He walked outside into the cold. The cavalrymen were forming in ranks, and their guidons stood out stiff in the wind and all their brasses glittered even though the sun was dim under a screen of high, thin clouds. The black Ninth Cavalry were serious and reserved and conscious of their recent honor. The horses moved against their bits and their tails blew between their legs and Samuel watched as a kind of great ordering took place, as if the union of men and horses made them more than themselves, something they were meant to be from the moment they were born. Their bugles a hazy harsh gold and their carbines sheathed at their left stirrups and the flag boots creaking on their slings and so they stood silently in the beauty of their weapons.
SAMUEL DROVE THE mile and a half to the agency, watching the winking of the horses’ shoes as they trotted on. He set the brake block as they started down the rocky slope to the valley of Cache Creek. The horses minced their way down, and the fixed wheels spewed dust. The agency appeared in the crawling weaves of ground-blow, the sandy wind poured through the white picket fence and around the warehouse and corrals. The place was empty and lifeless, devoid of red men or white men either one. Here and there a bit of ribbon and a rawhide box where things had been dropped as the Kiowa and Comanche women were taken captive. A sense of something about to happen. The stubborn brush unmoved by the wind. The wind’s scouring howl as it poured across Oklahoma.
Samuel did not know what to do with the scalps. They lay in loose sheaves of hair on his flowered carpet. Finally he buried them like kitchen trash in the manure pile behind the wagon shed.
He paced the agency house from one end to another. He felt he was turning into someone else. Or perhaps someone he had always been. He was hardening like pottery fired in a kiln. Hard angry words in his head carrying an abrasive silt. He did not like the sounds of the words in his own head. Outside he saw two Caddo boys digging the scalps out of the manure pile and turning them over in their hands. They threw them at each other and then one of them put the brown scalp on his own head and pranced in a circle. Samuel sat down in front of his coal stove. He did not like the chemical smell of it but wood was scarce. He was within seconds of going outside and taking the boy by the back of his jacket and beating him with the buggy whip.
He got up and walked through the door and slammed it behind him and went to stand in front of the new water mill, arising stone by stone, the masons snapping their chalked strings along the courses of sandstone. Others were constructing the dam. Shouts and songs. Mexicans and soldiers working side by side.
He stopped to watch two stonemasons with a scorpion. One shot down his hand with a knife and cut off its poisonous tail. It began to run in confused circles. The men squatted down to watch it and laughed.
He went back into the agency house and washed his face and hands and sat down in front of a plate of hominy grits and prairie chicken. He could not eat.
He sat at his desk and flipped through Isaiah as if through a law dictionary, searching out the right words, the right terms.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with Me. For I have trodden them in My anger, and trampled them in My fury; their blood is sprinkled upon My garments and I have stained all My robes. For the day of vengeance is in My heart, and the year of My redeemed has come. I have trodden down the peoples in My anger, made them drunk in My fury, and brought down their strength to the earth.
JAMES DEAVER TOOK a bath in a horse trough after the horses had been led to water in the late, cold evening. He had sent his clothes to the post laundresses. He had the impression of himself and all the horse Indians of the plains shut up in a frame and drifting away in thin colors on scattered sheets of paper. It was because of the gin that sat in its glass in the dirt beside the water trough. He got out and dried himself and did not feel the cold. He finished the gin and put on his shirt and then went to the barracks carrying his pants. He clodded across the parade ground with bare legs and wet shoes.
He sat at the table beside the fire and composed a long telegram to Dr. Reed of the Friends’ Indian Committee in Philadelphia. In it he stated that Samuel Hammond had abandoned all precepts of his Quaker upbringing. Imprisoned several Indian men in the guardhouse in Fort Sill to be sent to Texas justice. Indian women and children held in horse corral. Refused rations to the families that had come in who were destitute and starving. Imprisoned young boys in the schoolhouse whose only crime was that they had been captives and were not yet capable of accustoming themselves to the ways of white people. Discouraging thing that men could so change and alter. Red men wanted only a life of freedom on the plains and to hunt the bison there as God meant them to else why did he place them there. Agent Hammond ignoring all precepts of Peace Policy. Still time to stop conflict. Soldiers preparing to campaign. Your obedient sv’t, James Nathan Deaver.
