The Color of Lightning (8 page)
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on, Elizabeth recited silently all she had ever memorized in school. Bits of speeches on Inde-
pendence Day, verses of the Bible, the names of her neighbors, her children’s birthdays, whispering to herself under the chill sun of the November plains. Pillars of dust the color of madder rose up to mark their passage.
Overhead vultures wheeled high on the updrafts over the Red Rolling Plains, some rising and some sliding downward, descending in an airy mobile whose center shaft was in the remote blue zenith. They circled at great heights, mile upon mile, when heavy clouds white as glaciers sailed up from the northwest.
One early morning there was a heavy fog. They broke camp in a strange isolate stillness as if in a world just formed and not yet emerged into definition. Every limb adorned with lines of tiny drops and the grass wet. They walked on with soaked, dark legs, and they covered many miles in silence, going nowhere in the same spot with the blurring fog all around them. By midmorning the fog had separated into phantom banks lying apart like grounded clouds among the
ekasonip,
the stands of red grass. Then it rose up and fled
away overhead in a low, rolling tide. At every draw Eaten Alive’s two wives slid from their ponies to collect deadwood. Elizabeth gathered as much as either of them. She packed it with great crashes onto a travois. The Dismal Bitch avoided Elizabeth and would not look at her. Elizabeth picked up a heavy stick and stuck it in her belt. She secretly marked the days on it, one notch after another. Her checkered dress grew larger as she shrank inside it and the hem tattered into fringes.
After the Wichita they came to the Red River, and Elizabeth knew that beyond the Red was these people’s dwelling-place. Where she would be beyond help and beyond anyone’s reach in an alien country whose landscape was known only to a very few. The Happy Wife, Pakumah, had taken Lottie to herself now, maybe to spite Tabimachi, the Dismal Bitch, who sulked thin and bitter in her own eight square feet of space beside her parfleche boxes, packing and unpacking obsessively.
Elizabeth slept outside or just inside the tipi entrance, which she learned must always face to the east. But she did not care because Lottie was now wrapped in a four-point blanket beside Pakumah and ate from Pakumah’s bowl and slept soundly all night. She had begun to smile again. They had tattooed a star on her forehead. Pa- kumah and her sisters gave Lottie anything she asked for. When she screamed and threw things they smiled and tried to soothe her with little gifts of egret feathers or a pinch of sugar or a prairie chicken’s air sac dried and blown up like a small transparent balloon.
Elizabeth knew she herself was spending her life force like a running stream but she had ceased to care.
They came to the Red River bottoms at a place where the river made a loop to the south and so the current was slow and there was a tall forest in the flats. There were open stretches of pure white sand. The cottonwoods and the sycamores grew to great heights. Banks of jaunty Carrizo cane with its plumes and shakos. The water itself red as rust, as brick, red as wine. They camped on the south side at a place where it was clear they had always camped, and the men herded the horses through the trees and urged them into the river.
The horses hesitated and dodged and turned back, and then the leaders went in, and then the rest. They poured over the bank into the water in erupting sprays; pintos and duns, gruellas of dove gray, bays and blacks. They were stolen Texas horses with long backs, or the Comanche mustang ponies with trim clean legs and heavy manes and tails. Their tails floated behind them as they swam and then they footed themselves in shallow water and stood drinking greedily. The men and boys rode in after them and slipped from their horses’ backs into the water, unbraided their hair and ducked themselves again and again.
Elizabeth walked a long way in search of firewood. Pakumah gave her a worn little mare and a travois, and so she left Lottie in the young woman’s care and went more than a mile in a wandering route through the woods. The vines and saplings made dense thick- ets and the trees were skirted with heaped driftwood brought down by floods. Elizabeth delighted in the shade, the scattered sunlight, after the relentless sun of the open country. She loaded branch after branch. Her hair hung down in separate dirty locks and several of her fingernails were split, her shoes held together by thongs. She prayed aloud. Eaten Alive had hit her with his quirt for praying aloud, so she had learned to say nothing in English and to puzzle out Comanche words. She prayed that Lottie would get well as she lifted smooth gray deadwood onto the travois. She said
sycamore
and
driftwood
and
taibo
and
esakonip
and
haamee
.
