She was not called upon to work that day because the other women saw what she was doing and one came down with the loan of a kettle. It was the older woman who seemed to be related to Gonkon and was called in Kiowa grandmother. But all older women were called grandmother. Mary boiled their clothes. She stirred the water with a sycamore sapling pole and she and her son stood wrapped in their ragged blankets. She made an ointment of the poisonous mountain laurel beans, boiled and then mashed into fat. She plastered her head and her body with it and then washed it out. The powerful toxic alkaloid made her tongue tingle and her hands shake and the lice all died. Thick wads of Jube’s hair wafted off across the sandy flats. They looked like the clustered tatters of the buffalo bulls’ forelocks that were sheared off when they fought and crashed into one another head-on in the spring.
Aperian Crow rode by. He was magnificent in large abalone shell earrings and a bright plaid turban, a new soft buffalo robe thick with winter hair, moccasins to the knee beaded in the distinct Kiowa floral patterns. His shirt had been freshly boiled and his flashy dappled gray horse wore an embroidered saddlecloth. The band had shifted suddenly from poverty to wealth now they had found the main buffalo herd. Everyone was well fed and strong. They were celebratory and kind, they wore their best clothes. He said something in the tonal Kiowa language that made him sound as if he were singing, or beginning some melody that was never completed. He smiled and lifted his chin and gestured toward Jube’s sheared hair that the wind was taking away, toward Jube’s now-bald head. And so Jube got the name Fights in Autumn. This was a joke that it took Jube some time to understand.
Mary and Jube stepped into the open oval entrance of Gonkon and Aperian Crow’s lodge. Mary’s vision underwent some strange shift as she entered, in that everything became many times larger in some indescribable way, and then shrank down to normal again, but she maintained her balance and they stood quietly to one side without moving. Aperian Crow laughed at the sight of them, their newly boiled ragged clothes sewn together with the agave thorn and its thread, Jube’s shaved head shining and Mary’s tightly waved hair twisted and packed into the two combs. Their brown arms and legs shone with oil. Aperian Crow indicated that they should sit down in the place of lowest status, to the left of the door, and they did so and then she and her son ate from the bowl that was passed around from hand to hand, meat and dried wild peas and mesquite beans. Mary turned to look at her daughter.
Cherry sat with Millie on their bed made of willow withes, thick with buffalo robes. Cherry tossed a dried, inflated grouse air sac to the two-year-old. She felt important and petted since she was now six and had also been adopted. They batted it back and forth. It was thin and light, a transparent balloon. Two small elegant people decorated with tiny bone rings on their hands and glass beads in their ears and bright red paint dotted all along the parting of their hair. Millie was now called Sain-to-odii.
When they had all eaten, Gonkon handed two buffalo robes to Jube and Mary and indicated that they should spend the night and Cherry called out, “Mama, she says you-all are sleeping inside.”
Mary signed her thanks.
“Mama, you pretty,” said Cherry.
Mary nodded and smiled.
When the fire had burned low a man stepped inside and waited to be acknowledged. Aperian Crow looked at him carefully and made a gesture for him to sit down. It was one of the visiting Kiowa-Apache. He wore straight bangs over his forehead that had been stiffened until they stood out in a spray. He began to sign to Aperian Crow and so the two men smiled and talked and told jokes in sign language. Mary watched the signing as long as she could, trying to understand and remember, but then her head drooped forward as sleep overcame her. She jerked upright again as she heard them laughing and over the crackling of the fire she also heard Cherry’s laughter. Mary looked up, alarmed. Gonkon had said Cherry’s name, which was something about a fish, “Ohn pi.”
Cherry was signing rapidly. She was making the two men and Gonkon laugh. Her hands signed a story out of the dense and smoky air, threw shadows on the hide walls. She signed with fingers that spoke of falling in the river and chasing the grouse and Gonkon chiding them. She imitated Gonkon’s frown and her admonitory finger. The men laughed again. Then with the wisdom of a child who had seen her brother shot dead, watched her mother raped and beaten to the edge of death, who had been dragged along the ground by one arm by a man on horseback until he finally decided to throw her up on the horse behind him, she folded her small hands and quit while she was ahead.
