“I’m riding my horse,” Gunn said.
“That Indian pony won’t even let you get on him. Maybe you should try and trade him to the Quakers.”
Gunn looked Joseph up and down and went to fetch his horse. “Don’t think I will.”
“Are you going to stare at me all day or will you climb up here?” I asked Joseph.
Joseph blinked, but didn’t move.
“You don’t talk much, do you?”
He blinked again and sniffled.
“Good, Gunn talks nonstop and half the time he’s wrong. Maybe the muse will take you later in the morning, and we’ll get to know each other.”
Mama was bound to get upset if I left her mute behind, and I was still trying to figure out how to get him to talk when Gunn came around the back of the wagon. There was dust and bits of grass all over his back, and I knew that he had tried to mount the Kiowa pony behind the walls of the old building so that we couldn’t see how things turned out.
I watched as he tied the roan to the corner of the wagon bed. “Threw you, didn’t he?”
“Shut up.”
Gunn’s dog rubbed against Joseph’s leg, and the boy reached down and put a hand on its head.
“Don’t touch that dog. He bites,” Gunn said. “His name is Killer.”
Gunn really called the dog Reb, and that yellow skillet-licker never bit anybody. A rabbit could jump up right in front of old Reb and he might not notice it. The only way he could hurt you was to lick you to death or get under your feet and trip you.
No matter, Gunn loved that worthless mutt. Slept with him every night since we had been on the trail. Used to sneak him in his bed in the house before Texas, and let him under Mama’s kitchen table and fed him scraps.
Joseph didn’t pay any attention anyway, and continued to pet the dog absentmindedly.
“Sic ’im, Killer. Get ’im!” Gunn hissed through his teeth at the dog. “Attack!”
Reb only wagged his tail, and Joseph’s expression didn’t change.
“Get out of the way.” Gunn shoved past Joseph and climbed up on the gray steer beside mine. His nose was trickling blood and he swiped at it with the back of his shirtsleeve. He was going to have a black eye.
“Papa says that Kiowa gelding probably never smelled a white man,” I said.
“I’ll ride him. You wait and see.”
Papa was already a quarter of a mile west of camp, and Old Ben started Mama and the buggy after him. The two Mexicans who weren’t handling Papa’s other wagon were mounting their horses.
“Why doesn’t Papa stay here?” I asked. “Looks like a place we could live.”
“Papa said he’ll know what we want when he sees it,” Gunn said.
I turned to watch the Quakers’ wagons rattling across the grass in the opposite direction, and then looked again to the three fresh graves they had left behind. Papa had helped them bring in the bodies of their men the evening before. He wouldn’t let me see what the Kiowa had done to them, even if I had wanted to.
I caught Joseph looking at those graves, too—both his parents gone to a Kiowa war party. “You better climb up here. Papa won’t like it if we hold him up.”
“I don’t want to go,” Joseph said, barely above a whisper.
“Did you hear that?” Gunn asked. “He talks like a Yankee. Little Blue Bastard Peckerhead.”
Joseph did talk like a Yankee, and his voice quavered like he was about to cry. Mama should have let him ride in the buggy with her and Old Ben, or let Juanita watch him.
“Don’t mind Gunn. He likes to talk rough. Thinks it makes him bigger,” I said.
Gunn made a fist and held it out to me. “Keep talking.”
“You ought to be nice to him. What if you were an orphan?”
Gunn scowled at me but then he noticed that Old Ben had stopped the buggy, and Mama was shading her eyes with the flat of her hand and watching us.
“All right, Peckerhead. Climb up here so I don’t have to listen to Hamish whining anymore.”
I got down and took Joseph by the arm and helped him up on the wagon tongue. I climbed back on Old Speck and nodded my chin at the other two yoke of oxen behind us. Joseph remained standing on the tongue between Gunn and me.
“I think he’s off in the head,” Gunn said. “We ought to put him up on the wagon seat.”
