The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

  Paint wandered into the blacksmith shop with his noonday meal in his hand. He watched as the smith reset a tire. An old man sat on a bench with his feet in the shavings and the hoof clippings and shorn bits of metal. He was thin in a sort of collapsed way and his skin was like old paper and his lower lids drooped and were very red.

  The old man said, “I seen one other nigger that was turning white like that.” He nodded toward Paint’s arm. “In splashes.” He held out a skeletal hand toward the forge fire to warm it. The smith dropped the tire into the quenching vat and steam shot up in gouts.

  Paint looked over at the man and then away again with a polite smile.

  “Well sir, where was that?” Paint finished his biscuit and salted ham and then turned up a bottle of beer. He shook the crumbs from the cloth wrapping and put it in his pocket.

  “Alabama.” The old man shifted his tattered shoes. It was very warm in the blacksmith shop and the slight wind fluted at the dirty windowpanes. The old man had a heavy wool coat closed around him.

  Paint clasped his hands between his knees and pushed at a hoof clipping with his boot. “Well sir, did he turn all white or what?”

  “I don’t know,” said the old man. “We left.”

  “Well, it seems to always get bigger.” Paint lifted his forearm and looked at it. “I tried to color myself with hair dye but I couldn’t get the color right. It was always darker or lighter. So I give up.”

  The old man nodded. “The Lord sends to each of us some chastisement. Some burden, so that we may turn to him.”

  “Yes sir,” said Paint.

  “Yours is to turn into a white man.”

  Paint nodded slowly and thoughtfully but he had no idea what to say. The smith smashed his five-pound hammer onto the hot and glowing tire. After a few moments Paint thought of something to say and turned to the old man, but he was deeply asleep where he sat.

  They got out of Dallas without incident.

  The thirty miles between Dallas and Fort Worth was a long and pleasant drive. Britt knew it was a place where they would not have trouble from either Comanche or Kiowa or white men. It was a good feeling. He did not have that kind of feeling very often. The prairies between the two towns were damp with apricot-colored grasses that steamed in the noon sun, and the frost shadows of isolated live oaks shrank and wilted. Britt wished he had brought a saddle horse with him to ride through the shallow sunlight and the crisp air. He sat in the front wagon and drove with Dennis beside him and Paint coming alone behind in the second wagon. Vesey Smith had joined the Ninth Cavalry. He said he wanted to go hunting Indians.

  As they passed through Fort Worth with its few scattered buildings, Britt saw coming up from the south along Rucker Street a long tattered stream of cattle with men in broad hats riding alongside. He stood up in the seat to watch. There had to be more than a thousand head. It was too far away for him to see their road brands. Britt stood up with the ends of his muffler dangling over his chest.

  “What the hell are they doing?” he said.

  “Beats me,” said Dennis. “Maybe folks here in Fort Worth are hungry. Real hungry.”

  Britt saw ahead a black man walking alongside the road with a king of clubs playing card stuck in his hat band.

  “Hey you nigger,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  The man turned. “You speaking to me?”

  “Yes,” said Britt. “You the only man on the road.”

  “Then what?”

  Britt and Dennis on the wagon drew abreast. The harness jingled. “How come you got that card in your hat?”

  The man said, “Witches.”

  Britt pursed his lips and nodded and then said, “Tell me something.”

  The man was dressed in a threadbare coat and a dimly white shirt without a collar. “Just ast me.”

  “What are all those cattle coming up the road for?”

  The man turned and looked down Rucker Street and even as they stood the noise of cattle bawling at one another increased. The sound of their immense horns knocking together with a myriad clicking, an incessant running clatter, sounded like an avalanche of some small brittle things that never ended. The entire road was a field of moving horns. The men on horseback shouted at the cattle and at one another.

  “They going on up north. Way up north. I don’t know where exactly.”

  “What the hell for?” Britt stood on the wagon seat and watched.

  “So up north people can eat them.”

