“One of them’s got a Sharps fifty,” Paint said and fired again. They watched anxiously for the powder smoke of the big buffalo gun.
There it came drifting in a solid, glutinous gray bank from the south shore, but whoever fired it would no longer be there. Shining hides of horses in splashy colors faded and shifted behind the screen of sycamore trunks. Britt fired and heard a horse’s brief, impelled scream and shouts in Kiowa. A bullet cracked past his head and smashed into the shingles and a millisecond later the report of the muzzle blast. He fired again and again and reloaded and kept firing. The horses clawed up the sloping red sand of the south bank dragging the wagon behind them like condemned things born to flee all danger bearing heavy loads they could not jettison. Dennis whipped them on while the loose bells rang in a hundred different tones. Ahead of them near the road was the ruins of the place called the Old Stone Ranch House.
“Want me to pull off?” shouted Dennis.
“Yes!” Britt sighted down the Spencer, the barrel wavering, looking for a clear shot. “Paint, do something about those damn bells, they’ll hear us.”
Paint sat up to lever the top off one of the kegs of molasses with a farrier’s file and began to jam the cowbells, the school bells, and all the small copper sheep bells into the molasses, where they sank with dull clicks.
Behind a fallen stone wall they pulled up and vaulted over the sides of the wagon. Before them lay the ruined two-story house with its roof gone. They fell on their knees at the empty windows. Dennis crept low to run his hands over the horses, to look for wounds. Britt began to make a hole in the dried mortar between two stones just to the left of a window frame. He chipped at it with the point of his knife and then found a thin metal rod lying to hand and ran it into the hole and then back and forth until he had a peephole.
Paint sat at his back facing the other direction over the remains of a collapsed wall, among pieces of a cookstove and its rusty pipe. His hands were thick with molasses. He tried to lick it off and wipe his hands on his shirt. His hands were sticking to the gun stock. Bees came, and made a sound like zone zone zone around his head. Winter bees, hungry. There were broken bits of stone jugs and pickle jars lying around. Britt looked down and saw three chessmen, a king and two pawns, lying in the dirt. Also a broken mirror. It lay just as it had been knocked from the wall long ago and its pieces lay slightly apart from each other. He wrapped his right hand in his handkerchief and took up the largest piece and tilted it from behind the safety of the stone wall and saw in it the grassy landscape broken here and there by upthrust layers of red sandstone, a stand of bare cottonwoods near the river and a low and spiky plum thicket. He heard the flat smack of Paint killing bees.
“Hey, hey, you Britt,” called a voice from a long distance. And then after a moment, “You Britt,” the voice said again from a different place altogether. From behind a massed growth of prickly pear whose flat pads were crowned with red fruit.
“Here I am,” Britt called.
“You thief, you cheat, you steal that underwater boy.” This time the voice was closer.
“Too bad,” said Britt. “Come on.”
Paint whispered, Where is he?
Somewhere close. Britt sat utterly still except for the hand that held the mirror and this he tilted one way and then another.
Then Britt said in Spanish, “Ven y muere, pendejo.”
A man’s voice called out to him in reply, “Donde está mi hijito negrito? Ladron.”
Britt laid his rifle barrel on the window frame and fired into the stand of cactus. He fired three times, in spaced shots, moving each shot steadily to the right. Cactus fruit sprayed in bright red explosions. Paint stayed where he was but turned slightly and fired through an empty window to let them know that another rifle was present and in working condition.
After a while Britt heard them beginning to move away. He heard the soft thud of unshod horses and the tearing sound of someone forcing their way through brush. Perhaps Aperian Crow and a band of young Kiowa warriors and the Kiowa-Apache white renegade. Maybe some Comanche had joined them, maybe Tissoyo. Come to take his boy again. His only boy.
