The Son

Chapter Forty. Eli McCullough

It was not long before Judge Wilbarger was making arrangements for a necktie social, because once Whipple blabbered, the slaves were blabbering as well and then the whole town caught the whispering fever; everyone knew I’d been pirooting the judge’s wife eight and ten times a day, drinking his wine, stealing his horses, feeding his cigars to the hogs. It was reckoned a miracle he had not shotgunned his untrue companion, though it was equally reckoned that someone would have to meet Old Scratch in her place.

I had hopes I might win on popularity, but that was youthful ignorance, as the whites had no love for horse thieves and hog killers, even good ones. The only thing that saved me was Judge Black in Austin, who got the statehouse involved, and accused Wilbarger of mentally abusing me, a helpless returned Indian captive, son of a martyred Ranger, and so the trial and hanging were put off until Wilbarger found a way to get rid of me, namely mustering me into a Ranger company. Which, in those days, was considered near the same as a neck-lining.

THE IDEA OF riding with the Rangers appealed to me the same as riding with the Comanches would have appealed to my father, but the seriousness of my situation was made plain. I was taken to Austin in bracelets and released into Judge Black’s custody, though I was only there for a few hours. He had a small bay waiting for me, a good saddle, a second Colt Navy and a Springfield carbine. The children came and saw me but his wife would not, and the judge was down at the mouth, and nothing I could say would make it better.

I MUSTERED INTO the company at Fredericksburg, near our acreocracy, which my father had deeded to my stepmother. Rangering was not a career so much as a way to die young and get paid nothing for doing it; your chances of surviving a year with a company were about the same as not. The lucky ones ending up in an unmarked hole. The rest lost their topknots.

By then the days of the ace units, under Coffee Hays and Sam Walker, were over. Walker was dead, killed in Mexico. Hays had given up on Texas and gone to California. What was left was an assortment of bankrupt soldiers and adventure seekers, convicts and God’s abandons.

At the end of each tour, the ones who survived were given a square mile of unclaimed land somewhere in the state. It was a sharecropping of blood, in which we killed Indians and took a portion of their lands in payment, but like any other share work, you always came out a loser. The safe land was all claimed and the only acres still redeemable would not have value for decades. And so the vouchers were always traded for equipment, mostly to speculators who lived in big houses and offered us horses or new revolvers, picking up the land for ten cents on the dollar. Our only other remuneration was ammunition, which we got in unlimited supply. Everything else — from corn bread to side meat — we were expected to forage or otherwise annex.

WE DUNNED THE state for powder and lead and spent a few weeks training before riding out. All we did was shoot. We set up a fence post and the captain told us we were not leaving until everyone could hit the post five out of five times from horseback, at a lope at least, a gallop being better, with no preference for handedness, those appendages being considered disposable.

After those few weeks it was clear that a gun fit my hand better than a bow. Those who afforded it carried two Colt Navys, as reloading in those days took several minutes. A few of the men carried Walker Colts, which were twice as powerful but also twice as heavy, and had to be carried in saddle holsters, rather than a belt holster, which was not safe if you were separated from your horse. Not to mention the loading lever would sometimes drop and jam the cylinder; despite all that has been written about them, there was a reason not many Walkers were made.

MY FIRST TOUR we did not see a single Comanche. We saw their tracks and leavings, but could not catch them. Being better raiders they were better at avoiding raids, being better trackers they were harder to follow, and so my fears that I would one day see Nuukaru or Escuté over the barrel of my Springfield turned out to be laughable.

With the exception of a few tired Lipans and Mescaleros, most of what we caught were Mexicans and vagabond Negroes, or starving Fort Indians whose skills had rusted by close proximity to the whites. Meanwhile, any outlaw group worth its name carried an old bow and arrow and after making their killings they would shoot a few arrows into the victims, so the Indians would get blamed for whatever they’d done. Wherever you looked, the red man was at a discount.

When game was scarce or settlers stingy it was normal for us to go hungry a few days, so whenever we recovered a big lot of property, say horses or cattle, unless we recognized the brands we would take a detour to sell them in Mexico, along with any saddles and guns. To the settlers we sold scalps, lances, bows, and other Indian accoutrements that people wanted to hang as trophies. Ears were especially popular.

Despite this pilferage we usually rode home with empty pockets, our gear was always breaking and our horses dying and it all had to be replaced in the field. The legislators encouraged our thieving ways, plunder the plunderers—which of course was the same as stealing from our own people — but so far as the elected ones cared, anything not recorded in the register did not count as a tax increase, which was all that mattered to their owners, the cotton men.

