The Son Read Online Free Page B

like most everyone else on the frontier.
    “Eli, was that you shooting?” It was my sister.
    “It was just a wolf,” I shouted back. I thought about going down to get the skin—a white wolf, I had never seen one of those before—but decided against it, as it was getting dark.
    Because of all the food being made, we did not sit down for supper until late. Seven or eight tallow candles were lit around the house, another luxury. My mother and sister had been cooking all day and they brought out dish after dish. We all knew it was to punish my father for leaving us alone, for being guilted into a wild-goose chase, but no one said anything.
    My brother and I drank cool buttermilk, my mother and sister drank a bottle of white wine we had gotten from the Germans. My father had been saving the wine for a special occasion. Supper began with wheat bread and butter and the last of the cherry preserves, then ham, sweet potatoes, roast turkey, fish stuffed with wild garlic and fried in tallow, steaks rubbed with salt and chili pepper and cooked directly on the coals, the last of the spring morels, also cooked in butter, and a warm salad of pigweed and Indian spinach, cooked in more butter and with garlic. I had never eaten so much butter in my life. For dessert we had two pies: blackberry and plum, fruit my brother had picked that day. There was nothing left in the larder but hardtack and salt pork. If he wants to run with Syphilis Poe, my mother said, then he can eat like Syphilis Poe.
    I felt guilty but that did not stop me from eating my share. My mother did not feel guilty at all. She wished for more wine. Everyone was falling asleep.
    I carried the ham bone out to the springhouse, then sat watching the stars. I had my own names for them—the buck, the rattler, the running man—but my brother convinced me to use Ptolemy’s, which did not make any sense. Draco looks like a snake, not a dragon. Ursa Major looks like a man running; there is not a bear anywhere in it. But my brother could not abide anything so tainted with common sense and thus my effort to name the heavens was aborted.
    I put the horses in the stable, barred the door from the inside, and climbed out through the gap in the eaves. It would take any Indians a while to get at them. The horses seemed calm, which was a good sign, as they could smell Indians better than the dogs.
    By the time I got back inside, my mother and sister had retired to my parents’ canopy bed and my brother was lying in my sister’s cot. Usually my brother and I slept in the room across the dogtrot, but I let him be. After gathering my rifle, war bag, and boots to the foot of the bed, I spit into the last candle and climbed under the covers with my brother.
     
    A ROUND MIDNIGHT I heard our dogs rucking up a chorus. I had not been sleeping well anyway so I got up to check the porthole, worried my mother or sister would see what was sticking up under my nightshirt.
    Which I forgot about. There were a dozen men near our fence and more in the shadows near the road and still more in our side yard. I heard a dog yelp and then our smallest, a fyce named Perdida, went running off into the brush. She was hunched like a gut-shot deer.
    “Everyone get the hell up,” I said. “Get up, Momma. Get everyone up.”
    The moon was high and it might as well have been daylight. The Indians led our three horses out of the yard and down the hill. I wondered how they’d figured their way into the stable. Our bulldog was following a tall brave around like they were best friends.
    “Move over,” said my brother.
    He and my mother and sister had gotten out of bed and were both standing behind me.
    “There’s a lot of Indians.”
    “It’s probably Rooster Joe and the other Tonks,” said my brother.
    I let him push me out of the way, then went to the fire and poked it so we would have light. Since statehood we’d had good Indian years; most of the U.S. Army had been stationed in Texas to watch the