The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

“Off the wire, of course, up there at the fort. Colonel Grierson subscribes. Stayed last night in the enlisted barracks and now here I am. You don’t say thee and thou.”

  Samuel stood apart for fear of interrupting some inspiration, some moment of creativity, and observed Deaver’s thick-featured face, the spatulate fingertips and his loose collar, the ends of his foulard lying loose on his lapels.

  “No. I was never comfortable with it.”

  “You don’t say.” Deaver reached for another, finer brush in the jar. His eyes were intent on the paper. “How is that?”

  “I’m not sure. We live in the modern world now. Some of the older people still use it.”

  “But you come from a Quaker family.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of Philadelphia.”

  “Near Philadelphia. Yes, an old Quaker family.”

  “An old, rich Quaker family.”

  “Just so.” Samuel stepped forward and bent over the jar and stirred it with a brush. “Your water is dirty.”

  “Yes, yes, a recurrent problem. Dirty water.” Deaver made another swift line and bent over to blow on it several times and then straightened up again and set out a box of colors in round palettes. He took a drink from the tumbler. The colors in the box were primary, rich, they glowed in the candlelight while all around him were the sepia tones of unpainted wood and the dull colors of the woolen clothing on the shelves that the Indians did not want. What they wanted were the sort of brilliant tones that shone out of Mr. Deaver’s box, splashy calicoes and plaids. He lifted his head.

  “Come and look if you like.”

  Samuel walked around and stood behind him. It was a picture of Mato Tope of the Mandan, his elaborate hair, his face paint and the rich tones of his dark skin contrasted strongly with the lime green and dark red of his shawl. Gold shone in his ears.

  “This all means something,” Mr. Deaver said. “You see here this sort of toy knife in his hair. It means he stabbed a Cheyenne chief to death. These small cylinders mean that he has been shot so many times…” Deaver paused. “Ah, seven times.”

  Samuel pressed his lips together. He looked down at the haughty, aristocratic face on the paper.

  “Why?” he said.

  “I don’t know.” Deaver smiled. “I am only the recording angel.” He turned and pushed a stool toward Samuel, who sat down on the cowskin seat.

  “Apparently there are captives among them,” said Samuel.

  “Among who?” Deaver’s hand wavered for a moment over the paper and then he drew a bright yellow stripe, very fine, across the lime green and red shawl. He was making a plaid of it.

  “The Indians of my agency. The Comanche and Kiowa and the others.”

  Deaver nodded. “And how do you come to terms with that? I wonder.”

  Samuel considered.

  “I pity them. The red men. These are desperate measures. When I consider how we have crowded them and dispossessed them from the Atlantic on westward. They have been driven and harried and cheated. Perhaps they feel that by taking captives they will convince us to stop.”

  “Yes, but the Comanche originally came from the north and dispossessed others.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “An Apache told me.” Deaver ate several pieces of the crumbled hardtack. “All you have to do is ask.”

  Samuel was silent a moment, and then he laughed at himself. “I see.”

  Deaver brushed crumbs from his front. “They all take captives. They take captives from other tribes, from the Mexicans, from white people.” He carefully laid aside the portrait of Mato Tope to dry and then turned over to another sheet. It was an unfinished sketch; a scaffold burial and four or five people lifting a wrapped figure onto a framework of poles. “Probably they always have.” Deaver regarded the sketch and with one hand reached out to the jar of rinse water and lifted it to his lips.

  “Stop,” said Samuel. “You are drinking your rinse water.”

  “Again.” Deaver put it down. “Thank you.” He reached for the tumbler and drank and replaced it on the table. He began to firm up the lines of the sketch and then with his little finger he drew a smudge of charcoal inside the outline of a man and this gave the figure substance and a presence as if it actually weighed a certain number of pounds apart from the thin paper, apart from and beyond the lines in which it was constrained. A windy day and all their hair flying, they wept for this beloved now abandoned to the ravens. The ravens then appeared with four light strokes, pendant in the unfinished sky. “Like a chess game, in a way. Taking pawns.”