I held out my arm, and Joseph took it after a bit and pulled himself up behind me. The other wagon was moving, and all six of our oxen leaned into their yokes and we lurched forward. Joseph wrapped his arms about my waist and hugged close to my back. Gunn noticed and spat on the ground again.
The wagons rattled across the prairie, ours in front following Old Ben and Mama, Juanita on the ground, prodding her two oxen and the cart along with a stick, and her husband coming behind her driving a four-up team of mules and the wagon carrying Mama’s household stuff. The other two Mexican men split up and rode out some distance to either side of us. I guessed they were on the lookout for Indians.
“Papa is already out of sight,” I said, scanning the distance for him. “How much farther do you think he’ll take us?”
“Until he’s sure there aren’t any more politicians, and then that’ll be far enough, I imagine.”
According to Papa, politicians and lawyers were about as bad as Blue Bastards.
One of the chickens squawked in their cage on the tailgate, and Joseph hugged me tighter. I tried to ignore it.
“I’ll be,” Gunn said. “Thinks you’re his mama. Peckerhead.”
“Don’t mind Gunn,” I said to Joseph. “He isn’t always like this.”
“Those Indians scalped my daddy,” Joseph whispered into my back.
“Wipe your nose.”
Chapter Five
Our first Texas home was seven miles west of where we left the Quakers and about fifty yards from the Little Wichita River. It wasn’t really a house at all, no more than that narrow, muddy strip of water was a real river. What we ended up with, instead of a house, was what Texans called a dugout soddy.
A man like Papa, I always imagined him riding down from a castle, like in all the history books I read. Named men, chiefs, and would-be conquerors on the rim of the world, they all had fortresses to show their power and to fend off all comers. Not to say that Papa was the kind to conquer the world, but, oh, he was the kind to be remembered; the kind that took hold of things and wrestled them until he’d done what he set out to do and lived by no one’s rules except those he wrote himself. If Papa said it one time, he said it a thousand: the thing that he was most proud of was that he had never set himself to anything that he didn’t finish. He hadn’t yet told us exactly what he aimed to do in Texas, but he wouldn’t rest until he’d stacked his own rocks and logs and dug his moat; left a mark for all to see that he was there and to be reckoned with.
Nothing then but a dirty little dugout—I guess empires, big or small, don’t start out that way. Even Camelot was nothing but a pigpen before it shone with walls of marble. What I was coming to learn of Texas, the pigpen would stay with Camelot, and only the men were made of marble.
Papa and the Mexicans dug into the side of a little hill until they had an open-fronted square twenty feet deep and two wagon lengths wide. One of the Mexicans found a spot of ground not far away with enough of a hint of clay to hold it together, and with our moldboard plow they rolled up sheets of sod that were afterward cut into bricks, which became the front wall of our new house. The ridgepole and rafters were made from oak logs they cut and dragged up with a yoke of oxen. Old Ben split the logs with a sledgehammer and wedges, and Papa hacked them to shape with a broadax and adze.
One of the wagons was torn apart and its planks used for roof decking, and Gunn and I helped the Mexicans, hauling dirt from their diggings up the hill in buckets and pouring it on the roof until there was a foot or more of earth over it. Papa had bought a brand-new cast-iron stove before we left East Texas, and they plumbed the stovepipe right up through the dirt roof. Old Ben
hung a steer hide to serve as a front door, and the dugout was determined to be complete.
Mama camped for a week under the trees along the riverbank while the construction was going on, but I saw her often studying her soon-to-be new home. Once her furniture was inside, Papa brought her to stand before the dugout.
“I know it isn’t much, but we can build something better later,” Papa said when he tired of waiting for her to speak.
Mama started crying.
“I never said this was going to be easy,” Papa added.
I watched Mama cry and knew she was thinking about her house back in Alabama, with its white columns and a big porch lined with pretty flowers and her yard swing hanging under the limbs of an enormous oak. I had to admit, the dugout was a pitiful-looking thing. Papa saw a beginning, but Mama saw only a dirt hovel in the middle of nowhere. Papa was a man of big dreams, but I don’t know what Mama dreamed. How two such different people decided to come together, I don’t know.
