The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  “Yes sir. They spoke Spanish.”

  “Who did you live with?”

  “Señor Esteban Arocha.”

  “Well.” Komah then turned to Jube; to his lifted face, his torn, nappy hair with the lice streaming through it, the silver spur trembling in his hands. “And now, what do you want?”

  Jube sat suspended between several choices with held breath and the spur grasped hard to stop his hands’ shaking.

  He said, “Sir, my name is Jube Johnson.”

  “Chon-son, Chon-son,” said Old Man Komah. “Um-hm.”

  “Could you tell me the name of Aperian Crow’s wife? She has little Millie.”

  He nodded.

  “And now she has my sister Cherry.”

  “Yes, you should call her Gonkon.” Old Man Komah took out his tobacco bag and a small book of papers cut from the Dallas Clarion newspaper. The small square of paper had a picture of a woman’s hat and the price: fifty cents. “When you speak to her, call her Gonkon.” Komah rolled a cigarette and lit it and drew on it. “Now get down.”

  Jube dodged between the women on horseback with their loaded travois and the men on horseback and dogs and other children. He came back to his mother where she walked, trudging, one foot in front of the other. She was growing weaker. Her hands swung at her sides as if they were loose weights. That morning they had eaten some of the torn bits of flesh from a new buffalo hide and he did not know what they might get to eat tonight. They were not offered any of the meat from the three buffalo because it had been shared out among all the people in the band and there was none left for the captives. They had been given a throat and a tail.

  “Her name is Gonkon,” Jube said.

  Mary nodded.

  Jube said, “I am going to make some earring things for Nocteawah and get a knife from him.”

  Mary smiled. She reached out to touch his hair. She made a wiping motion. She did not yet know the sign for cut so she made a scissors with her fingers.

  “And you going to cut my hair.”

  Mary nodded again and closed her eyes for a moment. She stood still and wavered and then sank to her knees and fell forward on both hands. Jube cried out and got his hands under her armpits and pulled his mother to a sitting posture. Her hands were dotted with sandburs and she turned them palm up before her face. Jube knocked the burs away and begged his mother to get up and keep on walking. People passed them by on either side among sailing strands of grass and thin valances of dust raised by travois poles. Mary stared ahead at the golden striated levels of the plains that lay at the bottom of the sky, an absorbing pale yellow haze without definition in which there was neither work nor struggle nor hunger nor fear. Then she closed her eyes again and turned her head away from it.

  Then everything settled and fell into place. She got to her feet and stood and swayed for a moment from one foot to another. Jube looked up at her with open lips and horror in his eyes.

  “Mama, please.”

  She grasped the piece of skirt around her neck and nodded and patted his shoulder and walked on. She pressed forward on will-power alone. If she were left behind, the children would stay with her and so endanger themselves and so she must keep up at any cost.

  That night Mary tried to help Gonkon put up her tipi poles. First they laid the three center poles flat on the ground and tied them together near their tips. Then they lifted them upright and walked out the legs to make a tripod. Mary held to one of the poles to steady herself for a moment when Gonkon was not looking. Then they began to lay in the others in the crotch of the tripod one after the other so that when they were all up they made a mounting spiral of pole tips. Then they brought the cover: it had been rolled on a pole like a giant ancient manuscript and they unrolled it foot by foot around the tripod and secured it. Mary’s knees shook. She sat down outside the tipi and folded her hands in her lap. Aperian Crow’s wife came out of her tipi with a graceful step and Mary said, “Gonkon.”

  Jube looked up with a terrified expression. His mother was going to say “Gonkon, Gonkon,” over and over again until Old Man Komah came and hit her. But his mother clamped her lips shut and pressed her hand against them. Gonkon laughed.

  “Mar-ee.” She handed Mary a wooden bowl full of meat and broth and hominy and waved Jube away. When Mary had eaten, Gonkon brought Jube another bowl, which was all she had in her stores. That and no more. Then the two of them collapsed in sleep. Gonkon brought out two worn blankets that had been used as harness pads and threw them over Mary and Jube.

