The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  Samuel said, “I am the agent here and I am charged with discretionary powers. I want the stolen horses and mules returned. If I hear of more raids there will be no more rations. I mean that.”

  The clutter of languages started up again, startled and rapid. The Kiowa and Comanche women spoke to one another and the children fell silent.

  Eaten Alive said, An agent cannot do this. You talk about the paper that was signed, the agent and Washatun signed it as well.

  “It is being done now.” Samuel stood up.

  I don’t want the mules. You cannot run buffalo on them. Satank stood up as well, an old man but a dangerous one.

  “Then bring them back.” Samuel and the elderly Satank were on their feet, facing one another.

  If the young men feel like it, they might.

  “We will speak again when you have taken thought and considered.”

  We don’t need this. Esa Havey waved his hand toward the goods on the shelves. And if we do we can get it from the Comancheros.

  “I will stop the Comancheros. And their whiskey and arms.”

  You will not. We have traded with them from the time they carried the banner of the king of Spain. Felipe Quinto.

  “I have the power to stop them, and I will. By tomorrow morning I want to see my buggy team here at the agency. Then I will distribute the rations.”

  Samuel turned and walked out of the warehouse.

  SOME TIME IN the dark of night they brought his team in and tied the horses to the white picket fence in front of the agency house. They had placed hats on the horses’ heads. Someone had taken the hats distributed to the Indians, unwanted headgear, had cut holes in them for the ears. The dispirited team stood with hat brims drooping over their forelocks and their great ears turning as if upon hinges.

  More paperwork, another report.

  He wrote slowly with a fraying pen nib in the light of his lamp. He spoke aloud from time to time. “No need to mention the hats,” he said in a low and private voice.

  He walked up and down the agency house and realized he was listening for the sound of galloping horses. He washed in a basin of hot water as quietly as possible so that the noise of his splashing would not cover any sound from outside. He sat at the edge of his bed for a while in his wool long johns, clasping and unclasping his hands, and knew he would not sleep.

  He had imagined himself teaching young men how to harness horses to a plow and then the red earth turning over in shining plates. The young men interested and attentive. A spring rain and the green spears lifting above the rows like the headdresses of little underground spirits bearing as their traveling loads the rich heads of mature wheat. It was difficult to let this go. Very difficult. He said a long and confused prayer and then at last lit the lamp and took his Bible from the mantel.

  Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water: thou preparest them corn, when thou hast so provided for it. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof. Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness. They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little hills rejoice on every side.

  And still he was angry.

  Chapter 21

  BRITT AND HIS son rode north with a white man named Ferguson who came from a forted-up farm on the Brazos River in Palo Pinto County. Ferguson was seeking news of his two daughters who had been taken in January, five months ago. He said the war is done for them other people back east but it is not done for us. He had buried his wife and his aged mother.

  They went on toward the Red River. They passed the Stone Houses on the second night out. Traveling at night and all the next day they came to the gentle bluffs of the Red River. They found the crossing at the gravelly shoal but Britt knew better than to try it, and so he led them downstream until he could see a solid bank on the far side. They rode wet and streaming through the breast-high water, and then onto reaches of white sand and then into the tall bottomland trees. Jube came through the currents riding the black horse, with his rifle held high over his head. He thought, if anything happened he would throw himself into the river and let the horse go. He was convinced that bullets could not strike him if he were under water.

  The man with them slept badly. At night sitting in his blankets in a fireless camp he said he hoped he would have a chance to kill an Indian, he would kill as many as he could for the rest of the time that he was alive. Then he went to sleep, and in the middle of the night he called out in a low, inhuman voice the names of his daughters. It was as if he had left his body and had turned into a ghost and had gone out across the earth to haunt them.

  Within the week they arrived at the Indian Agency. There were some Comanche and Kiowa camped around the agency. Maybe they had come for rations or perhaps they liked to be near the cool water of Cache Creek or some spirit had moved them to erect their tipis for a time near the agency merely to see what the soldiers and the agent would do next. The men watched as Britt rode past the tipis with his son on the black horse beside him. Father and son both looked straight ahead and regarded no one. The word would pass from one person to another. Britt was flushed with a feeling of triumph, of defiance. There was such a thing as Fate and these people were its agents and he had defied them all.

  Ferguson said the agent was a Quaker and that Quakers do not believe in fighting or carrying weapons or that kind of thing.

  “Then why the hell have they sent him to be an agent for the Comanche and the Kiowa?” said Britt. “They should have sent him to the Cherokee.”

  “Got me,” said Ferguson. “It’s the government.”

  The agent seemed a delicate man with a serious way of slightly dropping his head and looking up at them. He wore a suit of heavy woolens and a hat with a great wide brim. Britt watched him carefully for signs and signals as to how he would treat a black man, but there was no hesitation in his manner. He was an easterner by his way of speaking. He looked up at Britt.

  “The slaves are free now,” said Hammond. He glanced from Britt to Ferguson. The white man lifted both hands in the air.

  “Don’t look at me.”

  “I am a free man,” said Britt. “Have been for years.”

  Hammond brightened. “Excellent! A free Negro! In Texas!”

