The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  What a sweet, high-hearted man he was. So openhanded, so dead. Wasted, wasted. Britt could not stop himself from reaching out to Tissoyo’s body once more. He got to his knees and bent forward and against all reason took the limp wrist in his hand and felt again for a pulse. He held it for a long time. A faint hope that the pulse might be buried down in the muscle somewhere, secretly pumping. Even though the brain and nerves inside the skull that had driven it were destroyed. But Tissoyo lay utterly still in his brave face paint and his silver bracelets in circles up his brown arms and his old Walker Colt in the red mud.

  After a while Britt released the dead hand and stood up and took off his jacket and then his shirt. With his hunting knife he cut his shirt into strips and dropped his trousers and bound up his wound, around and around the top of his thigh. His boot sloshed quietly.

  He did not know if Tissoyo had been alone, so he limped down the long draw in the fog, step by step, until he came to the place where it joined the main valley of the Clear Fork, and there he found Tissoyo’s camp. Sloppy and disorganized, still a bachelor. A burned-out campfire and a bag of brown sugar, a rawhide packet of stiff jerky to pour the brown sugar on, a rawhide box and in it Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s sausage grinder and a small package of coffee beans. A tin cup hung on a branch, the Hudson’s Bay four-point blanket and buffalo robes.

  Looking at him from a stand of live oak were the Medicine Hat paint and the black mare with her white nose, the splash of white on her side. They were hobbled, strands of grass in their mouths.

  Britt carried Tissoyo to the scaffold later that day. He had built it far away from the wagon trail so that the white men could not rob it. He placed Tissoyo on it and covered him with the four-point blanket and the buffalo robe. He pulled the firing pin and the cylinder from the revolver and threw them away and then placed the revolver in Tissoyo’s hand. He limped over to the Medicine Hat paint and led him to the scaffold and shot him between the eyes and the mare afterward.

  Chapter 35

  THEY CAME BACK to the house on Elm Creek for a day and a night, and they expected to sleep late the day afterward. It was just before Christmas, and they came early in the morning. It was the time of year when the Comanche and Kiowa kept to their winter camps.

  They left the children at Elizabeth’s fort. It had been a long time since they had been together with each other in solitude and only themselves for company, even for a few hours. Britt took a shovel and dug out the barbecue pit and broke up mesquite for the fire. He found a small hickory tree of the kind that grew in the north of Texas, and even though it was not like the great hickories of Kentucky it would burn well and long. Then he started the fire and placed a section of heavy hog wire nearby to lay over it when the fire was down to coals. Britt had rigged sections of canvas for awnings and his Spencer rifle stood leaning against the live oak fully loaded and one in the chamber.

  A calf carcass hung from the long limb of the live oak, glinting blue with sheath tissue and marbled red and white with fat. On the rise downstream young Jim lay in his eternal cold bed of earth with the words on his headboard fading into pale gray and a small glass vase of ekasonip tops in a cottony spray before it. Mary thought of her oldest son as a prince frozen in some icy cavern far below the earth who would lie there until the Second Coming, and then Jesus would place his hand upon the boy’s closed eyelids and say, Arise and come into thy kingdom.

  All those in the black community of Elm Creek and Fort Belknap and others even farther away were to come. For music they had Paint with his fiddle and the enlisted man of the Ninth who played a flute and a corporal named Henry Thrim who had acquired, and could play, the new instrument called a harmonica. Mary walked over to the wall and looked at herself, turning her head, in the small mirror. It belonged to the Elm Creek house because this was home and someday they would come back here to live and so she would have it nowhere else. She unfolded borrowed sheets to throw on the long sawbuck and plank tables. She waved Britt away from the dishes. She would not let him pick them up. His great callused hands were dirty with sap and charcoal. So he bent forward from his height of six foot one and kissed her with his hands out to each side.

  “Britt,” she said.