After a moment she turned back to Millie and the balloon, and they bunted it into the warm air with their fingertips. Mary watched the glinting air sac. Is this not how people speak with one another? Is this not the way those who can speak lift and balance words between them and send them into the air to one another and keep the speaking afloat? Mary sat quietly outside the gates of any language. They were closed to her. She watched as the air sac floated and drifted in the currents of hot air from the fire and tumbled back and forth between the girls’ fingertips.
THE BUFFALO WERE moving south again. Back to their caves in the remote south and so the people harvested them while they could. They took down enough buffalo to see them through the winter and although it seemed a great deal to Mary she also knew that this supply would dwindle down to starvation levels before the herds came back in the spring and she would try to survive until then because then Britt would come and get them. Mary did not reason out how this could come to be. When they crested a low, sloping ridge she could see the immense distances of relentless plain that lay between her and Britt. He was now a faint image hard to recall, his face and voice were fading and elusive.
They moved west along the Canadian River through white sands and heavy trees parallel to the water, lengthy groves of cottonwood and sycamore and snarling vines; grapevine, greenbrier. Like a four-hundred-mile oasis narrow as a snake. Above this valley yucca and sotol spiked all along the bare slopes. Clear drops on each needle in the foggy mornings. Cherry and Jube took up the singing language and its fluting tones easily and said the names of things and what the things did. An old man whose right hand shook all day and even in the night when he got up and walked around the lodges as if he carried an invisible rattle was called by words that meant possessed, inhabited, he counts out with that hand the remaining days of his life.
Jube sharpened his mother’s knife every night on a stone, working with an intent look on his face. They had their small space just inside the tipi entrance with their two buffalo robes. It was their space and no one stepped into it and they did not step into the space of anyone else, and as they settled themselves and cooked what they had to cook in the ancient pot they did not look at anyone else, nor did anyone look at them, and so they all lived in their own privacy, inside invisible rooms.
In the mornings Mary got up early to help with the corn. It was blue and red and yellow, the beautiful grains like jewels. It was soaked in ashes whenever they stopped for a few days so that the grains slipped their glassy indigestible hulls, and then had to be rinsed in the river with a net over the mouth of the skin bag and then pounded into a mass and then cooked in the ashes in a square of cornhusks. Old Man Komah called it tamal. It was so good, so hot on a cold morning, the thick, yellow pudding smoking from its cornhusks.
Jube thought about where he could go out to hunt. He would make himself a man in this small band. Those who were important and respected were hunters and thus far he and his mother were considered among the poor, the lost, those without status because they had no man to hunt for them, and so he would become that man.
He ran with the other boys his own age and learned to shoot with bow and arrow. It was a simple child’s bow made of a single piece of Osage orange. He learned by watching. To hold the bow in his left hand with his thumb cocked up and the arrow laid in that notch and drawn smoothly back to the head so that he could feel every imperfection along the shaft. He saw its yawing flight and how it shunted and misse
d and struck awry.
He spent a long time sitting near the men to watch them make their shafts and how they straightened and smoothed them, how they were fletched. He learned to use the round shield and dance in front of five or six shooters and stop their blunt arrows. The shield was a toy shield of thin scrap buffalo hide but Jube learned to keep it moving in a figure-eight pattern and bunt off the stob-headed arrows as they came at him. From time to time he was allowed to ride an elderly gelding that had once been white but was now heavily dotted with cedar-colored roaning. He was freed of all heavy chores and the women of the camp always had something for him. A grouse wing or pecan meats crushed and scattered over a fresh tamale or antelope eyes popped out of the head, smoking hot. Once Nocteawah signed that he wanted to see Jube argue with his fingers again, but Jube turned away.
