Comanche Moon ld-4

by Larry McMurtry

  "We had better move back there in those trees," Worm said, when Buffalo Hump came out.

  "Why?" Buffalo Hump asked.

  "They say the sun rides all night on the back of a great fish," Worm said. "When it is time for morning the great fish brings it back so it can shine on the people of the land and make them warm." In the mist it was hard to see the sun clearly.

  Buffalo Hump wondered if there was a great fish so large that it could carry the sun. He watched the surface of the water and saw no great fish, though that didn't mean that the story was untrue. The sun was now well up. Maybe the great fish that carried it had gone back to its home in the deep water.

  Maybe the fish slept all day, while the people of the land enjoyed the sun. He didn't know.

  What Buffalo Hump did know was that the ocean was a great mystery. In his country the stars and the moon were the great mysteries; he had been studying them all his life, and yet he knew nothing of the stars and the moon. The ocean was such a mystery, too. He could live his life on the sand, as the Indians of the seaside did, and yet never know the secrets of the ocean--why its waves moved in and out, why it sighed like a woman. Perhaps the ocean was even more powerful than the moon and stars. After all, it had called him to it, across hundreds of miles of land. Although the fighting had been good, he had finally grown restive with it; he did not want to delay any longer his trip to the Great Water.

  When the sun was high Buffalo Hump rode back to Worm, who was crouched nervously over the little campfire. Often Worm could be irritating, a cranky man with half an upper lip and many fears and complaints. But Worm, for all his complaining, was a powerful prophet, and sometimes his clearest prophecies were called forth by his fears.

  Buffalo Hump wanted a prophecy--all through the fighting he had wanted one, for his feelings were not good. Although he had felt again the excitement of war and the thrill of running down and killing his enemies, there had been a sadness in him through it all. At night as the young men sang and bragged of their killing, he had felt apart and could not make the sadness leave. In his life he had had many victories; the young men bragging and singing were as he had been in his youth, brave and unthinking. They expected that they would live their life as warriors and have many victories over the whites and the Mexicans. In their dreams and in their songs they saw themselves as Comanche warriors always, men of the bow andofthe horse.

  Buffalo Hump knew, though, that for most of them, it would not be that way. A warrior skilled with the lance and the bow might, if he were bold, prevail over a man with a gun; but a thousand men with guns, whether they were skilled or not, would win in a battle against even the bravest warriors with bows. His son, Blue Duck, though foolish and rude, would have to fight with the gun if he were to live.

  Buffalo Hump knew that the bluecoat soldiers would come in thousands someday. Their defeat would sting; they would try to reverse the Comanche victory. They would not come this year, but they would come; there were as many of them as there had once been buffalo. It was a bitter truth, but a truth.

  The young warriors who were even then stringing white scalps on their lances would either die in battle or end their days as old Slow Tree had predicted, growing corn on little patches of land the white men let them keep.

  Buffalo Hump wanted to see the ocean because the ocean would always be as it was. Few things could stay forever in the way they were when the spirits made them.

  Even the great plains of grass, the home of the People, would not be always as it had been. The whites would bring their plows and scar the earth; they would put their cattle on it and the cattle would bring the ugly mesquite trees. The grass that had been high forever would be trampled and torn. The llano would not be always as it had been. The ocean and the stars were eternal, things whose power and mystery were greater than the powers of men.

  Long before, when Buffalo Hump was a boy, his own grandmother had predicted the end of the Comanche people.

  She thought it would come through sickness and plague; and, indeed, sickness and plague had carried off almost half the p. Now, looking at the Great Water, Buffalo Hump wanted to know if Worm had a prophecy that would tell him how the next years would be.

  He got off his horse and sat for a few minutes with the old man, Worm. It was Worm who had said that the pox and the shitting sickness were caused by gold. He had a vision in which he saw a river of gold flowing out of a mountain to the west.

  The whites ran through their country like ants, seeking the gold, and left their sicknesses behind them.

  "I will take you away from this water you dislike so much if you will tell me a prophecy," Buffalo Hump said. "I won't let a great fish get you, either, or a snake as long as a pine tree." "I have the vision now," Worm said. "Last night I could not sleep because I heard too many horses squealing in my head." "I heard no horses squeal," Buffalo Hump said. Then he realized he had made a foolish comment. Worm was not talking about their horses, but about the horses in his vision.

  "It was not these horses with us," Worm said.

  "It was the horses we have taken in the raid, and the others, the horses at home." "Why did they squeal--was there a cougar near?" Buffalo Hump asked.

  "They were squealing because they were dying," Worm said. "The white men were killing them all, and the sky was black but it was not a storm. The sky was black because all the buzzards in the world had come to eat our horses. There were so many buzzards flying over that I could not see the sun. All I could see were black wings." "Is that the whole prophecy?" Buffalo Hump asked.

  Worm merely nodded. He seemed tired and sad.

