“Hmmm,” said Mary. She picked up another cob of corn and the sheller and began to tear off the grains into a wooden dough tray.
“She wants me to wash dishes.”
“Well, dishes need wash,” said Mary. “Wash and wash. Every day.”
Lottie’s nose grew red and her eyes filled with water and she stared with a blank face at Mary. Then she turned and ran away and sometime later Mary heard Lottie scream No! And the dishpan turned over and dishes smashing on the floor and Elizabeth’s voice in a howl.
Jube and Cherry walked silently into the feed barn to see the calves. There were three of them standing behind their mothers and smelling of milk. Jube wanted to shoot them. He wanted to drive an arrow into their thin sides and see them go down in the straw and manure. To cut them open and eat the clotted milk from their stomachs. Cherry whispered in Kiowa that he should not and Jube strolled through the barn strumming on his bowstring as if it were a harp. The two of them also seemed to have developed a light, hidden contempt for all the devices of civilization.
For a life that must be maintained by washing things made of textiles and china and wood in water that had to be heated and soap that had to be made, for the elaborate techniques of making bread and fermenting vinegar and protecting chickens from predators when wild eggs lay in nests for the gathering. Contempt for the digging in the ground to make outhouses, for the footings of palisades, furrows, postholes, to extract rock for permanent and immovable walls. They seemed to have forgotten the years of childhood that preceded their life with the Kiowa as if it had only been a time of exile from their true lives in movement across the face of the great high-hearted plains and its sky and its winds. The smell of horse, the spartan lives, the unaccountable gifts of food that fell to the hand from nowhere. The men in a state of war from the moment they were born as if there were no other proper human occupation. Jube would have grown to be an aristocrat on horseback, silent and honed and lethal, and yet he had been returned to the nation of houses with roofs and white men, to the country of devices and printed books.
Mary heard from a distance the singing tones of Kiowa and knew it had only been her presence with them during that time that held them here with her. Only for her had they come back.
Mary put the sheller down. She was beginning to see little flashes of light. It happened when she turned her head too quickly. When she was worried. When she remembered.
She stood up. She would put a cloth of cool water on her forehead. When she dreamed now it was of herself speaking. Talking unrestrained. In her dreams words came to her in an intricately and perfectly linked series of constructions called grammar. She knew she could do it again if she dreamed it, if she prayed. She dreamed of herself praying.
Elizabeth came in snorting.
“I am the only parent she has. And I will smack the child if she does something like that again. I can’t stand to smack her.”
Her loud, harsh voice made the small flashes of light wink on and off in Mary’s vision.
“Tell me,” said Mary, and waved her hand as if bidding the rest of the sentence to come to her.
Elizabeth softened.
“Yes, Mary, tell you what?”
Mary pointed to the tintype over the mantelpiece. A great fire was burning. It was the winter of 1869. A sudden and distant crack of thunder came to them and they both hesitated.
Then Elizabeth said, “That was Mr. Carter.”
“I know,” said Mary. “Tell me him.”
“Ah.” Elizabeth put her fists on her hips and stared at the tintype as if Mr. Carter had done everybody a deliberate disservice by getting himself killed. “He was half black and half white. As you can see. My daddy was a preacher and when I run off and married Mr. Carter I thought he was going to set himself on fire. That was back in East Texas. So I come out here where a person can live the life they want.” She sat down. “If they live.” Elizabeth pulled heavily at the heliotrope brocade skirts to settle herself in the chair. She spilled over the edges. “Mr. Carter’s father and him, the two of them was more interested in getting rich than looking out for themselves. They took a lot of chances. His daddy married a white woman too, and his grandfather before him. In New Orleans. They was all half black and half white for a bunch of generations. I don’t like that word mulatto. Sounds like some kind of a pudding.”
Mary laughed. Elizabeth looked over at her and was surprised, and smiled.
