The Color of Lightning (24 page)

Jube’s mind sifted quickly among several images; Susan Dur-

gan’s body with one leg cut off at the pelvis and her head a bony skull ringed by a few strands of curls; his brother Jim’s body jerking backward, a blossoming cloud of gunsmoke at his chest. The man who reached for him with a hand as big as a wagon wheel. These images were thrown out like face cards and then disappeared. In a few miles he forgot that he had thought them.

Other images came to him. His father’s alert and searching eyes and the Henry breech-loader. The feel of the percussion caps and the powder measure in the hand, the clicking noise the measure made. If anything happened, if they came to capture him and rip at his flesh and tear off the soles of his feet for trying to escape, he and his father would kill them. He and his father would wait in ambush behind some cover of stone and sotol, lying still on their stomachs. With a sudden flush in his cheeks he saw Aperian Crow in his sights. But the trigger seized up and would not pull. Then Old Man Komah appeared before him and said in a sad voice,
Son, son, listen to me, you are a clever boy. I will look out for you.

Jube awakened suddenly and his hand went to his mouth. It was dry as rawhide and his hands were full of minute cactus spines and his lips were bleeding.

Chapter 18
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W

S

a m ue l h a mm o n d wa l k ed
among the tipis as some of the Comanche came in for their rations. He tried to remember their faces, who was there and who was not. A cold front, a norther, had fallen upon the springtime plains, and it was wet and chilling and the force of it shivered the pointed smoke flaps of the Coman-

che tipis.

Samuel came to the campfire of a headman named Kicking Bird, and asked him to come with him to see the new shipment of farming tools that had come from Lawrence, Kansas. Corn plant- ers, double-shovel plows, rakes and harrows. Onofrio walked to one side, a slight linguistic shadow, and repeated whatever was said in a kind of trance.

Kicking Bird ran his hand down the skeletal tines of a hay rake in the bars of sunlight that came through the loose boards of the drive shed. His hand was weathered dark and worn as driftwood. A thick callus lay on the insides of his right forefinger and middle finger from drawing a bowstring, and there was a high muscle on the upper left arm that had come about from holding a bow at full length.

He regarded the plow blades with a kind of confused sadness. They had taken women’s work and women’s tools and made of them an enormous
vagina dentata,
this biting device that ate into the earth to tear up the grass roots and into the red body of the ground.

He walked slowly from one farm implement to another. They were things so alien he had no words for them. Their steel surfaces perfectly machined into curves and angles. They had claws and me- chanical arms that lifted up and let down. He touched the perfo- rated seat of a corn planter that gleamed with green paint in a shaft of sunlight. This was where a person sat to operate the machine and it seemed to him that after a while the man would do the machine’s bidding. It was better to die than to become the servant of these things. They would take the core of one’s self and change it to some- thing else. They would obliterate a person before he had a chance to stand before the sun and declare aloud the name that had been given to him, and then no one could ever rescue the tenuous and wavering self from disappearance and cold and eternal emptiness.

To Onofrio he said,
This is terrible.
He walked forward a few steps and stood before the lift arm of a toothed harrow.
These are terrible things.

Onofrio was eating peanuts out of his hat. He brushed at his mouth and then said, “He finds all this very interesting.”

Samuel said, “Farming is hard work, it is true. But once the peo- ple learn how, there is a great deal of tradition to it. I myself had a farm back in the East.”

Then why did you leave it?

“Because I felt a call to come here and do what I could to help. My beliefs. I felt a call from Christ to come here and speak to you, to your people, to do what I could to help.”

Onofrio said,
His guardian spirit, Jesus Christ, told him to come here.

Then perhaps Jesus Christ will tell him to go back. I will tell him you said this.

No. Tell him that we will not farm. We will travel up to the Cana-

dian and the Cimarron and down in Texas when we please. Why does he show me these things? They would turn us into mules. Do I not stand on two feet like a man?

Onofrio said, “He says that the Comanche are human beings and only mules pull the farm equipment. Ah, um, he doesn’t like them.” Onofrio rubbed some peanuts together to press away the red skins and then blew on them in his cupped hands.

