“My husband will take his riding horse for you.” She slid down and smiled. “Aperian Crow told him my daughter had died back there, and your father believes it.” She pressed her long hair out of her eyes. “You can go. We will not miss you.” The tip of her nose reddened as she swallowed noisily.
APERIAN CROW TURNED his head toward Britt. I will ask someone to go and see if they can find him. We will ask him if he wants to go back with you.
“Very well.”
Your horse is that one with your saddle on him?
“Yes.”
He is good-looking. He is young.
Tissoyo listened intently. In low, whispered Spanish he said to Britt, “You have him. You have them all. If the boy will come.”
Jube came walking out between the tipis by himself. No one was with him. On his shaved head he wore a round fox-fur hat with small tufts of feathers on each side in front of the ears. A knife in a beaded and fringed sheath was at his side. He saw his father and stopped. His father lifted a hand with the palm flat toward him but otherwise Britt did not move.
Jube came up to the fire.
Ah, he is here after all.
“Yes.”
And so, young man, do you wish to go back to Texas and live with your mother and father again?
No. I want to stay here.
Britt shifted his gaze off to the side, and then to the igneous vaulting landscape behind the village of tipis, searching among the crumbled lava stone and juniper and pine for the glint of a rifle barrel, for someone who might have Jube in his sights and would fire if he said the wrong thing.
“I don’t want to go back,” said Jube, in English. “I want to stay here for a while anyway. I like it here. They’re pretty good to me.” Then he turned to Aperian Crow and the Mexican trader and said the same in Kiowa.
Britt knew his child. He saw in Jube’s eyes and the way he held himself that he was lying, but Britt did not know about what. The boy made that odd little gesture with his hand, touching his thumb to his little finger as his hand lay alongside his leg. A compulsive small tapping of the fingers together at the tips when he was caught lying or inventing tales.
“Jube. Are you sure?”
“I want to stay.”
So. Aperian Crow smiled and turned to Jube, looking up from where he sat to the boy standing.
Britt said, “I can’t make you come home.”
“I know it.”
“Do you want to grow up here? With these people?”
“Yes, I do.” He did not say Pa, or Father, or Daddy. “Go on. Go on without me.”
“They killed your brother. They killed Joe Carter.”
Jube wavered and opened his lips to speak and didn’t say anything for a moment and then he said, “I don’t remember it.” He looked at the ground. “Jim and Joe shouldn’t have been fighting with them.”
“All right.”
“Go on without me.”
“All right, Jube.”
The boy turned and walked back between the tipis and then disappeared. Britt lifted his head to the men across from him. None of them smiled but regarded him with faces wiped clean of all expression. Britt turned slightly in his cross-legged sitting position and said, “Mary, can you understand me?”
“She can understand you, Papa,” said Cherry.
“Be quiet,” said Britt. “Mary, I will figure this out later, how to get Jube back. I will come back for him. And now I am looking at all these men’s faces and I will remember them. When we are gone, I want you to tell me which man laid a hand on you. Which man adopted my son.”
Behind him was only silence.
Tissoyo vanished among the tipis. Britt brought up the two paint horses and Aperian Crow signaled to a boy to take them away. A woman came to fold up the silk cloth. She ran her hand over it and frowned. She poured the flashing jewelry and the gold coins onto it and carried it off. Britt walked away with his wife and daughter. When he lifted Mary with great care to Cajun’s saddle he heard shouting and laughter around a fire somewhere among the lodges. He turned and saw Tissoyo tossing the red-and-blue sticks in the air with a group of young men. He was going to try to win his horses back.
So they set out again to the southeast, striking directly across the red and broken plains toward the Canadian River. Two adults and a child and the packhorse and Cajun. Britt walked beside Cajun with his hand on the lead rope and Cherry turned backward with damp, wide eyes, watching the village of tipis disappear.
JUBE SAT IN Gonkon’s tipi the rest of that day with his box of bones and stones and scraps of silver. He slept uneasily that night and woke up several times to listen to Aperian Crow breathing heavily beside Gonkon and then turned and closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. He did not want them to know he couldn’t sleep. The hours went by like a slow drip of water. Finally he heard the night herd coming in with the older boys behind them shouting. Then the camp crier calling out that the people would play the stick game again that night with their Comanche visitor and that some Kiowa-Apache scouts had come in. The scouts would have news and stories and gossip.
Jube ran all that next day with the other boys. They turned over rocks along the thin pools of the Cimarron and found scorpions. Jube showed them how he could pick one up by snatching at its tail and imprisoning the stinger between two fingers. He threw it at Kiisah. Kiisah dodged to one side in a curved motion and fell into the cold water. They took up bows and arrows and shot at a wand. Then the hours passed and the sun threw long shadows across the lava of Black Mesa. Jube heard Gonkon calling his name in a bright and merry voice and he could smell tamal and burned feathers and some kind of bird roasting. Aperian Crow walked by him and laid his hand on Jube’s bald head.
“Go tonight with the older boys on night herd,” said Aperian Crow. “Take my black horse.”
