The Color of Lightning (25 page)
“Still.” Samuel stood up and paced a few steps and turned. “Dr. Reed of the Friends’ Indian Committee is determined I should not use force. But I think about it.”
“Ah, Mr. Hammond. Life changes us.” “I wish you would call me Samuel.”
Deaver gave a brief bow of his head. “And I am James.” “And where have you been since I saw you on the train?”
“I went among the tribes near Omaha, and then to Denver, which was very boring, and then along with an army expedition to Wyoming. War has broken out there with Red Cloud of the Sioux. The army is building forts there in Wyoming along the Bozeman and they gallop out from time to time to do punitive things. I know you don’t approve but they are just the same.”
“Is that why you came down here?” Samuel sat down again and regarded the pen sketch taking shape beneath Deaver’s hand.
“It certainly is. Ridgeway Glover, he was an artist for
Frank Les- lie’s Illustrated Weekly,
just got sent to the happy hunting grounds. They found him a couple of miles from Fort Smith naked and scalped and cut in half longways. And so I decided to move on.” Deaver emptied the tumbler. “Colonel Grierson gave me a bottle of sherry. Won’t you have some?”
Samuel sat in silence for a few moments. “What? Oh, no, I don’t drink.”
“Very well. But, and this might interest you, first I went with a rather scholarly military man to the Snake River country in Idaho, that’s just to the west of Wyoming.” His hand was busy over the pa- per. Samuel knew he enjoyed astonishing him, Samuel Hammond, with stories of his relentless journeys. The danger and the discover- ies. While Samuel the Quaker sat in his agency house and fussed
with columns of figures. “Captain Charles Bendire, a gentleman, a naturalist, an infantryman. Yes, the Snake River country, which is where they say the Comanches came from. It is a curious thing.”
“What is?”
“There are fossils of
horses
there in the valley of the Snake River. Ancient fossils of horses very like the ones the Indians ride now. There were horse skulls and leg bones falling out of a bluff over the melodious waters of the Snake. At some time in ages past the Co- manche must have known them. And then they disappeared.”
“Really. The horses you mean. The horses disappeared.”
“Yes. And the Comanche, they say, are the most proficient horsemen in the world. The first of all Indians to take up horseback riding. They found again their long-lost brothers, their darlings, their pets. Very curious. Then back to Denver and then down here. My companion, the reporter, has covered all he wants to cover and has gone back to New York. Especially after poor Ridgeway was brought in all in tatters. Fulsome funeral obsequies, lamenting and so on. But I wanted to come down here. I didn’t want to miss the Comanche.”
“No, certainly not.”
Samuel emerged on the paper. His face square and lined and his mouth horizontal.
“That’s me.”
“It is indeed.” Deaver took a small brush out of the glass of rinse water and wiped it on his pants leg and then drew it across one of the little palettes and touched in pinkish flesh tones. Another palette; gray eyes.
“I look rather grim.”
“You find yourself in a grim situation, Samuel, I think it is an impossible situation.”
“Keeping the Texans and the Indians apart.”
“And keeping your Quakers happy back in Philadelphia.”
Samuel folded his arms. “I will make it clear to these people that farming, or at least keeping cattle, is far superior to the life they are living now. I don’t understand why they prefer war.”
“It’s beyond me,” said Deaver. “They raid down into Texas, where the Texans are trying to farm. And then they come up here in the winter to the reservation where it is safe.” He took up a cloth and wiped his hands. The cloth was a rainbow of paint smears. “I have often wondered why they didn’t just bring the Texans up here to the reservation and let them farm, eh?”
“But then there wouldn’t be anybody to raid.”
“There are always the Mexicans,” said Deaver. He whipped up a dirty foam in the jar and then wiped his brushes and laid them in his paint box. He closed it and flicked the catch. “How many human beings remain in this world, unvanquished and at liberty in plains like these? So few, so few. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
Samuel stared at the leaping candle flame and then turned in his chair. “Yes,” he said. “We make them ourselves, at great trouble and expense.”
