Читать книгу Brides in the Sky - Cary Holladay - Страница 9

Comanche Queen

I

December 1860

Mule Creek, Texas

When Captain Sullivan Ross told his Texas Rangers that the first one to shoot a Comanche Indian would get a brand-new Colt revolver, nineteen-year-old Tommy Kelliher decided the gun ought to be his. In pursuit of Chief Peta Nocona, Tommy and his fellow Rangers found a band of Comanches drying meat at a tributary of the Pease River. They were mostly women, kids, and old folks, but the Rangers attacked anyway. In the midst of the raid, Tommy spotted a blue-eyed woman and called out, “Hey, you.”

To another Ranger who leveled his rifle at her, he barked, “Don’t shoot.”

The woman held a baby. She bared her breasts.

“Americano!” she cried.

As Tommy gripped her rough arm and led her to a cottonwood tree, he wondered if he should lie with her or even wed her. Amid buzzing bullets and shrieking Indians, he entertained and rejected the idea of a future with her a dozen times, and him not even the romantic type. It was crazy, the thoughts you had in war, he would say later. Yet as time passed, he would be flabbergasted by the words that sprang to his lips (when I first beheld her) on those occasions that he told of discovering the person who turned out to be Cynthia Ann Parker, a famous missing child. Kidnapped by Comanches, she’d grown up to be the chief’s wife, one of his wives, Tommy would amend.

“We got him,” a soldier yelled.

The Rangers tossed a man high and fired at him. It was the chief. He was alive when he went up, and a dead body when he fell. The Rangers tore off the scalp. Tommy saw it, and so did the woman, who bellowed and gouged her cheeks with her fingernails.

Within minutes, the battle was over.

The Rangers took the woman back to their camp. Captain Ross gave her a stick and asked her to draw Parker’s Fort on the ground. Her sketch in the dirt showed her family’s compound as it was in 1836. Some shadow of the nine-year-old Cynthia Ann remained within, though she had lived with the Comanches for twenty-four years. That very night, Captain Ross got the word out by telegraph to Governor Sam Houston and every newspaper he could think of.

In a few days, Cynthia’s uncle, Colonel Isaac Parker, a rancher from Birdville, showed up to claim her. She stood in sunlight, wearing a calico dress loaned by a camp laundress and hiding her face in her baby’s neck.

“Is it her?” Tommy asked Isaac Parker.

She raised her head and regarded the men with burning eyes.

“It’s her, all right,” said Isaac Parker. “She looks like her daddy, my brother that the Indians killed. Remember me, Cindy Ann?”

“Why is she mad at us?” Tommy asked.

Isaac Parker spat a stream of tobacco juice that made the laundress’s helper, a mulatto girl named Ruth, leap out of the way.

“She wants to go back to ’em,” Isaac said.

“But they’s savages,” Ruth said.

“How she feels, ain’t the way I’d feel,” Isaac agreed.

“What happened when y’all were attacked?” Tommy asked.

Isaac’s face went dark. “Indians showed up at my daddy’s stockade, hundreds of them, saying they wanted beef. My brother Benjamin had left the gate open. He went back to the Indians with meat, to give the rest of us time to run.” He paused. “And they killed him.”

Tommy held out a flask. Isaac drank and said, “Then they killed my daddy, my brother Silas, and the two Frost boys. Tortured them first.”

Tommy shook his head.

“They raped our women,” Isaac said, “and drug off Cindy Ann, her brother John, and her cousin Rachel, my niece. Rachel got away and wrote a book about it. Recollected everything, even the skunks and turtles she had to eat. We ransomed John after six years, but he ran back to ’em.” To Cynthia, he said, “Whatever happened to John?”

She didn’t answer.

Tommy’s anger surged. “Your uncle asked you a question.”

Ignoring them, Cynthia nuzzled her baby.

“Her little brother, Silas Junior, they didn’t get him,” Isaac said. “Remember Silas, Cynthy Ann? He’s got a boy of his own now.”

She kept her head down.

