The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  “Excellent!” Elijah Earl’s severe, lengthy face brightened. “She can certainly help teach.”

  Paint stood behind Britt and waved his hands at Sergeant Earl and shook his head. No, no. Earl refused to look at him.

  “I’m not sure she could,” said Britt.

  “And why not?”

  Paint shook his head with his eyes squinched shut. The sergeant ignored him.

  “She’s had a head injury. She was taken captive by the Comanche and took a hard blow to the side of her head.” Britt shifted his weight to one foot and made a small gesture with his hand. “She’s starting to piece words together out of the Bible.”

  “Well, good God, man,” said Earl.

  There was a long silence. The white officer called in a quiet and diffident voice for another glass of whiskey. Dutch Nance brought it out. Britt knew he and the sergeant were sitting outside because black people were not allowed inside Nance’s store. Life on the road was going to be very good.

  “Let her come anyway,” said Earl. “Let her come and see if she can teach the simplest things. That would perhaps help her regain her ability. Don’t you think?”

  Britt said, “That’s possible.” He turned and looked out onto the dirt street. For a moment he asked himself where it would be better. Cities of the North, with their sections for blacks only. The South in ruins and seething with bitter ex-Confederates and confused and rootless freedmen. Unknown places with unknown rules, and all in a perilous state of flux.

  Jube came around from behind the store with a handful of peppermints. He offered them to the grown men as a matter of good manners, but the men all refused politely except for the white officer, who took one and cracked it between his teeth.

  “I’ll ask her. I don’t know if I would like her and the children in town, here. At the fort.”

  The white officer rested his head on one hand and said, “Susan, this is a hellhole. This fort is a hellhole.” He lifted his wobbling head. “If any of these crackers shoot one of my black troopers there is a certain question of jurisdiction. Of juries. Of steaming lawyers quoting the black laws of days of yore.” He crunched the peppermint and swallowed a drink of his whiskey.

  “I understand,” said Sergeant Earl. “But they must learn to read and write.” He laid his hand on Jube’s shoulder.

  “When are you going to have this school?”

  Earl gestured toward the immense stone warehouse where men were ripping up shingles and throwing them out into the air where they sailed like leather-winged bats and then fell onto a growing heap. Seven years of neglect, and the roof leaked like a sieve.

  “Two days a week is all I can get off from my duties. Do bring them in.”

  Britt nodded and absentmindedly ran his hand over Jube’s head. “Where could she and the children stay?”

  “You mean, where safe, where out of the way of drunks,” said Earl. “And others.”

  “Yes.”

  Earl thought for a moment. “She could probably stay with old man Sutton, a carpenter here. He has a wife and his four children are coming to the school. He is a good, sober man.”

  “All right.”

  And so it was decided.

  Britt turned to go with one hand on Paint’s shoulder and a gesture to his son. A white man in cattleman’s boots and a broad hat came under the veranda roof of Nance’s store and strode toward Elijah Earl.

  “Get out of the way, nigger.”

  The white officer looked up with his round doorknob eyes. He said, “That’s sergeant nigger to you, cracker.”

  The man said, “All right then. Get out of my way, sergeant nigger.”

  Elijah Earl had not moved, nor had Britt and Paint.

  “Don’t mess with me,” said the white officer. “That’s my sergeant.” His head wavered. “Get used to it.”

  The man stood without speaking or moving for a moment. He had a tanned and simple face and he was young and might yet learn to mend his manners. Britt and Paint and Earl had all turned to face him, and Jube stood beside his father with his handful of candies. Dutch Nance leaned against the doorframe of his dirt-floored store with his head lifted and watched carefully.

  Jube looked all around without turning his head to see who had a weapon. If anything happened he would run inside the store no matter what old man Nance said. Nance had a shotgun on the floor behind the grain bin, and Jube wondered if it were loaded or not. If he could get his hands on it. If anything happened.

  The black soldier said, “My name is Elijah Earl. Sergeant Elijah Earl.”

  “Get ushed to it,” said the major. “I mean, used to it.”

  The cattleman moved his jaw to one side and then closed his eyes and opened them again.

