The Son (54 page)

(The fact that he was an Indian has no bearing on his intelligence. She puts her finger to my lips.)

That night he couldn’t sleep, thinking about all he had to lose. He returned to the seer the following morning.

“Seer, will I lose my land?”

And the seer said: “You have the best horses for five hundred miles, the biggest house, the most beautiful wife, an ancient lineage, and four healthy sons. I am a blind, penniless Indian. You should be the one giving me the answers.”

“But you are wise.”

“I am old. So old that I remember playing at your house before it was there.”

“I suspect you are mistaken,” said Arturo. “That house has stood nearly a hundred years.”

“Nevertheless, I remember. There was an enormous rock I used to sleep on with my wife and all my children, for it was very warm, even in winter, as if it went down to the center of the earth. It must have been removed, as it was a growing rock, and became a little taller each year.”

Arturo knew there had been such a rock. The top had been blasted off and the house was built over what was left. But as the years passed, the rock had begun to grow, cracking the plaster and bowing all the floors, so that a marble placed in the center of the room would roll toward any of the walls. Finally the floor was removed and the rock hammered and chiseled away. But there was no way for the Indian to have known this. Arturo said: “Old Man, I have done you a favor, and now you will kindly do me this favor as well. Will I keep my land or not?”

The old Coahuiltecan did not take a single breath for ten minutes. Then he said: “You will not like my answer.”

“It is as I suspected.”

The man nodded.

“I must hear it.”

“I am sorry but you will not keep your land. You and your wife and all your sons will be killed by the Anglos.”

T
HAT EVENING
A
RTURO
stood on his portico, watching his sons play in the grass, his beautiful wife standing near, his vast pastures where his vaqueros and their families tended his herds.

He could not understand why a man like him, a good man, should suffer such a terrible fate and that night he took the most ancient weapon of his family, an
alabarda
that had seen combat against the French, the Dutch, and the Moors, and honed the edge so fine that it would split a hair. The next morning he returned to the camp of the old Coahuiltecan, where he cut off the man’s head with a single stroke. But even as the head lay there, detached from the body, it looked at him and uttered a curse.

(But the lungs, I say. Without the lungs there can be no air . . . )

(The finger goes again to my lips.)

A few months later, deciding on the course of maximum caution, Arturo sent his family to Mexico City for their safety. But before they could even cross the river, they were waylaid by white militiamen, who committed enormous outrages upon his wife as she lay dying and murdered Arturo’s four sons as well.

Arturo resolved to never marry again, and did not. In 1850, after the second war, he went to Austin and paid all his property taxes, and it was only because of his mastery of both written and spoken English, which exceeded that of every Anglo lawyer in the capital, that he was allowed to retain any property at all. Half his lands were immediately confiscated because the Anglos claimed the title was flawed, though they could not point out how, or where.

T
WENTY YEARS LATER
he disappeared, murdered with all his vaqueros. My father, who was his nephew, inherited the property. My mother wanted no part of it. She wanted him to sell the land to the Americans.

“But they are murderers,” my father said.

“Better to sell to them than live among them,” said my mother.

But my father began to go crazy thinking about the vast pastures he might own and six months after Arturo’s murder, he and my mother moved here, along with a dozen vaqueros he hired in Chihuahua.

The house was untouched, the family treasure still intact. After reading my uncle’s journals, he went and dug up a skeleton at the place they described. He reburied the man, whose head was indeed detached, at the most peaceful place he could find, under a persimmon tree next to a spring, with a good knife and a sack of beans to carry the man through his journeys in the next world. He was certain this would lift the curse and keep our family safe.

(She looks at me. “As you can see, it did not do any good.”)

Chapter Forty-three

Eli McCullough

1854–1855

T
hat winter, instead of being sent down to the border, we were sent north to range the breaks from the Washita to the Concho. Winter was usually when the Indians holed up, but the previous year, the government had settled five hundred reluctant Comanches on the Clear Fork of the Brazos and another two thousand Caddos and Wacos on a larger reservation farther east.

