The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

BRITT AND MARY slept with the two children between them. They lay in their blankets like parentheses around the two lives in their care, as if the rest of humanity had been destroyed by a volcanic explosion or a flood and only they four were left to start the world again. They slept all day and traveled in the night along the route Britt had come to know in its rivercourses with their long galleries of trees alongside and the stars overhead and the rising sun.

  Mary spoke to the children in sign, and often Cherry and Jube called to one another in Kiowa. Britt rode with Jube on the saddle behind, and Mary and his daughter rode together on the packhorse, whose pack was now light. As they rode, he asked Mary for the descriptions of the men who had laid hands on her. She told him. It took a long time. There had been two of her, one enduring and one looking on. The one looking on was not much moved or disturbed by what was happening to the other. She said she remembered two, one was a man with a sun tattoo on his chin. The other a tall man with a receding chin. They were the only two she could remember.

  When they reached the house on Elm Creek, the dust had sifted in the door, the trumpet vine snarled around the windows and hinges. Britt made up a fire and swept out the house and watched silently as Mary went to sit beside young Jim’s grave, holding her hands over her face. She seemed to have just now remembered all that had happened in the Fitzgerald house.

  Jube and Cherry came to stand beside her with confused looks as they carefully read the words on the headboard and came up against the fact that the gates of life had closed behind their older brother with a final shutting and all that remained was his name and brief, fissured images of him in some other life. They seemed to have been in a dream for all these past eight months or perhaps to have become some other persons who had to be reminded that they had former selves who lived on Elm Creek in a house with a roof, that they had worn hats on their heads and shoes with heels. That they had cooked in a kettle in a fireplace and had windows to look out of. That they must now come back and inhabit those selves.

  Britt worked to prepare his provisions and equipment for the trip north to search for Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her granddaughter Lottie. Jube sat watching. He had almost become a warrior. He had been on the war road to becoming a fighting man. He refused to carry water for his mother. He sat against the hard walls of their house; walls that were fixed and immovable. There were no people now. Only them. Mother, father, his sister and himself, all alone.

  “Do what I tell you,” said Britt. “Your mother needs the water.”

  “That’s women’s work,” said Jube. He leaned back against the house wall with his hands in his pockets.

  “Not here it ain’t,” said Britt. “Not on Elm Creek.”

  “It’s not right,” said Jube.

  “Move,” said Britt. “You are going with me when I go for Mrs. Fitzgerald.”

  Jube looked up, alarmed. “They’ll see me.”

  “Yes, they will,” said Britt. “I want them to see you. I want them to see I got my own back. You’ll ride beside me and carry a rifle if I can get one for you.”

  Jube stared at his father out of his round eyes, and suddenly his lips were dry. He stood up and took off his hat and beat the dust from it to cover the shaking in his hands.

  “That is man’s work,” said Britt. He smiled. “Get the damn water.”

  Britt sat with Mary at night in front of the tall fireplace. He put the Bible in her hands and opened it to her favorite passages. She stared at the letters and put her finger on a line and followed it and then closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “Yes, you can,” said Britt.

  “I was dekan,” she whispered. “Dna you cloth-ed em.”

  “Good!” cried Britt. He turned to the children. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jube. He was subdued now and lived with an hourly, unnerving fear of having to ride back north, among the Comanche and perhaps the Kiowa again after he had stolen himself and the black horse. All he could think about was the rifle his father would get for him. If he had the rifle and if anything happened, he could defend himself.

  Cherry was twisting her wavy hair into ringlets and tying them with pieces of ribbon. She smiled a bright, encouraging smile.

  “Oh, Mama, that’s good. Eeshona-ta, eeshona.”

  “Stop it,” said Britt. He leaned forward and placed his big hand on the Bible. They had all gone with the Johnson family to the Episcopal church in Kentucky and it was all Britt knew or cared to know about church matters but he did not want that language spoken in his house. Especially not in front of an open Bible. It seemed wrong, unholy.

