The Texicans Page 6

  AURELIA ATE THE LIZARD carefully, holding the body between two fingers and delicately gnawing first at its head and then its tail. Flying Braid ate hers greedily, with the body held flat against her face.

  “I saw everything starting to die inside me, even the baby,” Aurelia said. “I saw its face. It has two blond curls atop its head.”

  “If you saw its face, that means it is a girl,” Flying Braid said, and Aurelia asked if she could have some more lizard to eat, that she could feel the baby inside her crying with happiness.

  Flying Braid caught two rats, and she laid them on the stained carpet in front of Aurelia.

  “Rats are strong,” Flying Braid said, “and when you eat them their strength flows into your body, especially when they are warm from the kill,” and she tore off the head and tail and gave Aurelia the choicest bits.

  “I thought you were stupid to starve yourself to death when there is food to eat. Stupid people are ruled by their feelings. I once saw a woman die because her husband took another wife. She sat by the river and died. I thought you were going to do the same thing, and I told myself that you were the same as a horse that Tomás left here once and asked me to feed, and I didn’t worry about whether the horse ate what I gave it, and so I thought you were the same way, stupid as a horse, stupid as the woman who died because her husband took a second wife. But I see that you’re not stupid. No one I have ever seen who was as close to death as you were has ever sat up and decided to live. You must be very strong inside.”

  Grasshoppers were the most difficult for Aurelia to eat. Their bodies were crisp, but the meat had a stickiness that made her gag. The only way she could swallow them was to imagine they were potatoes, shredded and fried in lard to a dark brown.

  But even after eating what Flying Braid gave her, Aurelia remained weak, and Flying Braid told her she might still lose the child. She stayed close to Aurelia’s side, and gave her extra portions of what she caught, and brought her medicines that she said would purify her body for the birth, and smeared Aurelia’s stomach and breasts with bear grease so that the baby would not struggle too much to be born or work too hard at the breast to draw out the milk. And when Aurelia’s legs drew up in pain because of the way the baby lay inside her, Flying Braid made a poultice from the roots of a blue flower and applied it to the twitching muscles until Aurelia’s legs were calm and the pain was gone. She grew alarmed when Aurelia began to bleed before the baby was due, and padded Aurelia’s vagina with dried moss to keep the baby from coming out and fed her tea made of splinters from a tree that had been struck by lightning. She told her she could not get up now even to pee, and brought a shallow pan and put it between Aurelia’s legs.

  As the time grew closer for Aurelia to have the child, she told Flying Braid that she felt better and wanted to get up and help gather firewood or scavenge for food, but Flying Braid said that she should save her strength for her first pain.

  “The first pain must be fought the way you fight a bear so that the pains that come after that will fear your strength and become timid. You are strong inside, but you have never walked across the plains carrying bison robes on your back and will need to gather your strength and not waste it standing on your feet.”

  They passed the days telling each other stories. Aurelia’s stories were as fanciful as Flying Braid’s, and Aurelia thought how alike they were in their differences. But when she tried to kiss Flying Braid for being so kind to her, Flying Braid pushed her away and told her that a hug was all right, but for a woman to wet another woman’s cheek with her lips was disgusting.

  In the afternoons the old women in the village came into Flying Braid’s tepee. They brought their beadwork with them and listened to Aurelia and Flying Braid tell stories. After a while the other women forgot their shyness and joined in the storytelling, and Flying Braid turned their Comanche words into Spanish ones so Aurelia could understand. The stories they told were like beads on a string, each one leading to another and then another, and everyone laughed and cried and forgot how hungry they were.

  When the time for the birth came, Flying Braid burned sage outside and then brought the still fuming branch into the tepee and waved it over her head and slapped the bisonskin walls with it until the air was warm and scented. Then she dug a hole in the center of the tepee and lined it with a thick cushion of leaves. She sat at one edge of the pit and stretched her legs across to the other side while Aurelia straddled her outstretched legs, her feet braced against the sides of the pit.

