The Son (41 page)

Finally I got dressed. I made my way to the hallway in the west wing of the house, stepping quietly, as if meeting for an assignation, though it did not matter . . . we were alone. I noticed that my breath was foul, my hair and face greasy, the smell of old sweat, but I continued down the hall. A prowler in my own house. Past the busts on their pedestals, the drawings of ruins . . . another portrait of my mother, past Glenn’s room and Pete Junior’s room and Charlie’s room . . . finally I heard a fan blowing behind one of the doors. I knocked softly.

I knocked again and waited and then knocked a third time. Then I opened the door. The bed was empty but the sheets were mussed and it was dark. I went to the window and she was standing on the roof of the gallery, at the very edge.

“Come back from there.”

She didn’t move. She was wearing a nightdress Consuela must have given her. For a moment I thought she was sleepwalking.

“Come here,” I repeated.

“If you’re going to kill me . . .” she said. “I don’t care but I am not just going to walk out into the
brasada
with you.”

“You should stay here,” I told her.

“Imposible.”

“Stay until you’re well.”

She shook her head.

“I wanted to stop you before you left. That’s all I wanted.”

“In order that you will have done something kind.” She looked at me, shook her head, then looked out over the land. She was looking toward her old house, I realized. I worried she might step over the edge. She said, “Today in the kitchen while your back was turned, I thought about how I might put the chopping knife into your throat. I thought about how many steps it was and what I would do if you turned around.”

“Stay,” I said.

She shook her head. “You don’t know what you’re asking, Peter.”

J
UNE 24, 1917

In non-Garcia-related news, the vaqueros complain that the noise of the drilling is ruining the cattle. They do not see this year’s calf crop being a good one if the animals are subjected to all that noise.

I went to my father to ask how deep they intend to drill. He told me to the center of the earth. I ask if he knows that our aquifer is shallow, and our water some of the best in this part of Texas, and that if he leaks petroleum into it, we are done for. He tells me these men are experts. He means the ones who sleep in hog wallows.

I
T OCCURS TO
me that we are entering an era in which the human ear will cease to distinguish sounds. Today I barely heard the drillers. What other things am I not hearing?

W
HEN
I
RETURNED
to the house for dinner, there was the sound of the piano before I even reached the door. I removed my boots and left them outside so she would not hear me enter, opened and closed the door very softly, then lay on the divan listening to her play. When I opened my eyes she was standing over me. For an instant I imagined her as she had been ten years earlier: her round face, dark eyes. Then I looked at her hands. They were empty.

“I am going to eat.”

“Alone?”

“I don’t care,” she said.

She heated up what Consuela had left for us. When we finished I asked her again what had happened that day.

She acted like she hadn’t heard. “Would you mind if I cooked a little more? I can’t stop thinking about food.”

“There are always things in the icebox,” I said.

She took some cold chicken and began to eat. She tried to be dainty but I could tell it took a lot of effort, I was full but she was starving.

“Tell me.”

“You think that talking about this will allow me to forgive you.”

“I haven’t forgiven myself,” I said quietly.

“Telling you changes nothing,” she said. “Just so we are clear.”

I nodded.

“Fine. So, when they came into the house, they shot everyone, whether they were already on the floor or standing up. Someone shot my niece, who was six, and then, like a coward, I went into my room and hid in my closet. After that I remember sitting on my bed and someone removing my shirt and realizing they are going to rape me before they kill me, then I saw it was you. I thought you were going to rape me and somehow it was much worse.

“Then you walked me through the house. I saw into my parents’ room, my mother and father dead, my sister lying with them, then in the
sala
were Cesár and Romaldo and Gregorio, Martin and my nephew, and their families. I could see the front door was open, and the sun was coming through it and I began to hope I might live, but when we reached the portico I saw the entire town had gathered. Then I wished I hadn’t hidden in the closet. I nearly took your gun.