“So they got rich. Like old man Goyens. I had the best of whatever they could buy but before long somebody laid in wait for them and shot my husband and his father deader than Santa Ana.” She stood up again and pulled at the strings of her apron. “And I got fixed on the proposition of staying here anyway with my boy and girl. And the Comanche got both of them.” She lifted her broad, stained hand and wiped at her eyes. “And I am rich and they can all go to hell.” She lifted her shoulders and held them there for a moment and then turned to Mary again. “Now I want you to practice talking.”
The daylight diminished moment by moment and the faint tumbling roar of thunder somewhere to the south sounded again. Mary nodded. The lights were blazing through her vision like comets. There was the matter of Mr. Fitzgerald but Mary was now beyond curiosity and no longer cared about Elizabeth’s succession of disappearing husbands.
“Don’t just nod. Just talk. Say anything. I don’t care if it makes sense or not, just talk. Talk a lot.” Elizabeth turned her head to the sound of thunder. It made her hands sweat. “You hear.”
Mary felt the familiar trembling now all through her body. It would go on when the unbearable headache came upon her and then it would go away.
“I have lights and they are going,” said Mary. “Lights in my eyes and going hurt and the day and see when everything can see.” She put her hand to her forehead. “Hurt.”
“Oh dear,” said Elizabeth. “The affliction has come upon her.”
She went outside in the increasing wind to the water butt and soaked a cloth in the freezing water. She was suddenly afraid to be outside. She needed to be inside under a roof and with strong immovable walls around her. To the south, beyond the stiff live oak, a long light flashed sideways on the horizon and disappeared and then the thunder spoke again. In the back bedroom Elizabeth placed the wet cloth over Mary’s forehead and then went and shook out the last three drops of laudanum into a glass of water. Mary drank it with her eyes closed and lay back down. She was trembling in a high vibrato of muscle and nerve.
“It’s because Britt is a day late, isn’t it?”
Mary nodded.
“He’s all right, Mary. He’ll come home.”
Mary placed her hands together, palm to palm.
“Yes. I am praying too.” The thunder was like distant gunfire or some atmospheric traveling herd of horses that proceeded toward them in a low rumble. The windows lit up and then were dark again and then the thunder came again. “Mary, do you and Britt have a married life?”
Mary lay with her eyes closed and then shook her head.
Elizabeth sat in heavy silence with the cold cloth in her hands. She dipped it in the basin and wrung it out. “What do you remember?”
“It all,” said Mary. “So many days there was two of me and I wasn’t one but I was the other one.”
It was strange weather. A cold wind and the lightning and no rain.
“All right,” said Elizabeth.
“And for Britt I can’t.” Mary shut her hands together like hinges closing. “I can’t.”
“All right.”
Mary set herself to think of when the headache and shaking would be over, to think to the other side of it when she would feel very well and would get up and help Elizabeth and sing and talk and when Britt came she would try to read out loud to him from the newspaper, chasing the print with her eyes as it crawled in an insect stream off to the margins. When the headache and shaking were over with, she thought of all the good things that would happen.
After the children ate their su
pper they carried blankets and quilts to sleep in front of the fireplace where it was warmest.
As it grew on to black dark the wind increased. It shook everything that was not secure. Mary listened to it. She began to be afraid and the fear came on her like something creeping. Something she could not make go away. It was a spreading stain across her mind. She could not make the fear go away with prayer nor memorized verses of Saint Luke nor counting. In the uproar of the windstorm she thought she heard the sound of a hundred horses at a full gallop. She heard the door splintering on its hinges and all the precious civilized collection of objects thrown against the wall, everything broken, everything smashed, people and dishes and bottles and pictures and windows and clocks and dresses and bone and brains and tables and chairs. Her fear was so intense it was like being struck by lightning. They are coming, they are coming.
She sat up, alone in the small bedroom. It was very cold and she was sweating. Her headache had been reduced to a light tinny singing in her head. She darted out of bed and pulled off a quilt pieced in a confusing pattern called Broken Dishes and wrapped it around herself and felt her way to the door. Then on her cold bare feet through the main room where the children slept in the last dim glow of the fire in the fireplace and to the other side, to Elizabeth’s bedroom where she slept each night alone and fat in her tentlike nightgown.
