The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  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 catching 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.

  The children chased a pet antelope fawn and brought it back to the woman who had adopted it. Then they lost interest and found the dog with spotted puppies who had been allowed to ride in a travois and was grateful. Lottie picked up a writhing puppy and gave it a Comanche name. Tuaahtaki, cricket.

  Two young men went up a nearby peak to keep watch. Elizabeth, too, had begun to fear the soldiers. The Comanche often killed their captives when they were attacked. Elizabeth did not know if she could save both Lottie and herself if this were to happen. She helped unroll the tipi cover from its pole and decided she would die trying. She saw herself smashing the digging stick over a man’s nose. She made herself stop thinking this by humming a vagrant melody that she recalled, a ballad about drowning Scotsmen, and then straightened up and admired the bony, subdued horse that Lottie and two other children were riding about camp.

  Camp life surged around Elizabeth. A heavy older woman stood and sang in a loud, quavering voice with an expression of great happiness. A baby had just been born. Two men shouted at one another in anger and the civil chief stepped between them and separated them. He sent the younger man away from camp with a herd of fifteen horses; a young and handsome man with copper bracelets up his arms. The young man galloped away behind the horses, pouting and flashing his bracelets. Another group rode off to the northwest with loud flourishes and shouts; they were going to visit the Comanchero traders out of San Idlefonso.

  The tipis rose one after another like mushrooms. Fires crackled, the men ran the horses to water in the shallows of West Cache Creek, and so they lived life as it had been given to them for thousands of years, both here and in another creation, in the legend time and perhaps even before that, when God so made the world and set the stars in the heavens and the waters below and from those waters some aquatic being had brought up earth. A force had formed the hot and smoking blood clot that became the buffalo. Had set the ramparts of Medicine Bluff and the Wichita Mountains and smoothed the plains as if fleshing a great hide, and set the sun overhead on its indifferent burning wheel that dragged the Comanche’s crawling shadows behind them like dark and sacred hair over the wide earth.

  Rain came again in heavy downpours, wave after wave of it. The firewood Elizabeth and the two wives, happy Pakumah and the sullen Tabimachi, brought in was tangled with greenbrier and the last of the autumn flowers, purple asters and dog daisies. Elizabeth slept to one side of the doorway of the tipi instead of in the entrance, because she worked hard and did not look any man in the eye and because she could brain-tan buckskin as well as any. She took up a dull knife and tore the hair from a deer hide down to the skin, which was white as paper. They had never heard of a currier’s blade with a recurved edge that would have had the hair off in a minute. Idiots, an idiot people. She watched as the Dismal Bitch built a fire under it to smoke the hide brown. The thin wife threw a handful of oatmeal into the flames so that the deerskin took on an ochre color. Elizabeth saw the snowing handful of oatmeal and wondered where she had got it and wished she could have some to eat.

  She watched as Pakumah beaded a new buckskin dress for Lottie. Pakumah had left the deerskin in its natural white and beaded it in blue and black chevrons around the neck. Pakumah lifted it over Lottie’s head and sat back to admire her in it.

  Elizabeth learned the pattern of moccasins and cut them out and sewed them together and then stitched the heavy bull buffalo hide soles on them with very small waterproof stitches. She rammed the awl in as if she were piercing the heart of Eaten Alive with every stitch. Her anger had become a fixed and hidden constellation, and its cold fire warmed her heart. Elizabeth then handed the moccasins to the young wife Pakumah to see how it was she beaded the vamp.

  In the first week of December there came a heavy snow that started in the early morning, before dawn, and in that dark snow the thin and now silent older wife Tabimachi removed the door cover and stepped out. She walked along a narrow trail up the mountainside. She came to a great bluff where the waters of West Cache ran choked and foaming far below in a narrow chute. She tied the rope to a twisted post oak and put a heavy loop of the rope around her neck and fell over the edge of the cliff and so died.

  Chapter 8

  THAT SAME SNOW fell upon Mary and Jube and Cherry and little Millie living with the Kiowa far to the north, along the Canadian River. They had passed out of that part of the country where the men raided and were now in the territory of hunting and living and shifting in slow considered moves from one part of the plains to another, and so it seemed to Mary that they would not now kill her or her children. They might be abandoned. If they were left alone on the plains without tools or weapons or blankets, she would die and the children would die. She and her children were in an immense and beautiful prison, limitless on all sides.

  Mary held Cherry in her arms and Jube walked alongside, watching everything around him with alert and narrowed eyes. His dead older brother had left an empty space and Jube came to fill that space within days, flowing into its blank silhouette like powder smoke. They walked behind the travois of Aperian Crow’s wife in their tattered clothing and broken shoes. All Mary had to cover her was the remains of her dress and her long chemise. She had torn up several yards of the skirt to make a kind of shawl to cover her head and shoulders against the cold wind and the sun. Jube had more clothes; they had not been interested in tearing off his clothes. He had a shirt and a pair of pants of coarse wool and his unraveling stockings. His shoe soles were coming loose at the toes but that could be fixed if only they would stop traveling.

