I reached the wall and crawled over it. The young Ranger sergeant was talking to the men gathered: “ . . . I go through the door, you follow me, get out of the doorway as soon as you can but don’t move faster than you can shoot. The Mexicans will be in the corners. Do not pass a corner, do not turn your back to a corner, unless you or someone else is shooting into it.”
He raised his head so everyone could see him.
“When I stand up,” he called out, “I want you to empty your guns at the building. But as soon you see me clear this wall, you stop firing. You hear?”
I did not trust that anyone had heard. Between the ringing ears and the spectacle of destruction before us, everyone was in his own world. But somehow most agreed and those who did not had the instructions shouted into their ears.
When the sergeant stood up, there was a long volley that did not stop until finally he waved his hands and shouted for a long time and then he and a dozen other men, including Charles, rushed for the gallery. I called for Charles to come back, but he didn’t hear me, or pretended not to, and then I noticed that fat old Niles Gilbert had not gone, nor had either of his two sons.
The front door was so shattered they just walked right through it. The shooting began again, the tempo increasing as each man entered the house until it was nearly continuous. We couldn’t see any of what was happening inside, dark shapes passing behind the doors or windows, a few bullets leaking out and kicking up dirt in the yard. Then it got quiet and then there was a sudden
pop pop pop
. Then it got quiet and then there were more orphaned shots. After that I couldn’t bear to look. In the distance I could see the Nueces and the green river flats all around, the sun continuing to rise, catching in the pall of dust, the air around the casa mayor turning a brilliant orange as if some miracle were about to occur, a descent of angels, or perhaps the opposite, a kind of eruption, the ascent of some ancient fire that would wipe us all from the earth.
I looked for some sense in it. It was the best piece of land for miles—high, well-watered ground—we had not been the first to fight here. If we were to scratch the earth we would find the bones of crushed legs, ribs gashed from spears.
Then someone was waving his hat. It was Charles. His shirt was in tatters and his arm was bleeding. He shouted for us to put down our guns, but no one moved so I stood and stepped over the wall again, waving my arms and walking up and down the line so the others would lower their rifles.
I
ATTEMPTED TO
tend to Charles’s arm but he pushed me away. It appeared to be birdshot.
“Let me look at it,” I said.
“It doesn’t even hurt yet.” Then, as if I had some disease, he would not allow me any closer.
Inside the house, it looked as if workmen had been called to perform a demolition. Or vandals let into a museum. Antique furniture shot to pieces, upholstery shredded and the stuffing spilled as if the house had been invaded by a swarm of birds, ancient dark paintings of matriarchs and patriarchs, a Byzantine portrait of Christ, antique quilts, sketches, weapons, crosses, all punctured or smashed or knocked onto the floor. An illuminated Bible, the pride of Pedro’s family, fallen from its place in the
altarcito
and splayed open in the plaster.
In the living room I counted five dead men and one dead woman, shot so many times that every drop of blood had leaked from their bodies and mixed with the splinters and dust and gutted upholstery. One looked old enough to be Pedro but when I turned him over it was Cesár, a vaquero, a man who had helped us on roundups since I was a boy. In kneeling to turn him my pants soaked through and when I stood up the fabric stuck darkly to my legs.
Underneath one of the sofas something caught my eye: a young girl in a blue dress. Next to her a boy of six or eight, dead as well. By then a barricade had gone up between my eyes and mind; I saw them with scientific interest; here was the blood, there were the holes. Smaller details: standing pools of bright crimson, handprints and bootprints and long smears where the wounded had been dragged, bloody spray over the walls indicating some final moment, some story which would never be told. A young man with the white of his spine, another stretched out as if drunk; his brains had been spooned out onto his shirt. I saw others looking with the same cool interest; when blood does not belong to your kin it might as well be wine or water.
In the kitchen, six dead; three of Pedro’s vaqueros—Romaldo, Gregorio, and Martín—along with Pedro’s middle daughter, Carmen. Two men staring at each other over the crumpled bodies of Pedro’s twin granddaughters, the same white dresses and pigtails. The room smelled like an abattoir; blood and the musky smell of opened bellies, waste from the bodies, but there was something sweet as well—roses—which I suspected my mind had invented from a swamp of confused sensations.
