The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson

by Nancy Peacock

  “These are not the deeds of a coward,” Chloe said.

  We were, Chloe and Bright Star and I, sitting along the bank of a river near our camp. The weather was dry, but not so dry yet that the river did not sparkle against the sun. The sky was clear, a solid pale blue. Bright Star pulled himself up along my leg and stood teetering against me. He smiled at me and reached out to tug on my nose. I took his hand from my face and kissed it and looked out over the river.

  “We should have escaped Sweetmore,” I said. “I should not have waited so long. We should have escaped long before the boat to Texas. It is my fault that we are here.”

  “That’s right,” Chloe answered. “It is your fault that I no longer live with Master Wilson, that I am no longer being raped by him.”

  “We could be in New Orleans.” I wrapped my arms around Bright Star and lifted him to my lap where I began his favorite game of smacking him lightly on the bottom. He giggled and squirmed. “You could be making biscuits and pies,” I said. “Do you even remember how to make biscuits?”

  She smiled at me. “I will never forget,” she said.

  “You could be living in a house. You could have dresses. Our child would never be hungry. I might have found work, teaching school. I might have provided for you. You deserve to be . . .” I could not find the Comanche word for what I wished to say, and so I finished in English. “You deserve to be a lady.”

  “I be a lady,” Chloe answered in her own English. She entwined her fingers in mine as they rested on Bright Star’s back. “You provide for me,” she said in Comanche.

  She stood and lifted Bright Star from my lap. She jiggled him in her arms, and I knew that she wanted him to go to sleep. It did not take long. “Take your shirt off,” she said. And so I did, and I spread it on the grass and Chloe laid our son onto it. She took me in her arms then. She held me. She traced once again, the scars on my back, first with the light touch of her fingers, then with her tongue.

  I remember this day. The whisper of the breeze through the prairie grasses. The way they caressed themselves all around us. A tiny bird landing on a stalk of grass nearby, the grass bending gently under its weight. I remember the way that Chloe’s skin glowed in the sun, and the way that sun warmed my back and my buttocks. I remember the gurgle of the stream, and the feel of my wife opening up beneath me.

  THE SUMMER of Adobe Walls, the summer we made our war on you, marked my sixth year with the tribe, and Chloe’s fourth. Salt was nearing nine years old now, Elk Water and Fall Up were becoming young women, and Cocklebur’s belly was big with Thin Knife’s fourth child.

  It hurts me to write of the final days of this summer, for this was the last summer that I would be on the plains, the last summer that I would be free, the last summer that Chloe and Bright Star and I would be all together, the last summer that I would be surrounded by the people who knew Nakuhakeetuh as my wife. It is hard to believe that this summer I speak of was not even a year ago.

  When I left on raids or to hunt, Chloe held Bright Star up to me as I sat on my horse, and I kissed his black hair while he kicked his little legs and sank his little fists into the scalps on my shield. I remember so well Chloe untangling our son’s fingers from the hair of a man I had killed. I remember so well the way she pulled Bright Star down into her arms, and kissed his face, how she stepped away, and smiled up at me, and said, “Make me proud.”

  Bright Star, in spite of the hardships of his early months, was growing strong. He tottered around the tipi and the camp, clinging to the hem of Chloe’s dress. When he saw me he lurched into my arms. He had a fat little brown belly. He knew the word for horse. He knew the word for dog. He knew the sign for tahseewo.

  One night we were all home. Thin Knife and I were both stringing new sinew onto our bows. Across the tipi the women, four of them now, all bent their heads to their sewing. Cocklebur rested her work on the mound of her belly. Elk Water and Salt and Fall Up lay under the buffalo robes, their arms wrapped around each other, quietly watching the fire. Bright Star lay sleeping in the crook of his mother’s legs. Nakuhakeetuh looked up from her work and said, “Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo, there is something I must tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  She smiled. “We are to have another child.”

  At this news my breath came out of me in a little huff.

