The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  Elizabeth stood up and the red water cascaded down her spare body.

  “Lottie darling,” she said. “Don’t leave us.”

  “All right, Grandma,” Lottie said. “Grandma, you wet.”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth. She looked up. The skinny wife she called the Dismal Bitch came running down the sloping bank with her lips drawn back. She raised a heavy digging stick of bois d’arc in one hand and she had the handle of a fleshing-knife in the other. It was of soft cast iron and very old and it had broken off in Elizabeth’s hand two hours ago. The Dismal Bitch was shouting with rage. She kicked Lottie aside and strode toward Elizabeth and then waded into the water.

  The Dismal Bitch kept on crying out in Comanche as she sloshed through the water and waved the broken handle in Elizabeth’s face. Then she struck Elizabeth over the head with the digging stick. Bois d’arc is a yellow, dense wood, hard as iron. Lottie put both hands flat over her eyes.

  Elizabeth had taken her beatings without a word all the long walk from the Brazos to the Wichita River. Now she threw up both her hands. The Dismal Bitch smashed the stick onto her palms with such force that rays of fire burned from Elizabeth’s finger joints to her shoulders. Elizabeth shut her hands in a tight grip around the stick, and turned both wrists and jerked the stick toward herself, onto her own collarbones. She snatched the Dismal Bitch off balance. Then Elizabeth twisted to the right and tipped the stick over and threw the woman on her back into the shallow water. Elizabeth bore down. She fell to her knees on underwater stones and crushed the stick across the woman’s throat. The Dismal Bitch would not let go the stick. But you will soon enough, Elizabeth thought, when you are drowning you witch of hell.

  The Comanche woman’s hands jerked loose and she reached up out of the foaming water for Elizabeth’s hair. Elizabeth heard a light voice calling “Grandma, Grandma.” She stepped back with the stick in her hands.

  The bois d’arc wood was bright yellow and smooth, barkless, and shaved to a chisel shape on one end. When the woman stood up with the red water streaming down around her, Elizabeth drew the digging stick back like a baseball bat and struck her across the throat and then again across the top of the skull and again on her forearms as she lifted them in defense. Then again across the back of the head, a terrific blow, as she fell into the water and began to scramble away.

  Elizabeth yelled and raised the digging stick above her head and shook it. Her broad heavy face with deep lines cut like parentheses around her shouting mouth. She yelled in triumph.

  The Dismal Bitch reached the bank and ran toward the horse herd, beyond the encampment. She did not know where she was going except away from the river. She was seeing double and so ran into a travois and then tripped over a dog with puppies and then lay there.

  Elizabeth stood breathing hard and silently. The tipis had blossomed in white cones all along the banks of the Wichita, and there was laughter and the dogs barking at something and the smell of woodsmoke. The tall red grasses were tipped in shakos of white cotton lit by the late sun like spirit hair.

  On the grassy bank the second wife, the young happy wife with the pleasant face, sat down beside Lottie and patted the girl’s shoulder. Lottie lowered her eyes and began to open and shut her dirty hands and then a spreading stain appeared on the grass as her urine ran down in yellow streams, over the grass and cottonwood leaves.

  After a while the Dismal Bitch got up and wavered into the horse herd, and then vomited. She went back to the tipi with the thunderbird painted on it and collapsed.

  Happy Wife came and gave Elizabeth and Lottie pemmican wrapped in some fibrous inner bark and a wooden bowl of prairie turnips. Elizabeth and Lottie sat beside the fire outside Eaten Alive’s tipi. They ate the greasy mass, ate it all, relishing the bits of agarita berry. They drank from their cups made of the bitter buffalo gourd. Then Happy Wife came out and signaled that Lottie should sleep inside the tipi, just inside the entrance, and the three-year-old collapsed like a small dirty figurine and people coming in stepped over her carefully when Happy Wife shouted at them. She shouted at them and then turned and picked up a heavy red blanket and laid it over Lottie.