“I wouldn’t fool with these people too much,” Deaver said. “They are not toys or dolls that one can arrange their thoughts or minds as you wish, simply give them a change of costume. They are grown men and they are lethal.” Deaver took up the portrait of Mato Tope and held it horizontally to the candlelight and squinted down it as if it were a gunsight. He saw that it was dry and held it out to look at it. “A proud man,” he said. “Arrogant, I would say. Handsome.”
“By reasoning with them, am I treating them as toys?” “Your reasoning only goes one way.”
“Quite true. But still I will reason. They cannot take captives or kill women and children. It is insupportable.”
Deaver put the portrait away and sat back with his eyes half closed. “They are our great mystery. They are America’s great oth- erwise. People fall back in the face of an impenetrable mystery and refuse it. Yes, they take captives. Sometimes they kill women and old people. But the settlers are people who shouldn’t be where they are in the first place and they know it and they take their chances.”
“You are very cavalier about this.”
“So are they, my friend. The Texans are cavalier as well. Perhaps
we can regard this as a tragedy. Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not amenable to rea- son and we are fixers, aren’t we? We can fix everything.”
“This is not a matter of abstract argument for me,” Samuel said. “I am the Indian agent.” He put on his hat. “I have to do some- thing.” He started toward the door. “I am in a position of authority for the first time in my life. Come and have supper. There is a room for you.”
“I thought there would be.” Deaver got up. “I am coming.”
He blew on the watercolor sketch of Samuel’s face and then folded him in with the mourning Comanche and closed the workbook.
W
J
ub e h a d b e e n
sleeping curled up on his left side. The black horse stood over him patiently. The bowstring and reins
were tied to his wrist and he lay at the edge of a forest of smooth dead trees whose lead-colored branches bent to the ground in circle after circle like a city of fossils. The naked forest was extensive and far off to the horizon they printed on the sky and the land their repeated black curves. Waves of new grass shimmered throughout this unshaded woods. A dead forest of mesquite that had grown up a century ago after years of rains and then the capricious rain time had evaporated and the trees died.
The black horse stood with his head down as if it were too heavy to raise. He breathed slowly and his eyes were closed. A horse could not travel for two days without water. Nor could he. The horizon all around was level, the air thin with a high, silting dust in the sky. He remembered the day when he was captured that the men had stopped and burned off cactus needles and fed the flat green pads to the horses. So Jube broke off dead limbs and the dry grass stems among the new green growth, and took his flint and steel and chipped some sparks into the pile. He broke off another limb and
with it beat down a patch of prickly pear, picked up the flat pads with two sticks and threw them in the fire. The needles burned with quick flashes.
The horse ate them, one by one. Jube ate one as well. He sat and looked around himself. He did not know where he was on these broad plains. For the second time in his young life the knowledge that he could die came upon him but it was strangely thrilling, the thought took him in an exciting sort of tremor. The very fear of dying itself was intoxicating. It made him feel as if he had expanded and were large and cunning and adult. He understood there were great issues at stake and he had taken a perilous gamble like a grown man.
He had to find water. He was not a child that somebody had to find water for him. He had to find it himself or die.
He walked on, leading the black horse, through the waves of grass toward the southeast. Before the sun went down he made an- other fire in a dry wash and threw on more cactus pads and fed some to the horse and ate some himself. He lay down with the horse tied to his wrist and the slimy cactus fiber clinging and sticky in his mouth, like glycerin.
The next day very early he heard thunder toward the east. He sat up and listened. He could now barely walk and so he decided to sit where he was for a while. The black horse tried to graze with its dry mouth, one step at a time. The world grew lighter. Jube sat in the bed of grass where he had slept the night and watched as a heavy layer of rain cloud gathered and moved and strung itself out and gathered again in blue-gray foam to the east, dragging after it long, bending columns of rain.
With the increasing light the clouds moved over a series of flat- topped formations that had no tree or brush on them. They were perfectly bare. They were draped in short green grass that lay like velvet over every angle and rise.
