The Son Read online

  Everything was pulled from the wagons, including two more bodies we hadn’t noticed. It was hot and the red dust was settling over the flowers. The dead men’s pockets were searched, those who hadn’t been scalped were scalped; the last teamster had gone quiet. One of the Indians had a poultice applied, a pear pad split and tied with cloth; most of the hide shields had fresh lead streaks and a tall brave with Karankawa blood was cleaning his lance with grass. Others were going through the cargo, mostly flour sacks, which were cut and dumped in the road. A keg of whiskey was tomahawked and smaller kegs of gunpowder were strapped to horses along with several small crates, which from their weight must have been lead. Knives and blankets were taken, plugs of tobacco, bullet molds, a pair of axes and a handsaw, some calico fabric, a few repeating pistols. The locks and mainsprings on the rest of the guns were checked and the ones still good were taken. There was a brief debate over a scalp. Two plum pies were discovered and divvied up with the bloody knives.

  The younger Comanches were combing the grass for stray arrows, the mules were put into the horse pack, a few quick circles were made to be sure nothing and no one had been missed, a piece of interesting fabric recovered, then all the guns were recharged and the quivers repacked, straps and hitches tightened, mouths rinsed. The oxen bellowed their final protest as someone cut their throats; by then the rest of the blood in the road had turned black and the bodies covered over with dust. They looked like they’d always been there.

  The Indians split into three groups and left a wide set of tracks leading toward civilization, opposite the direction we were actually headed. Everyone was in a good mood. One of the braves rode up and slapped a fresh scalp on my head, the stringy gray hair hanging down. A man’s bloody hat was crushed down on top of it, which the Indians found hilarious. We continued northwest, the grass tall with scattered thick motts of oak and the mesquites with their flickering leaves and the yuccas in bloom with their white flowers.

  After a few hours the brave decided he didn’t want to soil his trophy any further and took it off my head, tying it to his belt and throwing the dead man’s hat into the bushes. The scalp and hat had been keeping the sun off and I asked for the hat back but we rode on. By then the other groups had rejoined us.

  At the next change of horses, the Indians passed around some jerky they’d taken off the teamsters. My brother and I were offered a few bites. It was still hot but the Indians didn’t care about drinking water, and when one of them offered me tobacco I was so thirsty I couldn’t take it. My brother was not offered tobacco. He stood with his legs in a straddle and looked miserable.

  When the sun finally went down my mouth was so dry I thought I would choke. I reminded myself to pick up a pebble to suck but then I was thinking about the spring near our house, of sitting and letting the water rush over as I looked out past the river. I began to feel better.

  It was dark and at some point we stopped at a muddy hole and the horses were held back while the Indians tore up grass and piled it on the mud and took about two swallows each. My brother and I stuck our whole faces in and drank our fill. It tasted like frogs and smelled like animals had been wallowing but we didn’t care. After he’d swallowed enough my brother started to cry, and then the Indians were kicking him in the belly and giving him the knife at the throat. Wuyupa?nitu, quiet down. Nihpu?aitu, stop talking.

  They were planning something. They changed their mounts but we were kept back with the horse herd.

  “I think we’ve come a hundred miles. We must be right below the San Saba.”

  “Do you think they’ll let me drink again?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He put his face back in the muddy water. I tried again but now I couldn’t stand the smell. My brother drank and drank. It hurt even just to sit in the dirt now. I wondered how long it would take to heal; weeks maybe. We huddled together as best as possible. There was a bad odor and I realized my brother had shat himself.

  “I can’t stop.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “There’s no point,” he said.

  “All we have to do is keep going,” I told him. “It is not that much when you think about it.”

  “And then what? What happens when we get where they’re taking us?”

  I was quiet.

  “I don’t want to find out,” he said.

  “There was John Tanner,” I said, “Charles Johnston, you yourself have read those books.”

  “I am not the type to live on bark and gooseberries.”

  “You’ll be a legend,” I said. “I’ll visit you in Boston and tell your friend Emerson that you’re a real man and not just some cockchafing poet.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “You could try a little harder,” I told him. “You’re risking our hair every time you piss them off.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “That is not true at all.”

  “Well, I’m glad you know.”

  He started to cry again. Then he was snoring. I was mad because he was just being lazy. We were not being fed any less, or driven any harder, than the Indians were driving themselves; we’d both had a lot more water than they had and who knew how long they’d been going like this? There was a logic but my brother couldn’t see it. If a man has done it, so can you: that is what our father used to tell us.

  Then we were slapped awake. It was still dark and they tied us to the horses and there was a bright light in the distance that I knew was a burning homestead. I hadn’t thought there were whites this far out, but the land was rich and I could see why they had risked it. A few braves came up and I could tell they were pleased with the youngsters for getting us mounted.

  In the darkness we saw another dozen or so horses driven into the remuda. There were two new captives; by their crying we knew they were women and by their language we knew they were German, or Dutch as we called them back then.

  By sunrise we’d gone another fifty miles, changing horses twice. The Germans didn’t stop crying the entire night. When it was light enough we climbed a mesa, winding around the far side before coming up to watch our backtrail. The land had opened up; there were mesas, buttes, distant views.

  The Germans were as naked as we were. One was seventeen or eighteen and the other a little older, and while they were both covered in blood and filth it was obvious they were at the peak of their female charms. The more I looked at them, the more I began to hate them and I hoped the Indians would degrade them some more and I would be able to watch.

  My brother said, “I hate those Dutch women and I hope the Indians give them a good fucking.”

  “Me too.”

  “You seem to be holding up, though.”

  “Because I don’t keep falling off my horse.” We had stopped twice that night so they could lash my brother on tighter.

  “I’ve been trying to catch a hoof in the head, but I haven’t been so lucky.”

  “I’m sure Momma would be happy to hear that.”

  “You’ll make a good little Indian, Eli. I’m sorry I won’t be there to see it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You know the reason I didn’t shoot is because I didn’t want them to hurt Mother or Lizzie.”

  “You froze up.”

  “They would have killed Mother anyway, that’s obvious, but they would have taken Lizzie with us. It was only because she’d been shot that . . .”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “You didn’t have to see what they did to her.”

  I was looking at him. He looked the same as always with his squinty eyes and thin lips but he seemed like someone I’d known a long time ago.

  A little later he told me he was sorry.

  The Indians passed around a few pieces of jerked meat from the teamsters. One of the Germans asked me where I thought we were going. I pretended not to understand her. She knew better than to talk to Martin.

  THE NEXT DAY the views got longer. We were in a canyon ten mil
es wide, the walls going up a thousand feet above us, all red rock. There were cottonwoods and hackberries but not many other trees and we passed a magenta spear point in the sand, twin to the one I’d seen below our house. There were stone creatures in every rock and stream bank: a nautilus big as a wagon wheel, the horns and bones of animals larger than anything still alive on the earth.

  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.”

  DESPITE TOSHAWAY’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.

  THE 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.

  “N
ote 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.