The Color of Lightning (3 page)

Chapter 2
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h at d ay o f
October 13, when the men were in Weath- erford buying supplies, a combined force of seven hundred Comanche and Kiowa poured down into what the white people knew as Young County. The force split up on the drainage of Rab- bit Creek, and several hundred Kiowa and Comanche men turned west and rode down both banks of Elm Creek. The first people they came upon were Joel Meyers and his son Paul and they killed both of them. A lance went straight through Joel Meyers and as he fell he clawed at it but within seconds his lungs had filled with blood and it poured out of his mouth so that although inside his head he heard

himself calling for his son, no words came out.

Paul ran for a hundred yards or so until Hears the Dawn caught him by his home-knit suspenders and dragged him for a long way while others shot arrows into his left eye and his abdomen and his chest and at last Hears the Dawn dropped him because the oth- ers were already galloping toward the Fitzgerald cabin. On the way they shot down Joseph Meyers. He spun backward over the cantle of his saddle and turned a complete somersault and lay dead facedown in the grass. Two men stopped to disembowel him, and take his

scalp, and divide his body into quarters as if to drive every last sign of humanity from his remains.

As they came on toward the Fitzgerald place on Elm Creek Mary talked and talked and sang and had done so all morning, but had never said a word about what had taken place between herself and Britt. Susan quietly told her mother to quit asking and not to get involved in black people’s affairs. Lottie Durgan, age three, re- fused to share a June bug on a string with Cherry Johnson, age five, calling her a nigger, and was heartily slapped by Elizabeth for say- ing nigger, and the June bug flew away high, high into the cool air trailing a thread, the last length of red thread in Elizabeth’s sewing kit, trailing it like a tiny line of blood.

The women heard them coming. It was unmistakable. The roar of more than a hundred horses at full gallop. There was no other sound like it in the world. It was like some giant piece of machinery bearing down on them from the north along the creek. Elizabeth Fitzgerald dropped her sausage grinder and grabbed for the powder horn and the ramrod but she spilled the powder.
“Susan, Susan!”
she screamed. Pieces of beef and slithering entrails spilled from a pan and flopped writhing on the kitchen floor.

Her daughter Susan Durgan had already loaded the forty-year- old Kentucky long rifle and ran out the door and on until she was out from under the roof of the veranda. She lifted the heavy flintlock, standing on the stones of the path. Mary grabbed the smaller chil- dren by their wrists and flung them inside the door so hard Millie Durgan, who was eighteen months old, fell on her face and skidded into the washstand. Elizabeth scooped up the gunpowder with a page she had torn out of Deuteronomy. Jim Johnson and Joe Carter were both now twelve years old and they knew they had to act as men but they were without weapons. They had entered into another life within seconds. All that they had been thinking of and talking about moments before were now things that might have been writ- ten down in some ancient text that told of life long ago.

Susan stood on the path stones and aimed the long rifle care- fully. She brought down Little Buffalo with one shot but then they

were on her and hacking at her. Elizabeth saw that her daughter was dead and shut the door as Susan Durgan was cut to pieces by the first men who reached her. She was dragged out into the yard by one leg and her clothes stripped from her. They hacked at her white breasts. She had life enough left to try to turn toward the door to see that it was shut and then all her life and her blood erupted from her chopped neck arteries. Elizabeth and the two larger boys threw the table and the chests up against the door but it could not be held.

Hears the Dawn and a man named That’s It smashed through the door and kicked away the remnants of boards and hinges. Sud- denly the cabin was full of men. Their hands reached out and took hold of flesh and balled up into fists and struck. A Kiowa and a Comanche each took one of Jim Johnson’s arms and claimed him. Then they began to fight with one another until at last Aperian Crow, a Koitsenko of the Kiowa, turned in exasperation and shot the boy dead. In the crowded, violent confines of the room the ex- plosion was deafening.

In the thick gunsmoke Comanche and Kiowa dragged the little girls and Jube out of their hiding places in the other rooms. They tied Joe Carter’s hands and beat him over the head with their rifle barrels. They smashed all the crockery and tore the featherbeds apart and threw up handsful of drifting down into the air. They ripped open the last bag of flour and scattered it and poured dirt and sand into the cornmeal bin. Mary and Elizabeth were tied to horses. The children were held in front by men. Then they were out and on the open prairie, riding hard. Susan Durgan’s scalp and its tangled brown hair bounced on the pommel of a man named Eaten Alive. As he rode, the bobby pins and the comb came out of it and fell into the grass.

