Philipp Meyer - The Son

The Kotsoteka Comanche lived mostly along the Canadian River, where the Llano ended and the dry plains turned into grassy canyonlands. Historically they’d ranged down to the outskirts of Austin; Toshaway knew my family’s headright better than I did. The Texans had signed a treaty saying that there would be no more settlements west of town, but in the end they were a certain breed, and when an agreement became troublesome, they did not mind breaking it.

“One day a few houses appeared,” said Toshaway. “Someone had been cutting the trees. Of course we did not mind, in the same way you would not mind if someone came into your family home, disposed of your belongings, and moved in their own family. But perhaps, I don’t know. Perhaps white people are different. Perhaps a Texan, if someone stole his house, he would say: ‘Oh, I have made a mistake, I have built this house, but I guess you like it also so you may have it, along with all this good land that feeds my family. I am but a kahúu, little mouse. Please allow me to tell you where my ancestors lie, so you may dig them up and plunder their graves.’ Do you think that is what he would say, Tiehteti-taibo?”

That was my name. I shook my head.

“That’s right,” said Toshaway. “He would kill the men who had stolen his house. He would tell them, ‘ Itsa n ukahni . Now I will cut out your heart.’ ”

We were lying in a grove of cottonwoods, looking out over the valley of the Canadian. The grass was thick around us, grama and bluestem, more than could ever be eaten. The sun was going down and the crickets were sawing away and the birds were making a slaughter. On our side of the river the cane was glowing like it would spark at any minute but across the water, toward the south and the white settlements, the cliffs had already gone dusky. I was thinking of all the times I’d been mad at my brother for keeping a candle lit and I’d gone to sleep by myself outside.

Toshaway was still talking: “Of course we are not stupid, the land did not always belong to the Comanche, many years ago it was Tonkawa land, but we liked it, so we killed the Tonkawa and took it from them… and now they are tawohho and try to kill us whenever they see us. But the whites do not think this way — they prefer to forget that everything they want already belongs to someone else. They think, Oh, I am white, this must be mine . And they really believe it, Tiehteti. I have never seen a white person who did not look surprised when you killed them.” He shrugged. “Me, when I steal something, I expect the person will try to kill me, and I know the song I will sing when I die.”

I nodded.

“Am I crazy to think this?”

“No sé nada.”

He shook his head. “I am not even slightly crazy. The white people are crazy. They all want to be rich, same as we do, but they do not admit to themselves that you only get rich by taking things from other people. They think that if you do not see the people you are stealing from, or if you do not know them, or if they do not look like you, it is not really stealing.”

A bear came down to the water and flights of teal and wigeon were settling in the far pools. Toshaway continued to braid his lariat.

“ Moowi, ” he said.

“ Moowi, ” I repeated.

“I have watched you many times, Tiehteti. Your father has seen me twice, but allowed himself to believe he had seen nothing. I have watched your mother feed the disgraced starving Indians who come to her door, I have watched you lying on your belly studying deer tracks, and I have watched when you killed the big t umakupa that night.” He sighed. “But the Yap-Eaters smelled the smoke from your evening meal, and when I lied and told them I knew the family that lived there, that you were very poor, nabukuwaat u, they insisted that for a poor family, you seemed to be eating very well, and then Urwat decided to check for himself.”

I looked out past the hills and saw my mother on the porch and my sister in the grass and my brother in a shallow pit. I wondered if my brother and sister had done something and that was what brought the Indians on us. Then I wondered if my sister had been winking in and out the way I was. My mother would not have let herself. But my sister… She would have let herself wink out, I decided. She had not been awake for most of it.

Then I was thinking about my father. I pushed him out of my mind. There was nothing but shame between us.

“ Moowi, ” I said to Toshaway.

“ Moowi, ” he said.

TOSHAWAY HAD NO idea how old he was, though he looked around forty. Like the other Comanche purebloods he had a big forehead, a fat nose, and a heavy square melon. He looked like a field hand, and on the ground he was slow as an old cowboy, but put him on a horse and the natural laws did not apply. The Comanches all rode like this, though they did not all look like Toshaway: they were darker or lighter, they were lathy as Karankawas and fat as bankers, they had faces like hatchets or Spanish kings, it was a democratic-looking mix. They all had a few captives somewhere in the bloodline — from other Indian tribes or the Spanish, or more recently, the Anglos and Germans.

UNLESS I WANTED a hiding, I was up before the stars set, walking through the wet grass, filling the water jugs in the cold stream and getting the fire going. The rest of the day I did whatever the women didn’t feel like doing. Pounding corn for Toshaway’s wife, cleaning and flaying game the men brought in, getting more water or firewood. Most Comanches used a flint and steel, same as the whites, but they made me learn the hand drill, which was a yucca stalk you spun between your palms while leaning it into a cedar board. You spun and leaned with all your strength until a coal formed or your hands began to bleed. The coal was the size of a pinhead. Usually it broke up before you could get it into the bundle of cattail down or punk or whatever you’d collected for tinder.

Meanwhile, when they weren’t hunting, Escuté and N uukaru spent their days sleeping, smoking, or gambling, and if I tried to talk to them when others could see, I would be ignored or beaten, though it was nothing compared to the beatings the women gave me.

When everything else was done I was set to making ta?siwoo uh u —buffalo robes — which was like printing money on a slow press. Each robe took a week. It would then be traded for a handful of glass beads and end up in the coat of a soldier who was out fighting other Indians or perhaps on a sofa in Boston or New York, where, having wiped out their own aboriginals, they held a great affinity for anything Native.

But all that was women’s work. If Toshaway called me over everything else stopped. Sometimes to catch and saddle his horse, sometimes to light his pipe or paint him for his evenings out. When he got back from a raid or trip I would spend a few hours picking lice, lancing his boils, cooking his dinner, plucking any beard hairs that had come in, and then his paint. He spent more time getting himself up than my sister ever had, going through slews of makeup and spending hours raking his hair with a porcupine brush, greasing and rebraiding it with slivers of copper and fur until it looked just like when he’d started.

Depending on what was in season, I was also put to gathering. Fruit from the wokwéesi (prickly pear), t uahpi (wild plum), and tunaséka (persimmon), beans from the wohi?huu (mesquite), k uuka (wild onion), paapasi (wild potato), or mutsi natsamukwe (mustang grapes). I was not allowed to carry a knife or gun or bow, just a digging stick, and there were wolf and bear and panther tracks everywhere.