The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson

by Nancy Peacock

  “Where was this?”

  I tried to remember.

  “There were sheep, I think,” I told the soldier. “The Hill Country maybe? Perhaps along the Llano? A man traveling with an ox along a road was killed. Maybe you can look up a record of this.”

  The soldier sighed. “We can’t look up a record if we don’t know where to look. I’m sure her father is anxious to get her back. Parents are writing to the agency all the time, trying to find their children. It’s a damn mess piecing this shit together. Can you remember anything else?”

  I shook my head. “There were many raids. This is all I remember about that one.” I passed the photograph back to him through the bars of my cell.

  He took it and looked at it sadly before tucking it into his pocket. “Do you know her name?”

  “We called her Koe-ko. It means chicken.”

  “Her white name?”

  I shook my head. “I do not know it.”

  The soldier turned to leave.

  “So she is captured now?” I asked.

  He turned to look at me.

  “By the whites, Koe-ko is captured?”

  He took a deep breath. “She is recovered,” he said.

  RECOVERED. THIS IS what is said about Chloe. She was recovered. Mrs. Joseph Wilson was found and recovered. Rescued from a life of savagery and degradation. This is the story you tell, but it is not the story I tell. I loved her and she loved me. Together we would love any child we were blessed with.

  Until I moved into the tipi with Thin Knife and his family I had never, as an adult, lived with little children. I loved Elk Water and Fall Up and Salt almost as if they had been my own. I wrestled with them at night. I fell down, pretending to be dead when Salt hit me in the chest with a toy arrow. I made a little doll out of corn husks for Elk Water and Fall Up to share. Now I was to have a child of my own, and Chloe and I were stupid with happiness, stupid with love.

  Outside our tipi Chloe staked a hide and scraped it and worked it until it was smooth and supple. And then she cut it into a pattern for a toy quiver. At night she sat in our lodge by the fire and began stitching it together while I sat across from her, stringing the toy bow I had made and fitting the toy arrows with soft tips. We looked up often from our work and smiled at each other, and even laughed at our foolishness in making such things so early for a child yet to be born.

  “Feather Horse says that we will have a son,” Chloe said, as if to convince herself that we were not wasting our time.

  “I will love the child no matter what,” I told her.

  “What if it is a girl?”

  “I told you, I will love her.”

  “What of all this work?”

  “What of it?” I answered. “Do you think this will be our only child?”

  She smiled at me and shook her head. “I believe in Feather Horse’s vision,” she said.

  “I, too, believe,” I told her.

  How could I not? Feather Horse’s vision of my woman sat across from me, pregnant with my child, foolish and happy and stitching a toy quiver. Our child would be a boy. A black circle would be painted above the door of our tipi to indicate that a warrior had been born. I could see it. I could see it all, as if it were my own vision. This was the happiest and most content that I have ever felt, these few months I spent with Chloe in our own lodge in preparation for our child.

  Thin Knife and his wives laughed at us. “Is this child to be born four years old?” Thin Knife joked, he and his family sitting in our lodge after having shared a meal with us. It was late, and the children had eaten their fill and now lay in our buffalo robes, sleeping. Elk Water lay with her head resting against Chloe’s thigh, and Chloe idly stroked her hair.

  “Ah. Leave them alone,” Crawls Along said. “It is their first. Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo and Nakuhakeetuh are too excited to help themselves.”

  “It is not wise to make these things too early,” Feather Horse told us. “It is a lot of work, and much can happen between now and then.”

  Chloe’s hand left Elk Water’s hair and went to her stomach, resting on its mound. “What you know gonna happen?” she asked, slipping from Comanche to her original language.

  They looked at her, not understanding. I translated. Feather Horse smiled and crawled across the floor and rested her hand on top of Chloe’s. “To this one? Nothing. You will have an easy birth and a fine baby.”

  Chloe smiled, and her hand returned to stroking Elk Water’s hair. Feather Horse returned to her place. She glanced at the little bow hanging from the lodge pole next to my bow. The toy arrows were lying in a bunch on the floor, tied with a rawhide thong. Feather Horse picked up the unfinished quiver and examined Chloe’s handiwork. “It is good,” she said. “You are doing good work. I hope it does not get lost in the plains, is all.”

