“Poor Tiehteti.”
“Poor nothing,” I said.
“Okay, I’m sorry.”
“Time to sleep.”
“I wonder when you’ll stop being so nice.”
“Time to sleep,” I said again.
“You are nice,” she said. “It’s obvious. You don’t order people around, you mostly skin your own animals, you—”
“Ask that papi bo?a how nice I am.” I pointed above the pallet, where the scalp of the Delaware was hanging.
“It’s a compliment.”
A short while later she put her hand on my thigh. I was not quite sure what it meant. She moved her hand slightly higher. “Are you still awake?”
“Yes.”
She pulled me on top of her and hitched her kwasu up. As usual it was too quick and then it was awkward as she tried to keep moving. I started to roll off but she held me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Everyone is quick with me at first.”
I was annoyed at how sure she was. Then I decided I wasn’t. I fell asleep. When I woke up she was gone, but she came back the next night.
DURING THE DAY we wouldn’t speak but at night, after the fire had died to nothing, I would hear her rustling at the tipi flap and then she would be in my bed. By the third night I had memorized every inch of her, as if I were blind as a pup, though there were moments, if her hair was different, or her smell was different, when I was not sure it was her. The Comanches took this uncertainty for granted, which worked mainly to the advantage of the women, who could satisfy their needs without risking their standing, and less so for the men, who were often not sure who they’d conquered, or if maybe they had been conquered themselves and had done it with someone they hadn’t wanted to. All skin was good at night, blotches invisible, crooked teeth straight, everyone was tall and beautiful and it was a fine kind of democracy; the women would not admit their names, and so a breast or ear or chin would be kissed to determine its shape, or the curve of a hip or collarbone, the softness of a belly, the length of a throat, everything had to be touched. The next day we would make a shape from the pictures we had gathered with our hands and mouths, watching the girls go by in the sun, wondering who it had been.
It had always been this way. There was a story about a beautiful young girl who was visited every night by a lover (which, as men, we were not allowed to do, but this had taken place in a different time) and, as her passion turned gradually to love, she began to wonder who this lover was; she knew every part but not the whole, and as time passed she became obsessed with knowing, so she might be with him during the day as well as night, that they might never be separate. One evening, just before her lover came to her, she blackened her hands with soot from the fire, in order that she might mark his back and have her answer. In the morning, when she rose to get water for her family, she saw her handprints on the back of her favorite brother, and she cried out and fled the tribe in shame, and her brother, who had never loved anyone more, ran after her. But she would not slow down, and he could not catch her, and the two of them streaked across the earth until finally she became the sun, and her brother the moon, and they could only be in the sky together at certain times and were never again allowed to touch.
As for Prairie Flower, she had something serious with a boy named Charges the Enemy, who was five or six years older than me but had gone on the long raid with Toshaway, Pizon, and the others. She was around sixteen, which the Comanches considered a marriageable age, but the fifty-horse price set for Hates Work had scared off most of Prairie Flower’s suitors, which she considered a temporary advantage, as she knew that no men in the tribe could afford her, though she also knew that as soon as we became prosperous again, she would be purchased by some fat old chief, and her life as she knew it would be over.
Most of the girls quietly worried about this. Prairie Flower’s hope was to remain unmarried until the age of twenty, a year longer than her sister, before some old man decided he would buy her as a wife. Charges the Enemy did not have fifty horses, or even twenty—he had about ten, she thought—and his family did not have many more; her father would never consider him a suitable match. In fact there were no young warriors with the capital her father required, Toshaway’s generosity being an unheard-of exception, and so Prairie Flower was doomed to be the third or fourth wife of someone she would never love, the lowest in the domestic order, and once married she would live out her days scraping hides like a common na?raiboo.