They ran the Texans’ stolen horses before them, the saddle horses and the gasping great bay draft horses, and then finally they halted beyond the Clear Fork of the Trinity. Three or four men stripped both women of their clothes so that they could not run away. They threw fuel on a great fire. In the bright, manic and arid night air thorn branches were seized by fire and burned into black script.

The men danced in a delicate, lifting step as if the earth no longer anchored them. Each man danced for himself alone, and the men at the drum sang in a high, tenor plainsong about war and the quick, beautiful horses that they owned and loved, horses that had brought them out of the northern mountains and carried them against their enemies. The men sometimes left off the dance and raped Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Mary Johnson. They tied the women’s legs apart and bound their ankles to brush while one man after another forced himself into the heavy white woman and the black woman. Mary tried to shove the first one away by grabbing his chin and forcing his head back, screaming. A man who moments before had been singing at the fire smashed her head with a rock. It sounded like someone had dropped a melon from a great height.

Then after many men had had their turn the younger boys came. A twelve-year-old Kiowa boy got up smiling and his groin was cov- ered in blood. Mary lay very still. The Kiowa boy wrapped her dress around his shoulders and said
yabba-babba-wuh-huh
as if he could imitate Mary’s speech. He then looked over his shoulder at the old- er men who had tired and were sitting by the fire on packsaddles. They laughed and so he began kicking Elizabeth in her dense, pad- ded flesh.

No, said Elizabeth. No, no. She fought to pull her legs together.

Joe Carter, who was twelve and also naked, rose up with his wrists tied and threw himself at the Kiowa boy, screaming.
“You fucking Indian, you goddamned red nigger!”
He bore the boy over backward and kneed him in the balls and the boy doubled up, snort- ing. Joe Carter was on top when Hears the Dawn brought down his knife on Joe’s neck, severing his spinal column. For long moments Joe Carter kicked and trembled spasmodically. He lay on his face in the dirt, his arms beneath him and kicked out one last time like a mechanical toy and then lay still.

In the slow dim moments before dawn the Comanche named Esa Havey came and cut the cords that tied Elizabeth and Mary. He sat down and looked at both of them and the children who had come to sleep beside them in the night; Cherry, age five, and Jube

Johnson, age nine, Lottie Durgan who was three, and little Millie who was eighteen months. The children were silent and still. They knew that they might die at the hands of these men and their moth- ers could not protect them. Elizabeth looked back at Esa Havey. He slapped her hard and her nose began to bleed. He did not like a woman’s direct stare. Elizabeth looked down. It seemed that she would be able to travel. If she were not able to stay on a horse they would kill her. Mary sat up and smiled. Esa Havey watched her. He looked closely at her eyes. Both of her eyes were open and focused so she would probably not die from the blow to her head but she was strange. Mary blew a kiss to him from her bloody mouth. He stood up and walked away in the dark.

“Mary?” said Elizabeth. She was whispering. “Mary.”

The outline of Mary’s cheekbones shone in the starlight. Her eyes wandered. “Night, late,” said Mary.

Elizabeth was silent for a long time. If only Mary would not have a seizure, if only she could ride, they might live.

“Yes, we’re out very late,” Elizabeth said, and watched as Mary stroked her hand over Cherry’s wildly waving hair. “We’ll have to get home, here, one of these days.”

Mary nodded but said nothing.

“We’ll have to do some hard riding, Mary,” said Elizabeth. Mary nodded.

“Mary, can you talk?” “Yes.”

“Do you understand?” “Yes.”

“Well, tell me what I just said.”

Mary turned her large dark eyes toward the flames that cracked up around twisted wood, around the hard dry brush that left little scent or smoke. Sparks floated upward to the yellow stone of the low bluffs of the Dry Fork of the Trinity River. The men moved among the horses. They pulled out their war stallions and let them go to rest and graze and follow as they would. One of the men brought out a stumbling, lamed pinto. There was a shot. Something heavy

fell with an earthen crash. The men began to cut pieces from the pinto.

“I don’t care what you just said.” Mary said this very clearly. Then she bent down and pressed her cheek against the top of Cherry’s head. “Undin Jim,” she whispered. “Un Jim din.”