  “What kind of a world have we come to,” he said. “What a world.” He shifted from right to left on his knee-high boots and their undecorated leather. “All right then. Would you let me by, Sergeant Earl?”

  “Happy to.” Earl and Britt and Paint all stood to one side. The man passed between them into the dark of the store.

  Chapter 24

  THE LEAN AND resilient young men of the Kiowa and the Comanche had trained relentlessly as warriors from the time they were very young. They were graceful beyond description, and their speech and symbolism and dreams were of war, ardent soldiers in an anarchic, leaderless army. The Kiowa-Apache had developed a form of speech used only during raids and conflicts, the backward language. In which all precepts of peace were turned around and all concept of human behavior was reversed. The shout for retreat meant Stand your ground. And through this fearful country and this state of undeclared war Britt was determined to drive his freight wagons.

  Britt and Dennis made most of the new harness themselves. Britt bought the metal parts in Weatherford on a trip for flour in borrowed harness, and then Dennis Cureton sat with him at the little ranch on Elm Creek and cut leather to Britt’s direction. Dennis’s long, thin fingers rambled over the cowhide with chalk and then cut, following the grain, smoothing the edges. He had a gift for shaping. The horse collars were generously padded and every seam tucked in. The stitches were minuscule and almost invisible. Every buckle was double-stitched to hold against runaways and wear. The back and hip strap and the breeching carefully folded and stitched down. Britt wanted to decorate them with studs and rivets, the blinds and winker stays, the breast straps; but Dennis sat and shook his head. Don’t get too fancy, he said. No showing out. Look what happened to old man Carter. He shot dead, Britt. No showing out.

  Britt Johnson ran his wagons during times of raids and on routes no other freighter would take. He did it because he wanted them to know he was not afraid. That he had got back his wife and children and would not be made to cower around the forts and hide behind the soldiers, the black Ninth Cavalry or the white troops, either one. And the money was very good.

  His drivers and guards were Paint Crawford and Vesey Smith and Dennis Cureton. Britt drove his horses hard. The Fitzgerald bays as wheelers and four others trapped on the plains, mustangs who left bruises on himself and Vesey Smith when they were broken to harness but served very well as leaders, light and agile. Two more heavy horses traded for in Weatherford. That gave him two complete teams of four each with the heavy wheelers next the wagon who took most of the load, and two quick leaders in front, who could shift direction easily and were responsive to the reins. Two extras in case one or two of the other horses were injured or galled or shot. Britt fed them on field corn and broken barley shorts and powdered molasses until they were in good flesh and strong.

  Britt often stood in the driver’s well so the jolting would not affect his vision, where he could take the shocks in his knees. Dennis or Paint or Vesey and sometimes all three of them rode with loaded rifles. He traveled with both wagons when he could get the orders and he got many orders because there were so few who would chance the road at that time. Britt carried replacement uniforms in strapped bales and ammunition and grain on the long and empty roads to Fort
Concho, Fort Griffin, Fort Belknap. They rattled along to Jacksboro and Weatherford, the White Settlement. They carried supplies and tools to Palo Pinto and salt from Graham. They went as far as Fort Worth, where they picked up two barber’s chairs for Sergeant Earl. They were the heaviest things they had ever tried to shift. Four grown men and they could barely lift them.

  “What the hell does he want these things for?” said Paint.

  “Starting a barbershop,” said Dennis and rubbed his long, thin hands together. They hurt from the grip he had taken on the underside of the chair.

  “Ain’t he a busy man,” said Paint. “Full-time army and a school and now a barbershop.”

  “He’s paying for the school with barbering money,” said Britt. “The women volunteered to do his linen.” Britt dipped a cloth in the water bucket and went to wipe down the horse’s eyes.

  Paint climbed up the tailgate and seated himself in a barber chair and gazed about himself at the dusty plank buildings of Fort Worth like royalty on a throne.

  “I am his majesty the king of Appalachicola!” he shouted and threw out both spotted hands. “Bow down to me, you peons! Off with your hats! Off with your heads!”

