The Color of Lightning (9 page)
The children chased a pet antelope fawn and brought it back to the woman who had adopted it. Then they lost interest and found the dog with spotted puppies who had been allowed to ride in a tra- vois and was grateful. Lottie picked up a writhing puppy and gave it a Comanche name.
Tuaahtaki,
cricket.
Two young men went up a nearby peak to keep watch. Elizabeth,
too, had begun to fear the soldiers. The Comanche often killed their captives when they were attacked. Elizabeth did not know if she could save both Lottie and herself if this were to happen. She helped unroll the tipi cover from its pole and decided she would die trying. She saw herself smashing the digging stick over a man’s nose. She made herself stop thinking this by humming a vagrant melody that she recalled, a ballad about drowning Scotsmen, and then straight- ened up and admired the bony, subdued horse that Lottie and two other children were riding about camp.
Camp life surged around Elizabeth. A heavy older woman stood and sang in a loud, quavering voice with an expression of great hap- piness. A baby had just been born. Two men shouted at one another in anger and the civil chief stepped between them and separated them. He sent the younger man away from camp with a herd of fifteen horses; a young and handsome man with copper bracelets up his arms. The young man galloped away behind the horses, pouting and flashing his bracelets. Another group rode off to the northwest with loud flourishes and shouts; they were going to visit the Co- manchero traders out of San Idlefonso.
The tipis rose one after another like mushrooms. Fires crack- led, the men ran the horses to water in the shallows of West Cache Creek, and so they lived life as it had been given to them for thou- sands of years, both here and in another creation, in the legend time and perhaps even before that, when God so made the world and set the stars in the heavens and the waters below and from those wa- ters some aquatic being had brought up earth. A force had formed the hot and smoking blood clot that became the buffalo. Had set the ramparts of Medicine Bluff and the Wichita Mountains and smoothed the plains as if fleshing a great hide, and set the sun over- head on its indifferent burning wheel that dragged the Comanche’s crawling shadows behind them like dark and sacred hair over the wide earth.
Rain came again in heavy downpours, wave after wave of it. The firewood Elizabeth and the two wives, happy Pakumah and the sullen Tabimachi, brought in was tangled with greenbrier and the
last of the autumn flowers, purple asters and dog daisies. Elizabeth slept to one side of the doorway of the tipi instead of in the entrance, because she worked hard and did not look any man in the eye and because she could brain-tan buckskin as well as any. She took up a dull knife and tore the hair from a deer hide down to the skin, which was white as paper. They had never heard of a currier’s blade with a recurved edge that would have had the hair off in a minute. Idiots, an idiot people. She watched as the Dismal Bitch built a fire under it to smoke the hide brown. The thin wife threw a handful of oatmeal into the flames so that the deerskin took on an ochre color. Elizabeth saw the snowing handful of oatmeal and wondered where she had got it and wished she could have some to eat.
She watched as Pakumah beaded a new buckskin dress for Lot- tie. Pakumah had left the deerskin in its natural white and beaded it in blue and black chevrons around the neck. Pakumah lifted it over Lottie’s head and sat back to admire her in it.
Elizabeth learned the pattern of moccasins and cut them out and sewed them together and then stitched the heavy bull buffalo hide soles on them with very small waterproof stitches. She rammed the awl in as if she were piercing the heart of Eaten Alive with every stitch. Her anger had become a fixed and hidden constellation, and its cold fire warmed her heart. Elizabeth then handed the mocca- sins to the young wife Pakumah to see how it was she beaded the vamp.
In the first week of December there came a heavy snow that started in the early morning, before dawn, and in that dark snow the thin and now silent older wife Tabimachi removed the door cover and stepped out. She walked along a narrow trail up the mountain- side. She came to a great bluff where the waters of West Cache ran choked and foaming far below in a narrow chute. She tied the rope to a twisted post oak and put a heavy loop of the rope around her neck and fell over the edge of the cliff and so died.
