“Eli, was that you shooting?” It was my sister.
“It was just a wolf,” I shouted back. I thought about going down to get the skin—a white wolf, I had never seen one of those before—but decided against it, as it was getting dark.
Because of all the food being made, we did not sit down for supper until late. Seven or eight tallow candles were lit around the house, another luxury. My mother and sister had been cooking all day and they brought out dish after dish. We all knew it was to punish my father for leaving us alone, for being guilted into a wild-goose chase, but no one said anything.
My brother and I drank cool buttermilk, my mother and sister drank a bottle of white wine we had gotten from the Germans. My father had been saving the wine for a special occasion. Supper began with wheat bread and butter and the last of the cherry preserves, then ham, sweet potatoes, roast turkey, fish stuffed with wild garlic and fried in tallow, steaks rubbed with salt and chili pepper and cooked directly on the coals, the last of the spring morels, also cooked in butter, and a warm salad of pigweed and Indian spinach, cooked in more butter and with garlic. I had never eaten so much butter in my life. For dessert we had two pies: blackberry and plum, fruit my brother had picked that day. There was nothing left in the larder but hardtack and salt pork. If he wants to run with Syphilis Poe, my mother said, then he can eat like Syphilis Poe.
I felt guilty but that did not stop me from eating my share. My mother did not feel guilty at all. She wished for more wine. Everyone was falling asleep.
I carried the ham bone out to the springhouse, then sat watching the stars. I had my own names for them—the buck, the rattler, the running man—but my brother convinced me to use Ptolemy’s, which did not make any sense. Draco looks like a snake, not a dragon. Ursa Major looks like a man running; there is not a bear anywhere in it. But my brother could not abide anything so tainted with common sense and thus my effort to name the heavens was aborted.
I put the horses in the stable, barred the door from the inside, and climbed out through the gap in the eaves. It would take any Indians a while to get at them. The horses seemed calm, which was a good sign, as they could smell Indians better than the dogs.
By the time I got back inside, my mother and sister had retired to my parents’ canopy bed and my brother was lying in my sister’s cot. Usually my brother and I slept in the room across the dogtrot, but I let him be. After gathering my rifle, war bag, and boots to the foot of the bed, I spit into the last candle and climbed under the covers with my brother.
A
ROUND MIDNIGHT
I heard our dogs rucking up a chorus. I had not been sleeping well anyway so I got up to check the porthole, worried my mother or sister would see what was sticking up under my nightshirt.
Which I forgot about. There were a dozen men near our fence and more in the shadows near the road and still more in our side yard. I heard a dog yelp and then our smallest, a fyce named Perdida, went running off into the brush. She was hunched like a gut-shot deer.
“Everyone get the hell up,” I said. “Get up, Momma. Get everyone up.”
The moon was high and it might as well have been daylight. The Indians led our three horses out of the yard and down the hill. I wondered how they’d figured their way into the stable. Our bulldog was following a tall brave around like they were best friends.
“Move over,” said my brother.
He and my mother and sister had gotten out of bed and were both standing behind me.
“There’s a lot of Indians.”
“It’s probably Rooster Joe and the other Tonks,” said my brother.
I let him push me out of the way, then went to the fire and poked it so we would have light. Since statehood we’d had good Indian years; most of the U.S. Army had been stationed in Texas to watch the frontier. I wondered where they were. I knew I should load all the guns, then remembered I had already done it. A rhyme came into my head,
buffalo grip, barlow blade, best damn knife that was ever made
. I knew what would happen—the Indians would knock on the door, we would not let them in, and they would try to break in until they got bored. Then they would set fire to the house and shoot us as we came out.
“Martin?” said my mother.
“He’s right. There are at least two dozen.”
“Then it’s whites,” said my sister. “It’s some gang of horse thieves.”
“No, it’s definitely Indians.”