I went to Pedro’s office. It was surprisingly untouched and I felt tired; I sat down in the chair opposite his desk as I had done many times. I resolved I would let the others make the necessary discoveries. Though of course that would be worse. There was no absolution. I got up and followed the scent of rosewater toward one of the bedrooms, where the door was perforated with two large holes from a shotgun, plaster dust grinding under my feet.
At the far end of the room, in the middle of his canopy bed, Pedro lay on his back as if taking a nap. The scent of rosewater was so strong I nearly retched. A small price. When I got closer I saw his face, the pillow and bedclothes stained. Something—a pair of teeth—had been knocked from his mouth. A few white feathers had settled on his face.
There had been a fight here—the back wall was pocked by bullets, the dressers and wardrobes splintered, jewelry scattered. I thought I heard Pedro speaking, but it was just a trick of my ringing ears. Near the foot of the bed lay Aná, Pedro’s youngest daughter, her church dress soaked to the waist, her back and neck arched as if she had gathered her energy to shout something. There was an old Colt Army.
Lourdes Garcia was on the other side of the bed, still gripping a Spanish fowling piece.
Just then the game warden came into the room, surveyed the damage, and told me not to touch the bodies.
“If you do not get the hell out of here,” I told him, “you will be looking for another job tomorrow.”
I straightened Aná’s skirts and placed her and Lourdes in the bed with Pedro. It was a pointless gesture. They would soon be carried outside. I left the room.
In one of the closets in another bedroom we found a woman in her thirties. She was alive.
¿Estás herida?
I guessed it was María, the unmarried daughter, but her face was so filthy and bloody and her eyes so wild I couldn’t be sure. She looked at me. She submitted as I ran my fingers over her scalp and through her hair to check for wounds, then opened her shirt quickly to check front and back for the same, then closed it again, then lifted her skirts to check her hip and waist area. She was not injured. She sat dumbly as I straightened her clothes.
I led her outside and turned her over to Ike Reynolds and his sons, whom I know to be respectable. A minute later they rode off. What family she has left I don’t know; the Garcias have been in this country far longer than any of the white families. They were once proper hidalgos, having been granted this land by the king of Spain himself. Pedro never spoke of any family in Mexico; he did not think of himself as Mexican.
Outside the sun was all the way up. Charles and one of the Rangers had both been hit by birdshot, but the pellets had not gone deep. I thought of the shotgun lying next to Lourdes. I wondered if Charles had killed her, or if he had killed Pedro, or maybe Aná.
Niles Gilbert’s friend from El Paso, who had been so anxious to “naturalize” some Mexicans, had been shot through the mouth. A brief sense of satisfaction rose within me, then slipped away; he would go down a martyr. The small blond Ranger sergeant had been hit in the hand and forearm and the stock of his carbine split by a bullet.
Wounded or not, the twelve living assaulters sat dumbly on the porch, some lying on their backs, others dangling their legs over the edge, staring at the roof or into the sky. Sullivan was lifting their shirts to check them for injuries, shouting instructions into their ears. I wondered again if Charles had been the one to shoot Pedro and Lourdes, but pushed away the question a second time.
Meanwhile, the men at the wall had begun to come forward. Bill Hollis had been laid out in the shade. His brother Dutch was sitting next to him. Four others were carried over. I could tell that one was a vaquero of ours, though I did not have the heart to get up and see who it was.
A
FEW HOURS
later the photographer showed up. The Rangers posed with the bodies of the male Garcias, the faces shot off most of the dead men, a detail that would be lost in the printing. They would look blurred, overdirty, as the faces of all dead men do.
No one commented on the absence of Pedro’s sons-in-law. It was just as he had told us—they were not in the house. The bodies of the women and children were placed in the shade, away from their men, perhaps out of some old-fashioned impulse, perhaps so they would not show in the pictures.
