He encountered other captives occasionally, as the bands and tribes came together in their wanderings. They were white boys like him or more often Mexicans. Sometimes they had just been recently taken and were pale with fear and he would turn his eyes from them. But if they had been with the Indians for a period of months they were as proudly wild as he was, some of them so savage and heedless they had to be spoken to quietly by older warriors before a raid to cool their raging tempers. There were girl captives too, usually more frightened and miserable than the boys, but he trained himself not to think of Jewell when he saw them.
In the second spring of his captivity, Lamar joined a raid on a Mexican sheepherders’ camp near the Devils River. The herders turned out to be cool and experienced fighters and the raid went bad. Two Comanches were killed outright and six were wounded, including Kanaumahka, who was shot through the belly and lived in hellish pain for two days. They buried him on a scaffold looking down on the Pecos and Lamar rode away from the site feeling empty and orphaned once again. He had friends among the Quahadas who spoke to him in consolation but there were others who saw him now only as unclaimed property. Had he been a few years older and more acquainted with human treachery he might have suspected something when five or six men he did not know well asked him along on a hunting trip up on the llano.
He suspected that it wasn’t just a hunting trip, that he would be subjected to some sort of initiation trial along the way, and that he would emerge from this ordeal with the full confidence of the tribe and new standing as an adult warrior. So he was not greatly surprised when they set upon him while he was sleeping one night and tied him up with ropes. But then they rode into Fort Chadbourne with him and handed him over without ceremony to the Indian agent. He never did know what they got for his ransom, because he was taken at once to the guardhouse, where a soldier with the Texas State Troops took a pair of sheep shears and cut off the hair that had grown down past his shoulders and that he had wrapped in otter fur. They tried to get him to talk in English but he couldn’t. It took a week or more for the words to start to come back.
The sound of his own name when he finally spoke it in answer to their questions was unsettling to him. He knew it was his name but the syllables attached themselves to nothing he could truly remember or understand. They kept him in the guardhouse and then in one of the officers’ homes. He was compliant. He sat at their table at dinner and bowed his head in prayer and answered their questions about who his people were and what had happened to them, but it was as if he were performing in a play.
“Well, Lamar, you are going home,” the officer said to him one day. They put him in a wagon and sent him in a supply train with an escort of troopers. It humiliated him to ride closed up in the coach with a woman who lectured him on the importance of his education while the soldiers rode outside on horseback. He thought it might be easy to steal one of the horses and ride off, but he didn’t know where to go. The Comanches had stolen him away and then cast him out. There were other bands who might take him in, but as the shock of his recapture began to wear off he understood that his future with the Indians would never be as secure as he longed for it to be. And he was willing to believe that at the end of this long journey back to Texas there might be some form of happiness waiting for him in spite of the fact that his family was gone.
But they didn’t take him back to his home in Wise County. They took him to San Antonio, where he had never been in his life. There was a band playing when they brought him into the town, and somebody made a speech and later he was taken after closing hours to a candy store and the owner told him he could have as much candy as he could carry out.
His father had a cousin who claimed him and took him in. She was a weepy sort of woman who was married to a German doctor twenty years older than she was who practiced the French horn at night and collected beetles in a little study that no one but him was allowed to enter. They had no children and the woman had no notion of how to talk to a boy of his age, especially one who was still wild and confused with yearning. The doctor confined his interest in Lamar to interviewing him at great length about his life with the Indians. He nodded with excitement as he took down with his pen the things that Lamar told him, about how in the desert country the Comanches would find tortoises and cook them alive over the fire and eat from their shells as if they were eating from a bowl; or about how trailing a rope on the ground was bad luck; or how Kanaumahka was always careful to pluck out the stray hairs around a wild horse’s eyes before he tried to ride it. The doctor wrote up these notes and sent them off to be published in Europe, but he showed no appreciation for the information and treated Lamar with the same cold scrutiny he gave to his beetles.
He was sent to school and found somebody to fight there almost every day. When it was explained to him that he had been expelled, he felt satisfaction, as if being thrown out of school had been a conscious aspiration. When the doctor found out, he yelled at him and raised a threatening hand, and Lamar made sure that he ended up on the floor with a broken jaw.
Before the police could come for him he had stolen a horse and ridden south out of San Antonio. He wandered without purpose for years. He trailed cattle to New Orleans and worked on the docks in Galveston and as a hand patrolling for Mexican rustlers on various ranches in the Nueces Strip. He was in his early twenties when the big trail drives started going up to Kansas and he made the trip three times. He liked being on the move again in open country, on horseback, working himself into exhaustion every night and every day, thinking of nothing but the cattle and the next river crossing and the earth spread out endlessly in front of him. The Indians had all pretty much been hunted down and starved out by then. Even the Quahadas had come onto the reservation. Sometimes, driving the cattle beyond the Red, they could see the Comanche and Kiowa camps in the distance, and once when he rode into Fort Sill he saw people he thought he knew lined up for rations. They were dressed in cheap sack suits and wide-brimmed hats like farmers and the women sat in the backs of the wagons holding parasols and waiting to butcher the cattle that the men would be given to shoot. None of them looked in his direction. They looked down at their feet as they shuffled obediently forward in line.
