The Son (42 page)

Mountain of Rocks asked me to leave him my Colt Navy, one of the two I’d gotten off the scalp hunter, but it was out of the question. I had buried the other with Toshaway. And I did not like the look of the traders, or Mountain of Rocks, for that matter.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT
Yellow Hair stayed close to me, away from the Comancheros.

“Don’t let them touch me,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Make them think I’m your wife.”

“They’re trying to get money for us,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll do anything.”

“Please,” she said.

The next night I knew she was right: one of them kept sitting closer until finally he put his arm around her. He was a big man with a large gut; he looked like an unwashed version of St. Nicholas. I stood up and pulled my knife and he put up his hands, laughing at me.

“You look a little young, but I won’t fight you.”

“We don’t have to fight for her,” I said. “We can just fight.”

He laughed some more and shook his head. “Boy, I can see you are holding on to her like death to a dead nigger. I already said I won’t fight you. I’m going to sleep.” He got up and went to his pallet under the wagon.

That night she slept in my robe. I hadn’t touched a woman or even myself in nearly two months, because all I could think about was Prairie Flower, and her ruined face when I put the dirt over her.

But spooning with Yellow Hair, part of me seemed to forget all that. I could smell her sweet unwashed hair, and finally, when I couldn’t stand it, I began to kiss her neck. I wondered if she was asleep but then she said: “I won’t stop you, but I don’t want to do that right now.”

I kissed her behind the ear and tried to make out that I had just been being brotherly. She moved my rutter so that it was not poking into her. We fell asleep.

The next night she said: “We can make love if you want to but you know I was raped by maybe ten men in our band. I tried to talk to you about it many times.”

I felt so ashamed that I pretended to be sleeping.

“It’s okay,” she said, patting my hip. “I doubt they would have let you into the tribe if you’d been nice to me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Just don’t let these men rape me. I don’t think I could stand it.”

On the third night I asked her: “Do you think I am not attracted to you because you slept with all those men in our band, or do you just not want to sleep with me?”

“I don’t want to sleep with anyone,” she said. “But especially not these Comancheros. St. Nicholas showed his cock and balls to me and they are covered with a disease.”

On the fourth night I persisted: “But what about me?”

“Would you kill these Comancheros if I asked you?”

“Yes.”

“In that case I’ll sleep with you. But we have to be quiet so they don’t hear us or you might end up having to kill them.”

“I’ll kill them,” I said, though in truth I thought it was unlikely, as we represented a year’s wage for them.

She looked at me. She was a sensitive one. “Forget it. I’ll sleep by myself.” She got out of the robe. “I’d rather be raped than have sex with a liar.”

“I’ll protect you,” I said. “Let’s not do anything. I’m sorry I mentioned it.”

The last time I asked her anything about sex was: “Did you ever get pregnant?”

“Three times, but they all came out after a couple of months.”

“How?” I said.

“I beat myself in the stomach with rocks. Also, no matter how hungry I was, I would not let myself eat.”

“If you’d had a baby, they might have made you a tribe member.”

“That would have been great except every night I was there, all I dreamed about was going home.”

“To where?”

“Anywhere there were white people. Anywhere I wouldn’t have to live with men who’d raped me.”

I should have felt sympathy for her, but it just made me angry. I missed Toshaway more than I missed my own parents and the thought of Prairie Flower made me so empty that I wanted to put my gun to my head. I rolled over and went to sleep.

We rode together for three weeks, sharing the same robe so the Comancheros would think we were married, and every night I expected we would make love, as we slept spooning in the same robe, but it was true what she had told me, she had no interest at all. Even the one night we drank whiskey with the traders and she let my hands wander more than normal and I thought this is the night I might get inside her, but soon realized she was breathing very deeply and was no longer awake. I let my hands wander over her a little longer. The Comancheros knew their buyers, they were feeding us four or five times a day and Yellow Hair was looking healthier every minute, her ribs softening, her breasts and hips filling out, though still she cried every night in her sleep.