As for the cotton men, they admired and respected the state’s public servants, who unlike them worked for glory rather than money. They passed this wisdom to the cattlemen, who passed it to the oilmen. It was a smooth-working system, as any foolish servant who suggested he might be paid in dollars, rather than pats on the back, was tarred as a Jayhawker or Free-Soiler, or, worse, an Abolitionist, and run out of the state.

IN THE RANGERS there were a number of former captives, some of whom were glad to get back at their old captors, though mostly they had joined for the same reasons I had, namely that the habits of whites had stopped making sense. They felt crowded in cities or even settlements, they longed for their old lives on the plains, and the closest they could get to their old lives, and their old friends, was to chase and occasionally kill them.

My second year I rode with Warren Lyons, who had spent ten years among the Comanches. After getting into a fight with some chiefs, he’d defected back to the whites, checking in with his birth family only to discover he had nothing left to say to them. Then he signed up with the Rangers. The men were not sure if he was a genius or mass murderer.

Thirteen of us rode out in May, and in June we lost an Ohioan to fever and in August our captain caught a ball along the lower San Antonio — El Paso road. Lyons was elected the new captain and we continued to range in the area between the Davis Mountains and the border. One day in September we were looking for some Mexicans who had stolen horses from Ed Hall, nooning on a nice ridge a day or so east of Presidio. A spring came out of the rock, as they did in those days before all the water was used up, and the country dropped below us to the green flats of the river, with the Sierra del Carmen showing blue in the distance. It was a peaceful scene. The last time I’d been there, with Toshaway and Pizon and the others, I had not had time to notice it.

We lunched on fresh venison, ate some fruit we’d gotten off the settlers, and were generally enjoy our jobs when Lyons spotted eight riders making their way toward us on the Mexican side, heading for one of the fords on the old Comanche war trail. He passed me the spyglass. I could barely make out their colors, but there was something about them and I was sure they were Comanches. They were driving a small caballada, maybe two dozen horses.

“What do you think?” I said to Lyons.

“I’d say they are Numunuu for damned sure,” he told me.

“The numbers aren’t exactly on our side.” There were only eleven of us. Unless you were fighting two or three to one, someone was going to get shot.

“They’re probably tired. They don’t have many horses.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re tired.”

“It means things went bad.”

I went back to tell the others. There was whooping and excitement; Comanches were as rare as elephants and everyone wanted to bag one.

Lyons was collecting himself in an orderly fashion. Meanwhile I was jumpy as I’d ever been, which was odd because we’d been getting in a fight once a week. We dropped from the bench down a cottonwood-lined drainage, sticking to the damp sand so as not to kick up any dust.

The Comanches had only two muskets between them and we decided to sneak just within gunshot of the ford and get as many as we could with rifles before they could close the distance. I wondered if Lyons was as rattled as I was. The others had their sap up, having never fought anything but Fort Indians.

When we got near the river I checked my guns a third time and put a fresh cap on my rifle. The Comanches were still on the other side of the water. We were ghosting through the rocks and willows and they hadn’t seen us and I knew if we could catch them in the river it would be a slaughter. I thought about Toshaway again.

When I turned to look for Lyons, he had thrown off his boots and was donning a pair of moccasins he’d pulled out of his saddlebag. He’d been with the Comanches almost a decade, he still talked to himself in Comanche, he didn’t even think of them as Comanches but as Numunuu, and I realized why he wasn’t nervous about taking them on when we were nearly evenly matched in numbers: he was heading back to fight alongside his old friends.

I unshucked my pistol; he stood up and walked straight into the muzzle.

“What the fuck are you doing, McCullough?”

“What the fuck are you doing?” I kept the gun pointed.

“I like my moccasins to fight in,” he said. He pushed the barrel away. “You got real troubles, McCullough. You got ’em all down but the nine.”

I COULD HEAR them laughing and talking, we were waiting for them to all get clear of the brush so we could lay a clean volley into them, but then Hinse Moody and the other half-wits fired their rifle shots and called out their war whoops and hubbed themselves in, kicking their ponies and charging down the hill. The Comanche was the wall-hanger; no one wanted to miss his chance.

The Indians took to the rocks and when Moody and the others got to pistol range the arrows started coming in.