  Thin Knife laughed and nodded and said, “This is good. We will have two babies in our lodge. Perhaps little warriors for both of us.”

  I laid down my bow and went to Nakuhakeetuh and kissed her cheek. “My heart is glad,” I said.

  I would like to close my eyes. I would like to close my ears to the noise of the people gathering outside my cell. I would, if I could, suspend time and live every minute I have left in this one moment in Thin Knife’s lodge, where my family surrounded me, where my wife and child sat across the fire from me, and inside her belly our second child grew. That summer was not so long ago, and yet it is forever ago. It was not an easy summer.

  We had declared war on you. I went on many raids. We attacked your hunters, your wagon trains, your little farms and camps. We struck and killed, and struck and killed again. We tortured any man we caught alive. We scalped the dead, and the soon to be dead. All summer long, we did this.

  You may think us cowards for attacking your civilians, but do not tell me that they were causing no harm. Were they not fouling our watering holes and rivers with their cities and towns? Were they not staking out the best grazing ground as their own forevermore? Were they not building the railroads and killing our buffalo? There would have been no war at all without them.

  All we wanted was to follow the buffalo, which were becoming fewer and fewer. Even that first summer of the hunters swarming across Texas we noticed this. We had to travel farther and farther to find the herds. The white hunters had spread out and set up many camps. Too many times for our comfort we passed by slaughtered herds, the bodies rotting in the sun, and too many times for your comfort you found your hunters killed and scalped.

  There was little rain that summer, and much work in providing for our families, and in killing the white people, but we went on about the business of it. Your army made some sort of rule that summer that all Indians were required to come into the agency and register, and if we did not do so, we would be considered hostiles. Do you hear how absurd you sounded to us? We must come in like little children, you said, and you would register every one of us and then we would be safe. You would count us as if we were sheep and herd us onto the land where you said we must stay forever. But we were not little children. We were not sheep to be herded and restrained. Besides, we heard of your rule far too late to meet the deadline, for we were not hovering about your forts awaiting word from you as to what we could and could not do. We were out on the plains, living and hunting as we had always done.

  Fall came and the drought broke and the heavy rains turned the plains into a carpet of mud. Because we had not registered, and were not contained, you sent your army out to find us. You sent into this miserable mire, not just one troop but many. We saw them looking for us, the Tonkawa scouts riding ahead, reading our trails, each troop crisscrossing the plains searching, searching, searching. We could not fight against such a large force, and so we did what we had always done. We slipped away and melted into the land. We were masters at this.

  There was a place, a special place, a favorite place to us all, the canyon known as Palo Duro, where I was first taken when I was captured, and where we would often winter. I have told you about it. The grass was good. The river was clean and beautiful, its banks lined with cottonwood, juniper, hackberry, wild cherry, and mesquite. The canyon walls were steep, so steep and so high that if you stood on the edge and looked down into our village, the tipis seemed no larger than Chloe’s button, which I still wore around my neck.

  It was a fortress and we went there. Many Indians went there, many tribes and many bands. We thought the soldiers would give up. The army had never campaigned into the winter
before. But they crossed the land, and each other’s tracks, over and over, as if the pressure of their horses’ hooves across the ground could squeeze us out of hiding.

  There was no talk among our men of giving ourselves up. We had no reason to. We had winter provisions. We had warm robes and lodges again. We had many horses. We had scouts who would see the soldiers long before they saw us. And we had this canyon in which to hide. They could not find us here. We were sure of it, and while the soldiers lived out in the plains and rode about in the miserable gumbo of mud, we tucked in. We cooked our meat, and ate our meals, and we talked, and laughed, and repaired our clothes, and carved new arrows and waited for spring.

  Chloe’s belly became a little marble. I lay my hand often on her stomach. The women sewed, Chloe making a new shirt for Bright Star. Thin Knife and I spent our time finding games in which to gamble. Cocklebur gave birth to a son, and Thin Knife named him Tuhkohnee, Little Frog Croak. Again the black circle was painted above our lodge door to show that a warrior had been born.

