Philipp Meyer - The Son

All in all, it was the greatest summer I had ever had, and despite everyone’s blue mood, I was content in a way I had never been. I might be killed any day, by whites or hostile Indians, I might be run down by a grizzly or a pack of buffalo wolves, but I rarely did anything I didn’t feel like doing, and maybe this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it. I slept in the tipi when it was cool and in a brush arbor when it was warm, or under the stars, went hunting or wandering when I wanted, and had a girl, even if she also considered herself the girl of someone else. The only thing I really missed was fishing, as the Comanches would not eat fish unless they were starving. Though even on my hunting trips, when I could have fished, I didn’t.

In October the older men of the tribe decided we ought to move south, into familiar territory, as winter would be much worse here, and food more scarce. Despite the fact the raiders had not yet returned, which was beginning to worry everyone, we packed the camp and left detailed instructions, in the form of hieroglyphs carved into a tree, about where we were headed.

We set up close to our old campsite, ten miles north of the Canadian, expecting it to be occupied, as it was close to several well-known Indian trails, but it was empty and the grass was tall. It had been a wet year and there was plenty of forage to get our horse herd through the winter, which was a good sign, but no other horses had been grazing there, which was a bad sign, and the tribe went further into a depression, the consensus being that an enormous number of Comanches must have been destroyed, not just the Penateka, for a campsite this good to have gone unoccupied since we had left it.

WHEN THE RAIDING party finally returned in December, the only good news was that Toshaway, Escuté, and N uukaru were still alive. They were all so pale and had all lost so much weight that when they first rode up, everyone thought they were spirits. Toshaway had nearly lost a foot to frostbite. Escuté had taken a ball through the shoulder early in the raiding and spent three months riding with it broken. He could barely raise his bow arm.

In June, they had captured eight hundred horses but there had been an ambush — the army and the Mexicans were working together now, instead of killing each other as they had always done — and nearly half the Kotsoteka warriors were killed or scattered. The army, along with several Ranger companies, had chased the remaining warriors deep into New Mexico.

While this was happening, the women’s camp, which had been waiting for the warriors to return from Mexico, had been attacked by Mescalero Apaches, and either wiped out entirely or carried away as captives. The remaining bodies were so scattered by animals it was impossible to count them. Toshaway’s daughter was among the lost, and of the three hundred Kotsoteka who’d ridden out, less than forty had returned, and, while no one would mention it in the same conversation, nearly a thousand horses had been lost as well, which meant that we had no surplus to trade and the winter would be even worse than expected. From that day until early spring, all the other noises were drowned out by crying and wailing, and half the women in camp had cuts on their faces and arms, many of them clipping off whole fingers to honor their dead family members.

Prairie Flower stopped seeing me for a while, as Charges the Enemy was known to have been killed, but had fallen behind the enemy lines so quickly that his body had not been recovered and was presumed to have been scalped and desecrated. She barely ate or left her tipi, but as they were not married, she could not even mourn in public, or tell anyone she had known when it happened, that she had witnessed his death just as clearly as if she had been there to see it.

Phineas called her to Austin a week after she finished high school. It was May and already hot, one hundred in McCullough, ninety in Austin, it would be nice to make a trip to Barton Springs, to lie in the grass and watch the people swimming — flirting couples, young men and their footballs — to spend the day by herself in a place she was not known. She wouldn’t, of course. There were people you could never figure — her great-grandfather for instance — but that was not her. I am boring, she thought. Predictable. But brave in my own way, brave despite … she did not like to think of the North, she did not like to think of her time there. She had been miserable and she had left. She did not mind taking risks when she wanted something, though no one else understood this. When she wanted something, she was truly brave. And yet no one else knew. So it didn’t matter.

The train made its way to Austin. There were more cars on the highway, double or triple what she had seen in her childhood, most Texans now lived in cities, they said. You would not have known it in Dimmit County. She watched a truck with a half-dozen Mexicans in the back, their knees scrunched around a pile of scrap iron, the driver weaving and changing lanes, one miscalculation and they would all be spilled to the pavement. She wondered why they allowed themselves to be treated that way. They’re animals, is what her father said. On Election Day he would take her down to the south end of McCullough, dusty streets, tin shacks, wreaths of chilies and goat meat hanging with the flies buzzing everywhere. Her father would hand out slabs of beef from an ice chest in the back of his truck, cases of warm beer; he would pay their poll taxes and show them how to mark the ballot. Gracias, patrón. Gracias. They were more gracious than niggers — that was another thing he always said.

The windows in the train were open and her face was cool in the breeze but she was sweating under her dress, under her arms. It was the time of the year the heat became its own entity, a creeping misery. No. It was like a sledgehammer on the head of a steer. It would only get worse until September. From the other side of the car, three soldiers were stealing glances, one of them was much older, the other two were Mexican, barely her age, afraid to look. Most draft boards had not yet begun to call up whites, though some, like her brothers, had volunteered.

She studied her reflection, imposed as it was on the dry rushing landscape beyond the window. I am pretty, she thought. There were prettier, but she was well above average. Phineas will offer me a job . A sort of special adviser, a confidante. But that was not possible, either. She was not even qualified to be a secretary; you needed shorthand for that. There was nothing she really knew how to do, nothing she did well, she was a dabbler. Pointless. If she vanished from the earth that instant, it would not have made a lick of a difference to anyone.

Maudlin, maudlin. She leaned her head against the glass and felt the shaking of the train. That’s not even your word, she thought, that’s from Jonas. She could see the hills to the north, the Llano uplift. The Colonel had known those things: this rock is ten million years old, this other two hundred, here is a fern contained in stone. The soldiers were staring at her openly now. When she was young, a year or two ago, she would have turned and stared them down, but now she let them drink her up, have their fantasies, or so she imagined. In a few months they would be off to war, and many would not come back, their final rest in a foreign place. Perhaps all three of them, their lines come to an end. She wondered who would survive, she guessed the bigger one, though you could not tell. It was not like the old days, it was a falling bomb and a hundred dead at once, all mothers’ sons. An emotion came over her, and she wondered if she might give them something, cigarettes or a soda pop, but those were just tokens, money would not help them. There was only one thing and she allowed herself to think about this for a while, shifted her legs and adjusted her dress, it was just a thought, out of the question, she had never given herself to anyone. But what did it matter, truly? There were times she was desperate, absolutely desperate to be shed of her virginity, but no, she thought, impossible, it could not be some pimple-faced soldier, or that older, more scary one with the patch of razor burn along his neck as if chafed by a rope. He will be the one to die. She felt it instantly. It excited her. It was all very dramatic.