She walked on up a sandy rise to a stone bluff that stood a hun-
dred feet or more above the river. Above the bottomlands every- thing changed. Now there was only dense thickets and short trees. She went on, pressing through the rigid branches. They all seemed to be made of thousands of strands of twisted, coarse wire. She tied the little mare to a limb and went to the top of the bluff.
It was good to be up high. The level horizon all around her had begun to give her a lost feeling of stalking earnestly and without end toward a vanishing horizon. It was good to look out over the flood- plain of the Red and the curve of the river and the wind turning the water’s surface into a weaving of light. No smoke anywhere, on any
quadrant of the horizon, except for the big camp upstream where the tipis’ pale cones rose out of the high trees, where the campfires were lit and children ran shouting in play and the men were bring- ing in the wet horses through the blue evening air.
Elizabeth went along the bluff and before long she came to a mound of stone blocks. They were squared. They bore chisel marks. She reached down to touch them. They were of weathered sand- stone, worn down by heat and rain until they lay in heaps and were shoved aside by ancient post oaks grim as trolls.
She walked among them looking for some sign or symbol. On one was a Spanish cross with bulbous terminals on each arm. Be- yond the remains of the Spanish fort was a ruined cabin built of upright logs that leaned in all directions. The stone chimney was blanketed by greenbrier and passionflower, gray and dry and noisy, seedpods shaking in the wind.
Grapevines tangled over the leaning wheels of a wagon. The Spanish had come and built something of stone and after them, people of her own kind, and neither could hold this place against the arid country or the Comanche and the Kiowa, so here their ef- forts lay in ruins. Inside the fallen walls she saw disintegrating cloth caught beneath several logs and within that the long bone of a leg or arm. It did not frighten her. She was too tired and had come to think of this as her end as well. Elizabeth thought,
I could well die in this country. I could die in the next five minutes.
Weighty clouds built up in the northwest now, lit from behind by the sunset light, and their topmost towers glowed with an in- ternal light. She pushed aside the planks of the wagon. The place had long ago been scavenged, the wagon’s metal tires gone to make fleshing knives or beaten into arrowheads.
She sat on the stone blocks awhile to rest. She was being worn down, faded and weathered like schist, suspended between two lan- guages so that words came to her out of an unstable white space where nothing seemed to hold meaning. She was not sure of the meaning of anything.
From downstream came a low and powerful sound. A deep
coughing roar. She raised her head, and across the river in the last of the November light a jaguar slipped out of the intricate netting of greenbrier vines and cane. He stopped to smell a limb of deadwood as if a message had been left there for him. Then he lifted his heavy head with its mouth open, panting. His beautiful rosettes were an extravagant adornment in the monotonous colors of the Red River and the white beaches and black trees, gray drifts of winter grass. He called out, singular and lonely, far north of his common range. He walked out of the trees and made a swift passage like a great spot- ted fish through the grass to the edge of the river in a slow moving tide of spots and when he reached the bank a covey of black ducks rattled up off the water. In the next second the jaguar had launched himself into the air and twisted upright and snatched a duck out of the clattering mass and fell, fell, with his long body writhing and sent up plumes of red water as he struck the surface.
He came up with the drake in his mouth and swam to the bank, his banded tail floating behind him. He heaved up on the bank streaming water and shook himself, a windmill of spray. His ro- settes shivered in waves down his body as he shook himself, and the duck wings flapped wildly in his mouth.
He dropped the duck and called out,
Hough! Hough!
Then he turned and looked up at her with his golden eyes. The stripes ran off his face like water.
Elizabeth was at the edge of starvation and near a fatal exhaus- tion, and in her weightless daze she felt he was speaking to her. A creature at the far edge of his range, or beyond it, solitary and lost but somehow surviving. A vision. She had been granted a vision.
