The Color of Lightning (33 page)
th e r e w e r e te n
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 read- justed 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 be- came 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 erup- tions 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 be- tween 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 plan- ing of bone and muscle still held hers. He was waiting with great patience. He would wait all night. Mary thought,
It is only a recur- ring 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 whirl- ing arms for the most silent child in class.
W
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the crossing of the Clear Fork of the Brazos on a chill winter day, in late 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 black- ened 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 clap- pers 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 op- posite side and watched for a target.
“One of them’s got a Sharps fifty,” Paint said and fired again. They watched anxiously for the powder smoke of the big buffalo gun.
There it came drifting in a solid, glutinous gray bank from the south shore, but whoever fired it would no longer be there. Shining hides of horses in splashy colors faded and shifted behind the screen of sycamore trunks. Britt fired and heard a horse’s brief, impelled scream and shouts in Kiowa. A bullet cracked past his head and smashed into the shingles and a millisecond later the report of the muzzle blast. He fired again and again and reloaded and kept fir- ing. The horses clawed up the sloping red sand of the south bank dragging the wagon behind them like condemned things born to flee all danger bearing heavy loads they could not jettison. Dennis whipped them on while the loose bells rang in a hundred different tones. Ahead of them near the road was the ruins of the place called the Old Stone Ranch House.
“Want me to pull off?” shouted Dennis.
“Yes!” Britt sighted down the Spencer, the barrel wavering, look- ing for a clear shot. “Paint, do something about those damn bells, they’ll hear us.”
Paint sat up to lever the top off one of the kegs of molasses with a farrier’s file and began to jam the cowbells, the school bells, and all the small copper sheep bells into the molasses, where they sank with dull clicks.
Behind a fallen stone wall they pulled up and vaulted over the sides of the wagon. Before them lay the ruined two-story house with its roof gone. They fell on their knees at the empty windows. Den- nis crept low to run his hands over the horses, to look for wounds. Britt began to make a hole in the dried mortar between two stones just to the left of a window frame. He chipped at it with the point of his knife and then found a thin metal rod lying to hand and ran it into the hole and then back and forth until he had a peephole.
Paint sat at his back facing the other direction over the remains of a collapsed wall, among pieces of a cookstove and its rusty pipe. His hands were thick with molasses. He tried to lick it off and wipe his hands on his shirt. His hands were sticking to the gun stock. Bees came, and made a sound like
zone zone zone
around his head. Winter bees, hungry. There were broken bits of stone jugs and pickle jars lying around. Britt looked down and saw three chessmen, a king and two pawns, lying in the dirt. Also a broken mirror. It lay just as it had been knocked from the wall long ago and its pieces lay slightly apart from each other. He wrapped his right hand in his handkerchief and took up the largest piece and tilted it from behind the safety of the stone wall and saw in it the grassy landscape broken here and there by upthrust layers of red sandstone, a stand of bare cottonwoods near the river and a low and spiky plum thicket. He heard the flat smack of Paint killing bees.
“Hey, hey, you Britt,” called a voice from a long distance. And then after a moment, “You Britt,” the voice said again from a differ- ent place altogether. From behind a massed growth of prickly pear whose flat pads were crowned with red fruit.
“Here I am,” Britt called.
“You thief, you cheat, you steal that underwater boy.” This time the voice was closer.
“Too bad,” said Britt. “Come on.” Paint whispered,
Where is he?
Somewhere close.
Britt sat utterly still except for the hand that
held the mirror and this he tilted one way and then another.
Then Britt said in Spanish,
“Ven y muere, pendejo.”
A man’s voice called out to him in reply,
“Donde está mi hijito negrito? Ladron.”
Britt laid his rifle barrel on the window frame and fired into the stand of cactus. He fired three times, in spaced shots, moving each shot steadily to the right. Cactus fruit sprayed in bright red explosions. Paint stayed where he was but turned slightly and fired through an empty window to let them know that another rifle was present and in working condition.
After a while Britt heard them beginning to move away. He heard the soft thud of unshod horses and the tearing sound of some- one forcing their way through brush. Perhaps Aperian Crow and a band of young Kiowa warriors and the Kiowa-Apache white ren- egade. Maybe some Comanche had joined them, maybe Tissoyo. Come to take his boy again. His only boy.
They sat until nightfall. It was the dark of the moon. A dry wind swept the sky clean and the starlight was enough to see by and the vast scattering of the constellations burned overhead, random streams of remote blue-white gems. The horses shifted and were restless under their sweaty harness. After a while Britt stepped out from behind the wall, trusting to his own dark face in the dark night, and went ahead at a walk along the dim trail. His night vi- sion came to him easily, his footfalls soft on the stony road. Then he turned and whistled. Paint and Dennis came in the wagon, the horses thirsty and tired. Britt walked a hundred yards ahead of them all the way to Fort Griffin.
Major Pinney at Fort Griffin told him that the burned buggy belonged to Dr. Seagram and that the doctor had been killed and
cut up in so many pieces they could not find all of him. Somewhere out on the plains coyotes carried these pieces away, trotting impor- tantly through the grasses like it was a job of work.
th e y p i c k ed up
flour in barrels and crates of bottled beer and whiskey, skillets and peppermints and tools and ready-made over- coats, to deliver them at Nance’s store in Fort Belknap, a store they could not enter. Each time before they pulled out Britt checked the toolbox to one side of the wagon to see that the big wrenches were there, and the wagon jack, an extra king bolt and carriage bolts of various sizes. He saw that the grease bucket hung behind was full. Paint and Vesey unloaded while Dennis checked off the items and made an X for payment.
Jube rode down the street. The boy had thrown down his slate when he heard Dennis blowing the dented bugle upon their arrival and shot out the door. He rode his black horse on an old dragoon saddle through the searing summer heat and dust. He carried the ancient Spanish spur buckled to his belt in the belief that one day he would find a mate for it.
Jube jumped off and then scrambled up the high back wheel and then into the driver’s well.