Britt loosened his hand. He had shut his hand around the saddle horn in an iron grip and his fingers were cramping. That was what the lift of the eyebrows meant; it meant, So I heard.
The Comanche stuck out his lower lip and lifted his chin toward the northwest. “There. That is where they are,” he said. Britt nodded. “Your wife and two children. A week away. With the Koiguh.”
“The Koi-guh.”
“You have come a long way,” said Tissoyo.
“Yes.”
Tissoyo smiled brightly. “Stay with me,” he said. “I was sent out here to look after Esa Havey’s horses because I threw flowers at his wife. Do you understand Via Láctea?”
“No.”
“The Mexicans say Via Láctea.” Tissoyo threw his head back until he faced the cool blue spring sky overhead and stuck out his lower lip. That was how they pointed at things, Britt thought. You never knew in what gesture or sign or object did magic lie, hidden maledictions or a bewitching that might be started up unawares like a jackrabbit bounding out from under your horse’s feet. Sprinting toward trouble and horrors on the grassed earth. “That up there, at night, stars without end in a long river across the sky, the Mexicans call it Via Láctea.”
“Ah,” said Britt. “I understand.” He meant the Milky Way.
“We Nemernah, we say, Esa Havey. Same. Via Láctea, Esa Havey.”
Britt lifted his eyebrows in the assenting gesture. This seemed to make Tissoyo happy.
The Comanche dropped both hands and patted his horse on either side of its neck. He said, “The camp chief, the civil chief, said I was a troublemaker and making eyes at Esa Havey’s wife was immoral and immodest and somebody would end up having to pay a great many horses to make somebody else feel better when his honor was wounded. So I might as well look after Esa Havey’s horses until when the strawberries are so big like the tip of my little finger because if this kind of thing kept up I would end up in debt to him anyway. And here I am all by myself. What do you have to eat?”
Britt smiled. “Probably about the same as you.”
“Do you have sugar?”
“Yes, I have brown sugar.” The horses shifted beneath them, trying to touch noses and smell of one another’s breath. Britt glanced toward the horse herd. Several horses had Moses Johnson’s brand and others carried the brand of Elizabeth Fitzgerald. In the noon sun they had broken out in a slight sweat that looked like leopard spots on their necks. He said nothing.
“Do you have coffee?” said Tissoyo.
“Yes. But it is green.”
“We will roast it. I have a square of metal so big, thus, it is from an army train. It was the top off of a box of ammunition. We can roast it on that. Come with me.”
Chapter 12
THEY RODE TOWARD a shallow valley in the distance. A small and shallow little creek valley with pecan trees, the grass grazed short by the buffalo until it seemed it had been carefully mowed. Not a stick of underbrush. Just the naked smooth grass and the stand of pecans and here and there fallen limbs. The gray trees with their bark as corrugated as runs of ancient lava. The pecans lifted brilliant, lime-green leaves no bigger than a snail’s shell up to the sky as if washing them in the cool air. The two of them set about gathering wood and when the fire blazed in transparent blue flames they stood in the smoke to rid themselves of mosquitoes. Britt unsaddled Cajun and lifted the pack from the pack pony’s back. The two of them shook themselves and then dropped down on their front knees carefully, like old people, and then flopped over on their sides and rolled with deep grunts of pleasure. Cajun wallowed on his back and his big hooves pawed with delicate gestures in the air. They got up and shook again and sent grass and dirt flying. Then they trotted over to the Comanche horses.
When the fire was down to coals Tissoyo set the metal lid of the ammunition box over them and Britt shook out green coffee beans onto the lid. They banged and jumped as they roasted. Britt took up a stick and began to turn the beans and shift them around.
She was alive. The children were alive. Britt felt as if he stood before the opening of a deep cave in which a great treasure was hidden. A treasure made up of all the things that made life worth living. If it would get his wife and children back he would have taken up his rifle and shot his new friend in the back without a moment’s hesitation but he had to enter this perilous and occult cavern with his hands empty of weapons.
