The Son (23 page)
Inside everything was covered with dust that had blown in the open doors and windows, the tracks of animals were thick, the blood dried to an indistinct black stain. In the living room, my father had pushed the furniture into a pile and sloshed oil over it. I followed him into the rest of the house, into the bedrooms and then Pedro’s office.
He pulled all the papers from their cabinets, old letters, stock records, deeds, certificates of birth and death for ten generations, the original land grant, back when this area was all a Spanish province, Nuevo Santander.
After everything was doused in coal oil, he struck the match. I stood watching the papers curl, the fire spreading across the desk and up the wall onto a large map of the state, drawn when all the sections had Spanish names. I heard someone calling my name—Pedro. Then I realized it was my father. I went to look for him and when I walked out of the office the entire house was filled with smoke; he’d lit fires in the other rooms.
I bent beneath the smoke, looking into Pedro and Lourdes’s bedroom. Their bed was beginning to burn; the canopy caught and flared and the light filled the dark room. I wondered how many generations had been sired there and knew the Colonel must have thought the same thing.
Through the flames I saw a dark shape calling me forward and only with effort did I turn and make my way toward the sunlight. When I reached the outside my father was already limping down the hill toward the Garcias’ stock buildings, a jug of fresh coal oil in each hand.
Eli/Tiehteti
The Buffalo
T
he Comanches owned all the territory between Mexico and the Dakotas, the most buffalo-rich land on the continent. The northern bands hunted them seasonally, but the Kotsoteka, whose home territory was the center of the range, hunted year-round. In summer they hunted the bulls, because they were fattest, and in winter they hunted the cows. Until the age of three summers, the meat of either animal was equally good; older than that and the cows tasted better. Old bulls were mostly killed for their hides.
The animals were hunted with either a lance or a bow. Using the lance required a bit more backbone; you had to match speed with the buffalo and drive the lance, one handed, through the ribs, through the lights and into the heart. At the first prick the animal would turn and try to gore you or crush you against the other running buffalo. The only safety was to go all in, give yourself totally to the lance, to use the animal’s own weight to drive the point deeper. Unless you were crushed first.
The average buffalo was twice the size of a cow and as mean-spirited as a grizzly. They could jump over a man’s head if they wanted, though they rarely did, and if your horse stumbled, or stepped in a prairie dog hole, you could lay money that there would be nothing left of you to bury, as buffalo, unlike horses, would go out of their way to trample you.
The bow gave more wiggle room, as the animal could be killed from a short distance, a few yards, shooting the arrow at a steep angle behind the last rib. Just the same, as soon as the buffalo felt it’d been stuck, it would turn and try to gore you. The best horses would veer at the sound of the bowstring, and this quarter-second gap was usually enough to keep you alive.
Until the big Sharps rifles came along, the buffalo had to be killed while running, from behind and to one side, and so a group of riders would whip the animals into a stampede, and then, by running their horses in front of the lead animals, turn the herd and force the buffalo into a mill, a running circle. Then the hunters would begin the killing.
When as many animals had been killed as could be cut up in a day, the herd was released from the mill and would disappear across the prairie. The fallen buffalo were butchered where they lay, though butchering is not the right word. The Comanche were like surgeons. The skin was cut carefully along the spine, because the best meat and the longest sinews were just underneath, and then the hide was peeled off the animal. If the village was close, by this point a group of optimistic children would have gathered and would be pestering the butcher for a piece of hot liver with the bile of the gallbladder squeezed over it. The stomach was removed, the grass squeezed from it, and the remaining juice drunk immediately as a tonic, or dabbed onto the face by those who had boils or rashes. The contents of the intestines were squeezed out between the fingers and the intestines themselves either broiled or eaten raw. The kidneys, kidney tallow, and tallow along the loins were also eaten raw, as the butchering continued, though sometimes they were lightly roasted, along with the testicles of the bull. If grass was scarce the contents of the stomach were fed to the horses. In winter, in the case of frostbite, the stomach was removed whole and the frostbitten hand or foot thrust in and allowed to warm; recovery was generally complete.