  Britt’s face was still. He said, “Are you?”

  Hammond was silent a moment. “Am I what?”

  “Free.”

  Hammond was silent for a moment. Then he gave Britt a quick nod. “An excellent question. One worthy of pondering.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then Britt stood down from his horse and drew the reins together. Hammond called for someone to take their horses and see to their unsaddling and feed and water and Britt handed over the reins to a boy in a coarse suit of clothes and a flat, billed cap.

  Jube slid down from his black horse. His war booty. He turned to the boy in the suit and said, “You get that saddle off first thing,” he said. “Hear me?”

  The boy lifted his chin and stared, but Jube stepped toward him one step, his black eyes fixed and intent, and the boy backed off. Jube shifted his rifle under his arm.

  Hammond said, “Young man, I would ask you to unload that weapon if you would. We are trying to practice nonviolence here, and just as a small beginning we try to keep weapons unloaded.”

  Britt nodded to his son. Jube lowered his head and shifted his jaw from side to side and then opened the breech and extracted the load. If anything happened he would use the rifle as a club.

  Hammond asked them to come into the agency house. It was chill and impersonal and strictly clean. They passed through the little decorative gate in the white picket fence and then Britt stood in the doorway, tall and bulky in his heavy boots and the revolver he did not unload. He stood with his hat in his hand until he was offered a chair. Ferguson sat with his hands in fists. He was choked with con
tained anger.

  Samuel brought out a ledger and wrote down the names and description of the girls that Ferguson was seeking. His daughters. He asked Ferguson to stay at the agency until he, Samuel, could try for information from the Indians that were camped at Cache Creek. The man stared at him a moment and then nodded and got up and went out.

  Britt said, “Agent Hammond, I am going to look for Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her granddaughter Lottie. I would like a cavalry escort. I know where I’m going.”

  “Very well.” Samuel smiled. “You seem very confident.”

  “I think I can do it.” Britt turned to his son. “Jube, I want you to stay here at the agency while I go on to the Wichitas.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jube was relieved. It was enough that the Kiowa and the Comanche who stayed around the agency would see him. They would talk about it when they went out again, they would unroll this gossip like a many-colored serape. The word would come to Old Man Komah and to Aperian Crow and all the others that he was with his own father again.

  Britt turned to the Indian agent.

  “Mr. Hammond, could my son stay here with you until I come back? He speaks some Kiowa.”

  “Of course.” The agent regarded Jube. “Why does he speak Kiowa?”

  “He was captive eight months.”

  “Really! How did you get him back?”

  Britt lifted one shoulder. “Well, I met a Comanche who helped me.” He put his hand on Jube’s shoulder. “And they had his mother and sister as well. I got them all back.”

  Hammond put one knuckle to his lips and then dropped his hand onto his knee. “That is astonishing.” He reached out and patted Jube on the shoulder. “He is very welcome. I am not, as you pointed out, free to go myself. I will send the men with you as you asked. It will show that you are on agency business.”

  “All right.” Britt sat carefully on the edge of the chair.

  “What do you need?”

  “Whatever they want in trade,” said Britt. “Whatever it is they like.”

  “I will find some supplies, some nice things.”

  Britt put on his hat and touched his son’s shoulder and said good day and without another word walked out the door.

  LOTTIE WORE HER Indian name in a kind of verbal badge blazoned on the spring air. She liked to hear Pakumah use it, calling her to come and eat, come and see something. Elizabeth did not pronounce the name correctly and had no intention of doing so. Sikkydee, Elizabeth said. Sockadee. Sackado. Elizabeth’s knuckles were growing large and swollen from the work but she kept on. She broke up the elk shoulder bones into hoes, the antlers into rakes. She learned to fasten the candelabra of bone to staffs. She cultivated corn in the valley of Cache Creek high in the Wichitas. She and the other women had poured in squash and corn seed early in the year. Seed carefully saved in bags in each woman’s tipi and left against the tipi walls during the winter. For each kind of seed a reverent name. The legends and the origins of the divine personages who belonged to each kind of seed had been lost but the seed names remained; all the more mysterious for being without provenance. The air was now full of oak pollen and Elizabeth sneezed and dug, wiped her nose on her arm and carried water from the pools of Cache Creek to throw on the rows of tasseling corn. She took up her antler rake and ripped out snarling nets of love vine as if they were entrails.

  Pakumah was afraid of Elizabeth and her power to drive people to suicide. Her power of life, her ability to survive and hoard her fury like a treasure, like seeds in a bag that would later bloom out into someone’s death. Her sheer furious life force. Her husband said they ought to kill Elizabeth, then, if she was such trouble, but Pakumah and three other wives cried No! No! because they had become convinced of Elizabeth’s ability to rise up out of water, earth, out of the moonlit nights, to strike at them even from the spirit world. To harry and hate until her victims hung themselves. She would be twice as dangerous if she were dead.