W
T
hat s a m e s n o w
fell upon Mary and Jube and Cherry and little Millie living with the Kiowa far to the north, along
the Canadian River. They had passed out of that part of the country where the men raided and were now in the territory of hunting and living and shifting in slow considered moves from one part of the plains to another, and so it seemed to Mary that they would not now kill her or her children. They might be abandoned. If they were left alone on the plains without tools or weapons or blankets, she would die and the children would die. She and her children were in an im- mense and beautiful prison, limitless on all sides.
Mary held Cherry in her arms and Jube walked alongside, watching everything around him with alert and narrowed eyes. His dead older brother had left an empty space and Jube came to fill that space within days, flowing into its blank silhouette like powder smoke. They walked behind the travois of Aperian Crow’s wife in their tattered clothing and broken shoes. All Mary had to cover her was the remains of her dress and her long chemise. She had torn up several yards of the skirt to make a kind of shawl to cover her head and shoulders against the cold wind and the sun. Jube had more
clothes; they had not been interested in tearing off his clothes. He had a shirt and a pair of pants of coarse wool and his unraveling stockings. His shoe soles were coming loose at the toes but that could be fixed if only they would stop traveling.
There were two other captives, Mexican boys of about seven and nine who every day fell farther and farther behind. The men had gone through battle and hard riding to capture them and now they seemed to have forgotten their existence. The Kiowa went on as if they were caught up in some cosmic rapids and Mary and her chil- dren too were caught up in it and borne along with them and where that impelled and violent current itself came from no one knew.
The bald sky overhead filled with a cool invisible wind that turned the seed-heads of the grasses in waves of silk toward the southeast, and thin cirrus clouds poured in streams in the same di- rection, curled like question marks. Words would not come to Mary. They shattered inside her head and then reassembled on her lips in strange combinations. So she had begun to learn sign.
The two thin ends of the lodgepoles that Aperian Crow’s wife used as her travois poles dragged and bumped along behind the pony and sent up little rooster trails of dust that hung for a long time in the dry air. Mary tried to keep herself and Cherry directly behind these two traveling spouts of dust. If she kept her eyes focused on them she could walk a straight line. Jube turned again and again to see if his mother and sister were keeping up. All around them the Kiowa moved across the face of the north Texas plains like fish in water, the familiar and sacred straits of grass that had been their own for several centuries and in which their songs and wars and marriages and births had taken place in moments of intensity while the wheel of the year revolved around them.
Aperian Crow’s wife turned and looked back. Her unbound hair lifted and fell in black strands. She made a come-here motion to Mary and pointed to the travois where eighteen-month-old Millie Durgan sat wrapped in a blanket.
Mary ran forward and put Cherry beside Millie on the heap of blankets and furs on the travois. The two girls crawled under the
blankets together and slept. And so the youngest, childless wife of Aperian Crow took Cherry to ride on her travois during the day. She would have adopted Cherry as well, but here, trudging along in the dirt, determined, unbeaten, tenacious, was Cherry’s own mother. Millie was hers alone. So they went on and Mary noticed that now only one of the Mexican boys stumbled along behind them, wounded and inarticulate. Late that night a woman gave the boy some shat- tered fragments of jerky and he sat and ate them at the far edge of the firelight, slavering like an animal.
Mary and Jube kept on and as they walked they scavenged. Whenever there was a halt they collected mesquite beans and scuffed in the dirt of old campsites where Mary found a piece of a broken bottle and Jube discovered a jumble of things half-uncovered at the root of a short and twisted cedar. An armadillo had dug a hole there and brought up the remains of a broken wooden box. Jube dug it out with his hands. He found a stiff boot of a very old design with a square toe and a high rotten heel, and under more layers of red soil he found two tarnished silver spoons and an ancient Spanish spur.
With the broken glass bottle Mary cut off the needle tip of an agave leaf as she had seen the Mexicans do and then drew it down so that a long string of fiber came with it. With this needle and thread she sewed their shoe-soles back on and made herself and Jube collecting bags from the rags of her skirt so that they might carry their finds with them and leave their hands free. She found a clay pot that was only broken at the top and could still hold water. A fan of windblown dirt streamed around it. It was very old, with odd figures on it. A lizard repeated many times in black and a squared spiral; a twisted cross in angles. She tried to show this to Jube but her words came out
crissin crissin crissin.