IT WAS A week later, the first week of January of the New Year, that the letter came from Dr. Reed. Samuel sat close to the window to read it as the light faded from a world that was glistening with windblown dust.
Our dear Samuel Friend in Christ;
We have with dismay read a report to this Committee that thou hast imprisoned five men of the Kiowa and Comanche tribes inclusive of their women and small children despite our professed desire to treat the Red Man as our brother and as a being deeply wronged over the centuries that we have inhabited this continent. Whatever the desperate measures taken by these people remember that they have been cheated and dispossessed of those things most dear to them. Is it not to be expected that the Kiowa and Comanche and others under thy charge are reduced to such measures?
If thou has stood resolutely by our agreement in that the Texans and others who have incrementally stolen the lands of these people be prevented from mistreating them then those for whom thou art responsible should have understood our feelings of love, of admiration, of brotherly regard and come to settle themselves on the vast reservation that has been set aside for them.
If thou hadst been attentive to thy duties then the saving truths of the Scripture would have been communicated to them. If the Red Men have not seen the advantages of peace then thou hast somehow been amiss, Samuel. Unless our reliance is on that which comes from above, we shall fail.
Samuel put the letter down. It was clear he would have to resign. He would be glad to go. He did not know how to use authority, he was not good at it. Let someone else come and take on this terrible task. He had only a few things left to do. War with the Comanche and Kiowa was coming as sure as the sun rose in the east. As the sparks fly upward. It would take his letter of resignation several weeks to reach Dr. Reed in Philadelphia, and in the meantime he must complete every task he could.
And after that he would take the overland route for San Francisco, where at some time the Monongahela would come in and he would board his own ship as supercargo and go with her round the Horn. How could he have known this was something he had always wanted to do? A private and obscure longing to be on the surface of the great oceans suddenly appeared as a complete and accomplished thought. He had been obligated to a life of service from his earliest upbringing and he had done his best. Now he wanted to take ship around Cape Horn and serve no earthly power whatever.
THE BOYS’ RELATIVES had at last been found, and until they came to claim them the boys lived like shadows in their army tent. Sometimes the soldiers came to teach them how to gamble with dice, and they liked that. They were in an empty space between their Comanche names and the names Clinton Smith and Adolph Korn and Temple Field and Valentine Maxey. It made them feel as if they were made of some other substance than flesh and blood. They often sat and gazed at the Speckled Blue-Faced Mountains behind the agency and the fort. Yes people were good to them. No they had not learned their alphabet. Yes they would try.
Samuel sent for a photographer to take their portraits. The boys watched with rigid and fixed expressions when the man set up the scaffolding and then placed the camera and the dark cloth over his head. When he turned the br
ass lens tube toward them like the barrel of some weapon, they shouted aloud and fled. All that remained on the glass plates were blurred streaks like smoke, or the impression of fugitive spirits caught in the flash powder.
Samuel sat and thought of how to reach them. How to describe anew their lives to them before they were taken, how to help them know who they were. He had the feeling that they might never again know who they were. That their identity might be held as some distant, lucid secret in the heart of God until the day they died.
Like his own. Like his own.
Beyond the windows the blue loom of the Wichita Mountains, a sanctuary of iron and granite and clean water. Temple Field regarded them from his half-closed eyes. No one knew what he thought. The other boy captives spoke to him but he refused to answer. Samuel handed him over to his grandfather, shook the old man’s hand, and handed him a handkerchief to soak up his tears.
Two years after Temple Field was returned to his family near De Soto, Kansas, he died of self-starvation, in complete silence.
