The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  He had told Mary to go away with the little ones and leave Jim with him, and that was what had happened.

  And so he talked; he asked Jim how the grass would be, for now that Jim was in the otherworld all things were known to him. He told Jim that he would set the old grass afire in two months, as soon as the cold and the random freezes were gone in late March, and then the new green grass would grow up thick as a carpet. Duke and Cajun would have plenty of grazing then, and they would grow fat and strong and then he would leave for the Indian country and he would bring back Mary and little Cherry and Jube and whoever else he could get hold of. He said that the flames might sweep over Jim’s grave but the boy would not mind that.

  Around him the slow lifting prairies of grass like old straw. But when those remains were set afire the grass came back. It came back like the fulfillment of some ancient promise, a treaty made with the world time out of mind. It seemed that the new grass even now was forming and trembling just under the surface of the earth. That it moved in flashing sequences beneath the soil and when it came up in spears his horses would grow strong on it and he would leave this house, the only one he had ever owned.

  In the distance Britt saw a man on horseback coming from the east. A white man. Britt could tell by the way the man carried himself and by the way he rode. His horse was in poor condition. It slogged along, throwing its hooves one by one as if they were as heavy as cannonballs. He had come a far distance and little to feed the horse.

  Britt stood up. He had nothing left but one sack of corn but he would offer it. He walked back to the house against the wind.

  His horses had seen the traveler and came galloping down the wide sloping draw, tossing their heads and calling out to the strange horse. Britt called “Come booooooys! Cope, cope!” and opened the corral gate as if he would feed them, and they dashed in and he shut the gate on them.

  Britt went inside the house and opened the last sack of field corn and poured a bucket full and went back out.

  The man sat on his trembling horse and regarded Britt.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “My name is Britt Johnson.”

  Britt put the bucket on the ground beside the tie rack and the man dismounted and pulled off the bridle. The bit was an army bit, stamped CSA on the button. He rebuckled the bridle around the horse’s neck to hold him because Cajun and Duke were calling out to him from the corral in a storm of noise.

  “Who do you belong to?”

  They watched the ravenous animal crush down on the corn grains.

  Britt said, “Moses Johnson. Ten miles from here.” He said that because it was the least trouble and spared explanations.

  “Why ain’t you there?”

  He looked up at Britt. Britt was taller by nearly a head, and he was gazing out over the creek with his long, perfectly black eyes. Finally he said, “Mr. Johnson and I have an agreement.”

  The man was very thin and when he took off his hat he had a deep scar that circled half of his head on the left side. His eyes were black and his stiff, greasy hair was black and stood out in spikes. His boots were sewn together crudely and the stitches were giving way. His trousers were some indefinite color and were held together with patches upon patches.

  “The war’s over,” he said. “They got Lee boxed up.”

  “Has he surrendered?”

  “Not yet. Won’t be long, though.”

  A slow caution overtook Britt as he stood there and watched the horse eat but he gave no sign and there was no change in his demeanor. He was thinking as to what was the best thing to say and at the same time he wondered if all black people were now free. What was to become of them, especially those in Kentucky where he knew his mother lived still, or had been living when he last had word.

  “We don’t get news out here,” Britt said.

  “How are the Johnsons?”

  “They are all right.”

  “What about the Durgans and the Fitzgeralds? The Hambys?” The man looked up and saw the headboard on the bluff on which was written, Jim Johnson Age 12 Kilt By Indians 1864. He didn’t say anything about the grave but turned and looked intently at Britt. “I am Thornton Hamby’s cousin. I am just come back from Virginia.”

  Britt said, “There was a raid in October. We think they came down across the Red. We were gone to Weatherford, the men. We went for supplies.”

  The man stood silently and his hand tightened on the horse’s mane.

  “They killed my boy there, and Doc Wilson, and Susan Durgan, Joel Meyers and his boy, and some more people there near Fort Murrah. Eleven all told. The Hambys and Pevelers are all right. They took my wife and my two children captive, and Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her two grandbabies. Little girls. They killed Joe Carter on the trail. That was Mrs. Fitzgerald’s boy from her first marriage.”

  Britt thought about saying more but he didn’t; it was more than he had said to another living human being in weeks. The man listened silently. The horse lifted his head from the bucket and looked around for more. Since there was no more he called out to Cajun and Duke. His mouth was wide open and bawling right beside the man’s ear.

  “Hush,” the man said. “This is the loudest horse I ever had in my life.” He unbuckled the bridle from around the horse’s neck and slipped the bit once more into its mouth. “They never got any of the Hambys?”

  “No sir. They are on high ground. They saw them coming. They hid the women and the children in a cave there on the creek and went back to Bragg’s place and held them off for five or six hours. Pete Harmonson was hit and he died here a week ago. Tom Hamby was blinded. Thornton Hamby was home on convalescence. Susan Durgan shot Little Buffalo before they killed her.” Britt gestured. “That’s what old man Peveler said. He looked at the body. He knows them.”

  “Killed him?”

  “Yes sir. Killed him graveyard dead.”

  The man turned and looked up at the sky. His nostrils flared out as he took deep breaths. He absentmindedly patted the horse on the neck and said, “Hush, hush.” He turned back to Britt. “Any word about the women and children?”

