The Color of Lightning (37 page)

Paint and Britt brought their team to a halt and jumped out.

“I can’t get her up,” he said. He twisted her tail and slapped her on the hindquarters. “Come on girl, get up, get up, Bella.” The gray mare groaned where she lay and she threw her head back again and again, along the ground, until she had made an angel wing in the dirt. “Damn, I am going to lose her.”

“Look here,” said Paint. “Here’s how.” He knelt his stocky body down beside the mare’s head. He clamped his black-and-white fin- gers around the mare’s mouth and nostrils and shut off her wind entirely. “Wait,” he said. After a moment of suffocation the mare fought wildly to her feet and Paint jumped out of the way. Britt was already in the driver’s seat and touched the bays with the whip and Paint and the man kept after the grays, slapping them, encouraging them. After a few minutes there was the sound of spurting, trum- peting farts that were as loud as steam whistles.

“Thank God!” the man said. “There you go,” said Britt.

“Whew.” Paint waved his hand in front of his face. “I am being knocked out, here.”

After another mile the man and Paint climbed up into the seat beside Britt and the grays came along behind, nodding. They had lost their sweat and were still farting. So they came into Graham, down the gentle slope on the far side of the Brazos among the hills that the river had carved out of the plains in ages past.

“Now what else is going to happen?” said Britt. He shifted the reins between one large callused hand and another.

“Well, what else has happened?” said the man. “My name is Barton Calloway.”

“Yes sir. My name is Britt Johnson, this here is Paint Craw- ford.”

“Britt Johnson,” the man said and looked at him.

“Well,” Britt said. “We slept in the warehouse there at Belknap and this morning a dog or something ran off with one of my boots. Damn, I looked all over.” He shifted his feet. On one foot he had a lace-up and on the other a pull-up boot. “Could have been a goat.”

“You’re Britt Johnson,” said Calloway.

“Uh-huh.”

There was a wowing, clattering sound as the right forward tire came loose from its wheel, and even though Britt stood up and pulled on the reins they could not stop in time. The wood of the wheel had shrunk under the tire in the summer heat and long travels and so the iron hoop sidled off the wheel rim and went bounding down the hill into the Graham salt works. It struck a stone and leaped into the air and bowled on downhill, gaining speed. There was nothing they could do but shout.

The iron tire hurled in great bounds and among the smoke and boilings of the salt works some men stood up and yelled. The tire bounced onto a kettle rim and jumped into the air. Hot drops of brine bolted upward and then the tire ran on through the salt works to the one street of Graham, the warehouse and two buildings of upright pickets, into an open space, and struck full into a trader’s wagon. The trader was a man who dealt in mirrors and shawls and pins and fash- ion dolls and sheet music and little blue china teapots. The tire hit the backcloth against which these things were displayed, and pieces of china and the heads of porcelain dolls sprayed. The peddler was shouting and swearing when they pulled in. He took off his bowler hat and hit it against the rail of his trader’s cart, shouting unknown words in an unknown language. His hand was shaking.

Britt walked up to him with his large hands gently patting the air. “Mister, I’ll make it good.”

The man was from some far country across the ocean, and he spoke in a language Britt could not understand as he set up the table and gathered up smashed teacups and loose sheets of music. Men came out of the warehouse to watch. The little trader was furious and there were tears in his eyes as if this strange visitation of a loose iron hoop smashing into his small stock of cheap and delicate trea- sures was the last in a long series of insults and failures. He looked up at Britt, who was at least a foot taller, with a suddenly frightened expression. He had a thin small face with black mustaches, and the drooping points of his mustaches were trembling. A sweating fat man at one of the boiling kettles watched and cried out, “Hor hor

hor, Britt! You bought yourself a dollie! Hor hor hor!” Brit reached out and patted the trader’s arm.

“It’s all right, it’s all right.”

The man calmed down a little. Britt came to stand beside him. The foreigner looked up at him with round black eyes. Britt pre- tended to write with his right hand on his left palm. “What do I owe you?”

