The Which Way Tree
Page 20
She laid there and wailed aloud, and cursed the panther, and cursed his hide, saying, He killed my mama! He ruined my face! It was my right! It was my right!
She yanked at her hair, and broke her heart right there in the mud, and spent her grief whilst we watched her.
After a time, Preacher Dob told her, Little girl, we need to get going. We need to start back. The Bible tells us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves them that are crushed in spirit. It is time for you to stand up and come on.
She got hold of herself, and we put our pants on, and I shouldered up Zechariah, and Preacher Dob mounted, on account of his leg was still hurt and he could not walk, and Sam mounted behind him, and we started off at a slow pace to make our way upriver.
At nightfall we come to a cluster of houses below Bandera that Preacher Dob knew. They was part of the camp the Mormons had moved on from, and now was lived in by Poles that did not speak English. We knocked on a door and was taken in.
The next day Sam and me rode the mare home, whilst a Polish man eighty or ninety years old carried Preacher Dob home in a wagon with Zechariah.
You might wonder about Zechariah, sir. He has been doing all right in the time since all this happened. I seen him not long ago and he was like a young dog. That hunt did him good.
Preacher Dob has stopped by on occasion to look in on us. He has been good to us and tried to help our situation but does not have means to do so. After his leg got fixed he come to our house and fetched Sam to live with him and his family. She went, but lasted there only a day. She would not agree that Preacher Dob’s Mexican boy named Jackson, that had got away from the Indians and come starving to Preacher Dob’s corn field, was not a actual Indian posed as a Mexican. She feared he would do them all in. She run off, and I found her back home, and we been here together since then.
Thank you again for your effort to find her a home that would take her. She will not do chores around here, and has nothing of interest to do, and I do worry about her. I am sorry it did not work out. And thank you for the gifts you give us. It is a odd thing how a event like that on the Julian, that had no justice nor kindness to it and cost eight decent men their lives, has somehow, by the way things turned, earned me books, and spectacles, and a steel nib pen.
I promise to make good use of them.
Yours kindly,
Benjamin Shreve
Chapter 14
Alfred R. Pittman
Attorney-at-Law
35 Eberly Building
215 South High Street
Columbus, Ohio
April 9, 1925
The Reverend Jackson Beck
First Methodist Episcopal Church
Third Street and Lead Avenue
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Dear Reverend Beck,
I fear you may have received from me a batch of papers sent to you without adequate explanation. This is entirely my fault. At my age I am not as orderly as I used to be, and apparently I mislaid the introductory letter when I gave the papers to my secretary to post. I have just come across it here on my desk, dated a month ago.
Presumably by now you have discovered the nature of the papers. I feel, however, that I should tell you how they came into my custody and why I sent them to you. They were originally in the possession of Judge Edward H. Carlton as he presided, at the close of the War Between the States, over a judicial district that extended from Kimble County, Texas, to the Mexican border. This was during a fractious era when the law was devoted to the arduous and often unpopular task of locating and bringing to justice those individuals guilty of crimes against civilians during the war. The judge conducted interviews with many individuals pertaining to the case of Clarence Hanlin, but it was Benjamin Shreve’s testimony, the pages of which you received from me, that most assisted him in rendering to the grand jury his recommendations.
I served as assistant and traveling companion to the judge during the time he was receiving Benjamin’s letters and written testimony. Shortly afterward, he left Texas and returned to his hometown of Cincinnati to care for his aging mother. I accompanied him on this move. We took with us the file containing Benjamin’s papers, as files were known to disappear from county courthouses and the judge intended to see to its preservation.
Some two years after our departure from Texas, I finished my law studies in Cincinnati and was admitted to the Ohio bar. At that time Judge Carlton and I returned to Texas for a visit. While we were there, we inquired of Benjamin and Samantha in the towns of Bandera and Comfort. We were told that Samantha’s whereabouts were unknown and that Benjamin had departed the state with an outfit out of San Antonio to transport cattle to Kansas and had not, as of that time, returned. We stopped at the location on Verde Creek that we presumed to have been their home, but we found the house deserted and uninhabitable. The judge was especially regretful at having lost touch with the boy. Being unmarried and having no children of his own, he had experienced during Benjamin’s testimony something akin to a fatherly feeling. He intended to make a further search for Benjamin in the future and see to his welfare and that of Samantha, but on our journey back to Cincinnati by train he was afflicted with a minor chill that quickly progressed into influenza. After we reached his mother’s home, the condition settled into his lungs. He passed away a few days later.
After his death the judge’s papers came into my possession and have remained in my care for the ensuing decades.
