Remember Ben Clayton

by Stephen Harrigan

  When the Indians walked in, the water in the pan had started to cool and he was looking down at the almost-detached toenail floating out from his blackening toe.

  His mother said, “Well!” when she saw them. Jewell screamed and his mother set down the knife and hurried in front of her daughter, nudging her back toward Lamar. Lamar grabbed Jewell’s arm and drew her to him. His foot was still in the pan of water. He thought about striding across the room to grab his father’s Hawken above the door but before he could make himself move one of the Indians had already beaten him to it.

  His mother did something strange. She held out her hand to the one who had come in first. Maybe she thought a handshake would help calm them down and be the start of a civil discussion. For just a moment, there was a confused expression on the Indian’s face. He was painted for war and it made the momentary puzzlement in his eyes more vivid. But instead of shaking hands he stabbed her under the ribs with a butcher knife and she collapsed onto the floor so promptly and compliantly it was like something the two of them had rehearsed.

  Jewell screamed and seemed to run in place as she sobbed. Lamar didn’t know what to do except to go to his mother, but before he could reach her they grabbed him and threw him against the stove. Three or four more Comanches streamed into the house and started stripping the linens off the beds and drinking the milk that had been set out on the table for supper. His mother was still alive and screaming his name, but the Indians beat him down with their quirts when he tried to reach her again and another one shot an arrow into her and he could hear it passing through her body and burying itself with a thunk into the plank floor.

  Three of the Indians grabbed him and pulled him to his feet. He fought and bit at them but they had him tight in their arms and he couldn’t get loose. He could smell his mother’s blood and could feel its slick warmth on his bare feet as they dragged him across the floor. He called out to her as they were wrestling him out the door and they hit him with their quirts again and his mother raised her head and looked at him and told him not to fight anymore or they would kill him.

  “Be a good boy and go with these Indians,” she said.

  He was bleeding from his head and he couldn’t wipe away the blood because his hands were bound behind him, but he blinked enough of it away when they pulled him outside to see that his sister was already tied down on a horse, still yelling out for him and his mother. They hit him again and threw him up onto one of the other horses and started tying him down to an old Mexican packsaddle. He held on as best he could as they rode away. He could hear his mother screaming back in the cabin as they scalped her, and when they had gone a few miles he saw the bodies of his father and brother with their arms cut off and hanging from a tree.

  THE MAN who captured him was named Kanaumahka, which Lamar learned later meant “Almost Dead” in Comanche. Looking back, he guessed Kanaumahka had been in his early forties then. He had a wide, muscular frame and a dish face whose bottom half that day was painted in black. There were two fingers missing on his left hand and on the side of his face his teeth didn’t meet up right because he had been kicked in the jaw by a horse when he was a boy, an accident that had also taken off the tip of his tongue. It took a few days for Lamar to understand that he and Jewell were in Kanaumahka’s keeping. They were so disoriented at first that Lamar did not even think to try to tell one Indian from another.

  They rode almost without stopping for three days. At first they tied Lamar’s and Jewell’s hands to the packsaddles and ran a rope between their feet beneath the horses as well. But after Jewell kept slipping down sideways and they had to stop and re-rig the ropes, they finally untied their captives’ hands and let them hold on to the saddle so that they could stay upright. It was clear enough to Lamar that if he tried to get away or fell off his horse they would just shoot him or put an arrow through him and move on.

  His mother’s hair was reddish with gray streaks and he recognized her scalp tied to one of the Indian’s lances, but he looked away and pretended to himself he didn’t see it, pretended so hard that to this day he wasn’t sure he actually had. The packsaddle wasn’t a proper saddle for riding and it was hard work to keep his seat as they rode all that day and through the night. When they finally untied him and Jewell and let them off their horses it was because one of the Indians rode up trailing a bellowing cow. They shot the cow and cut open its udder and shoved his head into it and made him drink the milk. He didn’t want to, and Jewell didn’t either. The milk was full of blood. He didn’t think either of them could keep it down, but they both managed. Afterward Kanaumahka noticed Lamar’s little toe pulled off to the side where he had jammed it and he went over and consulted with a few of the other Indians about how to doctor it. They finally decided to pull it up and back into place and tie it to the rest of his toes with a splint. They didn’t mind how much it hurt him and he tried not to cry out when they did it. It was the first time he had any hope that they hadn’t captured him just to kill him but that they had some reason for keeping him alive.

  There must have been people in pursuit from the beginning because the Comanches were nervous and from time to time Lamar could hear dogs baying in the distance. Once they set fire to the prairie to throw the dogs off the scent and rode even harder, stopping from time to time to look behind them through field glasses. Lamar could tell that the Indians were worried because the grass was dry and when they rode across it the trail was easy to read.

  The insides of his legs were rubbed raw by the packsaddle. When Kanaumahka saw the blood he ripped off Lamar’s trousers and put some sort of salve on his legs that helped the sores scab over. They passed within sight of farms and settlements but the Indians didn’t stop to raid anymore, and after a week or so Lamar got worried that they would end up so deep in wild country that he could never find his way home.

