The Color of Lightning (7 page)
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ot ti e b e ca m e re d - c h e e k e d
and feverish. Elizabeth knew the men would not abide a sick or crying captive child,
and the days after they were taken she carried Lottie in her arms. She made a sling of her shawl and wrapped the ends around both of them. She carried the three-year-old from the first great rise in the land until they came to a large encampment, where the men were greeted with shouts and singing. Women and girls danced alongside the men with their heraldic scalps, the confused and frightened sto- len horses. A great bonfire burned and in its light the horsemen rode around the camp to the songs and the cheering. They held up the things they had taken from the houses they had raided, they waved blankets and quilts, and a Kiowa warrior turned a hand mirror back and forth so that it flashed in the firelight.
Two old women came to them and seized Elizabeth by the arm and led her away into the dark and violent night. They shoved her and Lottie into a small stand of live oak. Mary and her two chil- dren and little Millie, eighteen months, were hidden by the elder women in some other place. They stayed there all night, watching the stars, as the celebration fires flared up and the singing went on
and on. The elder women sat between them and the firelit village of tipis. They watched from their old eyes, black with blue casts in them, old in their knowledge of the nature of men and raiding. They sat hooded in their blankets. Elizabeth held Lottie until the girl fell forward in sleep. Then she found herself waking up faint and hungry in a gray light.
That next day they went on. A light rain fell for two days, and it was cold. At some point they stopped and the traveling band of two hundred Comanche and Kiowa split up. The captives were divided between them. Elizabeth saw a young Kiowa woman sweep Millie up in her arms and stroke her hair and smile. The young woman pressed her cheek to the little girl with tears in her eyes. Elizabeth thought she would probably never see Millie again, and she was right.
The rain dropped thin as mist on the trees in the draws and painted their trunks dark as some unrefined ore, dark as slag coal. Elizabeth pulled her shawl over her head and over Lottie’s head when the two groups parted and she was shoved ahead with the Comanche. She could not see Mary or Jube or Cherry or Millie as they went away northwest with the Kiowa.
She walked on with the Comanche and their long, easy march of hundreds of horses and travois. The ends of the travois poles bore down to make deep wavering tracks in the wet earth and the heads of children with hair in stiff spikes stuck up out of bundles and blan- kets on the travois, jiggling like dolls. All along the trail were things that had been taken from houses on Elm Creek and then thrown away; a tobacco cutter soon abandoned because of its long, awkward handle, curling irons, a shoehorn, a flatiron, a pair of women’s high- laced shoes, a tintype of Jeremiah Durgan in its velvet frame and starred, cracked glass, all scattered in the grass.
They don’t want any of it,
thought Elizabeth.
They stole it and then they threw it away. All those things mean nothing to them.
Elizabeth found enough to eat as they went. She caught a painted terrapin and pried its shell apart. Inside there was meat and autumn fat. At the noon rest she boiled it inside its own shell and fed Lottie
first and then herself. She took up the bitter buffalo gourds and dug out their flesh and made drinking cups of them.
When they first came into camp Elizabeth was claimed as a slave by a skinny woman with a drawn and hostile face and elabo- rate tattoos around her mouth, who quickly taught her the Coman- che words for
water, wood, bring it
. Elizabeth endured the woman’s blows without a sound. The skinny woman was the wife of one of the men who had raped and beaten Elizabeth, and he had a thun- derbird painted on his tipi, an audacious claim to great power. His name meant Eaten Alive.
He had two wives, and the skinny woman was the older one. Elizabeth called her the Dismal Bitch. The younger had a round, plump face with a broad smile. Elizabeth saw her turn that happy face away when the Dismal Bitch turned on Elizabeth with her pony goad and left long bruises the shape and color of burned sticks on her arms.
Elizabeth Fitzgerald worked to make herself useful and needed so she could save Lottie’s life. The women’s lives were very hard. They were hard on others and hard on themselves. Eaten Alive’s skinny first wife lifted the massive fresh buffalo skins that weighed close to a hundred pounds with hands whose two forefingers were missing at the first joints where she had cut them off in grief over dead relatives. A brother whose raw half-broke pony ran him into a copse of trees on the drainage they called the Caddo’s Hand and knocked his brains out on a live oak branch. Her mother and father had perished in the great die-off of the spotted disease when wagon trains came through Comancheria on their way to California, and brought with them a killing fever, spirits that burned up so many people that there was hardly anyone left to hunt or pray. It left the people diminished and angry as hornets and perpetually hungry.
