“Thank you,” said Britt.
“Yes yes,” said the man.
Britt wiped the dusty mirror off on his shirtsleeves. It had a wooden frame that had been figured and gilded. He put it inside his shirt in the hopes that Mary might look at herself again. To make up for a mirror once thrown and smashed on the floor. That she might look at herself and see once again that she was beautiful and loved and desired. The small foreign man would never know what the mirror meant to Britt, or the extravagant hopes he put in it. The terrible damage he was asking it to undo.
So Britt found himself in possession of broken teapots and a doll that was nearly whole except for a chip off the right side of her head and some torn sheet music as well as the mirror. He took the clinking bag of destroyed gewgaws back to the wagon. They untied Calloway’s team and backed his wagon off. Fire flared in the broad daylight. The wooded hills around Graham were slowly being stripped of timber for the salt boiling.
Britt and Paint nodded to the men and turned to unload the delivery. Britt took the end of the long crate of surveyor’s equipment and began to back away. Paint jumped down to take the other end. The wagon wheel that had thrown its tire was frayed on every felloe, and it would take an hour to reset the tire.
The man Calloway stood and watched.
“You was the one went and got Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her granddaughter from the Indians up there.”
“Yes sir.” Britt staggered backward with his end of the crate. They dropped it at the door of the building. Dust billowed up. He straightened and beat the dust from his hands. “And my wife and my two children.”
“Well, we just got word they went down to Legion Valley, south of here, and murdered three white women and a baby. Five days ago. They took a boy named Dot Babb and a girl, Bianca Babb. They call her Banc.” The man took off his hat and wiped his hair and put the hat back on. He decided not to go into the details of that extravagant butchery, a woman seven months pregnant and left without a head. “Is there any way you could look for them? If you been there twice you can go three times.”
“Maybe,” said Britt.
“I’d make it worth your while.” He beat dust from his hat. “The whole family would.”
“I got work to do,” said Britt. “But I would keep an eye out for them. What do they look like?”
Tears stood out in the man’s eyes. “They’re my niece and nephew.” He paused and cleared his throat. “I will write down their description and names and everything.” He paused. “Can you read and write?”
“Yes,” said Britt.
“All right.” The man felt in his shirt pocket. “Just a minute. I got to borrow something to write with from old man Graham.”
“I’ll ask about them,” said Britt. “If I can.”
Chapter 31
IN THE FALL of 1870 the only children who came to the agency school were Caddo, a tribe that had settled down near the agency in fear of the Comanche, and also they came because their mothers were busy and did not want them underfoot. Two boys and a girl. The children took up their pencils and pretended to draw the letters of the alphabet.
The schoolhouse was a cheerless place. It was so seldom used now that it had become a place where washing was done when it was not in use as a classroom and the teacher’s desk had to be cleared and the washtubs and pans and buckets of grainy soap squares put back in place after the lessons. Sometimes there were clothes soaking in a bucket and the one girl who attended was interested in whose clothes they might be. She held up a heavy cotton shawl that dripped all over the floor and said something in Caddo to one of the boys and they all laughed. Storms grumbled outside and they looked nervously out the window as the predatory thing they knew as Walking Thunder stalked up and down impatiently in the west, his interior fires streaking like incandescent wires across the clotted, pendant clouds.
The children seemed strangely mature. They seemed to understand that life was a serious matter and often fatal. The teacher felt an air of contempt from them when they stared blankly at his enormous letters chalked on a black-painted board. A, this is A. There was a fierce rivalry between the two boys, who were of the same age or nearly the same age, and once a fight broke out over something the teacher did not understand and they hammered at one another with a silent and total commitment to doing damage to one another. He sat down between the two of them and asked what it was.
The girl translated. It was about one of the boys’ arrows that had been retrieved from a hornet’s nest and not given back. The teacher asked the girl to tell the boys that sharing was a good thing, because then other people would share with you. An arrow was a small thing, wasn’t it? Peace between people is a very big thing, a thing that wise men of all ages had considered, but they could have it if they wanted, even though it was very grand and its value beyond price.