  “It won’t,” Chloe said.

  But it did.

  Chloe completed the work on the quiver the night before the soldiers came. She filled it with the toy arrows I had made and hung it next to the little bow. She smiled and walked across the floor to me. I opened the buffalo robe that she might climb in. She was well along now, five or six moons, her belly round and taut. The fire flickered shadows across the tipi. I wrapped my arms around Nakuhakeetuh and I hugged her tight, and I stayed awake as long as I could, just to listen to her breath.

  The next day was warm, the sky a deep blue with patches of clouds. The women were busy cutting strips of meat and hanging them to dry on the scaffolding. A thicket of wild grapes had been discovered and in the afternoon, a woman and her son went off to gather some. Several of our men were on a buffalo hunt. Already our hunts had been successful. We would have plenty of meat for the coming winter.

  There were many bands camped here along this northern branch of the Red River. We were in safe and plentiful territory. The grass here was thick and the horses grazed peacefully, a breeze occasionally rippling their manes and tails.

  In the afternoon I left our tipi. “I am going to find a game,” I said to Chloe. She was outside on her knees, cutting meat into strips. She looked up at me. The breeze lifted her hair and she lifted one hand to wipe it from her face, a knife held in the other. She smiled. I licked my thumb and used it to wipe a smear of dirt from her cheek. “Win many horses,” she said before bending back to her work.

  I sauntered through the village. Outside the tipis the women were bent to the same work as Chloe was. At Beetle’s lodge I joined a group of men sitting on a blanket, gambling with colored wooden dice. I lost two horses in this game and had won one back when Beetle said, “Look,” and pointed out into the prairie. We stood. There was a cloud of dust forming in the distance. We watched for a while. “Our men are hunting,” another man said, and we settled ourselves again on the blanket, and tossed the dice.

  It was a bad mistake. That cloud of dust was the only warning we would have. One minute all was peaceful and good, the next we lifted our heads at the sound of hundreds of hooves pounding the ground, and we saw a cloud descending on our camp, and from that cloud burst your cavalry.

  We had no time to reach our horses, to put on our war paint, to group together and form a counter charge. At the first sight of the soldiers, I stood up from the blanket and fled. We all did. We were running this way and that, each man trying to reach his own lodge, his weapons, his horses. We dodged women and children also running. I grabbed my bow and my quiver and my rifle from our tipi. Chloe was not there.

  By now the soldiers were thick among us, riding right through our camp. They plowed their horses into our lodges, and the lodges toppled, the skins caving in and the poles falling. Women and children screamed and ran and fell and were sometimes trampled. We were in absolute frenzy trying to get away. Our men could not cover the retreat of our women and children. There was no time. The air thickened with smoke and flashes and booms of gunfire; the air thickened with screams of terror.

  We all fled in different directions. We scattered like ants. I saw, as I ran, a parflech
e dropped on the ground. I saw smoke curling from the tops of tipis that had not yet been squashed. I saw hides left pegged to the ground, half scraped, tools dropped beside them. I saw the soldiers ride into the scaffolding where our winter supply of meat lay drying. I fired into their ranks. I stumbled over a dead horse, and picked myself up, and fired again. I do not think I hit anyone.

  I ended up with many of the men, along the river. We hid ourselves in the long grass that overhung the banks. By then most of our horses had been captured, but we had a few that had been in camp when we were attacked. We grouped up with these few horses and charged the line of soldiers shooting at us from a ravine, but we were driven back, and we lost men. We threw our dead into the deep water to prevent them from being scalped by the Tonkawa scouts who always helped the soldiers. The blood of our dead swirled with the river water, and then the river was no longer the color of water, but was instead the color of blood.