Jube looked down at the ground to hide his sudden pride and happiness.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
Jube sat on the black gelding and felt through his thighs and seat how easily the horse handled. This gelding was a man’s horse, a warhorse, powerful and sweet to the hand. Even Jube, a lightweight ten-year-old boy, could make the gelding do as he asked. By dark he and the older boys had the horses grazing and dozing on a grassy flat between two anvil-headed mesas. There was no moon. Jube had his bow and shafts in a quiver at his back and his knife, and buckled to his belt the ancient Spanish spur. After a while he could tell he was a distance away from the other young men. He could not smell them, their woodsmoke odor, or hear their short, low whistles that they used when they shivvied the horses. Jube sat silently for a long minute and his breathing tightened like a knot, and then in a sudden motion he turned the black horse southeast, toward a gap between the anvil-headed mesas where the Cimarron had cut its way among them. He kept the horse to a quiet walk for a mile and then he pushed the gelding into a gallop. His father and mother and sister were two days ahead of him and because he had said he would stay with the Kiowa and then run off in the dark of night his father did not have to pay for him with Cajun, his only riding horse. His mother could ride. Jube had stolen himself and Aperian Crow’s best horse.
He rode with the reins taut in his hands because he was afraid the gelding would get away from him, but Aperian Crow had put a severe Spanish ring bit on the bridle. The horse slowed to a skidding walk and threw Jube forward and so he rode with the reins looser. He could barely see where he was going. They galloped through the shallows of the Cimarron River to the south bank and left deep tracks in the sand, but Jube did not know what else to do. He wanted to stay on the north side for a mile or so where he would not leave clear tracks on the stony soil but on the north side cliffs crowded in close to the river with jumbled, broken rock and thick stands of short cedar that were as stiff as fencing. He had to cross to the south bank into the sand. Behind him he left deep tracks. It worried him and made the skin on his back crawl. He had seen what was done to captives who were recovered. He had helped do those things to th
em.
After half a mile he was out of the sand and then many hours later he came out of the broken country and now the landscape was flatter. It rolled in waves toward the southeast. Toward home. The horse stumbled on a scattered series of rocks and Jube pulled him up, then pressed him into a trot again. Seven miles an hour over this cracked earth and the occasional stands of short grass, the stars above.
By dawn he was falling forward on the horse’s mane. They had come a very long way, and yet he was still afraid. He wanted to be with his father, who carried a Henry repeating rifle and a big Smith and Wesson police revolver. He was only ten and a captive and he had stolen a Koitsenko’s horse. They could well catch him and kill him and his mother and father and Cherry. It was too late to turn back. He was jouncing now on the back of the trotting horse, too tired to swing with the slight jars of the trot. After a while he fell off, holding tight to the reins.
The black horse stopped. He was breathing hard. He moved toward Jube’s prone body to ease the pressure of the ring bit. Jube sat up and stared at the horse’s legs. He sat on the ground as dumb as if he had been drugged, tired beyond caring. They had covered dozens of miles. It was not enough. It would never be enough.
Jube crawled to his feet and then threw himself over the horse’s back on his stomach and then righted himself. He pulled out his bow and unstrung it and tied the looped reins to his wrist with the bowstring. They went on at a walk under the flat rays of the rising sun. It was spring and the sun rose more and more to the north. He reckoned that his father would cross the level country between the Cimarron and the Canadian and then when he struck upon the Canadian he would follow it south and east. Jube would catch them somewhere on the Canadian River.
If he tried to remember, it seemed that when he had come north as a captive they had traveled for four days between the two rivers. Now he was alone and could travel faster, but also he had no adult to tell him which way to go. Maybe it was a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred miles between the two rivers. He had forgotten how far a mile was. But he remembered long ago his father saying that even a strong man could not make fifty miles a day, or maybe he had said forty, or thirty or seventy. Jube wobbled and swayed on the horse’s back. If anything happened he would crawl flat-bellied into the grass and lie very still until he could get his bow strung. He would die before they took him again.
Jube’s mind sifted quickly among several images; Susan Durgan’s body with one leg cut off at the pelvis and her head a bony skull ringed by a few strands of curls; his brother Jim’s body jerking backward, a blossoming cloud of gunsmoke at his chest. The man who reached for him with a hand as big as a wagon wheel. These images were thrown out like face cards and then disappeared. In a few miles he forgot that he had thought them.
Other images came to him. His father’s alert and searching eyes and the Henry breech-loader. The feel of the percussion caps and the powder measure in the hand, the clicking noise the measure made. If anything happened, if they came to capture him and rip at his flesh and tear off the soles of his feet for trying to escape, he and his father would kill them. He and his father would wait in ambush behind some cover of stone and sotol, lying still on their stomachs. With a sudden flush in his cheeks he saw Aperian Crow in his sights. But the trigger seized up and would not pull. Then Old Man Komah appeared before him and said in a sad voice, Son, son, listen to me, you are a clever boy. I will look out for you.
Jube awakened suddenly and his hand went to his mouth. It was dry as rawhide and his hands were full of minute cactus spines and his lips were bleeding.