“How are we going to grind them?” Britt asked.
“Here, I have this thing.” Tissoyo turned to a rawhide box and poked around in it. The pack box was painted with careful and brilliant designs along each seam. Loving work. Tissoyo held up a sausage grinder.
Britt nodded. It was Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s sausage grinder. The wooden handle had a chip out of it at a certain place. He had seen Mary use it many times.
“All right,” he said.
So he sat and ground up the roasted beans in the sausage grinder and although it was very coarse they still got good coffee out of it.
“The Americans do excellent things with wheels.” Tissoyo turned the handle of the sausage grinder.
“Yes, they do.”
He saw that Tissoyo had not bothered to set up a tipi. He was young and unmarried and he did not have a wife to set it up for him and so he was living the bachelor life in the way of bachelors all over the world and in every age; things in a muddle and careless with the remnants of food and his extra moccasins and a shabby wool coat hung on a tree limb. The Comanche drank the black coffee out of a tin cup and gestured toward dried meat hanging from the rack in cinnamon-colored ribbons.
“Now take some of that and put brown sugar on it and eat as much as you like and tomorrow we will go out and find a buffalo calf.”
“Good,” said Britt. He saw a Spencer repeating rifle in a decorated rawhide scabbard and a hard box of untanned leather beside it for the ammunition.
“You came through the raiding country,” said Tissoyo. “The place where we raid.”
“Yes, I did.” Britt took a pinch of brown sugar out of its bag and sprinkled it on a strip of jerky. “Honey is even better,” he said.
“Yes, but we don’t have the hives up here like they do down in the hills,” said Tissoyo. He pinched up a sticky clump of brown sugar from the bag that Britt pushed toward him and dropped it on the dried meat. He crushed up the sugared jerky between his strong white teeth. The fire reflected on the small pools of water that lay in the shelving creek bed.
“Yes, there are plenty of hives down there,” said Britt. “Down where there are big trees. Where are the white women and children?”
“The white woman? White. Ah, taibo. She and the little girl are with Esa Havey, with us Comanche.” Tissoyo swallowed. “Very good. The taibo woman is a slave to the first wife of Eaten Alive. The first wife of Eaten Alive is my mother’s sister’s child. They got into a big fight. The big loud taibo woman was in the water, on the Washita River, to bathe her tits because her tits were so big and swollen where Hears the Dawn and That’s It had beaten on them down in the raiding country. She was sitting in the water to cool her tits and Eaten Alive’s wife came and told her to get out of the water and threw a digging stick at her and hit the taibo woman over the left eye.” Tissoyo tapped himself over the left eyebrow. “So then the big loud woman got up and took her stick away from her and smashed my cousin in the head.”
Tissoyo began to laugh.
“Um-hum,” said Britt. He reached for more of the jerky.
“The big loud woman was yelling something. Hears the Dawn said she was saying ‘Kill me.’ Hears the Dawn can understand their speech, but he can’t speak it very well. Everybody was laughing. Maybe she said, ‘I will kill her.’ Somebody took up a rifle and said he would kill her, the loud woman, if it would make the loud woman happy, but Eaten Alive threw the man’s gun barrel down and said he could get a hundred dollars for her and so not to kill her. Now then, Eaten Alive’s first wife lay there for an hour and then got up and went and got her digg
ing stick and walked away from the camp for turnips. She walked like this.”
Tissoyo laughed and with his hand made a wavering motion.
Britt laughed as well and then choked on the sugar and cleared his throat. He smiled briefly and then took up his coffee cup. Maybe God had sent him into the camp of this talkative, gossipy, lonely young man who had been sent into temporary exile because of his frivolous behavior and who would probably talk the entire night. He had not been shot at. He must not lose any of these advantages. He nodded and smiled.
“And the captive girl?”
“Yes, yes, she is so big.” Tissoyo indicated the height of the three-year-old with his hand. “She has gray eyes and black hair.”
“Yes.”