  We could do nothing down in that river. We did not know where anyone was, except for those in our group. I did not know where Chloe was. Thin Knife did not know where Feather Horse or Crawls Along or the children were. The other men did not know where their families were. All was confusion in camp. All was lost. We could not prevent the soldiers from taking our village. I escaped, along with Thin Knife and three others, by hugging the bank and creeping upstream. All we could do, any of us, was save ourselves.

  It was quick and it was horrible. The entire destruction of our village took perhaps thirty minutes. We watched from our hiding place in the prairie, lying low in the grasses, as our possessions were thrown onto fires: our buffalo robes, our winter supplies, our clothes, our tools, the weapons we had dropped or left behind. The soldiers set our lodges on fire. They herded our horses together and led them away. I recognized Bad Hand MacKenzie riding among his men, snapping his bad fingers in the air. And then we saw, as the soldiers rode away, a large group of our women and children being herded along among them.

  One of the men I was with pulled a spyglass from the dripping wet bag slung across his shoulder. He wiped the river water away from its lens, and we took turns looking through it to see who was among the captives. Beside me, I felt Thin Knife let out his breath as he looked through the glass and recognized Feather Horse and Elk Water. Another man recognized his sister and aunt. A third man, his young daughter and son and first wife. I did not see Chloe. I did not know how to feel about this. I was relieved that she was not captured, but not being among the captives might mean that she was among the dead.

  When it was safe we made our way back to the village, as did the others who had been in hiding. One by one or in groups we crept into our camp and wandered around in a daze. Bodies were thick on the ground. Some had been scalped and mutilated.

  Our village was destroyed. My tipi, burned. The little bow and quiver of arrows we had made for our child, gone. Our buffalo robes, gone. Our kettles and tools, gone. Our food, gone. Nakuhakeetuh, gone.

  I turned over bodies, looking for her. The wails of the women started up as each discovered a relative who had been killed. I kept on turning over the unclaimed dead. Soon all the bodies were claimed, and the wailing of the women left in camp intensified. Now I was certain that Nakuhakeetuh must have been among the captured women with the soldiers. Perhaps I had not seen her because she had been mistaken for white. Perhaps she was no longer Nakuhakeetuh but was once again Mrs. Joseph Wilson, the captured white woman from Drunken Bride, pregnant now with the child of a savage.

  There was no time to let my heart break over this. I had to help the men gather the horses that had not been captured. We had to lead a raid. We had to get our women and children back. I had to do this, even if Chloe was not to be among them, even if she was being kept apart, interviewed perhaps by Bad Hand himself.

  At dusk we rode out after the soldiers and found them camped in the sand hills. From a distance we could see our women and children closely guarded in the center of the camp. Darkness fell and we began circling them, making our war whoops and firing, the soldiers firing back at us. Our efforts were of no use. Only a few of the captives were able to escape during the ruckus. At midnight we stampeded a herd of our stolen horses that had been corralled into a sinkhole, a group of sleeping Tonks left in guard of them. We got most of them back, as well as a few of the Tonks’ mounts.

  We ran the horses back to the stream beside our destroyed village. As we approached, even over the sound of the horses’ hooves thudding against the earth, I could hear the moans and wails of grieving women. I could smell our meat for the winter, our hides, and our tipi covers burning. I could see the fires set by the soldiers still glowing and smoldering in the distance.

  We turned the horses into the grasslands and found some boys to guard them. I dismounted and walked back through the village.

  Even though we had not been successful, I was grateful to have gone on the mission to rescue our women. I was grateful to help with the recovery of our horses. I was grateful to have had something useful to do, for without that I do not know how I would have survived those first few hours without Chloe. Now there was nothing to prevent my fear and sorrow from engulfing me. I called to her, but she did not answer. There were others wandering the village, calling out names. The moon and the smoldering fires of our lodges and possessions lit our way. I saw Crawls Along pulling a tipi hide behind her, piling on anything not destroyed that she could find. “Have you . . .” I began.

  She shook her head. “You had better get what you can find,” she said.

  “Nakuhakeetuh?” I said.

  “She is as good as gone,” Crawls Along scolded. “Now take this.” She unrolled another partially burnt skin from the pile of things on her tarp. “Go find things.”