  Eaten Alive sat up on a bluff of the river far away from the arguments of the women. He poured songs from a bone flute. They had passed the Wichita and would soon pass the Red. They had captives and horses and a harvest of winter skins. Little Buffalo and several others were dead, but they had died honorably, in battle. Eaten Alive tipped out a lilting current of mourning from the bone flute for Little Buffalo. All men must die and we must rise into the other world with a self whole and unchanged with the hair streaming uncut from our heads and so he had died. Eaten Alive owned five songs now, all love songs, love of winter and rain and horses and the morning sun and love for his young second wife. The humpbacked trader of the Tewa people came invisibly with his delicate music. His name was Kokopelli, and he bore melodies and seeds and he lived beyond the ages in the plains air, drifting with clear grace notes and tremolos.

  Chapter 6

  AS THEY WALKED on, Elizabeth recited silently all she had ever memorized in school. Bits of speeches on Independence Day, verses of the Bible, the names of her neighbors, her children’s birthdays, whispering to herself under the chill sun of the November plains. Pillars of dust the color of madder rose up to mark their passage.

  Overhead vultures wheeled high on the updrafts over the Red Rolling Plains, some rising and some sliding downward, descending in an airy mobile whose center shaft was in the remote blue zenith. They circled at great heights, mile upon mile, when heavy clouds white as glaciers sailed up from the northwest.

  One early morning there was a heavy fog. They broke camp in a strange isolate stillness as if in a world just formed and not yet emerged into definition. Every limb adorned with lines of tiny drops and the grass wet. They walked on with soaked, dark legs, and they covered many miles in silence, going nowhere in the same spot with the blurring fog all around them. By midmorning the fog had separated into phantom banks lying apart like grounded clouds among the ekasonip, the stands of red grass. Then it rose up and fled away overhead in a low, rolling tide. At every draw Eaten Alive’s two wives slid from their ponies to collect deadwood. Elizabeth gathered as much as either of them. She packed it with great crashes onto a travois. The Dismal Bitch avoided Elizabeth and would not look at her. Elizabeth picked up a heavy stick and stuck it in her belt. She secretly marked the days on it, one notch after another. Her checkered dress grew larger as she shrank inside it and the hem tattered into fringes.

  After the Wichita they came to the Red River, and Elizabeth knew that beyond the Red was these people’s dwelling-place. Where she would be beyond help and beyond anyone’s reach in an alien country whose landscape was known only to a very few. The Happy Wife, Pakumah, had taken Lottie to herself now, maybe to spite Tabimachi, the Dismal Bitch, who sulked thin and bitter in her own eight square feet of space beside her parfleche boxes, packing and unpacking obsessively.

  Elizabeth slept outside or just inside the tipi entrance, which she learned must always face to the east. But she did not care because Lottie was now wrapped in a four-point blanket beside Pakumah and ate from Pakumah’s bowl and slept soundly all night. She had begun to smile again. They had tattooed a star on her forehead. Pakumah and her sisters gave Lottie anything she asked for. When she screamed and threw things they smiled and tried to soothe her with little gifts of egret feathers or a pinch of sugar or a prairie chicken’s air sac dried and blown up like a small transparent balloon.

  Elizabeth knew she herself was spending her life force like a running stream but she had ceased to care.

  They came to the Red River bottoms at a place where the river made a loop to the south and so the current was slow and there was a tall forest in the flats. There were open stretches of pure white sand. The cottonwoods and the sycamores grew to great heights. Banks of jaunty Carrizo cane with its plumes and shakos. The water itself red as rust, as brick, red as win
e. They camped on the south side at a place where it was clear they had always camped, and the men herded the horses through the trees and urged them into the river. The horses hesitated and dodged and turned back, and then the leaders went in, and then the rest. They poured over the bank into the water in erupting sprays; pintos and duns, gruellas of dove gray, bays and blacks. They were stolen Texas horses with long backs, or the Comanche mustang ponies with trim clean legs and heavy manes and tails. Their tails floated behind them as they swam and then they footed themselves in shallow water and stood drinking greedily. The men and boys rode in after them and slipped from their horses’ backs into the water, unbraided their hair and ducked themselves again and again.

