“Dear God,” Papa rasped. His knees buckled and only the great strength of his broad shoulders spanning the doorway kept him from falling.
Gunn and I ran forward, but he straightened quickly at the sound of our footsteps and whirled on us with his eyes lit up like a madman.
“Get back!” he snarled.
That’s the only way I can describe it. Papa snarled like an animal—hurt and rage all mixed up together. More hurt and rage than I ever again saw in one human being—in anything.
Gunn and I froze, and Gunn let out something that sounded like a whimper—not as scary as Papa’s sound, but horrible nonetheless. I looked past Papa’s bulk into the dark confines of the dugout, in spite of how his eyes threatened and begged me not to. I saw Mama’s bloody arm outstretched on the floor in the narrowing streak of light that spilled into the gloom on either side of Papa’s shadow. Baby Beth’s yellow, lace-edged blanket was crumpled in the dirt at the end of Mama’s arm.
Gunn’s whimper turned to a howl and he charged the door, but Papa wrapped him in his arms and carried him away. Gunn’s little fists beat at Papa’s chest, cursing at one moment and begging the next.
Papa reached out for me when he came past, but I staggered away. Everything in me told me that I needed to go closer and look farther into the dugout, but I couldn’t, as if not seeing made it not so.
But there was no hiding from the sight of what they, those animals, had done to Old Ben. No shadows and walls hid him; nothing but the hot sun beating down and turning the black blood to a crust where it had seeped into the thirsty, cracked ground around him, staining the earth like rust. Naked, mutilated, and bloody—that’s how they left you. No dignity, just a husk of shame and the pallor of pain frozen into your death mask.
I fell to the ground beside Old Ben and was still sitting there when José covered him with a blanket. Maybe I should have been the one to do that instead of sitting there so long. But I knew that there was nothing I could do for Old Ben, or at least nothing that would help him. That’s why they did that to you, because nothing could fix you once you were like that. Not only dead, but maimed and tortured and bits of you cut away and left open to the world. Heaven or not, how do you ever get over that? Marked for life and beyond.
Old Ben, him that never asked for anything but a meal in his belly and a boy to tell his stories to. Him that went to look for Papa when Mama asked him to, and rode across Alabama to find Papa in a Confederate battlefield hospital, even though Old Ben had never been out of the county in his life and all the mad Southerners apt to string up a runaway slave. Took Papa away and cleaned the filth from his wounds, picked the maggots from his skin, and swore to God and to that rebel surgeon that he would shoot him down with his old shotgun before he would let them cut off Mr. Dollarhyde’s leg. Doctored Papa and wrapped his wounds with poultices his mammy taught him to make and camped on the roadsides for weeks while Papa mended so they could make their way back home.
Old Ben once told Gunn and me how his father was a mighty chief and wise man in Africa across the water, and who hunted lions with nothing more than a spear. And how he was captured in a great battle and sold by his enemies to Portuguese slave traders and sent to America on a great ship where many of his tribesmen died of disease and suffered lying like corpses chained belowdecks. Old Ben and his siblings never learned that old lion hunters’ language, but they made up songs of their own. Sang them in the fields of my father. Taught them to Gunn and me. Praised the new god, and plowed and picked and chopped for the new masters: cotton, sugarcane, and tobacco. Said “yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am” and ducked their heads when the white folks came by. All the while, teaching Gunn and me how to catch a fat-bellied catfish down at the river with a switch cane pole, or how to patch the busted wing of the baby mockingbird we found fallen from the high limb of its nest.
I wished I had thanked him; I wished I could tell him how sorry I was for what happened to him.
José let out a cry of his own. Not a sad one, but a happy one. I wiped my eyes and looked to the edge of the timber and saw Juanita waving at her husband. They ran to each other while another of the Mexicans came cautiously out of the thicket behind her, his rifle held ready and his eyes spooked. I was shocked to see that anyone had survived.