  And then one day our scouts told us that Bad Hand MacKenzie and his soldiers had set up a camp, too close to our canyon for comfort. We formed a war party. Hundreds of us. As I have said, there were many Indians, many tribes, many bands come together in the Palo Duro Canyon. Besides Comanche, there were Kiowa, Cheyenne, Apache. We planned to attack that night, stampede the horses and kill whatever men we could, and then the next day we would lead them on a chase away from our canyon, away from our women and children. We would lead the soldiers across the plains and get them lost. We would split up, and split again, and again, and confuse our trail until it could no longer be followed. It would be a simple thing to lead the soldiers to places without water. It would be a simple thing to take their horses. An attack always began with the horses.

  But when we attacked that night we discovered that the horses had been so thoroughly hobbled they could not move. They stood in terror as we rode among them whooping and hollering and firing our guns trying to make them stampede. When that failed we began circling, and the soldiers fired on us. But it was no use for either side, and early in the morning we gave it up.

  At daybreak the soldiers pulled out of camp and we watched from a high ridge. We did not try to hide. We showed ourselves, hundreds of us, painted up, the feathers of our war chiefs’ bonnets flicking in the breeze, our rifles and lances held in clear sight. We drove down toward them and shot at them, and they attacked, and we retreated, laying a trail southwest, away from our village.

  We were well satisfied when our rear-end scouts told us that Bad Hand and his men were following. We kept on, southwest, baiting them, showing ourselves and not showing ourselves, shooting at them, and taunting them, and keeping them on our tail all day long, leading them farther and farther away from our village.

  At sundown the soldiers went into camp. We stayed hidden and watched to see that it was not a feint, and as they started their cook fires and hobbled their horses we were convinced that our strategy had worked, and we doubled back and rode hard north to return to the Palo Duro.

  A Kiowa medicine man predicted that we would be safe there, but even if he had not done so, the talk among the men, the warriors, me, was that we could not be found. And besides, they would not follow us at night. Not across the muddy plains to a place they had never been before. No. They were making camp. We all saw it. We had led the soldiers twenty-five or thirty miles away. We had left them camping in another canyon. They did not know where we were. The plains were too muddy for them to make this trip. We believed all this, and it was our undoing.

  When I reached my home, Chloe dished out some stew for me, and as Thin Knife and I sat eating she asked, “Are we safe now?”

  “We are safe,” I answered.

  Thin Knife nodded to his wives. “Do not worry,” he said. “We have led them far away. It is night. The plains too muddy to travel. They don’t even know where we are.” He shrugged. “Do not worry,” he said again. He stood and Cocklebur handed him Tuhkohnee. “My Little Frog Croak,” he said. “You are my Little Frog Croak.”

  “You must see the shirt I made for Bright Star,” Chloe said, and she held up the finished garment. It was made of soft cream-colored buckskin, and she put it on our son and tugged it around his little chest. I fingered the leather and complimented her on her work. Bright Star climbed into my lap. We ate and crawled into our beds and fell asleep, and we woke up only when it was too late.

  The attack came in the morning. The soldiers had scrambled down the cliffs of our canyon while we slept. It was a long ways down, and if only we had awakened, we could have easily picked them off as they clung to the sides of the canyon walls. But we did not wake. We were tired from fighting and our hard ride home. There had been one rifle shot, and then nothing, and upon hearing it, I had assumed an Indian was hunting deer. I had rolled back over and lifted Bright Star’s little hand to make sure that I did not crush it, and wrapped my arm around Chloe. And then I had fallen back asleep.

  Was it the thundering of hooves that woke me, or was it the alarm being sounded, or perhaps the screaming and yelling and shooting? I cannot say, for all the sounds erupted at once. I was up. Thin Knife was up. We grabbed our guns and ran outside. “Run,” I yelled to Chloe as I lifted the tipi flap to follow Thin Knife out. “Run to the cliffs and climb out of here.”

