The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  He carried brown paper packages of stout serge cloth, portable soup packed in squares between sheets of waxed paper, hard, un-melting spermaceti candles. The sailors’ arms were hideous with tattoos from the Sandwich Islands, dark and strawberry-colored designs of naked women and the names of ships and wives and girlfriends, anchors and palm trees, blue-black on human skin.

  “And their language?” said Samuel.

  “I have no idea,” said Morgan. “I can’t think of the name of the fellow who is trying to classify the Indian languages. Schoolcraft has done quite a lot on the Chippewa.”

  They walked past the ancient salt and fish warehouse with its checkered English brick, and stopped to stare up at Irwin and Young’s ship carvings, fastened to the outside wall of the second story. There were women with naked breasts and pink nipples and a grim, toothy sailor in bright paint that seemed to have thrust himself through the window and was grinning at the far shore of the Delaware with teeth like piano keys. Third and Dock was dense with warehouses and markets and foot traffic, donkeys lifted from their feet between the shafts as more and more layers of stiff, papery dried mackerel were thrown onto their carts.

  “And their beliefs?” Samuel stopped to look in the window of Bingham’s Fish and Provisions. “Does this dried soup look better than the stuff I bought at Levin’s?”

  Morgan put his hand over his forehead like a visor and leaned against the glass and squinted against the reflections. “No, it’s got flies in it.” They walked on. “No one knows. We have studied the tribes on the Upper Missouri because they are accessible. We can get to them, you see. You can take a steamboat. These southern plains tribes lie great distances overland with no water transportation. No water. One creeps from waterhole to river to waterhole, as I have heard.”

  “They take scalps,” said Samuel. “What in God’s name for?”

  Morgan lifted his eyebrows and held up a forefinger. “Now that is interesting. At our latest meeting a fellow named Gaynor, Charles Gaynor, he is a natural philosopher and antiquarian just come back from the Russian Far East. He went there with Gennady Nevelskoy to the Amur River. Lord, how I envy him.” They strode onward on the smooth rounded cobblestones. “Myself with a recently bereaved family.”

  Samuel touched his arm. He could think of nothing to say that would not have to be shouted over the noise of the passing vehicles.

  “It’s all right. Thank you. Anyhow…” Morgan cleared his throat. He paused. Then he said, “Gaynor did some excavation there on the coast of Sakhalin in Siberia. At the risk of his life. Shoveling around in the ice and dirt in a burial mound. Found four mummies of very ancient provenance that had been scalped and the scalps sewn back on.”

  “Really.”

  “Just so.”

  “I see.”

  “He said his thought about it was that the mummies, you know, when they were live persons, had been scalped in some sort of war, or attack, and then their own people or tribe had most likely gone to a great deal of trouble to recover the scalps and sew them back on. Thus it is a safe conclusion that it has something to do with a person’s soul, ascent of the soul and so on.”

  They dodged a coal wagon and walked on. Samuel said, “There must be some similarity between the Comanche and the tribes you have visited.”

  “What I have heard from the Mandan and Sioux is that the Comanche are perpetually in a state of war with everybody. A Brulé Sioux man, an old man, said they had come from beyond the Rocky Mountains and simply leapt on everybody like tigers. Now you need a spirit stove and a sou’wester.”

  “No I do not, Lewis. I need a broad-brimmed hat. A good hat you can live under. My old one was lost going into Savannah. It was the best hat I ever had. I miss it.”

  They found one on Dock Street at a slop draper. It was brown, of beaver felt with a grosgrain ribbon around the edge of the three-inch brim. Samuel set it firmly on his head. “I am ready for arrows and runaways.”

  They trudged upward again, back up Market to the horsecars. Samuel and Lewis Henry Morgan stood back while laughing young women fought with their skirts on the step, and filled their seats with their packages and budgets and gloves and yards of skirt hems. The air was heavy with sea mists, and the sliding tilt of gulls overhead in their ash-colored jackets. A sea breeze sprang up out of the northeast, and on Queen Street white curtains were sucked out of the open windows and gestured frantically with embroidered hems.

