ALL OF IT, for some reason, makes me feel almost unbearably lonely . . . but I have always been a keen student of that emotion.
APRIL 19, 1917
The entire Pinkard Ranch—over one hundred sections—has been sold and divided. The family is moving to Dallas. I went to visit with Eldridge Pinkard. He could barely look at me. We are nearly the same age—his father settled this country not long after the Colonel.
“The bank would have taken it one of these days, Pete.” He shrugged. “Even with beef where it is, this drought . . . I had to pull the money out before there was none left.”
“Heard you bought a little in the cross timbers.”
He chuckled bitterly: “Two whole sections.”
“Probably run a few head.”
He shrugged and scuffed the dirt, looked out over what had been his pastures. “Before you get to thinking I am too badly looed . . .”
“I don’t,” I lied.
“You do, but I appreciate it. I wasn’t going to say this to any of you who’s staying, but you and me have known each other since there was Indians.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I was mighty down in the mouth about this until I got to talking to Eustice Caswell. On the draft board?” He shook his head. “Pete, a year from now all the good men’ll be overseas. I can’t even take a piss without some bond salesman drumming me for ten dollars. And . . . truthfully I am jealous of some of those boys who are shipping out, because by the time they get to France, they will have seen more country than I’ve seen in my whole life. And once I realized that, I got to seeing this as the last clear swing I’d ever get. And that I was a fool if I didn’t take it.”
“I guess.”
“It ain’t like our daddies grew up here, Pete. It ain’t like people have lived here long. This is just the place they happened to stop.”
“The fences got all of us,” I said.
He looked as if he might cry, but he didn’t, and then I saw that he was not happy, but he was not sad, either. The idea of moving away from here appealed to him. “You know if I was staying, I’d build roads through the whole place, get to where I could run it with a quarter of the hands, drive ten minutes instead of riding four hours, eat home every night, do the feeding out of trucks. You could get it pretty well oiled, if you put your mind to it. But even so . . .” He lifted his boot and ground it down on a mesquite seedling. “Let’s face it, Pete. This land is niggered out. I wish they’d taken pictures when we were kids, because I want to forget it ever looked like this.”
WHEN I GOT home, my father revealed he has known about it for months—he picked up half the minerals underneath the Pinkard land. I asked how we were going to pay for it.
“I decided to sell the pastures across the Nueces.”
“Where are we going to keep the bulls?”
“After the promoter’s cut we’re clearing $31.50 an acre. We can fence off whatever we want. This pays for the minerals under the Pinkard, plus half the Garcia acquisition.”
“You can see those pastures from every high point on our property,” I said.
“So what? We’ll look at the pretty farmer girls.”
“What if I refuse to sign the deed?”
“You can refuse whatever you want,” he said.
Except I cannot. I signed as he knew I would. I console myself with the fact that the Nueces pastures were not exactly convenient, anyway. The Colonel consoled me by pointing out we kept mineral rights. “Anymore, the surface ain’t worth two shits,” he said. “Luckily them ignorant Yankees were too busy carrying on about their college to figure that out.”
Fine except the Nueces pastures were the only sensible place to keep the bulls. It will be much harder to control breeding now, more work for us, more work for the vaqueros, and much more expensive.
As for the minerals, there has been a good deal of drilling along the big river; trucks and roughnecks no longer garner any notice. Lease prices have tripled. But still the closest strikes are at Piedras Pintas, far to the east, which produce only a few hundred barrels a day under pump. The rest is just gas, which for now is useless.
APRIL 26, 1917
The Colonel, who has been gone a week, returned today from Wichita Falls with a nearly new rotary drilling rig on several old trucks. He claims to have gotten a good price. Feller who owned it went bankrupt, he told me, as if this were a selling point.
Accompanying the Colonel is a very drunk man who claims to be a geologist. A second drunk who claims to be a driller. Drunks number three through five are the floor- and derrickmen. They look to have been sleeping in hog wallows.
“Where did you get all that?” I asked him.
“Wichita Falls,” he said, as if I didn’t know where he’d been.
“We puttin’ in more windmills?”
“Don’t you worry about it.”
He and the geologist went to explore in the sandy Garcia pastures. The rig builder, toolie, and driller retired to the Colonel’s porch to drink.
MAY 4, 1917
Having come up with nothing better, they have located a spot to drill, barely half a mile from the house, based on a foggy recollection of a seep my father might have seen fifty years ago, which has not been seen since.
“That’s an interesting spot,” I told him, “where we can see and hear it from the house. I guess you couldn’t find anywhere else in almost four hundred sections.”
“That’s what the doodlebug told me. Always listen to the doodlebug.”
There are times I can’t tell if he thinks I’m a simpleton, or if he really is one himself.
MAY 27, 1917
Panic sweeping through the Mexicans. Six of our top hands, including Aarón and Faustino Rodriquez, informed me they are resigning and returning to Mexico—they do not think it will be safe for their families.
Reason: The good people in Austin just approved funding to expand the Ranger force. Number of Rangers on border will increase to eight hundred (currently forty).
I tried pointing out to the vaqueros that Mexico is a war zone. They don’t care. Safer than here, they say.
