The Son (43 page)

“May I ask where are you from?”

“New York City.”

“I know that, but what tribe are you from? The Senecas? The Cayugas?”

The reporter shook his head.

“Or perhaps you are Erie, or Mohawk, or Mohican, or Montauk or Shinnecock, or Delaware or Oneida or Onondaga. Or, my favorite, Poospatuck? I suppose they are your neighbors. Do you attend their scalp dances?”

“Come off it,” said the reporter.

“There are no Indians left in your part of the country because you killed them all. So we find it interesting you have such a fascination with making sure we treat ours humanely. As if, unlike the savages your grandfather wiped out, ours are thoughtful and kind.”

“And yet look at this woman. She was taken as a prisoner, but not mistreated.”

The judge began to speak, then thought better of it. After a time, he said: “So it seems.”

Two weeks later, Ingrid Goetz was traveling east with that same reporter. I never saw or heard from her again.

A
ROUND THAT SAME
time Judge Black came to me and told me my father was dead. He had been killed somewhere near the border, riding with a Ranger company. A woman claiming to be his widow, who had seen the announcement of my return in the newspaper, had written the judge and offered to let me stay with her.

From what anyone knew, my father had signed back with the Rangers after coming home to find his house burned and his family dead or missing, and while he had survived his first two years, he had been killed the third. The Texas Rangers in those days had a 50 percent fatality rate per tour; they lay buried all over the state, three or four to a grave. My father had been killed by Mexicans. That was all anyone knew.

I took my bow and a pair of trousers the judge had bought for me, so I would not be mistaken for an Indian, and went walking by the river. I expected to blubber, but nothing came out, and then I wasn’t sure if I was betraying Toshaway or not and I decided to stop thinking about it. That night I had a dream in which my father and I were standing together by the old house.

“You couldn’t have caught us,” I was telling him. “No one could have.”

But then he was gone and I was not sure if I was saying that to him or to myself.

T
HE JUDGE CLAIMED
it was no problem but I could tell I was disturbing his household, as his three daughters had taken to painting their faces and making war whoops and practicing their ululations. His wife suspected this had something to do with me. She was the type who liked saving people but she had so many rules I couldn’t keep them straight.

I took to excusing myself after breakfast and spending the day along the river, looking for things to shoot. The judge made me promise to wear the white man’s clothing. He was worried I’d be killed by a citizen.

I was careful to hunt the birds I knew his wife liked and one afternoon I returned and laid out four ducks and a pheasant for the servants to pluck.

“Good day at work, I see.” The judge was sitting on the gallery, reading a book.

“Yessir.”

“It will be difficult to get you into a proper school, won’t it?”

I nodded.

“I have always found it interesting that white children take so quickly to Indian ways, while Indian children, when brought to be raised in white families, never take to it at all. Not that you are a child.”

“No sir.”

“Of course there is no doubt that the Indian lives closer to the earth and the natural gods. There is simply no question.” He closed his book. “Unfortunately there is no more room for that kind of living, Eli. Your and my ancestors departed from it the moment they buried a seed in the ground and ceased to wander like the other creatures. There can be no turning back from that.”

“I don’t think I’m going to school,” I said.

“Well, if you stay around here, at some point you will have to. Especially in m’lady’s house. It’s not quite proper to have wild Indians sleeping under one’s roof.”

I considered pointing out that I had two scalps under my belt, that I was a better hunter, tracker, and horseman than any white man in town. The idea of putting me in a school, with children, was ridiculous. But instead I said: “Well, maybe I should go check in with my father’s new wife.” She lived in Bastrop, which had never really settled up.

“No hurry,” he said. “I enjoy your company. But even there, if you want to have a future, you’ll have to acquire some education, however painful that might be.”

“I could sign with the Rangers right now,” I said.

“Of course. But I think it might be in you to do something more important than living among outlaws and mercenaries.”

I got sore at this but kept quiet. I tried to consider by what measure I might be thought to need further education. It was just that the whites were crazy for rules. And yet they were in charge. And I was white myself.

One of the Negroes brought us cold tea.

“Something’s been bothering me,” he said. “Ingrid Goetz wasn’t really treated any differently than any other captive, was she?”

“She was treated just as you thought she was.”

“So you made that story up to protect her?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “Glad to see your time with the savages has left your humanity intact, Master McCullough.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“One other thing.”

I nodded.

“M’lady’s favorite Persian cat is missing and she is worried you might have had something to do with it.”

“Absolutely not.”

“How are the Indians on cats?”

“I never saw one. Plenty of dogs, though.”

“They eat the dogs, don’t they?”

“That’s the Shoshones,” I said. “A dog or coyote is sacred to a Comanche. You would be cursed.”

“But they do eat human beings occasionally?”

“That’s the Tonkawas,” I said.

“Never the Comanches.”

“A Comanche who ate a man would be killed by the tribe immediately, because supposedly it becomes an addiction.”

“Interesting,” he said. He was scratching his chin. “And this Sun Dance they all talk about?

“That’s the Kiowas,” I said. “We never did that.”

S
HORTLY AFTER
I
NGRID
left, two more captives, sisters from Fredericksburg, were brought in by traders. There was a big fuss until people got a look at them. One had her nose cut off. The other seemed normal but her mind was gone. There was a big announcement in the paper but no one knew what to do with them; they were not talkative and very upsetting to be around so they ended up living in the spare house of the minister, behind the church. I went and visited them at the judge’s request, to try to communicate with them, but as soon as I spoke to them in Comanche, they didn’t want anything to do with me. They both drowned themselves a few weeks later.

Which, of course, saved everyone a good deal of trouble, as proper society now regarded them to be roughly the same as whores, being they’d been raped by buck Indians. And, unlike a whore, who might renounce her immoral choices and properly redeem herself, these women had no power over what had happened to them, and thus had no power to undo it, either.