  Elizabeth walked a long way in search of firewood. Pakumah gave her a worn little mare and a travois, and so she left Lottie in the young woman’s care and went more than a mile in a wandering route through the woods. The vines and saplings made dense thickets and the trees were skirted with heaped driftwood brought down by floods. Elizabeth delighted in the shade, the scattered sunlight, after the relentless sun of the open country. She loaded branch after branch. Her hair hung down in separate dirty locks and several of her fingernails were split, her shoes held together by thongs. She prayed aloud. Eaten Alive had hit her with his quirt for praying aloud, so she had learned to say nothing in English and to puzzle out Comanche words. She prayed that Lottie would get well as she lifted smooth gray deadwood onto the travois. She said sycamore and driftwood and taibo and esakonip and haamee.

  She walked on up a sandy rise to a stone bluff that stood a hundred feet or more above the river. Above the bottomlands everything changed. Now there was only dense thickets and short trees. She went on, pressing through the rigid branches. They all seemed to be made of thousands of strands of twisted, coarse wire. She tied the little mare to a limb and went to the top of the bluff.

  It was good to be up high. The level horizon all around her had begun to give her a lost feeling of stalking earnestly and without end toward a vanishing horizon. It was good to look out over the floodplain of the Red and the curve of the river and the wind turning the water’s surface into a weaving of light. No smoke anywhere, on any quadrant of the horizon, except for the big camp upstream where the tipis’ pale cones rose out of the high trees, where the campfires were lit and children ran shouting in play and the men were bringing in the wet horses through the blue evening air.

  Elizabeth went along the bluff and before long she came to a mound of stone blocks. They were squared. They bore chisel marks. She reached down to touch them. They were of weathered sandstone, worn down by heat and rain until they lay in heaps and were shoved aside by ancient post oaks grim as trolls.

  She walked among them looking for some sign or symbol. On one was a Spanish cross with bulbous terminals on each arm. Beyond the remains of the Spanish fort was a ruined cabin built of upright logs that leaned in all directions. The stone chimney was blanketed by greenbrier and passionflower, gray and dry and noisy, seedpods shaking in the wind.

  Grapevines tangled over the leaning wheels of a wagon. The Spanish had come and built something of stone and after them, people of her own kind, and neither could hold this place against the arid country or the Comanche and the Kiowa, so here their efforts lay in ruins. Inside the fallen walls she saw disintegrating cloth caught beneath several logs and within that the long bone of a leg or arm. It did not frighten her. She was too tired and had come to think of this as her end as well. Elizabeth thought, I could well die in this country. I could die in the next five minutes.

  Weighty clouds built up in the northwest now, lit from behind by the sunset light, and their topmost towers glowed with an internal light. She pushed aside the planks of the wagon. The place had long ago been scavenged, the wagon’s metal tires gone to make fleshing knives or beaten into arrowheads.

  She sat on the stone blocks awhile to rest. She was being worn down, faded and weathered like schist, suspended between two languages so that words came to her out of an unstable white space where nothing seemed to hold meaning. She was not sure of the meaning of anything.

  From downstream came a low and powerful sound. A deep coughing roar. She raised her head, and across the river in the last of the November light a jaguar slipped out of the intricate netting of greenbrier vines and cane. He stopped to smell a limb of deadwood as if a message had been left there for him. Then he lifted his heavy head with its mouth open, panting. His beautiful rosettes were an extravagant adornment in the monotonous colors of the Red River and the white beaches and black trees, gray drifts of winter grass. He called out, singular and lonely, far north of his common range. He walked out of the trees and made a swift passage like a great spotted fish through the grass to the edge of the river in a slow moving tide of spots and when he reached the bank a covey of black ducks rattled up off the water. In the next second the jaguar had launched himself into the air and twisted upright and snatched a duck out of the clattering mass and fell, fell, with his long body writhing and sent up plumes of red water as he struck the surface.