  Britt turned from the man with the card in his hat brim and spoke to Dennis and Paint. “They are going to hold them here till March. That’s what they’re going to do. And throw a bunch more together and then move them up to Kansas. I bet that’s what they’re doing. They are going to fat them up there where there’s rain. I’ll be damned. A whole herd. Man, that is a good idea.”

  The man turned and began walking on down the road.

  “If you knew how come you ast me?”

  Britt signaled to Dennis to get the horses moving and Britt said, “You want a ride? Get up here.”

  “Nah. I like walking.”

  “Where you going?”

  “I don’t have no idea.”

  THEY OVERNIGHTED AT the outskirts of the White Settlement and slept under the wagons. They got up to the sound of Paint singing “Marching through Georgia” over a brisk cookfire and banging the skillet and coffeepot. They fed the horses and then themselves and loaded their mess box and the bedding, and then started home.

  They stopped at the Graham Salt Works and paid old man Graham his money and he returned to Britt the money in gold pieces that made up his freighting fee. They headed on toward Fort Belknap. On the way they would pass Elm Creek and spend the night there. As they came out of the hilly country around the salt works and onto a level plain tall with yellow grasses, a place called Salt Fork Prairie, Dennis turned to the north.

  He said, “Yonder they come, Britt.”

  They flowed like a school of fish through the grasses in a cascade of shining paint hides. They were crying out in loud voices and riding through their own bank of gunsmoke. Their hair was cut short on the right side, tossing sheaves of blunt short hair, and some with unbound braids.

  Britt screamed for Paint to abandon his wagon and come on. Leave it, leave it! he shouted. It was not defensible. Maybe they would stop and loot the wagon and take the horses. They had been caught in the one unprotected stretch between Graham and Indian Mound.

  Paint threw away the reins and jumped and with his rifle over his head came running toward Britt and Dennis and the high-sided freight wagon. He ran alongside and laid one hand on the gunnel and vaulted over the side among the bales. Britt jumped back to join him and began firing. Dennis came over the driver’s seat as well and kept the reins in his hand and screamed at the horses. The Fitzgerald bays lunged into a full gallop within seconds and briefly slammed against the doubletrees and hit the leaders in the hocks with them until the leaders were also plunging forward. Crescents of dirt and sod flew up from their hooves.

  “Maybe we can make Indian Mound!” Britt yelled.

  “Too far!” Dennis half-lay behind the driver’s seat with the reins in his hands. He could not see where they were going. The wagon careened on from one small drainage to another and the horses lunged against the load.

  “Throw the shit out!” Britt shouted. The Kiowa had started their charge too soon and were still half a mile away but on the other hand on this open prairie they would have been seen at any distance. Britt and Paint tore open boxes and hurled out the loads of gloves and hats and mirrors, then tossed over the crates they had been packed in. They ripped open grain sacks and spilled barley and oats over the side in a long yellow waterfall of grain and then tossed the sacks in the air. Far behind Britt saw that some of them had stopped to jump into the abandoned wagon and begin rifling through the load. Bottles of beer shot into the air, strings of amber molasses flew in arcs. They were cutting the horses out of the harness.

 
They had to get somewhere to protect at least one side. Indian Mound Mountain with its timbered oak slopes and broken architecture of red stone lay ahead on the horizon, too far. On a slight rolling rise was a stand of brush and stunted live oak growing up around a tipped layer of stone.

  “Drive into it!” Britt called to Dennis. “Drive straight into it!”

  “There’s rock!”

  “Do as I tell you!”

  Dennis stood up despite the cracking shots around him and aimed the horses for the stand of brush and small trees. The horses crashed into the dense and wiry stand and tore their forelegs and clawed over rock and the wagon straddled the bank of stone and tipped. The bays lunged on in a powerful striving that pulled the wagon bed over the flat table of stone and crowned it, but the horses kept on clawing for purchase until it was clear the wagon would go no farther. Britt jumped out and carried with him the box of Spencer rimfire ammunition under one arm. The stiff, small limbs of the live oak saplings tore off his hat and ripped a gash in his hand.

