The Color of Lightning (42 page)

It was very still. Fog shifted in low banks in the valley of the Clear Fork of the Brazos and he and the horses he was leading rode down into these and inside the fog he could only see a few nodding heads behind him with the manes tossing along their necks in damp strands. Then they came up and were clear for a while and then they trotted forward into another fog bank and the horses followed him by scent and sound.

Before long he came to the remains of the Old Stone Ranch

House, where he and Paint and Dennis had sat behind the walls and fired at Kiowa and where he had heard someone in a taunting rage calling to him to give up his only son. The walls were indistinct in the heavy fog. If the temperature dropped, the fog would change to ice. The world would turn to glass.

Britt turned inside the remains of the wall that had once sur- rounded the ruined house, and the loose horses, eleven in number, followed and stood with round eyes and nostrils smelling of it all, the strange walls and the remains of the cookstove with its faint meat odors. He felt he had best stay within the broken wall and near the old house to see what the weather would do.

He unsaddled Cajun to give the horse’s back a rest and sat the saddle down on its fork and laid the saddle blankets over. He un- strapped the rifle scabbard to set the Spencer upright on its butt plate so that moisture would not leak down into the breech-loading mechanism. He leaned it against the wall.

The sound of his own footsteps was blurred and then silenced in the quiet noises of horses moving about, murmuring to one an- other. They would not stay within the ruined walls for long, but they would go no farther than the riverbed and its dried grasses and pools of water and he could easily collect them. They had been content with Cajun as their leader, but the gelding was now tied and resting. Before long they would choose another leader, most likely the oldest mare, the one with the glass eye, and she would soon set off toward the river.

Britt stood and listened. It was possible that the Kiowa crossed here often; a place that they had marked in their memory as a cross- ing that promised good fortune on their raids. A place on the north- west border of the rolling plains. He could hear nothing but the stamping and the breathing of the horses. He walked forward into the blank mystery of the fog toward the rear of the house where he knew the far wall was and beyond that a stone spring house. There was a good hiding place back there. A good place to lie in ambush. What did he have that they wanted? His life. His horses, his weapons, and his gear. Or it could be as Tissoyo told him; when a

loved one was killed, then you must go out on the roads and trails and kill the first person you came upon to send that person’s soul to be a slave to the one you loved in the world beyond. Britt never un- derstood what that world would be like. Maybe like this one where unformed beings crept step by step in a cold and blinding fog.

He stood at the front wall of the house with its sashless win- dows and doorless doorway out of which the mist drifted like breath from an open mouth. He walked around behind. Reefs of fallen rock where the back walls had come down. Each stone squared and marked with a chisel. The cookstove where Paint had taken shelter. From it came a scent of cold grease and wet iron. His footfalls were muffled by the damp dried grass and soaked litter from the bare hackberry trees. He stopped beside the fallen wall and listened.

In the distance he heard someone singing. It was a lifting, chant- ing falsetto. A song of grief and parting sung in some Indian lan- guage, in the dense mists of the river valley. Britt stood very still for some time. The song never faltered or stopped but went on and on with a thin insistence coming from a great distance through the fog. Finally he slid the revolver from its holster and checked to see that there was a round in the chamber. The big metal horse head of the six-shot revolver was comforting in his hand. A new Smith and Wesson that took ready-made rimfire cartridges.

He could not smell woodsmoke. He moved forward toward the singing. Always move forward toward the enemy. Toward those who would kill you and take your son and your wife and turn the minds of the children against their parents until they were recovered as shucked and empty shells. He came to a stand of trees with slaty trunks and limbs like black nerves dissolving into the mist. Beyond that a bank descending into a cut.

The singing had stopped. He had been heard. He took one long step that brought him under an anacua tree, and his boots pressed without sound on the dead sandpaper leaves and he laid his shoulder against the bark with the revolver’s barrel raised.