  “Stop what?” Cherry raised innocent and startled brown eyes to her father.

  “I won’t hear that language in my house.”

  “Yes, Papa.” She stuck out her lower lip and twisted sideways in her chair and pulled her dress down over her knees. “I guess.”

  Britt lowered his head. He took up the poker and jammed it at the coals. Ribbons of flame jumped upward and wavered into long tatters. They were all different. It chilled him. He had brought back a family of changelings.

  THE SPRING NIGHT air poured in through the window. Britt lay on his side facing Mary and watched her eyes shift in random movements beneath her closed lids. She was more frail than she had ever been; now her thin arms lay outside the coverlet and her fingers opened and closed. No, she said. No. He raised himself on one elbow and rested his head on his hand. With his other hand he reached out and tucked the fretted and disordered hair away from her face.

  She opened her eyes and stared for a moment at the boards of the loft above them and then turned to him. He lay back and pulled her onto his chest and held her. He patted her back in a slow rhythm.

  “You were having a bad dream,” he said. “Mary?”

  She sat up and regarded him. Her eyes were dulled with sleep.

  “What was it about, Britt?”

  How would I know? But he didn’t say it. Then he realized she had spoken a complete sentence clear as a bell.

  He pressed her down on his chest again and stroked her hair. He would invent a dream for her. He would make one up.

  It was about rain. You were dreaming about rain. The sound it makes running off the roof. You were dreaming about the Ohio River running out of the eastern mountains and how wide and brown it is. The dream was about flocks of cranes turning all together in the darkening world and how their wings catch the light which is the light of your heart. You were dreaming about who you were before it all happened. Who you will be again. You were dreaming about a girl named Mary sitting in the gin shed in Kentucky while the rain spouted off the roof in streams, where I first saw you. That was the first time I ever saw you. The first time I ever dreamed we could be free and that freedom with you was worth anything, anything. Listen to me. The dream was about rain, water, blood, this terrible baptism. Listen.

  Chapter 20

  THE HEADMEN SAT on the floor of the warehouse and behind them women and children. Only a few headmen had come in. They were treating it like a council. The women were there to carry away the rations.

  The wind made a low tuneless howling at the small windows. They were willing to sit and speak with Samuel but not for long. Grierson had sent a platoon of twenty men with a first lieutenant and his sergeant to barbecue a fat steer and make coffee in washpots. Troopers were dragging the bones and the head of the steer toward the disposal ditch behind the stables. Two others were picking up cups and plates to drop them in a soap kettle of boiling water. The lieutenant glanced occasionally toward the warehouse. The soldiers were not armed.

  Women and children packed in behind the headmen and they turned to look up at the goods and foodstuffs on the shelves. Children crawled over the women to come to grips with one another. Two young boys fought over a brass button and their mothers silently pried them apart with strong hands. A two-year-old girl climbed up her mother’s back to stare at the men in the council circle, pulling the woman’s hair until the woman swun
g the child around to her lap. A fawn-colored dog crept in at the door and lay beside a woman with several children, beating its tail on the floor.

  A pipe was handed around. Samuel took it and raised it upward, and then pointed the stem toward the earth. He put it to his lips but did not smoke and passed it on. The next man took it and made the careful gestures and then drew on it and handed it to his left. The smoke rose until it came to a layer of cooler air somewhere near the rafters and then flattened out. Samuel sat in his charcoal-colored suit with his hat beside him. Squares of light from the windows gilded the splintered planks of the floor and set the air alight with a mist of windy dust. The Kiowa and Comanche seemed Oriental to Samuel, with their still faces and pitch-black hair, beardless and agile with eyes like dark almonds. Though the headmen regarded him without expression, he knew they were impatient. They smelled of woodsmoke and sweated horses and gunpowder. The Kiowa moccasins were splashed with bright beading in floral designs, but the designs on Comanche moccasins were geometric and severe. They were all as weathered as sailors and not one of them wore a hat, as if they would defy the sun itself and the raw carnivorous wind.

