The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  Tissoyo wiped grease out of a small hard box of rawhide and applied it carefully to the Medicine Hat’s nose.

  “He gets sunburned,” he said. “I have to look out for him.” He fussed over the horse, drawing out the red mane between his fingers. “It’s his white nose. His skin is white under the hair and he gets sunburned. Mmm, mmm, mmm.” He blew his breath into the horse’s nostrils.

  “Why are you taking them along?”

  “I don’t want them to get stolen. Somebody would steal them right away if I were not with them.”

  That night Tissoyo drew a map in the dirt. First they would cross flat country northward and travel around the west side of the Wichita Mountains. Then on northwest, to the Washita River, and then on to the Antelope Hills on the Canadian. After the Antelope Hills they would go northwest to the Black Mesa country. Tissoyo gestured to the northwest. In the far north the Great Plains were very wide, but as you came south the plains narrowed and it was not far from the Black Mesa country across to higher mountains. They would be there. If not, somewhere else. In the morning he would ride to camp and get some boys to take the herd and then they would go. Nobody would care. Just so long as he stayed away from Esa Havey and his young wife.

  Chapter 13

  THE TRAIN RATTLED through the flat country in the April rains. The roadbed of the Illinois Central was only a few feet above the level of the Wabash River, and Samuel could see the long low wetland shimmering and speckled with floating islands of trash and the sun shining in a dull haze on the spring earth. Early the next morning they came to the Illinois shore of the Mississippi at East St. Louis. He and other passengers and freight crossed the great river on a wallowing ferry that fought clumsily against the spring floodwater. They tied up to an iron ring as big as a cartwheel on the St. Louis levee and then they went by hansom cab to the clanging railheads at Chouteau Pond. The passengers boarded another train there and continued westward.

  Going through the Ozarks he saw people who had not seen a razor or a bar of soap since the dawn of time. He sat in the dining car and stared out the smoky windows with a book in his hand. The track and roadbed were very bad; the car swayed from one side to the other and Samuel closed his eyes and shut his book.

  The porter staggered to his table. Behind him was a wide amiable-looking man with his hat in his hand. The porter asked Samuel if he would mind another gentleman sharing his table.

  Samuel looked up. The man held a large portfolio under one arm.

  “I am interrupting your reading.” The man turned to the porter. “I will wait in the smoking car.”

  “No, no,” said Samuel.

  The porter bowed over the white napkin on his arm. He said, “This is Mr. James Deaver, he is a correspondent and he is very hungry.”

  “Do please sit down,” said Samuel. “My name is Samuel Hammond.”

  “As he said, I am James Deaver.” The man sat down across from Samuel and glanced at him and then out the window and then back again to the menu in front of him. “Well, you are going west somewhere,” Deaver said. He ran his finger down the menu. “Somewhere exciting and probably dangerous.”

  Smoke erupted in thick and separate puffs at the window. The train jumped again and a man across the aisle with his bowler hat lying upside down beside his fork snatched at his soup bowl. The waiter came down the aisle touching each table for balance. Samuel nodded to him and said he would have the catfish and rice. The man across from him said beefsteak.

  “Yes, I am going to the Indian Agency in southern Oklahoma.”

  “There. I was right.” The whistle howled as they smoked past a road crossing and a small village of frame and log houses. Broad signs in heavy black lettering demanded that people vote for Bellingham For Mayor and crowds of men arguing with one another from wagon seats and on foot barely looked up to see the train rush past. Cinders came in the window. “Which Indians?”

  “I believe they are called Comanche and Kiowa.”

  “Ah!” Mr. Deaver was interested. He smiled and flaunted his napkin in the air to shake it out of its folds. “They are in the news lately. Now that the war is over, editors are looking around for mayhem. And here you are traveling to the middle of it. The very middle.”

  Samuel considered this for a moment and then nodded. “And you?”

  “I work for the New York Herald as well as some Chicago papers. I am to team up with another correspondent in Omaha.” He wagged his fork. “I hope we do not report any news of you, Mr. Hammond.”