  Aurelia’s pains had started at dawn and she had pushed against the first one the way Flying Braid showed her, pulling at two sticks Flying Braid had planted in the dirt. She had pulled as hard as she could and waited for the pains to grow timid, but they only grew stronger, and now she shoved her bare feet into the soft dirt of the pit and was dizzy with pain.

  Flying Braid called for the midwife, and she came and sat facing the pit and clasped Aurelia around the shoulders and jabbed her knee into Aurelia’s back. Flying Braid began to pull at Aurelia’s arms and sing to her in a thin papery voice, while the midwife pressed her knee deeper and deeper into Aurelia’s back and blew on Aurelia’s neck and made groaning sounds, as if she were the one giving birth.

  Aurelia began to howl and Flying Braid called for a second midwife, and this one poked at Aurelia’s arms and legs with a sharp stick, and soon there were other women in the tepee, and everyone was singing Flying Braid’s song, and Aurelia imagined herself standing with the women, and although she didn’t know the language of the song, she began to sing, too, and the singing seemed to take her away from the pain so that she barely felt the first midwife prodding her with her knees and blowing on her neck, and couldn’t tell if the second midwife was jabbing her with a stick now or pummeling her around the head, or if her arms were at her sides or being yanked out of their sockets. She knew she was in pain, but couldn’t find it, and was startled to hear her baby’s cry as it landed softly on its leafy bed.

  The first midwife showed the child to Aurelia, pointed out the female genitals, and counted all the fingers and toes, but Aurelia already knew the child because when she was dying she had seen its image.

  “I call her Yolanda,” Aurelia said.

  The midwife gave the baby to one of the women to clean and the two midwives took turns kneading Aurelia’s stomach until the bloody membrane was expelled. Then they brought an Indian baby into the tepee to suckle at each of Aurelia’s breasts to draw off the mucus so Yolanda’s first taste of the world would be pure milk.

  THE BRAVES CAME home from the hunt with forty bison. They crossed the Colorado and rode into camp, Ten Elk riding ahead, the women laden down with supplies and dragging the butchered bison along behind them until the ground turned bloody and the bison meat was studded with gravel and dirt. Tomás was with them, his hair tied down with a beaded band, a deerskin shirt hanging over his trousers.

  When Ten Elk and his braves were in the middle of the camp, swallowed up by women and children, everyone running up to the horses and pulling on the braves’ leggings to show how happy they were to see all that buffalo meat, Flying Braid left Aurelia and the baby inside the tepee with the flap closed and started across the clearing. Ten Elk was Flying Braid’s younger brother. When they were children she would put a cloth over her head and ghost scare him. But then he began to ride horses. When he was five years old he could ride faster than he could talk. The year he was fifteen he stole eighty-two horses and killed two bears. And since theirs was the largest family in the Colorado band, when he was eighteen he became chief. Now he was thirty-five and a single mean look from him could make Flying Braid’s heart jump. She couldn’t ghost scare him anymore. She had no husband. She had no voice. She sometimes smeared herself with the juice of juniper berries so that she would have no face. Tomás had brought no tobacco to the camp that summer, so that Ten Elk had had no tobacco to take with him on the hunt. Ten Elk always turned mean when the only thing he had to smoke were dried sumac le
aves.

  “Where are you going, Flying Braid?” His plucked-out eyebrows and lashless eyes made him look half man, half ghost.

  “To greet you,” she replied.

  Flying Braid couldn’t control her shaking now, and the more she shook, the fiercer Ten Elk seemed to her, the sun at his back, the feathers in his hair bristling in the wind. He got down from his horse and walked up close to her.

  “Were you hungry while we were gone?”

  “No,” Flying Braid said. “I dreamed of the afterworld and lost my hunger.”

  Ten Elk had once danced the beaver dance and had tried to go to the afterworld in his dreams, had tried to see its wonders, but couldn’t.

