They went to the blacksmith shop and the farrier greeted them with a quick wave of his hand and went back to the strap hinges he was hammering out on an anvil while his helper squinted and dodged.
Samuel went to bed at nine. Then there was a tumult in the night, the night of a damp, lukewarm wind that brought a fine rain with it and a distant howling. Samuel bolted out of bed and struck a light into a hurricane lantern and ran toward the corrals. The gate was open and fifteen horses and mules had been driven off. He stood there in his nightshirt and the coat of coarse ducking that had been waxed and oiled and was called a slicker. Five enlisted men and their sergeant came up in the dark.
The sergeant held his lantern down to the tracks. Samuel heard a fluting tone; it was the wind singing in the windows of the stable like a silver whistle.
“Well, sir,” said the sergeant. “They do it for fun, you know. The young men. Sometimes the old men too.” He was shouting into the wet dark wind.
“But my wagon team was among them.”
“Well, there you are,” said the sergeant.
“Do they do this often?”
The sergeant nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I want my team back.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” He lifted his shoulders. “If you offer them something for them. Like maybe flour, sugar, that kind of thing.”
“But those are rations.”
“Yes, sir, that’s right. Rations.” The sergeant wiped rain out of his eyes. “I will put a guard here at the corral for the rest of the week if you don’t mind.”
Samuel went back to the agency house and dried himself. For fun. Surely there were other ways they could have fun. He would put a chain and lock on the gate. That was not punitive, it was not unreasonable force. He sat at his desk and began writing a report by candlelight. It helped. His anger drained away in the specifics of official language.
Finally at two in the morning he was back in his bedroom. It was not the horses and mules he minded so much as the paperwork. He opened his Bible for a moment. The wind had a slow resonance and it sang at the ill-fitting window frames in several tones, one after the other.
When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings I will rejoice. My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.
SOLDIERS CLIMBED UP on wagon beds and barrels to watch. At the gate of the corral a hundred or so Comanche and Kiowa men sat on their ponies with rifle butts resting on their thighs. A Kiowa man with a loud voice stood beside Samuel. As each Texas longhorn was released from the corral it ran for its life out to the plains and the Kiowa shouted out the name of the man to whom it belonged. That man bolted forward on his horse after he had given the steer a running lead and shot it down.
Samuel sat silently and watched as the prairie earth before him for half a mile was littered with dead animals and the women slashing open their bellies to drag out the liver and the gallbladder and the long intestines. They and the small children ate these things on the spot. A young woman stood up in the watery spring sunlight and her silky black hair floated like a banner and her mouth and chin and hands were covered with tattoos and blood. Her fingers were slim and elegant and several rings gleamed out of the blood that covered them. She bent down with sweet words and soft whispers to her child and opened her hand to him so that he might take the piece of liver that trembled there like a jelly.
“Esa Havey!” The gate was thrown open and a piebald longhorn bolted out. The longhorn tipped his head from side to side and the great horns like turning spears shone in the sun. A man galloped out after him and the steer hooked his horse. It was not Esa Havey. It was a young male relative of Esa Havey that the older warrior had sent in to kill beef on his behalf. The man named Milky Way in the English language did not want to come in and be bothered about his captives. He did not want to have to sit and be lectured by the annoying new Indian agent.
The longhorn handled his massive horns like a desperate man with a saber. When the pony went down the longhorn turned within seconds and caught him in the gut and ripped through the cinch. The pony got to its feet with its entrails trailing.
“Shoot him, shoot him!” yelled the soldiers.
Esa Havey’s nephew ran from the longhorn on foot. The piebald bull hooked at him and turned and spun with the agility of a deer. Esa Havey’s nephew was unable to stop dodging long enough to cock his rifle. Then with the rifle in one hand the young man bent down and grabbed a handful of sand with the other and flung it in the steer’s eyes. This gave the boy enough seconds to cock his rifle and shoot it in the forehead. He shot standing on his toes, a lean and beautiful body upheld on sinew and bone with his long black hair loose from its braids and flying in heavy shooks. Then he turned and shot the pony. The little buckskin fell straight down, its legs folding under it, and then rolled to one side in a sliding glitter of intestines.
Samuel Hammond and Colonel Grierson walked back to the agency warehouse for the clothing issue. They passed a tipi where a woman in a brilliantly ribboned shirt slashed the throat of a small spotted dog and then held it out at arm’s length to let the blood drain.
“Kiowa,” said Grierson. “The Comanche don’t eat dog.”
“I see,” said Samuel.
He thought it would be better with the clothing issue. The coats and shirts and hats at least would not be shot or have their throats slit.
Samuel had asked that a great washpot of coffee with sugar be served out, and pilot biscuits and meat roasted on spits. Grierson had told him that the Indians believed one should never talk to a hungry man. The army was happy to butcher the beeves and serve up the feast since the enlisted men got to eat a great deal of it before it reached the trestles. The young people fell to play-fighting with the serge suit jackets and tore the arms off. Esa Havey’s nephew ran after a lovely young woman and pretended to beat her over the head with a pair of argyle socks. She grabbed them away and filled one with sand and circled it around and around her head as if winding it up and flung it at him and missed. A little boy pranced past with the seat of a chamber pot around his neck, singing in Kiowa, Here is a good-looking young man. Two elder women nearby who were eating pilot biscuits laughed themselves helpless and had to beat the cracker flakes from their breasts.