If water was scarce, the veins of the animals were opened and the blood drunk before it had time to clot. The skull was cracked, the brains stirred on a rawhide and eaten as well, being fatty and tender; the teats of any lactating cows were cut and the warm milk sucked directly from them. If the brains were not eaten immediately they were taken to tan hides; every animal has enough brains to tan its own hide, except the buffalo, which was too large.
Once emptied, the stomach was rinsed, dried, and used as a water bag. If there were no metal pots, food could be cooked in the stomach by filling it halfway with water and adding hot stones until the water boiled. Another popular water carrier was the whole skin of a deer, which, if it were to be used for that purpose, was cased and removed whole, and the ends sewn shut. But we are talking about the buffalo.
Once the organ meats were consumed, the hunters retired and the women took over the harder work of butchering. The meat was cut from the bones in three- to four-foot lengths. The strips were placed on the clean inner skin of the recently killed animal and when the animal’s skin was completely full of its own meat, it was wrapped up, tied, put on a horse or travois, and taken back to camp to be dried. After which it was packed into
oyóot
u
,
or rawhide containers, and sewn shut with the animal’s sinew. Once dry, the meat would keep indefinitely.
The tongue, hump, side ribs, and hump ribs were all choice cuts and were usually saved for barbecue. The bones were cracked and cooked and the buttery marrow,
tuhtsohpe?aip
u
,
scooped out to be used as a sauce alone, or, as previously mentioned, mixed with honey to make a sweet sauce, or cooled and mixed with pounded mesquite beans for dessert.
The shoulder blades were turned into shovels and hoes. The smaller bones were split, fire hardened, and whittled into needles or awls, or into knives, arrowheads, and scrapers. The hooves were boiled to make a glue used for saddle making, attaching sinew to bows, and nearly everything else. Every brave kept a small amount of this glue for emergency repairs. The horns were used as carriers for the fire drill, and, of course, for gunpowder.
The droppings, as a fuel source, improved every season they sat on the prairie, burning longer and slower and more evenly than mesquite. When dried and powdered, the droppings were also used to pack cradleboards for both warmth and moisture absorption, though cattail down, when available, was considered superior.
From the sinew along the spine, as well as the fascia under the shoulder blades, along the hump, and in the abdomen, all manner of thread, bowstring, and bow backers were made. Threads, ropes, and lariats were woven from the long tufts of hair on the head. Pipes were made from the thick ligament in the neck. Arrow straighteners were made from the center bone of the hump, though many preferred to use their teeth.
Scabbards were made from the tail skin, handles for knives and clubs from the tailbones; the trachea was cut and tied to make containers for paints, clays, and makeup. The hard yellow paste inside the gall was used for war paint, the udders dried to be used as dishes and bowls (pottery being fragile, heavy, and generally useless to horse-mounted people). Any unborn fetus was taken and boiled in its sac, and, being more tender than veal, was fed to babies and old people and those with bad teeth. While the pericardium was used for sacks, the heart itself was always left where the buffalo had fallen, so that when the grass grew up between its remaining ribs, the Creator would see that his people were not greedy and ensure that the tribes of buffalo were replenished, so that they would return ever after.
Jeannie McCullough
T
he Colonel died in 1936. Jonas left for Princeton the next year, returning only twice and fighting noisily with her father both times. He was no longer mentioned in the house. Her grandmother, too, had disappeared, but she had not died, only moved back to Dallas to be with her other family.
Her father and brothers took their supper in the pasture or ate it cold after working late. The three siblings would come home from school; her brothers would change quickly and ride out to meet their father; Jeannie would continue her studies. Every Saturday a tutor would drive in from San Antonio and assign her extra work. Her grandmother had insisted and her father agreed to anything that kept her occupied. One day she would rebel; she would do only half of what was assigned. She already knew what she would skip: it was Latin, it was definitely Latin, and the tutor would stare down his long sweaty nose while she triumphantly proclaimed she had not translated a word of
Suetonius
.