The two boys drew off from one another and nodded and sat down again at the long bench and drew A’s. Their rules of sharing and property were very complicated and sacred. Certain parts of the buffalo were shared with father’s brother’s son and other parts with grandparents on the mother’s side and arrows carried one’s mark of right into the air like an announcement and this was a form of signaling and war speech that should never be taken by another, but the teacher could not know that and did not think to ask.
SAMUEL SAT AT his desk beside his glowing sheet-iron stove and its crisp, tinking coal fire that shone through the isinglass. There were stacks of requests from Texas, for reparations from those who had had horses stolen, houses burned, crops destroyed. Some of these were honest and others were not. He marked with an X those that were dubious. When there was government money to be had, people did all sorts of strange things. Honest men would lie. He turned down a request from an Oklahoma man to come and grow hay and corn on reservation land that would be used for the Kiowa and Comanche rations. He refused the request because he knew the Comanche would destroy the crop, and the man knew it too, but he would then apply for reparations at two or three times what the crop was worth. The Comanche would be doing him a favor if they set it on fire. Then not only would the man have deceived the federal government but Samuel would have more paperwork.
Samuel very much wished to prosecute a thin young fellow with long yellow hair and an extravagant vest who had been taken up by soldiers and delivered to a sheriff for sharpshooting into a Comanche encampment up near the Cheyenne Agency. He had killed a woman and a young girl and got away with stolen horses. A vivid and malignant young man whose boots had two-inch heels. However, since the incident occurred on reservation land it was a federal crime, and the closest federal courthouse was Fort Smith, Arkansas. Samuel had two witnesses who might testify against the young dandy, but it was a month’s trip there and back and he must send in a request to the superintendent at Fort Leavenworth for a daily stipend and travel money for these witnesses and that would take several months if it were even granted. The witnesses had no intention of taking on two weeks’ travel to Fort Smith, Arkansas, at their own expense to testify against someone whom they then had to live near if he got out on bail. And he would get out on bail.
The last Samuel heard the prospective witnesses and the alleged killer were drinking together in some sleazy saloon in a crossroads town in the Sans Bois Mountains. They laughed in fruity alcoholic voices and retold the story of how the woman and girl were shot down. How their hair flew. Neither Samuel nor Colonel Grierson had the authority to arrest and detain United States citizens if they were not on reservation land. Grierson would have been horrified if Samuel had asked him to. He would have said, We are not under martial law here, sir.
There were days when work on the sawmill went slowly. Samuel took the wagon reins himself to carry logs to the sawpit and shifted stone with the stonemasons. They will have houses, he said. I will see that they have houses. If we ask them to abandon life out there, then they must have houses to come to. They will get used to roofs. They must.
He filled out more paperwork to
pay a man to raise a rail fence around ten acres of plowed ground. He went to inspect the fence, and when he stood on the rail in the middle of its span it gave way. Samuel told the man, “You will do it again and do it right. Tear this down. Start over.” Then he drove the small one-ton farm wagon to the banks of Cache Creek and helped to dig coal for his own fire and for the forge in the blacksmith shop. He bought a herd of two hundred head of Texas cattle for the beef ration but had to send them out to graze under the protection of several Caddo men to keep the Comanche from riding down and issuing to themselves the beef whenever they felt like it. The cattle had to be kept away from the Comanche and Kiowa so that Samuel could then hand them out or withhold them as he saw fit. To withhold them if they did not bring in the captives. It was insane. He drummed his fingers on the shelves of the warehouse and thought how demented it was.
A band of young Comanche men rode in at night and sent several shots through the agency windows and carried off a team of mules and took several bales of bright calico from the warehouse. Samuel was not awake when the rounds came through the front windows but he shot off the bed and found himself lying flat on the floor when he did awaken. The result of a year under fire.