I am now approaching my ninetieth year. My health remains vigorous, but I have felt the ever more pressing need to set my affairs in order. As well I have carried an increasing regret for having failed to search further for Benjamin and Samantha in the nearly sixty intervening years. The judge’s death was as great an emotional crisis as I have faced, and I fear that any lingering responsibility I felt toward the children became a casualty of my grief, in that I felt the necessity to cast my mind ruthlessly forward in time and not back. I departed the country for almost a decade of life abroad and on my return settled near my family in Columbus, built a law practice, and lost myself in it and in other scholarly work. Over time the great wound caused by my companion’s death healed, but by then, in the complexities of a new life, I had all but forgotten Benjamin’s papers and the sense of responsibility I should have felt toward them.
It was a few months ago that my omission began to weigh heavily on my conscience. I wrote to a friend who resides in the area of Comfort and asked what he might know of Benjamin and Samantha Shreve, or possibly of you or other members of your family, who I hoped might have information about them. When he told me of your ministry in Albuquerque, I felt that you would appreciate Benjamin’s letters and the testimony involving your father, whose wisdom and compassion pervades throughout, and that you might be kind enough to inform me of anything you know of Benjamin or Samantha.
It has been a happy occasion and great pleasure for me to read Benjamin’s pages once again, as they brought back those times on the circuit when the judge shared them with me alongside campfires or on porches in towns where we stopped and received the mail. I recall how he anticipated the postal stops and how he would often rapidly sift through envelopes, even before exchanging proper pleasantries with the postmaster, and hand me all other papers so that he might come upon Benjamin’s envelope and open it at once.
Concurrent with sending the original pages to you, I have placed photostats in the Bandera County Courthouse and the archives held by the Texas State Historical Association at the University of Texas. It was vastly important to Judge Carlton, as he stated to me shortly before his demise, that Benjamin’s testimony find its way to an appropriate archive.
I leave the destiny of the original pages to your discretion.
Respectfully yours,
Alfred R. Pittman
Reverend Jackson Beck
First Methodist Episcopal Church
Third Street and Lead Avenue
Albuquerque, New Mexico
August 19, 1925
Alfred R. Pittman
Attorney-at-Law
35 Eberly Building
215 South High Street
Columbus, Ohio
Dear Sir,
I hope you will accept my deep and sincere apology for this belated response to your kindness in having sent me Benjamin Shreve’s testimony and your letter that followed, which I received, respectively, three and four months ago. I read the testimony immediately upon receiving it but delayed responding to your letter because I lacked adequate words to describe the impact of Benjamin’s tale on my thoughts. My wife speculated that I was thrown into a deep emotional well. If so, it has taken me these months to find my way out. The story seemed to resurrect in me a buried longing for an element of my past that has been long lost to me and that I had thought was gone forever.
I will try to describe to you the journey that I subsequently embarked upon. To explain from the beginning my memories of Benjamin I will need to explain to you my own uncomfortable beginnings, or what little I know of them. I hope not to try your patience but rather to supplement the record Benjamin has left.
It is presumed I was born in Mexico to Mexican parents. At about the age of four or five I was taken from my family by Indians. I suppose they were the Comanche, who were prevalent in the area, although I cannot be certain, as they spoke primarily their own language and did not refer to themselves as such. I recall playing beneath large trees near a stream with other children when the Indians appeared on horseback, charged through the water toward us, and chased us as we ran through a field. I do not know the fate of the other children and recall only that I was pulled onto a horse by an Indian and carried away from my home at a great rate of speed. I have explicit memories of the harsh treatment I received at the hands of these Indians, over what period of time I do not exactly know, but I have long since ceased to dwell on these things.
My escape from them, some months or perhaps a year later, happened as the result of a surprise attack by other Indians—I do not know of which tribe. It occurred in the dark of night while we slept. At that time I believe I was partially, and perhaps wholly, assimilated into the tribe’s way of life, as I was sleeping freely among them beside a woman who treated me as her child. I remember sudden noise and chaos and a great deal of gunfire, from which I fled. After this I recall being utterly alone and feeling deep disquiet and extreme hunger. I wandered in the wilderness, for how long I don’t know, and would be a wanderer still had the Lord not guided me to the cornfield of Dobson Beck, known as Preacher Dob, who would become my father.
As muddled as most of my recollections of that time are, I recall with clarity the moment Dobson Beck discovered me in the cornfield, starving, naked, and retching up his raw corn, having made myself sick by eating my fill. I was overcome with fear upon seeing a human shape appear at the end of a row of stalks, pass by, and then instantly return, having seen me also. He approached me with the late sun of a winter afternoon glinting through his white hair. I attempted to escape him, but he dragged my sick weight into his arms and held on to me even as I, from habit or instinct, struck at him and attempted to claw my way out of his grasp.
That moment in his arms was the beginning of my salvation. I am alive because of him. I am a Christian because of him. I have a name because of him.
I am supposing it was less than a year later when I first saw Benjamin Shreve and his sister, Samantha. I believe this was the timing, as I remember that I had not yet learned to speak adequate English. By that time I was fully situated in the family as one of three children in the home, the other two being the grandson and granddaughter of Preacher Dob, whom I refer to as my father although he was never legally so.