As was normal, the reservations were short of food and the attempts to teach the Indians our superior white ways only convinced them of the opposite. The crops they grew were killed by drought or eaten by grasshoppers; there were more of them squeezed into a smaller space than they’d imagined humans could live. Locals complained about the reservation Indians stealing livestock; Indians complained the settlers were stealing horses and grazing their stock on Indian pastures. But we never caught any Indians, and the whites we caught we couldn’t do anything about.

M
EANWHILE, THERE WERE
houses going up within gunshot of the caprock. The settlers had pushed far beyond Belknap, Chadbourne, and Phantom Hill, a hundred miles past where the army could protect them. They did not care that there was only one Ranger company patrolling the entire eastern Llano. As for the legislature, lice-ridden clodhoppers did not vote or donate to political campaigns, so their problems, quietly viewed to be of their own causation—though necessary for the betterment of the state—were ignored. No new taxes. Rangers cost money.

One night in April we’d made camp on a mesa. Unlike the other ranging companies we were careful with our fires, building them like the Indians did, in arroyos or depressions away from any trees that would reflect their light. We could see thirty or forty miles, an expanse of badlands going on in every direction, the river snaking between mesas, buttes, and hoodoos, uncountable side canyons and rolling hills, motts of juniper and shinnery oak. The land was greening up, the hackberries and cottonwoods along all the streams, the grama and little bluestem on the river flats, and it was pleasant with the red rock buttes and green valleys and the darkening sky overhead. The Dipper was riding high and though we had not caught a single Indian in six months, the weather was warming and we were not going to lose any more toes. We were all ready to turn in when we saw a glow off in the east, in a small valley, that grew brighter the longer we watched it. Five minutes later the horses were saddled and we were making our way off the mesa, toward the fire.

The house was still burning when we reached it. There was a charred scalped body in the doorway; we could see it had been a woman. Off in the brush we found a man stuck with arrows. The arrows had two grooves and the moccasin prints narrowed at the front and I knew it was Comanches. The homestead had not been there long—the corral posts were still leaking sap—and there were the framed beginnings of a smokehouse and stable. Yoakum Nash found a silver locket and Rufus Choate found a barlow knife and after drinking our fill at their spring and making a quick scout for other valuables, we cut stick and rode after the Indians.

Their trail was clear enough, and a mile or so along it we came on a young boy with his head caved in, barely starting to stiffen. When we hit the river the tracks crossed and recrossed in every conceivable direction and the captain put me out front. All the trails were too obvious. I took us up the middle of the water until there was a long patch of rocky ground. I knew they’d taken it and sure enough, where the rocks ended, the pony tracks began.

The grass was high and the tracks were clear but there were not enough of them. They aimed toward a bluff, which the others presumed the Indians had climbed to watch their backtrail, but it was too early for that so I led us back to the river, losing another half hour. Then we found a pale blue dress in the rocks. It was something a teenager would wear, too small to have fit the burned woman, who was tall and chunky.

“Well, it appears we have a live one,” said the captain.

“Maybe,” said McClellan. He was the lieutenant. “Or maybe they just threw her off in the brush like the other one.”

I knew she was alive. They had taken her and her brother, but her brother was too young, or he had cried or been noisy and she was smart enough to take a lesson from that, despite what they had done to her before tying her to the horse.

We stood on the banks another minute, collecting our thoughts, looking around at the hoodoos and canyons and tall grass and cedar; the Indians might be anywhere. It would not take Napoleon to make an ambush in country like this and we all wanted to stay in the flat open plain along the water.

After a few more miles we came to a bend thickly overgrown with cottonwoods and there was something about the light. The sun was coming up behind us. The captain and I eased forward and he looked through his glass while I looked through mine; there were some specks along the red rock, maybe five miles out.

“You seeing horses?”

“Yup.”

“Do they know we’re following?”

“I don’t think so.”