They came upon a small group of buffalo walking southward with their breath smoking from their wide muzzles, with their sweet and grassy smell. Their beloved outline of humped back and low- carried heads a template in the mind for tens of thousands of years. The men ran them down and killed them for the heavy autumn
hides, to make moccasin soles and rawhide boxes and the stiff mit- tenlike horseshoes for the stony plains ahead. For winter robes and buckets and rope. The women ripped off the weighty hides as they would strip blankets from a bed.
Elizabeth had diminished within the ragged remains of the yellow-and-pink-checkered dress. She was lank and hungry and forty years old. She lifted the moist, bloody skins onto travois at the killing grounds and walked behind them to the camp. She went around the edges of the skins and hammered in small stakes and then raked the skins clean with a cast-iron scraper. She tore off the white connective tissue in great swaths. She broke into skulls with a stone and pulled the brains out and folded the shivering gray pud- ding into the damp skin. She was silent and furious at this filthy work and the primitive process. Why didn’t they get themselves a tanner’s beam and a big two-handed fleshing knife? They liked to kill themselves working, that’s why. She ripped at the skin as if it were one of the men who had raped her.
Every evening she was weary beyond feeling and still she car- ried water in buckets made of buffalo stomach until it was dark. Somewhere in camp were captives from villages in New Mexico but Elizabeth knew she was not to speak to them or see them and how she knew this was hard to say but she kept her head down with an acid feeling of willed subservience. She fed Lottie pieces of raw marrow out of her greasy hands. She did not know what was wrong with the child. The three-year-old’s head lolled on her shoulders as Lottie struggled to hold her head upright. Perhaps it was some spiri- tual collapse, a shrinking of the mind against the world in which she found herself.
Lottie did not cry. She was silent. No one adopted her because they were afraid of what disease she might have. Perhaps she was inhabited by some hostile entity, something living in her and look- ing out at the Comanche encampment from behind her gray three- year-old eyes. They made her sleep at the tipi entrance, and people stepped on her and shouted at her when they came inside. Eaten Alive’s youngest wife lifted her hand and told people to be careful
but the Dismal Bitch turned a blank, predatory stare on the Happy Wife and so the young woman deflated in a breath and went back to her stitching.
When they moved on northward that November of 1864, it was the fourth time they had shifted. Elizabeth was tiring day by day and hour by hour. She ate anything; meat scraps from skins and broth found at the bottoms of kettles. If she could stay strong and work she would live, and perhaps Lottie would live as well.
Elizabeth carried wood to the tipi and sharpened the frail old fleshing knife she had been given. She wondered how she could manage to have Lottie taken in and adopted by the Happy Wife. Even if she were adopted and learned Comanche and were tattooed, Elizabeth did not care, only that the child would live, under this cold, remote sun that seemed to burn the trail before them, mile after mile of open rolling plains and the tangled vines of buffalo gourd at her feet. They walked on from one river bottom to another, the ribbons of timber lacing the plains. Elizabeth walked resolutely with Lottie in her arms. When Lottie cried, she held her hand over the girl’s mouth.
She will live, she will,
thought Elizabeth as she walked.
The second buffalo kill was on the north bank of the Wichita River, at the falls. Elizabeth knew they would not be rescued. They were too far north, out in the plains, and any party that came after them would be outnumbered and outgunned. The Indian men had repeating rifles and bandoliers of ammunition, lances with foot-long steel heads, and every man was a warrior.
At the falls of the Wichita River where the water spilled five feet over a lip of red stone, Elizabeth slid into a pool to cool her injured breasts. Cottonwood leaves drifted from the great, calm trees. The leaves were the color of primroses and butter. They fell like rain and dotted the red water that boiled up at the foot of the falls in rusty foam. She left Lottie on the bank on the stinking greasy shawl. The girl’s face was skeletal. Her nose holes were as big as eyes and her gray eyes were sunk back into her skull to gaze out from the very
center of the child’s self, that which is otherworldly and hard and bright and indifferent.
Elizabeth stood up and the red water cascaded down her spare body.
“Lottie darling,” she said. “Don’t leave us.”