  They took up the trail beside the white sands of the Canadian River, traveling northwest. Before long First Wolf and his scouts came upon a streaming band of buffalo that numbered perhaps three or four hundred. The beasts smelled sweetly of grass and the bulls had grown the long shaking pantaloons and beards of winter. The men ran them down and shot them with bow and arrow, which were more easily handled than the long guns, and the bow and arrow were silent. Men like Aperian Crow and other warriors like Satank and That’s It and Kicking Bird could get off five arrows in the time it took to reload a long rifle. Their arrows were tipped with steel hunting arrowheads, without barbs, long and slim, which could be pulled out easily. The barbed steel arrowheads were for people.

  “Mar-ee.”

  Gonkon handed her a butchering knife and then signed that it was only a loan and Mary signed thank you, or some gesture that meant appreciation. Mary took a great bolus of meat in her hand and cut down through the middle of it and stopped short of halving it by half an inch. Then she spiraled her knife through one half of the chunk of meat until it was a long thin strip, and then the other half, spiraling around and around the inside of each half to the end, and thus it made a ribbon a yard and a half long. This was hung on the scaffolding and then she took up another and another, alongside all the other women, and by nighttime the scaffolding covered an acre of the white sands of the Canadian River valley and fires glowed beneath the thin ribbons of flesh. Quavering flames shone through them as if the meat were red paper. Gonkon saw that Mary was given good pieces of tongue and hump and kidney fat.

  It was a kind of great fair held out in the distant plains, a carnival of buffalo meat, of bones, of people singing in Kiowa of the immense being who had lifted the stone, and of the hole beneath the stone where the buffalo came streaming out in their millions to populate the earth.

  And so they went on into winter and Mary began to hope that she and her children would survive and that they would live to see Britt again and abide once more in their own house down in Young County. She tried to tell Jube that his father would come for them, that his father loved him dearly. Jube nodded and bent to his silver spoons. When Mary could rest she collapsed to the ground and stared out at the endless auburn and biscuit tones, the oxblood-colored earth, the lampblack hues of the leafless trees.

  She had dreams about Kentucky, where she had been born, about the two walnut trees that stood on either side of the well path that led from the back of the house into a countryside rich with water and rain. Old Mrs. Randall speaking to her in admonitory tones out of that white and angled face. Soon the true cold would set in; she and Jube must be allowed into a lodge, or they would not make it through the winter.

  Jube worked hard on his two spoons. He bent off the handles and put them away and begged a nail of Old Man Komah. The freighter had been born to a Mexican father and a Kiowa captive mother and at some time in the past decided to come and live permanently with the Kiowa as their interpreter and storyteller and blacksmith. In the carreta he carried a stack of old newspapers and pieces of leather, buckles, birds’ wings, jars of colored beads, and a toolbox. From this long box he held up a tenpenny nail to Jube as if he were granting him his dearest wish, as if the nail were the keys to the kingdom. Jube took it and thanked him and then ran.

  Jube shaped his fire coals as he thought best and heated both the nail and the dishes of the spoons. He made himself a pair of tongs of green mesquite. The tongs smoked and burned and only last
ed a short while but there was no shortage of mesquite. He drove a hole through the spoons and used a stone to wear down the broken edges where he had broken off the handles. Komah sat and watched him and said nothing. He rolled cigarettes out of square pieces of the Dallas Courier with its fragmentary news of Grant and Lee at each other’s throats in Virginia and its advertisements for hair dye, and smoked silently and offered no advice.

  Jube let the silver cool. He reached into his mother’s carrybag and found the piece of broken bottle. With great care he broke off small points and then more points of green glass.

  Komah nodded and then at last bent forward. He held out his hand for the chips of green glass. Jube gave them to him. Komah pulled a small leather sack out of his back pocket and filled it with sand. Jube sat on his heels in the kindliness of this man’s regard, his interest and care. It was like being someplace warm and out of the wind.

  “Too sharp, ya veas?” he said. “If you put these on an earring it’s going to cut somebody. Now here.” He poured all the glass chips in and shook it, rolled the bag of sand and glass between his hands. “So.”