  Elizabeth knew that as long as she kept her bullying ways to the society of women, she was safe. From time to time Elizabeth’s mind was overcome with images of herself driving a knife into Pakumah’s sternum, the resisting bone, the flash of blood. Of shooting somebody, an unspecified Comanche man, with a rifle or pistol. When this happened, she stopped what she was doing for a moment and got hold of herself and then went on slamming the antler into the earth and raking out the tangling wild buckwheat and greenbrier. On a fire nearby the women had taken the ripest of the ears and laid them on a green-stick grill over the coals to roast. They were ears with red and purple and blue-black kernels, Indian corn.

  Elizabeth knew that they had driven off most of her cattle and horses. She saw her own horses now in the Comanche herd as the young men and boys took them to grazing and to water. She wrapped her swollen knuckles in strips of scrap buckskin and turned weeds out of the red earth. She would get it all back. Her anger was like sweet water to her, her plans of revenge a biblical text that she read over to herself every night, and Lottie would become herself again when they got back to Elm Creek and not the Comanche princess she was now. Petted and strung with glass beads. Lottie girl, things are going to change. Above Elizabeth the metallurgical peaks of the Wichitas rose in a blue early-summer sky, their red granite boulders rounded and smooth, studded with juniper and live oak and pine. She could smell the roasting ears. When she returned to her own house she would have her own roasting ears with butter and salt and pepper.

  Several Comanche men came riding up the valley toward them. Elizabeth turned with the rake in her hand to watch them. Their hair looped behind them as they trotted their horses. A feeling of dread crawled up her back with a thousand legs. Something told her to prepare to defend herself against them. That the end might have come. The other women stopped and straightened up with their worn bone hoes glittering. All of them turned to look at Elizabeth.

  Taibo, they said. Soldiers.

  Elizabeth immediately thought of Lottie, and where she might be. If there were to be a fight with the soldiers, would they come and kill her and Lottie.

  One of the men on horseback gestured to Elizabeth and told her to follow. His eyes were a thin hazel color with a fixed look.

  They have come for you. They will decide your price.

  She only understood part of what was said. “Sackado,” she said. “Sikkydoo where?”

  The man’s look of contempt did not change. He gestured for her to come along and then they turned and rode back at a walk. Elizabeth ran after him. Then in a moment, so did Pakumah.

  BRITT SAT DOWN on his heels in front of the fire. He did not look at Major Semple or the soldiers. He regarded only the Comanche across from him and their bright trade blankets and serapes from the Mexican settlements, their earrings and the rosary beads worn as necklaces. When the sentries had brought in word of their coming, the Comanche headmen put on their best ornaments and prepared for a day of bargaining and food, a pleasant amusement.

  In the Wichita Mountains the Comanche had come upon some others who had just arrived from the agency with flour and sugar, baking soda and coffee, and they had traded for these things with ammunition and tobacco from the Comancheros.

  Thus the smell of baking bannocks that turned lightly brown in skillets, the odor of coffee and bacon. Britt sat down on the ground cross-legged and removed his spurs and buckled the straps together through his belt. If there were trouble he did not want to jump to his feet and get caught up in his own spurs. The Comanche men across from him saw him do it and noted it and Britt did not care one way or the other. The soldiers did not sit down but stood behind Britt and the major with their arms grounded. A pipe was brought to mark the meeting as a social occasion. Britt sat in the familiar smells of burning sumac and tobacco leaves, the coffee and woodsmoke. He passed the pipe to his left, holding the bowl in his hand, and the carved face on the bowl looked out from between his fingers.

  Then food came and Britt ate what was given him with good appetite. The major sat beside him and after a mom
ent, seeing that what he had been handed on a wooden tray was not raw liver or intestines or eyes, ate as well.

  “Ah, Brreet, Brreet!”

  Britt looked up. Tissoyo strode across the beaten red earth between the tipis. Tissoyo had a burst of snowy egret feathers on the top of his head like a minor white explosion of down and plumes. His arms jangled with silver bracelets and he wore an enormous, ostentatious rosary around his neck.

  “There you are,” Britt said in Spanish. He smiled. Tissoyo sat down beside Eaten Alive. He settled himself gracefully and dusted his hands. Eaten Alive glanced at him with a faint trace of annoyance and a bannock in one hand.

  “Yes, here I am.” Tissoyo gracefully opened one hand as if to present himself.

  “Did you win your horses back?”

  “They would not put them up, the cowards. The Medicine Hat stallion, they wanted him to make babies. But I won a great deal of other things.” He jangled the silver bracelets. They were wide and beautifully chased. They had crawled up his arm almost to the elbow and Tissoyo shook them down to his wrist. “Now, I will translate.” Tissoyo was then quiet and deferential because most of the Comanche understood at least some Spanish and so Tissoyo was limited in his desire to make remarks, to relay secrets, inside information. “This man is called Horseback, and this one Eaten Alive, and this is Toshana. I don’t know how to say Toshana in Spanish.” Then Tissoyo turned to the headmen and said the names of Major Semple and Britt, and, far away, in a wave of his hand to the south, the name of Hammond, the Indian agent who was called Keeps-All-the-Stuff because he was refusing rations if captives were not brought in. By making these introductions Tissoyo had effectively taken over the meeting.

  The major said, “I would appreciate a translation.”

  “You don’t speak Spanish?” Britt half turned to him.

  “No, I don’t. You know this young Indian here? With the bracelets?”