The Color of Lightning (16 page)

Tissoyo began to laugh.

“Um-hum,” said Britt. He reached for more of the jerky.

“The big loud woman was yelling something. Hears the Dawn said she was saying ‘Kill me.’ Hears the Dawn can understand their speech, but he can’t speak it very well. Everybody was laughing. Maybe she said, ‘I will kill her.’ Somebody took up a rifle and said he would kill her, the loud woman, if it would make the loud woman

happy, but Eaten Alive threw the man’s gun barrel down and said he could get a hundred dollars for her and so not to kill her. Now then, Eaten Alive’s first wife lay there for an hour and then got up and went and got her digging stick and walked away from the camp for turnips. She walked like this.”

Tissoyo laughed and with his hand made a wavering motion.

Britt laughed as well and then choked on the sugar and cleared his throat. He smiled briefly and then took up his coffee cup. Maybe God had sent him into the camp of this talkative, gossipy, lonely young man who had been sent into temporary exile because of his frivolous behavior and who would probably talk the entire night. He had not been shot at. He must not lose any of these advantages. He nodded and smiled.

“And the captive girl?”

“Yes, yes, she is so big.” Tissoyo indicated the height of the three- year-old with his hand. “She has gray eyes and black hair.”

“Yes.”

“She is sick. The loud woman tends to her. The girl sleeps in Eaten Alive’s tipi but she sleeps by the entrance and it is cold there and there is always wind coming in when somebody comes in and so she is still sick. People step over her when they can but they don’t always look where they are stepping and sometimes people step on her. She is too sick to get out of the way.”

“You just came from the Wichitas.”

“Well . . .” Tissoyo looked up and squinted one eye. “It was a half-moon like this three times when I came.”

Three months,
thought Britt.
She could be dead by now. But they were alive three months ago.

“There was nothing I could do. Maybe things have changed by now.”

Britt nodded.

“How could I tell Eaten Alive how to run things in his own tipi? He says I saw the
rinches
shoot my little brother in the head when they came down on our camp on what you call the Llano River and so what do I care about one of theirs? If she lives she lives.”

“When was that?”

“I am not really sure. No, it was when Eaten Alive and some others of his same age rode down the river they call the Nueces and shot up the red-bearded man’s
ranchito.
They tried to stab the redheaded girl to death, but she wouldn’t die. Before they started his little brother begged to go along.” Tissoyo lifted a hand. “What can you do when a child begs you? So he took him. And then after the fight at the redheaded man’s
ranchito,
they came back north, and Eaten Alive and all of them camped at night there on the Llano and the
rinches
came upon them. What a fight that was!” Tissoyo slapped his hands together. “I only heard about it. I was too young to go. How I wish I had been there. When they all came home they were streaming a kind of fire around them.”

Tissoyo ran his hands down through the air, each to one side of him, with waving fingers.

“They sang as they came into camp. Fifty men all singing of what they had done and how they had charged into the farms and ranches of the enemy. And somebody started up a mourning song for Eaten Alive’s little brother, ah, it made me cry to hear them singing as they rode. You could hear their voices for a mile. They had a red scalp and two blond scalps, very long ones that waved and shook in the wind, and in that hair was the soul of the enemy held tight, tight. There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”

“Think of it,” said Britt.
Fijate, hijo.

It was now fully dark. A light wind carried the odor of new grass that speared up through the stems of winter growth. A dry pelt that sulked heavy and brass-colored and fallen. Enough new grass that before long the Indians could ride out of their safe and comfortable camps and into the war country where everything was permitted and everything was done.

“But the one you call a black woman and children and the very smallest
taibo
girl are with the Koi-guh,” Tissoyo said.

“The Kiowa. Why?” Britt said.

Tissoyo looked at him in surprise. “We always split up the cap-

tives,” he said. “So they can’t talk with one another and plan to es- cape.” He gestured and his copper bracelets rattled. “You say
Kiowa
. Very well.”

“I see, yes.” Britt picked up a stick and pressed it on the coals. “Where are they?”