  Samuel was refreshed by the wind. He was going somewhere unknown, the western lands that lay beyond the politics of religion, the interminable splits of the Society of Friends. Beyond prisons, beyond cities, armed with a good hat and portable soup.

  In the silence of his little house on Mount Vernon Street he went over the map. It remained resolute and graphic in its inked lines for towns, cities, railroads, until it came to those western lands beyond the Missouri River, and then it faded into vast unmarked spaces, like a door left ajar with a storm coming and the wind blowing in at will.

  He went to Germantown to visit his mother and father, his sturdy farmer brother and his brother’s wife and children. Their hundreds of acres of wheatland and orchard near Lancaster. They nodded and said very little when he told them he was once again leaving Philadelphia. At prayer together that night his father asked the Lord to make clear His purposes and to help him, Nathaniel Hammond, to understand the paths of the wayward.

  Samuel sat with the men of the Society of Friends Indian Committee and went over the paperwork he would be required to complete. Every draft of money and all orders had to be written out in triplicate to avoid the corruption of the old Department of Indian Affairs. He must receive, verify, and then distribute the annuities. He must see that the annuity goods were shipped out of Leavenworth in due time. He must hire a clerk, workmen, perhaps a physician, with luck a schoolteacher, and all of these employees’ names must be submitted to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs and approved.

  The Kiowa and Comanche were to receive $30,000 worth of goods according to the treaty they had signed. These goods were to consist of blankets, brown muslin, satinet, calico, hosiery, needles, thread, suits of men’s clothes, butcher knives, iron kettles, frying pans, hoes, and small axes. In addition, rations were to be issued every two weeks; beef, bacon, flour, coffee, sugar, soap, tobacco, and soda. These would be given to the chiefs, who would distribute them among the women of each family. The beef was to be issued alive. The live cattle were to be given to a headman of each family, who had a signed receipt in hand.

  The members of the committee went over these stipulations carefully, as if what were written there would bring order and obedience. As if the issuing of calico and sugar would cause the Comanche and the Kiowa to become content, delighted, grateful. That it would inspire them to take up farming and eat vegetables.

  “The Indians are what we have made them,” said Dr. Reed. “Every war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.”

  Samuel said, “God made them, sir. I do not think we of Philadelphia have taken on the task of creation.”

  Dr. Reed stared at him in silence. The kindliness shrank out of his face. After a moment he said, “I see.”

  Samuel flushed. “I’m sorry, sir. I have spoken out of turn.”

  Dr. Reed nodded. “It is all right, Samuel. I have known thee from thy schooldays.” He turned in his chair and turned back again. “If the Texans would cease to crowd them,” he said. “If they would leave the red man alone. There is room out there for all.”

  SAMUEL BEGAN TO pay attention to newspapers. He read every news report from the far West that he came upon. The stories were brief and vague, half a column here and there in between headlines about Grant’s disjointed army piling up, one regiment after another, in Richmond. The New York World and the Times both had correspondents with Grant, and their headlines ate up the front pages. News from Texas consisted of clips from other
papers. Union troops landing in Indianola and Corpus Christi. Savages shot down in their villages. Long quotes from local officials about exterminating the red vermin.

  Samuel understood that the Society of Friends was troubled by the Texans because the Texans were so clear and straightforward in their speech. They did not seem to need to hide their intentions behind deceptive and gentle phrases. They came to take the land and they meant to keep it. They would take it from red men as they had taken land from the Shawnee and Cherokee in the Carolinas and before that the wild Irish in Ulster and before that whatever croft or patch of rocky land they could hold against the lairds in the lowlands, and if they could not hold it they rode with the lairds against the neighbors to raid other neighbors’ cattle and had been doing so for centuries before the birth of Christ, who was the Prince of Peace, and they intended to keep on doing it, for as long as it took.

