The Son (31 page)

“There are no more Hollises left. We have seen to that.”

“There will be someone else,” she said.

Considered mentioning this was her reward for marrying into the family of the great Eli McCullough, but said nothing. All the energy had left me.

“My nephews in Dallas have guns,” she said. “They use them to hunt deer. They go to school, they chase after the wrong sort of girls, but . . .” She choked up. “I went to see the boy . . .”

“Dutch?” I said gently.

“ . . . they had him laid out in a shed behind Bill Graham’s office. It was a disgrace.”

I did not say anything. Things have been so bad between us for so long and every time I have had hope, she has smashed it. I looked away from her and closed myself off.

“You might be staying here alone, Pete. I have lost all the sons I care to lose.”

Chapter Twenty-two

Eli/Tiehteti

Spring 1851

T
o white ears, the names of the Indians lacked any sort of dignity or sense and made it that much harder to figure why they ought to be treated as humans rather than prairie niggers. The reason for this was that the Comanches considered the use of a dead person’s name taboo. Unlike the whites, billions of whom shared the same handful of names, all interchangeable in the end, a Comanche name lived and died with a single person.

A child was not named by his parents, but by a relative or a famous person in the tribe; maybe for a deed that person had done, maybe for an object that struck their fancy. If a particular name was not serving well, the child might be renamed; for instance, Charges the Enemy had been a small and timid child and it was thought that giving him a braver name might cure these problems, which it had. Some people in the tribe were renamed a second or third time in adult life, if their friends and family found something more interesting to call them. The owner of the German captive Yellow Hair, whose birth name was Six Deer, was renamed Lazy Feet as a teenager, which stuck to him the rest of his life. Toshaway’s son Fat Wolf was so named because his namer had seen a very fat wolf the previous night, and being an interesting sight and not a bad name it had stuck. Toshaway’s name meant Bright Button, which had also stuck with him since birth, but that seemed a strange thing to call him so I thought of him as Toshaway. Spanish-sounding names were also common, though they often had no particular meaning—Pizon, Escuté, Concho—there was a warrior named Hisoo-ancho who had been captured at the age of seven or eight, whose Christian name was Jesus Sanchez, and, as that was all he would answer to, that was what he was called.

Many Comanche names were too vulgar to repeat in print and thus, when the situation required, were changed by whites. The chief who led the famous raid on Linnville in 1840 (in which a group of five hundred warriors sacked a warehouse full of fine clothing and made their escape dressed in top hats, wedding gowns, and silk shirts) was named Po-cha-na-quar-hip, meaning Cock That Stays Hard Forever. But neither this nor the more delicate translation, Erection That Will Not Go Down, could possibly be printed in newspapers, so it was decided to call him Buffalo Hump. He was thusly referred to until he died, many years later, attempting to learn farming on a reservation, having lost both his land and his good name to the whites, though in his own mind he remained Cock That Stays Hard Forever.

The medicine man who, along with Quanah Parker, led the entire Comanche nation against the whites in the Red River War of 1874 was named Isahata?i, meaning Coyote Pussy. The newspapers called him Ishtai, Eshati, and Eschiti, no translation offered. Toshaway had a nephew called Tried to Fuck a Mare, a name acquired in adolescence, and Hates Work, as previously mentioned, was originally called Single Bird. The Comanches were a good-natured sort and names were accepted with humor, though after Tried to Fuck a Mare got his first scalp and it was decided to change his name to Man on a Hill, he was not heard to complain.

B
Y
F
EBRUARY THE
tribe was starving. There had not been a big buffalo kill in over a year, and most of the local deer, elk, and antelope had been hunted down over the winter. The few animals still alive moved only at night, surviving on twigs and dry brush. By then we had taken to tracking packrats back to their nests and eating their stashes of dried fruits and nuts, along with the rats themselves if we could catch them, and everyone in the tribe knew that the very young, the very old, and the sick would soon begin to die, and they would have, had we not discovered a buffalo herd beginning to drift north.

