Philipp Meyer - The Son

“You need to eat.”

He was smiling. “You know, I never thought a place like this could exist. I’ll bet our tracks will be gone with the first wind.”

“They’re going to kill you if you don’t eat.”

“They’re going to kill me anyway, Eli.”

“Eat,” I said. “Daddy ate raw meat all the time.”

“I’m quite aware that as a Ranger, Daddy did everything. But I am not him. Sorry,” he said. He touched my leg. “I started a new poem about Lizzie. Would you like to hear it?”

“All right.”

“ ‘Your virgin blood, spilled by savages, you are whole again in heaven.’ Which of course is shit. But it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.”

The Indians were looking at us. Toshaway brought another chunk of buffalo and indicated I ought to give it to my brother. My brother pushed it away.

“I was sure I would go to Harvard,” he said. “And then Rome. I have actually been there in my mind, you know, because when I read, I actually see things; I physically see them in front of me. Did you know that?” He seemed to cheer up. “Even these people can’t ruin this place for me.” He shook his head. “I’ve written about ten letters to Emerson but I haven’t sent them. I think he would take them seriously, though.”

Any letters he’d written had been burned in the fire but I didn’t mention this. I told him he needed to eat.

“They’re not going to turn me into some fucking filthy Indian, Eli. I’d rather be dead.”

I must have gotten a look because then he said, “It wasn’t your fault. I go back and forth between thinking we shouldn’t have been living out there in the first place, and then I think what else could a man like Daddy do? He had no choice, really. It was fate.”

“I’m going to make you a pile of food.”

He ignored me. He was staring at something on the ground and then he reached over and pulled up one of the blanketflowers — we were sitting in a big patch. He held it up for all the Indians to see.

“Note the Indian blanket,” he said, “or Indian sunburst.”

They ignored him.

He continued in a louder voice. “It is worth noting that small, stunted, or useless plants — such as Mexican plum, Mexican walnut, or Mexican apple — are named after the Mexicans, who will doubtless endure among us for centuries, while colorful or beautiful plants are often named after Indians, as they will soon be vanquished from the earth.” He looked around at them. “It’s a great compliment to your race. Though if your vanquishing had come a bit earlier, I wouldn’t have complained.”

No one was paying attention.

“It’s the fate of a man like myself to be misunderstood. That’s Goethe, in case you were wondering.”

Toshaway tried a few more times to give him meat, but my brother wouldn’t touch it. Within half an hour there was nothing left but bone and hide. The hides were rolled up and put on the back of someone’s horse and the Indians began to mount.

Then my brother was looking at someone behind me.

“Don’t try to help.”

Toshaway pinned me to the grass. He and another Indian sat on me and tied my wrists and ankles as quick as my father might have tied a calf. I was dragged a good distance. When I looked over, Martin hadn’t moved. He was sitting there taking things in; I could barely see his face above the flowers. Three Indians had mounted their horses, including Urwat, my brother’s owner. They were riding in circles around him, whooping and hollering. He stood and they slapped him with the flats of their lances, giving him an opening and encouraging him to run, but he stayed where he was, up to his knees in the red-and-yellow flowers, looking small against the sky behind him.

Finally Urwat got tired and, instead of using the flat of his lance, lowered the point and ran it through my brother’s back. My brother stayed on his feet. Toshaway and the other Indians were holding me. Urwat charged again and my brother was knocked down into the flowers.

Then Toshaway got my head down. I knew I ought to be getting up but Toshaway wouldn’t let me, I knew I should get up but I didn’t want to. That is fine, I thought, but now I’ll get up . I strained against Toshaway but he wouldn’t let go.

My brother was standing again. How many times he’d been knocked down and gotten back up I didn’t know. Urwat had discarded his lance and now rode toward him with his ax but my brother didn’t flinch and after he fell the last time the Indians rushed forward and made a circle.

Toshaway later explained that my brother, who had acted like such a coward the entire time, was obviously not a coward at all, but a k u?tseena, a coyote or trickster, a mystical creature who had been sent to test them. It was very bad medicine to kill him — the coyote was so important that Comanches were not allowed to even scratch one. My brother could not be scalped. Urwat was cursed.

There was a good deal of milling and confusion and three of the Indian kids held me while the adults talked. I was telling myself I would kill Urwat. I looked around for a friendly eye, but the German women wouldn’t look at me.

The shoulder bones of the dead buffalo were cut loose and several of the braves began to dig. When there was a passable grave my brother was wrapped in calico taken from the freight wagon and lowered into the hole. Urwat left his tomahawk, someone else gave a knife; there was buffalo meat left as well. There was discussion about killing a horse, but it was voted down.

Then we rode off. I watched the grave disappear from sight, as if the blanketflower had already grown over, as if the place would not stand for any record of human life, or death; it would continue as my brother had said it would, our tracks disappearing in the first wind.

If she were a better person she would not leave her family a dime; a few million, maybe, something to pay for college or if they got sick. She had grown up knowing that if a drought went on another year, or the ticks got worse, or the flies, if any single thing went wrong, the family would not eat. Of course they had oil by then, it was an illusion. But her father had acted as if it were true, and she had believed it, and so it was.

When she was a child, her father often gave her orphaned calves to look after, and, every so often, she would fold the grown ones in with the steers when they were shipped off to Fort Worth. She made enough money off her dogies to make investments in stocks, and that, she told people, is what taught her the value of a dollar. More like the value of a thousand dollars, some reporter once said. He was not entirely masculine. He was from the North.

The Colonel, though he drank whiskey the entire ten years she’d known him, never slept past sunrise. When she was eight, and he ninety-eight, he had led her slowly across a dry pasture, following a track across the caliche she could not see, around clusters of prickly pear and yellow-flowered huisache, following a track she was certain her great-grandfather was imagining, until finally they arrived at a particular clump of soapbrush and he had reached into it and pulled out a baby rabbit. Its heart was pounding and she cradled it against the skin under her shirt.

“Are there more?” She could not have been more excited. She wanted all of them.

“We’ll leave the rest with their dam,” he said. His face was brown, cracked and furrowed like a dry riverbed, and his eyes were always running. His hands smelled of cottonwood buds, the sap that was like sugar and cinnamon and some flower she couldn’t name; he was always stopping among the cottonwoods to rub the bud sap onto his fingers, a habit she adopted as well. Even at the end of her life she would stop at an old tree and scrape the orange sap onto a thumbnail, that she might smell it the rest of the day, and think of her great-grandfather. Balm of Gilead, someone once told her, that’s what the sap was called, though it didn’t need a name.