“Those are the Antelope Hills,” he said. He began to walk to- ward them. He thought he remembered that the Canadian River ran on this side of the Antelopes. If he could keep on walking to- ward them, he would come upon the river.
It took him a long time to walk a mile, a mile and a half. Milk- weed plants stood scattered through the stands of Indian Blanket flowers of rich oranges and garnet. It began to rain in fine, thin mists. Jube held his hand out to it and licked his palm and kept walking. The Antelope Hills seemed plush, a paradise of water. Their tops were as flat as if they had been sheared off with a sword. Then Jube came to the white sands and stunted cottonwoods of the upper Canadian River and the Antelopes on the far side of it. He saw the sparkling braided water while the rain fell on him and the horse. They dragged through the fine sand and willows and at last drank together from the shallow clear water. Then he sat up and wiped his mouth and got to his feet and waded the main current. The flat crests of the Antelopes rose above him. He would lie there the day and drink and drink and then go on. When he pissed his urine was dark brown. The next morning the black horse grazed nearby, eating steadily. Jube went to the river and drank again.
Now he could follow the Canadian southeastward. Somewhere along that stream he would find his father and mother and sister and he would be able to prove that he had not betrayed them, that he loved them even more than the wild life on the plains.
When he saw them they were walking slowly across a sunlit level of bent grass striped yellow and new green. “Papa,” he said. “Papa!” His father was walking with his hand on his mother’s knee. Cherry’s small dark head bobbed behind her. They drifted defense- less through the morning air, measuring out every slow step toward home.
“Dad!” he shouted. “Dad!”
br i t t a n d m a r y
slept with the two children between them. They lay in their blankets like parentheses around the two lives in their care, as if the rest of humanity had been destroyed by a volcanic explosion or a f lood and only they four were left to start the world again. They slept all day and traveled in the night along the route Britt had come to know in its rivercourses with their long
galleries of trees alongside and the stars overhead and the rising sun. Mary spoke to the children in sign, and often Cherry and Jube called to one another in Kiowa. Britt rode with Jube on the saddle behind, and Mary and his daughter rode together on the pack- horse, whose pack was now light. As they rode, he asked Mary for the descriptions of the men who had laid hands on her. She told him. It took a long time. There had been two of her, one enduring and one looking on. The one looking on was not much moved or disturbed by what was happening to the other. She said she re- membered two, one was a man with a sun tattoo on his chin. The other a tall man with a receding chin. They were the only two she
could remember.
When they reached the house on Elm Creek, the dust had sifted in the door, the trumpet vine snarled around the windows and hinges. Britt made up a fire and swept out the house and watched silently as Mary went to sit beside young Jim’s grave, holding her hands over her face. She seemed to have just now remembered all that had hap- pened in the Fitzgerald house.
Jube and Cherry came to stand beside her with confused looks as they carefully read the words on the headboard and came up against the fact that the gates of life had closed behind their older brother with a final shutting and all that remained was his name and brief, fissured images of him in some other life. They seemed to have been in a dream for all these past eight months or perhaps to have become some other persons who had to be reminded that they had former selves who lived on Elm Creek in a house with a roof, that they had worn hats on their heads and shoes with heels. That they had cooked in a kettle in a fireplace and had windows to look out of. That they must now come back and inhabit those selves.
Britt worked to prepare his provisions and equipment for the trip north to search for Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her granddaugh- ter Lottie. Jube sat watching. He had almost become a warrior. He had been on the war road to becoming a fighting man. He re- fused to carry water for his mother. He sat against the hard walls of their house; walls that were fixed and immovable. There were
no people now. Only them. Mother, father, his sister and himself, all alone.
“Do what I tell you,” said Britt. “Your mother needs the water.” “That’s women’s work,” said Jube. He leaned back against the
house wall with his hands in his pockets.
“Not here it ain’t,” said Britt. “Not on Elm Creek.” “It’s not right,” said Jube.
“Move,” said Britt. “You are going with me when I go for Mrs.