He fought with the other boys. Jube was a hard fighter. He didn’t care what they did to him. He and Kiisah smashed each other with rocks and then sank their hands into one another. He took hold of Kiisah’s hair and tried to wrench it from his head but Kiisah could get no grip on Jube’s hair because he didn’t have any. They fell into a dead campfire and wallowed in sand and ashes, silently, rib bones flying up around them. Two grown men came and pulled them apart. One of them signed to Jube, We are moving. There is no time for fighting. Fight later. And as they walked away the men were silently laughing. “Fights in Autumn,” one of the men said. Jube’s left eye closed in a round leaking bulb and blood ran out of his nose but he held a handful of cold wet sand from the river packed over his face for a while and refused all help from his mother.
Kiisah became a silent observer of all that Jube did with pieces of bone. The fish carvings that were to dangle on the line and attract calico bass and carp that lived in the river, the white bone rings with lizards and galloping snakes and fishnet designs etched into them with ashes. Kiisah asked for one and Jube gave him a hair slide made of a ring of antelope thigh bone with dangles made of mother-of-pearl. Making the tiny holes in things was Jube’s greatest problem. Then Komah taught him to use a bow drill.
The creatures that lived on the south Texas and New Mexico plains each had their own guarded lives to live on certain trajectories that moved between the seasons and above the earth and below it. Fox fur would shed frost like no other, and Jube wanted foxes. They lived in holes where they kept their young ones away from the world until it was winter, and now was the time to take them. He spent a day and a night watching at a hole in the bank of the Canadian. He did not eat so they would not smell him. When at last the mother appeared he stood up and when he drew his bowstring he also drew in his own breath to suck away the life he wanted to take. He shot her and left her lying with an arrow through her ribs, her jaws snapping like a machine, and ran to the hole and began to dig. He dug into the frozen red soil with his bare hands and then with a stick he found to one side, until he got the kits and clubbed them to death and then the mother. He thrust a sharpened stick through their back legs and put them over his shoulder. They were heavy but skinning was women’s work. He walked and ran for an entire day until he caught up with the moving village of Kiowa, running in the cold dust, following the long snaking lines of travois tracks and the beaten paths of horses, until far ahead he could see smoke and the mist of horses’ breath lying low to the ground. He could see the poles rising and tipi covers flying out and up, a village appearing like magic among the bare cottonwoods alongside the Canadian. He walked among the expanding tipis with the mother fox and her kits over his shoulder and did not look to one side or the other.
Old Man Komah sat on his cart and called to him.
“Give me one,” he said.
Jube turned toward the cart and without a word handed up one of the fox kits with its rich pelt. Old Man Komah took it.
“I will give you something for this,” he said. “In return.”
“Never mind,” said Jube. He waved his hand. “It is a present.”
Old Man Komah turned his attention to the dead fox kit so that Jube would not see him smile.
The foxes were put between the liner and the tipi wall to stay cold until his mother could skin them and tan the skins. Jube sat and ate all that his mother and Gonkon gave him. He felt the fat and meat enter his bloodstream in a hot rush and then lay down and slept a long time.
There was a pleasant feeling that night in Aperian Crow’s tipi. The Koitsenko called Jube by his name, Fights in Autumn, and made a come-here motion. Jube went around by the tipi entrance to avoid passing between the others and the fire and sat down on his heels beside Aperian Crow. The man took Jube’s hand and held it palm up and poured into it five good steel hunting points. Jube understood that Aperian Crow was saying something about asking someone whose name was something about a face in the sky. That he should go to that person to see about a good horse.
Gonkon was the wife of an important man. So far she was the only wife with him. He had two other wives but they had begun to fight between themselves and Aperian Crow had tired of it. He wanted to be alone this winter with Gonkon and so he sent the others back to their families on the Arkansas River far up in Colorado.
Since Gonkon was a rich woman she had a tipi liner: a six-foot-high band of canvas that was strung all around inside and the skirts of it were pegged down to the floor with parfleche packing boxes and stones or whatever came to hand. Then Gonkon could lift the outside tipi skins a few inches between each tipi pole and fresh air roared up between the liner and the outside wall, drawing the smoke up with it. The people in Gonkon’s tipi sat warm on the draftless floor. So that night when the blizzard came, they of all the people slept lying with their legs out straight.