They sat until nightfall. It was the dark of the moon. A dry wind swept the sky clean and the starlight was enough to see by and the vast scattering of the constellations burned overhead, random streams of remote blue-white gems. The horses shifted and were restless under their sweaty harness. After a while Britt stepped out from behind the wall, trusting to his own dark face in the dark night, and went ahead at a walk along the dim trail. His night vision came to him easily, his footfalls soft on the stony road. Then he turned and whistled. Paint and Dennis came in the wagon, the horses thirsty and tired. Britt walked a hundred yards ahead of them all the way to Fort Griffin.
Major Pinney at Fort Griffin told him that the burned buggy belonged to Dr. Seagram and that the doctor had been killed and cut up in so many pieces they could not find all of him. Somewhere out on the plains coyotes carried these pieces away, trotting importantly through the grasses like it was a job of work.
THEY PICKED UP flour in barrels and crates of bottled beer and whiskey, skillets and peppermints and tools and ready-made overcoats, to deliver them at Nance’s store in Fort Belknap, a store they could not enter. Each time before they pulled out Britt checked the toolbox to one side of the wagon to see that the big wrenches were there, and the wagon jack, an extra king bolt and carriage bolts of various sizes. He saw that the grease bucket hung behind was full. Paint and Vesey unloaded while Dennis checked off the items and made an X for payment.
Jube rode down the street. The boy had thrown down his slate when he heard Dennis blowing the dented bugle upon their arrival and shot out the door. He rode his black horse on an old dragoon saddle through the searing summer heat and dust. He carried the ancient Spanish spur buckled to his belt in the belief that one day he would find a mate for it.
Jube jumped off and then scrambled up the high back wheel and then into the driver’s well.
Britt stepped down from Cajun. From time to time he rode alongside the wagons, or far out in front, scouting. He tied the big bay to an upright under their small warehouse. Then he climbed into the wagon to help unload.
“What are you doing out of school?” Britt said. “Isn’t this a school day?”
Jube stood in silence. His father had not even greeted him. Then he said, “Yes, sir.”
Then it seemed Britt came to himself and he put his arms around the boy and held him for a moment.
“I want you to stay in school, is all,” he said.
“I hate school.”
“Why?”
“I feel shut up.” Jube twisted inside his tight collar. “There’s too many white people here.” He took his father’s hand. “Did you have to go to school?”
“When I was young we were not allowed,” said Britt. “But I learned anyway. In secret. And here you got your own school right out in the open.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, did I ask you if you wanted to go to school or not?”
“No, sir.”
Britt took off his hat and wiped the tight, short hair of his sweating head and then put it back on. “Where is your mother?”
“At Sergeant Earl’s barbershop. It’s the day they wash all his linen for him. Because he puts the money in the school.”
“I’m glad you know that,” said Britt. “And I guess you consider the work your mother does and I do so you and Cherry and the rest of them can have a damn school. So get back there. Apologize. Sergeant Earl ain’t there for his health.”
Britt walked through the fort, past the parade ground and out the south entrance to the town. His shadow was a deep black intensity in the bald sun. Hackberry trees whose rough leaves were perpetually noisy even in the springtime shaded small houses of picket and frame and in the shade of one particularly large tree was a miniature building painted dark green with white trim and a striped barber pole in front.
Mary stood up a
nd turned to him. Three of her came to their feet in the broad mirrors and they all had an expression of delight. Several other women turned to him as well in greeting and the tiny barbershop seemed a vast hall of moving figures in bright calicoes.
Mary stood on her toes and stretched up to kiss him. He stood with his hat in his hand and said hello to Mrs. Earl and Mrs. Sutton and Miss Thrim. These three glanced at one another with significant glances and stepped significantly on one another’s toes and said they had to get the linens and towels ironed and so they left. The bright white linens were bundled in wads in their arms.
Britt sat down in the barber chair.
“They are hauling themselves out of here to give us time alone,” he said. He glanced into the mirror at Mary where she stood behind him, her hand laid on his shoulder. Mary would not look at herself in a mirror. Had not done so for a long time. “We need some time alone, baby girl.” He reached up to his shoulder and touched her hand. “Mary, say something. Anything.”
