The Color of Lightning (39 page)

They rode through a herd of sedate buffalo with long winter pelts. The cows moved away with their half-grown calves and the bulls with their elderly beards turned slowly in a studied way with their eyes on the riders. Their fat split hooves ground circles in the snow as they turned to keep the travelers fixed in their line of sight. The next day with Onofrio’s help they found a Comanche village near the tall spires of limestone on the south bank of the Canadian. The tipis smoked like ovens from their conical tops.

Onofrio went ahead with one hand lifted and calling out in

Comanche. Samuel and Beatty hung back. Samuel looked all about himself on the bare plains and thought what a miracle of endurance it was to live like this solely on God’s bounty, on what- ever came to hand, in this sere country. To find their way across it from the Wichita Mountains up to Colorado and even on to Wyoming, and south to the Rio Grande. People of great courage and fortitude, born with an unsatisfied wanderlust so that their greatest joy was to break down the tipis and move on. They trav- eled alongside the rivers of the plains with their belts of trees and then crossed from one river to another and found things they had left behind in some other camp, or with delight they came upon a garden they had planted last year and was now bearing fruit. They did not live in the same world of time that Samuel did. There were no hours. No birthdays.

And he must bring this to an end. That was his job. That was why he was here.

The headman of the band was a man named Toshana. The man smiled and said,
Ah, here is Keeps All the Stuff, come to visit us.
He sent out the camp crier to call out that they had an honored visitor, for the men to come. He offered his pipe and so they went through the ritual of smoking and then ate. Toshana said they had no captives either. That if the agent wanted them to stop taking captives he should tell the army to come to them and they would settle it by force. But that was the only way it would ever be settled. He smiled as he said it.

“It is known everywhere that you have
taibo
captives,” said Sam- uel. His face was still. He felt as if there were a band around his throat, frustration and anger.

Yes, perhaps some Mexicans.

Then Eaten Alive came into the tipi with a five- or six-year-old child. The boy’s brown skin was broken with sores and lacerations, he was thin and shivering and dressed in a piece of bed-ticking that nearly enveloped him.

You see here,
said Toshana.
We just got him from the Apache, see how they treat them. If you want to take him with you, you can. I will not ask you to pay.

“Where did he come from?” Samuel held his hand out to the boy and felt an anguish in his heart at the sight of the child. The boy ducked his head and shrank away.

We don’t know. The Apaches didn’t say where he came from.

“I will contact the military in Santa Fe. Maybe they have a re- port of a missing child.”

Toshana was silent for a while, and then he said,
But there are thousands.

Samuel nodded. Thousands. He gathered his thoughts and said that there were several white captives, at least four or five young boys and one who would be grown up now, perhaps eighteen, and several girls. They were United States citizens and could not be abandoned.

We are only Comanche here,
said Toshana.
Only Comanche.

Hears the Dawn spoke in a low assenting voice. He said that the people to the south were Texans anyway. They were not Americans. There were the Spanish in New Mexico, and the old people spoke of the French coming from far to the east and south, and then there were Americans north of the Red and Texans to the south. Beyond the Texans were the Mexicans.
Isn’t that right?

Samuel turned to Onofrio and said, “Tell him that they are all

white people and there are different nations among the white peo- ple. The Texans are now Americans.”

Onofrio spun a thin shred of bark between his fingers.

He said, “There is no name for white people. Nobody says ‘white.’ Only white people say ‘white people.’ In Comanche the name means something like ‘a captive.’
Taibo.
In Kiowa they say ‘the hairy mouth people.’ Beards, you see. I think the Sioux say
Wasichu
but it does not mean white. And I have heard from others that the Chippewa and the Cree call you-all Long Knives.
Kitche-mokoman.
”

Samuel listened with his head to one side, watching the flames that burned sedately on a layer of flat sandstone. The Comanche men around him listened as well with great patience to a language they could not understand.

Toshana said,
I am chief now that the Texans killed Peta Nocona.

His wife was Nautdah, and they took her away. They said her name was Cynthia Ann Parker.

Samuel heard Siinti-on Parkar, but he knew who it was. She had starved herself to death in the house of her white relatives.