  Chapter 5

  LOTTIE BECAME RED-CHEEKED and feverish. Elizabeth knew the men would not abide a sick or crying captive child, and the days after they were taken she carried Lottie in her arms. She made a sling of her shawl and wrapped the ends around both of them. She carried the three-year-old from the first great rise in the land until they came to a large encampment, where the men were greeted with shouts and singing. Women and girls danced alongside the men with their heraldic scalps, the confused and frightened stolen horses. A great bonfire burned and in its light the horsemen rode around the camp to the songs and the cheering. They held up the things they had taken from the houses they had raided, they waved blankets and quilts, and a Kiowa warrior turned a hand mirror back and forth so that it flashed in the firelight.

  Two old women came to them and seized Elizabeth by the arm and led her away into the dark and violent night. They shoved her and Lottie into a small stand of live oak. Mary and her two children and little Millie, eighteen months, were hidden by the elder women in some other place. They stayed there all night, watching the stars, as the celebration fires flared up and the singing went on and on. The elder women sat between them and the firelit village of tipis. They watched from their old eyes, black with blue casts in them, old in their knowledge of the nature of men and raiding. They sat hooded in their blankets. Elizabeth held Lottie until the girl fell forward in sleep. Then she found herself waking up faint and hungry in a gray light.

  That next day they went on. A light rain fell for two days, and it was cold. At some point they stopped and the traveling band of two hundred Comanche and Kiowa split up. The captives were divided between them. Elizabeth saw a young Kiowa woman sweep Millie up in her arms and stroke her hair and smile. The young woman pressed her cheek to the little girl with tears in her eyes. Elizabeth thought she would probably never see Millie again, and she was right.

  The rain dropped thin as mist on the trees in the draws and painted their trunks dark as some unrefined ore, dark as slag coal. Elizabeth pulled her shawl over her head and over Lottie’s head when the two groups parted and she was shoved ahead with the Comanche. She could not see Mary or Jube or Cherry or Millie as they went away northwest with the Kiowa.

  She walked on with the Comanche and their long, easy march of hundreds of horses and travois. The ends of the travois poles bore down to make deep wavering tracks in the wet earth and the heads of children with hair in stiff spikes stuck up out of bundles and blankets on the travois, jiggling like dolls. All along the trail were things that had been taken from houses on Elm Creek and then thrown away; a tobacco cutter soon abandoned because of its long, awkward handle, curling irons, a shoehorn, a flatiron, a pair of women’s high-laced shoes, a tintype of Jeremiah Durgan in its velvet frame and starred, cracked glass, all scattered in the grass. They don’t want any of it, thought Elizabeth. They stole it and then they threw it away. All those things mean nothing to them.

  Elizabeth found enough to eat as they went. She caught a painted terrapin and pried its shell apart. Inside there was meat and autumn fat. At the noon rest she boiled it inside its own shell and fed Lottie first and then herself. She took up the bitter buffalo gourds and dug out their flesh and made drinking cups of them.

  When they first came into camp Elizabeth was claimed as a slave by a skinny woman with a drawn and hostile face and elaborate tattoos around her mouth, who quickly taught her the Comanche words for water, wood, bring it. Elizabeth endured the woman’s blows without a sound. The skinny woman was the wife of one of the men who had raped and beaten Elizabeth, and he had a thunderbird painted on his tipi, an audacious claim to great power. His name meant Eaten Alive.

  He had two wives, and the skinny woman was the older one. Elizabeth called her the Dismal Bitch. The younger had a round, plump face with a broad smile. Elizabeth saw her turn that happy face away when the Dismal Bitch turned on Elizabeth with her pony goad and left long bruises the shape and color of burned sticks on her arms.

  Elizabeth Fitzgerald worked to make herself useful and needed so she could save Lottie’s life. The women’s lives were very hard. They were hard on others and hard on themselves. Eaten Alive’s skinny first wife lifted the massive fresh buffalo skins that weighed close to a hundred pounds with hands whose two forefingers were missing at the first joints where she had cut them off in grief over dead relatives. A brother whose raw half-broke pony ran him into a copse of trees on the drainage they called the Caddo’s Hand and knocked his brains out on a live oak branch. Her mother and father had perished in the great die-off of the spotted disease when wagon trains came through Comancheria on their way to California, and brought with them a killing fever, spirits that burned up so many people that there was hardly anyone left to hunt or pray. It left the people diminished and angry as hornets and perpetually hungry.