While José and Juanita hugged and celebrated finding each other, Papa went past them at a brisk walk. The Mexican coming to meet him, Emilio I think he was called, looked ready to run at the first loud noise, shaken as we all were. Papa stopped ten feet from him, and they said things to each other that were too hushed and too far away for me to make out. And then Papa pulled his pistol and shot that man. Shot him in the head and dropped him where he had stood only seconds before.
I looked where Papa had left Gunn sitting under a tree. Our eyes met, and I wasn’t sure that Gunn even realized that Papa had just shot one of his own employees.
“Coward,” Papa said as he stood over his victim. “Let them at my family while you hid in the woods!”
Papa fired again into the body and kept firing until his revolver was empty. And I knew that Papa wasn’t shooting the body—not in his mind. He was killing them that had done the thing, one by one, and blazing away in an attempt to kill all the misery filling him. It’s a hell of a thing to see your father kill a man.
I helped José and Papa dig the graves while Gunn sat under the shade tree and rocked back and forth, hugging his chest with both arms. Juanita sat with him. Nobody knew what had happened to Joseph the orphan, but all of us were thinking the same thing but not saying it. The savages had taken him. Everyone on the frontier knew that the plains tribes were apt to kidnap young children and raise them as their own.
We dug only three graves, and I wondered if the reason we didn’t dig a tiny one for Baby Beth was because the Kiowa had stolen her, too. Maybe she wasn’t with Mama. Maybe there was a chance for her.
Papa went inside the dugout while I helped José lower Old Ben into the hole dug for him. We misguessed, or had already forgotten how tall Old Ben was, and had to fold him a little to get him to fit in his grave. We were about finished shoveling the dirt over him when Papa finally came out of the dugout at dusk. He was carrying Mama’s body wrapped in blankets. José helped him set the load gently at the bottom of the grave. Mama was a little thing, and wrapped and padded like that, she didn’t even make a sound when she settled there.
“I thought it best to bury them together, your mama and your sister,” Papa said in one ragged, choking breath.
So there it was. No chance to dream of Baby Beth raised among the heathens. Lost to us for a time, but still alive and waiting for us to come get her. No hope.
After we covered Mama and Baby Beth with earth, Juanita and José led me away. Those two had gathered what scattered goods the raiders didn’t take, and I spent an hour picking up Mama’s books slung all over the yard, while José buried Emilio. Some of the books were missing, and I didn’t have a clue what an Indian would want with a book.
Juanita cooked us a meal. I ate because she told me to, spooning buffalo stew into my mouth without tasting it.
Gunn was beside me, still rocking back and forth and staring at where Papa stood beside the graves. I noticed that Gunn had somehow gotten Old Ben’s Dance revolver, clutching it to his belly like it was holding in his guts. I don’t know how the Kiowa overlooked it, or where Gunn found it.
Long after the sun went down and there were only the stars overhead and the dance of the campfire flames on the side of Juanita’s cart, Papa’s shadow marched across the yard and disappeared into the dugout. Shortly afterward, his bagpipes began to wail, low and quiet at first, and then louder until there was nothing else.
José and Juanita said nothing, looking at each other with big eyes and making the Catholic sign of the Cross upon their chests.
Mama had always laughed at Papa’s love of bagpipes; said they were a highlander’s instruments and Papa’s people came from the lowlands. Papa himself might have been born
in Scotland, but my grandparents brought him to South Carolina when he was still but a swaddling baby. Yet, he loved bagpipes anyway. Learned to play them long after he was grown and broke them out on occasion to play for us, no matter how much the dogs howled or Mama protested and laughed. Everyone agreed that Papa played them poorly and didn’t know any lively tunes, but the song he played that night is still as plain to me now as if it were a song I already knew and not one from another time across the ocean. Sad, banshee instruments made for the heartbroken, that’s what Mama called them, although Papa said that was the Irish in her talking. It was as if he jerked the sorrow from me and gave it a sound.