They took her captive and Peta Nocona’s child Topsannah and they both died in the house where they kept them. She was with us for twenty- five years. You take captives too and so it is hard to listen to what you have to say. She was my aunt, the girl my cousin, and now they are dead.

“That’s different,” said Samuel. “We only took her back again.”

But you did not get back her brother. His
taibo
name was Chon Par- kar, and they took him but he got away and came back to us, his people.

“I know.” Samuel nodded politely and made a conciliatory ges- ture. “Adults who have spent their lives with you will be able to make their choices. It is only fair. But they must be brought in so we can see they are not being held against their will.”

We are only Comanche here.

Samuel said, “Nonetheless, I have come to warn you. The Tex- ans are now Americans. So are the people of New Mexico. They have all become Americans and they are under American law. This is the last time. You will stop raiding and you will bring in the cap- tives. If not I will send the soldiers.”

Toshana laughed.
But you are Gai-ker. You do not fight.

“You will see.”

Samuel stood up to leave. The fire had burned down and the woman named Gonkon came in with more firewood. Before he left he said that he knew there were at least four boys with the Coman- che, and if they were not brought in he would have the headmen ar- rested and thrown in jail. In a jail with stone walls, and there would be manacles and chains.

Eaten Alive started to speak but then shut his lips around his words and sat and thought for a moment. He was very angry. He would come in for rations in a few weeks since it was a cold fall and the grass was poor. He expected to be given his live beef and his sugar and coffee. If he had a captive he would bring him. He said

that he would raid when he pleased. That he knew the Indian agent had goods brought to the agency in wagons from Forta Wurt but he himself would not raid the wagons. That the wagons were driven by a man named Breet, and the only reason that man was still alive was because he was a good friend to a Comanche named Tissoyo but this kind of thing cannot last forever.

“Bring them in,” said Samuel. He took the wordless young Mexi- can captive and put a blanket around him. “Or you will go to prison. My heart has hardened.”

Chapter 32
‌

W

B

r i t t ask e d a l l
three men, Dennis and Paint and Vesey, to ride with him as guards and drivers to take a load of trade goods from Fort Worth up to Oklahoma to the agency. He asked Major Pinney for an escort from the Ninth, and so three black sol- diers came as well. Britt took both wagons and asked four heavy horses of Elizabeth Fitzgerald so that he had six to a wagon. Eliza- beth asked only five dollars for the teams’ use. He could carry nearly twenty tons with two wagons and six-horse teams. They would carry mostly metal goods. Angle irons, plow blades, and massive rolls of copper wire for messages of some kind that would come down these wires from Kansas to Oklahoma. They carried crates of the strange bulbous glass cups that were somehow supposed to help

this process.

It was the last week of November of 1870 and cold. Better than the heat. Better for men and horses. They made it in five days from Fort Worth to the agency without trouble. They arrived at the burn- ing rock oil and the spring near it in good time early in the evening. Britt was pleased. During the night Britt had two men standing guard for four hours each. He slept with the quiet, secret speech

of the running spring water in his dreams. A spring in the desert plains. He awoke with a blanket wrapped around his head and his nose cold and his breath smoking in the thin winter air. He listened to the sound of Vesey and Dennis laughing and the horses grinding up corn from their feed box on a wagon tongue. He had dreamed he was sitting alone in the cabin at Elm Creek and that the Medicine Hat paint had come up to him out of the tangled winter grapevines and spoke to him. The paint wanted to tell him something, some- thing urgent.
What, what?
said Britt in his dream. He sat up in his clothes and the shadow of the little ravine was chill, the lines of thin strata like bricks a strange puzzle.

One of the soldiers with them played something on the harmon- ica as Paint shifted the crisping bacon from one side of the skillet to the other.

“What’s that song?” said Britt.

“ ‘Annie Laurie,’ sir,” said the soldier.

“My wife wants to hear a harmonica,” said Britt. “It’s a new thing.”

“Yes sir, my cousin sent me this from Chicago. A Chicago com- pany makes them.”