  They came upon a small group of buffalo walking southward with their breath smoking from their wide muzzles, with their sweet and grassy smell. Their beloved outline of humped back and low-carried heads a template in the mind for tens of thousands of years. The men ran them down and killed them for the heavy autumn hides, to make moccasin soles and rawhide boxes and the stiff mittenlike horseshoes for the stony plains ahead. For winter robes and buckets and rope. The women ripped off the weighty hides as they would strip blankets from a bed.

  Elizabeth had diminished within the ragged remains of the yellow-and-pink-checkered dress. She was lank and hungry and forty years old. She lifted the moist, bloody skins onto travois at the killing grounds and walked behind them to the camp. She went around the edges of the skins and hammered in small stakes and then raked the skins clean with a cast-iron scraper. She tore off the white connective tissue in great swaths. She broke into skulls with a stone and pulled the brains out and folded the shivering gray pudding into the damp skin. She was silent and furious at this filthy work and the primitive process. Why didn’t they get themselves a tanner’s beam and a big two-handed fleshing knife? They liked to kill themselves working, that’s why. She ripped at the skin as if it were one of the men who had raped her.

  Every evening she was weary beyond feeling and still she carried water in buckets made of buffalo stomach until it was dark. Somewhere in camp were captives from villages in New Mexico but Elizabeth knew she was not to speak to them or see them and how she knew this was hard to say but she kept her head down with an acid feeling of willed subservience. She fed Lottie pieces of raw marrow out of her greasy hands. She did not know what was wrong with the child. The three-year-old’s head lolled on her shoulders as Lottie struggled to hold her head upright. Perhaps it was some spiritual collapse, a shrinking of the mind against the world in which she found herself.

  Lottie did not cry. She was silent. No one adopted her because they were afraid of what disease she might have. Perhaps she was inhabited by some hostile entity, something living in her and looking out at the Comanche encampment from behind her gray three-year-old eyes. They made her sleep at the tipi entrance, and people stepped on her and shouted at her when they came inside. Eaten Alive’s youngest wife lifted her hand and told people to be
careful but the Dismal Bitch turned a blank, predatory stare on the Happy Wife and so the young woman deflated in a breath and went back to her stitching.

  When they moved on northward that November of 1864, it was the fourth time they had shifted. Elizabeth was tiring day by day and hour by hour. She ate anything; meat scraps from skins and broth found at the bottoms of kettles. If she could stay strong and work she would live, and perhaps Lottie would live as well.

  Elizabeth carried wood to the tipi and sharpened the frail old fleshing knife she had been given. She wondered how she could manage to have Lottie taken in and adopted by the Happy Wife. Even if she were adopted and learned Comanche and were tattooed, Elizabeth did not care, only that the child would live, under this cold, remote sun that seemed to burn the trail before them, mile after mile of open rolling plains and the tangled vines of buffalo gourd at her feet. They walked on from one river bottom to another, the ribbons of timber lacing the plains. Elizabeth walked resolutely with Lottie in her arms. When Lottie cried, she held her hand over the girl’s mouth. She will live, she will, thought Elizabeth as she walked.

  The second buffalo kill was on the north bank of the Wichita River, at the falls. Elizabeth knew they would not be rescued. They were too far north, out in the plains, and any party that came after them would be outnumbered and outgunned. The Indian men had repeating rifles and bandoliers of ammunition, lances with foot-long steel heads, and every man was a warrior.

  At the falls of the Wichita River where the water spilled five feet over a lip of red stone, Elizabeth slid into a pool to cool her injured breasts. Cottonwood leaves drifted from the great, calm trees. The leaves were the color of primroses and butter. They fell like rain and dotted the red water that boiled up at the foot of the falls in rusty foam. She left Lottie on the bank on the stinking greasy shawl. The girl’s face was skeletal. Her nose holes were as big as eyes and her gray eyes were sunk back into her skull to gaze out from the very center of the child’s self, that which is otherworldly and hard and bright and indifferent.