“I guess if I had a fantasy,” she told me, “it would be to rape all the men who raped me. Bring them back from the dead and rape all of them, over and over. With a big jagged stick, I mean. I would push it in and out and I would not stop until I was good and ready.”

I didn’t say anything. I thought about Toshaway and N
uu
karu and Pizon, and Prairie Flower and Fat Wolf and Grandfather, and Hates Work, who was really Single Bird, Escuté and Bright Morning, Two Bears, Always Visiting Someone; I guessed I might kill Yellow Hair quite happily just to have a single one of them back.

But she did not appear to notice. “I’ve actually thought about it quite a lot,” she said. “I mean raping them. It was what got me through the day sometimes.”

She was smiling.

“But now I don’t have to think about it anymore.”

I didn’t talk to her that night, or the next day, either.

T
HE LAST WEEK
we spent on wagon roads, passing villages, settlements, the first white people I’d seen in three years who hadn’t shot at me. Yellow Hair waved at everyone. But the whites did not think it was a special occasion, seeing other white people. The land was settling up.

When we reached the Colorado, close to Austin, I could not believe the roads; they had doubled in width and the ruts were all filled. Yellow Hair was happy, unusually talkative, and she had kissed the traders on their cheeks and thanked them and cuddled very close to me during supper. I could see their looks of jealousy, but St. Nick kept them in line. He knew what we were worth. He offered me a spare cylinder for my pistol if I would let him wash and cut my hair, which had grown halfway down my back. I thought about it, then agreed.

When we went to bed that night, Yellow Hair allowed me to put myself partway into her but she was very dry, and after moving around for several minutes she got no better, and I was so ashamed I removed myself.

“Go ahead and finish,” she said.

“I can’t with you not wanting to.”

She shrugged. “I really don’t mind. You kept your word.”

I thought about it and then got out of the robe, stood up, looked at the sky, and finished myself off. The grass was not even covered with frost, it was so much warmer in the hill country than on the plains. I got back into the robe with her.

“You’re a good man,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone like you.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
we rode into Austin. We were taken to the house of a merchant the traders knew and then to the state capitol. A bunch of white men came and asked our names. It took most of the day but eventually three hundred dollars each was raised for us; the traders were paid and rode off without a word to me, though they tried to kiss Yellow Hair good-bye. She turned away from them. Now that we were in public, she would not even allow them to touch her.

Her real name was Ingrid Goetz. The word spread and various wealthy women adopted her. When I saw her the next day she was wearing a blue silk dress, her hair washed and braided and pulled into a bun behind her head. Meanwhile I had refused to let them touch me—I was wearing buckskin leggings and a breechcloth, no shirt, and while they had insisted on holding on to my revolver, I would not let them take my knife, which I kept tucked into my belt.

And so I slept on a spare cot at the jail while Yellow Hair stayed at a plantation east of town, the home of the U.S. representative and his wife. After a few days there was a reception for us at a judge’s house, a Georgian-style mansion near the capitol with a nice view over the river. The judge was a big redheaded man who could have hoisted a barrel in each arm, though his hands were soft as a child’s. He’d been educated at Harvard in his youth, then became a senator in Kentucky, then swore off politics entirely and moved to Texas to increase his fortune. He read a lot of books and his words ran eight to the pound, but he had a good spirit and I took to him right away.

Yellow Hair and I made quite a pair. She looked like she’d lived in town all her life; I’d taken a bath and lost my long braids but otherwise I looked like a feral child. Several reporters gathered and they asked if we were husband and wife and looking at her, with her hair washed and her face clean, she struck me as even more beautiful than I had ever thought and I wanted her to say yes.

Everyone else wanted her to say yes as well, as it made a good story, but Yellow Hair was a selfish creature. No, we were not connected in any way, I had simply protected her honor from the Comanches, she was returning with her honor intact thanks to me, honor honor honor, she still had it, that was all.

