Captive Trail

by Susan Page Davis

  He closed his eyes for a minute then spoke in Comanche. “Ned says it’s about God’s gifts that he doesn’t deserve, and how wonderful they are. How sweet and unexpected.” He eyed her doubtfully, but Taabe nodded, so he went on. “Ned says he had lost his way but someone found him—God, I think. And he couldn’t see, but now he can.” Cat held up both hands. “But that’s not real. I mean, he wasn’t really blind. I think the song means it like … in a story. You say a man is as tall as a mountain, but he’s not really. And this song says he was blind, but it means … I think it means he was blind to God. He couldn’t see the things God wanted him to see, but now he can.”

  Taabe stood still for a long moment, letting that soak in. She turned and looked at Ned. He might have been holding his breath, he was so still, and his expression was one of dread.

  He is afraid I won’t understand—but I do!

  She smiled at him. “Sing again.”

  Ned let out a short laugh. “Play again.”

  She raised the flute and played the notes softly. Ned made the words fit with the music, and she knew they were right. Those were the words she couldn’t remember. I once was lost, but now am found. God had found her. He’d brought her here—one of His unexpected, wonderful gifts to her.

  Ned’s heart caught as the last notes died away. Singing to Taabe’s music had hit him hard, like catching a rock in the chest. Unless he was mistaken, she had tears in her eyes. Even Cat seemed to be moved by the song.

  Taabe spoke quietly to Cat, then jerked her head and her eyebrows toward Ned.

  “She wants me to tell you that she used to play an instrument in her old life. It was somewhat like this flute, but it was made of metal. She’s had this one that the old man made her for a long time. Her Comanche family liked to hear her play.”

  “It’s amazing.” Ned gripped the back of a chair. “Ask if she is ready to listen to the names. I’d like to read her the list now.”

  Cat spoke to Taabe. She nodded and laid the flute on the table.

  They spent another hour going over the list and talking in their awkward way about life in the Comanche village. Ned had never felt so drawn to a woman. Every new detail he learned about Taabe pulled him closer to her, until he wanted desperately to find the shadowy family she remembered—the ones who had given her a horse and a flute and a cat. No doubt they had loved her deeply.

  If only they had some proof of her identity.

  “Ask if she has any birthmarks or scars that would help her family identify her.”

  Her answer saddened him.

  “She believes any scars she carries were made after her capture.”

  Ned sighed and gazed across the table at her. What sorrows had she borne? What pain had she endured?

  “I wish I knew what questions to ask,” he said. “I’m sure there’s much more we don’t know that could help us.”

  Cat spoke gently to Taabe, and she answered at length. He turned to Ned. “She says that when she was taken, the Comanche band rode north for many days until they reached a place where white men never go.”

  “What sort of place?”

  “I expect she is talking about the Valle de las Lagrimas.”

  Ned puzzled that out. “The Valley of Tears?”

  “Yes. That is what the Spanish call it. I don’t know what the Comanche call it—they never speak of it to outsiders. It’s an isolated canyon deep in Comanche country. The Indians take captives there because they know that no one can follow them there.”

  “How can that be?”

  “It is secret, it is very defensible, and the entrance is well guarded. No white man has gone there except as a captive. Ever. It is said that they raid and take captives and then keep them in the valley until they either sell them to the Comancheros or else they are acclimated to the Comanche culture to such an extent, they will not want to leave.” He shrugged. “If they know they will keep the captive and adopt her into the tribe, they might not take her there. I can’t say that’s the place, but it’s a guess.”

  Ned gazed at Taabe. “Obviously they were not successful in assimilating this one.”

  “You mean?”

  “She did not forget everything. She never stopped wanting to return home.”

  Taabe spoke again, in the Comanche tongue, and Cat listened.

  “She says she tried for a long time to keep from forgetting English, but she was with them too long. They forbade her to speak it and punished her if she did. When you brought her here, she couldn’t remember any of the language or read the nuns’ books.” Cat’s eyes bored into Ned. “That’s important to her. She knows she could read at one time.”