Watching the photographer take pictures of townspeople posing with the Garcias—a loose queue had formed—I began to feel even more tired. I knew what anyone looking at the pictures would think, or rather not think, of the Garcias, whose remains were so matted with dust and dried blood that they were barely distinguishable from the caliche. The audience would notice only the living men, who had done a brave thing, while the dead would not even register as men. They were props—like a panther or dead buck—they had lived their entire lives in order to die for just this moment.
People from town continued to arrive, women and children now. Our vaqueros disappeared, taking the body of their fallen comrade, while the vigilantes and their wives went through the cupboards. The furniture inside the casa mayor was all quite valuable; most had come from the old country: old Spanish weapons and armor, a good deal of silver. The Garcias had once been quite wealthy and I knew when I returned I would find the house completely plundered.
As for myself, I have always known I will leave nothing behind me in this place, no sign I ever passed, but for the Garcias it was different, because they had hoped, and believed, that they would.
Eli McCullough
T
wo days after my brother died I was still in a fever. The Indians kept me tied to my horse. I was still in a fever and we were still on the Llano, and on the morning of the third day I saw something shining in the distance, which I took to be a city, and as we got closer I saw it was floating in the air, a shining city on a hill, and I knew my mother had been right, that the heat or my fever or some hilarious Indian had killed me and I would soon be joining the rest of my family. I knew I ought to be happy but I felt sadder than I’d ever been.
When we got closer I saw it wasn’t a city at all. It was a box canyon and it was still floating miles above us, as if a range of mountains had been carved out of the earth; there was a long shining river and drifting herds of deer and my mother had not been right at all. I was being taken by the Indians to their happy hunting ground, where I would remain their prisoner even in death.
I had a dauncy spell but no one heard me over the wind. Soon after, we reached the thing itself. It was a proper canyon cut into the earth but some mirage in the sky was reflecting it. It was even larger than the mirage made it look—a dozen miles across and a thousand feet deep, with fins and towers and hoodoos like observation posts, mesas and minor buttes, springs flowing brightly in the red rock. There were cottonwoods and hackberries, and the valley floor was thick with grass and wildflowers.
We took an hour dropping into it, then made an early camp next to a clear stream. There was a skull with an enormous tusk all turned to stone and sticking out of the bank. I wondered what my brother would have made of it. The Indians were relaxed. For my own protection I was kept tied to a tree, though the Germans were allowed to wander and by her yellow hair I could see one sitting on a far butte. The Indians were not worried; there were wolf and grizzly and panther tracks everywhere and it was no place to be playing a lone hand.
A few deer were killed and a yearling buffalo. Wild potatoes and turnips and sweet onions were dug up, braided, and roasted in the fire. The animals were carefully skinned, the meat filleted from the bones, coals raked out and the big roasts placed on them. The bones were put in the fire and when everything was ready they were cracked and the marrow spread on the potatoes. There were handfuls of chokecherries for dessert and a lemonade made from sumac. Everyone was full as a tick but finally the hump of the buffalo was dug out of the coals; it was dripping with fat and came apart in our fingers. It was the best I’d eaten since I’d left home and at the thought of that I got dauncy again and N
uu
karu came over and slapped me.
By sundown the walls of the canyon looked to be on fire and the clouds coming off the prairie were glowing like smoke in the light, as if this place were His forge and the Creator himself were still fashioning the earth.
“Urwat leaves tomorrow,” Toshaway said. When the others turned in I was tied down for sleep as I’d been since my brother died—my arms and legs roped to separate stakes in the ground. Toshaway put his buffalo robe over me. The stars were too bright to sleep, the Dipper, Pegasus, the serpent and dragon, Hercules; I watched them turn while meteors left smoking trails that stretched across the canyon.
A few of the Indians had their way with the Germans. This time I tried not to listen.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
the spoils of the raid—weapons, tools, equipment, horses, anything valuable including the German girls and me—were set out and divided. The older girl went with Urwat’s group; the younger girl and I with Toshaway’s. The younger girl was crying as Urwat’s group rode away with her cousin, and there was a patch of long dark hair, my mother’s, tied to the saddle of a horse in Urwat’s band. N
uu
karu came over and slapped me. I knew he was doing me a favor.