  “You still bleed every month,” Ten Elk said. “You have no husband. You have no children. Only warriors can dream of the afterworld.” She could see by the seriousness of his gaze that he was wondering what medicine she had that let her dream of the afterworld when he had tried and failed.

  “I don’t bleed any more. For two moons, since you were gone on the buffalo hunt, I haven’t bled.”

  She had never lied to Ten Elk before, but he didn’t check the cloths she put between her legs and he was too proud to ask her if she was lying. He would have to speak to her with respect if he thought she no longer bled. She would be the equal of any brave in the band if she was past the bleeding age. Tomás hung back now, out of Ten Elk’s sight. If Ten Elk’s medicine was strong enough to see through tepee walls, he would know that Tomás had brought Aurelia here and he would kill him. If Ten Elk could see inside Flying Braid’s head, he would know that she hadn’t gone to the afterworld, and he would kill her. There was no blame for killing an outsider who brought strangers to camp when Comanches were starving. There was no blame for killing a sister who lied.

  “You’re not old enough to stop bleeding,” Ten Elk said.

  “I washed myself for the last time when you went to hunt the buffalo.” She counted her breaths and waited.

  “What kinds of things did you see in the afterworld?” Ten Elk said after a long while.

  “I saw blue water and herds of bison and elk and deer. The trees were in leaves, and there were plums and berries to eat. Now that I know how to go to the afterworld, I’ll go there often.” The air was so fresh on her face it made her smile. Ten Elk was listening and she knew he couldn’t see through tepee walls.

  “Going to the afterworld is a special thing,” she said. “Not everyone can go.”

  THE BRAVES WERE doing a dance of celebration, and Tomás waited until the dancing was through before he came to where Aurelia and Flying Braid were waiting for him at the edge of the river.

  Flying Braid untied the baby from its cradleboard. “She is a very pretty baby,” she said, and handed the baby to Aurelia.

  “I brought you a present,” Tomás said to Flying Braid, and he gave her two sacks of flour and a sack of coffee.

  Flying Braid watched them leave. She stood in the short grass and every time Aurelia turned to look back at the village, she saw her standing there.

  7

  Near the Medina River, Texas

  November, 1845

  JOSEPH SAT DOWN on the riverbank and took off his boots. There were holes across the soles and a slice of heel was gone. He had once journeyed from the mouth of the Missouri down the Mississippi to New Orleans and hadn’t worn out a pair of boots. He had once journeyed three months on a keelboat, skirting the shore and setting traps and looking out for unfriendly Omaha, and then two months of trapping beaver through Crow country all the way to the trading post at the mouth of the Bighorn and hadn’t worn out a pair of boots.

  He eased his sore feet into the cold water and felt the skin begin to throb and then grow numb. He pulled his feet out of the water, let the air dry them and then put his stockings back on. They were heavy stockings, new when he left Independence. They now had gaping holes from toe to heel.

  He looked around him. Nothing seemed familiar. The only thing he knew for certain was that after two months of walking he hadn’t run into this particular river before. At least he thought he had been walking for two months. He couldn’t remember. His mind had been skipping all day, jumping from one thing to another, and he wondered if not remembering things like time was due to lack of food. It certainly wasn’t because he wasn’t sleeping. He was sleeping too much, hardly rousing himself when the sun came up before he was stumbling around looking for another place to lie down.

  He had a sudden urge to write a letter, to put down on paper how he came to be wandering around the plains, so that when someone found his body they’d know who he was and what he wanted done with the remains. But he had no pencil or paper, and, with Isaac gone, no relatives to notify.

  “This way, I say!”

  For a moment he wasn’t sure he had heard anything.

  “Pull harder, he’s sinking!”

  He yanked on his boots and began to run toward the voices. He could now see wagons lined along the riverbank and men straining to pull a steer out of the bog. The steer was nearly submerged, and the poles the men had slid under its body were bent down into the muck like so many fishing rods.

  “If you had a chain, you could attach it to the steer’s horns and have your oxen pull him out,” Joseph said.

