The Son (36 page)

Smaller raids continued all summer, mostly put on by young men who needed horses and scalps, both for marriage and because otherwise they had no status. The army had nearly finished a second line of forts—from Belknap to Abilene to Mason—but many settlers had already leapfrogged this second line. To the old-timers, the most ominous sign was the bee trees, which seemed to precede the line of settlement by a hundred miles or so and now reached nearly to the edge of the Llano. We were happy for so much honey, but we all knew what it meant.

The Comancheros had figured out we were prosperous again, and I convinced Toshaway to double the price of the horses we traded. Previously, a good horse might be traded for a handful of glass beads or a few yards of calico, but now we wanted more ammunition and gun parts, more steel arrowheads, and more food. I stayed in camp and hunted and broke horses, but mostly I spent time with Prairie Flower, who was no longer embarrassed to be seen in public with me, as my stature was now equal to N
uu
karu’s or even Escuté’s, even if my abilities were not.

T
HE MOST IMPORTANT
event of late summer was the capture of a young buffalo hunter, who, along with the rest of his party, had misjudged the degree to which the army and Rangers could protect him. We caught them in the lower reaches of the Palo Duro and after a brief fight his companions were all killed. He crawled out from under their wagon with his hands raised and, knowing what would happen to him, I immediately nocked an arrow, but Pizon shoved me and it went wide.

The hunter was in his late twenties, with blond hair and beard and blue eyes and an innocent sort of look. I was happy to get his rifled Springfield and Minie ball molds, but the real prize was the man himself. Because he was alive and uninjured and so close to our camp, it was decided to bring him in to be tortured.

This caused great excitement and all work was stopped for the day. It was as if the circus had come to town, or a public hanging called among the whites. He must have seen what was going to happen because he begged me to help him but there was nothing I could do, and a few of the newer captives, whose position was less secure, stomped on his face to show their loyalty.

The torture of a captive was considered a high honor for the women of the village and all the female elders were gathered along with the younger ones. Prairie Flower was upset that she had not been selected. After stripping him naked, tying his hands and feet to stakes, spread-eagled so he was just barely suspended in the air, they poked fun at his pale hair and his privates, which were shrunken with fear; one woman sat on top of him and pretended she was going to rut him, much to the delight of everyone. Most of the village was gathered, with children sitting or standing on shoulders, the same as would witness a hanging in town. The women built four very small fires, one each at his hands and feet. Fuel was added carefully, keeping the flames to a minimum, only building them hotter when he stopped shouting, which indicated the nerves had died. They would increase the heat by adding one very small stick, at which point he would begin to sing again.

He shrieked himself hoarse and the children mimicked him with great joy. By late afternoon he was barely making a sound and I wondered if he’d ruptured his vocal cords. At supper he was given broth and water, which his body accepted gladly, though he must have known why we were giving it to him. Later they fed him again. I walked by, thinking he was in a stupor, but he recognized me and begged me to kill him—one Christian to another. I stood there thinking, knowing what I would want done for me, and then Toshaway caught me as I was returning to the tipi.

“I know what you are thinking, Tiehteti. Everyone will know and the penalties will be severe. More than you think, probably.”

“I’m not thinking anything,” I said. “He’s killing our buffalo.”

“All right,” he said. “All right, Tiehteti.”

P
RAIRIE
F
LOWER WAS
on fire that night. I did my best but after the second time I was less interested. She was rubbing herself against me and finally I stopped her.

“Usually I can’t get rid of N
uu
karu and Escuté,” she said. They were out on a raid, so we had the tipi to ourselves. “But now the one time I could use them . . . ”

“I’m sure others are still awake, if that’s what you really want.”

“You know I don’t.” She cuddled against me. “What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“It’s the white man, isn’t it?”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” she said. “I apologize for my horniness.”

“Just give me a minute.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I’ll try,” I said. But I couldn’t.

I
N THE MORNING,
just after breakfast, they cut off his hands and feet because the nerves were all dead, and when the screaming began to abate, they moved the fire under the stumps where the nerves were still fresh. Fewer people were watching now, and though the sound of the man’s screaming filled the camp, it had already started to seem normal.

Toshaway told me this had once been a regular event, but over the years, as they began to raid farther and farther away from camp, the risks of bringing back a full-grown male prisoner just to torture had not been worth it.

“I am going out to hunt,” I said.

He looked at me.

“I’m fine,” I told him.

W
HEN YOU DON’T
want to see snakes you find them everywhere and when you want one you can’t find it. Certain men milked rattlesnakes for war arrows, but I fumbled my equipment so much I had not wanted to risk it. Still, I had milked snakes, and after spending most of the day looking, I finally found a big
w
u
ts
u
tsuki
late in the afternoon, on a high rock in the sun. When he had stopped thrashing I cut off his head and wrapped it in a piece of buckskin.

The second night, the buffalo hunter was given broth and more water. By then he had only fifty or so fans, sitting around eating and watching him. I went to bed like normal and then waited until I couldn’t hear any more talking. The night was overcast and nearly black, which I took as a sign. I made my way quietly to where he was staked out.

He made a sound when I approached; he might have been saying please; he might have been saying anything at all.

It was a stupid plan; it was dark, there were small sharp teeth, and it was messy, but I used the back of my knife to milk the snake’s head over his mouth. It was only a drop or two but he began to kick. “Let it pass through you,” I said. “You don’t have to hold on to it.” I made a cut on his throat and milked the rest of the venom into that. I could tell I’d nicked my hand.

His breathing was already starting to change.

I walked away and washed myself in the stream.

When I got back to my tipi, Prairie Flower was in my bed, as excited as the night before.

When we were done, she said: “Where were you?”

“Just walking.”

