The Son Page 9

  Nuukaru clapped me on the back for support, then everyone followed as I was led by the neck to an open area in the middle of the village. A big post had been driven into the ground. I was tied to it. From looking at the people gathered it was clear Judge Lynch was holding court and then three teenage Indians were pacing around me, pointing pistols at my head.

  Their sap was up and I expected them to shoot but they were waiting for more people. Finally most of the village was there; children running in and out of the crowd, putting pieces of wood and brush around my legs until there was a pile to my waist.

  The young Indians cocked their pistols and pressed them to my temple, into my mouth. My guts went loose. An old squaw came over with a skinning knife and I nearly released my innards, thinking I was about to be unshucked whole, but all she did was give me a few bleeders. Then I had to let some air out, which everyone found hilarious because they knew I was scared. Pakatsi tsa kuya?atu. Pakatsi tsa tu?uyatu!

  Nuukaru was standing at the front of the crowd, watching things; he was the same awkward age as my brother, tall and gangly, he would not be much help. The old woman walked away and one of the boys aimed his pistol and pulled the trigger. It pocked my face and singed my eyebrows but he hadn’t loaded a ball. The other two did the same. Then a kid ran up with a torch and feigned at lighting the pile of brush. I nodded at where I thought he ought to start the fire. I encouraged him and finally he lit the brush. The hair between my thighs began to sizzle and I was about to give up when Toshaway walked over and kicked away the burning sticks.

  Toshaway made a speech to the villagers, the gist of which was I hadn’t minded the idea of being burned or shot to death. The Indians highly approved of that outlook and a few of them slapped me on the back as I returned to Toshaway’s tipi. His wives poured tea over my cuts and burns and cleaned my face and dressed me in a new breechcloth. But before all that I went and squatted in the brush till I’d got the evil out of me.

  THE PARTY BEGAN at suppertime. Later Nuukaru told me this wouldn’t normally have been done because a man had been lost on the raid, but in this case no one liked the family and it was hoped they would move on.

  There was venison, elk, and buffalo, quail and prairie dog, bones roasted so the marrow could be spread on meat or mixed with mesquite beans and honey for dessert. There were potatoes and onions, corn bread and squash they’d gotten from the New Mexicans. The Comanches traded with the New Mexicans for nearly everything, and also the people at Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River. For corn, squash, and pumpkins, white and brown sugar, tortillas and hard breads, guns, powder, bar lead, and bullet molds. Ornaments for horses, percussion caps and steel knives, hatchets, axes and blankets, ribbons, linens and shrouds, gartering and gun screws, lance- and arrowheads, barrel hoops, bridles, steel wire, copper wire, gold wire, bells of all sizes, saddlebags, iron stirrups, iron pots, brass pots, mirrors and scissors, indigo and vermilion, glass beads and wampum, tobacco and tinder boxes, tweezers, combs, and dried fruit. The Comanches were the wealthiest of all the Indian tribes and spent half of what they made on baubles and cheap jewelry, though they did not, as some have written, care much for the white man’s clothing, for top hats or stockings or wedding veils.

  After everyone had eaten his fill the oldermost of the tribe began the dance and a warrior was called out and handed a long slender pole with scalps attached. The warrior told a story of bravery and called another warrior, who took the scalp pole and told a story and called up someone else. To tell a lie would bring a curse on the entire tribe and finally a brave was called who didn’t have any story better than the ones already told, and instead of talking he took up the scalp pole and began to dance. The people followed him in a big milling circle. I was standing watching. I had been scrubbed clean and painted and was wearing my breechcloth. The three old men had plucked out my eyebrows and the few scraggling hairs off my chin and upper lip. The drums beat and the Indians stepped in time; I was put into the circle and the scalp pole was handed to me and I was pushed to the front. After a few minutes I tried to hand it to the man behind me but he shoved me forward. The drums went faster, the air was red from the setting sun, I saw the wives of the man I’d killed and the next time I saw them they hadn’t moved and I knew the scalp pole was protecting me. They would not touch me as long as I held it. Several hours later the moon was up and I could barely stay awake, my feet hurt from stamping and my shoulders burned, but the Indians kept me at the front; there was grunting and whooping, the calls of bear and buffalo, panthers, deer, and elk.

  WHEN I WOKE up everything was black. I was under a robe. A small disk of dark sky over my head, a dying fire off to one side, the sound of someone breathing. It was peaceful. I was in a tipi on a soft bed of skins; I’d been washed again and rubbed with oil and my wounds dressed; I was clean and warm and rolled in a soft blanket. There was something about the person breathing, I got to feeling dauncy and it was like the Bible-thumpers say when you’re dunked: you think the world is one way and then you come up and find you’ve been wrong about everything.

  I got up from my pallet and went outside. There were stars and as far as I could see there were tipis glowing from their nightfires, around the bonfire people were still awake, talking softly. Women leaning on their men, children asleep against their parents. From some of the tipis there was snoring and in others there was giggling and in others there were women moaning, which went on for a long time and I got excited and then I thought of times I had heard my mother and father doing that, not to mention the few times I had imagined doing it to my sister, which of course I was ashamed of, more now than I’d been before.

