The Texicans Read online

  “I’m used to traveling alone, and I’m well prepared,” Joseph said. “And I’m not afraid of Indians. I’ve trapped the Missouri for beaver pelts and camped many times with the Indians. I never saw one sever anyone’s scalp or cut off anyone’s ears.”

  “I had thought you a schoolteacher from a tender age.”

  “And I would have been had my brother Isaac not wanted me to join him in the business of men’s suits and hats. I went into the Missouri wilderness to get away from him, and now I’m going into the Texas wilderness because he’s dead. He always said I had a streak of contrariness.”

  “Can you shoot a pistol, Mr. Kimmel?” one of the boys asked, and the others all crowded around to hear Joseph’s answer.

  “I can shoot a pistol and camp out in the open and set fur traps and have negotiated the distance between the Missouri River and the Mississippi in a canoe. Indians left me as alone as I wanted to be. I believe the stories about vicious Indians are exaggerated.”

  Then he passed the letter from Cyril McCorkle around for the boys to read. When he got it back, the cream-colored paper with its slanty writing and misspelled words was spotted with sticky red dabs of Texas from Mrs. Thurmond’s cake icing.

  “Well, I hadn’t meant to give you a glimpse of my soul,” Joseph said finally, embarrassed that he had said as much as he had. “I’ve told you more about myself in these last few minutes than I have in the two years I’ve been here. So mind your new teacher and do your lessons and I’ll miss you all and think of you often when I’m in Texas.”

  Somewhere on the Texas Plains

  September, 1845

  JOSEPH BROKE CAMP EARLY. He strapped first the tent and then the light bedding to his horse’s back and tied on the kettle. Then he put his plate, knife and fork in one saddlebag along with his last tin of dried beef, his canteen, tools, ammunition and gunpowder. In the other he placed cloth-wrapped parcels of sugar, crackers, coffee and salt. He was adept at packing and unpacking his possessions, and could load his horse and look around him and listen for sounds all at the same time.

  The night before he had felt the first bite of autumn’s cool air. And here along the river beneath the liveoaks, with their shivery green leaves and their limbs draped in lacy Spanish moss, he thought that the worst of the journey must be behind him. He had been warned about the Texas sun, told it would parch him, scald him, crisp his skin. And it had. But no one had told him about the windstorms or the stinging sand that clogged your throat and filled your ears and eyes and nose. Or about the heat vapors that rose up out of the sedge grass like water boiling on a stove and made your tongue dry up and swell in your mouth. Or about hailstones as big as apples and river water that made your bowels run when you drank it.

  Or the loneliness. It was strange how he hadn’t missed human companionship until now, hadn’t thought it of any worth at all. During all those years in the Missouri wilderness with no one to talk to, he hadn’t missed human companionship, and here he had been traveling for only two months and he longed for the sound of a human voice. He had seen a plume of smoke on the prairie once midway through his journey, and when he got off his horse and began to prepare his evening meal, he caught himself hoping that the smoke signaled a wagon train that would soon catch up with him, but by the time he had brewed his coffee and was eating his crackers and beef the plume had spread out over the tall grass and spewed up past the timber line into the sky and disappeared.

  This morning he thought he saw movement beneath the pecan trees while he was steeping the kettle in the cold water of the river. He had set the kettle down on the bank to allow the sediment to settle, and as he began to fill his canteen his eye happened to pass over a hillock to the east, where larkspur and wild red poppies ran along the moist bank of the river like a bright arrow of color in the golden expanse of flatland. He was sure that he saw the grass flatten in one spot, as though pushed aside by the wind, even though the air was dead still. He had reached for the handle of his single-shot pistol, and then sat staring in rigid concentration at the flattened area.

  He had only been able to afford one pistol, not two, as Cyril McCorkle had suggested, and although he had once been able to shoot a rabbit from a hundred yards away, he had somehow gotten away from killing living things and hadn’t shot the pistol once on this whole journey. Not at the rabbits that hopped out of the brushwood as he rode past, nor at the high-stepping elk that came in graceful waves across the prairie. Not even at the deer that lifted the earth with their long legs and made the landscape flutter as though a great wind were sweeping through. He still had crackers and flour and beef jerky and didn’t miss the taste of fresh meat. He supposed he would kill an animal for food if he got hungry enough.