  Ned looked at Taabe. “You once read books?” He held his hands together like a book.

  She nodded with tears in her eyes. “I read. I write too. I write long … long story. Not story, but … something.” She turned to Cat and spoke in Comanche.

  “She says she had lessons, like Quinta is having now. She learned to do a great many things. She wrote long essays—at least that’s what I think she means. Many sheets of paper.”

  Ned nodded.

  Taabe held out her hand to him across the table. Ned leaned forward and clasped it.

  “I am one of you,” Taabe said in a fierce whisper. “I am not one of them.”

  Ned’s heart lurched. Perhaps she was telling him more, beyond the surface of those few words. Did she have feelings for him too?

  “I will write letters,” he had Cat tell her. “I’ll write to anyone who is looking for a girl who might be you. We’ll find your family, Taabe. We’ll find where you belong.”

  Her eyes glistened as she squeezed his hand. He wanted to say more, but not through a translator. She released his hand, and he knew it was time to go.

  Ned and Cat took their leave of Taabe, saying a brief good-bye to Quinta and the nuns.

  Sister Adele accompanied Quinta out to the barn with them. “This visit was helpful?” she asked Ned.

  “Very. There is much more I’d like to ask her, but we’re all tired. Perhaps another time.” He sighed. “I didn’t learn much about the time between her capture and her escape. Just generally how she lived and that she wasn’t kept as a slave exactly. She had a Comanche family, and she said she was treated as well as anyone else. But I know there’s more we never touched on.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Thompson can come again.”

  Cat shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind. But the captain needs me to go out again with some troopers tomorrow. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

  “We can discuss it,” Ned said. “Maybe you can let me know.”

  Sister Adele paused outside the barn. “Quinta wishes to give you messages for her father and brothers. We told her that she might.”

  “All right.” Ned listened to all of Quinta’s chatter and her requests for trifles from her father.

  “I have something else to tell you,” she said, drawing him aside.

  “What is it?”

  Quinta beckoned him closer. He bent down and turned his head so she could whisper to him.

  “Sometimes Taabe cries. She doesn’t want the nuns to know, but my room is next to hers, and I hear her at night.”

  Ned swallowed hard. “Why? Why does she cry?”

  Quinta shrugged. “I think she said that she misses her baby. That can’t be right, can it? Maybe I should ask her again …” She eyed him anxiously.

  Ned’s heart plummeted. “No, chica. If she wants to tell you more, she will.”

  As he and Cat rode back to the fort, Ned ruminated on what Quinta told him. A baby. What did it mean? All sorts of possibilities presented themselves, but the strangling feeling wouldn’t leave. For the past few weeks, Ned’s life had centered on Taabe and his visits to the mission. He still knew very little about her, yet he cared for her deeply. What would something like a baby—a half-Comanche baby—do to their friendship?

  No, Quinta must be mistaken. Taabe had wept for someone else’s baby. Her Comanche siste
r’s, perhaps. He would say nothing of that, to anyone, until he heard from Taabe what it was about.

  And the place Cat had spoken of—the Valley of Tears. How close had Taabe come to being sold as a slave to the Comancheros, the Mexican traders who came up to swap goods with the Comanche? He uttered a silent prayer of thanks for her deliverance.

  “I can see why you were so determined to help her,” Cat said as their horses jogged along the road.

  “You’ll keep quiet—” Ned stopped and shook his head. “Sorry. I know you will.”

  Cat nodded. “My word is good. I’ll tell no one about her, and if anyone asks me, I will send them to the captain.”

  Cat left Ned at the parade ground and headed for the troopers’ barracks. Ned went to Captain Tapley’s office and gave him a quick overview of what he’d learned.

  “Would you like to write to this rancher down near Victoria?” the captain asked. “The Morgan girl seems by far the most likely candidate. If you give him some of these details you’ve learned, he should be able to tell you if this is his sister.”