“She is sick. The loud woman tends to her. The girl sleeps in Eaten Alive’s tipi but she sleeps by the entrance and it is cold there and there is always wind coming in when somebody comes in and so she is still sick. People step over her when they can but they don’t always look where they are stepping and sometimes people step on her. She is too sick to get out of the way.”
“You just came from the Wichitas.”
“Well…” Tissoyo looked up and squinted one eye. “It was a half-moon like this three times when I came.”
Three months, thought Britt. She could be dead by now. But they were alive three months ago.
“There was nothing I could do. Maybe things have changed by now.”
Britt nodded.
“How could I tell Eaten Alive how to run things in his own tipi? He says I saw the rinches shoot my little brother in the head when they came down on our camp on what you call the Llano River and so what do I care about one of theirs? If she lives she lives.”
“When was that?”
“I am not really sure. No, it was when Eaten Alive and some others of his same age rode down the river they call the Nueces and shot up the red-bearded man’s ranchito. They tried to stab the redheaded girl to death, but she wouldn’t die. Before they started his little brother begged to go along.” Tissoyo lifted a hand. “What can you do when a child begs you? So he took him. And then after the fight at the redheaded man’s ranchito, they came back north, and Eaten Alive and all of them camped at night there on the Llano and the rinches came upon them. What a fight that was!” Tissoyo slapped his hands together. “I only heard about it. I was too young to go. How I wish I had been there. When they all came home they were streaming a kind of fire around them.”
Tissoyo ran his hands down through the air, each to one side of him, with waving fingers.
“They sang as they came into camp. Fifty men all singing of what they had done and how they had charged into the farms and ranches of the enemy. And somebody started up a mourning song for Eaten Alive’s little brother, ah, it made me cry to hear them singing as they rode. You could hear their voices for a mile. They had a red scalp and two blond scalps, very long ones that waved and shook in the wind, and in that hair was the soul of the enemy held tight, tight. There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”
“Think of it,” said Britt. Fijate, hijo.
It was now fully dark. A light wind carried the odor of new grass that speared up through the stems of winter growth. A dry pelt that sulked heavy and brass-colored and fallen. Enough new grass that before long the Indians could ride out of their safe and comfortable camps and into the war country where everything was permitted and everything was done.
“But the one you call a black woman and children and the very smallest taibo girl are with the Koi-guh,” Tissoyo said.
“The Kiowa. Why?” Britt said.
Tissoyo looked at him in surprise. “We always split up the captives,” he said. “So they can’t talk with one another and plan to escape.” He gestured and his copper bracelets rattled. “You say Kiowa. Very well.”
“I see, yes.” Britt picked up a stick and pressed it on the coals. “Where are they?”
“Farther north. They went far up the river you call Canadian, north of the Wichita Mountains. Past the Antelope Hills. Aperian Crow doesn’t want the agent to bother him about things that are no business of the agent’s. The Kiowa are tricky people. I will help you. You are a slave yourself.”
“No,” said Britt. He thought of how to explain it. “They let me go.”
“You paid them,” said Tissoyo. He turned to Britt expectantly. “Dollar.”
Britt considered again what to say and after a moment he said, “Yes. I paid them.”
“Well, in the morning we will talk and I’ll tell you how to deal with the Kiowa. They are stingy people, and they are tricky to deal with, but I am going to help you. The taibo baby girl is the one adopted by Aperian Crow’s wife. His youngest wife is in love with her. You see I will tell you everything, how you are to act and so on.”
He loves intrigue, thought Britt. It is meat and honey to him. He loves to get in the middle of something and keep secrets and to outbargain people and to know things other people don’t know.
“I will do whatever you say,” said Britt.
“Good, then.”
They fell silent. In the east there was a faint flicker of lightning on the horizon. There was no moonrise except for a thin and milky light filtering through the overcast. Tissoyo lifted his head toward the east.
“Now, there are four Thunders,” he said. “There is Copper Thunderbird and Walking Thunder and Falling-to-pieces Thunder and the last one is Shy Thunder, which is what that is, and it may come to us and it may not.”
