Remember Ben Clayton (20 page)

All his life he had treated the things that brought him pride and comfort as if they were shameful secrets—even his love for his own son. There were times when Ben was older, when they were riding fence together or camped out during the roundup, that he had felt such contentment in being with him that he thought he ought to say something out loud about it. But he never had, not that he could recall. He had expected Ben to know his own value to his father just as he had expected Gilheaney tonight to know the quality of his own work. You shouldn’t have to tell people what ought to be plain to them already.

He remembered sharply and with regret how Ben had looked toward him after Sarey had died. He had wanted something from his father that Lamar didn’t have the will or the imagination to give him. That night after they’d buried her he couldn’t think of anything to say to the boy, or at least anything that sounded right. And after that, the subject of Sarey hardly ever came up between them. They just kept on living their lives without her there.

Lamar supposed he would have been a different sort of man if the Comanches hadn’t taken him, but it was a hard thing to factor because now he could barely remember the boy he had been beforehand. In an instant, that part of his life had just been sheared away.

They just walked through the door like they had lived there all their lives and were coming home from a day’s work. Lamar’s father and his older brother, Emory, were already lying dead and scalped along with their big Newfoundland dog two miles out on the Decatur road where they had been looking for a stray calf. That was the reason there was no warning.

Jewell was setting the table and his mother was cutting dough into strips for a cobbler crust. He remembered the fine hairs on her forearms dusted with flour and the concentration on her face as she cut the dough with a paring knife. The knife’s handle was worn and water-streaked and was as familiar to him as the smells of his mother’s cooking or the sound of her voice. There was a glass pickle tray on the table that she was proud of because it had come from New Orleans with her own mother and survived the Runaway Scrape after the Alamo fell and Sam Houston was on the run.

That afternoon the half-wild horse that his father had bought from a Tonkawa Indian had bolted with Lamar on it and jammed Lamar’s foot against the trunk of a bois d’arc tree. That was why he was in the house and not out looking for the calf with his father and brother. The little toe on his left foot had split off from the other four like a bent twig on a sapling. It was swollen tight and his mother had heated some water on the stove and poured it in a pan for him to soak his foot in. The pain was still strong and it felt personal, as if the pain itself had done this to him and not the horse or his own neglect.

When the Indians walked in, the water in the pan had started to cool and he was looking down at the almost-detached toenail floating out from his blackening toe.

His mother said, “Well!” when she saw them. Jewell screamed and his mother set down the knife and hurried in front of her daughter, nudging her back toward Lamar. Lamar grabbed Jewell’s arm and drew her to him. His foot was still in the pan of water. He thought about striding across the room to grab his father’s Hawken above the door but before he could make himself move one of the Indians had already beaten him to it.

His mother did something strange. She held out her hand to the one who had come in first. Maybe she thought a handshake would help calm them down and be the start of a civil discussion. For just a moment, there was a confused expression on the Indian’s face. He was painted for war and it made the momentary puzzlement in his eyes more vivid. But instead of shaking hands he stabbed her under the ribs with a butcher knife and she collapsed onto the floor so promptly and compliantly it was like something the two of them had rehearsed.

Jewell screamed and seemed to run in place as she sobbed. Lamar didn’t know what to do except to go to his mother, but before he could reach her they grabbed him and threw him against the stove. Three or four more Comanches streamed into the house and started stripping the linens off the beds and drinking the milk that had been set out on the table for supper. His mother was still alive and screaming his name, but the Indians beat him down with their quirts when he tried to reach her again and another one shot an arrow into her and he could hear it passing through her body and burying itself with a thunk into the plank floor.

Three of the Indians grabbed him and pulled him to his feet. He fought and bit at them but they had him tight in their arms and he couldn’t get loose. He could smell his mother’s blood and could feel its slick warmth on his bare feet as they dragged him across the floor. He called out to her as they were wrestling him out the door and they hit him with their quirts again and his mother raised her head and looked at him and told him not to fight anymore or they would kill him.

“Be a good boy and go with these Indians,” she said.