“I can see it, Mama. It’s all right Mama.”
Aperian Crow was a Koitsenko, a war leader, and now he was no longer the man to whom people listened. The landscape of war and raiding was behind them, south of the Red River, and they were in another frame of mind, another social arrangement, all of them content to be on the move in the galloping wind. The man whom
they now followed was First Wolf, who would tell off the days of march between one water and another, and which wandering roads the buffalo followed. Somehow he had made a mistake, and now the buffalo could not be found.
This was their promised land, and they learned it as one would learn the face of a beloved, every line and blink of eyelash, every turn of the head, motion of the hand. Tone of voice. Starvation was the unkind parent of the horse Indians of the plains, and its memory never left them. This time First Wolf had made a mistake or the mistake had made itself, and then the mistake had lain in wait for him and his people.
They went on for a week without game and ate up whatever they had. Mary and Cherry and Jube went without food for two days. Mary sat outside the lodge of Aperian Crow and begged of whoever passed them by and Jube said to them as they passed,
“Hei gow meen a tau hêimáh,”
we are very hungry, and because he said it in his clumsy mispronounced Kiowa people gave what they could spare. The knobby end of an old antelope thigh bone that Mary crushed with rocks and then boiled and fed to the children. A strip of rawhide. Half a pilot biscuit. Around their camp near Rainy Mountain the men found old buffalo skulls out on the prairie, and brought them in and turned them to point at the tipis. A message to the lost buffalo to show them the way to the starving Kiowa, who loved them.
At the end of a week several men rode in saying there were three buffalo carcasses ahead. They had killed them and had left them for the women to skin and cut up. Mary ran forward with the other women and with them fell upon the carcasses with whatever came to hand. They lay in heavy dark mounds and a ragged calf skipped and bawled near his dead mother. Three young girls ran the calf down on horseback and one of them roped it to cheers and shouts, and dragged it along in a fan of dust and then it was cut to pieces.
Mary had nothing but her broken piece of glass but she knelt down beside two other women and helped to tear at a stomach and lay open its hot interior. They tore out the still-moving entrails and ate them as they were. They handed the livers to the hunters.
In a short time all that was left were the white bones, slick and glistening, enameled with designs of red tendons. An old woman chopped off the ends of the greater bones with an axe and handed them to Mary. That night Mary fed her children on the rich, heavy marrow. She roasted the ends in the fire and broke them open with a rock, and the tubes of marrow slid out and she dropped these into Jube’s and Cherry’s hands still smoking. She broke open another and ate as much as she could and then roasted more. She meant to save some for the Mexican boy but in a moment found she had eaten it all and was ravenous for more and so she bent her head and hot tears streaked her face and she was bitter at what she had done, what she had become. A speechless, famished creature sitting in the cold dirt with smeared hands.
That night Aperian Crow’s youngest wife took Cherry into the tipi to sleep with Millie because Millie had cried for her and called her name over and over.
Then they went on.
Jube dropped back beside his mother. Mary pointed toward Aperian Crow’s wife and tried to say something. Jube grasped her hand and pushed it down.
“They don’t like you to point,” he said. Mary nodded, and kept walking.
“Jin, jin. Jin,” she said. Then she bowed her head and tears of frustration came to her eyes. The strange word kept coming to her lips and she could not stop herself from saying
Jin jin jin jin jin
un- til she pressed her own hand against her mouth. Last night it had made Old Man Komah so nervous, this repeated syllable, that he had left the campfire and had come to where she and the children sat together on a piece of blanket and hit her across the face with the ends of his quirt.
Millie started screaming. She held her hands out toward Mary and cried “Mar-ee! Mar-ee!” Aperian Crow’s wife had spoken sharply to Old Man Komah. The child was not to be upset, she was to be given whatever she wanted if it were in their power to give. Old Man Komah said nothing but went back and sat down by his