Papa led her to the door and held back the steer hide, maybe hoping that once she saw her mahogany bed and her grandmother’s dresser inside that she would realize that the dugout wasn’t so bad. It could be that he didn’t recognize how out of place Mama’s fancy, heirloom furniture looked in such a crude room—a room not so nice as our root cellar had been back before Texas—and what he thought would comfort her only reminded her of all that she’d left behind, like rubbing salt in a wound.
She stepped inside and shifted Baby Beth to her other hip while she looked around. “It’s like a cave.”
It would take a few rains to pack the dirt on the roof, and a trickle of dust and powder poured through the roof decking overhead and onto her shoulder. She brushed it away and started to cry again.
“I want to go back,” she said. “Argyle Dollarhyde, you take me back.”
“Maybe once we get settled a little more I can go east to Gainesville or Fort Worth, or wherever it takes and get you a window or two,” Papa said. “Windows in the front would let some light in.”
Mama set Baby Beth on her bed and drew the blanket curtain Papa had rigged to block off the back end of the dugout that served as their bedroom. We could hear her bawling even after we went outside.
That night, Papa stayed out at the campfire in the front yard, working on a big piece of rawhide. Come daylight, he was still working on it, and stayed at it until past noon. Then he knocked holes in the front wall to either side of the door, faced them with leftover wagon lumber, and tacked the pieces of the steer hide at the top over each new opening.
“See here,” Papa said to me while he lifted one of the hides up from the bottom. “We can still shoot out of them if need be. I’ll build some heavy shutters to go over them when I get the time.”
He went inside and found Mama sitting on her bed, and he pointed at the pieces of hide. “Now you’ve got windows. They’ll keep the weather out and still let a little sun in.”
He had scraped the rawhide so thin that you could see the feeble glow of the sun through it. The crude windows did let enough light in to make it where you could see to work around the stove, if only barely. The rest of the room was still gloomy unless the steer-hide door and Papa’s new windowpanes were tied out of the way, and even then, the back of the room was as dark as the bottom of a well.
Mama patted Papa on the shoulder. “It is better. I’ll make do until we can build something else.”
And then she started to cry again.
Papa hugged her with one arm. “It will be all right, Sarah.”
Somebody outside was shouting like they were crazy, and Papa and I rushed out the door.
Gunn was up on the roof and pointing to the west, across the prairie dotted here and there with scattered mesquite. “Look!”
Papa saw something, and so did the Mexicans who had climbed up on top of one of our wagons for a better vantage point. I scampered up the side of the hill and got on the roof with Gunn.
“Do you see them?” he asked, still pointing and talking too loud.
How could I not? The whole horizon was dotted with shadowed beasts, the dust rising up beneath their hooves in a ghost cloud, and the raw red sunset smeared behind them as if they were born from a molten womb. There were hundreds of them.
“Real live buffalo,” Gunn said. “Did you ever see anything like it?”
“No, I never.”
I could hear the bulls grunting and see the spring calves bucking and playing and darting in and out around their mothers on the edge of the herd. I could feel them, even though they were a long rifle shot away. The presence felt ancient, and at the same time, like something new. Like the big, beating heart of the land was there in the smoky dust and the afterbirth of the dying sun, throbbing hot and strong and hard inside me—something right and pure.
I turned to look at Gunn again, and there was that same strange expression on his face that had been there when he first saw those Kiowa charging Papa on the prairie, as if he had found something he had been looking for, and as if the finding made him whole and happy.
Maybe it was the same look that other men had long before such as a boy like Gunn ever came to be. Men with flint-tipped spears and smoke-cured panther hides wrapped about their loins, hungry sons of Esau dancing before the flames to celebrate the coming of the herds, their tattooed and feathered soothsayers blowing bloodlust and sacrament through their bone flutes and pounding old magic from skin drums. Men before time scrawling charcoal dreams on sooty cave walls—mighty beasts that flicker and run in the torchlight, the shapes and signs of the gods’ goodwill and the forms of the gods themselves. Vermilion-painted hand pressed into the stone with five proud, nimble fingers and a palm as red as blood itself, a sign left for all to see. Hunters and seekers were here, makers and destroyers, worshippers and slayers.