Freddy Ramirez (our segundo who first caught the Garcias stealing cattle) also put in his notice. The factories in Michigan are still hiring Mexicans. Or so he has heard.
I tried to make a joke about it: “Michigan? Muy frío!” Rubbing my hands on my arms.
He did not find this funny. “The cold we can survive. The Rinches, maybe not.”
MY FATHER DOES not care that we are losing seven of our best hands. After putting half our employees to work assembling the derrick and getting supplies to the drilling site, the real work has begun. Din is oppressive. Where there was once the sound of cattle, a creaking windmill, it now sounds like a train station, though the train never gets closer, or farther, or quieter. Because of the heat all the windows are open. I walk around with cotton stuffed in my ears.
JUNE 19, 1917
Drilling continues and so far nothing but sand. Meanwhile, because of the sale of the Pinkard Ranch, and other smaller ranches like it, the town is nearly unrecognizable. Trucks and vegetable pickers instead of horses and vaqueros. Gilbert’s store selling fertilizer by the ton. Went there to buy some digging bars, a few shovels, and a case of .30-cal gov’t for the Lewis gun.
“Is that my price as well?” Everything was three times as expensive as it had been.
“Nah. I figure the few of us left ought to stick together.” He pretended to do some figuring on a pad and reduced the bill by half. It was still a 20 percent increase over the previous month. I decided not to mention it.
“Who’s left?” I said.
“Far as the greasers, none of them. About ten families, Vargases, Guzmans, Mendezes, Herreras, Riveras, I don’t even fuckin’ know who else—all happened the same day, it seemed like—they sold their lots to Shaw who owns the rooming house, bought a few old trucks, and headed to Michigan, forty or fifty of them in one caravan. Cleaned me out of coats and blankets. Th
ey say Ford hired two thousand Mexicans in one factory. Which is pretty funny when you think about it, greasers building cars and all.”
Considered mentioning that several of the “greasers” (Vargas and Rivera, at least) had gone to college in Mexico City while Gilbert and his cross-eyed brothers were diddling heifers in Eagle Pass.
“Even old Gomez sold out. Everything in his store for cost. I got crates and crates of metates, chorizo, horsehair bridles, and hide ropes. Plus his curandero shit. You believe that? You are looking at the new town curandero, right here.”
The thought of any Mexican trusting Niles Gilbert to sell them medicine was depressing. I paid the bill and tried to hurry out, but not before he added: “Funny thing is, I do miss all those people, which I never thought I would say, given all the trouble they caused.”
Fine sentiments for a murderer. I suppose I am no better.
DESPITE THE DISAPPEARANCE of the last of the original Mexican families (many of whom have been here five or ten generations—longer than any white), a new crop has arrived to fill their places. They speak no English and will be easy prey for men like Gilbert. Still, it is better than northern Mexico, where a state of open warfare persists. Dunno what they’re complaining about, said my father. At least there’s no taxes.
After I got home, I rode out to help rotate the beefs off the number 19 pasture. We are getting everything cross-fenced, and as Pinkard said, this place is beginning to run like a well-oiled machine. But when does the soul go out of it? That is what no one seems to know.
JUNE 20, 1917
Need a new truck. Have settled on a Wichita. The 2.5-ton would be a dream. Cannot decide between the worm drive and the chain drive.
Considered a Ford (they now make the Model T cars in Dallas) but everyone who owns a Ford has had a shoulder dislocated (or broken) when the starting handle kicked back. You can judge a Ford driver by the cast on his arm—that is the old joke.
You cannot build junk and expect to survive in today’s world. People want things that last.
JUNE 21, 1917
A poor Mexican woman came to the door today. Was surprised she was bold enough to come through the gate. She looked familiar but I could not place her, presumed she was the wife or sister of one of the hands. She was thin and pale, wearing only a shift and a thin shawl over top, and when the wind blew her dress against her body I could see her legs were nearly skeletal.
“Buenas noches,” I said.
There was a pause.
“You don’t recognize me.” Her English was perfect.
“I guess not,” I said.
“I am María Garcia.”
I stepped back.
“I am Pedro Garcia’s daughter.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Eli/Tiehteti
Fall 1851
At first it was just a fever but then the spots appeared and everyone panicked. A quarter of the band struck their tipis, gathered their horses, and left the camp within a few hours. A few days later, the people who’d first taken sick were covered in boils, their faces and necks, arms and legs, the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet.
The medicine men built sweat lodges along the stream; people were dunked in the cold water, put in the sweat lodge, then dunked again. It wasn’t long after that that people started to die; soon all the medicine men were sick as well.
The whites had been variolating their children for a hundred years, but by the time of statehood, you could find the vaccine in most cities. The Germans had paid a doctor to come to Fredericksburg and my mother had taken us there to get our shots.
Prairie Flower was one of the first to get sick. She hadn’t touched the dead man, but I had. I hoped it was just a fever, but then her mouth felt strange, there was a kind of roughness around her lips, which I tried to smooth away.
A FEW WEEKS into the epidemic, a pair of young Comanches in their best war paint rode up to the camp calling out that the raiding party, including Escuté and Nuukaru, had won a great victory, many scalps and horses, not a single man lost.