  Thin Knife and I ran to the horses, as did all the other men. The women and children were everywhere, fleeing, screaming, and dropping things that they had tried to save. The ground was littered with dropped pots and empty cradleboards and sacks of flour and buffalo robes and blankets. The soldiers came on, riding into our village, shooting and trampling the lodges.

  I was mounted now, and I rode with the other men toward the cliffs, and there we climbed up, and covered the retreat of our families, shooting down into the crowd of soldiers. Behind us our women and children clambered up to the top of the canyon. I reloaded, and as I did so I saw down below a woman kneeling in the dirt touching something that lay before her, something that was brown and red and dressed in a cream-colored shirt. The soldiers’ horses surged around Chloe and what I knew to be the body of Bright Star.

  Bullets hit the dirt all around her, pinging up bits of grass. I slid back down the cliff. I dodged the charging horses. I reached her and grabbed her arm and pulled her up. “I tripped,” she said. “I was running and I fell and the horses . . .” She did not finish, and I glanced down only briefly to see Bright Star’s trampled body. I did not have to see this for long to have the image seared into my mind. He was unrecognizable, bloody and flattened beneath the hooves of a horse, or perhaps many horses. It had been not an hour before that I had lifted his little hand so that I would not crush it as I rolled over to wrap my arm around my wife.

  I pulled Chloe away from there. She wailed and fought against me, but I tugged on her arm and pulled her out of the middle of the action. I told her that she must move, she must come with me. There was no scooping Bright Star’s body up from the ground. I would not lose Chloe too. This is what I thought as I tugged on her arm and pulled her along.

  It was too late to run to the canyon walls. The men who had been covering the retreat of our village had done so, and they had now climbed the cliffs and disappeared. We were alone among the soldiers. Somehow we wove through them without harm, and when we came to a bush I shoved Chloe into it to hide, and I followed. She cried and clung to me. I hushed her. “Be quiet,” I whispered.

  The sounds of the battle died down. Fewer and fewer shots were fired. We heard now only the sounds of the soldiers as they ransacked our village. Tipi poles clattering as our lodges fell or were knocked down. The neighing of horses being herded together. Shouts and exclamations from soldiers as they found things worth keeping. Soon we heard footsteps nearby. I spread the branches of the bush and looked out to see a soldier poking a lance he had found into the shrubs, searching for hiding Indians. It would not be long before we were discovered. It would not be long before
we would be either killed or taken, and I did the only thing that I knew to do in order to protect my wife and our unborn child.

  “Chloe,” I said. “Nakuhakeetuh, I love you.” I pulled her to me, and held her, and then I pushed her away to look into her eyes. I rubbed my fingers across her cheeks to wipe the tears away. “You must go to the soldiers,” I said. “Tell them that you are Mrs. Joseph Wilson.”

  The sudden jerks of her sobs ceased. Her eyes became large with fear and surprise, for this must have been the last thing she ever thought to hear from me. She shook her head. “Naw,” she said in her old language. “Persy, naw. I ain’t married to him.”

  We could hear the soldier’s boots grinding into the dirt as he moved closer. We could hear the lance, stabbing into the brush nearby.

  “It is the only thing to do,” I said. “They are going to find us. He is just out there. You can hear him. They are going to think you are white anyway. You have to tell them that you are. Be white,” I said, “so you can live, so our baby can live.” I touched her hand. “I love you,” I said.

  “Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo,” she said. “Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo.” It was the last thing she ever said to me, and she said it twice. My name.

  I grabbed her arm and I dragged her out of the bush and I pushed her toward the soldier. “Take her,” I said. “I do not want her anymore.”

  She looked at me with panic. Six soldiers suddenly surrounded us, and just as suddenly they divided and three surrounded Chloe and three surrounded me. They held their guns on us. I thought that I could not bear to see the pleading in her eyes, but I made myself look and I held her eyes with mine and I said, “I caught her near that town you call Drunken Bride. She should go back to them I guess.” I raised my hands in surrender. “It is all over for me.”