MEANWHILE, I HAD made friends with the bow. With buffalo in short supply, I was killing a deer, elk, or antelope every other day for camp meat, though like everyone else, I was riding farther and farther to find the animals. At one point in August I was gone for nearly five days and realized I could simply ride east until I reached the whites, but as I sat there looking out over the plains on my horse, leading a mule loaded with meat for the tribe, it occurred to me that I had nothing to go back to, no family except perhaps my father, who, if he was still alive, had made no effort to find me. Many of the white families were actively seeking their children and news of rewards spread quickly among the tribes. A month earlier, a free Negro from Kansas had ridden into the camp, taking everyone so completely by surprise that it was decided not to kill him. His wife and two children, also Negros, had been taken, and he was hoping to buy them back.
We did not have them but we knew they had been seen with another band to the west, and, after feeding him and allowing him and his horses to rest two nights, we directed him toward the Noyukanuu. The only non-Indians we universally hated were the Tuhano, or Texans, whom we always killed on sight. Other whites, or Negroes for that matter, were mostly judged on an individual basis, and if a man did something especially brave or clever—like surprising a camp full of Comanches in broad daylight—he would not only be allowed to live, but be treated as a guest of honor as long as he wanted to stay. Toshaway’s father informed me that before the Tuhano came, the Comanches had had nothing against the whites—we had traded with the French and Spanish for hundreds of years—and that it was only the arrival of the Tuhano, who were greedy and violent, that had changed this. The whites knew this and a Texan, if caught by the Indians, would claim he was from New Mexico or Kansas. Coming from Texas would get you roasted over a slow fire. Even a knife was considered too quick for a Texan.
I stood there watching a blue front blow across the plain and decided to make my way back to camp. It occurred to me that I had not thought about going back to the whites in several months, and what I would be returning to was most likely an orphanage, or a job as a servant, and while the tribe considered me a grown man, the whites would have not thought any such thing. And of course there was Prairie Flower, who denied there was anything serious, but still came to my tipi every night. If I saw her carrying water, I would carry it for her, or help her collect firewood, or skin a deer I had killed for her family. Her father did not approve of me, though I was technically Toshaway’s son, he preferred Escuté, who was older, and not white, and not a captive.
Most of the boys were embarrassed for me, especially because they knew that the moment Charges the Enemy returned, Prairie Flower would forget I existed, and Charges the Enemy, while he would probably not kill me, would certainly hurt me badly, a likelihood they repeatedly reminded me of, urging me, if not to stop seeing her, to at least not humble myself in public. But if I’d once thought her the inferior of her sister, I now thought the opposite. Prairie Flower was as light on her feet as a fawn, her eyes and cheeks and chest not as exaggerated as her sister’s, but much finer, as if the Creator decided there ought to be nothing extra. I didn’t mind humbling myself.
In the end, there were other things to worry about. We had enough to eat but it was the same every night; we were short of all our trade goods, of sugar, corn, and squash as we had no spare horses or hides to trade for them. We were short of lead and powder and screws to repair our guns; we were in cold, dry, unfamiliar country. The sense of order continued to slowly b
reak down, as young boys who ought to have been playing were depended on to hunt, and old men were stuck doing the work of women. And perhaps it was this general lowness that had led Prairie Flower to first visit my tent. Or perhaps it was because in June, when it was presumed the raiders had reached Mexico, she had a series of dreams in which she had seen Charges the Enemy’s scalped corpse, which was not something she could have told any other Comanche, as it was very bad medicine. If for some reason she had decided to share her dreams, many of the older people in the tribe would have blamed her for being a bruja and she would have been driven from the band or killed. Of course if anyone had witched Charges the Enemy it was me, though I did not believe in those things, and besides felt bad for him, as he had taken me hunting a few times, so I did not want to see him scalped, maybe just captured by the Mexicans, and put in prison, and kept there forever.