  “I would hope not.”

  They sat back as the plates were laid in front of them. The waiter took his napkin and flicked away cinders, making a sound like um um um! and then left them. The train jolted and the waiter sailed along in his erratic walk, undeterred.

  “They have invented a new bureaucracy, I have heard. The Indian Bureau. And they have given the various tribes out to several religious denominations. To pious and deserving people. Am I right? I am usually right.”

  Samuel laughed. “Yes, you are right. I am to be the new agent there. I am of the Society of Friends, and I try to keep my piety in check.”

  “No offense, no offense!”

  “None taken.”

  “And how are you going to manage them?”

  “Oh, I think we want to try some unusual methods in dealing with the Indian people. Honesty. Honoring our treaties with them. We will not use the military. Not on my agency.”

  Deaver nodded and then reached out to seize his water glass before it turned over as they hit a particularly bad stretch of track. They both held to the arms of their chairs and the car tipped to one side and then the other and then finally righted itself.

  “Yes, novel and untried,” said Deaver. He took up his knife and fork. “So they have given the most warlike tribes on the plains into the hands of Quakers. The most warlike and the least known. How interesting life is. How strange.” He ate a large bite of his steak. “How peculiar are the ways of government.”

  “Are they so warlike?” Samuel said.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I am a newspaperman. Actually I am an illustrator but I am in the company of reporters and other illustrators. We love warlike and exciting things. It’s how we make a living, our little mite, such as it is.”

  “And where are you going beyond Omaha?”

  Deaver had a broad face and a wide nose and the sort of build that would become fat on good food, but at the moment his collar was somewhat too big for him. His mustache was short, reddish, and severely trimmed, and so was his hair. The tips of his fingers were spatulate, and there were ink-stains on his forefinger.

  “After Omaha? To Denver. Along with my colleague from the Herald. After the story broke about Chivington’s massacre of the Cheyennes, eastern papers were very interested. Savage doings. Outraged women. You can only hint about it, of course. Then, I think, I will make my way south if I can find a writer to go with me. Down to Indian Territory, same place as yourself. To report on the red men of the southern plains.” He dropped a piece of his steak and expertly stabbed it up again. “Wild times in the wild west.” Deaver wiped his mustache on his napkin and settled back in the racketing chair that trembled with every rail joint that clattered past beneath them. He tapped his fingers on the table. “I think you have a kind heart, Mr. Hammond.”

  “If I have, it is God’s gift,” said Samuel and smiled. He had known an engaging infantry sergeant in Sheridan’s Fifteenth Corps who was an expert in both gossip and theft who somewhat resembled Deaver. Samuel gestured toward the man’s portfolio. “How long have you been an illustrator?”

  “Oh, seven years or so, which is probably a mystical number or something.”

  “You must have worked during the war, I imagine.”

  “I did, I did.”

  He waited but Deaver said nothing more but turned in his chair to lift a hand to the waiter, who was bolting down the aisle with a lidded pot of coffee, taking advantage
of the comparative steadiness of the train to shoot coffee into people’s cups before they hit a bad stretch again.

  “Where?”

  The coffee splashed into the cups, and the waiter swiped at the stains and then hurried on.

  “I was in Tennessee with Grant for the New York World. I missed the battle of Pittsburgh Landing. Some people say it was the battle of Shiloh. And then on with Sherman. And on and on. I suppose your denomination worked with the Sanitary Commission?”

  “They did. I met Mother Bickerdyke, that remarkable woman.”

  “Ah well, so did I! January of ’64. I had switched over to the Chicago Tribune. I was there outside of Chattanooga when she tore down the breastworks for cooking fires. Saved the wounded from freezing entirely. It was a terrible storm.”

  “Yes.” Samuel ate his fish. “Wounded on both sides suffered extremely.”

  “She was a singular woman, Mrs. Bickerdyke. So we know someone in common.”

  “Yes, so we do,” said Samuel. “And then where did you go?”