He took each breath slowly. After a moment his heart quieted. He saw a drop of moisture on his hat brim appear and then grow

pendant with a condensed seed of light from the pale fog in its cen- ter, and then it dropped. A stone tumbled in a damp clatter down a bank he could not see. Still he did not move. He shifted the joint of his thumb over the hammer and then laid his left hand over it to deaden the sound and cocked the revolver. He took his left hand away and then stood with the weapon cocked and the barrel raised. The man appeared out of the mist like something being inflated.

Like something tiny that within seconds expanded and filled all the world in the space of a deafening shriek and bore down on him with a face painted half black and dotted with hailstones. Britt fired. Then a bullet clubbed his upper thigh and blood and flesh and fragments of cloth sprayed. The brilliant muzzle flashes exploded into strange pris- matic rays in the fog. The gunsmoke billowed dark and burnt against it. Britt dropped to the ground with his left hand over his crotch. He lay flat. There was a blundering noise as the man fell or rolled down the bank beyond into a deep pool of dark mist and then stillness.

Britt listened intently. A few stones cascaded down the bank af- ter the man. In a few moments there was no other sound. Far away he could hear the horses as they snorted in a rattling noise and blew and shifted at the sound of gunshots. He could feel himself bleed- ing into his heavy wool trousers. He shifted slowly onto his side and unbuckled his belt and felt for the wound and was swept by a kind of melting relief when he knew he had not been hit in his private parts. The round was embedded in his upper thigh an inch away. He brought his hand away bloody and wiped it on his shirt.

He lay for a long time in the dry anacua leaves. He lay on one side with the revolver against his chest, unmoving. The slightest shift would give him away. With infinite care he once again cocked the forty-four revolver and put his left hand over the hammer and his thumb as he did so, but still the slow
click click
seemed very loud, still there was a rustling noise among the leaves as he moved.

Long rays shot through the fog and it thinned. It was nearing midday. Still cold. He began to shake. He had to move. He was leaking blood. Had he been hit in an artery, he would have been dead by now.

He rose to his feet and was forced to hold to the trunk of the anacua for a moment and then limped forward into the tangle of brush and vines that guarded the bank. Leaves stuck to him. It had to be some cutoff of the Clear Fork. There was a torn place in the brush where the man had run through, and Britt came to it and held the cocked revolver high and slid down among the red and black stones.

At the bottom the man lay in the wet red soil faceup with his black hair scattered around him and bone fragments and a fan of brain tissue like thrown soup. His arms flung out with the silver bracelets shining. Britt saw that beyond the black face paint the man was Tissoyo, and that he had hit him in the left eye.

He uncocked the revolver and laid it down and fell to his knees. In a hopeless gesture he placed his hand around the side of Tissoyo’s neck to check for the thumping of that great artery in the throat but there was none. He tore off the breastplate of pipe beads and put his ear against Tissoyo’s warm chest but there was no sound.

Britt fell back to a sitting position against a shelf of rock and stared at him. Tissoyo’s face with its one eye was turned to the invis- ible sky overhead. His skull wrecked and scattered over the common earth. Britt sat there for a few moments beside the body and looked at Tissoyo in a way we are not allowed to look at people when they are alive. Searching desperately for a sign of life where there is none. The black hair was cut short around the left side of the head where he had shorn it off with a knife in grief for someone he loved who was dead, and now he was dead too. Britt felt a peculiar fullness in his head and his chest as if he were swelling up, and his ears were painfully blocked. He was weeping. Weeping and bleeding into his wool trousers and onto the stones and leaves around him.

What a sweet, high-hearted man he was. So openhanded, so dead. Wasted, wasted. Britt could not stop himself from reaching out to Tissoyo’s body once more. He got to his knees and bent for- ward and against all reason took the limp wrist in his hand and felt again for a pulse. He held it for a long time. A faint hope that the pulse might be buried down in the muscle somewhere, secretly

pumping. Even though the brain and nerves inside the skull that had driven it were destroyed. But Tissoyo lay utterly still in his brave face paint and his silver bracelets in circles up his brown arms and his old Walker Colt in the red mud.