The translator Onofrio Santa Cruz was the son of a Mexican trader and a Comanche mother, raised in San Idlefonso, New Mexico. A jaunty short-brimmed hat sat on his narrow head. He had some sort of a vision problem; he squinted and stared around himself with narrowed eyes.
Samuel gave a speech through Onofrio to bored and impatient headmen. Some of the men were old, and sat regarding him from under drooping eyelids, with noncommittal faces. Behind them were the younger men with paint in artistic and intriguing designs, and hawk and eagle feathers in their hair. Onofrio named them, but Samuel could not remember their names. The little boy with the toilet seat around his neck had fallen asleep in the lap of a big bony warrior with a receding chin.
Samuel said that when the annuity goods arrived he hoped more of the people would come in. He was very glad to meet them and his heart was turned to them and he wished to do right by them. The soft wind was heavy with grass pollen and the smell of frybread cooking in kettles. Samuel would, as their agent, see that the settlers no longer intruded on Indian land. They had been crowded and dispossessed but things were going to change. So there was no need to raid the agency for horses. No need. Now he would like to have his team back. Today he had added fifty pounds of rice and fifty of cane sugar, to say how much he wanted his team back.
Onofrio translated. Several headmen spoke among themselves in short sentences, in which language Samuel could not tell.
Onofrio said, “They say all right.”
Samuel hesitated, and then asked, “Was that all?”
“That’s about it.”
That night Samuel sent the guards back to Fort Sill. He would not have u
niformed army soldiers anywhere near the agency buildings. He would win over these people with patience and kindness. They would understand that white men were no threat to them and would not attack them, or take their land, and thus they would leave off their raiding. He sat for a while and read The Pickwick Papers and found himself laughing aloud in an empty house, transported to the wet, rich fields of Kent, and fell asleep in the chair, and forgot to turn to Psalms.
Chapter 15
THEY RODE OUT on the broad plains with nothing to sleep under, nothing to make a roof against the weather. Only themselves and the horses. Tissoyo rode a small buckskin, and his two spotted horses trailed along behind. It was possible that he simply liked to look at them, that they were like some fine embroidered linen, too beautiful to use. The loose horses paused and grazed and then when they found themselves left behind called out wildly and ran to catch up and stopped to graze again. Britt kept his revolver clean and the Henry carbine loose in the scabbard. They rode to the northwest. The air was fine and damp and the grassland rolled away for mile upon mile, differing in the colors and textures of grass as the soil changed, as they rode down northern slopes and up the southern ones. The big-headed brushy bluestem had broken out in stiff shakos, the Indian grass in violently swaying plumes. Everywhere the central stems of yucca burst out into tall stalks of flowers and sometimes an entire hillside would be covered with their waxy white candelabras.
“What is up there?” asked Britt. He lifted his chin toward the northwest. “How far can you go before you reach the ocean?” Cajun moved along steadily and sometimes broke into his easy, smooth trot.
“The what?” Tissoyo turned and squinted at him.
“El mar, el gran mar.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Well, how far can you go the way we are going?”
Tissoyo thought for a moment, his clean expressionless eyes flat to his face, staring toward the northwest. One hand lay on his thigh and the other across the bow of his saddle with the reins in it. The constant wind lifted the tasseled ends of his braids.
“After a long time you come to very high mountains. There is always snow on them. The peaks rise up so.” He lifted his hand, bent at the wrist, the palm upright. “Straight up. There are no antelope or buffalo there. But there are a lot of elk. The truly big bears are there.” He lifted a forefinger to his lips and then dropped his hand on his thigh again. “They say the half-a-men live in the rocks. Nenapi, they fade in and out of the rocks.” He opened and shut his hand. “Dangerous little pendejos.”
The blue slopes of the Wichita Mountains fell away behind them. They were passing around their western end and riding slowly higher and higher as the level of the Great Plains rose with every mile. In a long stretch that was floored with small sand dunes and bear grass they came upon the wreckage of several wagons. Weathered wood and unburied bones. Tipped wheels degraded into sections that had bleached to the color of burnished steel. There were scattered planks and round skulls half buried like kickballs with hopeless eyes.
Tissoyo sat and studied them for a while and then wondered if these were not the remains of the men who had been in the fight on the Little Robe River in his father’s time. He slid from his horse and watched as a snake of some sort made a wavering in the grasses and noted where it went. He pressed away the rags of leather from a heap of human bone that had grown glossy from the things that had gnawed them. Whoever they were, they had been somebody, he said.
Britt knew the bones should be buried. He sat on Cajun and thought about it, but then they went on.
At the crossing of the Washita River they found shallow pools of water among flat stones where they could safely wade in. The main current was a choppy, fluent gray stretch of water that hissed at the banks. On both sides the great fragile cottonwoods with their chattering leaves. Tissoyo gathered handsful of buffalo grass and threw them into the pools and then took up his water skin and filled it as the grass filtered the water. Britt pressed his canteen down into the matted, floating grasses.