He saw a group of young Kiowa women walking out of the Red Store. Their backs were to him and he could not see their faces, but there was something familiar in the posture and stride of one of the women that made him go slack. He kept watching them as they walked toward their wagons, wishing they would turn around so he could be sure the woman was not Jewell. But they didn’t turn around, and after they had gone a few more paces they disappeared into the crowds waiting for rations.
It had been eleven years. He had never looked for her or asked about her and he had pushed the painful thought of her as far from his haunted mind as he could. He had made it his purpose to get on with his life without letting the past come back to grab him. And he tried to continue to do so, but all the way to the Kansas railheads he was tortured by the thought that he had seen her after all and done nothing.
A year later he came back. The name Jewell Clayton was not on the Kiowa rolls, but he had not expected it to be. The agent at Fort Sill told him that there were many Indians on the agency lands that he had not personally seen or met, and that if she had had dark hair to begin with and had been with the Kiowas for as long as Lamar said she would probably not now seem out of place. He kept asking after her, and after a few days in Fort Sill he met a man in his fifties who had been Kanaumahka’s friend and had been one of the Indians who had captured Lamar and Jewell. He was now gaunt and solemn with anger. When he saw Lamar again after so many years he began to weep. He did not know that the men who had invited him to go hunting had sold him back to the whites. They had come back to the camp saying that Lamar had just forsaken the tribe on his own and had left them during the night to go back to live with his own people.
This man remembered the day that Kanaumahka had sold Jewell to the Kiowas. He remembered the name of th
e Kiowa man who had bought her, and what band he belonged to. When Lamar checked the rolls again he found the man’s name and learned that he was probably camped with his family along Medicine Bluff Creek.
It was a small camp, with two or three traditional lodges and a half-dozen agency tents and brush arbors strung out along the banks of the creek. The Kiowas shuffled together suspiciously when he rode in on horseback, but before he could even state his business Jewell walked out of one of the tents and began to wail at the sight of him. He got off his horse and walked over to her and said what she already knew, that he was her brother. She didn’t look nearly the same. Her skin was tight and coarse from years out in the sun, her hair was drab, and she was missing a couple of teeth in her upper mouth. There was a blue tattoo of a half-moon on her forehead. They did not embrace but just stood there talking. Jewell was weeping and all the Kiowas around them were teary as well. Lamar wished he could feel something else, but all he felt was anger and waste and shame at what had happened to them, and he couldn’t help blaming her in his mind for refusing to make an escape with him when they had the chance. In fact, he found himself starting to wonder if she had woken the Comanches up that morning and told them that he had gone just so they wouldn’t take their wrath out on her.
He did not say this to her, but he could not help thinking it when he saw what a complete Indian she had become, not just in dress or in language but—he knew almost at once—in thought. She could still speak English, but not without thinking about what she wanted to say beforehand, and the words when she said them were slow and ponderous.
She served him a meal of gristly agency beef and fried bread. She had a husband who went by the name of Eli Poahway. He was stringy and quiet and she said he was good to her. He was a medicine man and he wanted to set up a sweat for Lamar but Lamar said he would rather not. He didn’t know Kiowas, and their manner and rituals were strange to him and he didn’t want to linger among them.
Jewell told him that the Kiowas had treated her with great kindness, particularly a woman, now dead, who had adopted her as her own child. Several years after she was sold, a group of Texas Rangers rode into the camp and saw that she was white and tried to make a deal to ransom her. Jewell had become such a Kiowa by then that the thought of riding off with these strange men filled her with panic. She and her Indian mother crept out of camp that night and hid in the high grass across the river until the Rangers had given up and left. When Jewell and her mother came back they expected the chief who had made the deal with the Rangers to be angry, but he was so touched by their attachment to each other that he just chuckled softly and let the matter go.
Her Kiowa mother died before they came onto the reservation, but Jewell married Eli soon thereafter and had lived with him and his two sisters and their husbands ever since, moving camp frequently and mixing with the soldiers and Indian police at Fort Sill only when she had to.
As she was talking, Lamar looked around at the shabby camp and the people in their cheap white men’s clothes, at the frayed tents and the trash heaps and the overworked horses that were so few in number compared to the great herd he had once tended on the open prairies. These people were poor, and as they moved from place to place on the reservation lands they were pent up in a way that seemed almost comical when compared to the infinite license they had once enjoyed in wandering across the earth.
She wanted him to spend the night but he wanted to be away from there. He told her he was leaving and he was taking her home. He hadn’t thought any farther than that and he didn’t even know where home was, but he knew he was taking her. Eli didn’t speak English in those days and Jewell was careful not to translate what Lamar had just said. She looked at her brother in astonishment. This is where I live, she told him. These are the people I live with. What are you talking about?