They did not want the calico or the mules but they took them for trophies. Samuel rode out looking for them and found the mules wandering around the Keechi Hills draped in yards of flowered cloth. Afterward Samuel sent a message to Colonel Grierson saying that he wanted guards. He would now use armed guards at the warehouse. He wrote to the Friends’ Indian Committee that this should be permissible in their beliefs, because the guards, though they were soldiers, were under his civil authority and were therefore acting as policemen. Did they not have a police force there in Philadelphia? He was not using military force.
In his nightly prayers Samuel asked only that he be made to understand why he was here. What to do. He had no doubt that there was some greater design, but he fell into a deep sadness as he knew he could not understand this design. It made him feel shallow. A ship holed in some vital strakes and sunk to the gunnels and adrift. He was lonely and from time to time he felt the intensity of this loneliness, the strange questing feeling that comes from abandonment, that were he to keep on searching about in his mind and memory he would find someone or something to comfort him. The Holy Spirit was hidden in the vast plains and would not come to him even though he asked and asked again. It was because he was no longer a servant to his fellow men but an authority. A man with authority who must apply that power.
The world of Philadelphia faded and slipped from his mind. The concerns with the refitted Monongahela were the concerns of another time and place. She was out somewhere on the other side of the world carrying oil and flour from Argentina to California, they said, with money invested on his behalf. Letters from his parents and his brother’s wife told him of that other world called Philadelphia, and the harvests near Lancaster. The brittle and haughty young woman who in some other age had sent back his ring wrote in a beautiful hand to say she was sorry. Sorry for what? Samuel had to think for a moment about what it was she was sorry about. He did not answer the letter.
He got into his bed at night with a feeling that he was being besieged by hostile forces that sang without words just at the edge of the horizon, and one night he dreamed of an enormous moon lifting over the Washita Mountains. It was swollen and it covered half the sky. This was deeply frightening and also the moon itself seemed terrified, with its round O of a mouth, as if something even more fell was following the moon from behind.
AND SO THE Kiowa and the Comanche lived and raided and hunted out on the long rolling plains while the telegraph and the railroad approached from the east, bringing news of the corruptions of Washington and the Communards of Paris and the street fighting there. Samuel Hammond still refused to issue the orders that would have sent the army after the Kiowa and Comanche and bring them back by force to the reservation. So a band of Comanche rode down on Ledbetter’s Salt Works west of Fort Belknap. The men left the hot salt pans and retreated behind a palisade and charged their small field cannon. They knew they had no help from either the Rangers or the army nor would they go back to where they had come from in the southern states, now an occupied country, and so they fought until they ran out of ammunition. Then old man Ledbetter shoved the king bolt from a wagon into the twelve-pound Napoleon field piece and fired it. The hissing bolt socked into Esa Havey’s war horse and the stallion dropped like a stone. The Comanche turned and rode away. They laughed at Esa Havey running behind on foot until Hears the Dawn took pity on him and pulled him up behind.
On a dark night they infiltrated the town of Fredericksburg and took horses, and as they galloped away they overturned haystacks and set them afire and shot down a man who was walking out in the early morning singing and looking for his cattle. On the way home, on the plains, they came upon four men herding cattle and killed all four of them.
They struck at settlements far south of the Red River, far down in the Hill Country. They rode four hundred miles straight south to the ancient Spanish town of San Antonio, a town now grown up with theaters, paved streets, bakeries and candy stores and suburbs. Fifteen miles from San Antonio they captured two boys who within a year forgot every rule of behavior they knew and became skilled Comanche warriors. Throughout the winter of 1869 and the year 1870 the young men of the Comanche and the Kiowa rode with their hair floating in the night wind and their faces painted in beautiful colors of red and black and yellow, with hail marks and lightning strokes. Always there came that impeccable and otherworldly moment when they closed with the enemy, when they took the enemy’s women and children captive, whose faces were distorted in mortal terror and their eyes as round as dollars.