  There were two other captives, Mexican boys of about seven and nine who every day fell farther and farther behind. The men had gone through battle and hard riding to capture them and now they seemed to have forgotten their existence. The Kiowa went on as if they were caught up in some cosmic rapids and Mary and her children too were caught up in it and borne along with them and where that impelled and violent current itself came from no one knew.

  The bald sky overhead filled with a cool invisible wind that turned the seed-heads of the grasses in waves of silk toward the southeast, and thin cirrus clouds poured in streams in the same direction, curled like question marks. Words would not come to Mary. They shattered inside her head and then reassembled on her lips in strange combinations. So she had begun to learn sign.

  The two thin ends of the lodgepoles that Aperian Crow’s wife used as her travois poles dragged and bumped along behind the pony and sent up little rooster trails of dust that hung for a long time in the dry air. Mary tried to keep herself and Cherry directly behind these two traveling spouts of dust. If she kept her eyes focused on them she could walk a straight line. Jube turned again and again to see if his mother and sister were keeping up. All around them the Kiowa moved across the face of the north Texas plains like fish in water, the familiar and sacred straits of grass that had been their own for several centuries and in which their songs and wars and marriages and births had taken place in moments of intensity while the wheel of the year revolved around them.

  Aperian Crow’s wife turned and looked back. Her unbound hair lifted and fell in black strands. She made a come-here motion to Mary and pointed to the travois where eighteen-month-old Millie Durgan sat wrapped in a blanket
.

  Mary ran forward and put Cherry beside Millie on the heap of blankets and furs on the travois. The two girls crawled under the blankets together and slept. And so the youngest, childless wife of Aperian Crow took Cherry to ride on her travois during the day. She would have adopted Cherry as well, but here, trudging along in the dirt, determined, unbeaten, tenacious, was Cherry’s own mother. Millie was hers alone. So they went on and Mary noticed that now only one of the Mexican boys stumbled along behind them, wounded and inarticulate. Late that night a woman gave the boy some shattered fragments of jerky and he sat and ate them at the far edge of the firelight, slavering like an animal.

  Mary and Jube kept on and as they walked they scavenged. Whenever there was a halt they collected mesquite beans and scuffed in the dirt of old campsites where Mary found a piece of a broken bottle and Jube discovered a jumble of things half-uncovered at the root of a short and twisted cedar. An armadillo had dug a hole there and brought up the remains of a broken wooden box. Jube dug it out with his hands. He found a stiff boot of a very old design with a square toe and a high rotten heel, and under more layers of red soil he found two tarnished silver spoons and an ancient Spanish spur.

  With the broken glass bottle Mary cut off the needle tip of an agave leaf as she had seen the Mexicans do and then drew it down so that a long string of fiber came with it. With this needle and thread she sewed their shoe-soles back on and made herself and Jube collecting bags from the rags of her skirt so that they might carry their finds with them and leave their hands free. She found a clay pot that was only broken at the top and could still hold water. A fan of windblown dirt streamed around it. It was very old, with odd figures on it. A lizard repeated many times in black and a squared spiral; a twisted cross in angles. She tried to show this to Jube but her words came out crissin crissin crissin.

  “I can see it, Mama. It’s all right Mama.”

  Aperian Crow was a Koitsenko, a war leader, and now he was no longer the man to whom people listened. The landscape of war and raiding was behind them, south of the Red River, and they were in another frame of mind, another social arrangement, all of them content to be on the move in the galloping wind. The man whom they now followed was First Wolf, who would tell off the days of march between one water and another, and which wandering roads the buffalo followed. Somehow he had made a mistake, and now the buffalo could not be found.

  This was their promised land, and they learned it as one would learn the face of a beloved, every line and blink of eyelash, every turn of the head, motion of the hand. Tone of voice. Starvation was the unkind parent of the horse Indians of the plains, and its memory never left them. This time First Wolf had made a mistake or the mistake had made itself, and then the mistake had lain in wait for him and his people.

  They went on for a week without game and ate up whatever they had. Mary and Cherry and Jube went without food for two days. Mary sat outside the lodge of Aperian Crow and begged of whoever passed them by and Jube said to them as they passed, “Hei gow meen a tau hêimáh,” we are very hungry, and because he said it in his clumsy mispronounced Kiowa people gave what they could spare. The knobby end of an old antelope thigh bone that Mary crushed with rocks and then boiled and fed to the children. A strip of rawhide. Half a pilot biscuit. Around their camp near Rainy Mountain the men found old buffalo skulls out on the prairie, and brought them in and turned them to point at the tipis. A message to the lost buffalo to show them the way to the starving Kiowa, who loved them.

  At the end of a week several men rode in saying there were three buffalo carcasses ahead. They had killed them and had left them for the women to skin and cut up. Mary ran forward with the other women and with them fell upon the carcasses with whatever came to hand. They lay in heavy dark mounds and a ragged calf skipped and bawled near his dead mother. Three young girls ran the calf down on horseback and one of them roped it to cheers and shouts, and dragged it along in a fan of dust and then it was cut to pieces.

  Mary had nothing but her broken piece of glass but she knelt down beside two other women and helped to tear at a stomach and lay open its hot interior. They tore out the still-moving entrails and ate them as they were. They handed the livers to the hunters.