  He studied the grass where he thought he had seen the movement.

  “It’s nothing but the natural contour of the land,” he finally told his horse.

  He started off again, but he worried as he rode. He pondered the flattened grass all morning, turning often in the saddle to look back at where he had camped the night before. The thought that a child might have fallen off a wagon on the trail and been left behind, unnoticed and unmissed, gnawed at him. But he hadn’t seen a wagon. He hadn’t seen anything that even looked like a wagon for the past two months.

  At midmorning, he was still unable to dislodge the thought that a child might be lying hurt in the deep grass, and so he swung his horse around and headed back to where he had started that morning. Everything looked just the way he had left it. He walked around the cool ashes of the campfire, kicking dirt clods over with the toe of his boot. He explored the hillock where he thought he had seen the stirring of the grass, but the indentation was gone and the grass there seemed as tall and ripply as the rest of the prairie. He shook his head at his own foolishness, and was glad that there was no one around to see how he had wasted the day. But the idea that grass might move without a wind to move it bothered him. He dropped to his knees and began to crawl through the airless sea of feathery green stalks.

  A tall, scrawny man with a face as dark as the earth and eyes the color of sweet cherries lay on his side in the grass, lips trembling in fright.

  “I cain’t move.” He pointed to his bare feet, which were gouged and crusted with blood. “I jumped from the wagon, and when I done fell, I done felt somethin’ funny in one of dem ankles.”

  Joseph sat on his haunches and stared at the man. “I thought maybe a child fell off a wagon. I didn’t expect a runaway slave. I could have been bitten by a rattler, or even a centipede crawling around in the grass. I didn’t see a wagon. I’d have seen a wagon.”

  “I done fell off more’n a week past. I could walk some at first, but then it got too bad.”

  “I thought I saw smoke. I was sure of it.”

  The man seemed to be taller than Joseph, but he was thin and easy to lift. Joseph carried him back to the cold campfire and wrapped his feet with strips of clean rag. Then he gave him some crackers and beef jerky and sat back and watched while he ate.

  “I suppose I could take you to San Antonio with me and collect the bounty. What’s your name?”

  “Luck, suh.”

  “I don’t believe in slavery, but two hundred dollars is standard for a healthy runaway, and as poor as I am, even fifty dollars for a battered one would be a good thing.”

  After Luck had eaten his fill and drunk almost all the water in Joseph’s canteen, he fell asleep. Joseph poked his shoulder a few times to see if he was dead, he slept so soundly. It had been a shock discovering the man, and Joseph hadn’t meant what he said about taking him to San Antonio for the bounty money. Although it was a temptation. The sun was almost gone when Luck finally woke up.

  “One thing I know for sure, you can’t stay out here on the prairie,” Joseph told him, “so I’ll just have to take you with me to San Antonio and figure out what I’m going to do with you once we get there.”

  He hoisted Luck onto the horse and tied his wrists to the pommel of the saddle
with a piece of rope. As he began to lift himself into the saddle, he heard the metal rasp against the sole of his boot and felt the leather slide beneath his fingers.

  “Git!”

  The sound of Luck’s voice, sharp and commanding, startled Joseph. There were only seconds of time and inches of space between Joseph and a firm seat on the horse. But he had stayed on the ground too long, and now he felt himself falling, felt the sharp rocks against his back, heard Luck’s “Git!” two more times, and saw him gallop off, his tattered shirt darting like a butterfly in and out of the lacy hangings of the liveoak trees.