The messengers stopped at the edge of the village and Toshaway, who had the first of the red marks on his face, limped out to meet them, carrying his bow and quiver.
“The band is sick,” he said. “You have to go somewhere else.”
The messengers protested; they didn’t want to be denied their victory, and finally Toshaway told them he would shoot anyone who came into the camp, including his own sons, as it would be a more merciful death than the tasía.
Later that day the raiders appeared. They rode to within a few hundred yards of the camp and the people who were still able came out to wave their good-byes. Toshaway stood leaning on his bow. Two riders broke from the group and everyone squinted to see who they were. It was Nuukaru and Escuté. They came within fifty paces and then Toshaway nocked an arrow and fired it into the ground in front of them.
“We’ll wait for you in the Yamparikas’ territory,” said Escuté.
“We will not see you there,” said Toshaway. “But I will see you in the happy hunting grounds.”
Another young tekuniwapu came forward.
“I have stated my mind,” said Toshaway. “I will kill any man who comes into this village.”
“Where is Gets Fat?” said the young man.
“She’s sick,” said someone.
He continued to ride forward.
Toshaway shot an arrow past his head.
“You can kill me if you want, Toshaway, but either way I am going to die in this camp with my wife.”
Toshaway thought about it. Then he aimed his bow at the other raiders.
“The rest of you will leave now,” he said.
A few of the other tekuniwapu, not sure what they ought to do, not wanting to look like cowards, began to ride forward, but Escuté and Nuukaru held them back. Even the very sick had come out from their tipis; they gathered at the edge of the camp and began to call out to the young men, first telling them to stay back and then telling them things they wanted them to know, family news, old secrets, things they should have said a long time ago, things that had happened since the raiders had gone.
Finally, after all the messages had been shouted across the distance, the riders kicked their horses and began to ululate and the entire band, for the last time, called back with their own war whoops, until they filled the air, and the riders shook their bows and lances, and turned their horses, and disappeared across the prairie.
BY THE FOURTH week the boils covered Prairie Flower’s entire face—there was nothing left I could recognize, she had become the sickness itself. Each morning our pallet would be soaked from her breaking sores; but finally the boils began to shrink and scab and it seemed she would heal.
“I am not going to be beautiful anymore,” she said. She was crying.
“You’ll still be beautiful,” I told her.
“I don’t want to live if my face is ruined.”
“You’ll heal,” I said. “Don’t pick.”
That night her fever broke and she began to breathe easily. I watched her for a long time. When the sun woke me up my arm was numb—all her weight was on it—and when I tried to wake her she wouldn’t move.
IT WAS A clear warm day but only a few people were about. Toshaway was lying in his hammock, eyes closed, face to the light. The bumps on his skin were just starting to swell.
“Do I look bad?” he said.
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Yes. And soon I will look worse.” He spat. “Tiehteti. What an absurd way to die.”
“The strong always survive.”
“Is this known among the whites?”
“Yes.”
“You are lying.”
“Maybe not,” I said.
“Now it’s only maybe.” He closed his eyes again. “It’s not dignified.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about my lie or the sickness.
“When I was younger,” he said, “the son of our paraibo becam
e very sick. He had always been small but he was growing thinner every day, and no matter what medicine was made, he did not get better. Finally the paraibo asked if I might do him a favor. He made a purification ritual, washed and dressed his son for battle, gave him his own shield, the chief’s shield, and then we all went to a mountain, and my friend and I did battle with the chief’s son, just the three of us alone, and we killed him. And in that way, we took a pointless death and made it into a brave death.”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“You could not anyway,” he said. He grinned. “At least not yet.”
“But someday.” I didn’t mean it, but I knew it was what he wanted to hear.
“Come over here, if you don’t mind touching me.”
I sat on the ground.
“You smell,” he said.
“Prairie Flower just died.”
“Ah, Tiehteti.” He took my hand. “I am so sorry. And meanwhile you have been letting me talk.” He began to cry. “I am so sorry, my poor son. I am so sorry, Tiehteti.”
AFTER I BURIED Prairie Flower I began to go to the other tipis. There was a surplus of the dead. Pizon died that afternoon and I helped his son bury him. A week later I buried his wife and two weeks later I buried his son. Entire families passed in the same night and now I went tipi to tipi, tying the flaps shut if I had buried everyone. I buried Red Bird, Fat Wolf, Hates Work—whose dead face I kissed, imagining the scabs were not there—Lazy Feet and two of his slaves, Hard to Find, Two Bears Walking, Always Visiting Someone, Hisoo-ancho and his three children, whose names I never learned, Sun Eagle, Big Fall by Tripping. Black Dog, Little Mountain and her husband. Lost Again, who died in the arms of Big Bear, who was not her husband. I buried Hukiyani and In the Woods. Humaruu and Red Elk. Piitsuboa, White Elm, Ketumsa. The other names I didn’t know, or had forgotten.
I SLEPT IN my own tipi but spent my days with Toshaway. He and his two wives were all sick, the three of them on one pallet. There was a good supply of firewood and it was warm.