The man wiped his face with his sleeve. It was possible that the writing gesture meant,
I am a huge black outlaw and I am going to kill you so write out your last will and testament right now.
But after a moment the small man fished a pencil out of his pocket and a little pad of paper. The man went over the damage and wrote everything down in a shaky script and then added it up. It came to seven dol- lars. He showed Britt the writing and the sums. Britt took off his laced boot and opened a small packet that had been sewn to the upper and handed him the seven dollars in paper. The man stared at Britt’s two different boots for a moment and then nodded and put the bills in his pocket. Britt held out his hand. The man stared at it with his mouth slightly open and so Britt reached down and took his hand and shook it carefully.

“It’s all right,” Britt said. “Yes yes.”

Then Britt looked over the undamaged articles tangled up in the fallen backcloth and found a small hand mirror.

“This too,” he said. “For my wife.” “You wife? Wife.”

“Yes. How? Much?”

The small foreigner hesitated. He had just sold more articles than he would normally have sold in a week and he had the money in his pocket. He did not have to tramp about with his handcart in the hot sun for a whole day if he didn’t feel like it. He could sit in the cooling shade and repair things. He smiled and said, “Gift, gift. I gift you.”

“Nah,” said Britt.

“Yes yes! I gift you! You wife. Take it, take it.”

Britt turned the mirror over in his large hand. The man’s lips trembled as he nodded and smiled once more. Britt could not know that the little man had at one time been to a Shakespearean play translated into Romanian and had seen an actor painted coal black named Othello, who strangled a little blond actress until her eyes bulged in the footlights. Britt would not have known the name Shakespeare, or Othello.

“Thank you,” said Britt. “Yes yes,” said the man.

Britt wiped the dusty mirror off on his shirtsleeves. It had a wooden frame that had been figured and gilded. He put it inside his shirt in the hopes that Mary might look at herself again. To make up for a mirror once thrown and smashed on the floor. That she might look at herself and see once again that she was beautiful and loved and desired. The small foreign man would never know what the mirror meant to Britt, or the extravagant hopes he put in it. The terrible damage he was asking it to undo.

So Britt found himself in possession of broken teapots and a doll that was nearly whole except for a chip off the right side of her head and some torn sheet music as well as the mirror. He took the clinking bag of destroyed gewgaws back to the wagon. They un- tied Calloway’s team and backed his wagon off. Fire flared in the broad daylight. The wooded hills around Graham were slowly being stripped of timber for the salt boiling.

Britt and Paint nodded to the men and turned to unload the delivery. Britt took the end of the long crate of surveyor’s equipment and began to back away. Paint jumped down to take the other end. The wagon wheel that had thrown its tire was frayed on every felloe, and it would take an hour to reset the tire.

The man Calloway stood and watched.

“You was the one went and got Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her granddaughter from the Indians up there.”

“Yes sir.” Britt staggered backward with his end of the crate. They dropped it at the door of the building. Dust billowed up. He straightened and beat the dust from his hands. “And my wife and

my two children.”

“Well, we just got word they went down to Legion Valley, south of here, and murdered three white women and a baby. Five days ago. They took a boy named Dot Babb and a girl, Bianca Babb. They call her Banc.” The man took off his hat and wiped his hair and put the hat back on. He decided not to go into the details of that extrava- gant butchery, a woman seven months pregnant and left without a head. “Is there any way you could look for them? If you been there twice you can go three times.”

“Maybe,” said Britt.

“I’d make it worth your while.” He beat dust from his hat. “The whole family would.”

“I got work to do,” said Britt. “But I would keep an eye out for them. What do they look like?”

Tears stood out in the man’s eyes. “They’re my niece and nephew.” He paused and cleared his throat. “I will write down their descrip- tion and names and everything.” He paused. “Can you read and write?”

“Yes,” said Britt.

“All right.” The man felt in his shirt pocket. “Just a minute. I got to borrow something to write with from old man Graham.”

“I’ll ask about them,” said Britt. “If I can.”