“Farther north. They went far up the river you call Canadian, north of the Wichita Mountains. Past the Antelope Hills. Aperian Crow doesn’t want the agent to bother him about things that are no business of the agent’s. The Kiowa are tricky people. I will help you. You are a slave yourself.”

“No,” said Britt. He thought of how to explain it. “They let me go.”

“You paid them,” said Tissoyo. He turned to Britt expectantly. “Dollar.”

Britt considered again what to say and after a moment he said, “Yes. I paid them.”

“Well, in the morning we will talk and I’ll tell you how to deal with the Kiowa. They are stingy people, and they are tricky to deal with, but I am going to help you. The
taibo
baby girl is the one adopted by Aperian Crow’s wife. His youngest wife is in love with her. You see I will tell you everything, how you are to act and so on.”
He loves intrigue
, thought Britt.
It is meat and honey to him. He loves to get in the middle of something and keep secrets and to outbargain

people and to know things other people don’t know.
“I will do whatever you say,” said Britt. “Good, then.”

They fell silent. In the east there was a faint flicker of lightning on the horizon. There was no moonrise except for a thin and milky light filtering through the overcast. Tissoyo lifted his head toward the east.

“Now, there are four Thunders,” he said. “There is Copper Thunderbird and Walking Thunder and Falling-to-pieces Thunder and the last one is Shy Thunder, which is what that is, and it may come to us and it may not.”

Britt lifted his head to the ancient pecan trees and their brittle

limbs. All the leaves were lit up on the undersides by their campfire and when they moved there was a flickering quality to them. The great fragile limbs arched above them.

“If there is a wind we’d better move out from under.” “We will see.”

Britt called his horses and fed them a handful of corn and then hobbled them by the fading light of the fire and left them to graze on the new grass. They nosed busily through the overlay of dead stems for the lime-green bouquets that had started up, spray after spray. He sat down on his saddle blankets and turned his saddle upside down so that his head was against the fleecing of the un- derside. He was not afraid of Tissoyo or that Tissoyo would change his mind. He was wary of what could change Tissoyo’s mind for him. There might be some sign, some portent that would tell the Comanche that his guest was dangerous, that his guest harbored secret designs and needed to be shot. It could be the appearance of a flock of ravens in a certain pattern, or the appearance of one of the four thunders bearing a warning and speaking in an imperative voice. Britt was as alert to the possibility of signs and portents as was Tissoyo himself. He lay himself down carefully under his blankets and left his revolver wrapped up in his coat under his saddle and commended himself to God and fell asleep.

h e a n d th e
young Comanche sat on their horses downwind as a herd of two or three hundred bison walked deliberately down the long slope of the world and its tissues of wavering new grass. Britt crossed his hands over his saddle horn and watched. They were good to watch. They smelled like cattle, warm and rich, and their deep grunting calls made a web of sound almost below hearing. Their upright horns curved out of the mass of their dark heads so low to the earth. They paced toward the banks of Deep Red Creek for their morning drink. Ravens overhead sailed along with them calling
tok, tok.
He saw a raven alight between the horns of a shaggy bull and with a quick motion settled its tail and crossed its wings

behind and began to hammer at the bull’s head, pecking up ticks. The bull stared off at the creek waters and continued to chew. He was ragged. Patches of winter hair fell away in wads and the scis- sortails carried these away in tufts for their new nests.

The ravens had seen Britt and Tissoyo but they did not raise the alarm. They were busy. The cows and bulls walked grazing toward the water. When they came to a low place in the bright red sands of the bank they slid down and they splashed into the current, the cows weighing a ton and the bulls a ton and a half, sinking to their bellies in the brilliantly colored water. They were the divinities who ruled the intricate progressive movements of the year on the high southern plains, and other animals walked along in their passage. Wolves trot- ted patiently at a certain distance and the light-headed buffalo birds darted at their hooves as the buffalo flushed up insects and the prairie voles and the ferrets drank from their tracks. Cajun stared at them with a fixed look of intense interest, his ears pointed toward them.

