Philipp Meyer: The Son

For a time they moved every few weeks, staying in hotels under different names. It was quieter in the south and they had one child in Mérida and a second near Oaxaca, but when the war ended he began to worry they would be found, and in 1920, after Carranza was deposed, they moved to Mexico City.

There was a new government and the city was overflowing. There were bankers and industrialists, exiles and artists, musicians and anarchists; there were cathedrals and sprawling markets and gaudy pulquerías, murals going up everywhere, streetcars running through the night. Motorcars jostled with donkeys and horsemen and barefoot peasants. He guessed it would drive him insane. It didn’t. He would lean over the edge of their apartment building and watch the street; he had never seen so many people in his life.

“You don’t like cities,” she said.

“It’s better for the children.”

It was not just that. He was losing his memory; Pedro and Lourdes Garcia seemed impossibly young, likewise his mother and father; he could barely remember his own childhood; he could barely remember last year. If there was anyone watching from the dark corners, he never knew it. Each night after the sun set he would go and stand over the street and put his hands to the warm stone, a million lives passing just beneath him, millions more yet to come, they were all just like him, they were all free, they would all be forgotten.

Ihad told myself I would sell out by ’80. The rains were good and my two-year-olds had brought $14.50 and then a German baron, looking to stock a range in Kansas, promised ten dollars for spring yearlings. The hands sold their horses and took the train home, but I wired Madeline that I would be delayed. I had built her the house on the Nueces but by then she had stopped expecting I would come home at all.

I rode the long way down, past our old hunting grounds. I shooed cows from our camp on the Canadian, where the dogwoods had grown up straight and tall, higher than a man could reach. I looked for days, but I could not find the graves of Toshaway or Prairie Flower or Single Bird. The ground had gone to rocks and the trees had all been cut for firewood.

As for my brother’s grave, at times I have been certain the Indians led us up the Yellow House, and other times I have been equally certain it was the Blanco, or Tule, or the Palo Duro. I rode the length of the Llano, following the edge of the caprock, hoping I would be sparked, that I would feel the spot when I came to it. There was nothing.

I ARRIVED HOME to find my men all waiting for me on the gallery.

“Nothin’ better to do?” I said.

Then I saw the house.

“What was all the shooting?” I said.

No one answered.

“Who did the shooting?”

THEY HAD BURIED them under a cottonwood on a hill overlooking the house. It had a good view of things. Madeline, Everett, and a hand named Fairbanks.

Madeline had been shot in the yard and Everett had been shot trying to pull her into the house and the three surviving hands, two of whom were shot as well, had driven the bandits back. All anyone knew was it was renegade Indians. No one knew which ones.

“Were they scalped?”

Sullivan followed me up the hill. He had a sense for things. I took a shovel and set to digging and when we could smell the grave gas and Sullivan saw I wasn’t going to stop, he held me to the dirt. A penny for three measures of barley, hurt not the oil and the wine. My wife and son had not been scalped and neither Peter nor Phineas had been scratched.

THE ARMY THOUGHT the perpetrators to be a renegade group of Comanches. They had trailed them to Mexico but had not gone over the water. Sullivan led me to where the Indians had stood in the corral. It was Lipans. The toe of an Apache moccasin is much wider than a Comanche’s, which comes to a point, and the fringes are shorter and drag less. The Apache has a bigger foot. And the arrows had four grooves.

There were three and twenty hands and they all stood up to ride. The oldermost was twenty-eight, the youngest sixteen, and to ride on a group of Indians — they had thought those days were gone forever. If you were free to go back in history, to fight the great battles of your ancestors… you should have seen their shining faces.

The party of Lipans split seven times on rocky ground and the trail was weeks old but if I ever believed in a Creator it was for this reason: it had rained before the Lipan attack and then gone dry, leaving their tracks as frozen into the earth as the marks of the ancient beasts. Twelve riders, tracks of the unshod ponies leading right to the water’s edge.

We did not slow down when we reached the river. In Coahuila the tracks stopped; it was hard dry ground. I did not get off my horse. I looked into the book of the earth: I was Toshaway, I was Pizon, I was the Lipans themselves, afraid to stop looking behind me, knowing I’d killed where I should not and yet the ponies I’d taken would save my tribe another year.

The others saw nothing. A grieving man on a pale horse. They followed on faith alone.

By dusk we stood on a hill overlooking the last of the Lipan band. They had lived in the country five hundred years. We waited until their fires had gone dark.

We dynamited the tipis and shot the Indians down as they ran. A magnificent brave, his only weapon a patch knife, charged singing his death chant. A blind man fired a musket and his daughter ran forward, knowing the gun was empty; she swung it toward us and we shot her down as well. It was the last of a nation, squaws and cripples and old men, our guns so hot they fired of their own will, our squarecloths wrapped the fore-grips and still every hand was branded.

When the people were finished we killed every living dog and horse. I took the chief’s bladder for a tobacco pouch; it was tanned and embroidered with beads. In his shield, stuffed between the layers, was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire .

WHEN THE SUN came up, we discovered a boy of nine years. We left him as a witness. At noon we reached the river and saw the boy had followed us with his bow — for twenty miles he had kept up with men on horseback — for twenty miles he had been running to his death.

A child like that would be worth a thousand men today. We left him standing on the riverbank. As far as I know he is looking for me yet.

PHILIPP MEYERis the author of the critically lauded novel American Rust , winner of the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was an Economist Book of the Year, a Washington Post top ten book of the year, and a New York Times Notable Book. He is a graduate of Cornell University and has an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a James A. Michener Fellow. A native of Baltimore, he now lives mostly in Texas.

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