  Ned spent an hour wording his letter to Judson Morgan. He described Taabe Waipu, with her light brown hair that might be blond in the summer sun, and her eyes as blue as an August sky. He told of her musical ability and her memories of songs and playing a flute or similar instrument and also a piano, and about the herd of dark horses and the kitten named Fluffy. At last he sat back and reread the letter.

  If these people claimed her, what would happen? Taabe would go away, that’s what.

  He added another paragraph, advising the man not to set out too hastily. Better to correspond until they were certain than to take a journey of three hundred fifty miles and then learn they were wrong. He asked if Billie Morgan had any scars or other unmistakable physical characteristics. He emphasized that Taabe had forgotten English, her family, and even her name.

  His steps dragged as he walked to the front of the station to give the letter to Herr Stein. It would go out in the next sack of mail heading south. If this was the Morgan girl, surely the things he had told them would confirm that. If not, they might still hope and insist on seeing her.

  Ned stopped at the front door and looked eastward, toward the mission. His jaw tightened and he reminded himself to breathe, but the anxiety didn’t lessen. He had to force himself to enter the building with the letter. He handed it to Herr Stein and watched him place it in the sack.

  As he trudged back around the house to the room he would share with Brownie that night, the question weighed heavily on him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to answer it, but it hounded him.

  Did he really want to find Taabe’s family?

  The changes at the mission confused Taabe and sometimes frightened her. Girls were flitting everywhere. Though the sisters admonished them to be quiet and to move slowly, she could often hear raised voices and running footsteps. Another girl came to stay, and all of the small bedchambers now had occupants. If more students arrived, the girls would have to double up.

  As colder winds and rain settled in, Taabe often donned a habit and went outside with the girls and one of the sisters. The students eyed her with curiosity, but seldom tried to draw her into conversation. Taabe assumed that Quinta had given them her own explanation of her presence. She was glad to see Quinta joining in games with the others and leading them in excursions outside the mission house. The energetic youngster performed her chores heartily, setting an example for the older girls, who seemed less eager to carry water, sweep the floors, and wash dishes.

  Quinta also led the class in mathematics. Eager to learn more about numbers, Taabe sat in on this class, which Sister Adele taught all four pupils daily. It was not a discipline the Comanche cared about, beyond the usefulness of being able to describe quantities and keep track of their horses. Taabe found the precision of numbers refreshing. Her fingers flew as she wrote them on her slate and solved the arithmetic problems Sister Adele set her each day. Her only true rival was Quinta.

  In all the other classes—literature, history, French, deportment, domestic arts, and catechism—Quinta lagged behind the others. Taabe thought this was because she tended to daydream and much preferred action to studies.

  Another mysterious body of knowledge to Taabe was the calendar. Sister Adele and Sister Riva spent many hours teaching her the rudiments of measuring time. At Sister Riva’s suggestion, each girl constructed her own calendar. Quinta’s featured her drawings of horses around the borders of each page. Next Sister Natalie set the girls and Taabe to stitching calendars for the following year—1858—as samplers. This exacting work frustrated Quinta, but Taabe found it soothing as she placed the tiny stitches and saw the procession of days flow from her needle.

  “If I ever finish this, I shall give it to Papa for Christmas,” Quinta said as she and Taabe sat in the parlor working on their samplers while the older girls took their grammar lesson with Sister Adele in the dining room.

  Taabe planned to hang hers on the wall in her room, to help her track the stagecoach days in the new year. But the idea of giving gifts seized her attention. She had heard people speak of Christmas several times, and Sister Adele had explained that it was a celebration of Jesus’s birth.

  “Give to Papa?” She raised her eyebrows at Quinta, which usually elicited an outpouring of information from the chatterbox.

  “For his Christmas present. You know. Or do you?” Quinta looked stricken. “Have you gone without Christmas for years and years? How tragic!”

  “Jesus,” Taabe said.