And even the likes of me knew then, like Gunn of the warrior heart, that Texas was a place like no other. And when I looked for him again, for that look on his face to confirm what I, too, felt, he was already off the roof and cutting around the corner of the house.
“Where are you going?” I asked, my eyes back on the panorama before me.
“To get my rifle,” he called back. “Real, live buffalo.”
I thought about getting my own gun, but then I heard Mama below me, crying again, and the buffalo song faded.
Chapter Six
“That’ll take the starch out of him,” Old Ben said. “Just you wait and see. Let him lay under that tarp in the hot sun, and it’ll sweat the piss and vinegar out of him, sure as the world.”
Old Ben was huffing and puffing, with both of his hands on his hips, sweat dripping off his chin, and looking at the form of Gunn’s Kiowa pony under the wagon sheet. Papa and Old Ben had thrown the gelding, tied his feet, and covered him.
“I still think that’s a way to ruin a good horse,” Papa said. “Although I don’t know if that animal qualifies as such.”
“You let him lay there, boss man, and I promise you it’ll take the devil outta him,” Old Ben said. “Let him lay there all hot and bothered and to where he can’t see nothin’. When we let him up he’ll have a whole new attitude. Maybe, if he ain’t pure outlaw.”
“Some are,” Papa said.
“Men, too,” Old Ben said, taking a seat on a log we used for a couch at the fire pit in front of the house. “Lord, I’m gettin’ too old to rassle horses.”
“I guess we might go on a hunt tomorrow,” Papa said.
“You mean a buffalo hunt?” Gunn chimed in. He’d been after Papa all day to let him go after one, ever since the first herd passed by our camp the evening before.
“We need to lay in some meat,” Papa said. “Winters here are bound to be worse than what we’re used to.”
“How many buffalo do you reckon there are?” Gunn asked. “I bet there’s a gajillion of them.”
“Gajillion isn’t a real number,” I reminded him.
“There’s a lot of them, son,” Papa said to Gunn, and winked at me
.
“That ain’t all there is,” Old Ben said.
“I saw a buck deer with great big antlers this morning when I was fetching water,” Gunn said. “Had a hide as gray as a mouse and big ears, too.”
Old Ben nodded. “All kinds of wild critters, but that ain’t what I was talkin’ about. Seen a lot of cattle running loose. Big old brindle and painted-hide thangs with the damnedest horns I ever saw.”
All along the way west since we had left the Trinity River we’d spotted scattered groups of those big-horned cattle, so wild that they would throw up their tails and run off like a bounding deer at the sight of a man.
“Surprises me, too,” Papa said, but he sounded like he had already been thinking on the matter. “I heard those stories about cattle so wild that early colonists in Texas used to hunt them like deer. To tell you the truth, I thought that was all only stories told by land speculators, or something long ago before Texas was taken from Mexico.”
“Don’t they belong to somebody?” I asked.
“Looks like they’re wild to me,” Papa said.
“Wild as a peach-orchard boar,” Old Ben threw in.
“Maybe wandered off from somewhere east of here and multiplied over the years,” Papa said. “I hear Texans take a hot iron and burn their ownership mark on every head of stock they claim. Mexicans, too.”
“They burn Mexicans with hot irons?” I asked.
“No, the Mexicans are who taught them to brand cattle.”
“I saw such marks on a few of those cows,” Gunn said.
“Some,” Papa answered. “But not on most of them.”
“Maybe they belong to whoever built that abandoned town we passed,” I said. “Or maybe somebody lost them and can’t find them. That Quaker with the sunburned head said that all the people left this country when the war broke out. Maybe they were in such a hurry they left their cows.”
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