Elizabeth pushed back her bloody hair and she felt her naked- ness against the world. One man had grabbed at her nipples and wrenched them repeatedly, as if he were trying to tear them off, and now there were knotted swellings under both nipples. Her breasts hung down heavily, weighted with bruises and pus. Her son Joe’s body lay in the brush where someone had dragged it. Now flies were lighting on it, and she knew flies were buzzing about the bodies of young Jim Johnson and her daughter Susan where she lay in the yard with a bald and bony skull. Maybe the dogs had come to them already and she understood that she would have to think about whether she wanted to live or die. She couldn’t think at the moment. Her two granddaughters sat awake and silent with their hands gripped around her arms. She would have to live for now.

“Mary, Jim is dead.”

Mary put her hands to her eyes. “Half and half,” she said. She pressed her hands against her eyes and tears ran down between her fingers.

Elizabeth understood she meant something about when the two men who had grabbed him each by one arm.

“Don’t let them hear you cry,” she said. “Half and half,” whispered Mary.

th e y w e r e th r e e
days riding and on the second day Esa Havey came and threw bundles of cloth at Mary and Elizabeth. The women pulled on the remains of their underclothes and dresses and pulled them between their legs so that they would not rasp and chafe against the horses. The men would not give them saddles be- cause they were war saddles. They would be ruined and polluted by the women’s blood. On the second and third nights ten or so of the

men came to them and took their fill of sex but they stopped beating them although one man with otter-wrapped braids could not resist smashing Elizabeth across the breasts when he saw she was trying to protect her swollen nipples against his rough pounding. She did not scream. He wanted to make her scream and so he took up his bow and once again hit her across the breasts. The pain was so deep and fundamental that she fainted. After that loud words came from a man, shouted at another group of men. The men seemed divided in some way. They were arguing. Two men stood face-to-face and shouted.

Mary sat up and watched them with interest. She did not seem to care about the men who came to her and shoved themselves in- side her. Now she watched their faces in the firelight and their ges- tures and listened to their edged, dangerous voices. She sat beside Elizabeth and absentmindedly patted her head as if she were a child or a pet. Then she turned and circled little Millie under one arm and Cherry under another. Jube sat with Lottie. Then Mary took Cherry’s hand and made her pat Elizabeth on the forehead. Mary hummed a little and then as Elizabeth began to make groaning noises she pressed her hand over the white woman’s mouth. She knew the men were arguing about them; that the men had begun to lose the luminous aura that had sustained them in their ride and their attacks and their war-fury. It was drifting away. They were like men who had been very drunk and were now falling into the gray and ashy world of sobriety and were not yet hungover. To get out of that gray and ashy world and back into the wild light of sheer ag- gression they might rape the little girls. But somehow she could not put this into words, even in her mind.

Mary kept her hand tight over Elizabeth’s mouth and after a few moments the older woman stopped groaning. She sat up and held her arms across her breasts as if the pressure might help relieve the pain.

“Mary,” she said. “I want to die.”

“Too, too, when too,” Mary whispered, and lifted a hand to her head wound.

Elizabeth could not make sense of this. Esa Havey and another man spoke loudly and signed to a crowd of the other men and boys in front of the fire. They used the Plains sign language. They did not all have hair alike. A tall man with a slightly receding chin got up and started on a determined walk toward the captives. Even though Mary threw out both hands above Lottie Durgan’s head he grasped Lottie by the arm and knocked Mary aside. Esa Havey came up and shoved the man backward until he let go of Lottie. Elizabeth crawled forward and took hold of her granddaughter’s skirt and drew her into her weakened arms.

They stopped arguing. The silence was chilling. Each man turned and saddled his own horse and they threw the women onto barebacked ponies. By this time Elizabeth’s arms and face and throat were blistered with the sun and netted with bloody hash marks by the stiff creosote and blackbrush stands. Esa Havey took Lottie Durgan and put the little girl behind him. Lottie did not cry or look at her grandmother. The man with the receding chin came and handed the eighteen-month-old Millie to Mary after he had glanced at Elizabeth and saw her barely clinging to the pony’s mane. Then he took Cherry behind him and someone else took Jube. They went on in the night without moon or starlight and the horses car- ried their heads low to see the ground before them. They moved north under heavy cloud cover, in damp, thick air that seethed with incipient lightning.