I was speechless. No one except the Yankees believed a word of it. The Indian’s appetite for his female captives was well known to all Texans.

W
E WERE FED
big meals with fresh bread and beef and a roasted turkey, which I would not touch, as the Comanches thought that eating turkey made you a coward, and staring at the bird I was reminded of Escuté, who liked to tell the joke,
if eating turkey makes you a coward, what does eating pussy make you?
There was also roast pig, which I would not touch, as the Comanches knew it was a filthy animal. I ate about five pounds of beef and two rabbits and it was commented what a good appetite I had. Yellow Hair ate a small amount of bread and turkey and, looking at me directly, helped herself to several servings of pork.

That night, despite the breezes flowing through the house, it felt so hot and still, and the beds so soft and smothering, that I went outside and slept in the judge’s yard. Yellow Hair, meanwhile, was already telling people that she had come from an aristocratic German family, though, as they had all been killed, there was no way to verify it. I was certain she was lying, as I knew where her family had been living, and the others doubted her as well, but no one was going to say anything. They had never seen a female captive returned in such good condition. You did not look a gift horse in the mouth.

A few days later, the judge gathered several of the town’s influential people in his yard for a barbecue, along with a few reporters from the East. I was asked to dress in my garb and do some tricks. Of course most of what an Indian knows cannot be shown in a circus, like how to follow game, or read a man’s mood from his footprints, so I asked for a horse and galloped it up and down the yard bareback, while shooting arrows at a hay bale. The judge had first suggested I shoot a stump but that was out of the question, as it would ruin my arrows, and as both they and my bow had been made by Grandfather, I had no desire to damage them except on a living target. I sat there on the horse and people gave suggestions. The judge pointed out a squirrel that was high up in a live oak and I shot it off the branch and then shot a dove off a different branch. The onlookers applauded. Not far from them was a black eye in the grass that I knew belonged to a rabbit so I put an arrow through that as well. Several of the eastern reporters looked sick at the rabbit shrieking and flopping itself into the air but the judge laughed and said,
He’s got quite an eye, doesn’t he?
Then his wife gave him a look. He called an end to the demonstration. The Negroes stomped on the rabbit to quiet it and trampled the divots in the lawn as well.

We sat and drank tea and finally they got to quizzing me about Yellow Hair, or Ingrid Goetz, as they insisted on calling her. During my demonstration she’d claimed to have a spell and they’d taken her back to the plantation. Of course I knew better.

The judge, who was sitting in, said: “Did you know her well?”

“We were captured at the same time,” I said.

“So you did know her.”

“Somewhat.”

“And it’s true she wasn’t misused?” said the reporter. He was from the
New York Daily Times
.

I considered throwing her under the wagon, because she clearly wanted nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t. “For sure not,” I said. “They never touched her. She was a member of the tribe.”

“That is somewhat unlikely,” said the judge. He looked embarrassed but continued: “If that is true she would be the first case I have ever heard of, as most female captives are misused by the entire tribe. And often by any visitors to the tribe as well.” He coughed into his hand and looked at the ground.

“That is not what happened to her,” I said. “A lot of the braves wanted to marry her but she wouldn’t allow them. She was kept separate from the men.”

The judge was giving me a strange look.

“I guess there was one young chief who wanted to marry her but he was killed in a battle with the army and maybe that broke her heart.”

“Was she ever attached to this chief, matrimonially or otherwise?”

“No,” I said. “The Comanches are real strict about that stuff.”

“Poor girl,” said the reporter. “She might have ended up a queen.”

“Probably would have.”

The judge was staring at me, as if trying to deduce why I would tell such an outrageous lie.

“I guess that proves the red man can be noble if he wishes it,” said the reporter from the
Daily Times
. He looked at the judge. “Contrary to what I am told.”

The judge didn’t say anything.

“It is as plain as day,” said the reporter. “If the Indians were left in peace . . .” He shrugged. “There would not be any trouble with them.”