Remember Ben Clayton (21 page)

Later the raiding party met up with another group of Indians. They looked similar to the Comanches but there was something different about their dress and attitude that he could not quite pin down. They also seemed to speak a different language, judging by the way the two groups talked to each other in signs. It was not until he could speak Comanche himself that he found out from Kanaumahka that they were Kiowas.

For most of an afternoon they argued about something, though it was good-natured arguing as far as Lamar could tell. Kanaumahka checked the mouths of half a dozen different Kiowa horses and rode several of them off onto the prairie for an hour at a time, then finally went off by himself to think about something. When he was through thinking he stood up and walked over to Jewell and grabbed her by the arm and handed her to the Kiowa warrior he had been negotiating with.

It was over almost before either Lamar or Jewell could understand what was happening. The Kiowas threw her on a horse and tied her down again and rode off at a gallop below a grassy swell. Although he heard her screaming his name for quite a while, that was the last he saw of her. The Indians beat him again when he tried to run to the horse herd to ride after her, and when they saw him scanning the landscape hoping she would reappear they poured sand in his eyes to get him to stop. After a few days they managed to convince him that it was hopeless to get her back and pointless to try to live his life like it could be any different than it was.

Jewell getting sold was the turning point for him, when he was forced to begin looking ahead and not back. By the time the raiding party joined up with the rest of the band, somewhere in the Palo Duro country, he had picked up a few words and phrases of Comanche, and Kanaumahka began to treat him less like someone to be abused and more like someone who required instruction. In the camp, the women jeered at him at first and the other boys wanted to fight him, but he soon learned he had nothing to lose by ignoring the women and using every grain of his rage and indignation in defending himself against the boys. When he broke a boy’s wrist there were no consequences, not even from the father, who had a calm talk with Kanaumahka afterwards. From the tone of their conversation Lamar guessed that they had bet on the fight and that the man had lost and was good-natured about it.

He learned that the Comanche band that had taken him was called the Quahadas and that they had contempt for any other band or tribe who signed treaties with the whites or depended for their sustenance on the Indian agency at Fort Cobb. It didn’t matter to them if it was Union or Confederate soldiers who were in control of the fort, they were convinced that all white men were the same and wanted to push them off the buffalo grounds. They were friendly with the Mexican traders who sometimes came into the camps leading caravans of mules burdened down with implements and firearms and other trading goods, but they were independent-minded and aloof and thought their way of life was superior to anyone else’s.

For five or six weeks they made him haul wood and water for the women, but then Kanaumahka decided to put him to work herding his horses at night and guarding them against Tonkawa horse thieves. Kanaumahka had over a hundred and fifty horses and the nights were long and worrisome to Lamar because he didn’t know how far the horses were allowed to stray or what the punishment would be if any were lost or stolen. But Kanaumahka had no words of rebuke or praise, so Lamar took that to mean that he was satisfied with his work and he began to relax. He herded the horses most of the night and during the long, inconsequential days, when the Indians went out hunting, or gambled, or just gossiped outside their lodges, he slept and no one bothered him.

It was during those solitary nights, though, that he felt himself becoming a Comanche. He calmed himself by singing in a low voice the songs his mother had sung in the house, “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and “The Rose and the Briar.” But the songs began to seem strange to him, the words—“And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart”—making fainter and fainter sense as the direct Comanche words he was learning supplanted them in relevance and urgency. As the nights passed, some sort of contentment began to steal up on him. The fear of losing the horses had subsided, and the constant overpowering confusion drained away.

The life he had known had disappeared in one bewildering instant, but the life before him gradually began to seem beckoning and limitless—a life without any of the rules he was used to, and none of the angry strictures of work and propriety that had defined the limits of his father’s existence, that had kept him rooted to a farm in Wise County like a snake in its hole when the whole world stretched out before him. Lamar’s new life was at first life without human warmth and kindness, but that changed in imperceptible degrees, with an approving glance from Kanaumahka or an unexpected cordial greeting from one of the warriors or an invitation from some of the boys to range with them on long horseback adventures across the grasslands.

Kanaumahka was a patient teacher and in his way a kindly man. He told Lamar that years earlier, at the invitation of the U.S. government, he had traveled to Washington and met President Polk, and he still wore a medal around his neck with the president’s profile. He had eaten crab cakes in a restaurant and played whist. Lamar could not keep a firm grip on the idea that this man had killed his mother with a butcher knife, and eventually he had to let it go. His confusion extended to his sense of himself, and as he let that go too another self rose up to take its place. No one had to beat him anymore to make him comply or yell at him to make him understand. He complied. He understood. He belonged and could be trusted.

He was with them for almost two years, but it might have been twenty, so profound was his absorption into the Quahadas. He was with them on buffalo hunts and trading expeditions and on their nomadic excursions deep into the far mountains and beyond the Rio Grande into Mexico. He was with them on many horse-stealing raids and on many bitter reprisals against the Mexicans and the Texans.

He did not like to think about what he had done on those raids.

He encountered other captives occasionally, as the bands and tribes came together in their wanderings. They were white boys like him or more often Mexicans. Sometimes they had just been recently taken and were pale with fear and he would turn his eyes from them. But if they had been with the Indians for a period of months they were as proudly wild as he was, some of them so savage and heedless they had to be spoken to quietly by older warriors before a raid to cool their raging tempers. There were girl captives too, usually more frightened and miserable than the boys, but he trained himself not to think of Jewell when he saw them.

In the second spring of his captivity, Lamar joined a raid on a Mexican sheepherders’ camp near the Devils River. The herders turned out to be cool and experienced fighters and the raid went bad. Two Comanches were killed outright and six were wounded, including Kanaumahka, who was shot through the belly and lived in hellish pain for two days. They buried him on a scaffold looking down on the Pecos and Lamar rode away from the site feeling empty and orphaned once again. He had friends among the Quahadas who spoke to him in consolation but there were others who saw him now only as unclaimed property. Had he been a few years older and more acquainted with human treachery he might have suspected something when five or six men he did not know well asked him along on a hunting trip up on the llano.