“Elizabeth, Elizabeth.”
The big woman was sitting up on a chair in the dark. Mary could see her by the dim light from the fireplace. Elizabeth wiped her sweated palms on her striped nightgown.
“I got six men staying and working on this place. It’s just the wind. Lightning.”
“We must guns,” said Mary. She sat down on Elizabeth’s bed. “Load the guns.”
“It’s just the wind making us crazy.”
“They could come in the wind.”
“I know it.” Elizabeth reached to the wall where her heavy wool overcoat hung on a nail. “It’s stupid but I got to do it.”
So Elizabeth struck a light to her kerosene lamp and went out to the front room where her long guns were kept on pegs over the door. She took down the twelve-gauge shotgun. It was a muzzle-loader. She poured in a good charge of powder and then rammed home a load of double-aught buck. She took up the heavy revolver from the mantelpiece as well and then walked back to the bedroom and handed Mary the revolver and sat with the loaded shotgun between her knees. And so they sat all night while the windstorm tore like a Viking at the edges of the roof. Sat with their loaded arms and felt safe for a while with their weapons in their hands.
THERE WERE TEN pupils in Sergeant Earl’s black school and they held a Christmas pageant at one end of the warehouse. A girl fourteen or fifteen years old sang “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with a black trooper of the Ninth Cavalry playing the German flute and Paint with a fiddle under his chin. The parents sat on sacks of grain and a few broken chairs. A spattering of snow blew down on Fort Belknap in a sheer and fraying curtain. Britt stood like some piece of taxidermists’ work with a tight boiled collar and a black cravat and his large, scarred hands held demurely in front of him. Dennis was also fastened into a five-button cutaway; his long neck packaged in a sort of striped tie. He lifted his hands to it and readjusted it every five minutes.
He stood beside Britt and turned and regarded him.
“This is what happens when you get married?” he said. “You got to dress up and come to school meetings?”
“Yes,” said Britt. “You see some pretty thing smiling at you and little do you know what’s awaiting you.”
“Man. I just come for the cake.”
After the children had recited and Paint had played “Lorena” on his fiddle Dennis stood up nervously and then wiped his hands on his pants and walked forward. When he was up on the foot-high stage, made of unsteady logs and planks from packing crates, he suddenly turned to the audience of nearly thirty people and threw out his hand. He began to tramp in place, and recited a comic piece of the period about a man trying to sell a cow to a preacher. He became the cow, and then turned into the rigid and offended preacher, and then the profane farmer, and then the farmer’s dog. His long hands were like lines of elaborate writing. He stood in the eruptions of laughter without smiling and when it ended he bowed like a pump handle to the applause.
Outside, three enlisted men walked down the sloppy ruts between Nance’s store and the quartermaster’s building. It was dark. They were beginning to sober up but were still unsteady. One of them carried a heavy piece of fruitcake in one hand and his revolver in the other. They had promised to keep in mind their immortal souls and had been read the relevant passages of the season from Luke but the Methodist chaplain’s kindly urging had been forgotten with a bottle of brandy from Dutch Nance. They felt obligated to do something western. Something intemperate and unwise. So the man with the fruitcake jammed it in his pocket and lifted his revolver to the air and fired three times and ducked and shrank away from his own noisy pistol shots. The two men with him made whooping noises and did the same.
Mary snatched Cherry to her side and turned and fled to the stacked bales of shingles at the far end of the warehouse. Several women went after her. Britt crowded past them and told them to go away.
He sat beside her on a small pony keg. He put his hand on her shoulder. Mary looked down and swallowed noisily but she would not move. Cherry looked out from under her mother’s arm. People turned and whispered and the music came to a halt.
“Mary, it’s just some of the boys,” said Britt. “It’s all right.”
Mary was shaking. She shut her eyes.
