Remember Ben Clayton (36 page)

Sincerely,

Francis Gilheaney

P.S. By separate mail I am sending Ben’s clothes, which you were kind enough to lend me. His saddle and hat have been shipped as well and should arrive next week. All have been insured.

Lamar stared at the photographs of his son’s grave, at the close-up of his name carved in the marble cross, at the shot that showed his cross among all the others. It looked like there were as many crosses as there were blades of grass on the llano. He looked at the pictures of the shot-up little town—Saint-Étienne—that Ben and his regiment had attacked. He saw the cemetery where his son had died. While he was looking at the pictures George’s Mary came out of the kitchen and stood behind him. He passed each one off to her without comment and all she said was “Oh my.”

The last photos were of the statue. It was different than the model he had seen in Gilheaney’s studio that first time, the one that had startled him so much he had forgotten who he was and where he was. It wasn’t like Gilheaney was trying to steal Ben away anymore. Ben was there, in the statue, all by himself. It wasn’t like he was put there by the artist, like he was shaped by Gilheaney’s hands; it was like he and Poco had just showed up on their own.

It was there in the face, whatever it was: the quality that made Lamar believe that the sculptor had succeeded. He saw the innocence and trust that had been in Ben’s eyes when he was a boy, when he had been so proud to ride and work alongside his father. He saw some kind of wanting in that face too, not a lack of anything but an expectation, the bright sort of yearning that Sarey used to have when she talked about what it would be like to see Europe or some other such place.

But there was anger too, and you couldn’t miss it. Lamar didn’t know how Gilheaney had got it into Ben’s expression but it was there. It was the fury that had been in Ben’s face the last time Lamar had seen him, a fury Lamar had never been able to erase from his memory and that Gilheaney had somehow seen and understood and sealed into the sculpture.

The funny thing was that from one moment to the next you did not know what you were looking at: the innocence of a child, the buoyant expectation of a young man, or the anger of a betrayed son. They were all bound up together, like they might be in a living face, impossible to pin down or pry apart.

He handed these last pictures to George’s Mary. He watched her as she looked at them. She worked her mouth like a jackrabbit, unconsciously sucking and probing the empty places in her mouth where those teeth had been pulled.

“Well, what do you think?” he finally asked her.

“What do I think about what?”

“This damn statue. What do I do about it?”

“I never saw what you needed a statue of your son for in the first place. But that’s your business. You spend your money how you want.”

“It look like him to you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, throwing the photos into his lap. “It looks too damn much like him. It looks too much like our Ben.”

She went into her room and he could hear her sobbing. He thought about knocking on her door after she quieted down a little and trying to find something of comfort to say to her, maybe telling her to sleep in in the morning and not worry about getting breakfast. But he knew from long experience there was no way to be kind to her without stirring her up more. She’d wait on him hand and foot just to spite him, no matter how broken-up she was feeling.

Sometimes he wondered if her resentment of him had to do with more than just her nature and his and them being in the house together for so long. Sometimes he wondered if she knew. She had never told him much about what had happened on her farm when she was a little girl. He’d had to put it together himself, and after he had he’d kept quiet about it. He had made it a rule never to say much about his life with the Comanches to anybody—especially not to the newspaper writers or the college professors who used to come around every few years wanting him to drop everything he was doing and tell them his story, thinking he would be pleased by their attention. Sarey he had told the bare outlines, Ben even less. Enough time had passed that people thought there was romance in it, but he looked back on that part of his life with mostly shame—shame at what he had let happen to his sister and what he had let happen to him. His character, even as a boy, ought to have been stronger. He ought not to have surrendered his soul and turned into a Comanche because Kanaumahka and a few of the others had decided to be kind to him and accepting of him.