After a while Britt released the dead hand and stood up and took off his jacket and then his shirt. With his hunting knife he cut his shirt into strips and dropped his trousers and bound up his wound, around and around the top of his thigh. His boot sloshed quietly.

He did not know if Tissoyo had been alone, so he limped down the long draw in the fog, step by step, until he came to the place where it joined the main valley of the Clear Fork, and there he found Tissoyo’s camp. Sloppy and disorganized, still a bachelor. A burned- out campfire and a bag of brown sugar, a rawhide packet of stiff jerky to pour the brown sugar on, a rawhide box and in it Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s sausage grinder and a small package of coffee beans. A tin cup hung on a branch, the Hudson’s Bay four-point blanket and buffalo robes.

Looking at him from a stand of live oak were the Medicine Hat paint and the black mare with her white nose, the splash of white on her side. They were hobbled, strands of grass in their mouths.

Britt carried Tissoyo to the scaffold later that day. He had built it far away from the wagon trail so that the white men could not rob it. He placed Tissoyo on it and covered him with the four-point blan- ket and the buffalo robe. He pulled the firing pin and the cylinder from the revolver and threw them away and then placed the revolver in Tissoyo’s hand. He limped over to the Medicine Hat paint and led him to the scaffold and shot him between the eyes and the mare afterward.

Chapter 35
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W

T

he y c a me b a c k
to the house on Elm Creek for a day and a night, and they expected to sleep late the day afterward. It

was just before Christmas, and they came early in the morning. It was the time of year when the Comanche and Kiowa kept to their winter camps.

They left the children at Elizabeth’s fort. It had been a long time since they had been together with each other in solitude and only themselves for company, even for a few hours. Britt took a shovel and dug out the barbecue pit and broke up mesquite for the fire. He found a small hickory tree of the kind that grew in the north of Texas, and even though it was not like the great hickories of Ken- tucky it would burn well and long. Then he started the fire and placed a section of heavy hog wire nearby to lay over it when the fire was down to coals. Britt had rigged sections of canvas for awnings and his Spencer rifle stood leaning against the live oak fully loaded and one in the chamber.

A calf carcass hung from the long limb of the live oak, glinting blue with sheath tissue and marbled red and white with fat. On the rise downstream young Jim lay in his eternal cold bed of earth with

the words on his headboard fading into pale gray and a small glass vase of
ekasonip
tops in a cottony spray before it. Mary thought of her oldest son as a prince frozen in some icy cavern far below the earth who would lie there until the Second Coming, and then Jesus would place his hand upon the boy’s closed eyelids and say,
Arise and come into thy kingdom.

All those in the black community of Elm Creek and Fort Belknap and others even farther away were to come. For music they had Paint with his fiddle and the enlisted man of the Ninth who played a flute and a corporal named Henry Thrim who had acquired, and could play, the new instrument called a harmonica. Mary walked over to the wall and looked at herself, turning her head, in the small mir- ror. It belonged to the Elm Creek house because this was home and someday they would come back here to live and so she would have it nowhere else. She unfolded borrowed sheets to throw on the long sawbuck and plank tables. She waved Britt away from the dishes. She would not let him pick them up. His great callused hands were dirty with sap and charcoal. So he bent forward from his height of six foot one and kissed her with his hands out to each side.

“Britt,” she said.

Why now was his touch so vivid and sparkling? His touch was a tiny point of fire and her skin was alight. She thought of what had changed and when. When she had seen him lying on the surgeon’s table with his pants torn off and his boot thick with coagulated blood like shredded liver and the surgeon taping his private parts out of the way and plunging in with his probe for the bullet. His body suddenly her own and so vital that she would have given any- thing to spare him the steel instruments. How vital he was to her, how loved. The tongs probing muscle and fat with a wet clicking and then the bullet drawn out with strings of tissue clinging to it. The hissing carbide lamp. Mary on the opposite side of the table with her hands on Britt’s hands, which were clasped together like a construction of metal. She could not touch him enough, then.

She put on the five-gallon kettle full of water to boil for his bath and then went to take the broom and beat on the devil’s trumpet