The Son

Chapter Nineteen. Eli/Tiehteti, 1850

By summer we knew that the Penateka, the largest and wealthiest of all the Comanche bands, had been mostly wiped out. The previous year’s smallpox epidemic had been followed by cholera — all spread by the forty-niners, who shat into the creeks — and a hard winter had finished off the survivors. By the time the first meadowlarks appeared, the Penateka — with the exception of a thousand or so stragglers — were rotting into the earth.

We moved our camp far north, into what was then still New Mexico, to get away from the sick Indians and the disease-carrying whites still crossing along the Canadian toward California. We were now in the territory of the Yap-Eaters and I had a hope I might run into Urwat and be able to pay him back, but I never saw him, as the Yap-Eaters had gone even farther north, into Shoshone territory.

Despite the extermination of ten thousand Comanches, the plains had never been more crowded. The displaced tribes — from the easterners like the Chickasaws and Delawares to the more local Wichitas and Osages — continued to be resettled in our hunting grounds. The buffalo were scarcer than anyone could remember and the spring hunts had not yielded enough meat or hides to carry us through the year. Toshaway and the other elders decided to put in all our chips; planning the largest raid in the band’s history, which would bypass most of the settlements in Texas and go straight down into Mexico. Because of the size of the raid and the long distance, a number of women and boys would go along to keep the camps, and three hundred people in total, including Toshaway, Nuukaru, and Escuté, rode out in July and did not return until December.

I was left in the main ranchería, where, with the men gone and the buffalo scarce, the younger boys, whether they had gotten scalps or not, were kept patrolling and hunting all the time. There was a sense things were changing for the worse. The camp felt empty, everyone was missing a family member or two, and a general downheartedness had settled. The only good news was that the market for captives had improved — a white person could be sold back to the government at any of the new forts, sometimes for three hundred dollars or more. We bought several whites from the Yap-Eaters and took them to sell to the New Mexicans, who eventually sold them at the forts.

HATES WORK NEVER came back to my tipi, but gradually other girls began to, because their notsakapu or lovers were off raiding, and I was known to be a solitary type who didn’t talk to the other young tekuniwapu. Scalp or not, I was still a captive, and the other men saw nothing to gain by talking to me.

So the women would find me while I was out hunting or taking a nap and tell me things they didn’t want anyone to hear. Who was sleeping with her friend’s husband or with the paraibo. Who was planning to defect to the Yap-Eaters or start a new band. Who was going to elope with her notsakapu because his parents couldn’t afford her bride-price, who was tired of being the third wife of some fat old subchief — who, by the way, was lying about something he’d done in combat — who had caught pisipu from a married man, was it worth paying for a cure?

ONE NIGHT SOMEONE came into the tipi and sat by the opening, looking for my pallet in the darkness. There was a sweet smell I didn’t recognize, like honey, or maybe cinnamon.

“Who is it?” I said.

“Prairie Flower.”

I poked the embers to get some light. She was possibly not as pretty as her sister, Hates Work, but she was so far above my bend that I guessed she had come to talk.

“I’m tired,” I said.

She ignored me and took off her dress. She fell asleep so quickly afterward, nestled into me, that I wondered if that was all she wanted in the first place, someone to sleep next to while her boyfriend was off with Toshaway and the others. I fell asleep but only halfway. It was too dark to see her face, but she was warm and sweet-smelling and her skin was smooth. I lay for a long time breathing into her neck. I wanted to rut but I did not want to wake her up. Then I must have fallen asleep because later she was shaking me awake. She was putting her clothes on.

“Don’t expect this ever to happen again, and don’t tell anyone, either.”

I wondered if I’d done a bad job. “That’s also what your sister told me,” I said.

“Well, I am not a slut like she is, so you can expect I’m telling the truth.”

“She was also telling the truth.”

“Then you are one of the lucky few who has only had her once.”

“Huh,” I said.

She adjusted her dress. “That’s not true, really.”

“You can get back under the robe,” I said. “We don’t have to do anything.”

She thought about it, then did. I gave her as much space as I could.

“Good night,” I said.

“It’s been hard for you, with everyone being gone?”

“It’s been hard for everyone.”

“But you especially. Nuukaru and Escuté are your only friends.”

“That’s not true.”

“Who else, then?”

I shrugged. “What do you smell like?” I said, trying to change the subject.

“This? Cottonwood sap. The bud sap, you can only collect it in spring.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

It was quiet.

“People are stupid,” she said. “Everyone is from captives.”

“I guess not everyone looks like it.”

“What about Fat Wolf?”

“No, not really.”

“Poor Tiehteti.”

“Poor nothing,” I said.

“Okay, I’m sorry.”

“Time to sleep.”

“I wonder when you’ll stop being so nice.”

“Time to sleep,” I said again.

“You are nice,” she said. “It’s obvious. You don’t order people around, you mostly skin your own animals, you—”

“Ask that papi bo?a how nice I am.” I pointed above the pallet, where the scalp of the Delaware was hanging.

“It’s a compliment.”

A short while later she put her hand on my thigh. I was not quite sure what it meant. She moved her hand slightly higher. “Are you still awake?”

“Yes.”

She pulled me on top of her and hitched her kwasu up. As usual it was too quick and then it was awkward as she tried to keep moving. I started to roll off but she held me.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Everyone is quick with me at first.”

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 Noyukanuu. The only non-Indians we universally hated were the Tuhano, 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 Tuhano 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 Tuhano, 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.

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 Nuukaru 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.