  He came up with the drake in his mouth and swam to the bank, his banded tail floating behind him. He heaved up on the bank streaming water and shook himself, a windmill of spray. His rosettes shivered in waves down his body as he shook himself, and the duck wings flapped wildly in his mouth.

  He dropped the duck and called out, Hough! Hough! Then he turned and looked up at her with his golden eyes. The stripes ran off his face like water.

  Elizabeth was at the edge of starvation and near a fatal exhaustion, and in her weightless daze she felt he was speaking to her. A creature at the far edge of his range, or beyond it, solitary and lost but somehow surviving. A vision. She had been granted a vision.

  Chapter 7

  A COLD FRONT CAME down upon them from the north, great layers of chilled air revolving one over another. It tore leaves loose and tipped over a drying rack and the dogs seized upon the meat and bolted away with it in the wind. Tipis flattened against their poles on the north sides and the horses were unsettled and milled and shouldered into one another. It took all the men and boys to hold the herd and keep them from drifting back south over the river before the punishing wind.

  Elizabeth helped chase the dogs away with her stick and to set up the racks again and secure them. Now she was permitted to sleep inside the tipi. She listened to the light rain that came with the cold and fell asleep for a while. She woke up again and lay sleepless in the smell of woodsmoke and wet fur. She was visited by a pure and constant rage she could do nothing about. Lottie had another name now, and Elizabeth forced herself to accept this and to remember it. Siikadeah. Her name was now Siikadeah. When they broke camp the next morning to continue on to the north they left dry circles in the grass where the tipis had been.

  That day they ferried their travois loads across the wide flat surfaces of the Red River in boats made of skins stretched over willow frames, like tubs, wallowing and unstable, boats like bowls that tended to spin in circles when paddled. In places it was so shallow the women waded alongside. The boats were loaded with the women’s possessions and on top of a pile of these rode Lottie and two other children. Lottie threw pecans into the water, laughing and chattering in small phrases of Comanche. Pakumah kept a firm hold of Lottie’s ragged dress and the girl screamed in irritation and Pakumah let her scream. Lottie threw Pakumah’s digging stick into the water and Pakumah only laughed. The men swam the horses over in a pawing, blowing mass. Then they were on the far bank and in Indian Territory.

  THEY CAME UP Deep Red Creek with its vermilion sands, and then they cut to the west and came upon the timbered loops of Blue Buffalo Creek, searching for West Cache Creek, which would lead them into the Wichita Mountains. They had been joined by more and more traveling bands of Comanche and Kiowa until they numbered in the hundreds, walking through the cool November plain of yellow grass. Ahead in the mountains they would find plentiful water and timber for the winter, and elk, and antelope
, and nut trees. They were happy and lighthearted. Susan Durgan’s scalp waved in a terrible, playful way from a man’s shield. There were many other scalps in various colors of hair from nameless dead people now buried or left to the scavengers far to the south from Mexico to Oklahoma.

  The Wichitas began as a distant blue like a bank of clouds. Then they rose higher day by day. This was their winter camping place, these red granite mountains rising up alone in the great plains, foothills of nothing. A place of deities and shadows, sacred to the diminishing Wichita tribe, whose numbers had fallen and fallen and now they lived in one valley in their red-grass huts and grew corn and beans and ate the white man’s food when they could get it. The Comanche and Kiowa had reduced the Wichita to a fearful client people. As they came up West Cache Creek into the mountains Elizabeth saw their beehive grass houses, with thready trails of smoke rising from haystack crowns. There were people there but they scattered so quickly they were like mourning doves surprised at their feeding and they vaulted into the brush and the tangled black trees.

  They traveled up West Cache Creek. This led them to a wide prairie that lifted in elevation mile by mile into the heart of the Wichita mountains. As they went on higher and higher the travelers were surrounded on both sides by rocky peaks. On one mountain a pair of enormous stones stood by themselves staring down at travelers. The descending song of the canyon wren spilled down the granite slopes. Then they came to the forests of post oak and Spanish oak in between the peaks. They came upon a wide stony hole of water and despite the chill the children plunged in like otters.

  This was where they would spend the winter or not, as the spirit moved.