Mama. Nobody who knew her would have pictured her there, the belle of Montgomery County who young men had ridden for miles to court, and she who once sang and played her piano and recited poetry and tended her flowers, her laugh more alive than any sound on the earth. Who would I share stories with now? All the books we never read together. All the talks of learned things we would never have. Not a hug left from her on the whole turning of the earth. Lost to Texas. Gone like Baby Beth’s cries, faded in an instant. Silence except for those damned awful bagpipes that made me cry like the scared child I was.
The sound of hooves came through the thicket and José took up his gun. I noticed that he was shaking, thinking they had come back to finish us all.
Joseph shuffled into the firelight. He had lost one of his shoes somewhere, and he was even dirtier than he usually was, his blond hair tangled with twigs and bits of grass and the knees of his britches tore open to reveal his scraped knees. He was leading Gunn’s Kiowa roan on the end of a rope and Gunn’s yellow dog laid down at his feet when he stopped across the fire.
“I ran from them and then I hid under the creek bank,” Joseph said, standing there looking at nothing in particular but the ground. “I thought they were going to kill me, too.”
And then he looked up, right at Gunn. “I found your horse. He ran off in a thicket when they drove the rest of the stock away.”
“Old Reb there, where did you find him?” I asked.
Joseph blinked and shrugged. “He hid with me.”
Gunn rose and stepped over the fire, scattering sparks. He jerked the lead rope from Joseph’s hand.
“You damned coward,” Gunn said, glaring down at his dog.
Chapter Nine
Papa told us to saddle up the next morning while he went to talk with José. They talked long enough that Gunn and I were both sitting on our mules waiting for him. I noticed that José and Juanita started to break camp and load their cart as soon as Papa walked back over to us to saddle Shiloh.
“Are we going back?” I asked.
Papa looked at me across Shiloh’s saddle while he tightened his cinch. “Back where?”
“Alabama.”
Gunn grunted and spat on the ground. Then he passed a look to Papa, and it was as if I weren’t there and the two of them could read each other’s thoughts. Papa grunted just like Gunn when he swung up in the saddle.
“I’ve sent José and his wife on an errand,” Papa said. “We’ve got a chore to do.”
I knew what chore he meant without asking. An eye for an eye—that line has to be even older than the Bible for Papa’s breed. He would have lived by that law even if it were never quoted to him. He could have written it himself.
Papa meant to follow whatever Indians raided us. José said they were probably Kiowa or Comanche, but he wasn’t sure. They left no evidence behind other than their pony tracks. There were tribes around us that we hadn’t even heard about.
Gunn propped his carbine on his thigh as if to prove he was as determined as Papa to have his revenge. He had broken into howling again in the wee hours of the morning, and Papa had to pin him in his blankets and sleep with him hugged to his chest. But the craziness seemed to have spent itself, at least the loud part. Now he was crazy quiet. There is such a thing, I promise you. All you had to do was look at that hard, still face of his—Papa’s, too—with those eyes burning like no little boy’s you ever saw, and you knew things weren’t right. Every kind of emotion was churning and cooking inside him, held back only by willpower. But like Papa, I think he found a way to channel all the hurt in him to one point of focus.
I, too, should have been filled with bloodlust, but I didn’t feel much of anything. The wind was blowing, and the dust in my mouth kept making me remember the way Old Ben looked all cut up and Mama’s bloody arm stretched so delicately and bloody across the floor of the dugout. Maybe we were all already dead and didn’t know it yet.
“What about Joseph?” I asked.
Papa seemed to have forgotten about Joseph, but he quickly recovered. He turned Shiloh until he spotted the boy helping Juanita and José load the cart. “Hey, boy.”
Joseph stared back at him.
“He doesn’t have anything to ride,” I reminded Papa.
“He ain’t riding with me,” Gunn said.
“Shut your mouth,” Papa said. “Maybe I can get Juanita to take care of him.”
But when Papa came back, Joseph was leading Gunn’s Kiowa roan, and José had saddled the horse with Emilio’s saddle and tied a blanket behind the cantle and hung a drinking gourd from the saddle horn.
“You ain’t riding my horse,” Gunn said.