Her eyes shone and she lifted her hands and retied the ends of the headcloth. All the mirrors made this gesture seem that of an eight-armed Hindu goddess lifting in some mysterious sign or gesture. The bottles of bay rum and Tiger Balm glittered in the bevels.
“I can’t much,” she said. “The McGuffey blue already I said. I did.”
“Good!” Britt said this in a false, bright tone as if to a child and then heard himself. He closed his eyes for a moment. He took her hand again. He heard the bugle’s stuttering music for pay call and a dim and general roaring emerge from around the stone barracks. It would not be long before some of the men were here for hot water and haircuts and shaves and lotions. “I will sit and you will read it to me,” he said.
“All right,” she said. She stood behind him, very still. Her hand closed on his shoulder and he could feel that it was cold. “Britt, they are shooting at you.”
“No, Mary. No, baby. We are so armed we scare ourselves. They tried once and they won’t try again.” He drew her around to face him. “We need some time alone.”
Mary looked at the floor. “Britt, Britt.” She slowly leaned forward until her head and its white headcloth pressed on his shoulder. “I can’t.”
Over the big mirror facing him was an advertisement for Niagara Star Bitters. He studiously read it. He lifted his hand to the back of her neck. Felt her sweet, moist breath on his shoulder and the fine bones beneath his hand. A breeze washed through the hackberry leaves and then it was still again. “It’s all right,” he said. He longed for his wife and yet she was wounded and damaged and only she could say when those wounds had healed and still he wanted her. She knew it.
In a whisper she said, “There are women some you know. Britt are others than me.”
“Hush.” She stepped back and he stood up out of the barber chair. “No.” He put one hand on her upper arm and with the other hand flicked a small dry leaf from her collar. “Not ever.”
She caught the leaf and crushed it in her hand. A sparrow flew onto the doorstep and spied around itself out of the irregular black stripes that streamed down from its bill as if it had been feasting on roofing tar. Mary pulled off her white headcloth and shook it.
“Bad luck,” she said. “That bird in the house, go, go.”
Britt waited until the sparrow flew away. Then he said, “Mary?”
She lifted her head. “Oh Britt, find another,” she said. She pressed her hands to her eyes.
He took her arm and sat her down in the barber chair. “You saved my children.” He held her upper arms in both hands. “If you had not been there with them they would have died, or they would never have come back to us. I owe you everything.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. He let go of her and stepped back. “You are very beautiful. When I saw you and Cherry in the camp up there walking to me I almost broke down. In front of those men.”
She took hold of the arm of the barber chair. “And I saw you, I saw you.”
“I’ll wait as long as I have to wait.” He did not raise his hands to her again. “Forever if that’s how it is.”
She said nothing but she ran her hand down his shirtsleeve. Then she took his arm with both hands and leaned her head against it.
“Britt.”
He smiled and then stepped on the pedal again and again and the chair rose in jerks into the air. “How far does this thing go up?”
“Stop! Stop!” She began to laugh.
He took hold of the chair arm and spun her around and in all the mirrors Mary’s laughing face and the figured blue print of her dress whirled as if she were a merry-go-round of eight women with lifted hands and flying skirts.
He caught her and stopped the chair. “I’ll wait,” he said. “Hard work takes your mind off things.”
Chapter 27
AND SO HE kept on. Britt asked seventy-five cents a hundredweight and he got it because of the danger of the roads. Sometimes they had orders to carry to Fort Worth where the stagecoaches of the Butterfield route laid over and repaired. For the stagecoaches they brought thoroughbraces and window blinds and new wheels from Waco and then they took on mail and packages for the forts. They loaded an organ for the Methodist church in Palo Pinto and bales of red drapery for Lottie Deno’s establishment in Jacksboro. In that town they rested for two days once when it was raining so hard that the creeks were up and they could not move. Dennis and Paint watched from under their hat brims to see if Britt would go to seek out some other woman, being so long separated from Mary, but he stayed with them under the wagon covers, laid back atop the load, reading a seed catalogue. He licked his thumb and turned the damp pages from rutabagas to Red Chief tomatoes. There were four other freight outfits also marooned there, the men bored and impatient, smoking behind the running curtains of rain that poured from the eaves of the buildings. The streets were channeled with slow-moving lava flows of red mud.
