The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  Britt nodded. “I’ll do that. Thank you.”

  Tom Hamby sat on his horse with his hands atop one another on the saddle horn and his blind face turned in their direction.

  “Britt,” he said. “I wish you wouldn’t go. If you go I never expect to see anything of you ever again except your hair.” He stretched out a hand into the unseen world and his eyelids trembled over the caverned sockets. “And I wouldn’t be seeing that I would be a-feeling of it.”

  “Well, I got to, Tom,” said Britt.

  When they left, Britt stood in the yard to see them off and each one rode past him and bent down from his horse to shake Britt’s hand as he went by.

  Chapter 11

  HE STARTED OUT in a spring windstorm and made thirty miles by evening. As he came into the low, even valley of the Brazos, he turned into the shelter of the trees. Tall white-bodied sycamores whipped toward the southeast and their new leaves streamed like sequins into the wind. Lightning forked out of the clouds and in its brief catastrophic flash he saw the tree trunks become incandescent. The heaps of crumbling flood debris and jittering small leaves of the chokecherry lit up as if with pale fire. He unsaddled and sat with Moses Johnson’s good slicker over his head under the drumming rain. It sprang into glassy bars as the lightning flashed again and again. The wind tore at the slicker as he grasped its edges around himself and the horses stood like stoics with their heads down.

  When he woke up the wind had died and he could see stars overhead through the leaves. The Dipper stood at midnight when he re-saddled and laid his hand on the packs and checked all the wet knots and stood into the stirrup and went on.

  He splashed into the Brazos River in a blaze of moon reflections at a ford that he had used before. Beyond this he only knew to go northward toward the Stone Houses and the Red. The trail led him out of the valley of the Brazos into a landscape of new grass colorless as ash under the tearing clouds with a half-moon breaking through and the incessant, sulky noise of draining water. On his left side a low escarpment sat in black shadows thick as a pool of tar. The world smelled of earth and wet grass. The moon washed the landscape with an intense light. The clear plains air made it seem as if it were light that came out of the landscape itself. A great yellow star hung in the northeast and it turned on a sparkling axle over a world of moonlight and grass and a northern horizon drawing away even as he and the horses rode toward it.

  He did not know where the trail led but it went on straightforwardly through the world of winter grasses bent and broken, pierced by spears of new green. Stands of prickly pear cactus were blacked with ominous and suspicious shadows until he rode past, and then ahead appeared yet another. He was cold but he didn’t stop to get out the heavy wool blanket. He rode on with the lead rope in his hand and the packhorse coming after. He came up yet another rise. When he stopped, Cajun lifted his head and pointed his ears. Britt searched back along the trail where they had come. In the remote distance several rising stars spread out as if they had been spilled, and the three stars that shone in a line together lifted up out of the eastern horizon.

  He rode slowly through a broken landscape that seemed clear to the sight but yet it was not. Something large and spotted loped slowly and without concern across the trail a hundred yards in front of him. It paused with its head turned toward the horses and the long tail moved back and forth. It watched them come on for a long time. Then it went on at the same pace.

  The trail wavered faintly on, due north.

  Finally in the midst of a great stony flat with the horizon on all sides only an indistinct and darker line he stopped and patted Cajun on his heavy neck. He was in the war land where no one lived but only traveled through. It was a strange and peculiar place. It was a land designated for murder and captivity and flight. An arena where men came to contend with one another and kill one another. He had to make it through to the other side where they lived and ate and swam in the rivers and slept easily every night.

  This was a world unto itself that lay between the Canadian River and the Rio Grande as if it had been designated on the day that God made it as the place where men would come to fight and kill one another. The Texans had brought their women and their children and their slaves right into the middle of the war land and expected to set up houses and fields and herds and live as if they were in Maryland, and were surprised on moonlit nights like this when Comanche arrows sang through the air in the dark.