  Samuel nodded and thudded the joint of his thumb impatiently on his knee.

  “Have you seen any captives?”

  “I think I have. No, no, I am sure of it, now that I consider it. Up in Kansas. I was eating tamales and quail with a headman, or just a man, and a girl with blue eyes went by with a large bone.”

  “Among this agency’s Indians?”

  “Yes. They are elusive, strange creatures.” He waved his brush in the air. “She ran when she saw me. They are like elves. They are not white and they are not Indian either. They seem almost artificial.”

  “What band was it? What was her name?”

  “No idea. The band was some families of the Quahada, I think.”

  “They must be retrieved.” Samuel shifted on the three-legged stool. “They must give them up or I will consider cutting off their rations.” He looked around at the darkened spaces of the warehouse. “You need another candle in here.”

  “Many times they don’t want to be retrieved.”

  “I suppose they are afraid of being killed if they tried to escape.”

  “That. And also, life without clothing may be a marvelous thing.” Deaver smiled and placed clouds beyond the ravens with a thin white wash; vague indications of cumulus. “They become bonded and secured to their captors in some way we don’t understand. Surely it is not the cuisine.”

  “I was never informed of this, the captives, in Philadelphia.”

  “No?” Deaver carried the thin white wash over to a man’s figure and made two white dots on a head of black hair. Thus placing reflections on it and by inference the light of a plains sun.

  “No. It is not a matter of general knowledge.”

  “My goodness, there are stories and published accounts going back to colonial times. Last year the Oatman girl went around lecturing with the Mojave tattoo on her chin. It looked like some big biting thing, as if she had enormous black canines. Artfully done. Willful ignorance, then.” Deaver sat back and shifted a new loose page out of his portfolio. He took up a steel pen, dipped it in a bottle, and began bringing something to life with quick, calligraphic slashes. “We spend our lives in worlds remote from one another. We imagine we all live together on this round earth but we do not.”

  Samuel sighed and bent his head, clasped his hands together between his knees.

  “Colonel Grierson seems to think it is a small matter.”

  “Give him time. You are only just here.”

  “Still.” Samuel stood up and paced a few steps and turned. “Dr. Reed of the Friends’ Indian Committee is determined I should not use force. But I think about it.”

  “Ah, Mr. Hammond. Life changes us.”

  “I wish you would call me Samuel.”

  Deaver gave a brief bow of his head. “And I am James.”

  “And where have you been since I saw you on the train?”

  “I went among the tribes near Omaha, and then to Denver, which was very boring, and then along with an army expedition to Wyoming. War has broken out there with Red Cloud of the Sioux. The army is building forts there in Wyoming along the Bozeman and they gallop out from time to time to do punitive things. I know you don’t approve but they are just the same.”

  “Is that why you came down here?” Samuel sat down again and regarded the pen sketch taking shape beneath Deaver’s hand.

  “It certainly is. Ridgeway Glover, he was an artist for Frank Leslie’s I
llustrated Weekly, just got sent to the happy hunting grounds. They found him a couple of miles from Fort Smith naked and scalped and cut in half longways. And so I decided to move on.” Deaver emptied the tumbler. “Colonel Grierson gave me a bottle of sherry. Won’t you have some?”

  Samuel sat in silence for a few moments. “What? Oh, no, I don’t drink.”

  “Very well. But, and this might interest you, first I went with a rather scholarly military man to the Snake River country in Idaho, that’s just to the west of Wyoming.” His hand was busy over the paper. Samuel knew he enjoyed astonishing him, Samuel Hammond, with stories of his relentless journeys. The danger and the discoveries. While Samuel the Quaker sat in his agency house and fussed with columns of figures. “Captain Charles Bendire, a gentleman, a naturalist, an infantryman. Yes, the Snake River country, which is where they say the Comanches came from. It is a curious thing.”