Chapter 34
IN LATE DECEMBER of 1870 Britt rode in front of a herd of horses at a slow trot to bring them in to Fort Belknap. The army had bought them from a rancher named George Daley who lived in a large log house that was constructed like a fort out beyond the Old Stone Ranch House. In return for bringing them in, he was to have four of the best of them. Paint and Dennis were moving northeast from Elm Creek toward Jacksboro with a load of hay and butter in small kegs and salted beef. They would meet back in Fort Belknap and begin to break in the four horses to harness. Britt trotted Cajun at a slow and steady pace in the front, and as long as he kept this up, they would follow him.
It was very still. Fog shifted in low banks in the valley of the Clear Fork of the Brazos and he and the horses he was leading rode down into these and inside the fog he could only see a few nodding heads behind him with the manes tossing along their necks in damp strands. Then they came up and were clear for a while and then they trotted forward into another fog bank and the horses followed him by scent and sound.
Before long he came to the remains of the Old Stone Ranch House, where he and Paint and Dennis had sat behind the walls and fired at Kiowa and where he had heard someone in a taunting rage calling to him to give up his only son. The walls were indistinct in the heavy fog. If the temperature dropped, the fog would change to ice. The world would turn to glass.
Britt turned inside the remains of the wall that had once surrounded the ruined house, and the loose horses, eleven in number, followed and stood with round eyes and nostrils smelling of it all, the strange walls and the remains of the cookstove with its faint meat odors. He felt he had best stay within the broken wall and near the old house to see what the weather would do.
He unsaddled Cajun to give the horse’s back a rest and sat the saddle down on its fork and laid the saddle blankets over. He un-strapped the rifle scabbard to set the Spencer upright on its butt plate so that moisture would not leak down into the breech-loading mechanism. He leaned it against the wall.
The sound of his own footsteps was blurred and then silenced in the quiet noises of horses moving about, murmuring to one another. They would not stay within the ruined walls for long, but they would go no farther than the riverbed and its dried grasses and pools of water and he could easily collect them. They had been content with Cajun as their leader, but the gelding was now tied and resting. Before long they would choose another leader, most likely the oldest mare, the one with the glass eye, and she would soon set off toward the river.
Britt stood and listened. It was possible that the Kiowa crossed here often; a place that they had marked in their memory as a crossing that promised good fortune on their raids. A place on the northwest border of the rolling plains. He could hear nothing but the stamping and the breathing of the horses. He walked forward into the blank mystery of the fog toward the rear of the house where he knew the far wall was and beyond that a stone spring house. There was a good hiding place back there. A good place to lie in ambush.
What did he have that they wanted? His life. His horses, his weapons, and his gear. Or it could be as Tissoyo told him; when a loved one was killed, then you must go out on the roads and trails and kill the first person you came upon to send that person’s soul to be a slave to the one you loved in the world beyond. Britt never understood what that world would be like. Maybe like this one where unformed beings crept step by step in a cold and blinding fog.
He stood at the front wall of the house with its sashless windows and doorless doorway out of which the mist drifted like breath from an open mouth. He walked around behind. Reefs of fallen rock where the back walls had come down. Each stone squared and marked with a chisel. The cookstove where Paint had taken shelter. From it came a scent of cold grease and wet iron. His footfalls were muffled by the damp dried grass and soaked litter from the bare hackberry trees. He stopped beside the fallen wall and listened.
In the distance he heard someone singing. It was a lifting, chanting falsetto. A song of grief and parting sung in some Indian language, in the dense mists of the river valley. Britt stood very still for some time. The song never faltered or stopped but went on and on with a thin insistence coming from a great distance through the fog. Finally he slid the revolver from its holster and checked to see that there was a round in the chamber. The big metal horse head of the six-shot revolver was comforting in his hand. A new Smith and Wesson that took ready-made rimfire cartridges.