In the late fall of 1870 Samuel at last rode out onto the plains to search out the Kiowa and Comanche camps and to see the people of his agency where they lived. He did not think they would kill him. They might, but it was unlikely. He wore his broad-brimmed hat and a heavy coat and a muffler because in late October the wind was bitter. The annuity goods were two months behind coming from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. It was probable that the months would go on without their delivery. The army sent a message saying they had other priorities at the moment. There were forts out in Kansas and Colorado and Wyoming that had to be provisioned because the Sioux and the Cheyenne had broken out and were killing settlers like chickens in a run. They would send the annual goods for the Comanche and Kiowa at the earliest possible time. Your obedient servant, Major T. J. Kinnel.
But Samuel got his goods in his own way. He rode to the post to tell the colonel he had a shipment coming in. Bales of bright calicoes and brass bells, ship’s biscuit and kettles and salt. Things he could withhold or grant to the Kiowa and Comanche in return for meekness, good behavior, surrendered captives.
“You have a freighter coming up from Fort Worth?” said Grierson.
“Yes, it’s faster. I’ll deal with the paperwork later. The delays are unforgivable. A colored man named Britt Johnson.”
“How does he get through?”
“He has a friend among the Comanche. Apparently this friend looks out for him somehow. And I am leaving for a few weeks to go out to the plains.”
Samuel rode north and west into the Wichita Mountains with his schoolteacher and Onofrio for companions. They dragged a packhorse behind them. They had given up on the agency school. They rode through the red stone mountains and here and there they caught sight of elk galloping away into the canyons with their noses stretched out, bearing the heavy weight of their candelabra horns without effort. A bear’s shining agitated hide hurried up a mountainside. Samuel shut his coat tight against the wind and bent his head down to keep his hat from flying off.
His schoolteacher was a Friend named Thomas Beatty, and he was a good young man with an infinite supply of cheer who wanted more than life itself to go and live with the Kiowa to teach the children there in the lodges. Sooner or later Samuel would have to let him go and r
isk himself in that task.
They rode through broad valleys of dry grass. The stones of the Wichita Mountains had fallen wholesale into red heaps, and some stood isolated on the skyline in odd sentinels. One was very tall with a stone hat on its head. It regarded them from a sharp ridge as they rode by and when Samuel looked up with his hand on the crown of his hat it released them from its stone gaze and turned to wait for some other travelers. They slept beside a ragged fire that spit and cracked with mountain pine and in the morning they ate hot bannock and drank sugared coffee for breakfast. They saddled their horses and went on.
Every day was a gift of peace. Samuel listened to the quiet as they rode. The silky grass pale as champagne lifting and falling in currents. Once when they stopped at noon to eat he saw a cactus fruit on the tip of a prickly-pear pad glowing like a candle. He stared at it. It seemed that it had some sort of small light inside. Then he saw that sunlight was pouring through a hole in the red fruit and that the fruit itself was hollowed out. He stood up and bent over it. Two bees were at work inside the cactus fruit, scouring away the sweet pulp. Sunlight coming in through the hole had lit up the thin and transparent walls of the fruit and made it glow in a deep carmine red. He found Onofrio standing beside him. “Pretty,” said Onofrio. “Very pretty.” Then they rode on toward Mount Scott.
The Kiowa of Kicking Bird’s band welcomed them and took them in. Kicking Bird spoke to Onofrio in Spanish. He said they had not heard of any captives whatever. None. Perhaps here and there a Mexican child, but these they purchased from the Apaches who raided in New Mexico. There was no harm in buying a Mexican captive. The Apaches treated them like dogs. They had a better life with the Kiowa. They married and had children. Here in this camp is a man named Komah, they call him Old Man Komah, the son of a Mexican captive, he has a wife and children. He translates for us and trades to San Idlefonso. Aperian Crow gestured toward the tipi wall to some direction where he thought Old Man Komah might be at the moment. Crowds of wiry-haired children stood outside and tried to see in the tipi door. A little girl in a soft hide dress with a necklace of glass beads farted with a shrill noise and the other children hissed and cried out Nyyyah! and slapped her lightly until she began to cry.
The Color of Lightning Page 29