The sun was rising into their eyes but we turned around and cut through the brush anyway, keeping the trees and buttes between us and the Indians, gaffing hell out of our ponies. But when we got another look at them again, this time from the top of a small mesa, they’d put even more distance on us.

M
IDWAY THROUGH THE
day our horses were blown. The Comanches would have changed mounts twice and the captain was reckless, leading us through funnels and thickets at top speed. “They don’t want a fight,” he said. “They just want to get away.”

Meanwhile we were getting close to the Llano and the badlands had narrowed to a single canyon a few miles wide. Blocks of stone the size of courthouses had tumbled from the upper walls; there were forests of petrified stumps and logs, herds of pronghorn watching from the ledges. The Indians would have to climb out.

We were getting close to the canyon mouth and as we emerged from some cottonwoods, there they were, only a half mile ahead but six hundred feet above us. One of them turned to look and waved his arm. I was squinting through my field glass. It was Escuté.

I couldn’t make out his face, but I could tell by his straight back and crooked arm and the way he’d done his hair, which was unlike most Comanches. I wondered if N
uu
karu was with him. It occurred to me that N
uu
karu might not even be alive.

Then a flat crack rolled across the valley.

One of our men had a Sharps rifle with a tang sight, but he must have missed the Indians by a comfortable margin because they continued to wave as they disappeared over the ledge.

After three hours of riding into box canyons and other dead ends, we found the trail the Indians had taken. There was bear grass and juniper hanging above us, water splashing over shelves of rock nearly too high for our horses to climb. A few men with bows, firing down into the chasm, could have easily gotten all of us, so we moved slow. Our arms were shaking from keeping the pistols up. The ravine ended in a cul-de-sac. There was a wall covered with drawings and carvings, snakes and men dancing and horses and buffalo, a shaman in a headdress, the swirling figures you see when you fall asleep.

It had the feeling of a sacred place and we expected the Indians to appear above us and rain arrows from every direction. Then there was a rustling or whirring all around us and Elmer Pease began shooting. The rest of us jumped behind the closest rock.

There were no arrows. Instead there was a kind of dervish hanging in the air, a small tornado, though there was no wind, it was some kind of Indian spirit, and it floated about for a long time before moving back down the canyon, where it vanished.

The captain came out from behind his rock. “McCullough and Pease, get up behind that face and see if the path goes anywhere.”

An hour later we were on the Llano. The Comanches’ trail was faint but clear. In the tracks I saw three riders split west from the group, driving a dozen unsaddled ponies, leaving a large, clearly beaten trail, a diversion. The main body had continued north in single file, their tracks nearly indistinguishable among all the buffalo sign and rocks. I thought about the girl they had taken. Then I thought about Escuté.

“Here they go,” I said. I pointed toward the diversion.

A
FTER FIVE OR
six miles it petered out. I guessed they had been dragging brush and dropped it. Or they began to ride single file. Or they knew tricks I had never learned. We turned and followed our backtrack; we were six hours behind them and they all had fresh mounts. I got off my horse and stood looking around in the dirt, ignoring the trail they had left across the rocks, invisible to everyone else, but clear enough to me, a faint disturbance, scuffs here and there in the dust.

“I’m about stumped,” I said.

The captain looked at me.

“We could split up and see what we find.”

“We aren’t splitting up,” the captain said.

“We know they didn’t go west and they probably didn’t go south, either.”

“You don’t see anything?” he said. “Anything at all?”

“There’s no tracks,” I told him.

He didn’t believe me but there was nothing he could do. We went north along the caprock, putting the spurs in and hoping to get a glimpse of them against the horizon before the sun faded. I watched as we rode, our track slowly diverging from Escuté’s until finally we were on a different course entirely.

T
HE CAPTAIN DIDN’T
trust me after that, but it didn’t matter. Two months later, we made an unplanned resupply trip to Austin and he found his wife entertaining a sutler. The captain’s pistol misfired and the sutler stabbed him to death.