  Two days later the sharp edges of the green glass were dulled and Jube strung his spoons on agave-fiber thread, and Old Man Komah boiled a glue for him from buffalo hooves. Both of the concave discs glittered with emerald-colored glass chips. Jube had quickly learned Kiowa words, and the most important was ahô, said with a falling tone at the end, which meant Thank you, not to be confused with ahó, said with a rising tone at the end, which meant Kill him.

  Nocteawah was a young man who had been on only one raiding trip into Texas and had never taken any scalps and was somewhat boyish still so that he could not entirely hide his delight in the earrings. Jube saw his eyes widen slightly and then Nocteawah looked away. Jube had learned the Kiowa word for knife, and he said it. He started to hold up one finger and then changed his mind and held up two. Nocteawah would not take the earrings from him by force because everyone could see that Old Man Komah had begun to help Jube. Had boiled up the buffalo hooves for him. Had rolled a cigarette for him and let him smoke it.

  Nocteawah waved his finger back and forth in the Mexican way for No and held up that one finger. “P!ah,” he said. One knife.

  Jube waved his finger back and forth as well and then said, “Yii.” Two.

  Nocteawah looked up into the brilliant yellow cottonwood leaves, held up one finger again; P!ah. Then he made himself busy with a goose wing. He carefully chose two feathers for fletching. Jube put the earrings in his carrybag and stood up. He turned away. Then suddenly he turned around and thrust his arm out straight and held up two fingers and then began to dance around and around his own two fingers. He held them to his face with a puzzled expression as if he did not own them. He grasped them with his other hand and tried to force down one of the fingers but it wouldn’t fold. He spoke for the fingers in a piercing irritated voice in garbled Kiowa: Yii! Yii! Thae hohn noh hon dai! and then fell to wrestling and dancing with his fingers so that Nocteawah laughed and laughed, threw his head back and shouted with laughter and so saved face. He gave Jube two good knives and took the earrings and the next day rode with them sparkling and tossing in his ears. Ahô, ahô.

  Chapter 9

  WITH HER KNIFE Mary could now help Gonkon inside the lodge. She could trim stew meat and snap off the points of porcupine quills. She was better at the heavy work with the skins. Jube set to work with an antelope skull and his own new knife and made his mother two bone combs with very fine teeth. They stayed near the broken red ridges where Punta de Agua Creek came into the Canadian. The ridges bled red sand into the river, ridges edged with brush and stunted cedar. In the valleys, scattered groups of buffalo were still moving south in the autumn cold. The band of Kiowa stayed there for two weeks. The buffalo carcasses seemed to lie in hills and heaps of hills. Mary cut through the heavy hide from neck to vent and along each leg, stripped out the good liver and entrails and kidneys. Getting the head off was like hewing down a small tree. The meat was cut into round pieces that could be spiraled out into jerky. Gonkon told Cherry to tell her mother that someday they might be so hungry they would come back here to boil up the bones and the feet.

  The work was very hard but now Mary had all she wanted to eat and she was stronger and if she was careful she could hide the fact that she sometimes lost her balance and that her vision was blurry. The man who had smashed her head with a rock after he had raped her often passed her by without looking at her. He had a sun tattoo on his chin as if he spoke to this deity daily, and maybe he did. She pretended not to see him. She made him invisible.

  A group of men rode toward them one day and stopped a distance from the encampment. The crier came through the tipis with that jaunty and important way of walking that criers always have and shouted that they were Kiowa-Apache. They came to visit and smoke and after a day or so they and five or six men rode off to the Alibates flint quarries to see what they could find. Everyone was far away from the soldiers and the Indian agent and all the irritation and frustration that came from dealing with those people, and so they would enjoy themselves. Jube stood and watched them ride off. He wanted to go with them very much. To ride in that careless company of young men. Old Man Komah walked past him and then stopped and touched Jube’s shoulder.

  “Someday you can go with them,” he said. “But you have to get your dream first. You don’t have any protection now. You got to get your dream person.”