The invitation to go on his first raid had been a surprise. Kanaumahka and some of the other warriors had gotten all painted up and ridden their horses through the camp, gathering up recruits. They’d gone around three or four times when Kanaumahka finally reined up in front of Lamar and gave him a look that said: Ain’t you coming? It had never occurred to him before that moment that he was a member of the band and that he could decide what he wanted to do along with the rest of them. So he got his horse and followed the caravan around the camp and took part in the dancing that night and Kanaumahka gave him a shield and put it next to his on the rack outside his lodge, where it gathered up power from the sun all the next day.

They rode east for the better part of a week, Kanaumahka building little maps in the dirt at the start of each day’s travel, explaining to them all the landmarks they would pass in case any of them got separated from the main bunch. It was all very organized and strategic. Not a bunch of wild Indians whooping and carrying on, but a disciplined and well-informed body of mostly young men moving deliberately across the prairie. At the Salt Fork, the scouts came back with the opinion that a farm up ahead looked like a likely prospect, just a man and his wife, three or four teenage sons, a young girl, six or eight horses in the pen at night and a pasture with thirty head of cattle. Kanaumahka went on himself to see the place and came back and sketched out his plan. They would kill the dogs with arrows first and then whoever was visible in the pasture or in the horse pens and then move on up to the house before a clear warning could be given.

The party attacked on two fronts and Lamar was given the task of holding the horses of the warriors who crept up to the farm from the riverbank. It was late summer and that part of the Brazos was almost dry, the water only ankle-deep between sunbaked sandbars. In the case of a forced retreat, the assault party would have little trouble making its escape across the river to the rendezvous point. He held the reins of the horses while they stood cooling their forelegs in the shallow water. The trees were thick along the riverbank and they obscured his view as the Indians made their way along the grassy slope up toward the horse pens. He could hear the mother in the house calling out to somebody, but in a normal voice. She had not yet noticed anything wrong. He was confused, because the stealth and deliberation of this attack seemed at odds with his own memory of the Indians suddenly bursting into the house while his mother was setting the table. There had seemed no planning at all to the act that had changed his life, just a hair-raising impulsiveness.

He had painted his face black and yellow, and in the midday heat it was a suffocating paste. He could feel sweat running down the mask of his face and tickling the crown of his head, where he had outlined the parting of his now-longish hair with a red streak. He was young and inexperienced and not qualified to wear a feather, but the hair he had gathered into clumsy braids and tied with strips of blue homespun was decorated with beads of glass and flashy triangles of tin. He wore a bandanna around his neck whose ends were gathered into a hollowed-out knob of buffalo bone. He had asked a kindly old woman in the band to pierce the tops of his ears in imitation of the older warriors, and each ear now held multiple ornaments of brass and silver wire whose sagging weight he could feel. All of this he had fussed over. He could feel the power of these signs and markings. He understood them and gloried in them. Although his mouth was dry from fear he somehow did not feel confusion about the raid in which he was about to play his small part. He felt contempt for the Tahbybo, the white people who kept swarming over the horizon to live their demeaning settled lives, rooted to one spot, slaves to their crops and even to their stupid cattle. He no longer clung to his memories of being one of them, he no longer thought of his white family as anything more than unthinking people trying to control a land whose enormity and dominion and ancient memory they could not understand. Their ignorance had swept them away, all but him. In his mind the predation in which he was now taking part was mixed up with a sense of biblical righteousness, a cleansing of all who were presumptuous and ignorant and not fit to abide on the majestic earth.

He heard the abbreviated yelp of one dog and the agonized howling of another and swept the tree branches aside to see his fellow Comanches converging toward the cabin from two directions. The family that was taken by surprise was angry and incautious. An older brother came to the door and shot down an eighteen-year-old warrior named Tosaguera, who lay twisting in the grass with his legs drawn up for the rest of the fight and was dead before anybody could come to his aid. Kanaumahka burst through the door before the shooter could close it and another five or six followed him in. There was screaming in the cabin and not much gunfire. Lamar guessed that the fighting was too close and fast for anybody to reload. In a minute he saw one of the older warriors dragging the mother out by the hair with the little girl clinging to her skirts and trying to pull her away from the Indians. They bashed the mother’s head in but before they could do anything else there was rifle fire from a ridge on the other side of the cabin and four or five white men came running into the fight with their teeth bared and not caring whether they got killed or not. Nobody had seen the men on the scout and it was much argued about later where they had come from and how they had been able to take the Comanches by surprise.