  Lamar was twelve and Jewell was fourteen. For the first few days the Indians kept them apart at night, but once they were beyond the Brazos they relaxed the rules. As his older sister, Jewell did her best to comfort him but she was so scared she could barely speak, and he did not know what he could say to her to ease her fears. Sometimes the Comanches would pitch them strips of raw horse meat or a piece of the liver of a dead steer they had come across. They were hungry enough to eat anything, but Jewell gagged and choked on her tears as she tried to force the meat down and wailed for their mother.

  Lamar figured they were headed up toward the Canadian River. They no longer heard dogs howling in pursuit, and the Indians were growing more relaxed and joking with each other. Lamar knew that their chances of being rescued were almost gone, and that the farther they advanced into the treeless prairies the harder it would be to escape and find their way back. The expanding openness all around them, the billowing grasslands crowding the horizon, unsettled him deeply. He did not know this country; he did not belong in it. Every day that they traveled made the possibility of reaching home less real as they traveled into country more and more foreign and unwelcoming.

  Sometimes they came for Jewell at night and dragged her over to the edge of the camp. The first time they did this he fought them but it did no good, because they wrestled him to the ground and made him watch what they did to her. After that, she told him it would go easier for her if he didn’t try to stop them. But he tried anyway, and she had to plead with him not to interfere. When one of the warriors came the next night and ordered her to stand and follow him, Lamar did as she had asked and did not try to stop it, just as his sister got to her feet and walked away with the Indian whimpering quietly, her hands trembling.

  He resolved that they should escape while there was still some possibility of finding their way back. Their hands and feet were no longer bound, either on the horses or in camp, and the Indians had taken a less guarded attitude toward their presence, treating them more like dogs that were just part of the caravan than like prisoners that might turn on them or disappear into the wilderness. The horses were always picketed not far fro
m camp and the bridles and saddles were nearby in open sight. All of the Comanches slept soundly and Lamar did not think it would be very hard to grab a bridle and a skin of water and maybe some food and slip away to the horse herd. He was only a boy and his plans were not sophisticated, but he had a desperate confidence that if they got away in the middle of the night and rode hard enough, heading east, that they could find their way back to the Brazos and the settlements downriver. Just the thought of slipping away and being on the run was bewitching to him. He daydreamed about it all day long in the saddle and at night in his great terror and loneliness it was his only consoling thought.

  But when he whispered his plan to Jewell she sobbed and shivered with fright and said she would not go. She said they would be rescued soon and the Indians would kill them if they tried to get away. Night after night he tried to convince her, but she only grew increasingly upset and begged him not to try. He saw that she had let herself slide into a state of terrorized passivity and he knew that with every passing mile the chances of a successful escape were growing more distant.

  One night as the Indians were lying down to sleep he told her he could not wait anymore. He was going that very night. She grew hysterical and said she wouldn’t come. He said he was going anyway and would come back with soldiers or rangers to rescue her too. He was seventy years of age now and the memory of her face as he told her this still haunted him with dreamlike force and clarity. She had the dark hair and olive skin that came from their father’s side of the family. Her chin quivered uncontrollably as the tears flew out of her eyes and glistened in the light of the fires. She pleaded with him to stay with her. She said that the Indians would kill her when they discovered he was gone.

  He did not think they would kill her. He thought that if they were going to kill either of them they would have done so already. In the end, he lied to her just so she would go to sleep and not give his plan away with her crying. He told her he would not leave her after all. Then, when she was finally settled down in sleep he broke his promise and crept away, stealing a length of rope to make a hackamore because he worried that the clink of a bridle would wake the Indians. Most of the time since his capture he had been riding the same mare and she let him come up to her and slip the hackamore over her nose and ride her away.

  He followed a draw that he thought might lead him eventually to one of the forks of the Brazos. In that country at night the bands of the Milky Way were almost solid in their brilliance, bright enough to silhouette the shapes of the owls and nighthawks hunting in the high prairie grass. He was sorry to leave his sister and he tried not to think about how he had lied to her, but he was confident now that he would escape and he tried to think instead of the moment when she would see him riding into the camp along with the rescuers he was guiding. She would forgive him once she understood that he had done this so he could take her home.

  The Indians tracked him easily and overtook him several hours after daylight. Kanaumahka pulled him from his horse and beat him and kicked him and when they got back to the camp the other Comanches felt free to do the same. Then Kanaumahka put his Colt’s pistol to Jewell’s head and cocked it and looked sternly at Lamar to make sure he got the idea that if he tried to escape again his sister would pay for it. Jewell was a quaking heap afterwards and when he tried to comfort her and explain himself she screamed at him to get away and leave her alone and never talk to her again. This drama between the two captives seemed to suit the Indians. They laughed and talked to themselves, as if it were a play they were watching.