“You were wet,” she said.

My arm was tingling. Finally I asked her: “That didn’t bother you, what they did to that man?”

It came out louder than I wanted.

“It’s just because he is white.”

“I don’t know.”

“It is not good to discuss this with anyone.”

“I’m not. I wouldn’t.”

“Even me,” she said.

It was quiet.

“I know you’re not weak. Everyone knows you’re not weak.” She was measuring her words. “Toshaway says you’ll be chief one day. They’re making you a buffalo robe, but it was supposed to be a surprise.”

“I was just asking how you felt.”

“They’re making a robe that shows how you killed the Delaware, how your magic protected you from his arrows, and then how you saved Toshaway from the soldiers. It’s supposed to be a surprise, though.” Then she said, “That man was white. You need to think about that.”

“We didn’t do those things where I grew up.”

She rolled away. “You know I was not always Kotsoteka,” she said.

“No.”

“When I was
t
u
ep
u
r
u
,
maybe six years old, the Texans attacked my band. My brother made my sister and me go into the river and swim away. They shot my brother’s head off in the water, and they shot at me but missed. The next day my sister and I went back to our camp and found my mother, along with one hundred other dead women and dead old men and dead children. The Texans had cut off my mother’s head and put it on a stick in the ground and they had taken a
t
u
tsuwai
and put it all the way up between her legs, and there was so much blood we knew they had done it while she was still alive. But there was no blood around her neck so we knew that was not done until after. That is why I grew up
Pena t
u
hka
but now I am Kotsoteka.”

“The same thing happened to my mother and sister,” I told her. “And my brother.”

“Tiehteti,” she said, “this cannot happen.” She reached for her things and began to dress and I decided I didn’t care. And of course she was right: she was allowed to talk about her family, I was not allowed to talk about mine, because unless your family was Comanche, it was as if they had never existed.

“You can stop me if you want,” she said.

I didn’t say anything and I heard her make a little sob and then I grabbed her and pulled her back down.

“I won’t talk about it anymore,” I said.

She shrugged. She slipped out of her clothes but we just lay against each other and eventually she fell asleep.

I stayed up thinking, trying to figure if the tingling in my arm was spreading to my side or if I was imagining it. Then I was thinking about my father. In the early forties, there had been so few victories over the Comanches that when they occurred, the news spread to the entire state. In all those years there had only been one fight in which so many Comanches had died, which was Moore’s expedition on the Colorado. Moore had claimed that over one hundred fifty braves had been killed, but there had always been talk that it was mostly women and children, that the braves had been out hunting when the raiders hit the camp. My father had ridden with Moore, and sometimes talked about the raid, but no differently than he’d talked about anything else. It was just something that had happened. Little Indians became big Indians. Everyone knew it.

Prairie Flower kissed me in her sleep. “You are good,” she murmured. “You are honest and good and you are not afraid of anything.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
the buffalo hunter was dead. His face and neck were bloated, but no one seemed to notice. Mostly they were disappointed. It was another sign the old ways were being lost: in the past, a captive might have been kept alive two or three days longer.

But if anyone suspected me, nothing was said. Prairie Flower and I spent every night together and Toshaway said if I wanted to borrow some horses to offer as a bride-price, they were free for the taking. He cleared his throat then, and mentioned, in a quieter tone, that fifty horses would be far too high. Times had changed.

I was given the buffalo robe they’d made for me, and my own tipi as well. It was turning out to be a good year. Fall had come and the rains were heavy and the heat had left the plains. The nights were crisp and the days sunny, the hunting good, and I began to make my plans with Prairie Flower.

A
FEW WEEKS
after the buffalo hunter died, people began to get sick.

Chapter Twenty-six

Jeannie

Summer 1945

V
E-day came and for a few weeks it seemed everything would be different and then it wasn’t. Her brothers did not return, the vaqueros went about their business without her—she did not see the point of helping them lose money. Several times she packed a suitcase, feeling desperate enough to take up Jonas on his offer, but she could never reach him before she changed her mind, she was sure that if she found him in Berlin, it would be no different from Princeton, he would abandon her some way or other.

Mostly she was bored. She made runs to Carrizo for the cook (always managing to forget a thing or two), she made trips to San Antonio, where a few dressmakers knew her and promised to introduce her to young men, but never did. She visited with Phineas, always expecting an invitation to stay with him, in his grand house overlooking all of Austin. She thought they might sit on his gallery and talk long into the night, but he was a private man (
you are a grown woman,
is how he put it) and so she roomed at the Driscoll instead.

It was a good year for the land. The grass had stayed green. With so much good grass she knew she ought to buy a few hundred stocker animals, but the cattle were a luxury, the horses were a luxury, even the grass was a luxury: the poorer ranches now looked like patches of dirt. Anyway, she preferred grass to cows.

Once a week she would saddle her father’s horse, General Lee, and take him out on the land. Sullivan objected—he’d wanted to shoot the animal—and he was probably right. A few times General Lee had nearly gotten the best of her. He would stand quietly, allowing himself to be saddled, and then, just as she mounted, he would begin to kick. He did tend to buck a straight line, but he had thrown her more than once. You ought to be grateful, she told him. I am the only reason you are still alive.

But he was not grateful. He must have known she did not appreciate him, or that her feelings were mixed, or maybe, like her, he was simply bored, because he had no job and no prospects and when you went on like that too long, habits tended to grow on you.

Texas had once been full of wild horses, five million, ten million, no one knew. But they had mostly been rounded up and shipped to the British during the Great War. Between the war and the rendering plants, Texas had been just about cleaned out of ponies. In her childhood, most of the old cow horses still went to East Texas to become plow horses, but the tractors had changed that. Old horses now became feed for other animals.