Philipp Meyer - The Son

MARCH 16, 1916

Charles has returned, but he is not allowed to leave any of the four counties in which our property extends. He strides about with his chin up; I find it difficult to look at him. Judge Poole assures us there will be no indictment. In fact he and the sheriff and my father went calling at the homes of those likely to be empaneled.

Would like to report I have been torn between a hope he might receive punishment and hope he’ll be exonerated. I have not. I want only for him to be acquitted. And yet his crimes multiply… this the son I raised with my own hands.

Have been in to buy supplies, keeping my hat pulled low, terrified the entire time I would run into Esther Hollis, Dutch and Bill’s mother, but this evening, with enormous relief, I remembered that she has been dead several years.

No one seems particularly bothered, least of all the Mexicans. The coraje, they say, the heat and dust and thorns. Even horses get it. For the grandson of a great patrón —a man with blood — to get the coraje, it is only to be expected. Especially when a man slanders his family. And in public… In truth it was the only reasonable action.

Meanwhile both Hollis brothers now lie rotting. Impossible to believe we are truly in God’s image. Something of the reptile in us yet, the caveman’s allegiance to the spear. A vestige of our time in the swamps. And yet there are those wish to return. Be more like the reptile, they say. Be more like the snake, lying in wait. Of course they do not say snake, they say lion, but there is little difference in character between the two, only in appearance.

MARCH 24, 1916

Grand jury refused to indict.

APRIL 2, 1916

Despite Dutch Hollis, despite the Garcias, our name carries more weight than ever. Where I expect bitterness, I receive respect; where I expect jealousy, I receive encouragement. Do not steal from the McCulloughs — they will kill you; do not slander the McCulloughs — they will kill you. My father thinks this the proper state of affairs. I tell him this is the tenth century of the second millennium.

In the end it is as he says — they think we are made of different stuff. If it ever occurred to them that we eat and bleed the same as they do, they would run us down with torches and pitchforks. Or, more accurately, holy water and wooden stakes.

IN NEWS OF the broader suffering, Villa’s men attacked the barracks at Glenn Spring yesterday. My sympathies for the Mexican people aside, my father and I are both anxious for the arrival of our Lewis gun, which fires ten.30-caliber rounds per second. A true blessing for the few holding out against the many. Due to war in Europe they are running a severe backlog.

Serious talk that the Mexican government is planning an assault on Laredo — Carranza’s troops are massing across the river. The Mexicans believe we ought to hew to the original border (the Nueces). Texans believe the border belongs another three hundred miles south, somewhere around Durango.

SALLY WANTS TO move to San Antonio or Dallas or even Austin — anywhere but here.

“We are perfectly safe,” I told her. “Neither the Huns nor the Mexican army will be approaching our gate anytime soon.”

“That is not what I care about,” she said.

“Is this about the boys?”

“It’s about all three of them. The two living and the one buried.”

“They will be fine.”

“Until they do something like this again. Or until someone’s brother finds them.”

“There are no more Hollises left. We have seen to that.”

“There will be someone else,” she said.

Considered mentioning this was her reward for marrying into the family of the great Eli McCullough, but said nothing. All the energy had left me.

“My nephews in Dallas have guns,” she said. “They use them to hunt deer. They go to school, they chase after the wrong sort of girls, but…” She choked up. “I went to see the boy…”

“Dutch?” I said gently.

“… they had him laid out in a shed behind Bill Graham’s office. It was a disgrace.”

I did not say anything. Things have been so bad between us for so long and every time I have had hope, she has smashed it. I looked away from her and closed myself off.

“You might be staying here alone, Pete. I have lost all the sons I care to lose.”

To white ears, the names of the Indians lacked any sort of dignity or sense and made it that much harder to figure why they ought to be treated as humans rather than prairie niggers. The reason for this was that the Comanches considered the use of a dead person’s name taboo. Unlike the whites, billions of whom shared the same handful of names, all interchangeable in the end, a Comanche name lived and died with a single person.

A child was not named by his parents, but by a relative or a famous person in the tribe; maybe for a deed that person had done, maybe for an object that struck their fancy. If a particular name was not serving well, the child might be renamed; for instance, Charges the Enemy had been a small and timid child and it was thought that giving him a braver name might cure these problems, which it had. Some people in the tribe were renamed a second or third time in adult life, if their friends and family found something more interesting to call them. The owner of the German captive Yellow Hair, whose birth name was Six Deer, was renamed Lazy Feet as a teenager, which stuck to him the rest of his life. Toshaway’s son Fat Wolf was so named because his namer had seen a very fat wolf the previous night, and being an interesting sight and not a bad name it had stuck. Toshaway’s name meant Bright Button, which had also stuck with him since birth, but that seemed a strange thing to call him so I thought of him as Toshaway. Spanish-sounding names were also common, though they often had no particular meaning — Pizon, Escuté, Concho — there was a warrior named Hisoo-ancho who had been captured at the age of seven or eight, whose Christian name was Jesus Sanchez, and, as that was all he would answer to, that was what he was called.

Many Comanche names were too vulgar to repeat in print and thus, when the situation required, were changed by whites. The chief who led the famous raid on Linnville in 1840 (in which a group of five hundred warriors sacked a warehouse full of fine clothing and made their escape dressed in top hats, wedding gowns, and silk shirts) was named Po-cha-na-quar-hip, meaning Cock That Stays Hard Forever. But neither this nor the more delicate translation, Erection That Will Not Go Down, could possibly be printed in newspapers, so it was decided to call him Buffalo Hump. He was thusly referred to until he died, many years later, attempting to learn farming on a reservation, having lost both his land and his good name to the whites, though in his own mind he remained Cock That Stays Hard Forever.

The medicine man who, along with Quanah Parker, led the entire Comanche nation against the whites in the Red River War of 1874 was named Isahata?i, meaning Coyote Pussy. The newspapers called him Ishtai, Eshati, and Eschiti, no translation offered. Toshaway had a nephew called Tried to Fuck a Mare, a name acquired in adolescence, and Hates Work, as previously mentioned, was originally called Single Bird. The Comanches were a good-natured sort and names were accepted with humor, though after Tried to Fuck a Mare got his first scalp and it was decided to change his name to Man on a Hill, he was not heard to complain.

BY FEBRUARY THE tribe was starving. There had not been a big buffalo kill in over a year, and most of the local deer, elk, and antelope had been hunted down over the winter. The few animals still alive moved only at night, surviving on twigs and dry brush. By then we had taken to tracking packrats back to their nests and eating their stashes of dried fruits and nuts, along with the rats themselves if we could catch them, and everyone in the tribe knew that the very young, the very old, and the sick would soon begin to die, and they would have, had we not discovered a buffalo herd beginning to drift north.