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down upon them from the north, great layers of chilled air revolving one over another. It tore
leaves loose and tipped over a drying rack and the dogs seized upon the meat and bolted away with it in the wind. Tipis flattened against their poles on the north sides and the horses were unsettled and milled and shouldered into one another. It took all the men and boys to hold the herd and keep them from drifting back south over the river before the punishing wind.
Elizabeth helped chase the dogs away with her stick and to set up the racks again and secure them. Now she was permitted to sleep inside the tipi. She listened to the light rain that came with the cold and fell asleep for a while. She woke up again and lay sleepless in the smell of woodsmoke and wet fur. She was visited by a pure and constant rage she could do nothing about. Lottie had another name now, and Elizabeth forced herself to accept this and to remember it. Siikadeah. Her name was now Siikadeah. When they broke camp the next morning to continue on to the north they left dry circles in the grass where the tipis had been.
That day they ferried their travois loads across the wide flat sur-
faces of the Red River in boats made of skins stretched over wil- low frames, like tubs, wallowing and unstable, boats like bowls that tended to spin in circles when paddled. In places it was so shal- low the women waded alongside. The boats were loaded with the women’s possessions and on top of a pile of these rode Lottie and two other children. Lottie threw pecans into the water, laughing and chattering in small phrases of Comanche. Pakumah kept a firm hold of Lottie’s ragged dress and the girl screamed in irritation and Pakumah let her scream. Lottie threw Pakumah’s digging stick into the water and Pakumah only laughed. The men swam the horses over in a pawing, blowing mass. Then they were on the far bank and in Indian Territory.
th e y c a m e up
Deep Red Creek with its vermilion sands, and then they cut to the west and came upon the timbered loops of Blue Buffalo Creek, searching for West Cache Creek, which would lead them into the Wichita Mountains. They had been joined by more and more traveling bands of Comanche and Kiowa until they num- bered in the hundreds, walking through the cool November plain of yellow grass. Ahead in the mountains they would find plentiful wa- ter and timber for the winter, and elk, and antelope, and nut trees. They were happy and lighthearted. Susan Durgan’s scalp waved in a terrible, playful way from a man’s shield. There were many other scalps in various colors of hair from nameless dead people now bur- ied or left to the scavengers far to the south from Mexico to Okla- homa.
The Wichitas began as a distant blue like a bank of clouds. Then they rose higher day by day. This was their winter camping place, these red granite mountains rising up alone in the great plains, foothills of nothing. A place of deities and shadows, sacred to the diminishing Wichita tribe, whose numbers had fallen and fallen and now they lived in one valley in their red-grass huts and grew corn and beans and ate the white man’s food when they could get it. The Coman- che and Kiowa had reduced the Wichita to a fearful client people.
As they came up West Cache Creek into the mountains Elizabeth saw their beehive grass houses, with thready trails of smoke rising from haystack crowns. There were people there but they scattered so quickly they were like mourning doves surprised at their feeding and they vaulted into the brush and the tangled black trees.
They traveled up West Cache Creek. This led them to a wide prairie that lifted in elevation mile by mile into the heart of the Wichita mountains. As they went on higher and higher the travelers were surrounded on both sides by rocky peaks. On one mountain a pair of enormous stones stood by themselves staring down at trav- elers. The descending song of the canyon wren spilled down the granite slopes. Then they came to the forests of post oak and Span- ish oak in between the peaks. They came upon a wide stony hole of water and despite the chill the children plunged in like otters.
This was where they would spend the winter or not, as the spirit moved.
They halted in a valley of tall post oaks and Elizabeth walked among the shading trees of a true forest searching for campfire wood. Pools of water ran one into the next like beads on a string. Nervous killdeer darted around the edges of these pools, and they found the heart-shaped tracks of antelope.
Lottie kicked around in the travois blankets and went over one side and fell on her two hands. She got up again and was narrowly missed by a young boy galloping past heedless of anything but catch- ing up to the other boys. Elizabeth shouted to her granddaughter but Lottie’s two hands were taken by older girls and they went off with the other children among the clutter and flying poles and the men sifting quietly away from the women’s work to rest in the sun and smoke beside West Cache Creek.
