buying us machine guns,” he said. “They should have done it already.” Then he asked: “What do you think about this Sheriff Graham?”

  “I think he will be sad if he misses out on all this looting.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  It was quiet. We sat there on the porch looking out over the country.

  “What is it like to have all this?” he said.

  “I don’t know, really.”

  He nodded as if he’d expected this answer.

  “Would you like some supper to bring with you for later?” I said.

  He didn’t reply. We looked toward the town but you cannot see it from the porch.

  “Your old man is something, I’ll say that.”

  “He’s something all right.”

  “My daddy is dead,” he said.

  Something made me wonder if he were responsible for this condition. Still, I liked him. He could not have been over five foot five in boots and every man in town was afraid of him.

  “What are you planning to do about tonight?”

  “Shoot a lot of people, I guess.”

  “That does not sound like much of a plan.”

  “Well, that’s what we got.”

  “Have you done much work like this?”

  “I shot two guys in Beaumont. But this is like turkey season compared to that.”

  It was quiet.

  “How do you do it?”

  “You use your sights,” he said.

  AUGUST 15, 1915

  The light of several fires visible from my window last night; gunfire sporadic but constant.

  By morning another dozen Mexican families were gone; they appear to have left under their own power. Fourteen more dead, six of them white. On the phone, Campbell admitted that he was the one who shot the deputy the other evening. The deputy was wearing his badge and looting a house.

  Charles and I drove into town and came on a Tejano man hanging from a live oak.

  “That’s Fulgencio Ypina,” Charles said.

  We stopped and Charles climbed the tree and cut him down. We lifted and deposited him as gently as possible in the back of the truck. Fulgencio had cleared brush for us for years. His body was already beginning to swell.

  “Who is going to bury these people?” said Charles.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is the army coming?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “We should call Uncle Phineas.”

  “He is on a fishing trip.”

  “Well, you need to do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But you need to.”

  THE STREETS WERE empty. There were handwritten signs posted everywhere:

  ANYONE FOUND ON THESE STREETS AFTER DARK (INCLUDING WHITES) WILL BE SHOT. ORDER OF THE TEXAS RANGERS.

  When we found Sergeant Campbell, he had been shot again, this time through the upper part of his calf. He was sitting in a chair in the back of the feed store with his boots off and his pants down.

  “At least people seem to aim for your extremities,” I joked. The leg did not look bad—the bullet had missed the bone and the artery.

  Campbell was watching the doctor. “You get hit in the hands because your hands are in front of your chest when you aim a gun. And I got hit in the leg because when I shot the guy last night, he discharged his weapon when he fell over.” He looked at me as if our ages were reversed.

  “You can tell every Mexican family in town that they can come to my ranch,” I said.

  “That will make things easier on me.” He did not seem to consider it a big favor. He continued to watch Guillermo Chavez, who at twenty-five is the town veterinarian, having taken over from his father. Chavez unbandaged his hand and arm.

  “Who did these dressings?”

  “I did. Are you a real doctor?”

  “Mostly with animals.”

  “Licensed?”

  “Look at me and take a guess.”

  Campbell shook his head: “This is a goatfuck.”

  “I am happy you are here,” said Guillermo. “Which is something I never thought I would say to a Rinche.”

  Campbell ignored the insult. “What’s gonna happen if those bones knit like that?”

  “You’ll have trouble with your hand.” He shrugged. “But the forearm is the real trouble, because there is a lot of bruising and that will need to be cut out.”

  “Or I lose the arm?” His voice cracked and for an instant I saw Campbell for what he was, a scared twenty-year-old; but the mask quickly returned.

  “Just keep packing this powder into it. When it begins to ooze and get sticky, add more. Always keep dry powder in the wound.”

  “That looks like yellow sugar.”

  “Sugar and sulfa.”

  “Table sugar.”

  “It’s a reliable remedy. The sugar alone would be enough.”

  “This is fuckin’ stupid.”

