The Color of Lightning (38 page)

There were days when work on the sawmill went slowly. Samuel took the wagon reins himself to carry logs to the sawpit and shifted stone with the stonemasons. They will have houses, he said. I will see that they have houses. If we ask them to abandon life out there,

then they must have houses to come to. They will get used to roofs. They must.

He filled out more paperwork to pay a man to raise a rail fence around ten acres of plowed ground. He went to inspect the fence, and when he stood on the rail in the middle of its span it gave way. Samuel told the man, “You will do it again and do it right. Tear this down. Start over.” Then he drove the small one-ton farm wagon to the banks of Cache Creek and helped to dig coal for his own fire and for the forge in the blacksmith shop. He bought a herd of two hundred head of Texas cattle for the beef ration but had to send them out to graze under the protection of several Caddo men to keep the Comanche from riding down and issuing to themselves the beef whenever they felt like it. The cattle had to be kept away from the Comanche and Kiowa so that Samuel could then hand them out or withhold them as he saw fit. To withhold them if they did not bring in the captives. It was insane. He drummed his fingers on the shelves of the warehouse and thought how demented it was.

A band of young Comanche men rode in at night and sent sev- eral shots through the agency windows and carried off a team of mules and took several bales of bright calico from the warehouse. Samuel was not awake when the rounds came through the front windows but he shot off the bed and found himself lying flat on the floor when he did awaken. The result of a year under fire.

They did not want the calico or the mules but they took them for trophies. Samuel rode out looking for them and found the mules wandering around the Keechi Hills draped in yards of flowered cloth. Afterward Samuel sent a message to Colonel Grierson say- ing that he wanted guards. He would now use armed guards at the warehouse. He wrote to the Friends’ Indian Committee that this should be permissible in their beliefs, because the guards, though they were soldiers, were under his civil authority and were therefore acting as policemen. Did they not have a police force there in Phila- delphia? He was not using military force.

In his nightly prayers Samuel asked only that he be made to understand why he was here. What to do. He had no doubt that

there was some greater design, but he fell into a deep sadness as he knew he could not understand this design. It made him feel shal- low. A ship holed in some vital strakes and sunk to the gunnels and adrift. He was lonely and from time to time he felt the intensity of this loneliness, the strange questing feeling that comes from aban- donment, that were he to keep on searching about in his mind and memory he would find someone or something to comfort him. The Holy Spirit was hidden in the vast plains and would not come to him even though he asked and asked again. It was because he was no longer a servant to his fellow men but an authority. A man with authority who must apply that power.

The world of Philadelphia faded and slipped from his mind. The concerns with the refitted
Monongahela
were the concerns of an- other time and place. She was out somewhere on the other side of the world carrying oil and flour from Argentina to California, they said, with money invested on his behalf. Letters from his parents and his brother’s wife told him of that other world called Phila- delphia, and the harvests near Lancaster. The brittle and haughty young woman who in some other age had sent back his ring wrote in a beautiful hand to say she was sorry. Sorry for what? Samuel had to think for a moment about what it was she was sorry about. He did not answer the letter.

He got into his bed at night with a feeling that he was being besieged by hostile forces that sang without words just at the edge of the horizon, and one night he dreamed of an enormous moon lifting over the Washita Mountains. It was swollen and it covered half the sky. This was deeply frightening and also the moon itself seemed terrified, with its round O of a mouth, as if something even more fell was following the moon from behind.

and so the
Kiowa and the Comanche lived and raided and hunted out on the long rolling plains while the telegraph and the railroad approached from the east, bringing news of the corruptions of Wash- ington and the Communards of Paris and the street fighting there.

Samuel Hammond still refused to issue the orders that would have sent the army after the Kiowa and Comanche and bring them back by force to the reservation. So a band of Comanche rode down on Ledbetter’s Salt Works west of Fort Belknap. The men left the hot salt pans and retreated behind a palisade and charged their small field cannon. They knew they had no help from either the Rangers or the army nor would they go back to where they had come from in the southern states, now an occupied country, and so they fought until they ran out of ammunition. Then old man Ledbetter shoved the king bolt from a wagon into the twelve-pound Napoleon field piece and fired it. The hissing bolt socked into Esa Havey’s war horse and the stallion dropped like a stone. The Comanche turned and rode away. They laughed at Esa Havey running behind on foot until Hears the Dawn took pity on him and pulled him up behind.