  "That is a terrible prophecy--we need our horses," Buffalo Hump said. "Eat a little of this meat. Then we will go." "We will have to slip along at night," Worm said. "All the whites will be looking for us now." "Eat your meat," Buffalo Hump said.

  "Don't worry about the whites. I am going to take you up the Rio Grande. Once we are far enough up it we can go home along the old war trail we used to ride, when we went into Mexico and caught all those Mexicans. I don't think we will see many whites out that way--if we do see whites I will kill them." Worm was relieved. They had travelled far on the great raid, all the way from the llano to the sea. He did not care for the sea, he was tired, and he had no more armadillo meat to eat. But Buffalo Hump gave him a little of his pig meat and he ate it.

  When Worm had eaten, Buffalo Hump mounted and led him inland, back through the twisted trees, toward Mexico.

  "It's such a far way back, Woodrow," Augustus said. "I swear I wish we hadn't gone so far from town." He said it at night, as they were burying two men whose scalped and cut-open bodies they found just at dusk, at the foot of a small hill. The two men had been travelling in a little wagon, with nothing much in it except axes. The Indians hadn't destroyed the wagon, but they had used the axes to hack the two men open.

  "It's far yet, and we can't make no time for burying folks," Long Bill observed. The three older rangers watched as Pea Eye, Deets, and Jake Spoon dug the grave.

  The day before, they had found a family slaughtered by a poor little tent. Evidently they had intended to start a farm. There were two women among the six dead. Seeing the women, whom they wrapped in blankets and buried properly, put Gus in mind of Clara, Long Bill in mind of his Pearl, and Call in mind of Maggie. It would be many days before they knew whether their womenfolk had suffered the fate of the two young women just buried, and the anxiety was tiring them all. For three days they had pushed the horses to their limits, and yet they were still ten days from home.

  At night none of the older men could sleep.

  Images rose up in their minds, images that kept them tense. Call usually went off with his rifle and sat in the darkness. Long Bill and Gus stayed by the fire, talking about anything they could think to talk about. Pea Eye, Jake, and Deets, with no one at home to worry about, said little. Jake had thrown up at the sight of the mutilated bodies.

  "I never seen how a person looks inside themselves befor
e," he said to Pea Eye, who didn't reply.

  Pea Eye was afraid to talk about the deaths for fear that he would cry and embarrass himself before the older men. The sight of dead people made so much sadness come in him that he feared he couldn't contain it. In death people looked so small--the dead adults looked like sad children, and the dead children looked like dolls. The fury that found them was so great that it reduced them as they died.

  "Why will people come out here, Captain?" Jake asked, as they were burying the two men who were travelling in the small wagon. "This ain't farm country ... what could you grow, out here?" Call had often wondered the same thing himself.

  Over and over, rangering, he and Augustus had come upon little families, far out beyond the settlements, attempting to farm country that had never felt the plow. Often such pioneers didn't even have a plow. They might have a churn, a spindle, a spade, and a few axes, an almanac, and a primer for the children. Mainly what they had, as far as Call could tell, was their energies and their hopes. At least they had what most of them had never had before: land they could call their own.

  "You can't stop people from coming out here," Call said.

  "It's open country now." Later, Call and Augustus walked off from the group a little distance to discuss the problem of Long Bill, who was so distraught at the thought that his Pearl might have been killed or kidnapped that he seemed to be losing his mind.

  "Bill's always been steady," Call said.

  "I wouldn't have expected him to get this bad." "He's bad, Woodrow," Gus said. "I guess he's as crazy about Pearl as I am about Clara." The fact was, Call himself had had a number of disquieting thoughts about Maggie since hearing about the raid. Maggie had tried three times to talk about the baby she was carrying, a baby she claimed was his, but in his haste to round up his troop and get them started he had put her off, a rudeness he regretted. Now Maggie might be dead, and the child too, if there really was a child.

  "I mean to leave Texas forever, if Clara's dead," Augustus told him. "I wouldn't want to live here without my Clara. The memories would be too hard." Call refrained from commenting that the woman Gus was talking about wasn't his anymore.

  If Clara had left Austin before the big raid it was because she had married Bob Allen.

  "Let's get off the damn Brazos tomorrow," Gus suggested.

  "Why?" Call asked. "There's always abundant water in the Brazos." "I know it--t's why," Augustus said. "Where there's water, there's farmers--or people who were trying to be farmers. It means more people to bury. Me, I'd like to get on home." "It's wrong to leave Christian folk unburied," Call told him.

  "It ain't if we don't even see 'em," Gus said. "If we get away from all this watered country we won't happen on so many." It was a still, windless night, and very dark. The three young grave diggers had to bring burning sticks from the campfire, in order to determine if they had the grave deep enough. The spades they were digging with had belonged to the two men who were murdered.

  "We could start a hardware store with all the spades and axes scattered around out here," Gus remarked.

  Long Bill had not come out with them to the grave site. They could see his tall form, pacing back and forth in front of the campfire, making wavy shadows.