Everyone took this as a sign that our bad luck had ended, and the Creator-of-All-Things had forgiven us. By the time the first Spring Beauties appeared we had replenished our stores of meat and hides and begun to look forward to the summer, when the weather would be warm, though this also meant that the women in the band were put to double work preparing all the hides, so that they would be ready by the time the Comanchero traders arrived.

I
N
M
AY IT
was time to go raiding again. A third of the band had been killed the previous year, most of its horse wealth lost, and if this summer’s raids were not successful, it was not clear how much longer we would survive. Toshaway would go again, though Escuté, who still could not quite draw his bow, was ordered to stay in camp, and I would be sent in his place. N
uu
karu was also going but, unlike the other young braves, he was quiet about the deeds he would commit.

“Don’t look so down in the mouth,” said Escuté. “You can bring back a beautiful Mexican girl and listen to me fuck her.”

N
uu
karu shook his head.

“Let me guess. You have a bad feeling.”

“Stop,” he said, indicating me.

Escuté looked over: “This one always has a bad feeling. Don’t listen to him.”

“I had it about the last one, too.”

“Ah, the great
puha tenahp
u
. I had almost forgotten.”

“Things are changing,” he said. “Whether or not we admit it. The Penateka . . .”

“Fuck the fucking Penateka. They were the white man’s
tai?i
and they got what was coming to them.”

“They were four times our size.”

“And they were the white man’s bitch and got all his diseases.”

“Ah, of course. The ones who make the greatest-ever raid on the whites were also his bitch.”

“Ten winters ago.”

“They had horse herds as thick as buffalo.”

“N
uu
karu, we had one bad year, and you are a gloomy cocksucker, and you might ask to stay behind because if you continue to talk like that, instead of singing the
woho hubiya,
someone will shut your mouth with a tomahawk.”

“If we have another raid like last year,” said N
uu
karu, “there will be no one left to shut my mouth at all.”

“Ignore him, Tiehteti. This is what gets people killed.” He shook his head. “You will bring back a thousand horses and a hundred scalps and fifty Mexican slaves. That is what you will do. Talking about it is a waste of time.”

“All right,” said N
uu
karu.

“My arm hurts so bad I can’t sleep but you don’t hear me whining like a child. Kill some Mexicans, die a hero, I don’t give a fuck, but this talking is pointless, you might as well cut your own throat, and the throats of your people while you’re at it.”

“W
E ARE PLANNING
to avoid the whites,” said Toshaway, “but . . .”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” I told him.

“Good.” He looked out across the village, noticeably smaller than it had been the previous year. “I wish you had been born twenty years ago, Tiehteti, because those were real days. The buffalo wolves used to follow us on our raids because they knew they’d get something to eat.” He scratched his chin. “But perhaps those times will return.”

W
E DESCENDED FROM
the plains and the land became mesas and canyonlands again, there were trees, mostly cottonwoods and oaks, the grass was tall and the blanketflowers were thick, patches of color going on for miles.

Toshaway had relatives along the San Saba headwaters and while looking for them we found a freshly raided Comanche camp, around seventy bodies, all scalped. There were a few warriors, but mostly it was women and children and old men. Toshaway had found his relatives. They were a splinter band of the Kotsoteka. Many of the women and girls had been treated the same as my mother and sister, cut up in the same way as well. We spent the day burying them.

“Their men must still be out,” said Pizon.

There were boot prints everywhere, boots made in Austin or San Antonio or somewhere in the east. There was a strange litter of musket balls on the ground and the hoofprints of shod horses. The tipis, weapons, and camp equipment had all been thrown into a fire and burned. I was dauncy with shame, but the other Comanches kept their faces hard, and the only thing said was that a few years earlier, the nearest white settlements has been hundreds of miles away, and it was a bad sign that they had found this camp.

“How many whites are there?” said Toshaway. “Do you know?”