All in all, it was the greatest summer I had ever had, and despite everyone’s blue mood, I was content in a way I had never been. I might be killed any day, by whites or hostile Indians, I might be run down by a grizzly or a pack of buffalo wolves, but I rarely did anything I didn’t feel like doing, and maybe this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it. I slept in the tipi when it was cool and in a brush arbor when it was warm, or under the stars, went hunting or wandering when I wanted, and had a girl, even if she also considered herself the girl of someone else. The only thing I really missed was fishing, as the Comanches would not eat fish unless they were starving. Though even on my hunting trips, when I could have fished, I didn’t.
In October the older men of the tribe decided we ought to move south, into familiar territory, as winter would be much worse here, and food more scarce. Despite the fact the raiders had not yet returned, which was beginning to worry everyone, we packed the camp and left detailed instructions, in the form of hieroglyphs carved into a tree, about where we were headed.
We set up close to our old campsite, ten miles north of the Canadian, expecting it to be occupied, as it was close to several well-known Indian trails, but it was empty and the grass was tall. It had been a wet year and there was plenty of forage to get our horse herd through the winter, which was a good sign, but no other horses had been grazing there, which was a bad sign, and the tribe went further into a depression, the consensus being that an enormous number of Comanches must have been destroyed, not just the Penateka, for a campsite this good to have gone unoccupied since we had left it.
WHEN THE RAIDING party finally returned in December, the only good news was that Toshaway, Escuté, and Nuukaru were still alive. They were all so pale and had all lost so much weight that when they first rode up, everyone thought they were spirits. Toshaway had nearly lost a foot to frostbite. Escuté had taken a ball through the shoulder early in the raiding and spent three months riding with it broken. He could barely raise his bow arm.
In June, they had captured eight hundred horses but there had been an ambush—the army and the Mexicans were working together now, instead of killing each other as they had always done—and nearly half the Kotsoteka warriors were killed or scattered. The army, along with several Ranger companies, had chased the remaining warriors deep into New Mexico.
While this was happening, the women’s camp, which had been waiting for the warriors to return from Mexico, had been attacked by Mescalero Apaches, and either wiped out entirely or carried away as captives. The remaining bodies were so scattered by animals it was impossible to count them. Toshaway’s daughter was among the lost, and of the three hundred Kotsoteka who’d ridden out, less than forty had returned, and, while no one would mention it in the same conversation, nearly a thousand horses had been lost as well, which meant that we had no surplus to trade and the winter would be even worse than expected. From that day until early spring, all the other noises were drowned out by crying and wailing, and half the women in camp had cuts on their faces and arms, many of them clipping off whole fingers to honor their dead family members.
Prairie Flower stopped seeing me for a while, as Charges the Enemy was known to have been killed, but had fallen behind the enemy lines so quickly that his body had not been recovered and was presumed to have been scalped and desecrated. She barely ate or left her tipi, but as they were not married, she could not even mourn in public, or tell anyone she had known when it happened, that she had witnessed his death just as clearly as if she had been there to see it.
Chapter Twenty
Jeannie McCullough
1942
Phineas called her to Austin a week after she finished high school. It was May and already hot, one hundred in McCullough, ninety in Austin, it would be nice to make a trip to Barton Springs, to lie in the grass and watch the people swimming—flirting couples, young men and their footballs—to spend the day by herself in a place she was not known. She wouldn’t, of course. There were people you could never figure—her great-grandfather for instance—but that was not her. I am boring, she thought. Predictable. But brave in my own way, brave despite . . . she did not like to think of the North, she did not like to think of her time there. She had been miserable and she had left. She did not mind taking risks when she wanted something, though no one else understood this. When she wanted something, she was truly brave. And yet no one else knew. So it didn’t matter.
The train made its way to Austin. There were more cars on the highway, double or triple what she had seen in her childhood, most Texans now lived in cities, they said. You would not have known it in Dimmit County. She watched a truck with a half-dozen Mexicans in the back, their knees scrunched around a pile of scrap iron, the driver weaving and changing lanes, one miscalculation and they would all be spilled to the pavement. She wondered why they allowed themselves to be treated that way. They’re animals, is what her father said. On Election Day he would take her down to the south end of McCullough, dusty streets, tin shacks, wreaths of chilies and goat meat hanging with the flies buzzing everywhere. Her father would hand out slabs of beef from an ice chest in the back of his truck, cases of warm beer; he would pay their poll taxes and show them how to mark the ballot. Gracias, patrón. Gracias. They were more gracious than niggers—that was another thing he always said.