  A swarm of stars appeared against the eastern horizon as the moon went on westward. To the north stood two broken rises of caprock. In the dim moonlight it seemed that sand and gravel were draining down their sides from under a crown of dark stone in a stealthy movement, but as he stared at it nothing moved. When he turned away it seemed to start up crawling again.

  There were no house lights anywhere, from one horizon to the other. Only the yucca standing with streaks of moon reflection running down the glossy spiked leaves. Hope was very strong in him, as strong as his two hands, and he turned his mind toward the woman who was waiting for him at the end of all this. He thought of her kind face and it was like conjuring up a lighted window in this heartless landscape, a lighted window in an inhabited and comforting house.

  Then at some time during this long night he saw far ahead of him the minute winking of a fire. The fire appeared and disappeared, flared and then subsided. Britt felt the wind in his face. It was blowing toward him but he could not detect the smell of woodsmoke. Whoever was there, and whatever animals they had with them, could not take up his scent, either.

  He made out to his right what seemed to be a patch of low scrub and went there and found a sturdy stand of brush where he could tie the horses. He fought his way through the cranky limbs to the bole of something big and tied them there. Then he went forward on foot.

  The enormous belt of stars poured across the black meridian. He could see by their light. He walked and watched where he put his feet and then stopped to look at the firelight again. After a while he stood at the edge of a gentle slope and a drainage below him of cracked stone layers in starlit stripes. Along the side a flame burned out of the rock and a star glinted on the surface of a black pool that wallowed in dirty stains down the incline. It burned alone and un-tended.

  Oil. It’s rock oil that has caught afire.

  If it had drawn him to itself then it could draw others. Britt eased himself down on his heels and searched out every jittering shadow. The entire slope was alive with them and they seemed to flow and crawl, surfaces blazed and shone red and then disappeared as the flame sank to a sapphire blue and then rose again. As he sat he could smell sulfur and the reek of oil.

  He got up and paused to listen for a moment and then turned to walk back to his horses. His spurs made a low chinking sound. He then stopped and was confused. All around him the flame threw out long faint bars of moving light and shadow. He did not know where he had left his horses.

  He thought of himself alone and on foot in this immensity. On every side a deeper darkness marked the horizons of the earth and above the night sky alive with stars. He should have counted his steps. He did not want to wait for dawn and be caught afoot wandering in this no-man’s-land. He did not know where his horses were. He started walking again because it was the only thing he knew to do. This time he counted his steps. From time to time his spurs rang on stone. At six foot one he was the tallest object in this dark and limitless world. He had become the center of the universe because the only reference point was his lost self.

  Lord look down and have mercy, he said. Have mercy on my wife and children.

  God now seemed to be a cold force, a great wheeling being, the world’s axletree turning above his head in worlds upon worlds of light.

  He walked on with his ringing spurs and the light damp wind at his back.

  He called in a low voice, Come boys.

  There was no answer. Not even that of his horses loose and walking away or grazing. Britt stood without moving for a long time. He released a
long, nervous breath and began to walk again, south, with the Dipper at his back. He counted a hundred paces. He stopped and then he called again, louder, Come boys! Cope, cope!

  Cajun nickered to his left. An anxious sound. The packhorse called out as well.

  Britt turned toward them and called again and heard their worried voices. In a few moments he was with them. He stroked Cajun between the eyes and laid his hand on the big horse’s solid muscle of chest and shoulder. Then he tightened the cinch by feel and stepped up and they went on north.

  After a long while the moon sank into a straw-colored haze and a great gray battleship of cloud stood in the north, wired with repeated strobes of dry lightning. It had to be near sunrise. Then it would get warmer. Britt was very tired. At the horizon in front of him a thin line showed the faint gray of coming dawn.

  HE CROSSED THE Red River into Indian Territory late the following morning. He rode to the edge of the floodplain. Below him were the bottoms. The tall trees were all on the north side. On the south bank where he sat and watched, the post oak was stiff and short. Their leaves whispered in wet sibilants. He was uneasy and exposed here on the river and at a crossing frequently used.