Britt was restless when they had to stay in town for any length of time. He was wary of the white men. It was better on the road, traveling free of any rules and away from ex-Confederates and strange men come into the country from distant places. It was better to travel and sleep under the wagons with no company but their own. The road was like a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche.
Britt and Dennis and Paint stood at the open window of the large frame building where people had gathered to hear Captain Kidd recite the news of the day. The building was used for town meetings and storing wool and voting. It was still misting rain and they kept their hats on.
Captain Kidd was an elderly man who read all the newspapers he could find in Dallas and then he traveled from town to town and told the news both foreign and domestic. The crowd smelled of damp fabrics and tobacco. They were silent and intent.
Captain Kidd sat on a high stool and called out to the crowd that the Franco-Prussian War had begun. That the delicate Frenchmen with their thin mustaches and ancient guns were whipped soundly at Wissembourg by the Germans, who wore no toilet water scents and slept in the rain. Huge blond men grown strong on pork sausages had made mincemeat of the French army. Also the French could not traverse their guns. He said that a canal called Suez had been driven between the land of the Israelites and the valley of the Pharaohs and now the great ships were sailing on salt water to the land of Punt, where there were spices and turquoises and exotic diseases.
“Are the pharaohs still there?” whispered Paint.
Dennis lifted his thin shoulders. “I don’t know.”
A white man in the doorway signed to them to come in. “You boys better hear this,” he said. “Shem, Ham, and Japeth are all a-sailing down the Suez Canal.”
The three black men entered cautiously and stood against the back wall with their hats in their hands, looking at no one.
Captain Kidd had a white chin beard and a five-dollar hat. He sat in a shaft of faint rainy light pouring through the window, through the gaps in the boards o
f the wall. Cascades of water spanged on the roof. The tall stool made him seem an illuminated figure in a waxworks. Beside him on the floor his pile of newspapers, the New York Herald, the New York Times, the Chicago Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the London Daily News, the Cincinnati Times, and the Boston Morning Journal. All of them of varying dates and full of maps, engraved illustrations, and advertisements.
“And now an amendment has been got up between the several states,” said Captain Kidd. He stared out over the men and the women with their pancake hats, their bonnets, as if in a trance. He seemed to be receiving messages from another world. “It is the Fifteenth Amendment to our glorious Constitution which Constitution was written under threat of arrest and execution by our forefathers who signed their names and their honor and their sacred fortunes. This Fifteenth Amendment allows the vote to all men qualified to vote without regard to race or color or previous condition of servitude. That means colored gentlemen. That means the sons of Ham. And now a report from the joining of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads where Progress has lifted the locomotives on Her Mighty Wings to traverse the land of the savages despite their murders of survey crews and the small Chinese people toiling and toiling with the laying of the ties and so on.”
Captain Kidd continued straight on with fact after fact and reports one after the other as if he had been wound up and set to working despite murmurs or cheers or boos or hissing from the crowd. Dennis and Paint and Britt slipped out and went to their wagons. Heavy wagon sheets waxed and waterproofed were tied over the loads, and other sheets laid over the horses where they stood in a faint aura of steam from their warm bodies as water ran off the sheet hems.
“Let’s try the crossing at Keechi Creek,” said Britt. “It might be down.” He stroked the wet necks of the leaders, checked the trace chains and the tongue hounds. The wood of the wagons and all their complex parts had swollen with the rains and so were tight and secure. The sides of the wagons and the horse’s rain sheets were dotted with mud. Men went past in flapping slickers with rain running from their hat brims.
The Color of Lightning Page 26