“There,” said Tissoyo. A cow and a calf came up behind. Belated and unprotected. “The milk in its stomach is very good.” He lifted the Spencer and squinted his left eye and fired.

The other buffalo kept on grazing without a pause. Tissoyo cir- cled behind the herd and roped the calf carcass and dragged it away. Then he dismounted and slashed into its stomach and lifted out the bloody cheese of buffalo milk and rennet. He scooped a handful into his mouth and then offered another handful to Britt. Britt took it and swallowed it like a gory custard without blinking.

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Excellent.”

th at ni g h t ti s s o y o
began to pack his saddlebags. Tissoyo was moved and excited at the idea of following the Kiowa into the north and bargaining for captives. He shook out his blankets and packed small bags of face paint.

“Now, what do you have to offer them?”

“A few things,” said Britt. “Some gold coins.”

“Ah, they are going to want more than that.” “We’ll see.”

“Your horse is excellent. But they have horses as good.” Britt waved his hand impatiently. “We’ll see.”

Tissoyo went out into the evening and roped two paints and led them up. A Medicine Hat paint with a white face. Above his white face, red ears and forelock like a red cap on his head, and a splash of red across his chest like a shield. A patch of red on its rump and a red tail slashing at flies out of the red patch. A strong horse with hard white legs and good bones. The other a mare nearly all black except for a white stripe down her nose and a patch of white on the near side and trim white ankles. She had a curved neck. She was graceful and delicate.

Tissoyo wiped grease out of a small hard box of rawhide and ap- plied it carefully to the Medicine Hat’s nose.

“He gets sunburned,” he said. “I have to look out for him.” He fussed over the horse, drawing out the red mane between his fin- gers. “It’s his white nose. His skin is white under the hair and he gets sunburned. Mmm, mmm, mmm.” He blew his breath into the horse’s nostrils.

“Why are you taking them along?”

“I don’t want them to get stolen. Somebody would steal them right away if I were not with them.”

That night Tissoyo drew a map in the dirt. First they would cross flat country northward and travel around the west side of the Wichita Mountains. Then on northwest, to the Washita River, and then on to the Antelope Hills on the Canadian. After the Antelope Hills they would go northwest to the Black Mesa country. Tissoyo gestured to the northwest. In the far north the Great Plains were very wide, but as you came south the plains narrowed and it was not far from the Black Mesa country across to higher mountains. They would be there. If not, somewhere else. In the morning he would ride to camp and get some boys to take the herd and then they would go. Nobody would care. Just so long as he stayed away from Esa Havey and his young wife.

Chapter 13
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W

T

h e t r a i n r at t led
through the f lat country in the April rains. The roadbed of the Illinois Central was only a

few feet above the level of the Wabash River, and Samuel could see the long low wetland shimmering and speckled with f loating islands of trash and the sun shining in a dull haze on the spring earth. Early the next morning they came to the Illinois shore of the Mississippi at East St. Louis. He and other passengers and freight crossed the great river on a wallowing ferry that fought clumsily against the spring f loodwater. They tied up to an iron ring as big as a cartwheel on the St. Louis levee and then they went by hansom cab to the clanging railheads at Chouteau Pond. The passengers boarded another train there and continued west- ward.

Going through the Ozarks he saw people who had not seen a razor or a bar of soap since the dawn of time. He sat in the dining car and stared out the smoky windows with a book in his hand. The track and roadbed were very bad; the car swayed from one side to the other and Samuel closed his eyes and shut his book.

The porter staggered to his table. Behind him was a wide

amiable-looking man with his hat in his hand. The porter asked Samuel if he would mind another gentleman sharing his table.

Samuel looked up. The man held a large portfolio under one arm.

“I am interrupting your reading.” The man turned to the porter. “I will wait in the smoking car.”

“No, no,” said Samuel.

The porter bowed over the white napkin on his arm. He said, “This is Mr. James Deaver, he is a correspondent and he is very hungry.”

“Do please sit down,” said Samuel. “My name is Samuel Ham- mond.”