Britt lifted his head to the ancient pecan trees and their brittle limbs. All the leaves were lit up on the undersides by their campfire and when they moved there was a flickering quality to them. The great fragile limbs arched above them.
“If there is a wind we’d better move out from under.”
“We will see.”
Britt called his horses and fed them a handful of corn and then hobbled them by the fading light of the fire and left them to graze on the new grass. They nosed busily through the overlay of dead stems for the lime-green bouquets that had started up, spray after spray. He sat down on his saddle blankets and turned his saddle upside down so that his head was against the fleecing of the underside. He was not afraid of Tissoyo or that Tissoyo would change his mind. He was wary of what could change Tissoyo’s mind for him. There might be some sign, some portent that would tell the Comanche that his guest was dangerous, that his guest harbored secret designs and needed to be shot. It could be the appearance of a flock of ravens in a certain pattern, or the appearance of one of the four thunders bearing a warning and speaking in an imperative voice. Britt was as alert to the possibility of signs and portents as was Tissoyo himself. He lay himself down carefully under his blankets and left his revolver wrapped up in his coat under his saddle and commended himself to God and fell asleep.
HE AND THE young Comanche sat on their horses downwind as a herd of two or three hundred bison walked deliberately down the long slope of the world and its tissues of wavering new grass. Britt crossed his hands over his saddle horn and watched. They were good to watch. They smelled like cattle, warm and rich, and their deep grunting calls made a web of sound almost below hearing. Their upright horns curved out of the mass of their dark heads so low to the earth. They paced toward the banks of Deep Red Creek for their morning drink. Ravens overhead sailed along with them calling tok, tok. He saw a raven alight between the horns of a shaggy bull and with a quick motion settled its tail and crossed its wings behind and began to hammer at the bull’s head, pecking up ticks. The bull stared off at the creek waters and continued to chew. He was ragged. Patches of winter hair fell away in wads and the scissortails carried these away in tufts for their new nests.
The ravens had seen Britt and Tissoyo but they did not raise the alarm. They were busy. The cows and bulls walked grazing toward the water. When they came to a low place in the bright red sands of the bank they slid down and th
ey splashed into the current, the cows weighing a ton and the bulls a ton and a half, sinking to their bellies in the brilliantly colored water. They were the divinities who ruled the intricate progressive movements of the year on the high southern plains, and other animals walked along in their passage. Wolves trotted patiently at a certain distance and the light-headed buffalo birds darted at their hooves as the buffalo flushed up insects and the prairie voles and the ferrets drank from their tracks. Cajun stared at them with a fixed look of intense interest, his ears pointed toward them.
“There,” said Tissoyo. A cow and a calf came up behind. Belated and unprotected. “The milk in its stomach is very good.” He lifted the Spencer and squinted his left eye and fired.
The other buffalo kept on grazing without a pause. Tissoyo circled behind the herd and roped the calf carcass and dragged it away. Then he dismounted and slashed into its stomach and lifted out the bloody cheese of buffalo milk and rennet. He scooped a handful into his mouth and then offered another handful to Britt. Britt took it and swallowed it like a gory custard without blinking.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Excellent.”
THAT NIGHT TISSOYO began to pack his saddlebags. Tissoyo was moved and excited at the idea of following the Kiowa into the north and bargaining for captives. He shook out his blankets and packed small bags of face paint.
“Now, what do you have to offer them?”
“A few things,” said Britt. “Some gold coins.”
“Ah, they are going to want more than that.”
“We’ll see.”
“Your horse is excellent. But they have horses as good.”
Britt waved his hand impatiently. “We’ll see.”
Tissoyo went out into the evening and roped two paints and led them up. A Medicine Hat paint with a white face. Above his white face, red ears and forelock like a red cap on his head, and a splash of red across his chest like a shield. A patch of red on its rump and a red tail slashing at flies out of the red patch. A strong horse with hard white legs and good bones. The other a mare nearly all black except for a white stripe down her nose and a patch of white on the near side and trim white ankles. She had a curved neck. She was graceful and delicate.
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