When her schoolwork was done, the silence in the house would begin to weigh on her, and she would put on her boots and clomp around just to hear the noise they made, then eat supper alone on the gallery. She would listen to the president’s radio address and sometimes, if she were especially annoyed, she would leave it on so that when her father came home, he would have to go out to the porch and turn it off. It gave her satisfaction, knowing how angry this made him.
By that time she’d given up working in the pastures. She knew she might be good at it if she continued to try, but the work was hot and long and boring and besides, no one wanted her there. Even the Colonel, who had founded the ranch, had not thrown a loop in the last thirty years of his life—he saw no point to cattle except the tax breaks. Oil was what one ought to be interested in, and now, whenever her great-uncle Phineas came to visit—always with a geologist in tow—she would sit in the backseat while Phineas and the geologist rode up front, talking about shale and sand and electric well logging, which got the geologist very excited. He did not mind that Jeannie was only thirteen; he was happy to ramble on about everything he knew. She could see it pleased Phineas that she listened. The oil business was booming; there were parts of South Texas where you didn’t need headlights to drive at night, there was so much gas being flared, the fire lighting the sky for miles around.
Her grandmother returned every so often, smelling of ancient perfume and peppermint drops, her stern face pointy above a black dress, it was always black, as if she were in mourning for something no one else understood. Nothing could be to her satisfaction: the maids were scolded, her father was scolded, her brothers were scolded; she went down to the bunkhouse and ordered the hands to wash their sheets. Jeannie would be prescribed a long bath to open her pores, which, according to her grandmother, were growing larger each month.
After she’d soaked her face, conditioned her hair, dried herself off, and dressed again, she would sit in the library on the couch while her grandmother cleaned under each fingernail, filing off the rough edges, pushing back the cuticles and rubbing cold cream into her skin.
We will make a lady of you yet,
she said, though Jeannie had not thrown a rope in over a year and the calluses were long gone from her hands. Every third visit she would bring her entire wardrobe to the library so that her grandmother might assess the fit of her dresses—
that one makes you look like a servant girl on the prowl
. The offending articles would be packed into a box that her grandmother took to Dallas for tailoring.
Her grandmother always had news from the city, which Jeannie found immensely boring, except for the stories of good girls being ruined, which had begun to feature prominently in her grandmother’s lectures. Still, she no longer fell asleep during these talks; there was a comfort in being told to stay out of the sun—
your freckles are bad enough
—to watch what she ate—
you have your mother’s hips
—to wash her hair once a day and to never wear pants. Then her grandmother would take up Jeannie’s hands, as if something might have changed in the ten minutes since she last touched them, but no, there were her stubby inelegant fingers, which no amount of piano lessons could ever fix. Her grandmother’s own fingers were knobby and arthritic and resembled the claws of an animal, but they had once been the hands of a lady, no matter how many years she had wasted on this ranch.
A
MONTH OR
so after she finished the eighth grade, her grandmother, after giving the usual news from Dallas, informed Jeannie that she had been accepted to the Greenfield boarding school in Connecticut. Jeannie had not known she’d applied.
You leave in six weeks,
her grandmother said.
Tomorrow we’ll take the train to San Antonio and get you some proper clothes.
Her protests, which went on the rest of the summer, meant nothing. Clint and Paul considered it pointless to resist; her father was pleased that there might be a better place for her, going so far as to invoke Jonas as a reason she might be happy up north.
I’m not Jonas
, she protested, but everyone knew this was only partially true. Her grandmother gave her pearls and four sets of kid gloves, but this did nothing to assuage her anger; she did not even look at her father when he put her on the train north. She did look at the pearls for a long time that evening, after closing the curtains to her sleeping compartment. They were worth twenty thousand dollars, her grandmother had said; she would not have any granddaughter of hers looking common.