  “Use it or not, I don’t care. Your colleagues in Starr County murdered my cousin, your colleagues in Brownsville murdered my uncle and his son, and here I am, fixing you up.”

  “There’s rotten ones in every barrel,” said Campbell.

  “Tell that to Alfredo Cerda or Gregorio Cortez or Pedro Garcia. Or their wives and children, who are also dead. Your colleagues arrive and stir things up and the army comes and settles them down. But this is obvious. It is not even a matter for serious discussion.”

  Campbell was flexing his fingers to see if he could still grip his gun. “Do you have morphine?” he said to Guillermo. To me he said: “We can’t pay you for the use of the ranch.”

  “When is the army getting here?”

  “Never,” he said.

  “Well . . . One riot, one Ranger.”

  “Sure. Unless you’re the one Ranger.”

  SALLY WAS FURIOUS that I’d invited all the Mexicans in the town to our house and immediately demanded I put Consuela on the phone. I could hear her ordering Consuela to have the other maids hide the silver and take up the expensive rugs. Consuela handed the phone back.

  “What is wrong with you, Peter?”

  “These people are going to die if they don’t come here.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Glenn is going to be fine,” I told her.

  “You can’t say that,” she said. “You can’t say that when you’re not even here with him.”

  I HOPED THE Mexicans would make the move quietly, but by dark, half the Tejano residents of the town, nearly a hundred people, had walked, driven, or ridden up to the ranch, carrying, pushing, or pulling their valuables in donkey carts or handcarts or on their backs.

  Midkiff and Reynolds, without being prompted, both sent men to help protect the Mexicans. They are protecting our ranch, the Colonel corrected me, don’t be an idiot.

  Campbell came to check in in person, deputized the eight men (though he had no legal power to do so), and returned to town, limping badly, his right arm in a sling. Somewhere he acquired a .351 Winchester, which can be operated with one hand. I did not ask how he got it. We have chained and locked the gates to the ranch and Charles and the vaqueros have dug themselves in by the road.

  Chapter Ten

  Eli/Tiehteti

  1849

  The Kotsoteka Comanche lived mostly along the Canadian River, where the Llano ended and the dry plains turned into grassy canyonlands. Historically they’d ranged down to the outskirts of Austin; Toshaway knew my family’s headright better than I did. The Texans had signed a treaty saying that there would be no more settlements west of town, but in the end they were a certain breed, and when an agreement became troublesome, they did not mind breaking it.

  “One day a few houses appeared,” said Toshaway. “Someone had been cutting the trees. Of course we did not mind, in the same way you would not mind if someone came into your
family home, disposed of your belongings, and moved in their own family. But perhaps, I don’t know. Perhaps white people are different. Perhaps a Texan, if someone stole his house, he would say: ‘Oh, I have made a mistake, I have built this house, but I guess you like it also so you may have it, along with all this good land that feeds my family. I am but a kahúu, little mouse. Please allow me to tell you where my ancestors lie, so you may dig them up and plunder their graves.’ Do you think that is what he would say, Tiehteti-taibo?”

  That was my name. I shook my head.

  “That’s right,” said Toshaway. “He would kill the men who had stolen his house. He would tell them, ‘Itsa nu kahni. Now I will cut out your heart.’ ”

  We were lying in a grove of cottonwoods, looking out over the valley of the Canadian. The grass was thick around us, grama and bluestem, more than could ever be eaten. The sun was going down and the crickets were sawing away and the birds were making a slaughter. On our side of the river the cane was glowing like it would spark at any minute but across the water, toward the south and the white settlements, the cliffs had already gone dusky. I was thinking of all the times I’d been mad at my brother for keeping a candle lit and I’d gone to sleep by myself outside.

  Toshaway was still talking: “Of course we are not stupid, the land did not always belong to the Comanche, many years ago it was Tonkawa land, but we liked it, so we killed the Tonkawa and took it from them . . . and now they are tawohho and try to kill us whenever they see us. But the whites do not think this way—they prefer to forget that everything they want already belongs to someone else. They think, Oh, I am white, this must be mine. And they really believe it, Tiehteti. I have never seen a white person who did not look surprised when you killed them.” He shrugged. “Me, when I steal something, I expect the person will try to kill me, and I know the song I will sing when I die.”