  "Oh Saint Peterffwas they heard him exclaim. "Oh, Saint Paulffwas "I wish Billy would hear of some new saints to pray to," Gus said. "I'm tired of hearing him pray to Peter and Paul." "He can't read--I guess he's forgot the other saints," Call said. The grave diggers had paused for a moment--they were all exhausted, from hard travel and from fear.

  Call felt sorry for Long Bill Coleman. Seldom had he seen a man so broken by grief, though Pearl, the woman he grieved for, might well be alive and well.

  Pearl, though large, did not seem to him exceptional in any way. She had none of Clara's wit or spirit, nor Maggie's beauty of face.

  "Pearl must be a mighty good cook, for him to take on about her so before he even knows if she's dead." "No, she ain't," Augustus said. "I've et Pearl's cooking and it was only fair. I expect it's the poking." "The what?" Call asked, surprised.

  "The poking, Woodrow," Gus said. "Pearl was large and large women are usually a pleasure to poke." "Well, you would think that," Call said.

  In the aftermath of the great raid, much to her distress, Maggie's business increased. No one knew exactly where the Comanches were, but rumours of widespread carnage swept the town.

  Some said that Buffalo Hump had killed three hundred people in San Antonio, and one hundred more in Houston. Then a counterrumour reversed those numbers; others thought he had burnt Victoria, while someone had heard that he was already in Mexico. There was a general fear that he might come back through Austin and finish what he had begun. Men went about heavily armed, draped with all the weapons they could carry. At nights the streets were empty, though the saloons still did a good business. Men were so scared that they drank, and, having drunk, discovered that they were still too nervous to sleep.

  So they came to Maggie--a stream of men, knocking on her door at all hours of the day or night. She couldn't protest, but she was not welcoming, either. She had been sickly of a morning lately, and was often nauseous or queasy during the day. Her belly had begun to swell visibly, yet none of the men seemed to notice.

  They were so scared that only what she sold them could bring them a little peace. Maggie understood it. She was scared herself. Some nights she even went down and hid in the crawl space under the smokehouse. It brought her a little relief, both from fear and from the men.

  Maggie longed for Woodrow to show up, with the boys. Once Woodrow was there, the men would leave her be. Although they were only two men, they were respected; the townspeople took much comfort from their presence, just as she did.

  Every morning at first light Maggie looked out her window, toward the corrals where the rangers kept their horses. She was hoping to see Woodrow's buckskin, Johnny. If she could just spot Johnny she would know that he was back.

  But, morning after morning, there was no sign of the rangers. Maggie found Call's absence almost too much to bear, at such a time, with the baby in her. Just as she was hoping to give up whoring forever, all the men wanted her to do was whore, and she was afraid to refuse. The dark thought struck her that Woodrow might be dead. He had left with only five men, and the Comanches numbered more than five hundred, some said. The rangers might all be dead, and likely were.

  Even to think it made Maggie feel hopeless.

  If Woodrow was dead she would have no father for her baby. Then the whoring wouldn't stop: the men at the door, the men on top of her, the men who counted out money and waited for her to lay back and pull up her skirt. She would go on laying there, lifting her skirt to men who were none too clean, who stank and vomited, who had violence in their eyes, until she got sick, or was too old to be worth the money they counted out.

  She thought she could have borne all the worry and all the doubt a little better if Woodrow had just had time to talk to her about the baby, to give her some hope that he would marry her, or at least help her with the child. He hadn't seemed to be angry about it; just a few ^ws would have been enough. But he had been in a hurry, usually was. Maggie could not find it in her to tax Woodrow too hard for his failure to speak; she rarely taxed Woodrow too hard about any of the things that bothered her. He was a captain now and had many responsibilities. Her hope was that he would come round to liking the idea of a child, or at least to not minding it much. When Woodrow Call did get angry with her a coldness showed in him that made her question whether happiness would ever be hers. He could be so cold, when angered, that Maggie wondered how she had ever come to care for him anyway. He had only been a customer, after all, a young man with quick needs, like many another. The older whores had all warned her not to get attached to customers.

  One named Florie, who had taught her something of the business, had been emphatic on that score.

  "I've known whores to marry, but it's a seldom thing," Florie said. "It's one of those
things that if you look for them you won't find them." "Well, I ain't looking," Maggie declared --she had been much younger then. It wasn't entirely true: she had already met Woodrow Call and already knew she liked him.

  "I looked once, but not no more," Florie said. "I just take their money and give 'em a few jerks. It don't take much longer than it takes to wring out a mop, not if you set your hips right." The next year Florie stumbled coming down her own steps and broke her neck. She had a big basket of laundry in her arms--it was the laundry that caused her to misstep. She was lying dead at the bottom of the steps with her eyes wide open when they found her. A goat had wandered over and was eating her laundry basket, which was made of coarse straw.

  Maggie, despite Florie's advice, had gone on and got attached to Woodrow Call, so attached that she would sometimes put her hand on her belly and imagine that there was a little boy inside, who would look just like him.