The Last Karankawas(47)
On impulse, she exits. She doesn’t think. Murmurs to herself, “Today is about not thinking.”
She follows the feeder road behind a thicket of trees. It winds, circles, until it comes to a hidden parking lot. There sits a small visitor’s center with what looks like a gift shop, judging from the postcards and Texas-shaped magnets she can see in the window. Only one other car there, but no one in sight.
As she walks, Sam looms higher. The shadow he casts is long, and when she steps into it, she shivers at the drop in temperature. Finally she stands before him, craning her neck up.
Sam stands on a square platform of pink granite taller than her own head, its sheen catching the sunlight and casting it back even rosier. SAM HOUSTON, the etching reads beneath his feet, 1793–1863. She ticks the decades off on her fingers. Magdalena teases her about needing her hands to do simple math. Sam lived to seventy years old; older than her grandfather had been when he died, before she was born; older than her grandmother, strolling the crisp chill of the Galleria, listening to people chatter in Hindi and Greek and Korean, telling Mrs. de los Santos how she would look so good in that red camisa. Enough. Sam’s legs are long, booted, encased in trim trousers. He wears a fancy-looking vest with a crosshatched pattern carved into the white. From this angle it appears quilted, as if to touch it would be to run your palm over something feathery. But it would be hard, wouldn’t it. It must be. A man like Sam Houston would not be seen as soft. He has a handkerchief tied at the throat, an elaborate bow flaring beneath his chin. It seems like a formal thing. Jess, the history lover, would know. No, no, no. Over the vest, a long coat, open and pulled back on his left side by the hand hooked in his pocket. His thick hair waves down to his sideburns—Wolverine-level mutton chops, she thinks—and flares out from the sides of his face in wings. His eyes are level, his mouth a stern but thoughtful line. With his pocketed hand and cane, he looks as if he is surveying Texas, judging its purpose. Considering the possibilities.
“He was the president,” she murmurs aloud. “When we were our own country. A general in the army during the rebellion. And—”
And nothing else.
A founding father of Texas, Ms. Morton called him. But Carly cannot remember anything more than that.
She searches, harder, quicker. She cannot find a shred of memory to tell her more about him. And she wants to. Her breath comes fast, almost in gasps. Panicking.
Why? She draws shallow breaths, presses her fist to her chest.
Sam is hers, too. She has collected stories from her grandmother, stories from a textbook. Filipinos, newly arriving like her mother, climbing off a plane or a boat, stepping onto a shore. Mexicans, who were here when it was not called Texas. Karankawas—or Comanches, the Kiowa or Tonkawa or any of the others—here before it had a name, or bore a name, no books or oral histories. The shaping of the state, the island, where she was born. The shaping of her.
Unfamiliar. She is here for something new, something unknown. Rode off in search of it. Funny, then, isn’t it? This sudden, stabbing longing to hear Sam’s story. Any story.
* * *
The child is panicking. On her knee a scrape, the skin peeled back to reveal jagged pink flesh, bits of gravel in the pink, blood already welling like the tears on her cheeks. Mama.
Enough, anak ko. Her mother’s hand on her back, gentle, rubbing in small circles. You’re okay. Keep breathing. She smooths a wet washcloth over the child’s knee, shushing her when she cries out. We have to clean it. I know it hurts. It will stop, I promise. Cool dab of Neosporin, a Band-Aid. You’re okay. Keep breathing.
* * *
It takes three rings, but he answers. “Hey, baby.” The tears spill over at the sound of his voice. Of love? Regret? Need—she is afraid it is need. That she needs him and hasn’t known it until now.
She lets the tears come, for once, though she swallows so he won’t hear them. Speaks quickly before she can change her mind. “What do you remember about Sam Houston?”
Jess gives a grunt—something physical he is doing, on the boat, takes effort. She hears seagulls in the background, the grumble of some engine. “Mmph. There. What? Who?”
“Sam Houston. The general. Remember him?”
“Uh, yeah, sure. Why?”
“Just tell me, babe. Sam Houston. Tell me about him.” Tell me, Grandma. “You’re not busy, are you?”
“No, it’s fine, we’re sitting on the boat taking a break. Why do you—”
“Jess, please.”
“Okay, okay.” He pauses, and she knows he has the frown on his brow that means he is thinking, rifling through the extensive Texas history catalog he keeps in his mind, where he cannot remember which of his sisters has a birthday in July and which in January but can recall that the Battle of Goliad took place October 9, 1835.
“He was the president of the republic of Texas. He was a general during the revolution and—”
“He was the one who beat Santa Anna. After the Alamo. I already know that. What else?”
“Okay, hang on.” She hears the curiosity in his voice—Why do you want to know about Sam Houston all of a sudden, you’ve never given a shit—but he doesn’t push. “He was from Virginia, but he came here when it was still Mexico. H-town was named after him. It was the capital of Texas for a while, before they changed it to Austin.”