The Color of Lightning (18 page)

“What is this?” said Samuel. He sat at the folding camp table with his hands each to one side of his plate.

“Prairie turnips, sir. We dig them out of the ground. They eat like potatoes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Cardwell,” said Samuel. He had carefully learned and remembered most of the officers’ and the cook’s names so he did not have to use their military titles. “Much appreciated.”

One soldier was disciplined for brawling. The captain had him

brought up on charges. His sergeant spoke for him, on his behalf, and said that the argument was caused by his theft of a silver whistle from another soldier but he was a good man and worked hard and was always sober. It did him no good. Samuel walked out on the prairie when they tied him to a wagon wheel and ignored the sounds of the long thin rod slamming into the soldier’s back and his aston- ished and helpless shouts. That night out of the clear dark air he heard the triumphant tooting of the silver whistle in the hands of its proper owner until the sergeant shouted for silence.

The next day the soldiers closed around them as they passed by an encampment of plains Indians. The white cones of their tipis rose up from a draw of post oak dotted with new leaves. Thickets of smoke drifted around the camp. Indian men in a state of near nakedness sat on their horses alongside a herd of long-horned cattle. Samuel sat up, rigid and still. He saw a white woman, naked from the waist up, carrying a load of firewood on her back. She walked with a slow, determined walk between two tipis. The woman’s breasts were ringed with tattoos, circle after circle right down to her nipples. Her hair was a bleached-out brown color thickened with some kind of clay plaster and she had tattoos at the corners of her mouth. She saw the soldiers and dropped her load and disappeared among the tipis.

“Mr. Dearing! Mr. Dearing!”

The captain in charge came riding back. He touched his hat. “There is a white woman back there.” Samuel leaned forward on

the wagon seat. “There is a white woman in that encampment.” “Don’t say anything,” the captain said. “We will be lucky to get

through here with no trouble.”

“Why is she there?” Samuel clasped his hands together. “Surely we don’t allow that.”

“Allow what?”

“Allow American women to go about the tribes as common women.”

The captain paused and then said, “She’s a captive, sir.” “Well, why don’t you take her back?”

“They won’t sell.” “Sell?”

“We have offered two hundred dollars but it was refused.”

“Go and insist that they release her.” Samuel stood up on the jolting wagon seat and held on to the backrest.

The captain leaned out of his saddle and spit his quid on the ground.

“That would mean we’d be in a shooting situation, Mr. Ham- mond. There would be a lot of shooting and everybody would be really unhappy.” He paused. “And it’s possible she wouldn’t want to come back.”

“And why not?”

“She may have been with them since she was young, and if that’s the case then she’s married and got Indian children and she doesn’t speak English.”

Samuel sat down again, confused, caught between the iron blades of several conflicting facts.

“Do you know who she is?”

“We think she’s Martha Hudnell. If that’s who it is, she was taken from Fredericksburg in ’forty-four. She would have been about five at the time.” He bit off another chew of tobacco. “The people down there have been trying to get her back for years but unless you just go in and shoot everybody you are probably not going to get her back for any money.”

“Where is Fredericksburg?”

“In Texas. South of the Red. Down there in the hills.” “It’s impossible that we can do nothing about this.”

The captain nodded. “Yes sir, I will make out in my report that she has been sighted.”

The wagons went on, all their canvas covers lurching in differ- ent directions as they came upon a dip or a shelf of stone, each in turn. Two of the cavalrymen sang,
It’s your misfortune and none of my own.
Samuel’s wagon and himself as well now were weighted with paperwork and worry. The image of the woman with the blue eyes and plastered tawny hair came back to Samuel in infinite detail, the

woman taking long steps, her unbound breasts wobbling and her head bent against the tump line on her forehead.

It was outrageous to have a white woman walking around with her breasts exposed and those breasts ringed with dark tattoos, her brown hair in sticky strings bouncing about her shoulders with a great load of firewood on her back. But then why would it be accept- able for an Indian woman?

Samuel knew he was going to have dreams about this.