  5

  Hays ’ Rangers Campon the Nueces River

  September, 1845

  SOMETIMES THE RANGERS were gone for a week hunting Indians, sometimes for just a few days. They always left camp in a playful way, laughing and joking, as if going after Comanches were a game they were eager to play. Captain Hays would tell them stories the night before they left camp, stories about the time he was a surveyor out on the plains and got to hunting and killing Indians for the fun of it, without a uniform and without the Republic of Texas paying him for the job. He told them his hearing was so acute he could hear twigs snapping in his sleep, and how one night a band of Indians came crawling up to where he was camped, and before they could pounce on him with their spears and tomahawks he pulled out the three loaded flintlocks he kept at his side and killed two of them, then reloaded and killed three more, and kept reloading until he had killed fourteen, and never even got a scratched elbow. Indian ears make the best souvenirs, he told them. They don’t bleed too much and slip neatly into a saddlebag.

  Aurelia would sit with Tomás near the cook wagon when Captain Hays told his stories about Indians, and Tomás would whisper to her that Captain Hays always had his men search for Indians in the wrong places, and that was the reason they never encountered any. And he didn’t think Captain Hays had ever killed an Indian in battle. Oh, maybe he caught one by mistake a time or two and tied him up and then killed him, but that really didn’t count, it wasn’t like going into battle with the Indians. If he really wants to kill Indians, Tomás told her, he should ask me, I can tell him where they are.

  When Aurelia’s stomach began to swell she didn’t tell Willie, but waited until he could feel the bulge for himself.

  “It isn’t my baby,” he told her.

  “It’s yours. You come to me every night.”

  “It’s the others who come to you.”

  “You’re the only one. I know you by the way you groan, by the way you smell. It’s yours.”

  “Anyone who says the child is mine, I’ll tell him it isn’t,” he said.

  Aurelia decided she wanted to go home. She wanted to watch her brothers and sisters grow and help Luz gather wild herbs. She wanted to sit in the grass while Oscar dozed in his hammock. She wanted to feel the hot stones of the marketplace beneath her feet as she and Luz carried their bundles of herbs through the streets. She wanted to be rid of Willie.

  Are you a bruja? Tomás had asked her. She thought about his question at night when Willie pulled back the horse blanket and climbed on top of her. She thought about it in the morning while she was carrying water from the river. She thought about it when the men called her whore and when Willie kicked her stomach while she was sleeping. It was now almost October and she could feel the baby moving inside her. She decided that wondering whether she was a bruja was a waste of time. She had cured people of cholera; she should be able to rid herself of Willie. But she wasn’t sure how she would do it. Spells shouldn’t take too long to cast. And curses were said to be very effective. She had seen fortune tellers in the marketplace shaking maracas and yelling curses at anyone who didn’t pay for their fortune, and there were some who claimed that people fell dead in the street after a fortune teller cursed them. She had no maracas and she didn’t know what curses to use, although there were some words the priest said were satanic and blasphemous—magical words that wove webs of mystery and invited disaster, but he never revealed what they were, and Aurelia wasn’t sure whether a curse was the same as a spell, and she finally decided that she would get rid of him in her own way.

  She gathered a few lobelia flowers from beside the river and sprinkled them onto Willie’s head while he slept, and then she leaned over him and whispered in his ear. “You’re a cruel man, Willie, and others will make you suffer the way you’ve made me suffer.” And then she laid her hand lightly against his forehead. “Disappear,” she said. She didn’t specify how she wanted him to disappear. She gave no details. The next morning Willie and the Rangers marched off to hunt Indians. They looked particularly well turned out that morning, everyone in a different colored shirt and various kinds of vests and trousers. They had cleaned up by the river and trimmed their mustaches and shined their badges, and Captain Hays hardly had to say a thing to them to get them on their horses, they were so eager to go.

  “Maybe Captain Hays will find Indians and one of them will kill Willie,” Aurelia told Tomás.

  “If Willie dies,” he replied, “I’ll take you home.”

  Two weeks later Captain Hays returned to camp. Eight Hays’ Rangers had died fighting Comanche Indians, he said, and Willie Barnett was one of them.

  Aurelia waited for the captain to tell her he knew she had put a spell on Willie and caused his death, but all he said was, “Now you take these things and go on back to where you came from,” and gave her Willie’s hat and badge and bloody shirt.