  Why now was his touch so vivid and sparkling? His touch was a tiny point of fire and her skin was alight. She thought of what had changed and when. When she had seen him lying on the surgeon’s table with his pants torn off and his boot thick with coagulated blood like shredded liver and the surgeon taping his private parts out of the way and plunging in with his probe for the bullet. His body suddenly her own and so vital that she would have given anything to spare him the steel instruments. How vital he was to her, how loved. The tongs probing muscle and fat with a wet clicking and then the bullet drawn out with strings of tissue clinging to it. The hissing carbide lamp. Mary on the opposite side of the table with her hands on Britt’s hands, which were clasped together like a construction of metal. She could not touch him enough, then.

  She put on the five-gallon kettle full of water to boil for his bath and then went to take the broom and beat on the devil’s trumpet vine that crowded the front of the house and looped over the door. She beat on it until all the dead leaves had fallen off and it no longer looked so untidy. She sent the dead leaves flying into the yard. As she stood there a massive cloud bank engulfed the northern horizon like a silent and uninvited guest of gigantic proportions that hesitated on the threshold of the world but would come in whether or no. It was a deep marine blue and in front of it raced white squall lines in blowing lather. She went back in and arranged coals in the fireplace. She took up lids and squinted at the seething contents and then lifted coals onto the tops of the two heavy Dutch ovens and the spider skillet.

  Britt sectioned the ribs and backstraps and set them to barbecue slowly. From time to time he straightened and looked at the northern horizon and watched the long clean plains of dried grasses that spread beyond the heavy trees of Elm Creek. He stood very still and searched each stand of trees carefully. He listened. Then he dipped a small brush of dried sage into an ironstone cup of sauce made of brown sugar and the catsup Mary and Elizabeth had made and bottled, a sauce simmered with wild chili petins and half a cup of broth. He stood upright with the sweet-smelling brush in his hand and did a quick tap step.

  “Mary,” he said. “You going to read something.”

  “No,” she said. She walked over to him to look at the crisping meat. “You know anyhow people want to dance and dancing and not listen. Me up there words words words people falling over sleeping.”

  “They’ll listen or I will make them listen.”

  “No, Britt.” She did some steps beside him. The steps were precise and quick and she did not falter. “I am dancing too.”

  He watched her with a quiet expression and then she turned around in four steps and made her skirts fly out and then took his arm for a second or two. He smiled a slight, hesitant smile because he saw she was happier than he had seen her since she had been rescued, and he was afraid it might evaporate, be burned away when a headache and the tremors arrived again. He reached out and took her upper arm to steady her, and the newly made plaid cotton of her dress crinkled under his hand.

  “Britt, when will you stop going?” She laid her hand over his.

  “When they quit coming,” he said. He put his other hand to the crown of his hat because the increasing wind threatened to get under his hat brim and skim it way. “If they quit coming then the more people won’t be afraid to carry freight. Right now I hardly got no competition. There ain’t many of us on the road.” He lifted his hand from her forearm and touched her cheek. “It’s all right, baby.” He turned up his coat collar. “By that time all my cows will have twins each and we’ll be rich as old man Goyens.” He smiled. “But we won’t let anybody know. I went and sent all the money to a bank in New Mexico.”

  She lifted both eyebrows with wide eyes.

  “I been told it’s best.” Britt splashed sauc
e on the ribs so that they sizzled and blackened. “Sergeant Earl fixed it for me.”

  She gazed at him for a moment, thinking, and then lifted both hands to her bright headcloth in a sudden gust of wind. He took off his hat and set it over her head, cloth, and all. He laughed. It sank down around her ears. “Go inside, baby.”

  “Come in and wash.” She ran her hand over his rough shirtsleeve. It smelled like woodsmoke. “Wash up and a clean shirt and everything.”

  She poured the boiling water into the tub in front of the fireplace and then the cold water. He carried the Spencer in with him and stood it against the wall and then stripped off his clothes. He stepped into the tub and stood naked and turned up a pitcher of water over himself and then took the brush from her and scrubbed at his hands. He looked at them closely in the light from the window.