After ten minutes, two of the Comanches made a break for the river. Moody and the others had gone down in the first volley and most everyone else had gotten a dogwood switch in the meantime. Except Lyons. He fought like a purebred Numu, rolled off to one side of his grullo, shooting under the animal’s neck. His horse looked like a pincushion when it finally gave up; the Indians must have picked him as a turncoat because they were all shooting for him. When his horse went down I expected him to cover behind it, but he dodged through the arrows and was not even touched; they were clattering off the rocks all around him and he was closing on the Indians by himself.

There was a shadow in the brush I had a feeling about; I put a shot into it, adjusted a half foot, put another shot in, adjusting and putting a ball here and there until the gun was empty. I had barely got the first cylinder charged when Lyons went running up the left.

It was quiet. The arrows had stopped coming and my ears were ringing and there were horses squealing and snorting. Someone was moaning and calling for his wife. Other than Lyons and myself, there were only three on our side still up and they were dug in way behind me. Lyons was way ahead. My horse was down and I was happily covered behind it, but I made a rush and closed six or seven yards. Then Lyons made a rush. I watched the pile of rocks where the Indians were, but I’d lost my hat and the sun was glaring. I made another rush. Nothing happened. I made a longer rush and an arrow came out of the willows and clipped my thigh. I saw Lyons charging in, heard him shoot his gun empty, then made myself get up. I was not sure where I ought to be aiming. Lyons came out of the bushes.

“Well, I think that’s all of them.”

“How ’bout down there?”

“Well, go look. But I counted five dead ones, plus the two that ran off.”

“There’s one more by the water,” I said.

“Then there’s your eight.”

I didn’t feel so sure. “Do you have any left?”

He shucked the pistol and pulled out his second and checked it. “Two. Should be enough for some dead Indians.” Then he turned around: “Hey, you fucking women.”

The other three were eighty yards behind us.

“Move up the right.” He pointed toward the river.

Though the two of us were standing out there in the open, they all made the shortest possible rush and ducked down again.

“Who the fuck is that in the way back?” said Lyons.

“I think it’s Murphy and Dunham. And maybe Washburn behind them.”

“What a bunch of cockchafers.” He looked over. “You might want to check that leg.”

I did. By miracle of a quarter inch, the spike had turned to the outside of the hip instead of going inside where the big artery was. I made a wide circle of the rocks. Lyons went overtop. I could feel the blood running into my boot. But there were no more Indians and their horses were grazing along the water.

“You want us to come in?” shouted one of the laggards.

I looked at Lyons. “Not yet,” I shouted back.

We moved carefully among the fallen Comanches, some lying in deep slicks of blood while others looked asleep, a lucky ball to the neck, a clean, dry end, we lifted their faces and checked them carefully and Lyons must have seen someone he recognized, because when we called the other three in, he didn’t share in any of the scalping or stripping; he went off by himself and didn’t talk to anyone.

Just when we were starting to gather the dead, MacDowell, one of the men we thought was down for good, stood up. He had been hit in the head by a fragment and after he collected his senses he was able to ride. I bandaged my hip — considered again what a miracle it was that the arrow deflected away from my innards — and got our five dead loaded. We took them to Fort Leaton, where they had shovels.

THE NEXT MORNING, three of the four remaining Rangers, Murphy, Dunham, and Washburn, turned their badges in to Lyons. “We don’t want none of the aborgoin horses,” said Washburn. “We just want to keep the guns and scalps and such.”

“Keep ’em,” said Lyons.

“You startin’ to miss your turpentine?” I looked at Washburn. He was a cross-eye from East Texas and he had stayed a hundred yards behind us during the fight.

“There ain’t pay enough for this,” he said. “Even a clay-eater like me can tell that.” He indicated the others: “Dunham had ran with Hinse Moody since he was eight years old. You even know that?”

“No,” I said. Dunham was already walking off. I didn’t know why I was taking the blame.

The three deserters went to attend to their packing, which left only me, Lyons, and the young horse thief MacDowell. He had a good nature and I was happy he had made it. Later we stood on the parapet and watched them ride off toward the mountains, but they felt us looking and put the gaffs to their ponies.

“Well,” said Lyons. “Looks like our take just doubled.”

We spent the rest of the day scrubbing guns and fixing tack. Two of the horses we’d got off the Comanches had U.S. markings; we traded them to Ed Hall so he could sell them in Old Mexico. I got a beautiful pumpkin-skin gelding, which I later lost in a card game.

Ed Hall said, “How many do you think got away?”

“Two.”

“You sure you boys won’t stay awhile longer?”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just invite ’em for dinner in front of your cannon.”