The story of that initial visit paid to us by Benjamin and Samantha, in the company of Lorenzo Pacheco and my father’s nephew, Clarence Hanlin, is thoroughly described by Benjamin in his testimony. I will not burden you with my own memories of it except to tell you that I was instantly and acutely drawn to, as well as repelled by, Samantha. Her scars were even more disfiguring than Benjamin has described them, and I was compulsive in my need to look at them and to try to make sense of what had caused them. I had numerous scars of my own from wounds incurred during my captivity, as you may recall from Benjamin’s testimony. While my scars could be easily hidden and Samantha’s were stretched across her face in the most obvious placement, creating a situation for her that I presume was more difficult to bear, I remember nevertheless feeling a kinship based on the scars and perhaps also based on the implicit suffering. Most vividly, I am still able to evoke the deep and instinctive need I felt to connect or communicate with her.
Samantha’s need, in contrast, was for isolation. She refused, in the way Benjamin has explained, to be looked at. I was therefore a threat and even a terror to her, and I have been saddened to learn from reading Benjamin’s testament that it was largely her distrust of me that caused her to flee from our house after my father attempted to take her in.
It was likely the same impulse, coupled with her insatiable craving for revenge on the panther, that eventually caused her to take the flight of which I am about to tell you. Nothing of this part of Benjamin’s story is included in the materials you sent, as it happened later, perhaps a year after Benjamin wrote his testament to the judge.
I was ten or eleven years old. Benjamin must have been eighteen by then. He came pounding at our door late at night, in a frantic state, and told my father the panther was not dead, as they had believed him to be, but alive, and had preyed upon them once again. He said that on coming home after dark he had found the chickens slaughtered, the panther’s two-toed tracks leading down to the creek, and Samantha gone. She had taken a pony Benjamin had recently acquired, had taken with her the hunting gun, and had left behind a note composed using the writing skills that Benjamin had been teaching her. He pulled the note from his pocket and showed it to my father in the light of a lamp on the table. I do not know the exact content but presume it said she was going after the panther.
At that time my father had been anticipating the inevitable passing of his dog, Zechariah, who despite his state of relative decrepitude, as described by Benjamin in his testimony, had nevertheless managed to live through the intervening four years. Although the dog had grown increasingly feeble, when my father held Samantha’s note to the lamplight and took full stock of the desperation in Benjamin’s face, he declared that Zechariah would appreciate nothing better than to track a panther for one last time and even to die in the attempt. He said that he and the dog would join Benjamin and go in search of Samantha and the panther.
I begged my father and persuaded him to let me come along. He sent me to fetch the dog. I took the lantern and searched every row of the cornfield as well as the sheds and the smokehouse but could not find Zechariah. When I returned to the house and told my father, he shared a look with Benjamin that acknowledged what I think they both at once suspected, which was that Samantha had come and taken the dog herself. I remember the stricken look and the words of my father: “She has beat us to him.”
My father and I then accompanied Benjamin to his house on horseback, taking the trail Samantha was most likely to have taken in case we might come across her. When we reached the house we found the panther’s tracks and attempted to follow them by the light of our lanterns. However, they were muddied and intermingled with the pony’s, and we lost every trace of them in Verde Creek. In some places, near the water, we discovered the tracks of what appeared to be a dog alongside, but we could not distinguish these with any certainty from the tracks of the wolves and coyotes that Benjamin said were known to frequent the creek, and we could only guess if they belonged to Zechariah.
I was told to wait at the cabin in case Samantha might return there while Benjamin and my father searched for her. I can still hear, echoing in my mind, Benjamin calling her name, throughout the night, from across the dark canyons. The sound was heartrending and unfathomable to me, greeted as it was by silence. When Ben
jamin and my father arrived back at the cabin before daylight, hoping beyond reason to find Samantha there with me, Benjamin’s anguish and grief when he saw me there alone were evident to me, even at my young age, in spite of his attempt to remain stoic.
In the morning my father sent me home while he remained with Benjamin for several days and they continued to search the canyons. For at least a month afterward, Benjamin persisted in the search alone, riding from town to town, inquiring if Samantha had been seen. He returned, each time, defeated.
It was only a few years after this that my father passed away, suffering a hard death of what I now believe must have been a cancer of the stomach. I was but thirteen or fourteen years old at the time and unaware of the specific cause of his death, but I recall Ida’s desperate and prolonged efforts to relieve his pain. His son had been killed in the war, and I remember that he called out for him shortly before passing.
At this time, Benjamin had left the area to drive cattle out of state and therefore was not in attendance at the funeral.
That is everything I knew of Benjamin prior to reading his testimony and prior to the journey I took this year. I remained with Ida and her children, whom I considered then, and still consider, my brother and sister, until the age of eighteen, when I left to attend Baylor University, in Independence, at the generosity of a benefactor whom my father, before his death, had convinced I was worthy of education. My visits to the hill country were infrequent after that, as I married young and moved with my wife to New Mexico to raise our two children and carry forth my father’s service to those in need.