  “Paint, Paint, Paint,” said Britt and the horses leaned their heads against him as he stroked the cool cloth over their eyes, wiping away the fly dirt and dust and sweat.

  THAT YEAR OF 1867 the Comanche raided down across the Red River and once again struck Elm Creek and killed three young men, all of them nineteen years old. Rice Carleton, Patrick Profitt, Reuben Johnson. One of them was Moses Johnson’s grandson. They are buried in the Profitt graveyard where their bones lie together in the same grave to this day. The Kiowa and Comanche raiders drove off more than a thousand head of cattle. In their battle joy the young men struck one ranch and settlement after another. Britt carried headstones to the Profitt graveyard, and metal tools to rebuild the houses they had burned down. He and Mary and the children stood among the others at the graveside as the words were said and the dirt shoveled in. Old man Moses Johnson stood silent and fragile with strange lines of prophecies from the minor prophets coursing through his head in unrelated fragments but did not trust himself to speak. He was shaking inside his heavy woolens and now he leaned on a cane.

  Britt’s wagons continued to carry their loads among the very small towns and forts of north Texas. They were thinly scattered and open to attack. He did not build a fine house. He let the log cabin stand. It would not do to show out. Look at what happened to old man Carter. And old man Goyens from Nacogdoches, who was half black and who had also married a white woman and became rich and was the subject of lawsuit after lawsuit as white people tried to lawyer him into poverty. At least nobody shot him. The man had died wealthy and in the fullness of his years. Britt hired a survey crew to survey his quarter-section and a lawyer from far away, from the small town of Dallas, to see to it that his deed and his survey were properly registered and witnessed and notarized.

  He and Mary and the children visited the Elm Creek house very seldom. It was too dangerous. But they went there in early April of 1867 after the Medicine Lodge Treaty had been signed up in Kansas, between the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Sioux and the federal government, a document stating firmly that the plains horse tribes would stay north of the Red and that they would abandon their way of life and take up plowing and immobility. Which proved a futile hope. So Britt, with Vesey helping, put two of his mustang leaders to a double shovel plow and laid in fifty acres of corn and Mary planted her garden with quiet, hidden efforts to walk perfectly straight and lay her seeds in straight rows and then they went off and left it to the mercies of the climate.

  Britt carried ammunition to Fort Belknap for the Ninth Cavalry, who were allowed to gallop after the Comanche raiders as far north as the Red. They stopped and watered their horses from the silky oranges and reds of the river. The black Ninth Cavalrymen slapped their hands together in frustration. They wanted a fight. They wanted to prove themselves. Instead they had a boil-up of coffee and ate some biscuits. Then they tightened their cinches on the hated McClellan army saddles and turned around and came back. Britt and Paint and Dennis and Vesey stopped off at Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s to unload bolts of dark green duck and her hair dye and a twelve-gauge shotgun with powder and shot, a carpet, window glass, a crosscut saw, and bar lead. The woman was making a fortress of her big house and the corrals and barns. Men worked on a palisade around the entire headquarters. The air hummed with the noise of saws and the chopping of mattocks into the earth for the footing ditch of the palisade. Elizabeth now employed six men in gathering wild cattle out in the Brazos Valley. She paid them with some bottomless source of money left to her by her first husband, Alex Carter.

  “Britt, bring Mary and the children here, you hear me?” she said. “I’m lonesome here. I don’t have my Susan anymore. Millie died. That’s what them lying sons of bitches said anyhow.” She sat on the veranda where she was making a straw hat. It would have a big purple fabric flower on it. She was not making it for herself but to place on Susan’s grave there at the edge of the creek. Susan had always liked big hats. “When I’m lonesome I’m just damned dangerous.”

  “I might,” said Britt.

  “God knows what I owe Mary. Did all she could for Millie. And I owe you my life.” She stood up in the pile of loose straw and placed her hands on her hips. The yellow-and-pink-checkered dress was long gone. She was now wearing a heliotrope brocade with flounces of black velvet and a stained apron over it that made her seem even broader. She had regained every pound she had lost. No one had ever mentioned capture to her, or the word outraged, and this silence on the matter was what she wanted. “I got something for you. Hold on.” She went into the house and came back out with her dress flouncing around her heavy men’s shoes. “This here belonged to Alex.” She held out a brass spyglass. “So you can see them sorry bastards coming.”