“They say about twenty million.”

He grunted and looked at me.

“Come on.”

“It’s a fact.”

“Okay, Tiehteti.”

We rode in a wide circle around the camp, taking a break from digging. It could not have been a Ranger squad because twelve men could not kill seventy-three Comanches, even women and children. Toshaway guessed three hundred riders, but there were so many tracks on top of each other, as they had spent at least a day raping and sacking the village, it was hard to be certain.

I thought about my father’s tracks, he had a strange duck-footed walk and his left foot stuck out more than his right, and for a tall heavy man he had very small feet. I decided not to look.

At the top of a hill we found ruts as if a pair of wagons had been parked. The grass was burned down to the dirt.

“Strange,” said Toshaway.

“Those were cannons,” I said. “That’s why the grass is burned.”

“Those are very heavy, no?”

“A mountain howitzer can be pulled behind a horse. The army used them against the Mexicans all the time.”

The hill was maybe a furlong from the village and I knew the musket balls littering the ground must have been canister. A mountain howitzer loaded with canister was like two hundred rifles firing at once, or as my father used to say, like the hand of the Lord Himself.

“Tiehteti, it is very strange. For instance, how did they get into position without being noticed? And why would they have brought cannons all this way unless they were sure that Indians would be here? That is what I find strange.” He shook his head. “Someone was leading them.”

“They put the guns in place in the dark.”

“Of course in the dark. But still. They knew Indians were here.” He stood looking down at the ruins of the camp.

“Unfortunately most of the men seem to have fallen into their cooking fires and I could not tell if my cousin was among them. Though I did recognize his wife and two daughters.”

By then the other men were washing the ash and gore off in the river. Before we left, we hacked a flat place into a cottonwood and carved a note in hieroglyphics, telling what had happened, and how many we had buried, in case there were other members of the band who had not yet returned.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT
we saw campfires in the distance, fires as only the whites made them, twice as large as they needed to be, nearly two dozen in all. It could only be the army, as there were not that many Rangers in the entire state of Texas.

There was discussion about whether to steal their horses but we decided to keep going. It would be safer to get them from the Mexicans, and instead of sleeping we rode all night to put distance between us and the soldiers. We crossed the Pecos without seeing anyone else, though there were recent tracks of shod horses, a small party of travelers. There was a debate about following them but the army was still close and it was again decided to wait. Climbing out of the Pecos Valley, the land became flat and dry. Long patches of caliche, clumps of oaks, mesquites, and huisache, the occasional cedar. We didn’t relax until we’d reached the Davis Mountains, where there was another debate about using the standard route past the old Presidio del Norte, which was well watered and had good grass and involved the least climbing, or going farther east into the mountains, where it was steeper and less watered but also less traveled. The younger men—who needed scalps—were annoyed we hadn’t taken on either the army or the travelers whose tracks we’d crossed, so it was decided to go past Presidio.

We stayed at a distance from the town, dropping gradually into the valley, then the river itself, and then back up into the mountains. A day’s ride from the border was a latifundio that was known to have a thousand horses.

T
HERE WAS A
small village attached to the latifundio and we left the remuda with a half-dozen young Indians to guard the animals. Most were better hands than I was at riding and shooting, but that did not matter, because I had gotten a scalp and they hadn’t.

The rest of us picked the best horses, covered our faces and bodies with red and black and yellow paint, put on silver and brass armbands and bracelets, and tied feathers to the manes of our horses. Toshaway made sure I got a medicine hat with a large brown shield and I spent a long time painting it. I emptied my bowels three times, though the last time it was all water. I kept my eye on Toshaway and N
uu
karu. Toshaway was laughing and joking with various people, making sure everyone was ready; N
uu
karu was keeping to himself, and looked serious, and I also saw him go into the bushes and then a second time a few minutes later. I tried to eat some pemmican, but my mouth was too dry. I decided that was fine. If you were hit in the guts you did not want them to be full.