Philipp Meyer - The Son

“I suspect you are mistaken,” said Arturo. “That house has stood nearly a hundred years.”

“Nevertheless, I remember. There was an enormous rock I used to sleep on with my wife and all my children, for it was very warm, even in winter, as if it went down to the center of the earth. It must have been removed, as it was a growing rock, and became a little taller each year.”

Arturo knew there had been such a rock. The top had been blasted off and the house was built over what was left. But as the years passed, the rock had begun to grow, cracking the plaster and bowing all the floors, so that a marble placed in the center of the room would roll toward any of the walls. Finally the floor was removed and the rock hammered and chiseled away. But there was no way for the Indian to have known this. Arturo said: “Old Man, I have done you a favor, and now you will kindly do me this favor as well. Will I keep my land or not?”

The old Coahuiltecan did not take a single breath for ten minutes. Then he said: “You will not like my answer.”

“It is as I suspected.”

The man nodded.

“I must hear it.”

“I am sorry but you will not keep your land. You and your wife and all your sons will be killed by the Anglos.”

THAT EVENING ARTURO stood on his portico, watching his sons play in the grass, his beautiful wife standing near, his vast pastures where his vaqueros and their families tended his herds.

He could not understand why a man like him, a good man, should suffer such a terrible fate and that night he took the most ancient weapon of his family, an alabarda that had seen combat against the French, the Dutch, and the Moors, and honed the edge so fine that it would split a hair. The next morning he returned to the camp of the old Coahuiltecan, where he cut off the man’s head with a single stroke. But even as the head lay there, detached from the body, it looked at him and uttered a curse.

(But the lungs, I say. Without the lungs there can be no air…)

(The finger goes again to my lips.)

A few months later, deciding on the course of maximum caution, Arturo sent his family to Mexico City for their safety. But before they could even cross the river, they were waylaid by white militiamen, who committed enormous outrages upon his wife as she lay dying and murdered Arturo’s four sons as well.

Arturo resolved to never marry again, and did not. In 1850, after the second war, he went to Austin and paid all his property taxes, and it was only because of his mastery of both written and spoken English, which exceeded that of every Anglo lawyer in the capital, that he was allowed to retain any property at all. Half his lands were immediately confiscated because the Anglos claimed the title was flawed, though they could not point out how, or where.

TWENTY YEARS LATER he disappeared, murdered with all his vaqueros. My father, who was his nephew, inherited the property. My mother wanted no part of it. She wanted him to sell the land to the Americans.

“But they are murderers,” my father said.

“Better to sell to them than live among them,” said my mother.

But my father began to go crazy thinking about the vast pastures he might own and six months after Arturo’s murder, he and my mother moved here, along with a dozen vaqueros he hired in Chihuahua.

The house was untouched, the family treasure still intact. After reading my uncle’s journals, he went and dug up a skeleton at the place they described. He reburied the man, whose head was indeed detached, at the most peaceful place he could find, under a persimmon tree next to a spring, with a good knife and a sack of beans to carry the man through his journeys in the next world. He was certain this would lift the curse and keep our family safe.

(She looks at me. “As you can see, it did not do any good.”)

That winter, instead of being sent down to the border, we were sent north to range the breaks from the Washita to the Concho. Winter was usually when the Indians holed up, but the previous year, the government had settled five hundred reluctant Comanches on the Clear Fork of the Brazos and another two thousand Caddos and Wacos on a larger reservation farther east.

As was normal, the reservations were short of food and the attempts to teach the Indians our superior white ways only convinced them of the opposite. The crops they grew were killed by drought or eaten by grasshoppers; there were more of them squeezed into a smaller space than they’d imagined humans could live. Locals complained about the reservation Indians stealing livestock; Indians complained the settlers were stealing horses and grazing their stock on Indian pastures. But we never caught any Indians, and the whites we caught we couldn’t do anything about.

MEANWHILE, THERE WERE houses going up within gunshot of the caprock. The settlers had pushed far beyond Belknap, Chadbourne, and Phantom Hill, a hundred miles past where the army could protect them. They did not care that there was only one Ranger company patrolling the entire eastern Llano. As for the legislature, lice-ridden clodhoppers did not vote or donate to political campaigns, so their problems, quietly viewed to be of their own causation — though necessary for the betterment of the state — were ignored. No new taxes. Rangers cost money.

One night in April we’d made camp on a mesa. Unlike the other ranging companies we were careful with our fires, building them like the Indians did, in arroyos or depressions away from any trees that would reflect their light. We could see thirty or forty miles, an expanse of badlands going on in every direction, the river snaking between mesas, buttes, and hoodoos, uncountable side canyons and rolling hills, motts of juniper and shinnery oak. The land was greening up, the hackberries and cottonwoods along all the streams, the grama and little bluestem on the river flats, and it was pleasant with the red rock buttes and green valleys and the darkening sky overhead. The Dipper was riding high and though we had not caught a single Indian in six months, the weather was warming and we were not going to lose any more toes. We were all ready to turn in when we saw a glow off in the east, in a small valley, that grew brighter the longer we watched it. Five minutes later the horses were saddled and we were making our way off the mesa, toward the fire.

The house was still burning when we reached it. There was a charred scalped body in the doorway; we could see it had been a woman. Off in the brush we found a man stuck with arrows. The arrows had two grooves and the moccasin prints narrowed at the front and I knew it was Comanches. The homestead had not been there long — the corral posts were still leaking sap — and there were the framed beginnings of a smokehouse and stable. Yoakum Nash found a silver locket and Rufus Choate found a barlow knife and after drinking our fill at their spring and making a quick scout for other valuables, we cut stick and rode after the Indians.

Their trail was clear enough, and a mile or so along it we came on a young boy with his head caved in, barely starting to stiffen. When we hit the river the tracks crossed and recrossed in every conceivable direction and the captain put me out front. All the trails were too obvious. I took us up the middle of the water until there was a long patch of rocky ground. I knew they’d taken it and sure enough, where the rocks ended, the pony tracks began.

The grass was high and the tracks were clear but there were not enough of them. They aimed toward a bluff, which the others presumed the Indians had climbed to watch their backtrail, but it was too early for that so I led us back to the river, losing another half hour. Then we found a pale blue dress in the rocks. It was something a teenager would wear, too small to have fit the burned woman, who was tall and chunky.