  “Oh, then where? Yes, I shifted over to Leslie’s, because their reproduction plant is so much better, and stayed with Grant all the way into Virginia and Richmond. Lord, Lord, I am glad it’s over and done.”

  “Yes. We all are.”

  “I thought for a while when Lincoln was assassinated it was going to start up again, or something was. Jeff Davis thrown out a window, Lee drowned in a butt of malmsey.”

  Samuel said, “It seems to me the nation was too weary.”

  “I think you are right.” Mr. Deaver finished his steak. “Far too weary. I was up for three nights running doing sketches of the mourning drapery in St. Louis. I looked into people’s faces. They were crushed. Exhausted. As for me, the black drapery on everything was a great deal of trouble. You have to keep in mind your sketches go to an engraver, which is how they reproduce them on the printed page.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “No, people don’t. They think it’s done with magic lanterns or incantations.”

  It occurred to Samuel that Deaver was a sort of messenger who shifted shapes and locales, traveling from one human tribe to another and introducing incongruous images to each, an outsider who loved being outside. “So an engraver copies your sketches.”

  “On wood, yes. And then they are printed.”

  They turned to the window, to the bewitching flow of the landscape. How poor these people were. Horse harness made up of rope and pieces of carpet for padding. Men walking down the road barefoot with their ankles and pants legs brown with dust. One small town was a ruin of brick shells and standing doorways without walls and all around these doorways and sometimes windows glittering black heaps of burned wood and brick at odd angles.

  “That looks as if it were shelled,” said Samuel. “Are we in Missouri?”

  “Yes, there was quite a lot of fighting around here,” said Deaver.

  “I knew nothing of it.”

  “No. Fighting in the east crowded out all the other news.”

  After a few moments Deaver laid down his knife and fork and drained his water glass. “I must find my berth. Must jot down a few notes.”

  “It was good meeting you.”

  “Indeed! Fortuitous. I may come upon you down in the Indian Territory one of these days.”

  “It would be my pleasure.” Samuel stood up and gave a slight bow.

  “Good luck to you, Mr. Hammond. I wish you well and a safe journey,” Deaver said. “Guard your possessions from the army and the Indians both.”

  SAMUEL HAMMOND ARRIVED at Baxter Springs, a small town in the farthest southeastern corner of Kansas. It lay just west of the Missouri line and just above the Oklahoma border. It had huddled in these rolling hills against the ravages of guerillas and partisan warfare since 1857. The people appeared comatose with the effort and blood expended to no known purpose. The train station was still draped in black in mourning for the death of Lincoln. It had faded to gray. From here he would go by wagon to the Indian Agency in Oklahoma.

  He was to be accompanied to the agency by a cavalry unit from Fort Leavenworth. Loose bands of young Comanche and Kiowa men drifted through the Territories and also road agents and unsurrendered Confederate guerillas. Samuel had reluctantly agreed to the guard.

  He went to see that every basket and box and trunk was properly shifted from the train to the wagons. The spermaceti candles, his winter clothes, the extra boots, crates of dishes, chamber pots, medical supplies and reams of paper and bottles of ink. The people at the train windows watched with faces pressed against the glass like fleshy dots as a soldier heaved up a leather-strapped trunk and dropped it. It fell on its side and broke open. Quires of paper slid out in planes. The soldier gathered them up, dust and all, and said, “Sorry sir, sorry.”

  The soldiers were dressed in worn uniforms that had seen much marching in the East. They were lank and dusty and weary of conflict of any kind. They sat on barrels or the edge of the train station platform with reins in their hands or went into the Baxter Springs General Merchandise for barley candy or tobacco. Their horses splashed their bit shanks in the water troughs.

  At last the convoy of five wagons was lined out under a bland late-April sky. There was a remuda of forty or so horses and a cavalry escort. The officer in charge said they would not likely be attacked; they had twenty mounted and armed men. He said, “They will soon hear about us, they will know where we are every day and every night.”

  Samuel said, “Must we go armed?”