He was bleeding from his head and he couldn’t wipe away the blood because his hands were bound behind him, but he blinked enough of it away when they pulled him outside to see that his sister was already tied down on a horse, still yelling out for him and his mother. They hit him again and threw him up onto one of the other horses and started tying him down to an old Mexican packsaddle. He held on as best he could as they rode away. He could hear his mother screaming back in the cabin as they scalped her, and when they had gone a few miles he saw the bodies of his father and brother with their arms cut off and hanging from a tree.

THE MAN
who captured him was named Kanaumahka, which Lamar learned later meant “Almost Dead” in Comanche. Looking back, he guessed Kanaumahka had been in his early forties then. He had a wide, muscular frame and a dish face whose bottom half that day was painted in black. There were two fingers missing on his left hand and on the side of his face his teeth didn’t meet up right because he had been kicked in the jaw by a horse when he was a boy, an accident that had also taken off the tip of his tongue. It took a few days for Lamar to understand that he and Jewell were in Kanaumahka’s keeping. They were so disoriented at first that Lamar did not even think to try to tell one Indian from another.

They rode almost without stopping for three days. At first they tied Lamar’s and Jewell’s hands to the packsaddles and ran a rope between their feet beneath the horses as well. But after Jewell kept slipping down sideways and they had to stop and re-rig the ropes, they finally untied their captives’ hands and let them hold on to the saddle so that they could stay upright. It was clear enough to Lamar that if he tried to get away or fell off his horse they would just shoot him or put an arrow through him and move on.

His mother’s hair was reddish with gray streaks and he recognized her scalp tied to one of the Indian’s lances, but he looked away and pretended to himself he didn’t see it, pretended so hard that to this day he wasn’t sure he actually had. The packsaddle wasn’t a proper saddle for riding and it was hard work to keep his seat as they rode all that day and through the night. When they finally untied him and Jewell and let them off their horses it was because one of the Indians rode up trailing a bellowing cow. They shot the cow and cut open its udder and shoved his head into it and made him drink the milk. He didn’t want to, and Jewell didn’t either. The milk was full of blood. He didn’t think either of them could keep it down, but they both managed. Afterward Kanaumahka noticed Lamar’s little toe pulled off to the side where he had jammed it and he went over and consulted with a few of the other Indians about how to doctor it. They finally decided to pull it up and back into place and tie it to the rest of his toes with a splint. They didn’t mind how much it hurt him and he tried not to cry out when they did it. It was the first time he had any hope that they hadn’t captured him just to kill him but that they had some reason for keeping him alive.

There must have been people in pursuit from the beginning because the Comanches were nervous and from time to time Lamar could hear dogs baying in the distance. Once they set fire to the prairie to throw the dogs off the scent and rode even harder, stopping from time to time to look behind them through field glasses. Lamar could tell that the Indians were worried because the grass was dry and when they rode across it the trail was easy to read.

The insides of his legs were rubbed raw by the packsaddle. When Kanaumahka saw the blood he ripped off Lamar’s trousers and put some sort of salve on his legs that helped the sores scab over. They passed within sight of farms and settlements but the Indians didn’t stop to raid anymore, and after a week or so Lamar got worried that they would end up so deep in wild country that he could never find his way home.

Lamar was twelve and Jewell was fourteen. For the first few days the Indians kept them apart at night, but once they were beyond the Brazos they relaxed the rules. As his older sister, Jewell did her best to comfort him but she was so scared she could barely speak, and he did not know what he could say to her to ease her fears. Sometimes the Comanches would pitch them strips of raw horse meat or a piece of the liver of a dead steer they had come across. They were hungry enough to eat anything, but Jewell gagged and choked on her tears as she tried to force the meat down and wailed for their mother.

Lamar figured they were headed up toward the Canadian River. They no longer heard dogs howling in pursuit, and the Indians were growing more relaxed and joking with each other. Lamar knew that their chances of being rescued were almost gone, and that the farther they advanced into the treeless prairies the harder it would be to escape and find their way back. The expanding openness all around them, the billowing grasslands crowding the horizon, unsettled him deeply. He did not know this country; he did not belong in it. Every day that they traveled made the possibility of reaching home less real as they traveled into country more and more foreign and unwelcoming.