  “Not so far.”

  “You know the things they do to white women.”

  A slight pause. “I know.” Britt put his hands into the pockets of his coat and clasped them tightly shut against the bitter words he was about to say but didn’t.

  The man got back on his horse. The thin gelding staggered a little as he stepped up into the stirrup. He had two different stirrups on the saddle; one was steel and the other was made of wood. He was using a piece of carpet as a saddle pad.

  “Have they asked at the agency?”

  “No. Too dangerous to go up there.” Britt paused. “I am going to look for them when the grass is up.”

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?”

  Britt lifted his palms to the air and then once again put his hands in his coat pockets.

  “Well I’ll be damned.” The man looked around the house and barn, the washhouse and pens, saw the brush cleared along the creek. He raised his hand. “Thank you for the feed.”

  “I have a little coffee and some buffalo that’s still good,” said Britt. “If you want to stay to eat.”

  “I better get on.” The man fooled with the reins. “My name is Vance Hamby. I knew Thornton had come home wounded. Other than that we got no word.”

  “No. Never hear anything out here.”

  “And you’re going by yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  Vance Hamby sat silently for a moment and then he touched his hat brim. “Well, take care, Britt.”

  “Yes sir. I will.”

  IN THE MIDDLE of March Britt was visited by Paint Crawford and Dennis Cureton and Vesey Smith. The three were also free men. Paint was free because old man Crawford had died but before he died he had written the paper that set him loose, and Dennis Cureton was free because he had been free back in St. Louis before he ever came out here with the Cureton
family, and Vesey Smith was free because he had the manumission papers from somebody named Smith that had been killed in the Plum Creek raid back in the forties. No one had ever noticed that Smith’s dated signature had been written ten months after his death, but there were so many Smiths around, and so many people killed here and there, that nobody gave it much attention. North Texas was a good place to be a black man; slave or free, they were all expected to carry arms. Every hand was needed to a gun or a plow or a branding iron and there were no records and what with the chaos of the war and incessant guerilla warfare with the Comanche and the Kiowa a person could pretty well do what he liked and he could be whatever he took a mind to as long as he had a strong back and a good aim. Britt walked to meet the men out of the smoke of the grass fires that burned in long, thin lines across his pastures.

  They saw young Jim’s grave and the shambles of a womanless house and Britt’s lonely bed slept in only on one side. Mary’s yellow print dress hanging on a peg. Jube and Cherry’s wooden tops on their spindles to one side of the hearth. Tears came to Vesey Smith’s eyes, but he turned away before Britt saw him.

  They asked about Tom Hamby and how he was and Britt said he was as blind as a posthole. Vesey Smith asked how it had come about that he was blind and not dead because to be blind you have got to be shot in the eye somehow and usually it will go on through to your brain. Britt thought about it for a moment, and then said that when they had all forted up there during the raid, forted up at Bragg’s place, Tom Hamby had stuck his head out the door to grab at a dead Comanche who had fallen against it because he wanted the man’s cartridge box. When he did that, he was hit in both eyes by a load of pebbles. Some Kiowa had run out of buckshot for his shotgun and had loaded it with pebbles and caught him in the eyes and burst his eyeballs.

  They got into a discussion as to whether all the black people were now free or not. Britt sat and listened. They had come out with some homemade wine. Not very much, and it was acid, but it left him with a pleasant glow. They asked him over and over again for his opinion since he was a man very much honored and respected in the small black community of north Texas and in many ways in the white community as well, but Britt was not a talker. All he said was that they should wait until they heard one way or another. Just live your lives and be careful, he said. I think there is going to be trouble but what kind I don’t know. He said he was waiting for the grass, and then he had a job to do, and after that job was done then he would think about it.

  “Hear him,” said Paint. “The man has talked for five whole minutes.”

  “I was born to listen,” said Britt.

  “You going after Mary and the children,” said Paint. He lifted his fingers to his chin. His hand and the left side of his face were turning white in eccentric, random blotches.

  “That’s right,” said Britt.

  “Britt, we want to start up a freighting business,” said Cureton. “We can’t do that if you dead.” Dennis shifted his long knobby bones around on the cowhide stool. He was tall and thin and had a long neck and a face with high cheekbones, a collection of angles.

  “I’m going to bring them home,” said Britt. He tore off a strip of newspaper from a publication called The White Man, from Jacksboro. He rolled a thin cigarette of crisp tobacco leaves, a Mexican custom he had picked up in Nacogdoches. He lit it and smoked and turned up his tin cup of cloudy red wine. It was as sharp and caustic as the mustang grapes from which it had been fermented. “Whew!” He wiped his mouth. “God almighty.”

  “Britt, it might be too late,” said Dennis. “I hate to say them words.” Dennis lifted his long thin fingers to his mouth and then dropped them like spiders on his knees. “If you’ll pardon me.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Well, we want to talk about this freighting business,” said Vesey. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Talk on,” said Britt.