  The captain, a youngish man named Robert Dearing, stared at him for a moment and then said yes. It was best to go armed. The two mounted soldiers on either side of them glanced briefly at each other and then off into the distance with blank stares. The horses leaned into their collars and the wheels flung gravel in sprays and they left Baxter Springs behind.

  The landscape around them gradually drifted into rolling timbered hills that seemed to move in waves as they went past. The wagon smashed from rock to rock. The detachment of soldiers rode along in a column of two. From the scabbards their walnut rifle butts with brass butt-plates shone in the sun. It was spring, and he was far to the south and west of Philadelphia, and the sun was warm.

  That day as they journeyed on beyond Baxter Springs they passed some few cabins and once a settlement of five buildings. Along the road they met a man driving a wagon full of immense bones. The captain stopped as he came toward them and stood up in his stirrups to look into the wagon bed.

  “What have you got there?”

  The man pulled up and said it was a mammoth skeleton broken out of the side of a creek bed bone by bone, and he was taking them to Baxter Springs to telegraph somebody somewhere, if he could figure out who and where, to see if he could not get some money for them. He was smoking a pipe in the figure of a man’s head. The skeleton lay heaped in the wagon bed in a chaotic puzzle. The leg bones were big around as a small tree, the half-skull the size of a steamer trunk. Part of a curved tusk rolled upward and then was broken off. The creature must have stood fifteen feet at the shoulder.

  Samuel walked alongside for a few yards to look at them. The mammoths had stood on these great bones in some age beyond ages. Unaccounted for in Genesis or anywhere else. There were giants in the earth in those days, and here were the white remains.

  The man said he figured there were two worlds long ago and these mammoths came from World Number Two, which was also lived in by werewolves and the Great Black Dog and the sheehies, which his grandmother from county Fermanagh had told him about.

  “This son of a bitch must of been as big as the Capitol dome.” He knocked the dottle from his pipe, which made it look as if the carved man’s head was losing its smoking brains. “What do you figure it ate?”

  Samuel walked alongside and puzzled over it.

  “I don’t know. They must have needed a lot of sustenance.”

  “Well, whatever it ate, it must have eat it all up there in World Number Two and left h
is bones here in World Number One.”

  “That could be.”

  Sometime in the distant past the Indian people had known these immense beasts. Maybe they had hunted them or prayed to them. For the first time he understood that the red men had myths and histories of their own going back to the beginning of human time. That these myths had nothing to do with Europeans. Nothing.

  He wished the man good luck and then wrote down Lewis Morgan’s name and direction in Albany, New York, for him on a scrap of paper. He told the man that Mr. Morgan studied Indians but he might know someone who would be interested in these bones. The man thanked him and carefully folded the paper and tucked it in his vest pocket.

  As they traveled, the timber shrank down to isolated stands and then appeared only alongside the stream beds. At night several soldiers set up his tent, and put up a folding bed and a table and chairs. Beyond the walls of the tent the crude and brutal world rolled broken on every side. He ate hard pilot biscuits and pemmican, which was sticky and thick, and once in a while the company cook brought in a plate of boiled gray vegetables.

  “What is this?” said Samuel. He sat at the folding camp table with his hands each to one side of his plate.

  “Prairie turnips, sir. We dig them out of the ground. They eat like potatoes.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cardwell,” said Samuel. He had carefully learned and remembered most of the officers’ and the cook’s names so he did not have to use their military titles. “Much appreciated.”

  One soldier was disciplined for brawling. The captain had him brought up on charges. His sergeant spoke for him, on his behalf, and said that the argument was caused by his theft of a silver whistle from another soldier but he was a good man and worked hard and was always sober. It did him no good. Samuel walked out on the prairie when they tied him to a wagon wheel and ignored the sounds of the long thin rod slamming into the soldier’s back and his astonished and helpless shouts. That night out of the clear dark air he heard the triumphant tooting of the silver whistle in the hands of its proper owner until the sergeant shouted for silence.