Sometimes they came for Jewell at night and dragged her over to the edge of the camp. The first time they did this he fought them but it did no good, because they wrestled him to the ground and made him watch what they did to her. After that, she told him it would go easier for her if he didn’t try to stop them. But he tried anyway, and she had to plead with him not to interfere. When one of the warriors came the next night and ordered her to stand and follow him, Lamar did as she had asked and did not try to stop it, just as his sister got to her feet and walked away with the Indian whimpering quietly, her hands trembling.

He resolved that they should escape while there was still some possibility of finding their way back. Their hands and feet were no longer bound, either on the horses or in camp, and the Indians had taken a less guarded attitude toward their presence, treating them more like dogs that were just part of the caravan than like prisoners that might turn on them or disappear into the wilderness. The horses were always picketed not far from camp and the bridles and saddles were nearby in open sight. All of the Comanches slept soundly and Lamar did not think it would be very hard to grab a bridle and a skin of water and maybe some food and slip away to the horse herd. He was only a boy and his plans were not sophisticated, but he had a desperate confidence that if they got away in the middle of the night and rode hard enough, heading east, that they could find their way back to the Brazos and the settlements downriver. Just the thought of slipping away and being on the run was bewitching to him. He daydreamed about it all day long in the saddle and at night in his great terror and loneliness it was his only consoling thought.

But when he whispered his plan to Jewell she sobbed and shivered with fright and said she would not go. She said they would be rescued soon and the Indians would kill them if they tried to get away. Night after night he tried to convince her, but she only grew increasingly upset and begged him not to try. He saw that she had let herself slide into a state of terrorized passivity and he knew that with every passing mile the chances of a successful escape were growing more distant.

One night as the Indians were lying down to sleep he told her he could not wait anymore. He was going that very night. She grew hysterical and said she wouldn’t come. He said he was going anyway and would come back with soldiers or rangers to rescue her too. He was seventy years of age now and the memory of her face as he told her this still haunted him with dreamlike force and clarity. She had the dark hair and olive skin that came from their father’s side of the family. Her chin quivered uncontrollably as the tears flew out of her eyes and glistened in the light of the fires. She pleaded with him to stay with her. She said that the Indians would kill her when they discovered he was gone.

He did not think they would kill her. He thought that if they were going to kill either of them they would have done so already. In the end, he lied to her just so she would go to sleep and not give his plan away with her crying. He told her he would not leave her after all. Then, when she was finally settled down in sleep he broke his promise and crept away, stealing a length of rope to make a hackamore because he worried that the clink of a bridle would wake the Indians. Most of the time since his capture he had been riding the same mare and she let him come up to her and slip the hackamore over her nose and ride her away.

He followed a draw that he thought might lead him eventually to one of the forks of the Brazos. In that country at night the bands of the Milky Way were almost solid in their brilliance, bright enough to silhouette the shapes of the owls and nighthawks hunting in the high prairie grass. He was sorry to leave his sister and he tried not to think about how he had lied to her, but he was confident now that he would escape and he tried to think instead of the moment when she would see him riding into the camp along with the rescuers he was guiding. She would forgive him once she understood that he had done this so he could take her home.

The Indians tracked him easily and overtook him several hours after daylight. Kanaumahka pulled him from his horse and beat him and kicked him and when they got back to the camp the other Comanches felt free to do the same. Then Kanaumahka put his Colt’s pistol to Jewell’s head and cocked it and looked sternly at Lamar to make sure he got the idea that if he tried to escape again his sister would pay for it. Jewell was a quaking heap afterwards and when he tried to comfort her and explain himself she screamed at him to get away and leave her alone and never talk to her again. This drama between the two captives seemed to suit the Indians. They laughed and talked to themselves, as if it were a play they were watching.