The Son (7 page)

Toshaway told me in Spanish that by fall the canyon would be full of buffalo. He was appreciating the scene. There were long tufts of black hair streaming from the cedar and mesquite; the buffalo had been using this place a long time.

The Indians showed no sign of tiring or of wanting a proper feed, but the pace had slowed. My mouth was watering; any number of fish could have been speared as we passed: the water was full of yellow cats, eels, buffalo fish, and gar. I lost count of the whitetail and antelope. A cinnamon grizzly, the largest I’d ever seen, was sunning himself on a ledge. Springs flowing down cliff faces, pools underneath.

That night we made our first real camp and I fell asleep in the rocks holding my brother. Someone put a buffalo robe over us and when I looked up, Toshaway was squatting next to me. His smell was becoming familiar. “Tomorrow we’ll make a fire,” he said.

The next morning we rode past sandstone mesas with figures scratched into the rock: shamans, men in combat, lances and shields and tipis.

“You know they’re going to separate us,” Martin said.

I looked at him.

“These guys are from two different bands.”

“How would you even know?” I said.

“The one who owns you is Kotsoteka,” he said. “The one who owns me is Yamparika.”

“The one who owns me is Toshaway.”

“That’s his name. He’s from the Kotsoteka band. The one who owns me is Urwat. They’ve been saying that Urwat has a long way to go, but the guy who owns you is not that far from home.”

“They don’t own us,” I said.

“You’re right. Why they might have that impression is completely beyond me.”

We continued to ride.

“What about the Penatekas?”

“The Penatekas are sick right now, or something else bad is happening to them. I can’t tell except that none of these are Penatekas.”

D
ESPITE
T
OSHAWAY’S PROMISE
, we made another cold camp that night. In the morning we climbed out of the big canyon and onto the plains. There was no timber, no trail, no lines of brush to mark a stream, it was nothing but grass and sky and my stomach felt wobbly just looking at it. I knew where we were: the Llano Estacado. A blank space on the map.

After riding an hour nothing had changed and I was dizzy again. We might have gone ten inches or ten miles and by the end of the day I thought something had come loose in my head. My brother fell asleep and rolled all the way under his horse and the Indians stopped, beat him, and tied him back on.

We made camp at a stream cut so deep into the plain you could not see it until you were on top of it. It was our first fire and because there were no trees to reflect the light, it could not be seen from any distance. A pair of antelopes were thrown on, skin and all, and Toshaway brought us a pile of steaming half-cooked venison. My brother didn’t have the energy to eat. I chewed the meat into small pieces and fed it to him.

Then I climbed out of the streambed to have a look. The stars came down to the earth on all sides and the Comanches had pickets looking for other campfires. They ignored me. I went back to our pallet.

A catamount screamed at us for nearly an hour, and wolf calls were echoing from one side of the plain to the other. My brother began to cry out in his sleep; I started to shake him, then stopped. There wasn’t any dream he could be having that would be as bad as waking up.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
they didn’t bother to tie us. There was nowhere to go.

My brother, despite having eaten real food and slept six hours, was not any better. Meanwhile the Indians were laughing and cutting capers, riding their horses backward or standing up, calling back and forth with jokes. I fell asleep and woke up in the grass. We stopped and I was tied on again, slapped a few times but not beaten. Toshaway came over and gave me a long drink of water, then chewed up some tobacco and rubbed the juice into my eyes. Still I spent the rest of the day not knowing if I was asleep or awake. I had the feeling that somewhere ahead of us was the edge of the earth and if we reached it we would never stop falling.

That afternoon a small herd of buffalo were spotted and run down and after a discussion my brother and I were taken off our horses and led to one of the calves. It was cut open and its innards pulled out. Toshaway cut into the stomach and offered me a handful of curdled milk but I did not want any part of it. Another Indian forced my brother’s head into the stomach but he shut his eyes and mouth. I was given the same treatment. I tried to swallow the milk but instead I aired my paunch.