“And you’ve got a little sister who was born after you was took,” Isaac said. “Orlena, her name is. What do you think about that?”

She pressed her face against the baby’s.

Isaac sighed. “Benjamin ought not to left that gate open.”

He held the flask toward Tommy, who said, “I’d be honored if you kept it.”

* * *

THE laundress who had loaned the dress was named Lorna Devereaux (“Poppa was French Canuck”). She and Ruth, her helper, had scrubbed Cynthia’s face and washed her matted hair. Cynthia did not submit readily; Ruth zealously held her down. The baby was clean, and Lorna and Ruth had exclaimed about that.

After the meeting with Isaac Parker, Cynthia stumped into the room she shared with Lorna, curled into the corner, and nursed the baby. Lorna was there, resting on a cot.

“Mighty nice of your uncle to come all this way,” Lorna said, though she knew Cynthia wouldn’t answer.

It was twilight. The men were talking outside. From her cot, Lorna listened.

“Does she really want to go back to the Comanches?” Tommy Kelliher said, and Isaac Parker said, “Son, no good deed . . .”

“. . . goes unpunished,” Lorna whispered. Her ears pricked up at the sound of whoops and shouts. Indians, she thought, her mouth going dry.

“She’s asleep,” Isaac Parker called out. “Come back in the morning,” and Lorna understood that news of Cynthia had spread, and people wanted to see her.

“You been took twice, Cindy,” Lorna said, her voice hollow in the darkness. “First by Indians, now by whites, and you ain’t either one.”

There was not a word from the seething, lactating presence in the corner.

Lorna tried again. “Your uncle looked for you for years. Offered a reward, trying to get you back. Nobody’d pay to get me back.”

Specifically, Lorna meant Tommy Kelliher. She had been in love with him for three days, ever since he’d returned with the woman in tow and a swagger in his step. Lorna was ten years older and had whored around with so many soldiers that she held scant hope of being a prize for anyone. She didn’t envy Cynthia her fame, but did begrudge her the love behind the ransom that had never been paid.

The next morning, while Lorna scrubbed clothes and bossed the girl tending the fires beneath boiling pots, Isaac Parker led Cynthia out of the fort, he astride a big horse and her and her baby on the meanest mule in the army. Spectators, who had indeed come back at sunup, cheered and applauded. Isaac Parker tipped his hat, but Cynthia gave no sign. Lorna watched them fade into dots far out on the plains. She let the washing fall from her hands. Tears filmed her eyes and spilled over. Her heart was a rockslide, a wagon train, a circle of fire.

“What’s the matter, Lorna?” Tommy said.

“He came all that way for her. Nobody would do that for me.”

“Aw, honey.”

“I could die, and nobody notice.”

“I would,” Tommy said.

“You would?” Joy rose up in Lorna’s heart. She beamed at him, and together they went to her room.

Ruth took over, stirring the wash and thinking. A captive rescued after twenty-four years—seven years longer than Ruth had been alive—a woman so dirty she’d changed color, and sore headed about being found, and her uncle come to fetch her? Amazing. It was like—the girl struggled to compare. Like something in the Bible. There was another emotion in her heart, too, a welter she couldn’t parse.

“She ugly,” she said to the suds, “but the baby . . .”

Was darling, she admitted. The child’s name was Topsannah. A half-Indian cook had translated: it meant Prairie Flower. Ruth thought of sunflowers and rambling roses. She abandoned the washing, sought out the cook, and asked him what else he knew about Cynthia Ann Parker. He prided himself on being an authority on the white squaw.

“She got two boys by the chief,” the cook said. “Quanah, about seventeen years, he’s killed men already. Big warrior. Younger son is Pecos. The chief had another wife, a full-blood Comanche woman. They shared him.”

Ruth shivered. This was better than what the clapping people got. Let the clothes boil over in the pots. If Lorna didn’t care, she didn’t have to, either. From an oven, the cook took a pan of bread and offered her a slice.

She bit into it. “How come she do that to her face?”

“Broken heart,” the cook said.