The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  “I don’t want the damn thing and I never wanted it the minute you brought it home. Don’t ask me if I’m sorry because I ain’t sorry and I never will be sorry.” She kicked at the broken pieces. “There ain’t nothing wrong with those papers because I could scrape it all off if I wanted to, Britt Johnson, and besides they are going to end the war and free everybody and those papers won’t mean nothing, nothing, listen to me. You never listen, Britt. You are half deaf, I don’t know which half, maybe it switches from one ear to the other depending which side I am standing on. And I wouldn’t mind going home at all, no sir I would not. Next wagon going east I would, I can cook and earn my way as well as anybody.”

  “Woman, will you never shut up?”

  They were both caught up in a rage of destruction, both hoping that at some point the other would realize how serious this was.

  Britt turned and left. He walked straight out to the corral and pulled the lead rope from its pullaway knot and got on Cajun’s back. He caught up Duke’s lead rope in his right hand. He bent his head for a moment and thought about the other black people he would see in Weatherford. He named them to himself as if the names were a kind of secret, personal magic against the desolation he saw in front of him which was his life, if she indeed were to leave, without her, and without Cherry and Jube. At the last moment young Jim bolted out of the washhouse and in one clean leap sat himself on Duke’s back.

  Mary stood in the doorway. She was crying.

  “And don’t bring me back nothing,” she said.

  He turned the leader out onto the road. “All right,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go back to Kentucky,” she said.

  “All right.”

  AT THE FITZGERALD home Britt slid off his saddle horse Cajun and lifted his hat to the people gathered there. Young Jim lifted his hat as well but remained on Duke’s back.

  “Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mrs. Durgan,” Britt said. “Good morning, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Peveler, Judge.”

  “Good morning, Britt,” they said.

  “Well, Britt, I hate to see you hitch up that good saddle horse,” said old man Peveler.

  “I’ll have me a team,” said Britt. “Before too long.” He lifted the harness onto Cajun’s back.

  Mrs. Fitzgerald was a large woman who had been married in East Texas to a man named Carter who was half black and then she was widowed in some dubious way, and had come out to the Red River country with her son and daughter and son-in-law and two granddaughters. After Carter died then she married a man named Fitzgerald and then he died of tertiary fever. Her ranch house was two stories, built of horizontal logs and plastered over an eggshell white. It had a wide veranda all around and immense cottonwoods sighing overhead now illuminated by fall leaves the color of lemons. She had a view toward the architectural arrangements of red stone in the bluffs of the Brazos and Indian Mound Mountain. Her son-in-law had been shot dead in some kind of argument over property lines. Elizabeth Fitzgerald now ran the place single-handed with her powerful, carrying voice and bottomless energy. Her daughter, Susan Durgan, and the two granddaughters stayed close to the ranchhouse while Mrs. Fitzgerald rode out sidesaddle to harass her hired hands all day. Her twelve-year-old son Joe Carter rode out with her but stayed twenty yards behind. At present Elizabeth was boxed into a stiff, loud dress, and her vast waistline was armored with a whalebone corset.

  “Don’t you give Mr. Graham any more than five cents a pound for that dirty salt of his!” she shouted.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Moses Johnson. His voice was low and resigned. He cleared his throat.

  Two of Fitzgerald’s heavy wheelers stood in the corral unharnessed and calling out to the other horses. The Fitzgerald team were solid bays and when they sweated the sweat came out in rosettes on their necks like leopard spots. They were her best horses and she would not permit them to be used for a short trip to Weatherford and so instead they backed a pair of half-broke chestnuts into the traces and then placed Britt’s light leaders in front of the two-ton freight wagon.

  Jim jumped down and stood aside as his father’s horses were backed into place. The men got aboard. They would cross Elm Creek and the water would swell the wood of the freight wagons, the felloes and the axles. They would journey on for a day to Weatherford with tight wheel spokes and undercarriages.

  “Didn’t Mary send you with no dinner?” Elizabeth Fitzgerald stormed up to Britt where he sat on the wagon seat and peered at the space at his feet. Her big yellow-and-pink-checkered skirts flew out around her feet.

  “No ma’am,” he said.

  “Well, Britt.” Elizabeth nodded. “Y’all been fighting. I won’t have it, I won’t have it.”

  “Mrs. Fitzgerald.” He lifted a hand. “I can fight with my own wife if I want.”

  “Leave young Jim with me,” she said. “I’ll get something for you.” She turned back to the house. When she came out with a parcel of food wrapped in a tea towel she said, “Leave young Jim here. I’ll send him over to bring Mary and the little ones to stay with me while you’re gone.”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Britt. “Jim, you hear?” He watched as his son Jim, in bitter disappointment, wrung his hat between his hands and stalked off to the house.

  “Joe ain’t going either so no sulking!” Elizabeth shouted after him.

  Joe Carter and Jim slunk away toward the creek in a loose adolescent walk and kicked at stones and horse manure.

  Moses Johnson glanced at Britt and then to Judge Wilson.

  “I guess she don’t care for you going all the way to Weatherford.” Moses’ raspy low voice was thick with the heavy pollen in the air. His lips worked with the effort of not saying anything more.

  “It ain’t that,” said Britt.

  “Well.” Moses shifted the reins from hand to hand. The two lead horses shifted the straight-bar driving bits in their mouths. They were impatient to go. The cool wind was inviting.

  “You could bring her back something fine from Weatherford,” he said.

  Britt looked ahead at the road. “Maybe that would help. I don’t know.”

  And so they started and the water of the creek flashed up in sprays around them, flew out in arcs from the passage of the wheels, the pools dotted with cottonwood leaves. Overhead the sandhill cranes and the great white egrets drifted like ash in shifting planes, heading south.

  Chapter 2

  THAT DAY OF October 13, when the men were in Weatherford 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 Rabbit 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 others 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, refused to share a June bug on a string with Cherry Johnson, age five, calling her a nigger, and was heartily slapped by Elizabeth for saying nigger, a
nd 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 children 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 written down in some ancient text that told of life long ago.

  Susan stood on the path stones and aimed the long rifle carefully. 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. Suddenly 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 explosion 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 covered 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 older men who had tired and were sitting by the fire on packsaddles. They laughed and so he began kicking Elizabeth in her dense, padded 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, snorting. 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 mothers 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 nakedness 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.

  THEY WERE THREE 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 because 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.