He chuckled: “I don’t think they’ll fall for that one twice.”

Of course it was not his cannon; it was Ben Leaton’s. Leaton had died a few years earlier and Hall had married his widow but was having trouble filling his shoes. Leaton had been a scalp hunter extraordinaire and I’d always suspected he ran the party that had nearly got Toshaway and me. He was most famous for inviting a group of Indians to dinner, then slipping out halfway through the meal to touch off a cannon he’d charged with canister and hidden behind a curtain. The shot obliterated the unsuspecting Indians along with everything else in his dining room. No one stole his horses after that.

WHEN WE GOT up in the morning we found that MacDowell died during the night.

“I’m cursed,” Lyons told me.

“I think MacDowell was cursed worse than you.” I was in no mood for his antics. My leg was throbbing and I hadn’t slept and I was too tired to dig another grave.

“No,” he said. “I mean I’ve always known it, that everyone around me will die and I will never even get a scratch.”

“I’m the same way,” I told him.

He looked at me. “Just in the six months I’ve known you, you’ve been stuck with two arrows.”

“But not seriously,” I said.

“Still. There’s a big fuckin’ difference.”

I could not make him understand that there was no difference at all. He quit the Rangers a year before we mustered out to join the Confederacy. Then he moved to New Mexico and died despite his luck and good health.

AFTER SELLING THE horses and captured guns and saddles in Austin, Lyons and I split the money and he rode out again toward the border. I kitted myself out in a new shirt, pants, and hat, dropped my guns off to get the timing fixed, and went to pay the judge for the horse and pistol he’d given me two years earlier. He would not take it, but he was happy to see me, he said, looking and acting like a white man. I had dinner with his wife and three daughters, who were happy to see me also, and I could tell his wife was warming up to me.

“I just knew this would be good for you,” she said. “I knew it would help civilize you just a little bit.”

I didn’t tell her I was doing the same thing I’d been doing with the Indians. The oldest daughters were making eyes at me, and that was not bad, except that it put me in a certain mood and within a few days I’d emptied my pockets.

The city was above my bend. It was nothing but guttersnipes and gaycats, whoremongers and Sunday men. I sold my derringer pistol for a dozen doses of calomel, poured in both ends, as I thought I’d caught the French pox. Then I pawned one of my Colts and got the cheapest room I could find, waiting for another patrol to be funded by the Chosen Ones.

A man found me at the rooming house. He handed me a rawhide wallet like he was making a delivery I was expecting. I took the bag but didn’t open it, and I reached toward my back pocket until I remembered I’d sold my derringer. The man had a weak chin and four days of stubble and a rotting hat pulled to his eyebrows. He looked like a mortuarian’s assistant.

“I saw Sher Washburn the other day,” he said. “He mentioned he had rode with you and I thought I knew your name. Then I found I had wrote it down.”

I looked at him.

“Your daddy talked about you a fair bit. We all knew.”

“Who are you?” I said.

“I rode in from Nacadoch. I’m trying my hand at granging up there but I have kept this a long time to give to you.”

Inside the wallet was a scalp vest. Dozens of scalps, some with the hair on, others with the hair off, sewn together in a careful pattern. They all looked dark.

“Oh, they’re all Injun,” he said. “You can be goddamn sure of that; I probably helped your daddy with about half of ’em.” I handled the vest; it was soft and finely made and I thought of Toshaway, who had his own shirt made of scalps. I had buried him in it.

“Can I give you something for it?”

“Nope.” He shook his head and went to spit and then stopped himself.

“Let’s get into the air,” I said.

We walked toward the edge of town.

“You know he went after you, don’t you? He was always worrying if you knew that. They got as far as the Llano before they lost the trail.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Oh, he went after you all right.”

We reached the water and stood there and there was not much to say. A few boatmen were poling supplies for the settlers upriver. I took out my piece of thick and offered it and he cut off a chunk and put it in his lip.

“Your daddy was somethin’ else,” he said. “He could smell the Indians better than a wolf.”

“What happened to him?”

He was looking over the water. “I remember you could stand on Congress and hear billiards in one ear and whoopin’ aborgoins out the other. There was thirty, forty houses, maybe. And now look at it.” He looked behind us at the town, where there were now thousands of people. Down on the riverbank, the ferryman was doing a brisk business.

“What happened to him?” I said again. He was quiet and I thought of my father coming back to his house and wife and daughter and then I thought of him riding out after us. I watched the water. I could feel my fear drifting away from me.

The man just stood there. He never answered.