He suspected that it wasn’t just a hunting trip, that he would be subjected to some sort of initiation trial along the way, and that he would emerge from this ordeal with the full confidence of the tribe and new standing as an adult warrior. So he was not greatly surprised when they set upon him while he was sleeping one night and tied him up with ropes. But then they rode into Fort Chadbourne with him and handed him over without ceremony to the Indian agent. He never did know what they got for his ransom, because he was taken at once to the guardhouse, where a soldier with the Texas State Troops took a pair of sheep shears and cut off the hair that had grown down past his shoulders and that he had wrapped in otter fur. They tried to get him to talk in English but he couldn’t. It took a week or more for the words to start to come back.

The sound of his own name when he finally spoke it in answer to their questions was unsettling to him. He knew it was his name but the syllables attached themselves to nothing he could truly remember or understand. They kept him in the guardhouse and then in one of the officers’ homes. He was compliant. He sat at their table at dinner and bowed his head in prayer and answered their questions about who his people were and what had happened to them, but it was as if he were performing in a play.

“Well, Lamar, you are going home,” the officer said to him one day. They put him in a wagon and sent him in a supply train with an escort of troopers. It humiliated him to ride closed up in the coach with a woman who lectured him on the importance of his education while the soldiers rode outside on horseback. He thought it might be easy to steal one of the horses and ride off, but he didn’t know where to go. The Comanches had stolen him away and then cast him out. There were other bands who might take him in, but as the shock of his recapture began to wear off he understood that his future with the Indians would never be as secure as he longed for it to be. And he was willing to believe that at the end of this long journey back to Texas there might be some form of happiness waiting for him in spite of the fact that his family was gone.

But they didn’t take him back to his home in Wise County. They took him to San Antonio, where he had never been in his life. There was a band playing when they brought him into the town, and somebody made a speech and later he was taken after closing hours to a candy store and the owner told him he could have as much candy as he could carry out.

His father had a cousin who claimed him and took him in. She was a weepy sort of woman who was married to a German doctor twenty years older than she was who practiced the French horn at night and collected beetles in a little study that no one but him was allowed to enter. They had no children and the woman had no notion of how to talk to a boy of his age, especially one who was still wild and confused with yearning. The doctor confined his interest in Lamar to interviewing him at great length about his life with the Indians. He nodded with excitement as he took down with his pen the things that Lamar told him, about how in the desert country the Comanches would find tortoises and cook them alive over the fire and eat from their shells as if they were eating from a bowl; or about how trailing a rope on the ground was bad luck; or how Kanaumahka was always careful to pluck out the stray hairs around a wild horse’s eyes before he tried to ride it. The doctor wrote up these notes and sent them off to be published in Europe, but he showed no appreciation for the information and treated Lamar with the same cold scrutiny he gave to his beetles.

He was sent to school and found somebody to fight there almost every day. When it was explained to him that he had been expelled, he felt satisfaction, as if being thrown out of school had been a conscious aspiration. When the doctor found out, he yelled at him and raised a threatening hand, and Lamar made sure that he ended up on the floor with a broken jaw.

Before the police could come for him he had stolen a horse and ridden south out of San Antonio. He wandered without purpose for years. He trailed cattle to New Orleans and worked on the docks in Galveston and as a hand patrolling for Mexican rustlers on various ranches in the Nueces Strip. He was in his early twenties when the big trail drives started going up to Kansas and he made the trip three times. He liked being on the move again in open country, on horseback, working himself into exhaustion every night and every day, thinking of nothing but the cattle and the next river crossing and the earth spread out endlessly in front of him. The Indians had all pretty much been hunted down and starved out by then. Even the Quahadas had come onto the reservation. Sometimes, driving the cattle beyond the Red, they could see the Comanche and Kiowa camps in the distance, and once when he rode into Fort Sill he saw people he thought he knew lined up for rations. They were dressed in cheap sack suits and wide-brimmed hats like farmers and the women sat in the backs of the wagons holding parasols and waiting to butcher the cattle that the men would be given to shoot. None of them looked in his direction. They looked down at their feet as they shuffled obediently forward in line.

He saw a group of young Kiowa women walking out of the Red Store. Their backs were to him and he could not see their faces, but there was something familiar in the posture and stride of one of the women that made him go slack. He kept watching them as they walked toward their wagons, wishing they would turn around so he could be sure the woman was not Jewell. But they didn’t turn around, and after they had gone a few more paces they disappeared into the crowds waiting for rations.

It had been eleven years. He had never looked for her or asked about her and he had pushed the painful thought of her as far from his haunted mind as he could. He had made it his purpose to get on with his life without letting the past come back to grab him. And he tried to continue to do so, but all the way to the Kansas railheads he was tortured by the thought that he had seen her after all and done nothing.

A year later he came back. The name Jewell Clayton was not on the Kiowa rolls, but he had not expected it to be. The agent at Fort Sill told him that there were many Indians on the agency lands that he had not personally seen or met, and that if she had had dark hair to begin with and had been with the Kiowas for as long as Lamar said she would probably not now seem out of place. He kept asking after her, and after a few days in Fort Sill he met a man in his fifties who had been Kanaumahka’s friend and had been one of the Indians who had captured Lamar and Jewell. He was now gaunt and solemn with anger. When he saw Lamar again after so many years he began to weep. He did not know that the men who had invited him to go hunting had sold him back to the whites. They had come back to the camp saying that Lamar had just forsaken the tribe on his own and had left them during the night to go back to live with his own people.