“After that I was at the Reynoldses’ house. They thought they were rescuing me, they thought they were doing me a favor. They fed me, allowed me to bathe, gave me clothes, a room with clean sheets. Meanwhile, my own house, with my own bed and my own clothes, was just a few miles away. But it was already not mine.”

“No one wanted it to happen.”

“These lies come out of your mouth so easily,” she said. “You yourself, I believe you had reservations, perhaps a few others . . . the Reynoldses, obviously . . . but not anyone else.”

She looked at the plate in front of her. “And still I am hungry. That is what I cannot believe.”

It was quiet and finally she said, “Can we go outside? I get spells of hot and cold, and now I am very hot.”

We went onto the porch and looked over the land. It was an unusually cool day, a pleasant evening, with the sun just going down. I considered remarking as much, then decided against it. I could hear the drilling going on from the other side of the hill.

After we’d sat awhile, she said: “I’ve spent a long time thinking about what happened. And the longer I thought about it, the more I began to think that things had just gone very badly wrong, of course the shooting of your son—it was Glenn?”

“Yes.”

“And how is he?”

“He is alive.”

“I am glad.”

I felt my face get hot. For some reason this—Glenn still being alive—embarrassed me.

“One of yours hurt, eleven of mine dead . . .” She put up her hands, as if balancing scales. “We have all suffered, the past is the past, it is time to move on.”

I didn’t answer.

“That is what you think, isn’t it? Your child injured, my family exterminated, we are even. And of course you are the best of them; the others think okay, a white man was scratched, there is no amount of Mexican blood that can wash out that sin. Five, ten, one hundred . . . it’s all the same to them. In the newspapers, a dead Mexican is called a carcass”—she held up her fingers—“like an animal.”

“Not all newspapers.”

“Just the ones that matter. But of course I’m no better; for a long time, I had fantasies about nearly every white person in town, burning them, cutting them. I remember very clearly Terrell Snyder staring at me with a grin on his face and the Slaughter brothers as well . . .”

“I don’t think the Slaughters were there,” I said.

“They were, I saw them clearly, but that is irrelevant. I decided I would stop being angry and perhaps accept that the entire situation, everything that had happened, was bad luck. In fact I became certain of it. We had known your family for decades, it didn’t make sense. You in particular we knew very well; I could not imagine you plotting against us. I began to think that perhaps I overreacted by fleeing from the Reynoldses’ house.

“And so when my cousin was killed, I decided I would come back. I crossed the river and reached our pastures and felt more alive than I had been in months. I decided to walk all night. I had a story prepared if I met one of your fence riders, though I hoped I would not, as I knew that, depending on their mood, my story would not matter. But . . . there was no one. This I also took as a sign.

“I knew what condition the house would be in. The stuffing would be pulled out of chairs, bird droppings, dirt everywhere, our papers shredded by mice, and of course the old pools of the blood of my family would not have been cleaned and the bullets would still be in every wall. It would look exactly as I had left it, except that it would have aged two years.

“When I reached our lower pasture, by the old church, the sun was coming up and I could see the house had been burned. But still I thought no, empty homes are often vandalized, lovers go to them, the poor occupy them, the dry climate—even a cigarette might have started a fire. I went through one of the doors, made my way through the rubble to my father’s office, where I knew all our papers were kept, in metal cabinets that would have resisted any fire. The cabinets were buried under debris, like everything else, but after some time I uncovered them. My birth certificate, perhaps some money, stock certificates, things like that. But do you know what I found?”

I looked away.

“Nothing. They were empty. The papers were gone. Every single document and letter, every record had been removed. And then I knew it had been intentional. It was not enough to exterminate my family; it was also necessary to remove every record of our existence.”

“No one wanted that,” I told her.

“Another lie. You of all people, you have already forgotten that you are lying. Your lies have become the truth.”

I decided to study a green lizard scuttling across the porch. Sometime later I heard a sound; her breath was rattling like a dying man’s. I had a terrible feeling but I watched her and she continued to breathe; she was asleep. I watched her for a long time after that and when I was sure she was not going to perish, I went inside and got a blanket and put it over her.