They came into the agency with a loud noise and much call- ing and shouting. Britt stood in the wagon seat with the reins of the front team in his hands and nodded as men came out from the sawpit and the stables and wagon sheds to meet him. He signed the receipt for the accountant. He unloaded at the agency warehouse.

Then they reset the load for Fort Sill; kerosene in barrels and the lamps themselves packed in straw, the sacks of rolled barley and corn for the cavalry horses and a church bell for the chaplain’s new small stone church. It was a heavy load. The cavalry was preparing to move, they said. Before long they were to take to the field and come to grips with the horse Indians of the plains.

Britt and his men and the two wagons passed by Cache Creek on the south bank. At one of the wide places, on the north side, the Kiowa were camped. They had the wide plains around them and the long galleria of the timber on Cache Creek to one side. They

did not bother him because he and the men with him were well armed, although they came to watch him arrive and then pass by. The heavy wagons and twelve horses jangled and thudded across the dry earth and then went down the slope into the water. They stood in a long line drinking in the roiled water, and the men with him, Dennis and Paint as well as the three enlisted men from the Ninth, sat with their rifles in their hands. As Britt stood knee-deep in the water, checking harness, he saw a boy come down to the bank with a buffalo-stomach bucket. His feet in moccasins that patted the red dust lightly and the bucket swinging from one hand. Then the boy looked up and stopped. Although he had black hair, Britt saw that he was a white boy.

“Who are you?” said Britt.

The boy stared at him with narrow blue eyes. He stepped back a few paces into the brush.

“Do you know your name?” asked Britt.

“Chon,” the boy said. “I Chon Digasun.” The wind tore at his hair. The boy stood rigid with water slopping on his shins. “You leave me alone.”

“John Dickson,” said Britt. “I will come back. When I come back from Fort Sill, I will come by here and I’ll have money to ex- change for you.”

“You leave me alone.”

The boy turned and ran back to the tipis. He left the bucket where it fell.

on e b y on e ,
captives were brought in. Samuel checked his lists. There was no word of little Alice Todd, the Whitlock boy still un- accounted for, the names Kuykendall and Massengill and Dickson, the two Smith boys, Herman Lehmann, written out clean and ac- cusing. A distant band of Comanche brought in a boy with a thin, sensitive face, a wide mouth, and hooded eyes. He never looked at anyone from the moment he was brought in. He kept his head high and stiff and his eyes half closed and his gaze on the floorboards.

He moved slowly and carefully. He seemed to be injured in some obscure way. His adopted father had bargained over his price, hold- ing out for one more pound of coffee, another blanket. The Coman- che had been traders for a century or more, and they were skilled at it. The boy listened with his beautiful eyes on the windowsill. Listened as he was sold by the man he had adored and whom he had imitated in everything. Followed across the hot plains, the man who had given him his Comanche name and approved of his aim with a rifle and his torture of a Mexican captive.

He stood up like an automaton and followed the Indian agent, expecting to be killed, and when he was not killed, he was flooded by a feeling of contempt. He was crushed into whiteman’s clothing and led to a building.

By late November there were four of them. All of them boys and angry and silent in the stone schoolhouse. Samuel was not sure who they were. He sat with each of them alone and tried to find out their names but they had trouble pronouncing the words.
Kleenton, Haydoff, Tempah.
The smallest one only knew his Comanche name, Toppish. The soldiers plunged them into tin bathtubs and took away their weapons and their buckskins and cut their hair and they all looked like thin unfinished wraiths with uneven haircuts and mistrusting expressions. They refused to sleep in the schoolhouse and so Samuel had an army tent placed in the schoolyard and they settled in there; they slept on the bare dirt floor of the tent in the cold, in their new woolen clothes and their shoes beside their heads. They were afraid of the schoolhouse walls.

He asked for the names of their parents, but they had forgot- ten. He asked them to remember where they were from, but they had only vague images of a double-log cabin and a truck patch and sisters or mothers or fathers who were dead. Samuel guessed that one of them might be Clinton Smith, whose brother Jeff was still missing. Another was Adolph Korn, who spoke only Comanche and German. The third boy with the thin and sensitive face might be Temple Field who was taken in the Legion Valley massacre, but the last and smallest did not match any information he had. They were