  “Cut them loose, Dennis!” He dragged the ammunition box into the low trees. “Cut them loose and tie them somewhere. Tie them to the wagon tongue.” He slapped his hat back on his head.

  Paint and Britt tipped over one of the trunks that carried hair dye and another with carboys of carbolic acid. A round plowed into the hair dye with a loud smash and flung it all over Britt’s hands and it ran down along with the blood from the gash in his hand. He shoved a trunk to one side of the copse and the trunk with the carboys in it to the other side. They had at least some protection on three sides. Not much. But some.

  Dennis crawled over to the wagon and then to the horses but he could not get them unharnessed. Bullets and one arrow struck so close that his face was powdered with tiny splinters. The arrow had hit the hard planks of the wagon with such force that it buried its steel head almost to the barbs. He left off grappling with the buckles and crawled back into the wiry brush and yelled for ammunition.

  The Kiowa galloped like circus riders in an invisible ring. They called out and sang and there was a kind of fire streaming around them. They were lethal and beautiful and they had come bearing the mystery of death for mankind to puzzle over. They were adorned with the flight feathers of eagles and their horses were outlined in sunlit manes. One man wore an ancient Spanish coat of mail slapping over his chest and he shouted at the men forted up in the stand of live oak and brush in a merry voice. The horsemen wove and circled and turned and spun, incessantly moving targets. Britt felt the brush all around him jumping with bullets. He looked for the young white renegade and then the boy rode past, a small shield on his arm and on the boss of the shield a scalp of light brown hair tossed in dirty strands.

  Britt aimed for the boy’s ribs and fired. The boy shot sideways off the horse’s back and a blossom of blood sprayed over his horse’s withers. He went down and stayed down.

  “I got the little son of a bitch,” said Britt.

  Paint crawled through the brush and rocks to shove a hatful of cartridges to Dennis and then fought his way back to where the banks of heavy gunpowder smoke threaded among the stiff wire of yaupon holly and live oak saplings and it was all lit up by repeated muzzle flashes. They kept firing until their barrels were too hot and the cartridges were cooking off before they could be fired. Sweat ran into their eyes and they could hardly see one another for the gunsmoke and their own shots deafened them. It seemed like hours had passed or that they had been thrown into some eternity of strife that would never end. Britt shifted to his revolver but he had only one bandolier of ammunition for it so he became very careful. Paint turned over one of the bottles of acid on his rifle barrel and it hissed and stank.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said Britt.

  “I’m cooling it.”

  “You’re going to gas us.”

  The Kiowa knew what was happening. They knew their barrels were overheated. Britt saw in the distance two men standing outside of pistol range and holding two horses each. This meant that several Kiowa were on the ground and crawling toward them. They could not see them unless they stood up and then they would be exposed.

  Dennis stood up with his Spencer and saw two men coming forward on their hands and knees in a stand of wild buckwheat. He fired over the dancing, nervous backs of the bays and as he did a round struck him in the throat and he fell back onto the stiff brush and was tangled in it and half held there a foot above the ground. Bright red blood leaped out of his throat in regular, pulsing sprays and painted the live oak leaves with a startling color. After a few moments he lifted one hand and then dropped it and his rifle fell beside him.

  “Dennis is hit,” said Paint. He lay down behind the trunk of acid bottles. He fired twice and saw a young man with a beautiful long brown body spin around on his horse and fling off the far side and come to lie on his face.

  “Is he dead?” Britt sat up and began to feed rounds into the magazine. Bright brass casings lay all around him.

  “Yeah, Britt.”

  And then Britt was hit in the center of his chest. He threw up his hands into the air and his rifle somersaulted forward and fell at his feet. His eyes drifted and then in the middle of all the shouting and dust and noise and the sound of a hundred horses galloping his eyelids slowly closed. The hole in his shirt was dark and absolute. He fell forward with his hands opening like flowers. A long brilliant sun moved on toward the afternoon and its change of color in the air and overhead the vultures rose tier upon tier, riding the updrafts. How beautiful is the sky over the rolling plains. How far away.

  “Aw, Britt,” said Paint. “Britt.”