The windows in the train were open and her face was cool in the breeze but she was sweating under her dress, under her arms. It was the time of the year the heat became its own entity, a creeping misery. No. It was like a sledgehammer on the head of a steer. It would only get worse until September. From the other side of the car, three soldiers were stealing glances, one of them was much older, the other two were Mexican, barely her age, afraid to look. Most draft boards had not yet begun to call up whites, though some, like her brothers, had volunteered.
She studied her reflection, imposed as it was on the dry rushing landscape beyond the window. I am pretty, she thought. There were prettier, but she was well above average. Phineas will offer me a job. A sort of special adviser, a confidante. But that was not possible, either. She was not even qualified to be a secretary; you needed shorthand for that. There was nothing she really knew how to do, nothing she did well, she was a dabbler. Pointless. If she vanished from the earth that instant, it would not have made a lick of a difference to anyone.
Maudlin, maudlin. She leaned her head against the glass and felt the shaking of the train. That’s not even your word, she thought, that’s from Jonas. She could see the hills to the north, the Llano uplift. The Colonel had known those things: this rock is ten million years old, this other two hundred, here is a fern contained in stone. The soldiers were staring at her openly now. When she was young, a year or two ago, she would have turned and stared them down, but now she let them drink her up, have their fantasies, or so she imagined. In a few months they would be off to war, and many would not come back, their final rest in a foreign place. Perhaps all three of them, their lines come to an
end. She wondered who would survive, she guessed the bigger one, though you could not tell. It was not like the old days, it was a falling bomb and a hundred dead at once, all mothers’ sons. An emotion came over her, and she wondered if she might give them something, cigarettes or a soda pop, but those were just tokens, money would not help them. There was only one thing and she allowed herself to think about this for a while, shifted her legs and adjusted her dress, it was just a thought, out of the question, she had never given herself to anyone. But what did it matter, truly? There were times she was desperate, absolutely desperate to be shed of her virginity, but no, she thought, impossible, it could not be some pimple-faced soldier, or that older, more scary one with the patch of razor burn along his neck as if chafed by a rope. He will be the one to die. She felt it instantly. It excited her. It was all very dramatic.
Then she felt guilty. She thought of her brothers, who were still in America, training in Georgia. Clint would do something to show off and be killed. Paul would be more careful, though easily convinced to do something risky, especially if a friend were in trouble. She prayed he would have no friends. Otherwise he would surely be killed. It was Jonas: he was the only one among her brothers who acted like a rich man’s son. He would not take any risk if someone else might do it instead. And he was an officer.
Outside, the grass was already brown from the heat. To the south, the flat Texas plain stretched down to Mexico; to the north the escarpment began. A yellow tint of summer haze. A mule pulling a plow. She did not know why, it was plain to see there would be no rain for weeks, the dryness made you wonder if it would ever rain again.
Her uncle Phineas was a powerful man, head of the Railroad Commission, more powerful than the governor, they said. He was not really her uncle, but great-uncle, and he determined how much oil could be pumped in all of Texas. Somehow that controlled the price. She supposed it was like cattle. In a drought everyone had to sell quickly so the price went down, though when beef got scarce the price went up again. Except the packers were now interrupting this—buying cheap from distressed ranchers while raising the price on the other end—telling the city buyers, who did not know better, that a drought meant scarcity. The packers were where the money had gone; it was no longer made on grass, but in cement buildings. Armour and Swift. Her father hated them. Meanwhile Texas made more oil than anyplace on the earth. You did not hear people who made oil complaining very much.