  “Yes. And we give gifts to the people we love. I shall make something for each of my brothers, and for Ned. I’ve asked Papa to send me some oil-tanned leather so I can braid a new set of reins for Marcos and one for Benito. I’m not sure about the others yet. Perhaps I could sew something—although I doubt I’ll finish this sampler in time to sew anything else before Christmas.” Quinta frowned and jabbed her needle through the linen. “I’m only up to February on my calendar, and that means ten more months to go.”

  “Sister Adele says be patient,” Taabe said.

  Quinta grimaced. “My horse calendar only took me two days to make. This will take me two months. And it’s all time I could spend doing other things that are so much fun.”

  The kittens tumbled in from the entry, swatting at each other, and rolled together across the floor. Quinta laughed and jumped up, casting aside her needlework.

  Taabe felt she ought to call Quinta back to her task, as any of the nuns would, but she didn’t want to. Instead, she laughed as she watched Fluffy and Mimi, the calico, chase the skein of floss Quinta waved before them.

  Many times Taabe felt she stood between adulthood and childhood, between responsibility and freedom. Quinta’s presence accentuated that. It was another tearing of her character, as was the tugging between the white world and the Indian. Most of the time she wanted to live in the world of the whites. She belonged here. She had the strong conviction that if she persisted in relearning the white culture, she could take her place in it again.

  But sometimes she looked back to her life with the Numinu and sadness caught her. Would she never see her sister, Pia, again? The tiny baby girl Pia had borne last summer had seized her heart, and Taabe loved holding the baby and helping care for it—though it reminded her of her own loss. Sometimes she shed tears when she recalled cradling a warm little body close to her heart. She’d come to love the little scrap of a child she’d had once—and had resolved at that time to be content as a Numinu woman.

  But that season had passed, and with it came much sorrow. When Peca began making advances, she had backed away. Pia and Chano saw no reason why she should not marry the warrior, but the idea troubled Taabe. When he staked out the horses before their lodge, Taabe’s uncertainties fled, and she had settled her mind and her heart once and for all. She had one last chance to be free, and she would not tie herself forever to the Numinu. She would never become the wife of a man like Peca.

  Although
she’d accepted much of the Comanche life as normal, she never quite felt it was normal for her. Always, even when she could no longer remember the English words to the songs she used to sing, when she no longer knew the name of the little girl she had been, even then she could not bring herself to accept again becoming the wife of a raiding warrior.

  Now it seemed she had escaped that life. Ned spoke of a family who had lost a child who sounded like her. Would she soon meet her true family?

  The faint call of the horn reached them through the narrow window. Quinta’s head jerked around.

  “Stagecoach!” She leaped to her feet and ran to the entry to unbar the door.

  Taabe rose and put away her embroidery so the kittens wouldn’t play with it. She wanted to fly as Quinta had to the front yard. Ned was here—that knowledge always tugged her toward him. But now she always waited to see if he had strangers with him.

  Two of the sisters hurried past the doorway. Sister Adele paused and poked her head in. “You are all right, Taabe?”

  “I wait here.”

  Sister Adele nodded. Taabe leaned against the cool wall by the window, trying to see the stagecoach, but all that came within her view at first were the mules pulling it. They stood, stamping and snorting, and then she saw him. Ned strode past the leaders, lifting his hat then settling it onto his head. Taabe put her ear to the opening but couldn’t make out his words to the sisters.

  A moment later, Sister Adele came to the door. “Taabe, Mr. Bright is here to see you. He’s alone.”

  The nun stepped aside and Ned walked in smiling. His face was smoothly shaven this morning. The trail must not be dusty today, since rain had fallen lightly in the night—his blue flannel shirt looked fresh. He held his hat in one hand and extended the other to her.

  Taabe stepped forward and took his hand for a moment.

  “I have a message for you,” he said. “I hope it makes you happy.”

  She waited, not wanting to hope too much.

  “I wrote to the people near Victoria. The Morgan family.”

  “Billie Morgan,” she said, remembering the name he’d pressed her about two weeks ago. The more she repeated the name to herself, the more it seemed to belong.