He could not smell woodsmoke. He moved forward toward the singing. Always move forward toward the enemy. Toward those who would kill you and take your son and your wife and turn the minds of the children against their parents until they were recovered as shucked and empty shells. He came to a stand of trees with slaty trunks and limbs like black nerves dissolving into the mist. Beyond that a bank descending into a cut.
The singing had stopped. He had been heard. He took one long step that brought him under an anacua tree, and his boots pressed without sound on the dead sandpaper leaves and he laid his shoulder against the bark with the revolver’s barrel raised.
He took each breath slowly. After a moment his heart quieted. He saw a drop of moisture on his hat brim appear and then grow pendant with a condensed seed of light from the pale fog in its center, and then it dropped. A stone tumbled in a damp clatter down a bank he could not see. Still he did not move. He shifted the joint of his thumb over the hammer and then laid his left hand over it to deaden the sound and cocked the revolver. He took his left hand away and then stood with the weapon cocked and the barrel raised.
The man appeared out of the mist like something being inflated. Like something tiny that within seconds expanded and filled all the world in the space of a deafening shriek and bore down on him with a face painted half black and dotted with hailstones. Britt fired. Then a bullet clubbed his upper thigh and blood and flesh and fragments of cloth sprayed. The brilliant muzzle flashes exploded into strange prismatic rays in the fog. The gunsmoke billowed dark and burnt against it. Britt dropped to the ground with his left hand over his crotch. He lay flat. There was a blundering noise as the man fell or rolled down the bank beyond into a deep pool of dark mist and then stillness.
Britt listened intently. A few stones cascaded down the bank after the man. In a few moments there was no other sound. Far away he could hear the horses as they snorted in a rattling noise and blew and shifted at the sound of gunshots. He could feel himself bleeding into his heavy wool trousers. He shifted slowly onto his side and unbuckled his belt and felt for the wound and was swept by a kind of melting relief when he knew he had not been hit in his private parts. The round was embedded in his upper thigh an inch away. He brought his hand away bloody and wiped it on his shirt.
He lay for a long time in the dry anacua leaves. He lay on one side with the revolver against his chest, unmoving. The slightest shift would give him away. With infinite care he once again cocked the forty-four revolver and put his left hand over the hamme
r and his thumb as he did so, but still the slow click click seemed very loud, still there was a rustling noise among the leaves as he moved.
Long rays shot through the fog and it thinned. It was nearing midday. Still cold. He began to shake. He had to move. He was leaking blood. Had he been hit in an artery, he would have been dead by now.
He rose to his feet and was forced to hold to the trunk of the anacua for a moment and then limped forward into the tangle of brush and vines that guarded the bank. Leaves stuck to him. It had to be some cutoff of the Clear Fork. There was a torn place in the brush where the man had run through, and Britt came to it and held the cocked revolver high and slid down among the red and black stones.
At the bottom the man lay in the wet red soil faceup with his black hair scattered around him and bone fragments and a fan of brain tissue like thrown soup. His arms flung out with the silver bracelets shining. Britt saw that beyond the black face paint the man was Tissoyo, and that he had hit him in the left eye.
He uncocked the revolver and laid it down and fell to his knees. In a hopeless gesture he placed his hand around the side of Tissoyo’s neck to check for the thumping of that great artery in the throat but there was none. He tore off the breastplate of pipe beads and put his ear against Tissoyo’s warm chest but there was no sound.
Britt fell back to a sitting position against a shelf of rock and stared at him. Tissoyo’s face with its one eye was turned to the invisible sky overhead. His skull wrecked and scattered over the common earth. Britt sat there for a few moments beside the body and looked at Tissoyo in a way we are not allowed to look at people when they are alive. Searching desperately for a sign of life where there is none. The black hair was cut short around the left side of the head where he had shorn it off with a knife in grief for someone he loved who was dead, and now he was dead too. Britt felt a peculiar fullness in his head and his chest as if he were swelling up, and his ears were painfully blocked. He was weeping. Weeping and bleeding into his wool trousers and onto the stones and leaves around him.
The Color of Lightning Page 32