  Later the raiding party met up with another group of Indians. They looked similar to the Comanches but there was something different about their dress and attitude that he could not quite pin down. They also seemed to speak a different language, judging by the way the two groups talked to each other in signs. It was not until he could speak Comanche himself that he found out from Kanaumahka that they were Kiowas.

  For most of an afternoon they argued about something, though it was good-natured arguing as far as Lamar could tell. Kanaumahka checked the mouths of half a dozen different Kiowa horses and rode several of them off onto the prairie for an hour at a time, then finally went off by himself to think about something. When he was through thinking he stood up and walked over to Jewell and grabbed her by the arm and handed her to the Kiowa warrior he had been negotiating with.

  It was over almost before either Lamar or Jewell could understand what was happening. The Kiowas threw her on a horse and tied her down again and rode off at a gallop below a grassy swell. Although he heard her screaming his name for quite a while, that was the last he saw of her. The Indians beat him again when he tried to run to the horse herd to ride after her, and when they saw him scanning the landscape hoping she would reappear they poured sand in his eyes to get him to stop. After a few days they managed to convince him that it was hopeless to get her back and pointless to try to live his life like it could be any different than it was.

  Jewell getting sold was the turning point for him, when he was forced to begin looking ahead and not back. By the time the raiding party joined up with the rest of the band, somewhere in the Palo Duro country, he had picked up a few words and phrases of Comanche, and Kanaumahka began to treat him less like someone to be abused and more like someone who required instruction. In the camp, the women jeered at him at first and the other boys wanted to fight him, but he soon learned he had nothing to lose by ignoring the women and using every grain of his rage and indignation in defending himself against the boys. When he broke a boy’s wrist there were no consequences, not even from the father, who had a calm talk with Kanaumahka afterwards. From the tone of their conversation Lamar guessed that they had bet on the fight and that the man had lost and was good-natured about it.

  He learned that the Comanche band that had taken him was called the Quahadas and that they had contempt for any other band or tribe who signed treaties with the whites or depended for their sustenance on the Indian agency at Fort Cobb. It didn’t matter to them if it was Union or Confederate soldiers who were in control of the fort, they were convinced that all white men were the same and wanted to push them off the buffalo grounds. They were friendly with the Mexican traders who sometimes came into the camps leading caravans of mules burdened down with implements and firearms and other trading goods, but they were independent-minded and aloof and thought their way of life was superior to anyone else’s.

  For five or six weeks they made him haul wood and water for the women, but then Kanaumahka decided to put him to work herding his horses at night and guarding them against Tonkawa horse thieves. Kanaumahka had over a hundred and fifty horses and the nights were long and worrisome to Lamar because he didn’t know how far the horses were allowed to stray or what the punishment would be if any were lost or stolen. But Kanaumahka had no words of rebuke or praise, so Lamar took that to mean that he was satisfied with his work and he began to relax. He herded the horses most of the night and during the long, inconsequential days, when the Indians went out hunting, or gambled, or just gossiped outside their lodges, he slept and no one bothered him.

  It was during those solitary nights, though, that he felt himself becoming a Comanche. He calmed himself by singing in a low voice the songs his mother had sung in the house, “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and “The Rose and the Briar.” But the songs began to seem strange to him, the words—“And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart”—making fainter and fainter sense as the direct Comanche words he was learning supplanted them in relevance and urgency. As the nights passed, some sort of contentment began to steal up on him. The fear of losing the horses had subsided, and the constant overpowering confusion drained away.

  The life he had known had disappeared in one bewildering instant, but the life before him gradually began to seem beckoning and limitless—a life without any of the rules he was used to, and none of the angry strictures of work and propriety that had defined the limits of his father’s existen
ce, that had kept him rooted to a farm in Wise County like a snake in its hole when the whole world stretched out before him. Lamar’s new life was at first life without human warmth and kindness, but that changed in imperceptible degrees, with an approving glance from Kanaumahka or an unexpected cordial greeting from one of the warriors or an invitation from some of the boys to range with them on long horseback adventures across the grasslands.

  Kanaumahka was a patient teacher and in his way a kindly man. He told Lamar that years earlier, at the invitation of the U.S. government, he had traveled to Washington and met President Polk, and he still wore a medal around his neck with the president’s profile. He had eaten crab cakes in a restaurant and played whist. Lamar could not keep a firm grip on the idea that this man had killed his mother with a butcher knife, and eventually he had to let it go. His confusion extended to his sense of himself, and as he let that go too another self rose up to take its place. No one had to beat him anymore to make him comply or yell at him to make him understand. He complied. He understood. He belonged and could be trusted.

  He was with them for almost two years, but it might have been twenty, so profound was his absorption into the Quahadas. He was with them on buffalo hunts and trading expeditions and on their nomadic excursions deep into the far mountains and beyond the Rio Grande into Mexico. He was with them on many horse-stealing raids and on many bitter reprisals against the Mexicans and the Texans.

  He did not like to think about what he had done on those raids.