  I heard someone rustle in their sleep, either Nuukaru or Toshaway’s son Escuté. I decided I would find Urwat and the rest of the Yap-Eaters and I would take from them a collection of scalps so long it would trail behind my horse ten miles.

  As for Toshaway and his family, he had saved me and he had tried to save my brother. He might have saved my mother and sister if he had known better. But the Indians had their rules same as we had ours. My father and I had once shot at a pair of runaway slaves collecting pecans from under our trees. My gun snapped and misfired and my father’s shot went yards high. I couldn’t understand as the niggers were barely at eighty paces and my father the best rifle shot in the county. Then they were dark streaks running through the forest. I said we ought to get Rufe Perry and his nigger dogs but my father said it was likely to rain and we had rows yet to hoe. I asked where the slaves were headed and he said Mexico, most likely, or to live out with the Indians, who would take in Negroes and other types as long as they lived according to their laws. I said how can they take in niggers to live among them? He said plenty of people do. I could not think of anything except I was sorry my gun had snapped and he told me one day I would be thankful for small mercies.

  I could hear Nuukaru and Escuté breathing deeply. I listened as long as I could before I fell asleep myself.

  Chapter Eight

  J.A. McCullough

  She was young again, riding an old wooden roller coaster, but something was going wrong—the cars were running faster and faster until finally at the very top, the whole train of them leaped from the tracks. She was flying and then she was not, she was watching the ground, everything was taking a long time, This is very serious, she thought, and then all the cars came down on top of her.

  Then she was in the desert. The biggest frac job of her life, the engineer directing tankers like the conductor of a symphony; the lines were charged, twelve thousand PSI, and then a coupler broke. A solid iron pipe whipped like a snake. Her eyes were stinging, she was looking right into the sun, there was a Life Flight on the way, but it wouldn’t do any good. Yes, she thought. That is what happened.

  She opened her eyes again. Except there had been a man, she was certain of it. She wondered if he’d gone for help. She watched the logs and embers in the fireplace. The burgundy rug spread beneath her, its birds and flowers and curlicues, the bu
sts of old Romans. She was dreaming.

  She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they’d press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil.

  People thought Henry Ford had ushered in the automobile age. False. Cart before the horse. It was Spindletop that had begun the automobile age and Howard Hughes, with his miraculous drill bit, who had completed it. Modern life was born at the Lucas gusher, when people suddenly realized how much oil there might be on earth. Before that, gasoline was nothing more than a cheap solvent—used to clean gears and bicycle chains—and all the oil that made John Rockefeller a millionaire was burned in lamps, a replacement for whale oil. It was Spindletop and the Hughes bit that had opened the way for the car, the truck, and the airplane, which all depended on cheap oil the way a church depended on God.

  She had done right. Made something out of nothing. The human life span had doubled, you did not get to the hospital without oil, the medicines you took could not be made, the food you ate did not reach the store, the tractor did not leave the farmer’s barn. She took something useless under the ground and brought it to the surface, into the light, where it meant something. It was creation. Her entire life.

  Once, she had not been unique in this. The industrialists built the country, the oilmen made it run. Now it was just the oilmen. The industrialists, or whatever they called themselves these days, led lives based on destruction, closing down factories and moving them abroad. She did not expect to be loved but there were bastards and there were bastards; those men had taken apart the country brick by brick and if there was anything she hated more than unions, it was people who couldn’t work.

  Other memories came back in a rush. Visiting the houses of the Mexican hands with her father, the women out of another century, pregnant and carrying water buckets from distant wells, irons over a wood fire, bluing to steaming washpots, wringing the boiling clothes. Canning fruits and vegetables in the worst of the summer heat—hotter in the jacals than it was outside. The men in the shade, braiding lariats from horsehair. Why don’t they buy their ropes from the store? she asked, but her father didn’t answer.

  Walking through the pasture hours before sunup, crouching low to find the horses against the dark sky. All around her, the hands roping their mounts. Blowing of horses, clicking of cinches, voices soothing in Spanish. Some of the ponies gave in to the rope, others bucked and kicked, not wanting to spend the day running in the sun and thorns. Many of them were nothing but scar tissue from wither to hoof; the brush took all the hair off.

  A never-ending creak of windmills, kneeling with the Colonel to study the wet ground at the stock tanks, the night’s fresh tracks. Cattle, deer, foxes, javelina, rabbits, paisano, hares, mice, raccoons, snakes, turkey, bobcats. The appearance of a panther track brought her father and brothers, an old Mexican with his dogs. At some point, she did not remember when, the Colonel began to put his hand over every panther track he saw, obliterating it completely. Don’t tell anyone. The adult world ran on secrets. The derision of her father and brothers when she said she wanted to see a wolf or bear. They are better in zoos, said her father. They are better gone forever.

  And what had she learned? She had lost half her family before their time. The land was hard on its sons, harder yet on the sons of other lands. Her grandmother had once proposed a bounty for each pair of Mexican ears—treat them the same as coyotes. She thought of her brothers killed by the Germans, her uncle Glenn blown to bits in a trench.