  Jube stood in the dry grasses as they went past, and saw that every one of them had some invisible phantom riding with him, a transparent being that shone in transient sparkles around their heads, over their scalp locks. A protector and guide. Jube deeply wanted one of those beings to come to him and tell him, I will be with you always.

  AMONG THE KIOWA-APACHE was a young white captive. Jube saw him sitting on his horse among the other warriors when they returned from the Alibates with pieces of flint striped and spotted in many colors like layered candy. The boy was burned brown by the sun but he was somehow pale beneath this and very thin. His body had no fat on it, and his long bones were prominent and his kneecaps were like cylinders. His stomach and abdomen were flat. His fair hair hung in two braids to his waist, and he wore the stiffened bangs of the Kiowa-Apache, and heavy earrings. He spoke their language easily as if he had no other and moved among the young men of that tribe as one of them. They laughed and rode past one another to bang the convex fronts of their shields in a kind of play-fighting. The young white warrior’s shield had a tossing light-brown scalp pendent from its center like a tassel.

  When he slid from his horse into the cold pools of Palo Duro Creek his elongated reflection shimmied in the breeze as if it were his spirit detached from himself, paler and thinner and lost. Among the other young men he seemed the replica of a plains warrior that had somehow been left unfinished or perhaps something not yet begun. He stood stroking the horse’s neck while it drank.

  Jube followed him and sat on an outcrop of red stone. The young man looked up.

  “Hello,” said Jube.

  The young man said something to him in a language he had never heard.

  “Can you understand me?” said Jube.

  The boy said underwater person in Kiowa. He stared at Jube with a wide hostile stare.

  “Where are you from?” said Jube.

  The boy bent down and picked up a handful of rocks and with a quick bend of his wrist shot them at Jube.

  “I no English,” he said. “No.”

  Jube ducked and jumped off the rock and ran backward.

  The young man sat down on the ground then, cross-legged with his parfleche boxes, and drew out a rawhide-wrapped package of steel lance heads. He selected one and turned it over in the sun along the sight of his right eye, and its edge was clean as a razor and shone like a line of fire.

  Jube approached him again as he would a feral animal. He stepped carefully over the crackling shallows of new ice. The boy suddenly sprang to his feet in o
ne motion and slashed at Jube with the lance head. His eyes were like blue glass.

  Underwater boy, he said in Kiowa. Go, go.

  Jube turned and ran a few yards. He turned back again.

  “What is your name?” he said. He said it in English.

  The young man lifted his chin and stared downward at Jube from half-shut lids, his eyes fringed in bleached lashes. “Mat-thiew.” Then he laughed and turned back to the lance heads.

  Jube stood for a moment and then walked back to the village of Kiowa lodges and he was disturbed and he did not know why.

  UNDER MARY’S HANDS the thick winter hides changed from something that had come from a bloody wreck of an animal to soft pliable blankets. In them a person would be safe against all the winter snow and cold. If she worked hard enough she might be allowed to keep one. Mary turned the edge in her fingers and saw that the short hairs of the buffalo were thick and dense, more so than any other animal hide she had ever seen.

  Gonkon had already chosen two hides from seven-month-old cows for Millie and Cherry and worked several hours making them a Kiowa bed, a couch of basketwork. The little girls were like dolls to her. She combed the lice from Cherry’s and Millie’s hair with a porcupine-quill lice comb and with a quick flick of the wrist snapped the lice into the fire where they burned up in sparks. She oiled Cherry’s hair with fat and twisted it into ringlets. Mary and her daughter both had wavy hair. Jube’s hair was a mass of kinks like his father’s.

  Mary walked out into the cold shallows of the Canadian. She went in the late afternoon when the sun was warmest. She made soap from the yucca root and soaped Jube’s hair. Then with her sharpened butcher knife she shaved it off very carefully. “Mama you scalping me,” he said. Mary smacked him lightly on the back of the neck and kept on. They would be more welcome in the lodge if they looked better, she and Jube. These Kiowa were a vain and cleanly people whenever it was possible. They admired good looks and shining hair.