I got my rifle and sat down in a corner facing the door. It was shadows and dim red light. I wondered if I would go to hell. My brother was pacing and my mother and sister had sat down on their bed. My mother was brushing my sister’s hair saying,
Shush now, Lizzie, everything will be fine.
In the dimness their eyes were empty sockets like the buzzards had already found them. I looked the other way.
“Your rifle has a nipple on it,” I told my brother, “and so do the pistols.”
He shook his head.
“If we put up a fight, they might just be happy with the horses.”
I could tell he didn’t agree but he went to the corner and took up his squirrel gun, feeling the nipple for a percussion cap.
“I already capped it,” I repeated.
“Maybe they’ll think we’re not home,” said my sister. She looked to my brother but he said, “They can see we have a fire going, Lizzie.”
We could hear the Indians clanging things around in my father’s metal shop, talking in low voices. My mother got up and put a chair in front of the door and stood on it. There was another gun port up high and she removed the board and put her face to it: “I only see seven.”
“There are at least thirty,” I told her.
“Daddy will be following them,” said my sister. “He’ll know they’re here.”
“Maybe when he sees the flames,” said my brother.
“They’re coming.”
“Get down from there, Mammy.”
“Not so loud,” said my sister.
Someone kicked the door and my mother nearly fell off her perch.
Salir, salir.
There was pounding. Spanish was the language most of the wild tribes spoke, if they spoke anything but Indian. I thought the door might stop a few shots at best and I motioned again for my mother to get down.
Tenemos hambre. Nos dan los alimentos.
“That is ridiculous,” said my brother. “Who would believe that?”
There was a long quiet time and then Mother looked at us and said, in her schoolteacher voice: “Eli and Martin, please put your guns on the floor.” She began to remove the bar from the door and I realized that everything they ever said about women was true—they had no common sense and you could not trust them.
“Do not open that door, Momma.
“Grab her,” I told Martin. But he didn’t move. I saw the bar lift and propped the rifle on my knee. The moonlight was coming through the cracks like a white fire but my mother didn’t notice; she set the bar aside like she was welcoming an old friend, like she’d been expecting this from the day we were born.
I
T WAS SAID
in the newspapers that mothers on the frontier saved their last bullets for their own children, so they would not be taken by the heathens, but you did not hear of anyone doing it. In fact it was the opposite. We all knew I was of prime age—the Indians would want me alive. My brother and sister might have been slightly old, but my sister was pretty and my brother looked younger than he really was. Meanwhile my mother was almost forty. She knew exactly what they would do to her.
The door flung open and two men tackled her. A third man stood behind them in the doorway, squinting into the darkness of the house.
When my shot hit, he windmilled an arm and fell backward. The other Indians sprinted out and I yelled for my brother to shut the door but he didn’t move. I ran over to shut it myself but the dead Indian was lying across the sill. I was grabbing for his feet, intending to pull him in and clear the doorway, when he kicked me under the jaw.
When I came to there were trees waving in the moonlight and one loud noise after another. Indians were standing on either side of the doorway, leaning to shoot into the room, then ducking back around the corner. My sister said,
Martin, I think they’ve shot me
. My brother was just sitting there. I thought he’d taken a ball. The Indians took a break for the powder smoke to thin so I jerked the rifle from his hand, checked that the hammer was cocked, and was swinging it toward the Indians when my mother stopped me.
Then I was on my stomach; at first I thought the house had fallen, but it was a man. I grabbed at his neck but my head kept chunking against the floor. Then I was outside under the trees.
I tried to stand but was kicked and tried again and was kicked again. Now a man’s feet, now the ground next to them. Now a pair of legs, covered in buckskin. I bit his foot and was kicked a third time and then my hair was being pulled like it would come out at the roots. I waited for the cutting.
When I opened my eyes there was a big red face; he smelled like onions and a dirty outhouse and he showed me with the knife that I would behave or he would cut my head off. Then he lashed my hands with a piggin string.