  She had tried to retire twelve years ago. She had been a child kneeling by the stock tank and then her own children were middle-aged; she had not been perfect, she wanted to patch things, she wanted to know her grandchildren. There had been a window. But oil had been low, cheaper than water, they said, and the bids she got for her leases were a fraction of what they should have been. She knew it was her last chance to make things right with the family. But to sell at such a bottom—the thought made her physically ill.

  Then the Arabs hit New York. She began hiring drillers. Her children had their own lives, they did not need her, oil began to climb. To see a well come in where there had just been desert, to see flow after a good frac job, from a hole everyone had given up on—that was what she lived for. Something out of nothing. Act of creation. There would always be time for family.

  Chapter Nine

  Diaries of Peter McCullough

  AUGUST 13, 1915

  Memory is a curse. When I close my eyes I see Pedro’s shot-off face and the weeping hole in Lourdes’s cheek, a clear fluid issuing forth like a tear. Aná’s blood-soaked dress. When I sleep I am back in their room. Pedro is sitting up in bed, pointing at me, speaking in some ancient language, and as I get closer I realize the sound is not coming from his mouth, but from the hole in his temple. Upon waking I lie still a long time and hope for my heart to stop beating, as if death might absolve me from my place in this.

  What happened at the Garcias’ was only the beginning. In town, there are at least a hundred armed men that no one knows, carrying rifles and shotguns as if it were half a century ago, as if there were no town at all. Amado Batista was murdered sometime in the night, his store looted, an attempt made to burn the building though the fire did not catch.

  The Garcias are described in all the papers as Mexican radicals; in truth they were the most conservative landowners in Webb and Dimmit Counties. The picture of their bodies is reprinted in every corner of the state and in Mexico, where, despite the fact that old landowners are not quite in favor, they will doubtless go down as martyrs.

  Glenn remains in San Antonio, recovering at the hospital. Neither he nor Sally reacted to the news of the Garcias’ annihilation. I wonder if I am going crazy or if I do not love my family enough, or if it is the opposite, if I love them too much. If I am the only sane person I know.

  Meanwhile, the rooming houses are full of the worst sorts the Rio Grande Valley has to offer and the Rangers are having trouble keeping order. I suggested to Sergeant Campbell (Was he the one to shoot Pedro and Lourdes? Was it my own son?) that he send for the rest of his company, but they are occupied up and down the border, guarding other ranches.

  Campbell, despite his mean looks, is troubled that half the dead were women and children. I refuse to talk to him about it. People like him think you can apologize things away, that you can confess over and over until you are free to repeat your crime.

  OUR HOUSE WAS busy all day with well-wishers; at one point I drove into town to escape them, whereupon I came on two trucks with a dozen men each, well armed and hoping to make battle with Mexican insurgents. I told them everyone was dead. They looked disappointed but after some discussion they decided to go into town anyway: no point giving up hope just yet.

  Returned to find Judge Poole eating our beef and drinking our whiskey and taking statements from all present. I gave him my story—just the facts—he corrected me several times—not your interpretation. Finally he asked me to step outside, away from the others.

  “This is just a formality, Pete. Don’t let anyone think I’ll side with a wetback over a white man.”

  Nearly pointed out that we are the wetbacks, having swum our horses across the Nueces a century after the Garcias first settled here. But of course I said nothing. He clapped me on the back—his butcher’s hands—and went in to eat more free beef.

  People continued to arrive at the house, bringing cakes, roasts, and regrets that they had not been able to reach us in time to help—how brave we were to assault the Mexicans with such a small force. By that they mean seventy-three against ten. Fifteen if you c
ount the women. Nineteen if you count the children.

  AUGUST 14, 1915

  Sally asked why I had not yet come to see Glenn at the hospital. I explained my reasons:

  Three houses were burned last night and eight townspeople killed, all Mexican except Llewellyn Pierce, who had a Mexican wife.

  Sergeant Campbell shot at least three looters, though two escaped into the brush. The dead man is from Eagle Pass. The three were in the process of setting fire to the home of Custodio and Adriana Morales. The Moraleses were already dead. I thought of Custodio and how he loved our fine horses; he always charged too little to repair the tack and other goods I brought him. I had been meaning to invite him over to ride for twenty years now.

  Campbell confided that one of his men refused to shoot at white looters. Also a sheriff’s deputy was found dead, but no one knew any details.

  Campbell has cabled again for the rest of his company but was told that they were busy with bigger problems farther south.

  “We need to do something about these Mexicans,” he told me. “They’re not going to be safe here.”

  He had not seemed very concerned about the safety of the Garcias. I did not say this but he must have read my face.

  “Our job is to enforce the peace against anyone who disturbs it,” he said. “I don’t care what color they are.”

  SEVERAL TEJANO FAMILIES—the Alberto Gonzaleses, the Claudio Lopezes, the Janeros, Sapinosos, and the Urracas—left town this afternoon with all their belongings.