The Son (33 page)

“Now we ride.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Does it hurt. Oh, Tiehteti.”

There was shooting along the river—they had found someone from the band. The noise slowed and then stopped. I wondered who it was.

“Keep going,” said Toshaway.

B
Y THE TIME
the sun came up, the horse was nearly dead. Toshaway was pale and sweaty and we were looking north into a dry basin that went on for dozens of miles.

“How is your water?”

“The
pihpóo
was shot at the river.”

“Very bad,” he said.

The horse was lying on its side. There was no hope for it.

He cut a vein on the animal’s neck and drank for a minute. Then he made me do the same. The horse didn’t protest. Toshaway began to drink again. My mouth was full of hair and my stomach was full of blood and I wanted to air my paunch. He made me drink some more. The horse’s breathing got quicker.

“Now we walk,” he said. “And hope the buzzards don’t lead our friends to the
tusanabo
.”

I inspected my rifle and saw the lock was wrecked so I threw it into the brush.

“Those were fucking Indians leading them,” he said. “Lipans. And there were white men as well.” He shook his head. “The Apaches sucking the cocks of the Mexicans who are sucking the cocks of the whites. The world is against us.”

B
Y AFTERNOON WE
had dropped into the basin. From the top we could see a tree line farther north—a stream—but to reach it we would have to cross miles of open ground, no cover but cane cholla and giant dagger. Anyone looking would see us right away.

“Unfortunately I do not think I will make it if we skirt the edge.”

“We’ll cross the flat.”

“No,” he said. “Give me a few of your arrows. You will take the long way and stay hidden.”

“We’ll cross the flat,” I repeated.

“Tiehteti,” he said. “It is good to give your life, but not for a dead man.”

“We’re crossing the flat,” I said.

By late afternoon we were in the shade along the creek. It was not much more than a muddy trickle and as gyppy as I’d ever tasted, but we both lay drinking for several minutes. I left Toshaway and went off with my bow to see if I could find a deer or something we might eat and also we needed a stomach for a water carrier.

I had been sitting in the willows, hoping to see some game, when I noticed a man on a bay horse picking his way up the stream. He was leading a small paint that was saddled and covered in handprints, similar to the horse Ten Buffalo had been riding.

The man was white and wearing new buckskin and there were scalps on his belt. I began to shift my weight. Then he stopped. He was staring at my footprints in the mud. I had been drawing my bow so slowly he would not have seen it even if he’d looked directly at me, and the way the light came through the leaves there was a pattern all over him and I found a bright spot and popped my fingers. He saw the arrow and then his horse turned and pitched through the bushes. There was more crashing. I moved about another ten yards and nocked another arrow and waited. I thought I could see his horse just past the trees. Finally I circled around.

He was lying in the grass in the shade. He had pulled out the arrow and it was still in his hand and something made me think of my father, but there was only a slim resemblance, dirty black hair and bloodshot eyes and pale skin under his hat. He looked right at me but it was an illusion; I counted the scalps tied to his saddle and then rolled him onto his belly to take his.

In addition to the two horses, he had a pair of brand-new Colt Navys, a .69 rifle, a nearly new gun belt, a powder flask, a knife, a heavy bullet pouch, three water gourds, and a wallet full of food. I notched the arrow with an X, then stripped off all his clothes and bundled them in case Toshaway wanted them.

The paint was grazing at the edge of the stream. I nickered and it came immediately. I was no longer sure it had belonged to Ten Buffalo but it was wearing a Comanche saddle and there were red and yellow handprints all over it.

I was looking out over the mountains to the north where I could see trees and good grass; it would be nothing to ride away, there would be no more ambushes, I could reach Bexar in eight days. But the feeling soon passed and I went to find Toshaway.

W
E SAT EATING
the man’s dried beef and drinking his clean water and eating the dried plums and apples he’d been carrying as well. I was starting to feel good about things when Toshaway decided it was time to cut the bruised parts out of his leg. He had split and cut more pear pads and gathered up creosote leaves for a poultice and mashed them with water and soaked two clean pieces of the man’s shirt. Then he sat down near the stream.