  Esa Havey gestured toward Onofrio.

  We are waiting to hear what he has to say and then the women want the coffee and sugar. Also some calico.

  Samuel turned to Onofrio. “Would you translate that?”

  Onofrio squinted and nodded his narrow face. “They are happy to hear what you have to say.”

  “Very well.” Samuel placed his hands on his knees. “Say that I am glad to see them come here, but Colonel Grierson says the band called Quahada has not come in.”

  Onofrio Santa Cruz moved his hand in a diffident gesture around the circle and repeated what Samuel had said, in Comanche. Behind the headmen sat a young man translating rapidly from Comanche to Kiowa for both the three Kiowa leaders and the Kiowa women in the group behind. He wore a soldier’s blue coat and a bandolier and two silver earrings in his ears that had been made from the bowls of silver spoons. Stripes of blue-black paint ran from his mouth to his ears.

  That is Quanah’s band. They never come in, said Satank. They never will. They detest white people. White people have diseases.

  Onofrio said, “This man is Satank. He is a Koitsenko of the Kiowa. Great warrior society. He says they are still hunting. The buffalo have been scarce. Few.”

  Samuel nodded. “But then where will the Quahada get coffee and sugar and ammunition? Their saddles and blankets?”

  Onofrio leaned forward. He understands they trade stolen horses to the Comancheros for the things they want. The colonel told him this. He is not a newborn.

  Eaten Alive made an irritated, quick motion with his hand. His long hair was wrapped in otter, and a beautiful plaque of multicolored quillwork was sewn to the breast of his buckskin shirt. It had a glassy and intricate glinting surface.

  What business is it of his what the Quahada do? Peta Nocona does not go to Washantun and tell their headmen to come here, go there. These things are given us because we signed a treaty. Or some Nemernah did, and these are gifts. We can come and claim them or not.

  The Kiowa named First Wolf took up the long-stemmed pipe and knocked the dottle out onto a smooth stone in his hand. He then packed it again with tobacco and lit it. He lifted the stem upward and then bent it toward the earth and then drew on it and sent it off on a second round.

  Onofrio paused and then said, “He says they are owed these things because of the treaty and they can come and claim them or stay away, either one.”

  Samuel held up one hand. “Yes, but the treaty they signed gave them a certain amount of land to be theirs. A very large tract of land. From the Wichita Mountains to the Red River. They are not to go south of the Red River. In exchange for this promise they are to receive the annuity goods every year and other supplies every two weeks. There are plenty of buffalo and water and wood within the bounds of the land given to them.”

  Onofrio sighed and cleared his throat and repeated it. There was a low, incessant murmuring as the young warrior translated from Comanche to Kiowa.

  Satank said, No one gives land to anyone else. This was not Washantun’s to give. It is ours. I never touched the pen to any paper where that was written. We told that to Big Pants who was here before him and we will tell him as well.

  Eaten Alive snorted out smoke. We came down long ago from very far to the north, from the Snake River, a very long time ago. We drove out the Wichita and the Osage and the Lipan Apache and the Tonkawa from Texas. And so it is ours. I know the country, every canyon and cave from the Canadian River to the Rio Grande. I could travel that country in the dark. I have done so. I could tell you every spring of water from here and on beyond the Mexican towns. Why should we stay here? Big Pants wanted us to stay here too. Now he is gone. This man will go too, sometime in the future. I am not a man to turn over dirt. He is going to ask us to stay here and turn over dirt.

  Onofrio pressed his fingertips around the brim of his hat. He cleared his throat and squinted at Samuel. “Well, he said they had some battles around here and this is their sacred ground and the Great Spirit gave it to them and so it’s theirs. The Great Spirit meant them to live on it.”

  “Is that all he said?”

  “That’s about it.” Onofrio knew that agents and commissioners and army officers liked to hear references to the Great Spirit.

  Samuel said, “This is good grass country and many people have begun to herd cattle.”