  “How’s that?” he said. Runnels of soapsuds poured down his forearms and dripped off his elbows. “Can I sit in the front row now?”

  “Yes.”

  She handed him the cotton towels made in a rough tabby weave and he scrubbed at his short, tight hair and ran the towel behind himself and then between his legs and over the thinly healed hole in his upper thigh where the Fort Belknap surgeon had dug out the .44 round and had taken sections of flesh with it. He turned himself in front of the fire and all the damp evaporated from his skin. Mary started to grip the sides of the tub to throw the water out, but Britt took it from her and opened the door and stepped out into the cold naked and flung the water and yelled, “Hoowee, God almighty!”

  He dropped the galvanized tub and ran back in. Mary wrapped a quilt around his shoulders and he stood again in front of the roaring fire until he had warmed. He reached for her, but Mary firmly handed him his underwear and socks and shirt.

  “People coming,” she said. “But after and so on.”

  “And so on,” he said.

  They stood inside at the windows and watched the storm arrive. On the stone hearth sat the brass barber’s basin that they had borrowed from Sergeant Earl to pass around for school money. On a long table the steaming trifle in its blue-willow bowl, jars of stuffed peppers.

  “Mary,” he said. “They aren’t coming.” The wind struck the house like a hammer. Every pane in the windows jumped. It had grown very dark. It was perhaps two in the afternoon of a short winter day. Between the bare limbs of the cedar elm they saw the storm ballooning across the plains to the north of them. The columns of snow drifted down from the overburden of cloud and were then blown horizontal. The windowpanes shivered and the blown snow lifted up the canvas awnings to throw them in manic flights across the open lands or plaster them against the tree trunks of Elm Creek. The smoke of the fireplace was sucked up the chimney in a solid column.

  “Maybe some.”

  “Nobody’s going to travel in this.”

  “Oh.” Mary’s lower lip stuck out. “Dancing. I was dancing and that new thing of some music.”

  “Harmonica,” said Britt.

  “Don’t talk for me,” she said.

  “All right. You wanted to hear that new thing of some music.”

  “A harmonica,” she said. Her eyes were large and round at the bottoms and very black. She had brushed out her wavy hair until it shone and pinned it in a decorative knot with a black net over the knot and then set a starched headcloth in a taffeta plaid on the back of her head. The long scar that forked and raveled like lightning into her scalp had diminished in color and her hair grew over it. She snapped her fingers. “Damn.”

  “Listen to you,” he said. “You cussing like a freighter.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “Never mind. The Comanche or the Kiowa won’t be coming either.” He tucked back a strand of her hair. “It’s been a while since it was just you and me.” He dropped his hands and went and bent over the spider skillet. “No kids. And plenty of firewood for all night and the morning.” He spooned up some of the apple mixture with its crisp topping and blew on it and tasted it. “All this for us.” He put the spoon down. “All that barbecue for us.” He set off the Dutch ovens and the skillet so the apple crisp and the potatoes would not burn.

  Mary bit her lip and looked at the floor. In a low and mournful voice she said, “I was going to dancing, Britt.”

  “Here.” He took her in his arms and moved her around the floor singing “Appalacky Town.” “When all the gents and the ladies come down, going to have a walk around Appalacky Town.” They danced sedately around the floor in front of the fire for as long as Britt had breath to sing but he could not carry a tune in his hat, and Mary started laughing at him and so they stopped.

  She said, “Remember the sorghum coming in? Old man Chessman and lost his load.”

  He lifted his hand to her hair and gently took off the taffeta headcloth. “Yes. In Kentucky. They let us have a dance that night and old man Chessman sat in a corner and pouted. Spilled it all over the Findlay road.” He laid the headcloth on the table beside the trifle. “They said he was going to get whipped for it, but Mr. Burkett never did nothing.” He lifted his hand once again to her hairnet and carefully disengaged it, and her hair fell down. “We danced all night.” Snow built a shelf of white on the sills and the windowlights jumped with every blast of wind so that they sent out planes of altering red reflections from the fire.

