The only one I broke this rule for was the German girl, whose name was Suhi?ohapitu, Yellow Hair Between the Legs, but who was mostly referred to as Yellow Hair. Whatever she had been to her family, to the Comanches she was invisible, a nonperson. She spent all her time scraping skins, hauling wood and water, digging tutupipu, everything I had done my first six months. But for her, there would be no end.
In spring, I ran into her in one of the pastures, looking after the horses. She looked well fed, though her muscles were ropy for a white woman and she didn’t have much fat. She appeared to have grown water shy. I could smell her from a good distance and her back was dotted with mohto?a as if she had not bathed in months.
“It’s you,” she said in English. “The chosen one.”
I could tell she was sulking.
“I see they’re treating you well.”
It threw me off to hear English. I told her—in Comanche—that she might consider washing herself. Which was not fair, but I was mad at her for saying I ought to be read out as some kind of deserter.
“Why should I?” she said. “I hoped it would make them stop touching me, but it hasn’t.”
“They aren’t supposed to do that anymore. They could get in big trouble.”
“Well, they are.”
“Well, they’re not supposed to.”
“That’s very useful of you to say.”
“Is it like before?”
“It’s one or two in particular,” she said. “Though why that makes a difference I don’t know.”
“How are the horses?” I said. “That one with the sore foot, I could get some wet rawhide.”
“Do you think about what we are?” she said. “Me, if I speak to them, they pretend not to hear me. They’ve given me a new name, because of this.” She pointed between her legs. “That’s all I am.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The only thing that makes me happy is the thought that if I die I’ll cost them money, because they’ll get fewer hides finished.” She looked at me. “And you, Tiehteti”—she used my Indian name—“can you see yourself?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You’re too young. They were smart when they got you.”
This annoyed me as well. “You know I can help you if you just ask,” I said, though I was not sure what I meant by that.
“Then kill me. Or take me out of here. I don’t care which one.”
She went back to scraping her hide. I looked around for Ekanaki, the red-eared pinto Toshaway had given me. The sun was getting low and it was cold and there was horseshit everywhere.
“I need to fetch my pony,” I said.
“That’s what I thought.”
I would have been happy to never speak another word to her in my life.
“Tiehteti,” she called after me, “if I know it’s you I won’t fight back.” She pointed to the side of her neck, where you’d put a knife in. “I promise. I just can’t bring myself to do it.”
Chapter Eleven
J.A. McCullough
The house had been dead a long time; she was the last of its children. She willed herself to get up. The chandeliers hung quietly above her, indifferent to her suffering. Get up, she thought. But nothing happened.
DURING HER CHILDHOOD it been a gay, chattering place, not a moment of silence or privacy; the idea that she might one day be lying alone, the house silent as a graveyard . . . When she came home from school there was always someone talking in the great room or on the gallery or she would wander around and there would be the Colonel, a cluster of his friends talking and drinking or shooting clay pigeons. There were serious-looking young men who came to take notes, ancient plainsmen living out their last days in rented rooms, and there were others who, like the Colonel, were millionaires.
There were reporters and politicians and Indians who came in great bunches, six or eight to a car. The Colonel was different around the Indians; he did not hold court as he did among the whites but rather sat and nodded and listened. She did not like to see it. The Indians did not dress the way they should have—they might as well have been grangers or Mexicans—and they smelled strongly and did not pay her any attention. She would find them stalking around the house and her father thought they stole. But the Colonel did not seem to mind, and the Indians got along fine with the waddies; many mornings she came into the great room to discover a dozen old men asleep among their former enemies, spilled beer and whiskey, a beef quarter half-eaten in the fireplace.
It was the Colonel’s house, there was no mistaking it, though he mostly slept in a jacal down the hill. Her father complained about the noise and grandstanding and endless strangers and houseguests, about the food bills and the size of the domestic staff. The Colonel did not care for him, either; he found her father’s interest in cattle quite taxing. “We have not made a dime off the dumb brutes in twenty years” or “That man can’t take a shit without asking the county agent.”