Chapter Thirty-one

Eli/Tiehteti

Late Fall/Early Winter 1851

A
fter we buried the last of the dead, the fifty of us still alive had gathered the few remaining horses and were making our way southwest, mostly on foot, hoping to find the buffalo, or to at least cut their trail. There was no fresh sign. It was clear the
n
u
m
u
kutsu
had not been in the area for over a year.

No one knew where the good grass was or where the buffalo might be headed. Later we found out they had stayed north, with the Cheyennes and Arapahoes. Meanwhile, the snow was beginning to fall and there was not much to eat.

With the exception of Yellow Hair, myself, and a few old Comanches who’d been exposed in previous epidemics, there was no logic to who had survived. The
tasía
had killed the weak and the strong, the smart and the stupid, the cowardly and the brave, and if the survivors had anything in common, it was that they had been too lazy or fatalistic to run away. The best of us had either fled or died in the plague.

No one spoke. There was nothing but the wind, creaking of packs, the travois poles scraping over rocks. If we did not see enough deer or antelope, we would kill a horse, further slowing our progress. There was no plan except to find the buffalo; we did not know what we would do if we ran into the
T
u
hano
or the army; there were less than ten of us who could still fight; many of the children had gone blind.

One day, as we watched another norther blow in, the sky behind us the color of a bruise, a cold I knew would cut through my robe, it occurred to me that I had missed seeing many of the children at breakfast. I could not recall seeing them the previous night, either. I looked behind me and made a count of our long slow column and it was true. Half the children were missing. Their mothers had taken all the blind ones out onto the prairie and killed them, so that the rest of us would have enough to eat.

That night we ran into a group of Comanchero traders who saw our fire in the storm. They were loaded down with cornmeal and squash, powder and lead, knives and steel arrowheads, woolen blankets. We had nothing to give them. Apparently all the other bands were decimated because they decided to keep us company a few days. They gave us a few sacks of cornmeal but we had no hides and our few remaining horses could not be traded.

As they began to repack their mules, a sense of despair came over everyone; a few people sat down in the snow and refused to be consoled. The night had cleared and I walked away from the fire to look at the stars. There did not seem to be much point in continuing. The few people like me, who could still hunt, could simply ride away, but that was out of the question. I was standing there thinking when our surviving chief, Mountain of Rocks, came up next to me.

“I would like to speak quickly, Tiehteti.”

“All right,” I said.

“Obviously,” he said, “we may not make it through the winter.”

“I can see that.”

He looked out over the prairie, now covered with a light dusting of snow, which would soon turn into several feet.

“There is a way for you to help.”

I knew what he was getting at. The government was still paying high prices for returned captives.

“You yourself may survive this winter here. Most of us will not. Maybe none of us will. But if you return to the
taibo
. . .” He shrugged. “You can simply come back once the traders are paid.”

I didn’t look at him.

“It is your decision, of course. But there is talk that you might volunteer to do this, especially given the sacrifices that many of the families have already made.” He meant the children. “Still, you are one of us and we would prefer if you stayed.”

F
OR THE
G
ERMAN
girl and me, the Comancheros left twenty bags of cornmeal, forty pounds of
piloncillo,
ten bushels of squash. Twenty pounds of lead, a barrel of powder, some gun lock screws, a thousand-pack of steel arrowheads, a few rough knife blades with rawhide handles. It was considered quite generous, though the traders had no doubt they would make a large profit, as I was still young, and the German girl still pretty, her face unmarked. Many captives, especially women, were returned with ears and noses cut off, faces branded, but Yellow Hair looked unscathed, and it was obvious that she would be beautiful once cleaned up. I was asked a few questions in English, to see if I still knew how to speak it, which I did. After nearly three years living among the wild Indians, that was not common, either, and by any measure our return would look like a great success and the Comancheros would be well paid.