  “What is?”

  “There are fossils of horses there in the valley of the Snake River. Ancient fossils of horses very like the ones the Indians ride now. There were horse skulls and leg bones falling out of a bluff over the melodious waters of the Snake. At some time in ages past the Comanche must have known them. And then they disappeared.”

  “Really. The horses you mean. The horses disappeared.”

  “Yes. And the Comanche, they say, are the most proficient horsemen in the world. The first of all Indians to take up horseback riding. They found again their long-lost brothers, their darlings, their pets. Very curious. Then back to Denver and then down here. My companion, the reporter, has covered all he wants to cover and has gone back to New York. Especially after poor Ridgeway was brought in all in tatters. Fulsome funeral obsequies, lamenting and so on. But I wanted to come down here. I didn’t want to miss the Comanche.”

  “No, certainly not.”

  Samuel emerged on the paper. His face square and lined and his mouth horizontal.

  “That’s me.”

  “It is indeed.” Deaver took a small brush out of the glass of rinse water and wiped it on his pants leg and then drew it across one of the little palettes and touched in pinkish flesh tones. Another palette; gray eyes.

  “I look rather grim.”

  “You find yourself in a grim situation, Samuel, I think it is an impossible situation.”

  “Keeping the Texans and the Indians apart.”

  “And keeping your Quakers happy back in Philadelphia.”

  Samuel folded his arms. “I will make it clear to these people that farming, or at least keeping cattle, is far superior to the life they are living now. I don’t understand why they prefer war.”

  “It’s beyond me,” said Deaver. “They raid down into Texas, where the Texans are trying to farm. And then they come up here in the winter to the reservation where it is safe.” He took up a cloth and wiped his hands. The cloth was a rainbow of paint smears. “I have often wondered why they didn’t just bring the Texans up here to the reservation and let them farm, eh?”

  “But then there wouldn’t be anybody to raid.”

  “There are always the Mexicans,” said Deaver. He whipped up a dirty foam in the jar and then wiped his brushes and laid them in his paint box. He closed it and flicked the catch. “How many human beings remain in this world, unvanquished and at liberty in plains like these? So few, so few. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

  Samuel stared at the leaping candle flame and then turned in his chair. “Yes,” he said. “We make them ourselves, at great trouble and expense.”

  “I wouldn’t fool with these people too much,” Deaver said. “They are not toys or dolls that one can arrange their thoughts or minds as you wish, simply give them a change of costume. They are grown men and they are lethal.” Deaver took up the portrait of Mato Tope and held it horizontally to the candlelight and squinted down it as if it were a gunsight. He saw that it was dry and held it out to look at it. “A proud man,” he said. “Arrogant, I would say. Handsome.”

  “By reasoning with them, am I treating them as toys?”

  “Your reasoning only goes one way.”

  “Quite true. But still I will reason. They cannot take captives or kill women and children. It is insupportable.”

  Deaver put the portrait away and sat back with his eyes half closed. “They are our great mystery. They are America’s great otherwise. People fall back in the face of an impenetrable mystery and refuse it. Yes, they take captives. Sometimes they kill women and old people. But the settlers are people who shouldn’t be where they are in the first place and they know it and they take their chances.”

  “You are very cavalier about this.”

  “So are they, my friend. The Texans are cavalier as well. Perhaps we can regard this as a tragedy. Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not amenable to reason and we are fixers, aren’t we? We can fix everything.”

  “This is not a matter of abstract argument for me,” Samuel said. “I am the Indian agent.” He put on his hat. “I have to do something.” He started toward the door. “I am in a position of authority for the first time in my life. Come and have supper. There is a room for you.”

  “I thought there would be.” Deaver got up. “I am coming.”

  He blew on the watercolor sketch of Samuel’s face and then folded him in with the mourning Comanche and closed the workbook.