Samuel Hammond nodded. It had taken weeks of paperwork to purchase the equipment. More weeks for it to be shipped and then it had all been stalled at Fort Leavenworth for the entire spring sea- son and only with the first rains had the army teamsters consented to bring it down on freight wagons. Now it was nearly beyond the planting season and it would all sit here until it rusted.

o n e e v e n i n g af te r
supper Samuel walked down the long hall of the warehouse and saw Mr. Deaver sitting at a table, and on the table before him were his colors and inks and his enormous sketchbook. Shelf after shelf made long stripes along the walls of the warehouse and each one of them carried some remnant of the clothing that the Indians did not want or had not bothered to come in and claim when their names were called out. Empty sleeves and pants legs hung over the edges in a sloppy, abandoned way. Caps without heads sat in rows.

Mr. Deaver’s shadow poured out to his left and the candlelight gleamed on his right hand. He wore narrow spectacles and they flashed with every small movement of his head. The front of his traveling coat was smeared with reds and yellows. Pieces of hardtack were crumbled on the table.

“Agent Hammond.” He looked up and smiled and took off his glasses. There was a tumbler half full of some reddish liquid and a rinse jar for his brushes.

“Well, it’s you,” Samuel said. “Mr. Deaver, the artist.”

“Yes, myself in person. Travel-weary and frayed. How do you do?”

“I’m very well.” Samuel clasped his hands together. “When did you come here?”

“Got into Fort Sill yesterday.” Deaver made a swift line and then looked up. “In a supply wagon from Kansas. I was merely another piece of baggage along with the horse food.”

“And before that?”

“Wyoming, more or less. I hope you don’t mind that I have camped on you, here.” Deaver was frayed and his clothing faded from his travels. He smelled of woodsmoke and animal fats and he was wearing a pair of high-topped boots with copper toes.

“Not at all, not at all. I am glad you’ve come.”

“You weren’t at the agency house so I just made myself at home.”

“You are most welcome.” Samuel watched him skim his brush across the paper. “Have you brought any newspapers?”

“Yes, yes, I brought you some AP sheets. I left them inside your door, there. They are all sticky and wrinkled but otherwise sani- tary.”

“No matter. Where did you get AP reports?”

“Off the wire, of course, up there at the fort. Colonel Grierson subscribes. Stayed last night in the enlisted barracks and now here I am. You don’t say
thee
and
thou
.”

Samuel stood apart for fear of interrupting some inspiration,

some moment of creativity, and observed Deaver’s thick-featured face, the spatulate fingertips and his loose collar, the ends of his foulard lying loose on his lapels.

“No. I was never comfortable with it.”

“You don’t say.” Deaver reached for another, finer brush in the jar. His eyes were intent on the paper. “How is that?”

“I’m not sure. We live in the modern world now. Some of the older people still use it.”

“But you come from a Quaker family.” “Yes.”

“Of Philadelphia.”

“Near Philadelphia. Yes, an old Quaker family.”

“An old, rich Quaker family.”

“Just so.” Samuel stepped forward and bent over the jar and stirred it with a brush. “Your water is dirty.”

“Yes, yes, a recurrent problem. Dirty water.” Deaver made an- other swift line and bent over to blow on it several times and then straightened up again and set out a box of colors in round palettes. He took a drink from the tumbler. The colors in the box were pri- mary, rich, they glowed in the candlelight while all around him were the sepia tones of unpainted wood and the dull colors of the woolen clothing on the shelves that the Indians did not want. What they wanted were the sort of brilliant tones that shone out of Mr. Deaver’s box, splashy calicoes and plaids. He lifted his head.

“Come and look if you like.”

Samuel walked around and stood behind him. It was a picture of Mato Tope of the Mandan, his elaborate hair, his face paint and the rich tones of his dark skin contrasted strongly with the lime green and dark red of his shawl. Gold shone in his ears.

“This all means something,” Mr. Deaver said. “You see here this sort of toy knife in his hair. It means he stabbed a Cheyenne chief to death. These small cylinders mean that he has been shot so many times . . .” Deaver paused. “Ah, seven times.”

Samuel pressed his lips together. He looked down at the haughty, aristocratic face on the paper.