“All right, Grandma,” Lottie said. “Grandma, you wet.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. She looked up. The skinny wife she called the Dismal Bitch came running down the sloping bank with her lips drawn back. She raised a heavy digging stick of bois d’arc in one hand and she had the handle of a fleshing-knife in the other. It was of soft cast iron and very old and it had broken off in Elizabeth’s hand two hours ago. The Dismal Bitch was shouting with rage. She kicked Lottie aside and strode toward Elizabeth and then waded into the water.
The Dismal Bitch kept on crying out in Comanche as she sloshed through the water and waved the broken handle in Elizabeth’s face. Then she struck Elizabeth over the head with the digging stick. Bois d’arc is a yellow, dense wood, hard as iron. Lottie put both hands flat over her eyes.
Elizabeth had taken her beatings without a word all the long walk from the Brazos to the Wichita River. Now she threw up both her hands. The Dismal Bitch smashed the stick onto her palms with such force that rays of fire burned from Elizabeth’s finger joints to her shoulders. Elizabeth shut her hands in a tight grip around the stick, and turned both wrists and jerked the stick toward herself, onto her own collarbones. She snatched the Dismal Bitch off bal- ance. Then Elizabeth twisted to the right and tipped the stick over and threw the woman on her back into the shallow water. Elizabeth bore down. She fell to her knees on underwater stones and crushed the stick across the woman’s throat. The Dismal Bitch would not let go the stick.
But you will soon enough,
Elizabeth thought,
when you are drowning you witch of hell.
The Comanche woman’s hands jerked loose and she reached
up out of the foaming water for Elizabeth’s hair. Elizabeth heard a
light voice calling “Grandma, Grandma.” She stepped back with the stick in her hands.
The bois d’arc wood was bright yellow and smooth, barkless, and shaved to a chisel shape on one end. When the woman stood up with the red water streaming down around her, Elizabeth drew the digging stick back like a baseball bat and struck her across the throat and then again across the top of the skull and again on her forearms as she lifted them in defense. Then again across the back of the head, a terrific blow, as she fell into the water and began to scramble away.
Elizabeth yelled and raised the digging stick above her head and shook it. Her broad heavy face with deep lines cut like parentheses around her shouting mouth. She yelled in triumph.
The Dismal Bitch reached the bank and ran toward the horse herd, beyond the encampment. She did not know where she was going except away from the river. She was seeing double and so ran into a travois and then tripped over a dog with puppies and then lay there.
Elizabeth stood breathing hard and silently. The tipis had blos- somed in white cones all along the banks of the Wichita, and there was laughter and the dogs barking at something and the smell of woodsmoke. The tall red grasses were tipped in shakos of white cotton lit by the late sun like spirit hair.
On the grassy bank the second wife, the young happy wife with the pleasant face, sat down beside Lottie and patted the girl’s shoul- der. Lottie lowered her eyes and began to open and shut her dirty hands and then a spreading stain appeared on the grass as her urine ran down in yellow streams, over the grass and cottonwood leaves.
After a while the Dismal Bitch got up and wavered into the horse herd, and then vomited. She went back to the tipi with the thunderbird painted on it and collapsed.
Happy Wife came and gave Elizabeth and Lottie pemmican wrapped in some fibrous inner bark and a wooden bowl of prai- rie turnips. Elizabeth and Lottie sat beside the fire outside Eaten Alive’s tipi. They ate the greasy mass, ate it all, relishing the bits of
agarita berry. They drank from their cups made of the bitter buffalo gourd. Then Happy Wife came out and signaled that Lottie should sleep inside the tipi, just inside the entrance, and the three-year-old collapsed like a small dirty figurine and people coming in stepped over her carefully when Happy Wife shouted at them. She shouted at them and then turned and picked up a heavy red blanket and laid it over Lottie.
Eaten Alive sat up on a bluff of the river far away from the argu- ments of the women. He poured songs from a bone flute. They had passed the Wichita and would soon pass the Red. They had captives and horses and a harvest of winter skins. Little Buffalo and sev- eral others were dead, but they had died honorably, in battle. Eaten Alive tipped out a lilting current of mourning from the bone flute for Little Buffalo. All men must die and we must rise into the other world with a self whole and unchanged with the hair streaming un- cut from our heads and so he had died. Eaten Alive owned five songs now, all love songs, love of winter and rain and horses and the morning sun and love for his young second wife. The humpbacked trader of the Tewa people came invisibly with his delicate music. His name was Kokopelli, and he bore melodies and seeds and he lived beyond the ages in the plains air, drifting with clear grace notes and tremolos.