It began with a hard, single blast. This was in the late evening when the sun was already down but not all of the light was yet gone. It was very still. The bare cottonwood limbs lifted and floated in black nerve patterns against the fading pink and magenta sky. In those dramatic and discrete slashes of black, Fights in Autumn could see Kokopelli with his cedar flute and hear his songs of love and desire ringing across the drifting nighttime planes of the great world. Suddenly the northwest side of the tipi belled in with the force of the blast and then slackened and then a few moments later it flattened again against the tipi poles and the liner. Aperian Crow lifted his head. He was thinking about his horses.
With a series of shrieks the wind hit again, and this time it carried snow. The sound rose into a sustained howl. Mary stood up and went out with Gonkon to bring in armfuls of wood. They fought with the round hide door, snatching it shut, and tied it down. They stacked the wood against the liner all around the circumference of the tipi and then it was full night and the wind and snow bore down on the Kiowa and all their animals with a great noise.
Mary lay half awake all night to watch the flickering light of the fire shifting on the tipi walls and the liner, a hypnotic and incessant dashing of light and shadow, the noise of the tipi cover and liner belling in and out accompanied by the unpredictable stanzas of the wind. The fire smoke shot upward, carried by the chimney of air that rose between the liner and the walls. It blossomed up into the smoke flaps and out. Whirling eddies of snow sifted down between the flaps and flashed in the light of the fire, and vanished. The fire threw shadows of moccasins hung up to dry so that they seemed to walk against the tipi walls, the fire threw shadows of a fishnet and a gourd dipper snaring the evaporating snowflakes.
Mary lay warm under her buffalo robe. Its dense hair circled her neck. She could hear Jube breathing, deeply asleep, and Cherry in some dream, whispering in Kiowa. All their possessions so hard-won in their places: the knives, the moccasins, her combs and the box of bone and shell and bits of silver that was Jube’s workbox, the silver spur and now his arrowheads. His foxes stiff and cold between the liner and the outside wall. Mary closed her eyes. She had ceased to dream in language. She dreamed now only in images.
She dreamed of buffalo skeletons reassembling themselves, walking disjointedly through the snow and w
ind. They walked in jerky articulation into the world of the storm, striding forward with eye sockets bald as moon craters looking out of their earless heads. The flakes passed through rib cages and the eyeholes of skulls as the skeletons of buffalo walked on and on through the blizzard, undaunted, determined, heading back to where they had come from, far to the south, to the cave of winds where they were endlessly reborn. Where they would re-form over the long winter and then come north again in the spring as they always had and always would.
Chapter 10
THROUGH THE WINTER of 1864 and 1865 Britt Johnson lived in the cabin by himself. His son Jim lay buried a hundred yards away, above the flood line of Elm Creek, on a pleasant small bluff with a view northward so he could forever watch for the Comanche and the Kiowa who had killed him, where he could lie in sleepless vigil, watching under the full moon, listening for the sound of a hundred horses at full gallop, a sound that was like no other.
Britt’s shadow fell on the plastered white walls, restless and without comfort. He was impatient with the chore of cooking and so he ate little and there was little to eat. The bare limbs of the cottonwoods and the sumac, the twisted mesquite, were like iron calligraphy against the cold sky. The Indians raided only when there was enough grass to feed their horses, but now and again two young men or three would cross the Red River on a winter lark and ride south into Young County, singing about their wish to come away with Texas horses and Texas captives and to bury their steel points and bullets in enemy bodies. He kept watch against their coming to take away what little remained to him.
Britt walked away from his shadow in the house. He went out to Jim’s grave and talked to the boy. Jim had said, Dad you never say much. Dad tell me about how you all came from Kentucky. Tell me about Nacogdoches. And he had said, Well there’s not much to tell. And he remembered the disappointed, frustrated look on Jim’s face.
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