Something got into Lamar when she said that. She had been unwilling to come with him years ago when they had a chance to escape their bondage, and now she was unwilling to do so again, even though the bondage this time was of her own making. All these years Lamar had carried within himself an anger he could not suppress or explain, an anger that had been brewed out of being a captive and an exile both. He had been taken by the Comanches, beaten and humiliated and then gradually educated and formed to their ways, and then when he thought he was one of them he had been cast out and thrown upon the mercy of a people he no longer understood and who had no patience to deal with him.
He told her that if she didn’t come with him then by God that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. She was crying and Eli was looking agitated. Lamar got into an argument that ended with him sitting on his horse and riding away alone while Eli and three or four other men trotted along beside with rifles and knives in their hands. He heard Jewell crying behind him in the same high-pitched wail of grief and confusion he remembered from the day the Kiowas had taken her.
If he had had his way he would never have seen her again. But decades later, he made the mistake of mentioning to Sarey that he had once had a sister and that as far as he knew she was still living in the Indian Territories. Sarey took it upon herself to write Jewell a letter through the agency at Fort Sill and invite her to their wedding, but Lamar saw it before she mailed it and tore it up. They had a fight afterwards that almost put an end to everything. They made up and got married after all, but Sarey would never let up on the idea of Jewell. Family meant everything to her and she would not tolerate Lamar being on bad terms with his sister. The letter she made sure he did not have a chance to tear up was the one she sent after Ben was born inviting Jewell to come meet her new nephew.
Lamar did not learn she was coming until the day Sarey told him he had to go meet the train. Jewell stepped onto the platform with Eli behind her, paying no attention to the hostile stares of the other passengers or the people at the station. Sarey paid no attention either. She walked right up to them and gave them both a warm handshake and put little Ben in Jewell’s arms.
They stayed for three days. Lamar did not have much he cared to say to his sister and she was the same with him. She was in her fifties then and looked no different than any other old Kiowa woman, deep lines around her slack mouth and her stringy hair in braids and a ragged dress whose muddy hem trailed around her ankles. The blue moon tattoo on her forehead was faded now and cross-hatched with wrinkles. Her English since he had last seen her had become halting and uncertain, and perhaps the reason they stayed civil with each other was because she knew she could no longer hold an argument with him in their native tongue.
She stared down at Ben in his crib as if she had never seen a baby before in her life. She had no children of her own, at least none that Lamar knew about, and the silent claim she seemed to be making on his child disturbed him in ways he could not fathom or tolerate. He put up with it until Eli opened his satchel and pulled out a bundle of sage and lit it right there in the parlor. He said he only wanted to bless the child and Sarey said it would do no harm, but Lamar shouted at all of them that Indians had ruined his life and ruined Jewell’s life too, even though she wouldn’t admit it, and he would be damned if he would allow any of that business around his son.
Jewell and Eli were gone before sunrise the next morning. He didn’t hear them leave and he never did learn how they got themselves to the train station. Sarey took the baby the next day and moved in with her folks and left him alone there for two weeks to think about things before she would do him the favor of coming home.
He was still thinking about things. There was a whole hell of a lot he could have handled differently in his life, starting with him moving faster to get that rifle from above the door when the Comanches came into his house and ending with the way he had spoken to Gil Gilheaney tonight for no good reason other than to get the man’s bristles up. On nights like this he had a habit of working his way back through those regrets one by one as if he was looking for some sort of answer or satisfaction. But there was no answer to anything, and no satisfaction, and
no one left to apologize to except for the sculptor sleeping in his dead son’s room.
NINETEEN
By six o’clock the next morning Gil had dressed and packed his bag and set it against the wall of the parlor. Clayton did not join him and Maureen for breakfast, and George’s Mary served them with wary discretion until she grew too curious to be silent any longer.
“So what did he do?”
“It’s nothing,” Gil said. “A slight disagreement.”
“Go ahead and tell me,” George’s Mary said to Maureen. “I ain’t going to be surprised.”
“He was rude and insulting. My father treats his clients with respect and is accustomed to—”
“Maureen,” Gil told her, “you should pack.”
“I’ll pack when I’m through with my breakfast.”
Gil set his napkin on the table and walked over to the front window. The winter storm of the night before had sheathed the tree branches along the creek in ice, and as the wind gusted he could almost hear them tinkling like the glass in a chandelier. Clayton, Ernest, and Nax were all standing on the frosted ground by the corral fence. The two younger men stood next to their saddled horses as they talked to their boss. It looked like they were arguing with him about something—probably, Gil supposed, about whether they actually had to go out riding in this weather. The argument ended when Clayton turned his back on them, and Ernest and Nax, with a shared look of annoyance, mounted their horses and rode them off into the face of the wind.
Clayton walked into the house and when he saw Gil standing at the window he said good morning and walked over to the dinner table for a cup of coffee. His face was flushed with the cold and as he walked he left a melting trail of ice droplets on the rug.
Gil followed and stood in front of Clayton. “When I get back to San Antonio I’ll immediately put a check in the mail, reimbursing you for your last payment to me.”
Remember Ben Clayton Page 23