  Tomás told Captain Hays he thought Aurelia should have Willie’s pay for the month. Captain Hays turned red at that remark, the color traveling up from his cheeks all the way into his hairline, and he said he thought Tomás ought to leave, too.

  That night Tomás saddled his horse and stole one of the Rangers’ horses for Aurelia and before the Rangers were up and looking for their breakfast, Tomás and Aurelia were on their way to San Antonio.

  “I WANT TO GET to San Antonio before the Northers come down on us,” Tomás said.

  “We’ll get there before then,” Aurelia replied.

  It was the second time they had stopped that morning. The first time was when they reached a shallow stream and Aurelia got down from her horse and crept through the shimmery forest of green, foraging for goldenseal to make a skin poultice for her aching legs. They stopped a second time when she saw a patch of dill which she brewed into a potion to ease her nausea. Tomás was impatient to get going again, but she said she thought she’d wade out into the water and search for lichens or algae to spice the rabbit stew he made every evening. The water was cold and she shivered as she ran her hand over the rocks and felt for slime beneath her bare feet. When she came out of the water empty-handed and was putting her shoes on, Tomás said that with her stomach as big as it was she could have slipped and drowned, that from now on she’d best stay out of the water. She merely glanced at him when he said it, but he jumped as if she had screamed at him. And now she sat on the riverbank and watched the river rushing by, wind-whipped wavelets lapping at the rocks and turning the water purple and green with sparks of red. Beyond lay a great deep valley, prairie grass flashing gold in the sun, the horizon like a flat plate in a sea of wheat.

  “An able-bodied man on a horse could have covered the thirty miles to San Antonio in a day,” Tomás said. “We’ve been traveling three.”

  “I’m not an able-bodied man, and the Northers won’t come for another month. We’ll be in San Antonio long before that.”

  “I don’t know how you figure that.”

  “There are no clouds.”

  “There might be tomorrow.”

  “It will be clear tomorrow.”

  Aurelia liked sitting here, moss hanging down around her face like lightly knitted strands of silk. Mealy-bugs fed on the sugary leaves of the hackberry trees and the air was misted with mealy-bug dew. She stuck out her tongue to catch the drops. When she was a child, she and her brothers and sisters would catch mealy-bug dew in their hands, then lick their palms
. It was sweeter than peach nectar, stickier than candied plums. Ghost rain, Luz called it, because it only came when the summer was over and there were no clouds in the sky.

  “I’m sorry I ever said I’d take you home,” he muttered. “I should have left you with the Rangers and let you find out what they’d end up doing to a Mexican girl with no one to look out for her.”

  “Maybe you should have.”

  “I might just leave you and go on ahead.”

  “I think you should do that if you want to.”

  “I’m not afraid of you, you know, witch or not. Some people might think you can see into the future, but I don’t.”

  “I didn’t say I could.”

  He shook his head, and then said he was going to see if he could find a quail for supper, he was tired of rabbit.

  She watched him walk away with his peculiar loping gait. He said he wasn’t afraid of her, but sometimes she caught him watching her out of the corner of his eye as they rode, looking as if he thought at any moment she might turn into a hawk and fly up into the sky. And when he spoke to her, he didn’t look at her full in the face, but at a slant, avoiding her eyes.

  She hadn’t asked him to come with her. She had expected up until the moment he mounted his horse that he’d tell her he had changed his mind. But he had come with her. She knew it was because he was waiting for her to do something magical. I’m just a plain, ordinary Mexican girl, she could have told him, but she knew he wouldn’t have believed her. She could have told him all sorts of things if she had wanted to. She could have told him that she was in no hurry to get to San Antonio, that she was stretching out the time, making the journey last as long as she could, looking for the spotted dark green tufts of goldenseal and the feathery stalks of dill when she knew it was too early for goldenseal to have sprouted or for the wispy tails of dill to have produced their healing seeds. She could have told him she knew that this time of year the river had tumbled the stones and washed away the lichens and algae. She could have told him that she had had a dream in which Luz was swinging in a hammock instead of Oscar and that the dream had terrified her.