  I nodded.

  “Am I crazy to think this?”

  “No sé nada.”

  He shook his head. “I am not even slightly crazy. The white people are crazy. They all want to be rich, same as we do, but they do not admit to themselves that you only get rich by taking things from other people. They think that if you do not see the people you are stealing from, or if you do not know them, or if they do not look like you, it is not really stealing.”

  A bear came down to the water and flights of teal and wigeon were settling in the far pools. Toshaway continued to braid his lariat.

  “Moowi,” he said.

  “Moowi,” I repeated.

  “I have watched you many times, Tiehteti. Your father has seen me twice, but allowed himself to believe he had seen nothing. I have watched your mother feed the disgraced starving Indians who come to her door, I have watched you lying on your belly studying deer tracks, and I have watched when you killed the big tumakupa that night.” He sighed. “But the Yap-Eaters smelled the smoke from your evening meal, and when I lied and told them I knew the family that lived there, that you were very poor, nabukuwaatu, they insisted that for a poor family, you seemed to be eating very well, and then Urwat decided to check for himself.”

  I looked out past the hills and saw my mother on the porch and my sister in the grass and my brother in a shallow pit. I wondered if my brother and sister had done something and that was what brought the Indians on us. Then I wondered if my sister had been winking in and out the way I was. My mother would not have let herself. But my sister . . . She would have let herself wink out, I decided. She had not been awake for most of it.

  Then I was thinking about my father. I pushed him out of my mind. There was nothing but shame between us.

  “Moowi,” I said to Toshaway.

  “Moowi,” he said.

  TOSHAWAY HAD NO idea how old he was, though he looked around forty. Like the other Comanche purebloods he had a big forehead, a fat nose, and a heavy square melon. He looked like a field hand, and on the ground he was slow as an old cowboy, but put him on a horse and the natural laws did not apply. The Comanches all rode like this, though they did not all look like Toshaway: they were darker or lighter, they were lathy as Karankawas and fat as bankers, they had faces like hatchets or Spanish kings, it was a democratic-looking mix. They all had a few captives somewhere in the bloodline—from other Indian tribes or the Spanish, or more recently, the Anglos and Germans.

  UNLESS I WANTED a hiding, I was up before the stars set, walking through the wet grass, filling the water jugs in the cold stream and getting the fire going. The rest of the day I did whatever the women didn’t feel like doing. Pounding corn for Toshaway’s wife, cleaning and flaying game the men brought in, getting more water or firewood. Most Comanches used a flint and steel, same as the whites, but they made me learn the hand drill, which was a yucca stalk you spun between your palms while leaning it into a cedar board. You spun and leaned with all your strength until a coal formed or your hands began to bleed. The coal was the size of a pinhead. Usually it broke up before you could get it into the bundle of cattail down or punk or whatever you’d collected for tinder.

  Meanwhile, when they weren’t hunting, Escuté and Nuukaru spent their days sleeping, smoking, or gambling, and if I tried to talk to them when others could see, I would be ignored or beaten, though it was nothing compared to the beatings the women gave me.

  When everything else was done I was set to making ta?siwoo uhu—buffalo robes—which was like printing money on a slow press. Each robe took a week. It would then be traded for a handful of glass beads and end up in the coat of a soldier who was out fighting other Indians or perhaps on a sofa in Boston or New York, where, having wiped out their own aboriginals, they held a great affinity for anything Native.

  But all that was women’s work. If Toshaway called me over everything else stopped. Sometimes to catch and saddle his horse, sometimes to light his pipe or paint him for his evenings out. When he got back from a raid or trip I would spend a few hours picking lice, lancing his boils, cooking his dinner, plucking any beard hairs that had come in, and then his paint. He spent more time getting himself up than my sister ever had, going through slews of makeup and spending hours raking his hair with a porcupine brush, greasing and rebraiding it with slivers of copper and fur until it looked just like when he’d started.