“Why?” he said.

“I don’t know.” Deaver smiled. “I am only the recording angel.” He turned and pushed a stool toward Samuel, who sat down on the cowskin seat.

“Apparently there are captives among them,” said Samuel. “Among who?” Deaver’s hand wavered for a moment over the

paper and then he drew a bright yellow stripe, very fine, across the lime green and red shawl. He was making a plaid of it.

“The Indians of my agency. The Comanche and Kiowa and the others.”

Deaver nodded. “And how do you come to terms with that? I wonder.”

Samuel considered.

“I pity them. The red men. These are desperate measures. When I consider how we have crowded them and dispossessed them from the Atlantic on westward. They have been driven and harried and cheated. Perhaps they feel that by taking captives they will convince us to stop.”

“Yes, but the Comanche originally came from the north and dis- possessed others.”

“How do you know that?”

“An Apache told me.” Deaver ate several pieces of the crumbled hardtack. “All you have to do is ask.”

Samuel was silent a moment, and then he laughed at himself. “I see.”

Deaver brushed crumbs from his front. “They all take captives. They take captives from other tribes, from the Mexicans, from white people.” He carefully laid aside the portrait of Mato Tope to dry and then turned over to another sheet. It was an unfinished sketch; a scaffold burial and four or five people lifting a wrapped figure onto a framework of poles. “Probably they always have.” Deaver regarded the sketch and with one hand reached out to the jar of rinse water and lifted it to his lips.

“Stop,” said Samuel. “You are drinking your rinse water.” “Again.” Deaver put it down. “Thank you.” He reached for the

tumbler and drank and replaced it on the table. He began to firm up the lines of the sketch and then with his little finger he drew a smudge of charcoal inside the outline of a man and this gave the figure substance and a presence as if it actually weighed a certain number of pounds apart from the thin paper, apart from and be- yond the lines in which it was constrained. A windy day and all their hair f lying, they wept for this beloved now abandoned to the ravens. The ravens then appeared with four light strokes, pen- dant in the unfinished sky. “Like a chess game, in a way. Taking pawns.”

Samuel nodded and thudded the joint of his thumb impatiently on his knee.

“Have you seen any captives?”

“I think I have. No, no, I am sure of it, now that I consider it. Up in Kansas. I was eating tamales and quail with a headman, or just a man, and a girl with blue eyes went by with a large bone.”

“Among this agency’s Indians?”

“Yes. They are elusive, strange creatures.” He waved his brush in the air. “She ran when she saw me. They are like elves. They are not white and they are not Indian either. They seem almost artificial.”

“What band was it? What was her name?”

“No idea. The band was some families of the Quahada, I think.”

“They must be retrieved.” Samuel shifted on the three-legged stool. “They must give them up or I will consider cutting off their rations.” He looked around at the darkened spaces of the warehouse. “You need another candle in here.”

“Many times they don’t want to be retrieved.”

“I suppose they are afraid of being killed if they tried to es- cape.”

“That. And also, life without clothing may be a marvelous thing.” Deaver smiled and placed clouds beyond the ravens with a thin white wash; vague indications of cumulus. “They become bonded and secured to their captors in some way we don’t under- stand. Surely it is not the cuisine.”

“I was never informed of this, the captives, in Philadelphia.” “No?” Deaver carried the thin white wash over to a man’s figure

and made two white dots on a head of black hair. Thus placing re- flections on it and by inference the light of a plains sun.

“No. It is not a matter of general knowledge.”

“My goodness, there are stories and published accounts going back to colonial times. Last year the Oatman girl went around lec- turing with the Mojave tattoo on her chin. It looked like some big biting thing, as if she had enormous black canines. Artfully done. Willful ignorance, then.” Deaver sat back and shifted a new loose page out of his portfolio. He took up a steel pen, dipped it in a bot- tle, and began bringing something to life with quick, calligraphic

slashes. “We spend our lives in worlds remote from one another. We imagine we all live together on this round earth but we do not.”

Samuel sighed and bent his head, clasped his hands together between his knees.

“Colonel Grierson seems to think it is a small matter.” “Give him time. You are only just here.”