  Esa Havey gestured toward the window and the horizon beyond. The buffalo take care of themselves without herding. You ask us to live inside houses like the Tewa. For more years than I can think, they have always been asking us this.

  Onofrio wiggled his fingers and squinted and again cleared his throat.

  “Well, he said the buffalo don’t need herding.”

  Samuel nodded. There was a long, hostile silence.

  “Very well. Tell them whether they personally signed or not, the treaty is law and they must abide by it. Their chiefs agreed to cease raiding and learn to farm.”

  The headmen listened and Satank said, Now he is going to give us the talk about farming.

  Onofrio writhed on his seat bones and said, I know it.

  Satank drew on the pipe. He’s going to talk about how the Iroquois settled down and started farming and the Cherokees and so on. It will take him a long time.

  Onofrio nodded. Ahuh.

  And how the Wichita farm. If I went up to a Wichita and blew on him he would die of terror. The Cherokee started to farm and look what happened, they ran them out of that country. Now they shit in little houses. They wear hats and eat pumpkins.

  Onofrio had grown nervous in several stages and now he had reached the stage where he was turning his hat around in his hands by the brim. He turned to Samuel. The warehouse smelled of wet fur and dust. The low murmur of Kiowa went on for a moment and then there was laughter from the Kiowa women and headmen.

  “He says they were not meant to stay in one place.” Onofrio had translated for so many of these councils he knew the stock phrases by rote. He could have conducted an entire council alone, doing voices in two languages, by himself.

  Samuel heard the tones in the headmen’s voices. They were clear as telegrams. He held up his hand. “Please consider. The Wichita farm, as do the Iroquois in the country I come from, in the East. As well as the Cherokee. They sleep well at night, they do not worry about food supplies, their women do not mourn their deaths in battle. They sit at night in front of their own fireplaces and read newspapers in their own language. Farming is not easy, but many red men have done it and I will help any way I can. Plowing is a skill, but I am prepared to have land plowed for you.”

  Onofrio closed his eyes briefly and considered. Then he turned to Eaten Alive and said, And so how is your aunt?

  She is all right. It is just her little finger is numb. Eaten Alive wriggled the little finger on his right hand.

  I heard it broke her a
rm, said Onofrio.

  No, nothing broken. I told her not to get near that horse but she paid no attention to me. I am going to shoot him or give him away before he kicks one of the children.

  The young dandy who was translating from Comanche into Kiowa said they were talking about Eaten Alive’s buff-colored horse that kicked his aunt and He wants to give it away. Two men made signs that they would take it. Another said, Shoot it, and another said, Hitch him to one of those plow things.

  Samuel listened to the fragmented sounds of languages breaking up all around him and the laughter. He raised his voice.

  “And also, tell him I could bring some Pueblo people to speak with them about raising crops and how it is done. They have always farmed, they were not made to do so by the white man. As the year goes around it is very beautiful. The green shoots come up and the bud and then the fruit, then the harvest.” Against the blank and polite silence he felt his words falter and his voice weaken and grow thin. “We will hold another council soon, with the Pueblo if they will come and they will talk about how they farm in the dry country. They have much to teach us. To teach me.”

  Onofrio started to translate but Esa Havey said, Who is he talking about, that word Pueblo?

  He means the Tewa.

  Oh, the filthy Tewa. They hide in their little square dwellings like rats. They stink. We kill some of them every year. I took three captives last year, I dragged them out of their square doors. Now they carry my water.

  Samuel did not need this to be translated.

  “And you will no longer go down and raid the Texans. You must stay north of the Red River, you must look for another way to live. This is how it is. This will happen whether you want it or not.” His voice was hard. He knew how to speak in a hard voice.

  Onofrio took a breath and translated. The Kiowa language in its floating tones murmured in the background against Onofrio’s Comanche with its hard and frequent r’s.

  The Kiowa chief Satank said, If you don’t want us to raid in Texas then move Texas to some other place far away so the young men are not tempted. A laugh ran around the agency storehouse.