When he walked away, he did not look like any Indian I’d ever seen. The aborigines living among the whites were thin, light bodied, and hard wintered. This one was tall and stocky, with a square head and fat nose; he looked more like a Negro than a lathy starving Indian and he walked with his chest out, as if taking everything we owned was his natural right.
There were fifteen or twenty horses outside the gate and as many Indians against our fence, laughing and making jokes. There was no sign of my mother or brother or sister. The Indians were stripped to the waist and covered with paint and designs like they’d escaped from a traveling show; one had painted his face like a skull, another had the same design on his chest.
Some of the Indians were rummaging the house and others rummaging the stables or outbuildings but most were leaning on the fence watching their friends work. All the white men I’d ever seen after a fight were nervous for hours, pacing and talking so fast you couldn’t understand them, but the Indians were bored and yawning like they’d just come back from an evening constitutional, except for the man I’d shot, who was sitting against the house. There was blood on his chest and his mouth was frothing. Maybe he’d jumped sideways when the cap popped—they said the aboriginals had reflexes like deer. His friends saw me staring and one came over and said
taibo n
u
w
u
kupat
u?i
,
then knocked me in the head.
I had a long dream where I was brought before a man to judge me for my sins. It was Saint Peter, only in the form of the teacher of our school in Bastrop, who had disliked me over all the other students, and I knew I was going to hell.
Then most of the Indians were standing looking at something on the ground. There was a white leg crooked in the air and a man’s bare ass and buckskin leggings on top. I realized it was my mother and by the way the man was moving and the bells on his legs were jingling I knew what he was doing to her. After a while he stood up and retied his breechcloth. Another jumped right into place. I had just gotten to my feet when my ears started ringing and the ground came up and I thought I was dead for certain.
A while later I heard noises again. I could see the second group of Indians a little farther down the fence but now I could hear my sister’s voice whimpering. The Indians were doing the same to her as my mother.
F
INALLY
I
REALIZED
I was in bed. I was having a dream. It was nice until I woke up all the way and heard war whoops and saw I was still in the yard. My mother was naked and crawling away from the Indians; she had reached the porch and was trying to make it to the door. Inside the house, someone was pounding on the piano and there was something waving out from my mother’s back that I realized was an arrow.
The Indians must have decided they did not want her in the house because they began shooting more arrows into her. She kept crawling. Finally one of them walked up to her, put his foot between her shoulders and pressed her to the ground. He gathered up her long hair as if he was fixing to wash it, then pulled it tight with one hand and drew his butcher knife. My mother had not made a sound since I woke up, even with the arrows sticking out of her, but she began to scream then, and I saw another Indian walking up to her with my father’s broadax.
I had been puddling and moaning but that is when I dried up for good. I did not look at my mother and I might have heard a sound or I might not have. I tried to find Martin and Lizzie. Where Lizzie had been I made out a small white patch and then another and I realized it was her and that she was lying where they had left her. Later, when they led us out, I saw a body with its breasts cut off and its bowels draped around. I knew it was my sister but she no longer looked like herself.
I was dragged over to the fence next to my brother. He was crying and going quiet and crying again. Meanwhile nothing was coming out of me. I gathered myself up to look over at my mother; she was on her belly with the arrows sticking out of her. The Indians were going in and out of the house. My brother was sitting there looking at things. I began to choke and air my paunch and when I was done he said: “I thought you were dead. I was watching you for a long time.”
It felt like a wedge had been stuck between my eyes.
“I was thinking Daddy might come home, but now I think we’ll be miles away before anyone knows what happened.”
A young Indian saw us talking and threatened us with his knife to shut up, but after he walked off Martin said: “Lizzie was hit in the stomach.”
I knew what he was getting at and I thought about how he’d sat there while our mother unbarred the door, sat there when I tried to get the Indian out of the doorway, sat with a loaded rifle while Indians were shooting into the house. But my head hurt too much to say any of it. I saw spots again.