  In a short time all that was left were the white bones, slick and glistening, enameled with designs of red tendons. An old woman chopped off the ends of the greater bones with an axe and handed them to Mary. That night Mary fed her children on the rich, heavy marrow. She roasted the ends in the fire and broke them open with a rock, and the tubes of marrow slid out and she dropped these into Jube’s and Cherry’s hands still smoking. She broke open another and ate as much as she could and then roasted more. She meant to save some for the Mexican boy but in a moment found she had eaten it all and was ravenous for more and so she bent her head and hot tears streaked her face and she was bitter at what she had done, what she had become. A speechless, famished creature sitting in the cold dirt with smeared hands.

  That night Aperian Crow’s youngest wife took Cherry into the tipi to sleep with Millie because Millie had cried for her and called her name over and over.

  Then they went on.

  Jube dropped back beside his mother. Mary pointed toward Aperian Crow’s wife and tried to say something. Jube grasped her hand and pushed it down.

  “They don’t like you to point,” he said.

  Mary nodded, and kept walking.

  “Jin, jin. Jin,” she said. Then she bowed her head and tears of frustration came to her eyes. The strange word kept coming to her lips and she could not stop herself from saying Jin jin jin jin jin until she pressed her own hand against her mouth. Last night it had made Old Man Komah so nervous, this repeated syllable, that he had left the campfire and had come to where she and the children sat together on a piece of blanket and hit her across the face with the ends of his quirt.

  Millie started screaming. She held her hands out toward Mary and cried “Mar-ee! Mar-ee!” Aperian Crow’s wife had spoken sharply to Old Man Komah. The child was not to be upset, she was to be given whatever she wanted if it were in their power to give. Old Man Komah said nothing but went back and sat down by his own fire. The young wife then stood up with Millie in her arms and came to Mary and the children and made a motion with her hand that they were to move their little piece of blanket and to sleep close to the tipi. Then she took both Cherry and Millie inside, singing a low song to them.

  The night sky was cloudless so that the cold fell out of it like dew and in the morning Mary and Jube found themselves curled nearly in the ashes. Her longing for Britt was so intense that she felt utterly vacant. But she lifted her hollow self upright at dawn and staggered and then waited for her balance to return and went to gather buffalo chips and brush and whatever she could come upon that would burn and warm herself and Jube.

  As they walked along Jube said, “Mama, don’t try to talk no more. Listen, just make the signs they make.”

  Mary signed yes. In the distance was a rise and the foremost riders coming to it appeared briefly as cutouts against the hazed yellow sky. They jogged downward and then others lifted to take their places. Then Mary signed name.

  “Yes, Mama, we got to know her name.” Her polite name. Neither her secret spirit name nor a joke name. It was not information easily come by. Jube had learned quickly.

  Mary nodded furiously, and reached out to put her hand on Jube’s thin shoulder.

  “I’m going to do that,” he said.

  Jube ran ahead. His strength was rapidly leaving him and there was a kind of trembling in his interior but because of all the marrow he had eaten last night the weakness had not yet reached his hands or legs and he must keep going while he could. He dodged around the travois legs and the dogs and was careful not to run in front of any mounted warrior’s horse. He ran on until he came to Old Man Komah’s two-wheeled cart. He called to him in Spanish.

  “Mister Komah. Here I have you a present.”

  The man looked down at Jube. “W
here did you get that?” he said.

  Jube held up the Spanish spur with the great spiked rowel. “I found it back there. I was looking for mesquite beans. It was in an armadillo hole.”

  “Why is it not rusted?”

  “I rubbed it with sand.” Jube held it up toward Old Man Komah as he ran alongside. “I saved it for you because you’re Mexican.”

  Old Man Komah sat with the reins in his hand and said nothing while Jube continued to walk and then run a little and then walk alongside his carreta wheels. The axles sang in a disjointed noise, a phrase in a high whine repeated over and over. He made Jube wait awhile.

  “Get up here,” he said.

  Jube calculated the roll of the spokes and then stepped on one and was carried upward and grasped the rails and made it to the seat. Old Man Komah laughed. He held out his hand and Jube put the spur in it. Komah turned it over and looked at it carefully. His mule swiveled one ear and then the other, and hoarded the world in its dark eyes.

  “Those Spaniards,” he said. “When there was a king of Spain.” He handed it back to the boy. “Keep it. What else did you find?”

  “Spoons. I think they are silver.”

  “See if you can make some kind of jewelry out of those spoons. You can trade them to that man there.” Komah lifted his head and stuck out his lower lip toward a man ahead of them on a three-color paint horse. The man had rings of tattoos around his upper arms. “Nocteawah. He likes things for his ears.”

  “What does Nocteawah mean?”

  “Find out for yourself. Learn to speak Kiowa.”

  “Yes sir,” said Jube. “I’m trying.”

  “How do you speak Spanish?”

  “All of my family spent a year in Nacogdoches, working for an old Spanish man.”

  Komah still did not look at him but off across the prairie. Komah was an important person in this little band. Jube was not. Jube was a runty little captive child who might not live much longer. “An old Spanish man in Nacogdoches.”