I
WAS ALREADY
getting tired of the judge’s house and had taken to sleeping outside. I’d gotten in small trouble for borrowing a neighbor’s horse and for shooting various of the neighborhood hogs full of arrows, not to mention that all the other petty larcenies, which had nothing to do with me, were now attributed to my presence.

I admitted to the judge that the Comanches hated swine and I guess I’d inherited that from them. I was severely understimulated. I had no idea what white children did to occupy themselves. They go to school, he told me. I told him the slaughter of the pigs would look like nothing if I was put into school. Which of course was an exaggeration—I would simply walk out. Meanwhile the judge told the neighbors that the state would reimburse them, as I was still adjusting back to civilized life.

One afternoon he sat me down: “Master McCullough, I don’t mean to suggest you aren’t welcome in my house, but it might be time to pay your father’s new family a visit down in Bastrop. M’lady believes this might do you some good, if you know what I mean.”

“She doesn’t like me.”

“She admires your spirit greatly,” he said. “But one of the Negroes discovered a few items that he believed to be human scalps and reported as much to m’lady.”

“The niggers went into my bag?”

“They are naturally curious,” he said. “My apologies.”

“Where is it now?”

“It has been deposited above the stables for safekeeping. Don’t worry, I told them they would be whipped if even a single item was missing.”

“I guess I will leave today, then.”

“No need for that,” he said. “But soon.”

I gathered my things and asked the Negroes to return the scalps they’d stolen, along with my madstone.

Then I went and found the judge in his study and thanked him and made him a present of my butcher knife and beaded sheath. I had liberated a better one, a fine bowie knife, from one of the judge’s neighbors who had kept it in a glass case: supposedly it had been owned by Jim Bowie himself. I would have given it to the judge, but I did not want to get him in trouble. As for my Indian knife, the judge asked: “This ever raise any hair?”

“Some,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Only Mexican and Indian,” I lied.

He looked at the knife.

“I’ll have a display case made for it. I know just the man to do it.”

“Whatever you like,” I said.

“I’m honored to meet you, young man. You’re headed for great things if you don’t get yourself hanged. I think you’ll find that not all servants of the law are as liberal minded as yours truly; that judge in Bastrop is a real prick, in fact, he’s one of my greatest enemies and I would not mention our friendship to him if you can avoid it.”

That night I left for Bastrop, over the judge’s objections, as he said I ought to catch a wagon in the morning. I could see the mistress felt guilty about having me removed, and the children, when they found out I was leaving, wept and could not be consoled; their eldest daughter jumped on me and began kissing my neck and crying hysterically.

But I felt free again, as the judge’s forty acres, though he was quite proud of it, seemed to me like a postage stamp; I was used to having twenty or so million at my disposal. And Austin was overrun with people, five thousand and climbing; it was impossible to walk along the river without being interrupted by the clinking of horsebells and the cries of boatmen. Anyone could see there were too many pigs for the tits.

Chapter Thirty-two

Jeannie McCullough

I
t was near first light when she fell asleep and sometime later she heard him calling. She opened her eyes. By the sound of it he was right outside her door and though she’d been thinking about him all night, she found herself afraid and not sure what to do so she stayed quiet. She could hear him there in the hallway.

Finally she got the nerve to call out, “I’ll be down in a minute. Tell Flores to make you coffee.”

She heard him go downstairs. Then she was sorry. She told herself it was only because she didn’t want him seeing her like this, puffy faced and without makeup, but she knew that wasn’t true.
I’m a coward,
she thought. She washed and put her hair back and made herself up. Then she went to the kitchen.

“How’d you sleep?” she said.

“Pretty good, I guess.”

If the comment hurt her, she didn’t show it.

After breakfast, he went to fiddle with the maps and as she was carrying the lunch basket out to the truck, her eye caught on the serving cart with its bottle of whiskey and silver cocktail shaker. She put them into the basket, chiding herself the entire time, wondering how she might explain it if she were somehow caught, or if he objected, but it occurred to her there was no one to catch her, and this made her feel both better and worse, and then it seemed to her that as far as Hank was concerned, things could not move quickly enough. She went back to the kitchen and wrapped a block of ice in some towels and she needed sugar as well. She could always get rid of it if she changed her mind.

As they were driving away from the house, she said, “Pull up next to that stock tank.”

He complied. She got out and picked a big handful of mint and put it in the basket. “What is that for?” he said.

“Refreshments.”

“I will take your word for it.”

A few hours later, when he was satisfied he had seen enough of the country to take a break, they ate lunch at the stream by the old Garcia house. Along the stream were a few young cottonwoods; she excused herself and picked her way down the steep embankment and plucked a handful of the buds, then walked back up to see him. She scraped the sap of the buds with her fingernail.

“Here,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Just smell it.”

He gave her a skeptical look and then she put her hand near his face.

“Whoa,” he said. He seized her arm and pulled her whole hand in and they sat like that. She could feel his breath on her wrist.

“I wish I could smell that the rest of my life.”

“It’s the sap of the buds,” she said. “You can only get it a few times a year.”

“What’s it taste like?”

“Try it.”

“Off your fingers?”

She shrugged. She watched him . . . hoping for . . . she didn’t know. But he put only the tip of her finger into his mouth, then removed it quickly.

“Smells better than it tastes,” he said, and laughed.

She sat there hoping he would kiss her, but he didn’t move, in fact he let go of her wrist.

“This is country,” he said, looking out over the savannah.

She forced herself to nod. Something had settled over her which blotted out the light.

“The company is not bad, either.”

She nodded again. They could hear the stream running and the locusts.

“And if you are telling me that I am hard to beat as well, I agree with you.”

“I didn’t say anything at all,” she said.