And so he did. That night Jesus appeared to Samuel in a busi- ness suit and asked him to sign something with a strange pen made of hair. To sign it would be fatal. He was resigned to this when he woke up in thick down layers under an early-May prairie dawn. In spite of his dream he felt very peaceful and quiet. He listened to the men shouting orders, orders that had to do with feeding the teams and who should be hitched with who. The military bugle calls tore out through the blue air and smoke rose up through the cranky limbs of the timber belt where they had camped.

That day they came to a traveling people strung out for half a mile, people a soldier said were Osage, taking their horses to the new spring grass in the Sans Bois Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. The women and children passed them riding in wagons. The men’s heads were shaven bald except for a scalp lock bursting with feathers, and small spotted dogs trotted importantly alongside the wagons.

Then after five days when the land was empty of people of any kind and only miles of dim, rainy prairies where the wind bleached currents in the grass, they came to a group of Kiowa-Apache men, blinking in the rain. There were ten or twelve of them.

The soldiers talked their way past the Kiowa-Apache on the strength of the treaty and the fact that there were twenty soldiers along with the wagon. The two groups rode past one another in a state of humming tension with no weapon unsheathed but ready to hand. The Kiowa-Apache men held their blankets hooded over their heads like monks’ cowls. Samuel looked into each face as they passed. At their rifles wrapped in pieces of canvas and their hands loose on the reins, the dark tattoos. Their reserved faces.

That night Samuel thought about the captive woman. That she had been taken but now lived, probably quite happily, with the In- dians and had an Indian husband and children and so he resigned himself to it. The reports of white women and children killed might well be exaggerations of the Texans, who exaggerated everything. It was how they were. All you had to do was to listen to the Texans’ tall tales, their songs, which were full of bloody revenge stories. Only hear them. The army teamsters and buffalo hunters that had joined in with them for a while, sitting at the campfire singing “Down by the Ohio.”

I held a knife against her breast, as into my arms she pressed, she cried O Willie don’t murder me, I’m not prepared for eternity.

Chapter 14
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W

S

amuel made an
office of the front room of the new agency house, set out his forms and pens and papers. Placed his worn Bible atop the mantel. The house stood fifty yards from the banks of Cache Creek under the newly leafed cottonwoods. The trim was bright with new paint. A schoolhouse was being built as he had requested, and the agency warehouse repaired. He would set men to work on a sawmill and a blacksmith shop. Two miles away was the rudimentary army post, with buildings of adobe and picket housing three companies and their horses. Restless troopers shot dice, repaired tack, and smoked. They drilled on the dusty parade ground. They lost things and went hunting for them, cut hay in the bottoms, and once in a while found some- thing alcoholic and high-proof to drink. Civilian contractors had begun to lay out the foundations for the stone buildings that

would become Fort Sill.

Samuel sat down with Colonel Grierson. Dotted leaf shadows bounced in the dirty window lights. How good it was to be under a roof again.

The colonel said, “You have about two thousand, five hundred

Comanche, and one thousand, nine hundred Kiowa and five hun- dred Kiowa-Apache. There are three hundred Wichita.” Grierson handed him a sheet of paper. He sat with a military posture. Gri- erson’s upper lip was covered with a brown mustache. He still wore the insignia of Griffon’s Tenth Division, Cavalry. His uniform was somewhat faded, especially at the knees of his trousers and at his shoulders. The yellow stripe running down the outside of his pants denoting cavalry was threadbare where he habitually tucked his pants leg into his boot. “Those are approximate. A great many of them are living as they always have, out on the High Plains, and they don’t come in to be counted. So let’s guess at maybe four thou- sand all told.”

“Is that all?” Samuel cocked his head.

“Yes. From what I read in old reports, at one time they were ten times more. Maybe thirty thousand. But reports of cholera and smallpox epidemics on the plains started to come in in the fifties. I guess it was when the gold rush wagons went through. Nobody heard about it until about ’fifty-one. ’Fifty or ’fifty-one.”

“Then they lost most of their people.” “Apparently. Much reduced.”

Samuel bent his head to the desk before him and thought about it. Tried to imagine it. Then he said, “Very well.” He went over the figures. “And you are clear as to your duties?”

“I believe so.” Grierson had his hat on his knee and both boots side by side on the floor.

“And would you go over them, please?”