“Don’t be a fucking butcher,” he said, “but don’t take your time, either.”

He put a stick in his mouth and I took up my scalping knife and cut around the bullet hole. His eyes rolled and the stick fell out of his mouth. I finished cutting, then rolled him over and cut out the bruise from the other side. Then I pushed the pieces of the man’s shirt through the wound and drew them out. I was packing it when he woke up. Piss continued to run out from between his legs, but he did not seem to notice. The wound was bleeding freely and he told me that was a good sign. When I had packed it full and covered it with the split pear pads, we tied a tight bandage with another piece of the scalp hunter’s shirt.

As we were sitting there he told me he knew on the night I was captured that I had been the one to shoot Skulking Bear, but he had not told anyone else in the tribe.

“It did not make sense to me, either,” he said. “I knew you had done it and yet I did not tell anyone.”

I was quiet.

“I knew what you had in you,” he said. “Now everyone else will see it as well.”

I wasn’t really listening. I was thinking about the night I was captured, about my mother and brother and sister. He saw something in my face and told me that his grandfather had been a captive Mexican—the tribe was all from captives—it was the way of the Comanche; it had kept our blood strong all these years.

W
E CONTINUED TO
ride and change his poultice. A few days later we found a honey tree and filled our wallets from it, eating some but saving the rest to pack his wound, resting while the sun was up and traveling only at night.

By the time we reached the plains, two weeks later, there was still a gash in his leg, but the redness and swelling were gone. In another two weeks we were back in camp.

Chapter Twenty-three

Jeannie

Spring 1945

I
t was a bad storm, a gully washer, the rain coming so fast the ground had no time to absorb it, the clouds so heavy they blotted out the light. By noon it was completely dark. The lightning was echoing through the house and she was sure it was a gunnery raid, a mission from the Kaufman air base gone off target. She watched fire leap through a patch of cedar close to the house, entire trees erupting ahead of the flames; a great sheave of rain put it out.

Her father had been out in the far pastures. He did not return for supper but a few hours later his horse showed up at the gate, alone and still saddled. It was even darker now; she could barely see her own feet. There was no chance of going after him, but it was not cold, and he was resourceful, and she expected he would show up sometime in the morning, soaked and footsore but otherwise intact.

Still, she slept in fits, waking every hour or so until at some point she looked out and saw the moon. The vaqueros were all waiting downstairs; her horse was already saddled. At first light they followed the dim tracks of her father’s grullo, nearly obliterated by the rain but, when she put herself in the right mind, clear enough to follow.

The tracks led to a big arroyo but they did not continue on the other side. The light was spreading across the horizon and the birdcalls were starting up as if nothing had happened. Jeannie and the older vaqueros continued the search, the horses and most of the men held back so as not to trample any sign, but even later, with the sun risen, there were no tracks.

Her father, upon reaching the arroyo, must have dismounted. Or more likely, he had come upon it at speed, blinded by the rain and dark, and been thrown. There was only a thin trickle of water now, but high along the banks, fresh grass dangled from the sycamores. A man might have been carried miles. Dozens of miles.

F
OUR DAYS LATER,
one of the Midkiff vaqueros found him at a water gap, the white sole of a foot showing under the brush and flotsam. No one told her; the telephone rang and then Sullivan got into his truck and went to town and when he returned, there was a box on the front seat with her father’s clothes. They were filthy and torn but she recognized his shirt. She picked it up, thinking to bring it to her face, then dropped it. It was crawling with blowflies.

Clint had died at Salerno, Paul at the Battle of the Bulge, even though she had prayed every night, even though she had not missed a Sunday of church. When Clint was killed she had continued to pray for Paul and Jonas, and at some point, months before his death, she had begun to pray for her father as well. Now she wondered if she had somehow killed them. One seemed as likely as the other. She decided she would stop praying for Jonas, and he had lived.

B
ECAUSE OF HER
father’s condition, the funeral was planned for the next day, and as she lay in her bed that afternoon, exhausted but unable to fall asleep, it occurred to her that the ranch still needed to be run, that there was no one left but her.