On a dark night they infiltrated the town of Fredericksburg and took horses, and as they galloped away they overturned haystacks and set them afire and shot down a man who was walking out in the early morning singing and looking for his cattle. On the way home, on the plains, they came upon four men herding cattle and killed all four of them.

They struck at settlements far south of the Red River, far down in the Hill Country. They rode four hundred miles straight south to the ancient Spanish town of San Antonio, a town now grown up with theaters, paved streets, bakeries and candy stores and sub- urbs. Fifteen miles from San Antonio they captured two boys who within a year forgot every rule of behavior they knew and became skilled Comanche warriors. Throughout the winter of 1869 and the year 1870 the young men of the Comanche and the Kiowa rode with their hair floating in the night wind and their faces painted in beautiful colors of red and black and yellow, with hail marks and lightning strokes. Always there came that impeccable and other- worldly moment when they closed with the enemy, when they took the enemy’s women and children captive, whose faces were distorted in mortal terror and their eyes as round as dollars.

In the late fall of 1870 Samuel at last rode out onto the plains to

search out the Kiowa and Comanche camps and to see the people of his agency where they lived. He did not think they would kill him. They might, but it was unlikely. He wore his broad-brimmed hat and a heavy coat and a muffler because in late October the wind was bitter. The annuity goods were two months behind coming from Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. It was probable that the months would go on without their delivery. The army sent a message saying they had other priorities at the moment. There were forts out in Kansas and Colorado and Wyoming that had to be provisioned because the Sioux and the Cheyenne had broken out and were killing settlers like chickens in a run. They would send the annual goods for the Comanche and Kiowa at the earliest possible time. Your obedient servant, Major T. J. Kinnel.

But Samuel got his goods in his own way. He rode to the post to tell the colonel he had a shipment coming in. Bales of bright calicoes and brass bells, ship’s biscuit and kettles and salt. Things he could withhold or grant to the Kiowa and Comanche in return for meek- ness, good behavior, surrendered captives.

“You have a freighter coming up from Fort Worth?” said Grierson.

“Yes, it’s faster. I’ll deal with the paperwork later. The delays are unforgivable. A colored man named Britt Johnson.”

“How does he get through?”

“He has a friend among the Comanche. Apparently this friend looks out for him somehow. And I am leaving for a few weeks to go out to the plains.”

Samuel rode north and west into the Wichita Mountains with his schoolteacher and Onofrio for companions. They dragged a packhorse behind them. They had given up on the agency school. They rode through the red stone mountains and here and there they caught sight of elk galloping away into the canyons with their noses stretched out, bearing the heavy weight of their candelabra horns without effort. A bear’s shining agitated hide hurried up a moun- tainside. Samuel shut his coat tight against the wind and bent his head down to keep his hat from flying off.

His schoolteacher was a Friend named Thomas Beatty, and he was a good young man with an infinite supply of cheer who wanted more than life itself to go and live with the Kiowa to teach the chil- dren there in the lodges. Sooner or later Samuel would have to let him go and risk himself in that task.

They rode through broad valleys of dry grass. The stones of the Wichita Mountains had fallen wholesale into red heaps, and some stood isolated on the skyline in odd sentinels. One was very tall with a stone hat on its head. It regarded them from a sharp ridge as they rode by and when Samuel looked up with his hand on the crown of his hat it released them from its stone gaze and turned to wait for some other travelers. They slept beside a ragged fire that spit and cracked with mountain pine and in the morning they ate hot ban- nock and drank sugared coffee for breakfast. They saddled their horses and went on.