This was done two or three times, with my brother not swallowing at all, me trying and throwing up, until the Indians gave up trying and scooped out all the curdled milk for themselves. When the stomach was empty the liver was cut out. My brother refused to touch it and I saw the way they looked at him so I forced myself to keep it down. The blood turned in my gizzard. I had always thought blood tasted like metal but that is only if you drink a small amount. What it actually tastes like is musk and salt. I reached for more liver and the Indians were happy to see it and I continued to eat until they slapped me away and ate the rest of the liver themselves, squeezing the gallbladder over it as a sauce.

When the organs were gone the calf was skinned out and a piece of meat held up to the sun in an offering and then the rest distributed to everyone, about five pounds apiece. The Indians finished their allotment within a few minutes and I was worried they would take mine so I ate quickly as well.

It was the first time I’d had a full belly in nearly a week and I felt tired and peaceful but my brother just sat there, sunburned and filthy and covered in his own vomit.

“You need to eat.”

He was smiling. “You know, I never thought a place like this could exist. I’ll bet our tracks will be gone with the first wind.”

“They’re going to kill you if you don’t eat.”

“They’re going to kill me anyway, Eli.”

“Eat,” I said. “Daddy ate raw meat all the time.”

“I’m quite aware that as a Ranger, Daddy did everything. But I am not him. Sorry,” he said. He touched my leg. “I started a new poem about Lizzie. Would you like to hear it?”

“All right.”

“ ‘Your virgin blood, spilled by savages, you are whole again in heaven.’ Which of course is shit. But it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.”

The Indians were looking at us. Toshaway brought another chunk of buffalo and indicated I ought to give it to my brother. My brother pushed it away.

“I was sure I would go to Harvard,” he said. “And then Rome. I have actually been there in my mind, you know, because when I read, I actually see things; I physically see them in front of me. Did you know that?” He seemed to cheer up. “Even these people can’t ruin this place for me.” He shook his head. “I’ve written about ten letters to Emerson but I haven’t sent them. I think he would take them seriously, though.”

Any letters he’d written had been burned in the fire but I didn’t mention this. I told him he needed to eat.

“They’re not going to turn me into some fucking filthy Indian, Eli. I’d rather be dead.”

I must have gotten a look because then he said, “It wasn’t your fault. I go back and forth between thinking we shouldn’t have been living out there in the first place, and then I think what else could a man like Daddy do? He had no choice, really. It was fate.”

“I’m going to make you a pile of food.”

He ignored me. He was staring at something on the ground and then he reached over and pulled up one of the blanketflowers—we were sitting in a big patch. He held it up for all the Indians to see.

“Note the Indian blanket,” he said, “or Indian sunburst.”

They ignored him.

He continued in a louder voice. “It is worth noting that small, stunted, or useless plants—such as Mexican plum, Mexican walnut, or Mexican apple—are named after the Mexicans, who will doubtless endure among us for centuries, while colorful or beautiful plants are often named after Indians, as they will soon be vanquished from the earth.” He looked around at them. “It’s a great compliment to your race. Though if your vanquishing had come a bit earlier, I wouldn’t have complained.”

No one was paying attention.

“It’s the fate of a man like myself to be misunderstood. That’s Goethe, in case you were wondering.”

Toshaway tried a few more times to give him meat, but my brother wouldn’t touch it. Within half an hour there was nothing left but bone and hide. The hides were rolled up and put on the back of someone’s horse and the Indians began to mount.

Then my brother was looking at someone behind me.

“Don’t try to help.”

Toshaway pinned me to the grass. He and another Indian sat on me and tied my wrists and ankles as quick as my father might have tied a calf. I was dragged a good distance. When I looked over, Martin hadn’t moved. He was sitting there taking things in; I could barely see his face above the flowers. Three Indians had mounted their horses, including Urwat, my brother’s owner. They were riding in circles around him, whooping and hollering. He stood and they slapped him with the flats of their lances, giving him an opening and encouraging him to run, but he stayed where he was, up to his knees in the red-and-yellow flowers, looking small against the sky behind him.