She allowed herself a few more minutes, then drew a bath, scrubbing herself thoroughly, though without wasting any time, as she imagined a mother might wash a child. She put on her black dress, then decided against it; she could not afford to be worrying about her clothes. She changed into blue jeans and old boots and knew her grandmother would not have approved, though of course she was gone as well, dead the previous year. She put on a bit of makeup—almost as bad as the pants. But her eyelashes were blond, like the rest of her—they made her look too young.
Where is Jonas?
she thought.

No work had been done in four days; everyone had been looking for her father. Now all thirty of his employees—vaqueros, fence riders, the windmill monkeys—were gathered around the bunkhouse, sitting on the porch or under trees in the shade, speaking quietly and wondering what was going to happen.

She told them nothing would change, that if for some reason she were not around, their paychecks would be distributed by Mrs. Wright, the bookkeeper. Everyone will be paid for the past four days, she continued, and tomorrow will be a day off. But between now and then, the water gaps need tending, the Midkiffs have some of our stock, and anything else the storm broke, you just get to fixing it, you don’t have to ask.

She did not tell them that she did not have the authority to sign their checks. She spent the rest of that day and night alternately worrying that no one would attend the funeral and wondering where her father kept his will. Their lawyer tore his office apart but found nothing; around midnight Jeannie found the document in an old file cabinet. It had been updated several times: once for Clint and once for Paul, but the newest version, dated only a few months previous, which had doubtless caused her father much anxiety, named her sole inheritor of his share of the ranch. Jonas got a share of the minerals but that was all.

A feeling of happiness overtook her; she could not help smiling, then laughing, and then felt terrible. Still, Phineas would be overjoyed—the entire property was now split between them. Jonas would not care too much; he was trying to make his way back from Germany, though the flights were infrequent and always full and a ship would take weeks. She went back to worrying about the funeral.

Outside several fires had been built, calves and goats and hogs set to roasting. Trips had been made to Carrizo for beans, corn, coffee, and two dozen store-made cakes. A hundred cases of Pearl beer and four cases of whiskey. The house felt more alive than it had in years; the cooks were up all night, doing whatever it was they did, and the maids were as well, changing all the linens in the guest rooms, getting the folding cots out of storage, making the house ready for company.

P
HINEAS ARRIVED WITH
a sizable entourage; there was a trickle, then a flood, of people from Austin and San Antonio and Dallas, from Houston and El Paso and Brownsville, the other South Texas ranchers, newspapermen, nearly five hundred people in total, which at first caused her to weep—her father had been more appreciated than she had ever realized—but as the day went on she saw that most had come out of politeness, not for her father but for her, or for the family, for the idea of the McCulloughs. The local Mexicans, who had mostly hated her father, and not without cause, they all came as well, because that was what you did when your
patrón
died.

T
HE LAST TIME
the house had been so full was at the Colonel’s funeral, but that had a different feel altogether, of genuine misery, the end of something, of grown men who could not stop crying. The faces now were somber but not troubled, the conversation easy. Her father had not mattered. It was not fair but the more she thought about it, the more condolences she accepted, the more she heard the circumstances of his death whispered around the room, the more furious she got. He had died stupidly. From stubbornness and poor judgment. The vaqueros had all lit for home as soon as the storm blew in—lightning killed more cowboys than guns ever had—but her father, with his notions, had wanted to finish his count.
I don’t mind getting a little wet
—those were his last words.

She circulated through the house, hundreds of people, thanking them for coming and insisting they eat, the smell of beef and cabrito and roast pig, unending dishes of beans and sauce and tortillas, gallons of beer and sweet tea. She was in and out of the kitchen; yes, another calf should be knocked in the head—on the coals immediately—yes, another run was needed to Carrizo—no telling how long people would stay. Sullivan periodically appeared and pressed a cold glass of tea into her hand. She had sweated through her dress. She went up to change but there was nothing else; of course she had only one black dress. She hung it in front of the fan in her bedroom, wiped herself down with a wash towel, then stood in front of the fan herself. She made a note to check Sullivan’s salary; his people had worked for the family three generations; her father had been stingy. She was tempted to rest but knew she would fall asleep.