Philipp Meyer - The Son

Toshaway made a speech to the villagers, the gist of which was I hadn’t minded the idea of being burned or shot to death. The Indians highly approved of that outlook and a few of them slapped me on the back as I returned to Toshaway’s tipi. His wives poured tea over my cuts and burns and cleaned my face and dressed me in a new breechcloth. But before all that I went and squatted in the brush till I’d got the evil out of me.

THE PARTY BEGAN at suppertime. Later N uukaru told me this wouldn’t normally have been done because a man had been lost on the raid, but in this case no one liked the family and it was hoped they would move on.

There was venison, elk, and buffalo, quail and prairie dog, bones roasted so the marrow could be spread on meat or mixed with mesquite beans and honey for dessert. There were potatoes and onions, corn bread and squash they’d gotten from the New Mexicans. The Comanches traded with the New Mexicans for nearly everything, and also the people at Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River. For corn, squash, and pumpkins, white and brown sugar, tortillas and hard breads, guns, powder, bar lead, and bullet molds. Ornaments for horses, percussion caps and steel knives, hatchets, axes and blankets, ribbons, linens and shrouds, gartering and gun screws, lance- and arrowheads, barrel hoops, bridles, steel wire, copper wire, gold wire, bells of all sizes, saddlebags, iron stirrups, iron pots, brass pots, mirrors and scissors, indigo and vermilion, glass beads and wampum, tobacco and tinder boxes, tweezers, combs, and dried fruit. The Comanches were the wealthiest of all the Indian tribes and spent half of what they made on baubles and cheap jewelry, though they did not, as some have written, care much for the white man’s clothing, for top hats or stockings or wedding veils.

After everyone had eaten his fill the oldermost of the tribe began the dance and a warrior was called out and handed a long slender pole with scalps attached. The warrior told a story of bravery and called another warrior, who took the scalp pole and told a story and called up someone else. To tell a lie would bring a curse on the entire tribe and finally a brave was called who didn’t have any story better than the ones already told, and instead of talking he took up the scalp pole and began to dance. The people followed him in a big milling circle. I was standing watching. I had been scrubbed clean and painted and was wearing my breechcloth. The three old men had plucked out my eyebrows and the few scraggling hairs off my chin and upper lip. The drums beat and the Indians stepped in time; I was put into the circle and the scalp pole was handed to me and I was pushed to the front. After a few minutes I tried to hand it to the man behind me but he shoved me forward. The drums went faster, the air was red from the setting sun, I saw the wives of the man I’d killed and the next time I saw them they hadn’t moved and I knew the scalp pole was protecting me. They would not touch me as long as I held it. Several hours later the moon was up and I could barely stay awake, my feet hurt from stamping and my shoulders burned, but the Indians kept me at the front; there was grunting and whooping, the calls of bear and buffalo, panthers, deer, and elk.

WHEN I WOKE up everything was black. I was under a robe. A small disk of dark sky over my head, a dying fire off to one side, the sound of someone breathing. It was peaceful. I was in a tipi on a soft bed of skins; I’d been washed again and rubbed with oil and my wounds dressed; I was clean and warm and rolled in a soft blanket. There was something about the person breathing, I got to feeling dauncy and it was like the Bible-thumpers say when you’re dunked: you think the world is one way and then you come up and find you’ve been wrong about everything.

I got up from my pallet and went outside. There were stars and as far as I could see there were tipis glowing from their nightfires, around the bonfire people were still awake, talking softly. Women leaning on their men, children asleep against their parents. From some of the tipis there was snoring and in others there was giggling and in others there were women moaning, which went on for a long time and I got excited and then I thought of times I had heard my mother and father doing that, not to mention the few times I had imagined doing it to my sister, which of course I was ashamed of, more now than I’d been before.

I heard someone rustle in their sleep, either N uukaru or Toshaway’s son Escuté. I decided I would find Urwat and the rest of the Yap-Eaters and I would take from them a collection of scalps so long it would trail behind my horse ten miles.

As for Toshaway and his family, he had saved me and he had tried to save my brother. He might have saved my mother and sister if he had known better. But the Indians had their rules same as we had ours. My father and I had once shot at a pair of runaway slaves collecting pecans from under our trees. My gun snapped and misfired and my father’s shot went yards high. I couldn’t understand as the niggers were barely at eighty paces and my father the best rifle shot in the county. Then they were dark streaks running through the forest. I said we ought to get Rufe Perry and his nigger dogs but my father said it was likely to rain and we had rows yet to hoe. I asked where the slaves were headed and he said Mexico, most likely, or to live out with the Indians, who would take in Negroes and other types as long as they lived according to their laws. I said how can they take in niggers to live among them? He said plenty of people do. I could not think of anything except I was sorry my gun had snapped and he told me one day I would be thankful for small mercies.

I could hear N uukaru and Escuté breathing deeply. I listened as long as I could before I fell asleep myself.

She was young again, riding an old wooden roller coaster, but something was going wrong — the cars were running faster and faster until finally at the very top, the whole train of them leaped from the tracks. She was flying and then she was not, she was watching the ground, everything was taking a long time, This is very serious, she thought, and then all the cars came down on top of her.

Then she was in the desert. The biggest frac job of her life, the engineer directing tankers like the conductor of a symphony; the lines were charged, twelve thousand PSI, and then a coupler broke. A solid iron pipe whipped like a snake. Her eyes were stinging, she was looking right into the sun, there was a Life Flight on the way, but it wouldn’t do any good. Yes, she thought. That is what happened.

She opened her eyes again. Except there had been a man, she was certain of it. She wondered if he’d gone for help. She watched the logs and embers in the fireplace. The burgundy rug spread beneath her, its birds and flowers and curlicues, the busts of old Romans. She was dreaming.

She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they’d press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil.

People thought Henry Ford had ushered in the automobile age. False. Cart before the horse. It was Spindletop that had begun the automobile age and Howard Hughes, with his miraculous drill bit, who had completed it. Modern life was born at the Lucas gusher, when people suddenly realized how much oil there might be on earth. Before that, gasoline was nothing more than a cheap solvent — used to clean gears and bicycle chains — and all the oil that made John Rockefeller a millionaire was burned in lamps, a replacement for whale oil. It was Spindletop and the Hughes bit that had opened the way for the car, the truck, and the airplane, which all depended on cheap oil the way a church depended on God.