Philipp Meyer - The Son

I was annoyed at how sure she was. Then I decided I wasn’t. I fell asleep. When I woke up she was gone, but she came back the next night.

DURING THE DAY we wouldn’t speak but at night, after the fire had died to nothing, I would hear her rustling at the tipi flap and then she would be in my bed. By the third night I had memorized every inch of her, as if I were blind as a pup, though there were moments, if her hair was different, or her smell was different, when I was not sure it was her. The Comanches took this uncertainty for granted, which worked mainly to the advantage of the women, who could satisfy their needs without risking their standing, and less so for the men, who were often not sure who they’d conquered, or if maybe they had been conquered themselves and had done it with someone they hadn’t wanted to. All skin was good at night, blotches invisible, crooked teeth straight, everyone was tall and beautiful and it was a fine kind of democracy; the women would not admit their names, and so a breast or ear or chin would be kissed to determine its shape, or the curve of a hip or collarbone, the softness of a belly, the length of a throat, everything had to be touched. The next day we would make a shape from the pictures we had gathered with our hands and mouths, watching the girls go by in the sun, wondering who it had been.

It had always been this way. There was a story about a beautiful young girl who was visited every night by a lover (which, as men, we were not allowed to do, but this had taken place in a different time) and, as her passion turned gradually to love, she began to wonder who this lover was; she knew every part but not the whole, and as time passed she became obsessed with knowing, so she might be with him during the day as well as night, that they might never be separate. One evening, just before her lover came to her, she blackened her hands with soot from the fire, in order that she might mark his back and have her answer. In the morning, when she rose to get water for her family, she saw her handprints on the back of her favorite brother, and she cried out and fled the tribe in shame, and her brother, who had never loved anyone more, ran after her. But she would not slow down, and he could not catch her, and the two of them streaked across the earth until finally she became the sun, and her brother the moon, and they could only be in the sky together at certain times and were never again allowed to touch.

As for Prairie Flower, she had something serious with a boy named Charges the Enemy, who was five or six years older than me but had gone on the long raid with Toshaway, Pizon, and the others. She was around sixteen, which the Comanches considered a marriageable age, but the fifty-horse price set for Hates Work had scared off most of Prairie Flower’s suitors, which she considered a temporary advantage, as she knew that no men in the tribe could afford her, though she also knew that as soon as we became prosperous again, she would be purchased by some fat old chief, and her life as she knew it would be over.

Most of the girls quietly worried about this. Prairie Flower’s hope was to remain unmarried until the age of twenty, a year longer than her sister, before some old man decided he would buy her as a wife. Charges the Enemy did not have fifty horses, or even twenty — he had about ten, she thought — and his family did not have many more; her father would never consider him a suitable match. In fact there were no young warriors with the capital her father required, Toshaway’s generosity being an unheard-of exception, and so Prairie Flower was doomed to be the third or fourth wife of someone she would never love, the lowest in the domestic order, and once married she would live out her days scraping hides like a common na?raiboo.

MEANWHILE, I HAD made friends with the bow. With buffalo in short supply, I was killing a deer, elk, or antelope every other day for camp meat, though like everyone else, I was riding farther and farther to find the animals. At one point in August I was gone for nearly five days and realized I could simply ride east until I reached the whites, but as I sat there looking out over the plains on my horse, leading a mule loaded with meat for the tribe, it occurred to me that I had nothing to go back to, no family except perhaps my father, who, if he was still alive, had made no effort to find me. Many of the white families were actively seeking their children and news of rewards spread quickly among the tribes. A month earlier, a free Negro from Kansas had ridden into the camp, taking everyone so completely by surprise that it was decided not to kill him. His wife and two children, also Negros, had been taken, and he was hoping to buy them back.

We did not have them but we knew they had been seen with another band to the west, and, after feeding him and allowing him and his horses to rest two nights, we directed him toward the Noy ukan uu . The only non-Indians we universally hated were the T uhano, or Texans, whom we always killed on sight. Other whites, or Negroes for that matter, were mostly judged on an individual basis, and if a man did something especially brave or clever — like surprising a camp full of Comanches in broad daylight — he would not only be allowed to live, but be treated as a guest of honor as long as he wanted to stay. Toshaway’s father informed me that before the T uhano came, the Comanches had had nothing against the whites — we had traded with the French and Spanish for hundreds of years — and that it was only the arrival of the T uhano, who were greedy and violent, that had changed this. The whites knew this and a Texan, if caught by the Indians, would claim he was from New Mexico or Kansas. Coming from Texas would get you roasted over a slow fire. Even a knife was considered too quick for a Texan.

I stood there watching a blue front blow across the plain and decided to make my way back to camp. It occurred to me that I had not thought about going back to the whites in several months, and what I would be returning to was most likely an orphanage, or a job as a servant, and while the tribe considered me a grown man, the whites would have not thought any such thing. And of course there was Prairie Flower, who denied there was anything serious, but still came to my tipi every night. If I saw her carrying water, I would carry it for her, or help her collect firewood, or skin a deer I had killed for her family. Her father did not approve of me, though I was technically Toshaway’s son, he preferred Escuté, who was older, and not white, and not a captive.

Most of the boys were embarrassed for me, especially because they knew that the moment Charges the Enemy returned, Prairie Flower would forget I existed, and Charges the Enemy, while he would probably not kill me, would certainly hurt me badly, a likelihood they repeatedly reminded me of, urging me, if not to stop seeing her, to at least not humble myself in public. But if I’d once thought her the inferior of her sister, I now thought the opposite. Prairie Flower was as light on her feet as a fawn, her eyes and cheeks and chest not as exaggerated as her sister’s, but much finer, as if the Creator decided there ought to be nothing extra. I didn’t mind humbling myself.

In the end, there were other things to worry about. We had enough to eat but it was the same every night; we were short of all our trade goods, of sugar, corn, and squash as we had no spare horses or hides to trade for them. We were short of lead and powder and screws to repair our guns; we were in cold, dry, unfamiliar country. The sense of order continued to slowly break down, as young boys who ought to have been playing were depended on to hunt, and old men were stuck doing the work of women. And perhaps it was this general lowness that had led Prairie Flower to first visit my tent. Or perhaps it was because in June, when it was presumed the raiders had reached Mexico, she had a series of dreams in which she had seen Charges the Enemy’s scalped corpse, which was not something she could have told any other Comanche, as it was very bad medicine. If for some reason she had decided to share her dreams, many of the older people in the tribe would have blamed her for being a bruja and she would have been driven from the band or killed. Of course if anyone had witched Charges the Enemy it was me, though I did not believe in those things, and besides felt bad for him, as he had taken me hunting a few times, so I did not want to see him scalped, maybe just captured by the Mexicans, and put in prison, and kept there forever.