  Britt stepped up under the veranda roof and took it and slid the brass sleeves out to their full length. He put it to his eye and turned it to the workmen. He saw in its circle a man splashing water into his face from a basin and his two-day beard and the rough weave of his shirt and every bright drop running down his cheeks.

  “Jesus,” he said. “It’s powerful.” He collapsed it and put it in his pocket. “Much appreciated. Now I can spy on you,” he said. “I can blackmail you.”

  “I wish,” she said. “I ain’t that lucky. If you run onto a loose man tie him up and deliver him. But not if he’s married. I don’t believe in bigamy. I never did.” She sat down again. “Only twenty-five dollars. I’ll show them goddamned savages.”

  Britt looked down. He lifted a hand to his mouth and coughed. “I’ll bring Mary and the children. Then they can go into Belknap two days a week for the black school.”

  “By God if that woman don’t have a spine. Bashed in the head and ever word she ever knew knocked right out of her brain pan and here she is teaching school.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Britt. The gate of the palisade as yet had no upright logs around it but stood alone like a doorway to nowhere. Dennis and Paint yelled at him. Paint wanted to know if he was going to stand there and talk all day. Dennis added that the world was waiting on them with money in its hand. Vesey Smith in the second wagon lifted his head to the sky and sang a song about Appalacky Town.

  And so they went on in the hammering brutal heat of the sun on the broad open plains, the wagon wheels and axles rumbling down into the valley of the Brazos with its obscuring timber. They skirted Indian Mound Mountain to deliver their load of tools and hay and grain to Fort Concho and then turned around without rest to drive to Weatherford carrying buffalo hides in unfleshed stinking bales. In Weatherford they unloaded the hides and took on barrels of flour and a shipment of eight-day clocks in crates, loads of slaked lime and cement in paper sacks and cedar poles, the Fort Griffin regimental surgeon’s trunk of drugs and medications.

  Britt bought a Smith and Wesson .44 revolver t
hat took ready-made metallic cartridges. For Paint and Dennis and himself he bought the new Spencers out of the surplus firearms market that came about after the war ended. They were .52 caliber and loaded seven shots and also took the new self-contained metallic cartridges and so they no longer had to mess with loose powder and percussion caps. Britt watched the horizon as he drove; the long thin galleries of timber along the Brazos and Elm Creek and the lifts of sandstone rises. He had the wind in his face and the shimmering broad grassy world rolling under his wheels and ahead of him the pointed ears of the Fitzgerald bays nodding in their hard, racketing gallop.

  Chapter 25

  MARY SAT IN the front room and shelled the Indian corn into a white bowl and then separated the kernels according to their color. All the blue-black ones in one place and the red ones in another heap and the yellow ones she poured out of her hand into an ironstone cup. The school needed them for counters. This was how Sergeant Earl taught the scholars arithmetic. The dark ones were tens and the red ones fives and the yellows were one. Mary sat beneath the advertisement for Jaguar Varmint Traps that Elizabeth had framed and fixed to the plastered wall. Mary did not know why Elizabeth treasured this colored lithograph of a snarling, spotted great cat but did not feel she ought to ask.

  Lottie stood in the doorway and watched Mary counting out the kernels. It was a damp December with a low cloud cover. A strong gust of wind shot impelled streams of cold air under the doors and through the spaces around the windows. The bitter air made the girl’s skin pale and so the tattoo in the middle of her forehead stood out like a dense and secretive third eye the color of a blue-black grain of corn. She was seven now, or eight.

  “Lot-tie,” said Mary. “How old years are you now don’t you?”

  Lottie stared at her. “You talk funny.”

  Mary smiled and nodded. “Yup,” she said. “How old?”

  “I am seven,” said Lottie. “Grandma wants me to wear that apron.” Mary kept on separating grains. “So I don’t get my dress dirty.”