  Chapter 19

  JUBE HAD BEEN sleeping curled up on his left side. The black horse stood over him patiently. The bowstring and reins were tied to his wrist and he lay at the edge of a forest of smooth dead trees whose lead-colored branches bent to the ground in circle after circle like a city of fossils. The naked forest was extensive and far off to the horizon they printed on the sky and the land their repeated black curves. Waves of new grass shimmered throughout this unshaded woods. A dead forest of mesquite that had grown up a century ago after years of rains and then the capricious rain time had evaporated and the trees died.

  The black horse stood with his head down as if it were too heavy to raise. He breathed slowly and his eyes were closed. A horse could not travel for two days without water. Nor could he. The horizon all around was level, the air thin with a high, silting dust in the sky. He remembered the day when he was captured that the men had stopped and burned off cactus needles and fed the flat green pads to the horses. So Jube broke off dead limbs and the dry grass stems among the new green growth, and took his flint and steel and chipped some sparks into the pile. He broke off another limb and with it beat down a patch of prickly pear, picked up the flat pads with two sticks and threw them in the fire. The needles burned with quick flashes.

  The horse ate them, one by one. Jube ate one as well. He sat and looked around himself. He did not know where he was on these broad plains. For the second time in his young life the knowledge that he could die came upon him but it was strangely thrilling, the thought took him in an exciting sort of tremor. The very fear of dying itself was intoxicating. It made him feel as if he had expanded and were large and cunning and adult. He understood there were great issues at stake and he had taken a perilous gamble like a grown man.

  He had to find water. He was not a child that somebody had to find water for him. He had to find it himself or die.

  He walked on, leading the black horse, through the waves of grass toward the southeast. Before the sun went down he made another fire in a dry wash and threw on more cactus pads and fed some to the horse and ate some himself. He lay down with the horse tied to his wrist and the slimy cactus fiber clinging and sticky in his mouth, like glycerin.

  The next day very early he heard thunder toward the east. He sat up and listened. He could now barely walk and so he decided to sit where he was for a while. The black horse tried to graze with its dry mouth, one step at a time. The world grew lighter. Jube sat in the bed of grass where he had slept the night and watched as a heavy layer of rain cloud gathered and moved and strung itself out and gathered again in blue-gray
foam to the east, dragging after it long, bending columns of rain.

  With the increasing light the clouds moved over a series of flat-topped formations that had no tree or brush on them. They were perfectly bare. They were draped in short green grass that lay like velvet over every angle and rise.

  “Those are the Antelope Hills,” he said. He began to walk toward them. He thought he remembered that the Canadian River ran on this side of the Antelopes. If he could keep on walking toward them, he would come upon the river.

  It took him a long time to walk a mile, a mile and a half. Milk-weed plants stood scattered through the stands of Indian Blanket flowers of rich oranges and garnet. It began to rain in fine, thin mists. Jube held his hand out to it and licked his palm and kept walking. The Antelope Hills seemed plush, a paradise of water. Their tops were as flat as if they had been sheared off with a sword. Then Jube came to the white sands and stunted cottonwoods of the upper Canadian River and the Antelopes on the far side of it. He saw the sparkling braided water while the rain fell on him and the horse. They dragged through the fine sand and willows and at last drank together from the shallow clear water. Then he sat up and wiped his mouth and got to his feet and waded the main current. The flat crests of the Antelopes rose above him. He would lie there the day and drink and drink and then go on. When he pissed his urine was dark brown. The next morning the black horse grazed nearby, eating steadily. Jube went to the river and drank again.

  Now he could follow the Canadian southeastward. Somewhere along that stream he would find his father and mother and sister and he would be able to prove that he had not betrayed them, that he loved them even more than the wild life on the plains.

  When he saw them they were walking slowly across a sunlit level of bent grass striped yellow and new green. “Papa,” he said. “Papa!” His father was walking with his hand on his mother’s knee. Cherry’s small dark head bobbed behind her. They drifted defenseless through the morning air, measuring out every slow step toward home.

  “Dad!” he shouted. “Dad!”