The Color of Lightning (10 page)

own fire. The young wife then stood up with Millie in her arms and came to Mary and the children and made a motion with her hand that they were to move their little piece of blanket and to sleep close to the tipi. Then she took both Cherry and Millie inside, singing a low song to them.

The night sky was cloudless so that the cold fell out of it like dew and in the morning Mary and Jube found themselves curled nearly in the ashes. Her longing for Britt was so intense that she felt utterly vacant. But she lifted her hollow self upright at dawn and staggered and then waited for her balance to return and went to gather buffalo chips and brush and whatever she could come upon that would burn and warm herself and Jube.

As they walked along Jube said, “Mama, don’t try to talk no more. Listen, just make the signs they make.”

Mary signed
yes
. In the distance was a rise and the foremost riders coming to it appeared briefly as cutouts against the hazed yel- low sky. They jogged downward and then others lifted to take their places. Then Mary signed
name
.

“Yes, Mama, we got to know her name.” Her polite name. Nei- ther her secret spirit name nor a joke name. It was not information easily come by. Jube had learned quickly.

Mary nodded furiously, and reached out to put her hand on Jube’s thin shoulder.

“I’m going to do that,” he said.

Jube ran ahead. His strength was rapidly leaving him and there was a kind of trembling in his interior but because of all the marrow he had eaten last night the weakness had not yet reached his hands or legs and he must keep going while he could. He dodged around the travois legs and the dogs and was careful not to run in front of any mounted warrior’s horse. He ran on until he came to Old Man Komah’s two-wheeled cart. He called to him in Spanish.

“Mister Komah. Here I have you a present.”

The man looked down at Jube. “Where did you get that?” he said.

Jube held up the Spanish spur with the great spiked rowel. “I

found it back there. I was looking for mesquite beans. It was in an armadillo hole.”

“Why is it not rusted?”

“I rubbed it with sand.” Jube held it up toward Old Man Komah as he ran alongside. “I saved it for you because you’re Mexican.”

Old Man Komah sat with the reins in his hand and said nothing while Jube continued to walk and then run a little and then walk alongside his
carreta
wheels. The axles sang in a disjointed noise, a phrase in a high whine repeated over and over. He made Jube wait awhile.

“Get up here,” he said.

Jube calculated the roll of the spokes and then stepped on one and was carried upward and grasped the rails and made it to the seat. Old Man Komah laughed. He held out his hand and Jube put the spur in it. Komah turned it over and looked at it carefully. His mule swiveled one ear and then the other, and hoarded the world in its dark eyes.

“Those Spaniards,” he said. “When there was a king of Spain.” He handed it back to the boy. “Keep it. What else did you find?”

“Spoons. I think they are silver.”

“See if you can make some kind of jewelry out of those spoons. You can trade them to that man there.” Komah lifted his head and stuck out his lower lip toward a man ahead of them on a three-color paint horse. The man had rings of tattoos around his upper arms. “Nocteawah. He likes things for his ears.”

“What does Nocteawah mean?”

“Find out for yourself. Learn to speak Kiowa.” “Yes sir,” said Jube. “I’m trying.”

“How do you speak Spanish?”

“All of my family spent a year in Nacogdoches, working for an old Spanish man.”

Komah still did not look at him but off across the prairie. Ko- mah was an important person in this little band. Jube was not. Jube was a runty little captive child who might not live much longer. “An old Spanish man in Nacogdoches.”

“Yes sir. They spoke Spanish.” “Who did you live with?” “Señor Esteban Arocha.”

“Well.” Komah then turned to Jube; to his lifted face, his torn, nappy hair with the lice streaming through it, the silver spur trem- bling in his hands. “And now, what do you want?”

Jube sat suspended between several choices with held breath and the spur grasped hard to stop his hands’ shaking.

He said, “Sir, my name is Jube Johnson.”

“Chon-son, Chon-son,” said Old Man Komah. “Um-hm.” “Could you tell me the name of Aperian Crow’s wife? She has

little Millie.” He nodded.

“And now she has my sister Cherry.”