  A tall man in a stiff collar standing at the edge of the bog turned and looked in Joseph’s direction. “I saw no horse or wagon.”

  “I have no horse or wagon and no provisions. I am as you see me, my clothes ripped by the rocks of the ravine I fell into yesterday and caked with the dirt of the holes I’ve slept in at night. Joseph Kimmel is my name. Have I in my wanderings crossed the plains and landed back where I started from?”

  “I don’t know where you started from, but you are in Texas, and I am Henry Castro of Paris, France. Perhaps you have heard of me.”

  “I haven’t, but then I know of no reason why I should have.”

  Castro resembled the phantoms Joseph had seen in his wanderings. Long, narrow face, drooping eyelids, and a sag-shouldered body that in the sun’s glare seemed larger to Joseph than the leafless tree at the man’s back.

  “No man walks across the Texas plains,” Castro said. “A man rides a horse or sits in a wagon. How have you come here? By what means?”

  “I started out on horseback from Independence four months ago. Midway through the journey I was robbed by a runaway slave of everything I owned. For a meal and the loan of a horse I’ll try to save your animal.”

  “I can’t spare a horse.”

  “Then a meal is sufficient. I’ve eaten little more than grubs and roots for more than two months.”

  “The meal is yours, but I’m afraid the steer is lost.”

  “If you have a chain and will choose two of your strongest men to hold me by my feet, I will make an attempt.”

  Castro, who seemed unperturbed by the animal’s braying and shrieking, had one of his men bring Joseph a length of chain.

  “Is the length sufficient?” Castro asked.

  “It will be long enough to span the distance between the bank and the middle of the bog,” Joseph replied.

  He slid onto the bog on his stomach, the chain clutched in his hands, two men holding firmly to the heels of his boots. The sand trembled like aspic beneath him and a meaty smell bubbled up from the muck, as though air and fire and beast were boiling deep inside some hidden cauldron.

  The steer was silent now, its eyes open in fright, a moist film forming across its nostrils. Joseph wrapped the chain tightly around its head and called for the oxen to pull.

  As the oxen pulled, it appeared that the bog was giving way, that the animal would be freed after all. And then Joseph heard a sigh, or perhaps a creak, as of a rotted door closing, and finally a crisp snap as the steer’s head separated from its body, and head and rope and chain flew into the air. Joseph studied the sluggish ripples fanning out like smiles from the place where the steer had been just moments before. The animal’s frightened gaze seemed not to h
ave disappeared. Joseph was sure of that. There. He could see it hanging a few feet above the bog, its pathetic, sorry gaze outlined in droplets of sand. And then it was gone. Joseph looked around him, as if he had misplaced the animal and by diligent looking would find it again, but there was nothing to find, and the bog was now making sucking noises, the way a person might after a fine meal.

  “You did your best,” Castro said when Joseph was on firm ground again.

  “I had hoped to save it,” Joseph replied. His hair was mud-clumped and animal blood dotted his broad forehead. “I thought the chain would bring the animal out. I didn’t expect it to tear the beast apart.” Joseph extended his gritty palm to the man. “My happiness at finding you is boundless.”

  There were more than twenty Alsatians in Castro’s group. My colonists, Castro called them. The way he said it made Joseph think of a king and his subjects. They were from a place called Alsace, Castro explained, a frontier region between Germany and France, and Joseph noted how freely the man talked about his financial arrangements in front of them, the money he had paid for the land, the profit he expected to realize on it when it was all parceled out. Of course, he said, as he and Joseph sat on a log near the campfire, tins of thick black coffee and plates of pork and cornbread balanced on their laps, there were more colonists to come, and he would be going back to France to recruit them as soon as he was able. He had the backing of European bankers, and there was even the possibility that he could settle all of Texas with Europeans, and that he might become president of the republic one day. There certainly was nothing in the Texas Constitution to prohibit a Jew from becoming president, he said.