The Comanches were in possession of the cabin and the outbuildings and were not in the mood just then to surrender them, so for a time there was firing back and forth from both sides. Lamar had tied the reins of the horses to pecan trunks and he checked them to make sure they wouldn’t run off but they weren’t as scared as he was and they stayed in place. Through the trees he saw one of the brothers that lived on the farm rise up from where he had been hiding in the grass and run in panic toward the river. He stumbled when one of the Indians shot him but he kept on coming, right toward Lamar. Lamar could hear him breathing and could see his face. It was pale and stretched tight with fear.

Lamar notched an arrow and pulled it tight and pointed it at the man as he came crashing down the bank and flailed wildly at the tangles of branches and grapevine. He was not a man. He was hardly older than Lamar himself. The shot had caught him below the elbow and his arm was flopping like he had no control over it as he ran. He didn’t even see Lamar at first, but when he stumbled into the water he saw the horses and then he looked back like he’d missed something. He held up his good arm and said “Please” and it was the first English word Lamar had heard in a long time. It was familiar but he didn’t know the meaning of it anymore, or wouldn’t let himself.

The boy turned his back and kept on stumbling through the water toward the sandbar in the middle of the river. Lamar could hear the Comanches calling to each other behind him and he knew they had had enough of the fight and were running back to him to get their horses. The white boy kept looking back at him as he ran and waving at him not to shoot him but he did anyway. The arrow slipped into the boy without a sound and it seemed like he was determined to ignore it at first. He made his way to the sandbar and then sat down and looked back at Lamar. He was just breathing and looking at him, like he was trying to figure out who Lamar was. But Lamar turned his back on him and untied the horses just as the rest of the Comanches came running down the riverbank with the rifle balls of the attackers hitting the branches and leaves all around them.

Two of the Indians counted coup on the stunned boy sitting on the sandbar as they rode past him. Another reined up beside him, jumped down from his horse and stuck his knife into his windpipe and then cut away his scalp in practically the same motion.

They met up at the rendezvous point with the men who had attacked the homestead from the other direction, and who had carried away the body of Tosaguera, the only Comanche casualty in the fight. They had killed a number of Tahbybo but because they had been surprised by the men coming over the ridge they had not been able to carry off any stock or any goods, so the raid was counted as more or less a failure. The men who had driven them off would organize their neighbors for a reprisal, and the Rangers would be after them as well, so they decided it was best to do no more raiding along the Salt Fork that summer.

They rode for five or six days before it was deemed safe enough to have a fire, and it was only then that they began to talk about the fight with any spirit. The various members of the party claimed their kills and their coups in that boastful way that was still foreign to him. Nobody had seen Lamar shoot the fleeing boy, at least that he knew. If he stood up to speak about it there would be nobody to back him up and he would lose the respect he was just starting to gain. He was given credit by Kanaumahka for steadily maintaining his station during the fight and that was enough. It was better not to remind himself of the boy’s pale distorted face as he raced past him toward the river, and the disappointed look he had taken on as he sat down on the sandbar after Lamar shot him with the arrow.

It was only decades later, long after he had brought George’s Mary from Fort Griffin to his ranch house, that she got it into her mind to tell him and Sarey anything about that day. As he recalled it, it was after she had worn herself out cooking one Fourth of July and the three of them were sitting out on the porch after Ben had gone to bed. She said she had had three brothers. The two older ones were Octavius and Marius. Her father had been an admirer of ancient history but after the first two boys were born her mother had said enough was enough with the Roman names and called the next one Andy. Andy had almost gotten away that day, she told them. He had made it halfway across the river.