He remembered the fury of his anger as they lashed his hands and ankles to the side of a cart, then ripped down his torn and bloody britches as he cried out to his mother’s God for help.
But her God never came to take away the pain, the suffering, little Zeke’s pitiful sobs. They were beaten savagely every time they cried out that night and for many nights to come.
Along about that time Jeremiah began wishing, even praying, that they could be killed and through with this torment. Or that they would be taken prisoner by the savage Indians that had so filled his childhood dreams for years.
Indians, yes—instead of white men who beat and sodomized them.
Blood-loving savages who would just outright kill the boys and be over with it. Hideous, painted, smelly warriors come to take away this torment.
It was of a cold, forbidding morning, the cloudy undergut overhead threatening to burst, that the two dozen comancheros suddenly jabbered excitedly, their voices raised stridently, some pointing to the southeast, where Jeremiah saw the sun was rising as red as the blood pouring from the neck of one of the hogs his papa would butcher back to home.
“Pa,” he had whispered to the miles and the years in that noisy confusion, “why you never come for us sooner?”
That was the moment Jeremiah knew he would wait a long time for his answer, the same moment he learned the cause of the comancheros’ anxiety.
Never before had the boy seen real live Indians. Oh, there had been those red-skinned men, women, and children he had gaped at from the back of a horse as the white looters journeyed into Indian Territory. But those Indians had dressed like white men, their faces charred with whipped expressions surrounding hound-dog eyes, the eyes of a people beaten and not liable to push themselves back up again.
But these Jeremiah looked at in wonder this morning—these were real warriors, by God! Just like the boyhood stories said Indians should be: long hair flowing, the color of a satiny blackbird’s wing. Silver trinkets and round conchos were braided into those lustrous locks. Each man of them was naked to the waist where a thong held the breechclout in place. Most of the fifty or so riders had painted their bare legs with magic symbols, stars and hail stones and lightning bolts streaking all the way down to their moccasins.
None of them rode on saddles, no feet stuffed into stirrups. Jeremiah had marveled at that, wide-eyed, as the fifty rode up, slowed, and spread out around the comanchero camp before coming to a halt.
As much as he yearned to understand what was said between the Indian leaders and the leaders of the comancheros, as much as he sensed it had something to do with Zeke and him, Jeremiah knew only that the voices on both sides grew angry all too quickly for this to be anything close to barter. He sensed the charge to the air as the comancheros eased behind their carts, their hands seeking out their guns; as the horsemen on their hammerheaded cayuses grew increasingly restless, shifting their fourteen-foot lances from one hand into the other and pulling forth their short, sturdy bows.
Then a shot thundered from one of the comanchero pistols, breaking the impasse. In answer ten arrows hissed among the Mexicans before the rattle of gunfire grew too deafening, swallowing up the sounds of the Indian war cries and the
When it was over, the air became quiet, deathly still for a few moments before Jeremiah dared open his eyes.
“They gone?” Zeke had asked in his seven-year-old voice.
“Don’t know,” Jeremiah had answered, blinking his eyes into the gray gloom beyond their little haven beneath that wagon.
There then erupted a blood-chilling cry from one throat, answered by half-a-hundred more as the Indians came among the comanchero dead. They stripped the Mexicans of all clothing and danced about in their newly won coats resplendent with shiny buttons and braidwork, most still wet, stained dark with the past owner’s blood. From beneath the cart, Jeremiah watched as the warriors began to butcher and mutilate the bodies of his former owners. And his fear rose high in his throat to think that now he was no longer among civilized human beings.
“Indians are heathens who don’t believe in God,” his mother had taught him at her knee back on the homestead in southwestern Missouri. So close to Indian country were they that she thought such an education worthwhile.
“What do they believe in?” Jeremiah had asked, though for years he remained without an answer that made sense in his limited view of the way of things in the universe.
He was thinking back on those lessons from his mother’s Bible—how she told him what these savage, half- naked people would do to helpless white men—when Jeremiah turned about with a jerk, finding a painted, dust- furred face bending down into the shade to peer at his little brother and him. Jeremiah’s heart seized in his throat to think that so much evil had happened to Zeke and him at the hands of evil white men—what horrors must surely await them if they were taken prisoner by these naked savages?
He cried and fought the Indians, struggling to get away from the first warrior, slamming into the legs of a second as he tried to scoot away from his clutches. Then a third face appeared before him, the face of a man who looked into his eyes, then held out his hand to Jeremiah. Another he held down for little Zeke, motioning for them to come out from their hiding place. One of the others gave the warrior a Mexican canteen. He pulled loose the cork with his teeth, drank and swallowed, then handed the canteen to Jeremiah.
For weeks now, maybe many months, he hadn’t had a drink when he wanted it. He was never offered water except in the morning and again at each night’s camp. Now this simple gift of water. Now these hideously painted savages were offering him a drink, from a canteen held in the same bloodstained hands that had hacked the manhood parts from the comancheros and stuffed those appendages into the Mexicans’ mouths so that they draped from the brown chins like so many limp tongues.
Jeremiah gave Zeke the first drink, then took a long one for himself. Soon they took the warrior’s hand and emerged into the stormy light of that bloody place, staring down at the oak-pale, brown-skinned comancheros who had brought down so much pain and fear upon the two boys. Now the Mexicans were gone and the Indians were done going through the carts, stealing all that the warriors could carry on their horses or pack on the animals once hitched to the traders’
At long last Jeremiah had his wish: that the Indians would come. For so long he had prayed for Indians to come kill them.
Instead the warriors hoisted little Zeke behind one of the older horsemen. He felt himself lifted from the ground, set on a pony behind a warrior whose skin smelled of camp fires and grease, slick with sweat. He smiled at Jeremiah and patted the white boy’s leg as if to give voice to something unspoken between two different peoples.
As if to assure Jeremiah that he was now among civilized people.
And as those riders suddenly pounded moccasins into their ponies’ ribs and shot off with a shout from half- a-hundred throats, Jeremiah thanked God that his prayers had not been answered.
Tears welled in his eyes as he hugged that nameless warrior, gripping the man as the pony raced away from that bloody place. Jeremiah looked back but once, barely able to make out the naked bodies sprawled on the ground. It was easier to see the black spires rising, adrift on the breeze above the burning carts.
For all that his young eyes had seen in that year gone from the Missouri homestead, for all that he had been forced to learn about the ways of white men and their evildoing in that same endless year, Jeremiah felt an overwhelming relief to be at last among a frightening, savage people.
These who killed and hacked and slashed off hair and manhood parts. These who nonetheless looked at the two boys with kind eyes and offered them water, then carried Jeremiah and Zeke off across the unmapped rolling plains, riding north toward the rocky escarpment coming purple beneath the gray light of that rainy morning.
So once more on this day, just as he had on every day since that morning the warriors had butchered the comancheros, Jeremiah understood he had been saved.
And came to believe that maybe his mother’s white God was not the only divine power out here in all this wilderness.