“Sir, I am under your command. We are allowed only to ask the Indians to remain here on the reservation, and we are not to con- front them in any way. If they leave we might ride out and ask them to return. We are never to engage.” He lifted his hat from his knee and replaced it again. “That’s about it.”

“Just so. How do you feel about that?” “I am perfectly content, sir.”

“Good.”

“It was a long war, Mr. Hammond.”

“Yes, it was.”

“And as a Friend you had no part in the fighting, but I can tell you the men sent here are fairly worn down and they are willing to forgo any hostilities. And so am I.”

Samuel inclined his head and glanced up at Grierson from under his eyebrows. “I understand perfectly well. I drove an ambulance for Sherman’s army medical corps. I know very well they are weary.”

“Ah.” Grierson glanced at Samuel and something about his thin body relaxed beneath the uniform. “I see. A Howard?”

“No, the Finley. I was at Chattanooga and then on down to Savannah.”

“The Finley was a good machine. Got carried off by one myself.

How long were you driving?”

“A year. ’Sixty-four. It was instructive.” Samuel hesitated, and then said, “It was humbling.”

Grierson bowed slightly. “My compliments, sir.”

Samuel folded his hands together. “Entirely unnecessary, Colo- nel. Unlike yourself I was rarely in the line of fire.”

“Still.” Grierson reached into his pocket and drew out a scrap of paper. “Now, I have a young man I can assign you as a clerk. He is with the commissary and his term of service is completed. He un- derstands very well the intricacies of the paperwork requirements of the federal government. It is a style all its own.”

“Excellent!” Samuel said. “That will relieve me of a great deal of worry. And his character?”

“He has a good-conduct medal.”

Samuel nodded. “Awarded to enlisted men who have not ab- sconded with unit funds, attempted to seduce the commander’s wife, and have not contracted more than the company average of venereal diseases.” Grierson laughed and Samuel smiled. “Does he use spirituous liquors?”

“Every chance he gets.”

“Well, send him. We will see.”

“There is a Mexican woman to cook and clean for you. She was rescued from the Comanche.”

“How was that managed?” Samuel lifted his head.

“Last winter. There was a big blizzard in January, they tell me, and a band became scattered. The last agent sent patrols out to look for them and they came upon her.”

Samuel thought for a moment and then said, “I don’t think it would be appropriate. Since I am unmarried.”

Grierson leaned back. “Then I will send you a dog robber. He’ll carry your washing to the post for the washerwomen there.”

“Good.”

“Also a translator. Onofrio Santa Cruz. Another Mexican cap- tive, he was with the Comanche. Fluent in Comanche, Spanish, and English.” Grierson turned to look out the window where his sergeant stood with their horses. “And I would like to leave five men here with you at least for a while.”

“I will not have armed guards here at the agency,” said Samuel. “I understand that. But until you get settled in, let’s say five men

and a sergeant to help out with your buggy horses and hauling in forage and so on. A work detail.”

Samuel frowned. “All right. And now, about captives.”

Grierson spread his rein-callused hands. “They want money or trade goods. I don’t know if this new Indian Bureau has a budget for that. Or if your denomination has.”

“But that’s ransom money.”

“I know,” said Grierson. “Agent Donelly who was here before you was paying two hundred dollars and once fifteen hundred to get someone back.”

Samuel lowered his head and stared at the floor, thinking. There was a long silence. Then he said, “Colonel, what is that?”

Grierson lifted his head and craned, his hands on his kneecaps. “A scorpion, sir.” He stood up and walked across the room and stepped on it. He came back and sat down. “Stuff your shoes and boots with something. They like hiding in shoes and boots. It is painful but not fatal.”

“All right.” Samuel regarded the spiky, twisted clot. “Did Donelly then receive some of that money back, under the table?”

“It’s possible.” He paused. “With Agent Donelly anything was possible.”

Samuel put his head in one hand, briefly. “And they expect to continue this traffic in human beings.”

Grierson lifted his shoulders and turned his hat in his hand. “As far as I have heard the red men have always taken captives. It’s a kind of custom. Sometimes the captives survive and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the red men themselves survive and sometimes they don’t. Life is hard for everybody out there.”