  And so by the light of the fire they conjured up wagons and teams. They predicted entire divisions of the United States Army that would arrive in Texas now that the war was over, when they came to reoccupy the deserted forts. The army would need everything from horseshoes to black pepper and one of these days there would be a railhead at Fort Worth carrying these things. Things that needed to be off-loaded and then transported to Fort Belknap, Fort McKavitt, all the towns that would spring up when the war was over. A man needed to learn how to pack glass panes, trail one wagon behind another, how to waterproof canvas for the wagon sheets.

  Britt nodded. He thought about the great tall wheels of a freight wagon and their intricate shaping. He liked the thought of them rolling forward over the land and the land falling out behind like a glossy, brass-colored substance or a textile woven out of the earth itself. He and Mary and the children with a few luxuries, and more children to come. Money to buy some great draft horses with feathered fetlocks and heavy necks. Mary chattering away in some little schoolhouse where she would delight black children with her stories, her alphabet, her strown and reigneth.

  Vesey said there would be the men coming home, towns going up. That’s the place for a free nigger, is freighting. That’s what the free niggers did in the South, done it for years. White men don’t care if you freight or barber. Now I don’t want to be a barber. I’d cut somebody’s ear off by mistake and they’d lynch me.

  “Don’t make jokes like that,” said Britt.

  Vesey hastily poured him another cup of the bitter wine. And so his three visitors imagined a business; a fleet of freight wagons that they would own themselves and not be held down to a little farm. A little farm on some creek bottom was about all they could get if they could even get that, since they did not know what their status was now. Hard work, busting dirt. How much better it would be to sit on the high seat of a freight wagon traveling under a wide sky and calling out the names of your team. And so Britt listened and said nothing and when the thin moon came up and they were asleep in their blankets in front of the crackling fireplace he walked out and sat down by Jim’s grave. Out of the dark plains to the north came the liquid, collapsing sound of some night bird casting about in the air. The two of them sat for an hour and watched to the north and listened for the sound of horses.

  IN EARLY APRIL the grass came up bright green out of the burned-over pastures and Cajun and Duke walked slowly with their heads down, tearing up great mouthfuls of it. Britt began to stitch his boots together again. He cut away the shredded leather around the seams and pieced them back together and hoped they would hold out. If not he would have to go barefoot. He had his jerk meat drying before a great fire in the yard. He had ten dollars in silver money and with this he would ride to the Johnsons and ask to buy enough field corn to make into hominy. The hard corn and hominy might last him to the Red River and it might not. The rest was ransom money. There was nothing he could do about his coat or his pants. His most valuable possession was Cajun, a dark bay with a white snip on his nose. He was close to sixteen hands and well-built and kept his weight, his black hooves were solid and took the shoe nails easily. There was very little that frightened him. As long as he had Cajun Britt felt he might make it. He would use his big slanky gray horse, Duke, as a packhorse.

  A little after sunrise on the day that he had planned to start, Thornton and Tom Hamby, Moses Johnson, and the Pevelers rode up with a loaded packhorse.

  “Are you going, Britt?” asked Moses.

  “Yes sir,” he said. “The grass is good. It’s time to go.”

  Thornton stepped down and tied the packhorse to Britt’s yard rail. “There’s as much as you can use there,” he said. “Flour, meal, biscuit powder, bacon grease. There’s my .36 Colt. It’s the police model but I put a Navy cylinder in it. Two extra cylinders, loaded. There’s powder and caps and such as that. And my holster.”

  Moses Johnson came and laid a package on the chair in the yard. He laid it down carefully as if it contained secrets or prophesies. He was silent a moment and then regarded Britt. “‘Thus hath the Lord Go
d shewed unto me: and behold a basket of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer fruit.’” His long upper lip worked. “That’s in Amos. Not many people know that.”

  “No they don’t, Moses.” Britt used the man’s first name and it went unremarked.

  “There’s boots and pants and a coat and two shirts. Some jewelry and Mrs. Fitzgerald had about fifteen yards of figured silk so we threw that in too. Whatever interests them.”

  “Well,” said Britt. “Y’all didn’t have to do this.”

  Moses hesitated a moment and then said, “Well, we did too.” He touched his brown beard and drew out the thin ends of it.

  Tom Hamby said, “And there’s dresses and things in there for Mary and Elizabeth should you get them back. If they are alive I don’t reckon they will have much left on in the way of dresses.”

  Britt nodded. There was an acid feeling in his throat. “I packed her yellow one,” he said.

  “We talked about it and if we go this leaves the women and children with no protection,” said old man Peveler. “That’s what happened last time. And if the Federals catch us armed they’ll say we’re in rebellion again and they’ll send us to jail in Austin.”

  “When did that come about?” said Britt.

  “It’s the new rules,” he said. “The Union army come and occupied Texas now, well at least they’re in Austin. And they are laying down some new laws. They don’t want people forming ranger companies.”

  Britt shook his head. “That ain’t going to work,” he said.

  “That’s how it is.”

  Britt wondered if this applied to black men as well but said nothing. “How are people going to hold off when they come raiding?”

  “I don’t know, Britt. They ain’t no arguing with them.” Peveler gestured toward Duke. “Leave that horse with me. Take that pack pony. He’s thrifty and he’ll carry a quarter his own weight. I just shod him.”