Chapter 18
SAMUEL HAMMOND WALKED among the tipis as some of the Comanche came in for their rations. He tried to remember their faces, who was there and who was not. A cold front, a norther, had fallen upon the springtime plains, and it was wet and chilling and the force of it shivered the pointed smoke flaps of the Comanche tipis.
Samuel came to the campfire of a headman named Kicking Bird, and asked him to come with him to see the new shipment of farming tools that had come from Lawrence, Kansas. Corn planters, double-shovel plows, rakes and harrows. Onofrio walked to one side, a slight linguistic shadow, and repeated whatever was said in a kind of trance.
Kicking Bird ran his hand down the skeletal tines of a hay rake in the bars of sunlight that came through the loose boards of the drive shed. His hand was weathered dark and worn as driftwood. A thick callus lay on the insides of his right forefinger and middle finger from drawing a bowstring, and there was a high muscle on the upper left arm that had come about from holding a bow at full length.
He regarded the plow blades with a kind of confused sadness. They had taken women’s work and women’s tools and made of them an enormous vagina dentata, this biting device that ate into the earth to tear up the grass roots and into the red body of the ground.
He walked slowly from one farm implement to another. They were things so alien he had no words for them. Their steel surfaces perfectly machined into curves and angles. They had claws and mechanical arms that lifted up and let down. He touched the perforated seat of a corn planter that gleamed with green paint in a shaft of sunlight. This was where a person sat to operate the machine and it seemed to him that after a while the man would do the machine’s bidding. It was better to die than to become the servant of these things. They would take the core of one’s self and change it to something else. They would obliterate a person before he had a chance to stand before the sun and declare aloud the name that had been given to him, and then no one could ever rescue the tenuous and wavering self from disappearance and cold and eternal emptiness.
To Onofrio he said, This is terrible. He walked forward a few steps and stood before the lift arm of a toothed harrow. These are terrible things.
Onofrio was eating peanuts out of his hat. He brushed at his mouth and then said, “He finds all this very interesting.”
Samuel said, “Farming is hard work, it is true. But once the people learn how, there is a great deal of tradition to it. I myself had a farm back in the East.”
Then why did you leave it?
“Because I felt a call to come here and do what I could to help. My beliefs. I felt a call from Christ to come here and speak to you, to your people, to do what I could to help.”
Onofrio said, His guardian spirit, Jesus Christ, told him to come here.
Then perhaps Jesus Christ will tell him to go back.
I will tell him you said this.
No. Tell him that we will not farm. We will travel up to the Canadian and the Cimarron and down in Texas when we please. Why does he show me these things? They would turn us into mules. Do I not stand on two feet like a man?
Onofrio said, “He says that the Comanche are human beings and only mules pull the farm equipment. Ah, um, he doesn’t like them.” Onofrio rubbed some peanuts together to press away the red skins and then blew on them in his cupped hands.
Samuel Hammond nodded. It had taken weeks of paperwork to purchase the equipment. More weeks for it to be shipped and then it had all been stalled at Fort Leavenworth for the entire spring season and only with the first rains had the army teamsters consented to bring it down on freight wagons. Now it was nearly beyond the planting season and it would all sit here until it rusted.
ONE EVENING AFTER supper Samuel walked down the long hall of the warehouse and saw Mr. Deaver sitting at a table, and on the table before him were his colors and inks and his enormous sketchbook. Shelf after shelf made long stripes along the walls of the warehouse and each one of them carried some remnant of the clothing that the Indians did not want or had not bothered to come in and claim when their names were called out. Empty sleeves and pants legs hung over the edges in a sloppy, abandoned way. Caps without heads sat in rows.
Mr. Deaver’s shadow poured out to his left and the candlelight gleamed on his right hand. He wore narrow spectacles and they flashed with every small movement of his head. The front of his traveling coat was smeared with reds and yel
lows. Pieces of hardtack were crumbled on the table.
“Agent Hammond.” He looked up and smiled and took off his glasses. There was a tumbler half full of some reddish liquid and a rinse jar for his brushes.
“Well, it’s you,” Samuel said. “Mr. Deaver, the artist.”
“Yes, myself in person. Travel-weary and frayed. How do you do?”
“I’m very well.” Samuel clasped his hands together. “When did you come here?”
“Got into Fort Sill yesterday.” Deaver made a swift line and then looked up. “In a supply wagon from Kansas. I was merely another piece of baggage along with the horse food.”
“And before that?”
“Wyoming, more or less. I hope you don’t mind that I have camped on you, here.” Deaver was frayed and his clothing faded from his travels. He smelled of woodsmoke and animal fats and he was wearing a pair of high-topped boots with copper toes.
“Not at all, not at all. I am glad you’ve come.”
“You weren’t at the agency house so I just made myself at home.”
“You are most welcome.” Samuel watched him skim his brush across the paper. “Have you brought any newspapers?”
“Yes, yes, I brought you some AP sheets. I left them inside your door, there. They are all sticky and wrinkled but otherwise sanitary.”
“No matter. Where did you get AP reports?”
The Color of Lightning Page 18