“Yes, you should call her Gonkon.” Old Man Komah took out his tobacco bag and a small book of papers cut from the
Dallas Clarion
newspaper. The small square of paper had a picture of a woman’s hat and the price: fifty cents. “When you speak to her, call her Gonkon.” Komah rolled a cigarette and lit it and drew on it. “Now get down.”

Jube dodged between the women on horseback with their loaded travois and the men on horseback and dogs and other children. He came back to his mother where she walked, trudging, one foot in front of the other. She was growing weaker. Her hands swung at her sides as if they were loose weights. That morning they had eaten some of the torn bits of flesh from a new buffalo hide and he did not know what they might get to eat tonight. They were not offered any of the meat from the three buffalo because it had been shared out among all the people in the band and there was none left for the captives. They had been given a throat and a tail.

“Her name is Gonkon,” Jube said. Mary nodded.

Jube said, “I am going to make some earring things for Nocte- awah and get a knife from him.”

Mary smiled. She reached out to touch his hair. She made a

wiping motion. She did not yet know the sign for
cut
so she made a scissors with her fingers.

“And you going to cut my hair.”

Mary nodded again and closed her eyes for a moment. She stood still and wavered and then sank to her knees and fell forward on both hands. Jube cried out and got his hands under her armpits and pulled his mother to a sitting posture. Her hands were dotted with sandburs and she turned them palm up before her face. Jube knocked the burs away and begged his mother to get up and keep on walking. People passed them by on either side among sailing strands of grass and thin valances of dust raised by travois poles. Mary stared ahead at the golden striated levels of the plains that lay at the bottom of the sky, an absorbing pale yellow haze without definition in which there was neither work nor struggle nor hunger nor fear. Then she closed her eyes again and turned her head away from it.

Then everything settled and fell into place. She got to her feet and stood and swayed for a moment from one foot to another. Jube looked up at her with open lips and horror in his eyes.

“Mama, please.”

She grasped the piece of skirt around her neck and nodded and patted his shoulder and walked on. She pressed forward on will- power alone. If she were left behind, the children would stay with her and so endanger themselves and so she must keep up at any cost.

That night Mary tried to help Gonkon put up her tipi poles. First they laid the three center poles f lat on the ground and tied them together near their tips. Then they lifted them upright and walked out the legs to make a tripod. Mary held to one of the poles to steady herself for a moment when Gonkon was not looking. Then they began to lay in the others in the crotch of the tripod one after the other so that when they were all up they made a mounting spiral of pole tips. Then they brought the cover: it had been rolled on a pole like a giant ancient manuscript and they unrolled it foot by foot around the tripod and secured it. Mary’s knees shook. She sat down outside the tipi and folded her hands in her lap. Aperian

Crow’s wife came out of her tipi with a graceful step and Mary said, “Gonkon.”

Jube looked up with a terrified expression. His mother was go- ing to say “Gonkon, Gonkon,” over and over again until Old Man Komah came and hit her. But his mother clamped her lips shut and pressed her hand against them. Gonkon laughed.

“Mar-ee.” She handed Mary a wooden bowl full of meat and broth and hominy and waved Jube away. When Mary had eaten, Gonkon brought Jube another bowl, which was all she had in her stores. That and no more. Then the two of them collapsed in sleep. Gonkon brought out two worn blankets that had been used as har- ness pads and threw them over Mary and Jube.

They took up the trail beside the white sands of the Canadian River, traveling northwest. Before long First Wolf and his scouts came upon a streaming band of buffalo that numbered perhaps three or four hundred. The beasts smelled sweetly of grass and the bulls had grown the long shaking pantaloons and beards of winter. The men ran them down and shot them with bow and arrow, which were more easily handled than the long guns, and the bow and arrow were silent. Men like Aperian Crow and other warriors like Satank and That’s It and Kicking Bird could get off five arrows in the time it took to reload a long rifle. Their arrows were tipped with steel hunting arrowheads, without barbs, long and slim, which could be pulled out easily. The barbed steel arrowheads were for people.

“Mar-ee.”