“Then you ride him and I’ll ride your mule.” Joseph looked down and scuffed the ground with one foot. He was wearing Mexican boots that were way too big for him, and I wondered if they, too, had belonged to Emilio, the one that Papa had killed.
“I suppose you think you can ride him,” Gunn said.
Before any of us could say anything else, Joseph pitched his reins up on the roan’s neck, stretched awkwardly to poke a toe in the stirrup, grabbed a handful of saddle strings, and climbed up on the horse hand over hand until he was sitting in the saddle. The roan stood rock still while he climbed him like a tree.
“Well, I’ll be,” Papa said.
Gunn grunted and turned his horse away so that he didn’t have to look at any of us.
I looked back as we were riding away. “Where did you send José and Juanita, Papa?”
“I gave them your mama’s silverware and her gold,” Papa said. “They’re going off to buy us more supplies.”
The silverware and the handful of antique gold coins had been a wedding gift from Mama’s father. “Mama would never sell those things.”
Papa slowed Shiloh so that he could stare down at me on my little mule. “No, she wouldn’t.”
“How do you know that José and Juanita will come back?” I was thinking how Papa gunned down Emilio and that José might be glad to get free of us.
“José will come back. He gave his word, and I believe him.”
Papa left me then, no matter how many more questions I wanted to ask. He had already cut for sign earlier that morning, and we picked up the trail of the Kiowa raiders across the Little Wichita and followed it north, mile after mile, day after day, winding through the choking hot oak thickets of the Cross Timbers and then west onto more open country that fronts the barren tableland of the Llano Estacado. Time and again, we lost the trail, but Papa wouldn’t quit. How he intended to find Mama’s murderers in such an expanse, or how he intended to deal with them with nothing but three boys, I don’t know. I followed him only because there was nothing else to do.
Papa didn’t talk, and Gunn didn’t talk. Joseph didn’t talk, either, maybe because none of us talked to him. I wondered what he thought of the mad family he had joined, but then again, he was an odd one himself and more than a little warped, like the rest of us.
Chapter Ten
“Is that them?” I asked. Papa had an old brass-tubed sea glass to spy on the Indian camp in the distance to the west, but I didn’t have anything except for my own two eyes.
Papa lowered the spyglass and twisted his neck to look down the dry streambed to where Joseph was holding our mounts. “Have you boys checked the loads on your rifles?”
Gunn a
djusted himself on his belly in the tall grass and shoved his carbine forward for Papa to see, as if that proved anything. I merely nodded at Papa, wondering what he had in mind. Although it was only a small camp of about seven lodges, I thought I had already counted at least five warriors and several women and children. The setting sun was in our faces, and it was hard to be sure of anything.
“We’ll wait till morning,” Papa said. “That will be best.”
“How do we know it’s them?” I asked.
“That’s them, all right,” Papa said. “That’s your mama’s good black buggy mare tied to that lodge. No mistaking that.”
Indeed, it was Mama’s mare. I’d have known her anywhere, and Papa would, too. General Forrest himself had given that mare to Mama as an anniversary present.
“Are they Kioway?” Gunn whispered.
“Maybe, but it don’t matter.” Papa put his spyglass to his eye again. “That’s them that done it.”
We watched the Indian camp until it was too dark to see, and then we went down the streambed to our horses and rode off to make a dry camp a good two miles away. Papa wouldn’t let us have a fire, and it had been a day and a half since we’d eaten the last of a pronghorn buck Papa shot. We all settled for a drink of lukewarm, brackish water from our canteens and settled in for the night with nothing but sweaty horse blankets to cover us and our saddles for backrests. The coyotes started yammering at one another somewhere nearby, and we all sat quiet and listened to them until they quit.
“I know I’m asking a lot of you boys, but there’s no helping it,” Papa finally said.
There wasn’t any moon to speak of, and I couldn’t see him where he sat across from me.
“When the time comes, you think about your mama and your baby sister. Don’t think about nothing but that when it comes time to pull a trigger.” Papa took out his whetstone and began to sharpen his skinning knife. There was silence again between us, except for the sound of the steel grating back and forth along the length of that Arkansas stone.
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