  The two lead horses were brought down. The light sorrel horses jerked and stiffened and then fell straight down in the harness; it seemed they had lain down with their legs folded under them and their necks bent forward in a graceful curve so that their noses touched the ground, bowing. They were both dead. The Indians could now hear only one rifle replying.

  Paint shoved himself backward over the stone and clawing brush and laid his hand on Britt’s collar and drew him down. Britt’s hat fell off and his unmoving eyes looked upward toward the building clouds and the vultures that rose higher and higher on some rising column of air into the white ices of the cumulus until they reached such altitudes that they winked out like dark stars. Paint touched Britt’s eyeball but there was no movement, no blink, and the ribs under the shirt had ceased to move and draw breath.

  “Aw, Britt.”

  A certain calm overcame Paint. A strange thought came to him for one second and that thought was that the random splashes of white that flowed over his face and his arms made him very beautiful. That they were not random at all but that there was a pattern underlying them he had never seen before. He decided he would go out to them. He would present himself to them. Like a Medicine Hat paint.

  And so he reloaded his Spencer. The barrel had cooled. He laid Britt’s rifle across his chest and covered the handsome face in its saddle-colored skin, now strangely pale, with his coat. The long hands with their smooth heavy muscle lying each to one side empty as clothes without people in them. Paint stood up without a hat on his bullet head so that the Kiowa could see the startling markings on his bald skull. Both the black and white parts of his arms were streaked with blood from the brush and cactus but he was unwounded. He would present himself to them as a whole person. He shouted something. He walked past where Dennis lay suspended in the ironlike brush and the dead sorrels bowing to the earth and the trembling Fitzgerald bays.

  He stood up in the river of savory grasses with their colors of sepia and slate and the drifting phantoms of powder smoke. He began firing. His rifle muzzle followed each target, hungry and seeking. The brass cartridge shells leaped from the breech like jewelry thrown to the wind. He made of himself a gift. He shot and cocked and shot again. He was hit many times. Ahó, ahó, they shouted. The Kiowa words with the rising tone that meant Kill him, kill him. Or perhaps one of them said it in the falling tone ahô
, ahô that meant Thank you, thank you.

  Epilogue

  BRITT, DENNIS, AND Paint were found the following day by fellow teamsters and were buried where they had fallen. Their grave marker was cut by hand into native stone and it is in the middle of a field and it is not easy to find. Some reminiscences taken down in the early 1900s say that the men were scalped, other accounts say they were not. Some say the cavalry found them and buried them and others say they were found by other freighters. No one knows who made the headstone.

  In May of 1871 General William Tecumseh Sherman arrived in Texas to investigate the endless complaints of Texans concerning Indian depredations. His entourage passed near the place where Britt and his companions had been killed five months before and was watched, from a distance, by Setanta, Satank, Horseback, and other Kiowa and Comanche on a raiding party. They let Sherman’s column go unmolested, but the day following, the war party rode down on a train of freight wagons and killed Nathan Long, N. J. Baxter, Jesse Bowman, James and Samuel Elliot, James and Thomas Williams, all freighters for Henry Warren, government contractor. The wounded were brought in to Fort Richardson, where Sherman was staying. A fort with stone barracks and a dusty parade ground at the edge of the Red River Valley. When Sherman got the news and realized the attack had missed him by a matter of hours, he rode out to the site and saw the bodies of men who had been tied to wheels and burned alive. There was no mention of Britt Johnson and his black companions. The men of the Warren massacre were all white men, and a Texas state marker in good gray granite has been erected and their names carved into it.

  Because of the Warren Wagon Train Massacre, President Grant rescinded the Peace Policy and the Quakers were removed from their position on the board of the Indian Bureau. Thus the long Red River War began and was finished only when the buffalo were destroyed and Ranald MacKenzie ran Quanah Parker to earth in Palo Duro Canyon in 1874 and shot seven hundred of his horses. When Quanah Parker surrendered, there were at least two white warriors with his small band, who had fought alongside him for many years. And so it ended.