Every day was a gift of peace. Samuel listened to the quiet as they rode. The silky grass pale as champagne lifting and falling in cur- rents. Once when they stopped at noon to eat he saw a cactus fruit on the tip of a prickly-pear pad glowing like a candle. He stared at it. It seemed that it had some sort of small light inside. Then he saw that sunlight was pouring through a hole in the red fruit and that the fruit itself was hollowed out. He stood up and bent over it. Two bees were at work inside the cactus fruit, scouring away the sweet pulp. Sunlight coming in through the hole had lit up the thin and transparent walls of the fruit and made it glow in a deep carmine red. He found Onofrio standing beside him. “Pretty,” said Onofrio. “Very pretty.” Then they rode on toward Mount Scott.

The Kiowa of Kicking Bird’s band welcomed them and took them in. Kicking Bird spoke to Onofrio in Spanish. He said they had not heard of any captives whatever. None. Perhaps here and there a Mexi- can child, but these they purchased from the Apaches who raided in New Mexico. There was no harm in buying a Mexican captive. The Apaches treated them like dogs. They had a better life with the Kiowa. They married and had children. Here in this camp is a man named Komah, they call him Old Man Komah, the son of a Mexican

captive, he has a wife and children. He translates for us and trades to San Idlefonso. Aperian Crow gestured toward the tipi wall to some direction where he thought Old Man Komah might be at the mo- ment. Crowds of wiry-haired children stood outside and tried to see in the tipi door. A little girl in a soft hide dress with a necklace of glass beads farted with a shrill noise and the other children hissed and cried out
Nyyyah!
and slapped her lightly until she began to cry.

A young woman named Gonkon came in and laid blankets on

their laps and then brought wooden trenchers of tongue and tamales wrapped in shucks and sat these on their laps over the blankets. The tipi was the first he had ever seen with a liner inside. It was very comfortable. He ate and listened to the odd and pleasing sounds of a tonal language.

Kicking Bird and many others were going out in the spring to meet the Comancheros near the Alibates flint quarries and did not understand why they should not. It was a great fair, a festival on the open plains, and when the two-wheeled carts came from New Mexico there were horse races and gambling games and shooting at targets. The Comancheros sometimes tried to trade for one of the Mexican captives, tried to redeem them. They had to know the person’s name, however, and often it was too late, the captive had become Kiowa like us. The captive had forgotten his name, and it was too late.

Samuel listened attentively as Onofrio translated. He told them that it did not matter what the customs were. They were now under United States law under the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, and the United States had just fought a great war against slavery so that the taking of captives and selling them was not allowed.
Raiding is not allowed because it is murder. I have said this many times. The soldiers have not bothered you before. But my heart has hardened. Where is the girl named Millie Durgan? She would be eight or nine years old now.

Kicking Bird shook his head. They did not know of any girl named Millie Durgan. Not alive. There had been a captive taken five years ago, but the girl died from some disease a long time ago. There were no white captives with the Kiowa.

“What about Elias Sheppard, thirteen years old, taken near the town of Blanco? Clinton and Jeff Smith, Adolph Korn, Alice Todd? The Lehmann boy, Temple Field? And many others.”

I will ask here and there. Perhaps some other bands have some cap- tives.

Samuel was silent when he heard this translated. The silence lay between them like a delicate invisible structure that no one wanted to disturb. And finally Samuel said that he would withhold all ra- tions until they were brought in, and if not, he had the soldiers at his orders.

They went on into the country around Rainy Mountain and then on to the Antelope Hills. From the crest of the hills Samuel saw a herd of mustangs in full flight across the undulating plain. They ran with nodding heads, and their thick wavy tails streamed behind them. They had trim legs and small hooves, crested necks and long flowing manes. They bore within themselves the Andalusian and Soraya blood from the horses who had escaped from the Spaniards centuries ago. He wondered what they were running from. There had to have been two hundred or more. Then he knew they were running because they wanted to, because the plains were open and level and they were made to run. The herd broke apart around a breakwater of standing stones and came together again and then they bolted through the belt of trees, the cottonwoods and willows. Through the bare limbs Samuel saw the stream of flashing tails and ribs and backs plush with winter hair. Then the wild horses splashed snorting into the Canadian River.