  And between that time and this Britt had become a different man than the one who was polite and grateful to be allowed a dance, who had stood silent and diffident behind Moses Johnson as his freedom papers were written out in Little Egypt. That self had disappeared as if in the heavy spring fogs of the Ohio and this person he was now had appeared, someone who had been there all along. A man with land and a house and a family and a Spencer rifle to hold it all.

  Mary lighted a candle at the coals and stood gazing at the flame with the faint curl of wick smoke rising past her hand. “Remember the whistle boats and that rock of fog river?”

  The great bluff of stone that stood out over the Ohio River and in a deep fog you could stand on it and look down into a drifting mist and hear far upstream on the wide river the steamboats laying on their whistles and the cry of it was like something calling for help or guidance in a dangerous, lightless world. When all was wet and damp and rich with water.

  “Yes, I remember.”

  The snow fell upon the house and the trees beyond the window and ran in manic circles between the washhouse and the leaping fire in the pit. He turned to look at her where she stood still with her hair falling down on the shoulders of her plaid dress and the small gold dots in her ears that glinted in the firelight. Somehow neither one of them wanted to eat.

  He moved past her to the heavy bedstead in the far corner and sat down on it. “All we need now is some of Paint’s godawful wine.” He lay his heavy hand down on the coverlet with the palm open to her. “Mary girl.”

  She turned her head slightly to one side and looked at him out of the side of her eyes and smiled a small, questioning smile that was somewhat sly. She held up one finger. She went to the tall safe that stood against the wall and held their cookware and the heavy steel canisters of flour and baking soda and cornmeal and brought out a glass jug that sloshed with a deep purple liquid and a living, gelatinous sediment that wavered in the bottom.

  “God damn don’t shake it up,” he said. “They’ll find us dead in the morning.” He took the ironstone cup from her and drank it down. She made an attempt but after one drink her eyes began to water and she put it down on the floor.

  “Mary, do you want me?”

  She bent forward and laid her hand on his neck and kissed his cheek. So he began to unbutton her dress button by button and they made their own world again between them. He laid his hands on that warm skin he had not touched for so long. They lay in the light of the fire in their own house. Snow thickened on the windowsills. The tumbled sheets and her small body warmed him to the center of himself. They had come home, if only for a short while. Every moment and every touch of her hands on his back was like stol
en riches. The treasonous world tapped at their windows, dots of snow against the black night.

  Chapter 36

  IN LATE JANUARY of 1871 Britt decided to set up a route past Fort Worth and on into Dallas. The two towns were thirty miles apart. When Britt and Paint and Dennis started out they went with two wagons and four horses to a wagon and they were already loaded with forage and grain for the horses for this long trip, but even so they picked up several tons of salt from the Graham Salt Works in heavy burlap sacks and two tons of cut limestone from the quarry in the White Settlement. Named for some people named White.

  Dallas had nearly five thousand people, and they said a railroad was coming in. It had freedmen’s towns in small neighborhoods at the fringes. Britt intended to drive straight into the ford over the Trinity River and then up the bluff road and onto Peachtree Street without any delays. Dallas was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and the town was like some hostile nation that had within its borders treasures of cloth and bales of gloves and kegs of kerosene and lightning rods and he had to go in and deliver the salt and limestone and pick up the return load and get out before anything happened. They kept the horses at a trot until they came to Peachtree and then walked the horses carefully through the traffic. They left the salt and the limestone at the depot where the Curry brothers waited for them in the freezing, drafty air of the warehouse. They then went on and came away from the Sheridan’s Supply warehouse with part of the return load; cases of Brandon and Kilmeyer beer in amber bottles brought from Leavenworth to go to Nance’s store. Then they went on to Poindexter’s Ironworks for wagon tires and tools and ox yokes.