Britt reached over and took her hand. “Let’s just wait here a while until you feel better.” He saw her nod her lowered head and shut her fingers around his in a fierce grip. She took her other hand from Cherry’s shoulder and carefully wiped away the tears that had splattered on the back of Britt’s knuckles.
“Cherry, go on back,” said Britt. His daughter, now ten years old, with the face of something carefully carved into a look of un-shakable calm, nodded and got up and took up her skirts in both hands and walked gracefully back to the other end of the warehouse, among the candles and swags of cedar boughs.
Sergeant Earl cleared his throat and nodded to the flute player. “Go on,” he said. “Paint? Let’s do ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem.’”
Dennis Cureton’s thin fingers wandered over his coat buttons. “Yes, Paint,” he said. “Hit that fiddle.”
Mary lifted her head to the music. How still we see thee lie, above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. She kept a tight grip on Britt’s hand. There was something inside her heart waiting to be born out of all that violence. Perhaps it was a donkey or an ox or a sheep that stood around a cradle staring mesmerized and empty of speech until the newborn presence came to itself like the smoking blood clot, the great gift to the Kiowa and Comanche, the clot of blood that in ages past had formed itself into a young man who was the buffalo. The young man in clothes of glory who stood before the starving old people, abandoned in the snow in the great wall of stone called the Wind River Mountains, and spread both hands and said, I am your sustenance, kill me and eat me.
She felt a turning in her heart. Britt’s large hand with its planing of bone and muscle still held hers. He was waiting with great patience. He would wait all night. Mary thought, It is only a recurring illness like malaria. That was all. It was chronic. It would come and then like the headaches she would think about when it would be gone. Think through to the other end of it. She slid her hand from under Britt’s hand and stood up.
She put her hand on Britt’s arm and they came back to watch Sergeant Earl hand out the handmade certificates for best pupil recitation, best attendance, first in arithmetic, the most memorized Bible verses, and for Jube the prize of a small metal toy with whirling arms for the most silent child in class.
Chapter 26
THEY CAME TO the crossing of the Clear Fork of the Brazos on a chill winter day, in l
ate February of 1869. As they came to the low and gentle slope down to the river valley, Dennis stood up and said, “There’s a fire.”
In the middle of the road below them a buggy was burning. A light four-wheeled buggy with a top made of oiled canvas, and it was on fire. It stood there and burned all by itself. The oiled canvas top burned brightly and collapsed and the shafts were outlined in small upright flames. Clothing was scattered around. A shoe, a hat, books, eyeglasses. They pulled up and stared at it. Pieces of chopped-up harness lay on the ground. The leather upholstery shrank and blackened and the flames were nearly transparent in the sun.
Britt saw a boy step out of the naked white and green sycamore trunks of the crossing. The boy held up both hands. It was a white boy. Maybe eleven or twelve years of age. He wore a hat far too big for him that fell down around his ears, and a wool coat, also too big, and a bare chest underneath it. Around his neck a cravat was loosely tied in some clumsy imitation of the dress of the white men of the towns. He wore leggings over a pair of flowered Kiowa moccasins. His fair hair in two thick braids and a waving cut edge where it was shorn short on the right side of his face.
“Estop,” the boy called. “Help me!”
“Decoy,” said Britt, and threw the reins to Dennis.
He stood up and stared down the barrel of the Spencer and fired. The boy hunched over and like a pinkish salamander writhed into the brush. Paint began to fire at random into the dull green of the Carrizo cane and grapevines on the south bank. Then a large-caliber round hit the lock of a box of farrier’s tools and bells. It knocked the box into flying splinters and the bells jumped ringing onto the floorboards, they rolled like open mouths with their clappers spilling out. Cowbells, sheep bells, and several heavy school bells sang in metallic tones all over the wagon bed.
Dennis laid the whip hard on the big bays and they charged into the red water, throwing circular sprays in giant pinwheels. The bells clanged and sang out. Paint laid flat behind the bales of cedar shingles and five pony kegs of molasses. Britt threw himself over the driver’s backrest and laid himself behind the shingles on the opposite side and watched for a target.
The Color of Lightning Page 25