  Across the broad Red River Valley lines of pelicans slid away to the windward in the blue air. The river itself wound and shifted among white sands. The pelicans were newly arrived on the springtime plains and had a thousand miles yet to go. When Britt rode to the water they rose up reluctantly and sailed away a short distance in orderly rows. Britt searched up and down the bank, looking for a trail where people crossed. He had heard that the quicksand was deeper than a man was tall.

  He came upon a wide track. It was beaten down by the flat round prints of horses that had no shoes. It led through the short trees down to an unlikely-looking place at the river’s edge. He did not like the appearance of a sand and gravel shoal on the far side. It seemed washy and unstable. The trail showed that this was the crossing, but springtime floods could well have changed everything.

  He got off and reset the pack on the packhorse’s back. The pack harness was a good one with a breast collar and a crupper. He tightened these and tucked in the ends of the straps and the knots over the two packs. He was satisfied that it was balanced evenly on both sides and would not pull the horse to one side or the other. He took off his boots and fed a bit of string through the pulls and hung them around his neck. He unloaded the revolver and the Henry and wrapped the loads and the two extra cylinders tightly in the slicker. He put this over one shoulder. He pushed the Henry into the scabbard and wrapped it and the revolver in a piece of ducking. He tied them on top of the pack. Then he hung his holster and belt on the saddle horn.

  Britt spurred Cajun down the short, steep bank and into the water. Cajun had flat hooves like paddles and the big horse plunged in, thrashing through the water with walled eyes and Britt off to one side, clinging to the saddle horn. Cajun went under once and the Red River poured into the horse’s mouth and eyes and he came up snorting. They were all right until they came to the farther bank and its shoal of gravelly sand. Cajun began to sink and flounder. He clawed at the watery gravel and it gave way beneath him and the water clouded with streaming sand. Britt staggered alongside and sank to his knees and then sank even more.

  The horse surged forward. It was as if he were digging out a canal. The whole bank ran with water around and under the gravel and it continued to collapse under them. It was worse than quicksand. Britt sank to his thighs alongside the horse and felt the myriad clickings as the small stones gave way under him and muddy red water filled the holes that Cajun stove in the shoal. Britt forgot about the packhorse. Cajun fought so hard to get clear that he was bucking; his legs and hooves made sucking noises as he charged forward. It nearly broke Britt’s hold but his large hands gripped the saddle horn and held, his veins seeming to lift and burst out of his wrists and arms.

  At last Cajun struck on an underlying layer of stone or hard clay with his front hooves. He bent his back in a high curve and clawed up onto it, still up to his knees in the soupy gravel but his front feet were on some buried hard surface and he charged forward, dragging Britt alongside.

  The packhorse was already across and stood calling to them in a shivering high whinny. He had got across and run up the bank among the trees. Britt came to him, streaming water, and patted his wet neck and then unwrapped the revolver and the rifle. He wiped them carefully and then broke open the barrel of the Henry and blew it out and then snapped it closed again. He ran his hands down Cajun’s legs. He had pulled them both out of that collapsing sink and there he stood unhurt and ready for travel. Britt loosened the cinch for a moment and let both horses rest and then went on. They passed through the belt of tall sycamores and cottonwoods of the north bank, then into brushy bottoms and up onto the plains again.

  As he went on he felt in his back and knees how tired he was, and he rode with his feet out of the stirrups to relieve the pressure on his knees. He saw that the land on the north side of the Red River was a country of long waves of land that sometimes rose to broken ridges. Here and there a dark streak where a few trees grew along a dry watercourse. He rode on with a chill April wind in his face and shivered uncontrollably in his wet clothes, but he did not stop.

  BRITT CAME UPON Tissoyo at noon on the day he crossed the Red. Just beyond the lifting prairie stood the Wichita Mountains, blue and remote, dreamlike. In front of these distant peaks the young man sat on his horse combing his hair, keeping watch over a herd of more than a hundred horses. Britt stopped immediately, pulling back on the packhorse’s rope. The horses were going to call out at any moment.