Chapter 31
‌

W

I

n th e fa ll
of 1870 the only children who came to the agency school were Caddo, a tribe that had settled down near

the agency in fear of the Comanche, and also they came because their mothers were busy and did not want them underfoot. Two boys and a girl. The children took up their pencils and pretended to draw the letters of the alphabet.

The schoolhouse was a cheerless place. It was so seldom used now that it had become a place where washing was done when it was not in use as a classroom and the teacher’s desk had to be cleared and the washtubs and pans and buckets of grainy soap squares put back in place after the lessons. Sometimes there were clothes soaking in a bucket and the one girl who attended was interested in whose clothes they might be. She held up a heavy cotton shawl that dripped all over the floor and said something in Caddo to one of the boys and they all laughed. Storms grumbled outside and they looked nervously out the window as the predatory thing they knew as Walking Thunder stalked up and down impatiently in the west, his interior fires streak- ing like incandescent wires across the clotted, pendant clouds.

The children seemed strangely mature. They seemed to under-

stand that life was a serious matter and often fatal. The teacher felt an air of contempt from them when they stared blankly at his enor- mous letters chalked on a black-painted board. A, this is A. There was a fierce rivalry between the two boys, who were of the same age or nearly the same age, and once a fight broke out over something the teacher did not understand and they hammered at one another with a silent and total commitment to doing damage to one another. He sat down between the two of them and asked what it was.

The girl translated. It was about one of the boys’ arrows that had been retrieved from a hornet’s nest and not given back. The teacher asked the girl to tell the boys that sharing was a good thing, because then other people would share with you. An arrow was a small thing, wasn’t it? Peace between people is a very big thing, a thing that wise men of all ages had considered, but they could have it if they wanted, even though it was very grand and its value beyond price.

The two boys drew off from one another and nodded and sat down again at the long bench and drew A’s. Their rules of sharing and property were very complicated and sacred. Certain parts of the buffalo were shared with father’s brother’s son and other parts with grandparents on the mother’s side and arrows carried one’s mark of right into the air like an announcement and this was a form of signaling and war speech that should never be taken by another, but the teacher could not know that and did not think to ask.

sa mue l sat at
his desk beside his glowing sheet-iron stove and its crisp, tinking coal fire that shone through the isinglass. There were stacks of requests from Texas, for reparations from those who had had horses stolen, houses burned, crops destroyed. Some of these were honest and others were not. He marked with an X those that were dubious. When there was government money to be had, people did all sorts of strange things. Honest men would lie. He turned down a request from an Oklahoma man to come and grow hay and corn on reservation land that would be used for the Kiowa

and Comanche rations. He refused the request because he knew the Comanche would destroy the crop, and the man knew it too, but he would then apply for reparations at two or three times what the crop was worth. The Comanche would be doing him a favor if they set it on fire. Then not only would the man have deceived the federal government but Samuel would have more paperwork.

Samuel very much wished to prosecute a thin young fellow with long yellow hair and an extravagant vest who had been taken up by soldiers and delivered to a sheriff for sharpshooting into a Comanche encampment up near the Cheyenne Agency. He had killed a woman and a young girl and got away with stolen horses. A vivid and ma- lignant young man whose boots had two-inch heels. However, since the incident occurred on reservation land it was a federal crime, and the closest federal courthouse was Fort Smith, Arkansas. Samuel had two witnesses who might testify against the young dandy, but it was a month’s trip there and back and he must send in a request to the superintendent at Fort Leavenworth for a daily stipend and travel money for these witnesses and that would take several months if it were even granted. The witnesses had no intention of taking on two weeks’ travel to Fort Smith, Arkansas, at their own expense to testify against someone whom they then had to live near if he got out on bail. And he would get out on bail.

The last Samuel heard the prospective witnesses and the alleged killer were drinking together in some sleazy saloon in a crossroads town in the Sans Bois Mountains. They laughed in fruity alcoholic voices and retold the story of how the woman and girl were shot down. How their hair flew. Neither Samuel nor Colonel Grierson had the authority to arrest and detain United States citizens if they were not on reservation land. Grierson would have been horrified if Samuel had asked him to. He would have said,
We are not under martial law here, sir.