national officers,” Roma said.
She moved forward and made introductions. The words came automatically. Thanks to the sorority handbook, she had memorized the names and faces, down to the mole on the chin of Mrs. Jean Jelpy, President. The others were Mrs. Louise Whitecliff, Vice President, and Mrs. Georgina Powers, Secretary.
“We are so honored,” Roma said.
This would be a legend. For years, girls would talk about the time the national officers just showed up.
“We can’t stay,” the women said. “Bring us wonderful pledges this year, like you always do, girls like yourselves. We’re counting on you. We keep track of you from our headquarters, far away from this lovely place. You are our favorite chapter in the country, the whole world.”
“Let’s sing one song,” said Mrs. Georgina Powers. She settled on the piano bench and launched into the anthem. She pressed the pedals so the chords sounded deep and slow. Pewter hair bobbed free from her chignon.
Roma closed her eyes and sang. Others joined in. Like divas, the officers loosed their full-throated vigor.
The anthem was never sung in Porch Routine. It was too sad, and it was secret, a song about reunions when they were all unimaginably old, when evening was coming down around them like shades. Roma smelled the officers’ White Shoulders cologne. She would be one of them some day, with varicose veins on her legs and a mink coat in her closet.
You are my favorite in the whole world.
The door opened, and Natalie came in, her head down. She raised her streaked face and found Roma’s eyes.
Grace Road, Roma thought, as if she’d been there when Warren crossed the yard and ran to tell his people, I met a queen.
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