  I did as I was told. I found a knife. A spyglass. Some arrows. A pot. Down by the river where we had been fighting, I found a five-foot bow. In the ravine where the soldiers had been, I found a canteen. And then as I was climbing out of the ravine, I saw her. Nakuhakeetuh. She came in sight, walking across the grass toward me, like a mud goddess, for her skin and hair and face were caked and smeared with the stuff. Her hands rested on her pregnant belly as she walked.

  “Nakuhakeetuh,” I called, and I ran to her, and I caught her in my arms.

  “I be all right,” she said, unaware that she was using the language of a previous life. “I be all right, Persy. I go to the river. I don’t know why I go there. But I dig into the bank. I dig in along some tree roots and I stay there till it over. That why I be so dirty.” She looked down at herself and swiped her hands against her dress, then rested them on her belly again, and stood there swaying.

  “Are you sure you are all right? Is the baby all right?”

  “I be all right,” she said again.

  “Let’s get this mud off of you.”

  “That be good.”

  She stumbled as she began walking and I reached out and caught her by the elbow.

  “Is the baby hurt?” I asked again.

  “I’s real careful with the baby, Persy. I has to claw out a pretty big hole. I think the baby be all right. I needs to ask Feather Horse ’bout it. I needs to ask her if he be all right.”

  “Feather Horse is captured,” I said.

  “Uh.”

  “Elk Water is captured too. A lot of women and children are captured. We tried to get them back, but we couldn’t.”

  “Oh no. Po’ Thin Knife,” she said. “Po’ Crawls Along. Oh no. Po’ Salt and Fall Up.”

  I took her to the river, to a shallow rippling spot away from where the fighting had taken place, away from where the water was colored red and the bodies were sunk. I lifted her dress over her head and she stood naked in the moonlight as I cupped water in my hands and poured it over her. Rivulets of mud and dirt trickled down her skin. “Can you sit down?” I asked. “Can you dip your head back? Let me wash your hair?”

  I held her arms as she eased herself down. She lay back and I sat down and ran my hands through her hair, wor
king out the cakes of mud. When I was done she lay there looking up at the moon while I rinsed her dress.

  “You can’t wear this,” I said. “It’s wet. Come with me.”

  We went back to the ravine. I moved everything I’d found off the burnt hide, and I wrapped it around us and held her close. And there we slept for a few hours, in the cavity in the earth where the soldiers had been.

  The next day we counted our dead, and we saw who was missing from our village. There were few among us whose families were not affected. Many women and children had been captured, more than a hundred gone with the soldiers. We did not know where they would be taken, or how they would be treated. We were inconsolable. We wrapped our dead in whatever we could find. We carried them off, away from what was left of our camp, and we dug shallow graves and buried them and tried to cover the graves with rocks, but there were not enough rocks to be had. We did not burn their possessions, for this had already been done by your soldiers, for both the dead and the living. Each night the grieving women withdrew from us and moaned and slashed themselves. It was a horrible time. Every night Chloe and I covered ourselves with the burnt lodge cover and slept in the ravine where the soldiers had been.

  I stayed close to her, for in the days and weeks following the raid on our village hatred for whites swelled like a dead body left in the sun. It swelled until it would burst, and for many of the women who had lost husbands and sons, the hatred burst onto our white captives. Some women swore that they would kill a white person, even if that white person was one of the boys who guarded our horses, who had gone on raids with us, who had risked his own life and killed when killing needed to be done.

  The women were crazed with loss. Husbands were gone forever. Sons, dead. These men would not be coming back. Nor would daughters and mothers and sisters and aunts be returning. The women, when they looked at our white Indians, saw only their skin. It did not matter that our white Indians had remained loyal to the tribe, had not tried to sneak away in escape, had learned our ways and lived among us. It did not matter that they knew less about how to be white than how to be Indian. I could not trust that when a grief-stricken woman looked at Chloe she would not consider her white. If I had to go into council with Thin Knife or any of the other men, I made certain to leave Chloe in the care of Crawls Along.