“They call you the underwater people,” said Tissoyo. “You black skins.” He pinched up a fold of Britt’s skin on his forearm.
Britt stared at Tissoyo’s hand until he removed it.
Then he asked, “Why are we underwater people?”
“When you lean over to look into the water your water-shadow is dark, like you are, and the one who is bending over the water is surprised.” Tissoyo stood up and gazed around himself in a casual and untroubled manner, and then bent over to look into the water at his dark shadow or reflection that appeared there, with rays of the sun lancing all around the shadow’s head like the halos of the Mexican saints. He pretended to gasp and jump back.
Then he turned to Britt with a theatrical gesture.
“You see.” He held out one hand as if introducing Britt to his underwater self.
Britt leaned over. His dark shadow looked up at him as if it had lain there in the pool of water all along, suspended in infinite time, waiting for him, to rise up now and glimmer on the surface as he bent over to it.
“Yes, there I am,” he said. “Interesting.” Britt lifted his full canteen and it dripped on the stone. “So what do you call the people who are like me but they don’t have black skins?”
“Ah, the taibo. The Indian agent and soldiers and people who live in log houses and the Tejanos, and French and Spanish and all of them.” Tissoyo waved his hand toward the east.
“What does that mean?”
“Captive. It means captive. Sometimes it means a boy from the sun or soldiers. And so on.”
Britt drank from the canteen and screwed the cap on. He leaned over the water again to see his underwater self rise toward him in shadow with his head outlined in luminescent rays. He said, “There are fish there.” He bent to the surface. “That’s supper.”
Tissoyo made an elaborate gasping noise with indrawn breath. “Don’t touch them! You can make people angry like that. Eating fish.”
They stood into their stirrups and went on. The two spotted horses and the pack pony waded into the pools and drank their fill and then ran to catch up. Their wavering reflections disappeared into stone and then they were churning across the main stream. It was only breast-high on the horses. They splashed out the other side.
“What’s wrong with fish?”
“Something. I don’t know, but something.” Tissoyo waved one hand. His copper bracelets flashed. “We cannot eat them. It makes something become resentful. A being.”
Britt listened to the light jingle of his spurs in the stirrups and the lilt of the wind that never ceased on these high plains. It made Tissoyo’s hawk feathers move forward and then flatten as if they were making statements. A wind vane. Overhead, streaks of cirrus clouds streamed, pure and seraphic. Before them a flat-headed misty bluff stood out where the Washita River had carved around a headland. Cajun’s step was steady and quick. His black mane lifted and fell.
“Why don’t you know?” Britt said.
“They all died. The people who knew died.”
“What about the Kiowa?”
“Eh, the Kiowa will eat anything.”
As they rode Tissoyo spoke of the death of all the old people when his father was young, from the sickness that had come with the wagons that were going west. The wagons were all full of men and they were anxious to get to someplace called California. The fever was a malediction that grew and spread and ate people. It was invisible in the plains air but slaughtered whole villages nonetheless. They lay down and died and rotted in their tipis and whoever could walk or get on a horse left them there. Once a small girl lived through the fever in one of those decaying tipis, alone among the dead. She walked out on the empty land and a man called Twisted Horn came upon her but did not know whether she was still inhabited by the hostile, acidic beings, and so he left food and blankets for her, and stayed by her at a distance for days until it was clear she was going to live and that the fever had left her. Then he took her up
behind him. Her face was full of holes as if she had been shot with birdshot. She was now an old woman. She doesn’t remember the names of her mother and father. It was like fleshing a hide. Tissoyo made a sweeping motion. All the people of that generation gone and raked off and flung aside. When the sickness had passed over, less than half of the Comanche were left alive.
And so there were no old people left to tell the young men when to raid and when not to raid or even the reason for raiding. None to restrain them. The Comanche had no clans; the names and the structure of the clans had been disassembled and left behind in pieces when they ran from the California fever. The wagon fever. Anyone who remembered the names of clans or why we do not eat fish or dog had died. There was nothing to stop the young men from killing or to calm them. The Kiowa have a lot, they are rich. They all own a lot of songs, and they have a way of making counts of days and years, and some small manlike images. They have songs and year-counts and the little images and stories. They are rich with ritual and legend. They know the names of the beings that are stars. They have the story of their beginning. So we stay close to them, it is like being beside a good fire.
The people who survived forgot where it was we came from except it was said we came from far to the north and we know this because we speak like the Utes speak and they say they came from the other side of the Rocky Mountains many months of travel from here. All they could do was fight and now every year we lose more and more young men in battles and so we diminish.
When all the people got sick and died, they say it was like the end of the world. A world with no Comanches in it. That would be evil. Without us to inhabit and think and to mourn for what was lost. For who we were. That would be evil.
Britt thought about this for a mile or so of steady walking and the loose horses flaunting their tails. They bit one another on the withers and once one of Tissoyo’s horses lay down to roll and so Britt turned Cajun and caught up the pack pony’s halter rope so that he would not lay down and roll as well, on top of the pack, and bust all his knots and rigging.
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