Finally Urwat got tired and, instead of using the flat of his lance, lowered the point and ran it through my brother’s back. My brother stayed on his feet. Toshaway and the other Indians were holding me. Urwat charged again and my brother was knocked down into the flowers.

Then Toshaway got my head down. I knew I ought to be getting up but Toshaway wouldn’t let me, I knew I should get up but I didn’t want to.
That is fine,
I thought,
but now I’ll get up
. I strained against Toshaway but he wouldn’t let go.

My brother was standing again. How many times he’d been knocked down and gotten back up I didn’t know. Urwat had discarded his lance and now rode toward him with his ax but my brother didn’t flinch and after he fell the last time the Indians rushed forward and made a circle.

Toshaway later explained that my brother, who had acted like such a coward the entire time, was obviously not a coward at all, but a
k
u
?tseena,
a coyote or trickster, a mystical creature who had been sent to test them. It was very bad medicine to kill him—the coyote was so important that Comanches were not allowed to even scratch one. My brother could not be scalped. Urwat was cursed.

There was a good deal of milling and confusion and three of the Indian kids held me while the adults talked. I was telling myself I would kill Urwat. I looked around for a friendly eye, but the German women wouldn’t look at me.

The shoulder bones of the dead buffalo were cut loose and several of the braves began to dig. When there was a passable grave my brother was wrapped in calico taken from the freight wagon and lowered into the hole. Urwat left his tomahawk, someone else gave a knife; there was buffalo meat left as well. There was discussion about killing a horse, but it was voted down.

Then we rode off. I watched the grave disappear from sight, as if the blanketflower had already grown over, as if the place would not stand for any record of human life, or death; it would continue as my brother had said it would, our tracks disappearing in the first wind.

Chapter Five

J.A. McCullough

I
f she were a better person she would not leave her family a dime; a few million, maybe, something to pay for college or if they got sick. She had grown up knowing that if a drought went on another year, or the ticks got worse, or the flies, if any single thing went wrong, the family would not eat. Of course they had oil by then, it was an illusion. But her father had acted as if it were true, and she had believed it, and so it was.

When she was a child, her father often gave her orphaned calves to look after, and, every so often, she would fold the grown ones in with the steers when they were shipped off to Fort Worth. She made enough money off her dogies to make investments in stocks, and that, she told people, is what taught her the value of a dollar.
More like the value of a thousand dollars,
some reporter once said. He was not entirely masculine. He was from the North.

The Colonel, though he drank whiskey the entire ten years she’d known him, never slept past sunrise. When she was eight, and he ninety-eight, he had led her slowly across a dry pasture, following a track across the caliche she could not see, around clusters of prickly pear and yellow-flowered huisache, following a track she was certain her great-grandfather was imagining, until finally they arrived at a particular clump of soapbrush and he had reached into it and pulled out a baby rabbit. Its heart was pounding and she cradled it against the skin under her shirt.

“Are there more?” She could not have been more excited. She wanted all of them.

“We’ll leave the rest with their dam,” he said. His face was brown, cracked and furrowed like a dry riverbed, and his eyes were always running. His hands smelled of cottonwood buds, the sap that was like sugar and cinnamon and some flower she couldn’t name; he was always stopping among the cottonwoods to rub the bud sap onto his fingers, a habit she adopted as well. Even at the end of her life she would stop at an old tree and scrape the orange sap onto a thumbnail, that she might smell it the rest of the day, and think of her great-grandfather. Balm of Gilead, someone once told her, that’s what the sap was called, though it didn’t need a name.

She had taken the kit home and given it milk but the next day the dogs got it. She knew she could go back to the brush for more, but the dogs would get them all eventually, so she decided to leave the remaining rabbits where they were, a decision she knew to be very grown-up and merciful. And yet she could not stop thinking about the kit’s fur against her belly, a nearly liquid softness, her great-grandfather’s hand on her shoulder, leaning on her for support.