The Colonel was in favor of oil, in favor of Jonas going to Princeton, and as for Clint and Paul, they would make damn fine hands. But you, he would say, tapping her on the shoulder, you are going to do something. She had not known how fragile that all was. Now, looking across the dim room from her place on the floor, she saw the house as it would soon be: a haven for bats and owls, for mice and coyotes, the deer leaving footprints in the dust. The roof would give way and brush would begin to grow inside the house until there was nothing left but stone walls in a desert.
ASIDE FROM THE Colonel, her grandmother was the only one who paid her any mind. On hot days they would sit in the library while her grandmother sorted, for the thousandth time, the contents of various boxes, pictures and tintypes, here was her first husband, who had died before they had children, here were her two sisters, dead of typhoid, here was Uncle Glenn in his army uniform. There were more pictures of Glendale—who had been shot by the Mexicans but had died fighting the Huns—than there were of Jeannie’s mother. If her grandmother knew a single thing about the woman who’d brought Jeannie into this world, she didn’t share it. Here is your great-grandfather Cornellius, the most famous lawyer in Dallas, your great-great-grandfather Silas Burns, who owned the biggest plantation in Texas before the Yankees ran the niggers off. Jeannie did not know much about niggers, except for the few she’d seen working on the trains. They said East Texas was full of them. But she did know something about the old men in the tintypes, their ridiculous collars and mustaches, coats buttoned to their necks, looking like they had sat on a splinter. She did not care what her grandmother said; she was not related to them and never would be.
Invitations to parties, calling cards, gaudy pins. Cheap jewelry only a child would wear. The engagement ring from her first husband, who had died before she met Peter McCullough. Jeannie’s grandfather. The Great Disgrace.
Her grandmother occasionally took her riding; a hand would prepare her horse and sidesaddle, the only one in Dimmit County. She was a fair horsewoman, even on the awkward device. She scolded Jeannie for going bareback and for climbing fences. You will do things to yourself you will be sorry about later. What those things were, she wouldn’t say, and sometimes, if Jeannie fell asleep during the stories of her grandmother’s dull girlhood, she would awake to a firm pinch.
Her grandmother and the other grown-ups did not mind being boring; they often went on until Jeannie wished she were the dead one, instead of the person in the story, who was always more clever, or handsome, with more style and grace and wit than anyone Jeannie had ever met. If the Colonel had any boring stories, he must have forgotten them. He never said the same thing twice. Here was where to find a hawk’s nest or a pair of bucks who had died with their antlers locked, here was a leaf fossil or old bone or piece of purple flint. They kept a box of things they had found together, the skulls of little mice, squirrels, raccoons, and other animals.
When there were no visitors the Colonel would sit on the gallery making arrowheads or whittling cedar. Once, after whittling a p
iece into shavings, he told her: “If I wasn’t so old we’d get into the airplane business. We could build ’em here and sell ’em to the government and they would fly ’em at that field near Sanderson.”
He had tried to teach her to make arrowheads, but it had not taken. She had gashed her palm on a piece of sharp flint, at first surprised that a simple rock could cut her so deeply, then fascinated by the free flow of her own blood, then nauseated. The Colonel had come out of his trance and they had hobbled into the kitchen, where he bandaged her up and brought her back to the porch.
“I guess you’re off drinks duty,” he said, and winked. He went to the cart and made her a julep without the whiskey, and, against her father’s rules, let her sip straight from the cold silver shaker, the two of them conspiring against all that was right and good. She sat happily, forgetting the pain in her hand.
“It’s a foolish activity,” he said, taking up the arrowhead she’d begun. “Though if you make a knife, you can do anything. One day I will take all the arrowheads I’ve made and scatter them around the ranch and then maybe in a thousand years, some historian will find them and make up stories that aren’t true.” Then he looked up. “There is a thrush in that granjeno.”