  Tissoyo drew a quill comb through his hair. He had parted it behind and had thrown each half forward over his right and left shoulders and was combing the right part, the silky black hank in his hand, stroking the comb through over and over and singing. Above his head chill and massive ranges of clouds blossomed upward, tier upon tier, and among them vultures sailed effortlessly.

  Britt had heard that the Comanche and the Kiowa and the Kiowa-Apache possessed some kind of bottomless and efficient magic that carried them through all the years of their wars on the settlements, that kept them ahead of Rangers and cavalry alike, and this magic had to do with their hair and with other people’s hair. He watched for a few moments as the young man tied up the right braid with a thong and then wrapped it in a long shank of otterskin. Before he could dress the other braid the packhorse called out in a wild, long whinny and Cajun called out as well. Britt held both hands out into the air on either side of himself.

  They sat and looked at each other for a long time. The Comanche sat on his horse with one braid done up and the other loose on his breast. He had stopped singing. Britt sat without moving and his hands out to either side. The young man searched the country behind Britt but it was wide open and no concealing trees or brush in sight, only the bending new grass and the horizon and great clouds soaring upward, white as porcelain and crisp at the edges. The black man was alone in all that wide and limitless space.

  Slowly Tissoyo began to wrap his undone hair. When his second braid was wrapped in otter like the other he lifted his hand and made a come-on motion, cupping his hand toward himself.

  Britt rode slowly toward him. The herd of horses grazing on the side of the slight rise lifted their curious heads to Britt’s horses and several called out with their ears pointed. Britt was not sure what to do. There was no telling what he ought to do. Neither man reached for a weapon. The distance between them closed.

  “Unha numuu tekwa eyu?”

  Britt shook his head. He stopped within speaking distance.

  “Habla español?” Britt said.

  “Ah, si, si.” The Indian watched him for a moment. Then he said in Spanish, “Are there others with you?”

  “No one.”

  The young man sat on his buckskin horse and considered. He wore a revolver in a holster and a bandolier over one shoulder, a buckskin shirt and moccasins with leggings.


  “Where are you going?”

  “Here,” said Britt.

  “Hm. Where do you come from?”

  “The Brazos River.” Britt placed both hands on his saddle horn, one on top of the other. “Tell me your name.”

  The young man told him his everyday name, Tissoyo, and said that he was a Comanche, Nemernah. He continued to gaze at Britt and Britt knew the man was trying to place him in some category where armed and mounted black men took up their social space but could not.

  Tissoyo wanted to know if Britt had brought things to trade. Britt said that he was not here to trade, but was looking for things that had been stolen and wished to recover them, and he told Tissoyo his own name as well. Britt.

  “No lead bars? Do you have caps for a Nah-vee Golt?”

  Britt shook his head. “No.”

  “Then you are not a Comanchero. We are waiting for them to come from Santa Fe with ammunition. It’s spring, it’s good grass time and time for people to travel.” He gestured at the land, and then bent forward with one forearm on the saddle horn and inspected Britt closely. “What lost thing are you looking for?”

  “The women and children that were taken on Elm Creek south of here, near Fort Belknap.”

  “Ahhhhh.” Tissoyo nodded. “Brrreet.” He said Britt’s name over and over. Britt sat quietly and brushed away the mosquitoes that had begun to land on his horse’s neck and his own neck. He did not know what sort of customs this man lived with or how he thought inside those customs and traditions and so he proceeded with great caution into an alien landscape of the mind and the mind’s eye.

  “It was the fight where Little Buffalo was killed,” Britt said.

  Tissoyo lifted his eyebrows very high. “So I heard,” he said.

  “They have my wife and two children and they are black like me.”

  Tissoyo lifted his eyebrows once more and once more said, “So I heard.”