Gonkon handed her a butchering knife and then signed that it was only a loan and Mary signed
thank you,
or some gesture that meant appreciation. Mary took a great bolus of meat in her hand and cut down through the middle of it and stopped short of halving it by half an inch. Then she spiraled her knife through one half of the chunk of meat until it was a long thin strip, and then the other half, spiraling around and around the inside of each half to the end, and thus it made a ribbon a yard and a half long. This was hung on the scaffolding and then she took up another and another, along- side all the other women, and by nighttime the scaffolding covered

an acre of the white sands of the Canadian River valley and fires glowed beneath the thin ribbons of flesh. Quavering flames shone through them as if the meat were red paper. Gonkon saw that Mary was given good pieces of tongue and hump and kidney fat.

It was a kind of great fair held out in the distant plains, a car- nival of buffalo meat, of bones, of people singing in Kiowa of the immense being who had lifted the stone, and of the hole beneath the stone where the buffalo came streaming out in their millions to populate the earth.

And so they went on into winter and Mary began to hope that she and her children would survive and that they would live to see Britt again and abide once more in their own house down in Young County. She tried to tell Jube that his father would come for them, that his father loved him dearly. Jube nodded and bent to his sil- ver spoons. When Mary could rest she collapsed to the ground and stared out at the endless auburn and biscuit tones, the oxblood- colored earth, the lampblack hues of the leafless trees.

She had dreams about Kentucky, where she had been born, about the two walnut trees that stood on either side of the well path that led from the back of the house into a countryside rich with water and rain. Old Mrs. Randall speaking to her in admonitory tones out of that white and angled face. Soon the true cold would set in; she and Jube must be allowed into a lodge, or they would not make it through the winter.

Jube worked hard on his two spoons. He bent off the handles and put them away and begged a nail of Old Man Komah. The freighter had been born to a Mexican father and a Kiowa captive mother and at some time in the past decided to come and live permanently with the Kiowa as their interpreter and storyteller and blacksmith. In the
carreta
he carried a stack of old newspapers and pieces of leather, buckles, birds’ wings, jars of colored beads, and a toolbox. From this long box he held up a tenpenny nail to Jube as if he were granting him his dearest wish, as if the nail were the keys to the kingdom. Jube took it and thanked him and then ran.

Jube shaped his fire coals as he thought best and heated both the

nail and the dishes of the spoons. He made himself a pair of tongs of green mesquite. The tongs smoked and burned and only lasted a short while but there was no shortage of mesquite. He drove a hole through the spoons and used a stone to wear down the broken edges where he had broken off the handles. Komah sat and watched him and said nothing. He rolled cigarettes out of square pieces of the
Dallas Courier
with its fragmentary news of Grant and Lee at each other’s throats in Virginia and its advertisements for hair dye, and smoked silently and offered no advice.

Jube let the silver cool. He reached into his mother’s carrybag and found the piece of broken bottle. With great care he broke off small points and then more points of green glass.

Komah nodded and then at last bent forward. He held out his hand for the chips of green glass. Jube gave them to him. Komah pulled a small leather sack out of his back pocket and filled it with sand. Jube sat on his heels in the kindliness of this man’s regard, his interest and care. It was like being someplace warm and out of the wind.

“Too sharp,
ya veas
?” he said. “If you put these on an earring it’s going to cut somebody. Now here.” He poured all the glass chips in and shook it, rolled the bag of sand and glass between his hands. “So.”

Two days later the sharp edges of the green glass were dulled and Jube strung his spoons on agave-fiber thread, and Old Man Komah boiled a glue for him from buffalo hooves. Both of the concave discs glittered with emerald-colored glass chips. Jube had quickly learned Kiowa words, and the most important was
ahô,
said with a falling tone at the end, which meant
Thank you,
not to be confused with
ahó,
said with a rising tone at the end, which meant
Kill him.

Nocteawah was a young man who had been on only one raiding trip into Texas and had never taken any scalps and was somewhat boyish still so that he could not entirely hide his delight in the ear- rings. Jube saw his eyes widen slightly and then Nocteawah looked away. Jube had learned the Kiowa word for
knife
, and he said it. He started to hold up one finger and then changed his mind and held