  Depending on what was in season, I was also put to gathering. Fruit from the wokwéesi (prickly pear), tuahpi (wild plum), and tunaséka (persimmon), beans from the wohi?huu (mesquite), kuuka (wild onion), paapasi (wild potato), or mutsi natsamukwe (mustang grapes). I was not allowed to carry a knife or gun or bow, just a digging stick, and there were wolf and bear and panther tracks everywhere.

  No white person, even an Irishman, would have spent an hour digging a handful of runty potatoes, but I knew I had gotten off easy. I had not taken the big jump. I still got the feeling of a full stomach, a hot fire against a cold night, the sound of other people sleeping close. I knew what it would look like with the grass waving over me; the road to heaven would be slick with my own blood.

  IT WOULD BE nice to expound upon the kinship I discovered between myself and the black Africans my countrymen kept in bondage, but, unfortunately, I made no such discovery. I thought only of my own troubles. I was an empty bucket that needing filling with whatever food or favors the Indians would allow, crippling my way through each day, hoping for extra food or praise or a few easy minutes to myself.

  As for escaping, there were eight hundred miles of dry wilderness between the ranchería and civilization. The first time I was caught by the other children. The second time I was caught by Toshaway, who turned me over to his wives. They and their mothers beat me hollow, cut up the soles of my feet, and had a long discussion about blinding me in one eye, and I knew the next time I bucked would be the end of me.

  TO PREPARE A hide, you stretched out the skin in the grass, hair side down, staking the corners. Then you knelt on the bloody surface, pushing and scraping off the fat and sinew with a piece of blunt bone or metal. If the tool was too sharp or you weren?
??t careful you would push through to the other side, ruining the hide, for which you would be beaten.

  Between scrapings I spread a layer of wood ash so the lye would soften the fat; while that was happening I was sent for more water or wood, or I would skin, bone, and flay out a deer one of the men or boys had dragged in. The only thing I didn’t do was repair or make clothing, though the women would have taught me if they could have—they were always months behind what the men needed: a new pair of moccasins or leggings (one hide), a bearskin robe (two hides), a wolf robe (four hides). The hides had to be cut so the shape of the animal matched the shape of the wearer, and, as it took all day to finish even a single deer or wolf hide, mistakes could not be made.

  In addition to making all the tools the band needed—axes, awls, needles, digging sticks, scrapers, knives and utensils—the women also made all the thread, rope, and twine. The band went through miles of it—for tipis and clothing, for saddles and bridles and hobbles, for every tool or weapon they made—everything in their lives was held together by string, which had to be twisted inch by inch. The leaves of a yucca or agave would be soaked or pounded, or the fibers separated from grasses or cedar bark. Once the fibers were loose they were braided. Animal sinews were also saved—tendons from a deer’s ankles were chewed until they split. The sinews along the spine were longer and very easy to work with, but these were in short supply and saved to make weapons, and the women were not allowed to use them.

  If you were in a tight spot, cordage could be made from rawhide, but there were better uses for it and it stretched when wet. A hide would be laid flat and a spiral cut into it an inch or two wide, starting from the outside and cutting inward until the entire hide was one long strand. A single lariat required six different strands, though mostly the men made their own lariats, unless a woman was seen sitting with nothing to do.

  The Comanches had no patience for the ignorance of their white captives when they themselves had been raised knowing that whether it took a minute or an hour to build a fire or make a weapon or track a man or animal might, at some point, be the difference between living and dying. When there was nothing to do, no one could match them in laziness; otherwise they were careful as goldsmiths. When they looked at a forest they saw each individual plant and knew its name and the seasons they could eat or use it as medicine; they saw the tracks of every living thing that had passed through. Any of them might have been dropped naked upon the earth and within a few days would be living comfortably.