She looked out over the pasture, but she didn’t see anything. The sun was bright but it was early in the year; the grass was still green and the live oaks beginning their springtime shed.
“They have told me there is a German named Hertz,” he said, “who has given his name to, among other things, the way flint breaks when you strike it. It is always the same way.” He held up a chip. “Though of course Hertz did not discover this. In fact the man who did discover it has been dead two million years. Which is how long people have been knocking rocks together to make tools.” He took another flake. “Remember that,” he said. “None of it’s worth a shit until you put your name on it.”
Chapter Twelve
Diaries of Peter McCullough
AUGUST 16, 1915
The shooting could be heard as soon as it got dark. Near midnight about fifty men came to the gate, carrying torches, shouting for us to turn over the Mexicans.
They hesitated there in the road—fifty men or not, it is no small thing to trespass on McCullough land—but after a long period of milling around, one of them put his foot on the bar and began to climb over. At which point we opened fire over their heads. Charles put his automatic Remington to good use, unleashing all fifteen rounds as the crowd broke and fled down the road. We spent a good deal of time afterward stomping out the fires that started when they dropped their torches.
Later Niles Gilbert and two others from the Law and Order League drove up and pleaded with me to kick the Mexicans out, lest the town be burned.
Charles shouted: “So go shoot the assholes who are burning your town. It ain’t like you don’t have enough guns.”
“How many men do you have, Peter?”
“I’ve got enough. And I’ve armed all the Mexicans as well.” Which was not true.
“This isn’t going to turn out well for you,” he said.
CONSUELA AND SULLIVAN had been cooking all night so there was plenty of beef and cabrito. By morning half the families had asked permission to stay at the ranch until the town was safe. The other half loaded up with food and water and began to walk or ride across our pastures, toward the river and Mexico. They are going into a war zone but apparently it is preferable to this.
Naturally they all believe the Colonel is responsible for their salvation—who else could it be but Don Eli? This rankles greatly but I did not bother to correct them. How they will ever get democracy I don’t know—they are very comfortable with the idea that powerful men rule their lives. Or perhaps they are simply more honest about it than we allow ourselves to be.
My father was well behaved, entertaining all the children on the gallery with his Indian stories, showing them how to start a fire with two sticks, giving archery demonstrations as well (he can still draw his old Indian bow, which I can barely pull back myself). He was happy and at ease and laughed a lot—I do not remember seeing him like this since before my mother died. Perhaps he was meant to be a schoolteacher. As we watched the refugees walking and riding toward the river, their belongings piled on mules and carts, he said: “That’ll be the last time we see any of ’em moving south, I’d imagine.”
And yet they love him. They go back to their jacals at night, which are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, while he goes back to our house, a sprawling white monstrosity, a thousand years’ salary for them, or a thousand thousand. Meanwhile their children are stillborn and they bury them near the corrals. Who are you to say they ain’t happy? That is what a white man will tell you, looking you straight in the eye as he says it.
AFTER THE LARGEST group of Mexicans left, a group of us went door-to-door in town and gave everyone we didn’t recognize five minutes to be on their way. Campbell put up new signs: ANYONE CARRYING A FIREARM WILL BE SHOT AND/OR ARRESTED.
By six o’clock the streets were deserted. Fourteen houses have been burned. Sergeant Campbell is leaving tomorrow to get medical attention for his wounds. Apparently he has gotten quite a hiding for not going south to protect the big ranches: two hundred sections is considered middling. But, thanks to Guillermo’s sugar remedy, his arm does not appear to be getting any worse.
To help me relax I read the newspapers for the first time in a week. A storm hit Galveston yesterday, killing three hundred. A great victory as the last one killed ten thousand, ending Galveston’s reign as our state’s queen city.
SALLY CALLED AT FIVE A.M. Glenn’s fever appears to have broken.
AUGUST 18, 1915
Today at the meeting of all the remaining townspeople, I suggested that the train station be named after Bill Hollis (killed at the Garcias’), a motion seconded and carried. Feel extremely poorly for Marjorie Hollis. While Glenn was repeatedly mentioned by name in all the newspaper articles as having been wounded, and Charles singled out for leading the charge on the Garcia compound (each time mentioning he is the grandson of the famous Indian fighter Eli McCullough)—Bill Hollis was only mentioned once, in the local paper.
Afterward I wondered why I did not suggest the station be named after one of the many dead Mexicans.
AUGUST 20, 1915
Storm giving us a good soaking. Everyone in high spirits. Except me. Can’t sleep—faces of the Garcias have returned—spent most of the morning in a nervous daze, searching for things to do, as if I did not find something to occupy my mind . . . I avoid looking into the shadows, as I know what I’ll find there.
Visited with the Reynolds family, inquired about the surviving girl, who we all now know was María Garcia. Apparently she locked herself in their spare bedroom and then disappeared during the night, stealing an old pair of boots, as she had no shoes.
Ike motioned for me to follow him out to the gallery, where the others couldn’t hear us.
“Pete, don’t take this the wrong way, but if I were that girl, I might believe I was the only living witness to a murder.” He held up his hands. “Not that I’m saying she is, but from her point of view . . .”
“I was against it from the start.”
“I know that.” He scuffed his boot. “Sometimes I wish there was another way to live here.”
Chapter Thirteen
Eli/Tiehteti
1850
By the time I’d been with them a year, I was treated the same as any other Comanche, though they kept a bright eye on me, like some derelict uncle who’d taken the pledge. Dame Nature had made my eyes and hair naturally dark and in winter I kept my skin brown by lying out in the sun on a robe. Most nights I slept as gentle as a dead calf and had no thoughts of going off with the whites. There was nothing back there but shame and if my father had come looking for me, I hadn’t heard about it.
Escuté and Nuukaru still ignored me so I spent my time with the younger boys; we’d graduated to breaking the band’s horses and soon we would
go to hold the remuda during the raids. A steady trickle of unbroken ponies came off the plains: whenever a herd was spotted, the fastest braves would ride out and rope them and the animals whose necks didn’t break would be brought back to camp. Then their nostrils were held shut until they sagged to the ground. They were tied that way and left for us to handle.
There is something in the white man that loves a sorrel but the Indians had no use for them; there were only five horses we cared about: red paints, black paints, Appaloosas, red medicine hats, and black medicine hats. The medicine hats had dark bands around their heads and dark ears and a blaze in the shape of a medieval shield on their chests. There was one type—the pia tso?nika or war bonnet—that had black eye patches as well and from a distance looked like a skull or death’s head. Centuries of hard living had made them as frothy as panthers; they had as much in common with a domestic horse as a wolf has with a lapdog and they would stave in your ribs if you gave them half a chance. We loved them.
I SLEPT WHEN I wanted and ate when I wanted and did nothing all day that I didn’t feel like doing. The white in me expected any minute that I would be ordered to do chores or some other form of slave labor but it never happened. We rode and hunted and wrestled and made arrows. We slayed every living thing we laid eyes on—prairie chickens and prairie dogs, plovers and pheasants, blacktail deer and antelope; we launched arrows at panther and elk and bears of every size, dumping our kills in camp for the women to clean, then walking off with our chests out like men. Along the river we dug up the bones from giant bison and enormous shells turned to stone and almost too heavy to lift; we found crayfish and shards of pottery and carried it all to the tops of cliffs and smashed it on the rocks below. We arrowed bobcats at night while they stalked ducks in the cane and the weather was warming and the flowers coming out, the yucca had shot their stalks and big white flowers hung ten feet in the air; there were patches of bluebonnet or blanketflower or greenthread that went on for miles, now it was green, now it was blue, now it was red and orange as far as the eye would carry. The snow was gone and fat high clouds hung everywhere, and the sun blinked on and off as they moved across the wind, heading south toward Mexico, where they would burn away forever.