The Color of Lightning (11 page)

up two. Nocteawah would not take the earrings from him by force because everyone could see that Old Man Komah had begun to help Jube. Had boiled up the buffalo hooves for him. Had rolled a ciga- rette for him and let him smoke it.

Nocteawah waved his finger back and forth in the Mexican way for
No
and held up that one finger.
“P!ah,”
he said. One knife.

Jube waved his finger back and forth as well and then said,

“Yii.”
Two.

Nocteawah looked up into the brilliant yellow cottonwood leaves, held up one finger again;
P!ah
. Then he made himself busy with a goose wing. He carefully chose two feathers for f letching. Jube put the earrings in his carrybag and stood up. He turned away. Then suddenly he turned around and thrust his arm out straight and held up two fingers and then began to dance around and around his own two fingers. He held them to his face with a puzzled expression as if he did not own them. He grasped them with his other hand and tried to force down one of the fingers but it wouldn’t fold. He spoke for the fingers in a piercing irritated voice in garbled Kiowa:
Yii! Yii! Thae hohn noh hon dai!
and then fell to wrestling and dancing with his fingers so that Nocteawah laughed and laughed, threw his head back and shouted with laugh- ter and so saved face. He gave Jube two good knives and took the earrings and the next day rode with them sparkling and tossing in his ears.
Ahô, ahô.

Chapter 9
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W

W

i t h h e r k n i f e
Mary could now help Gonkon inside the lodge. She could trim stew meat and snap off the

points of porcupine quills. She was better at the heavy work with the skins. Jube set to work with an antelope skull and his own new knife and made his mother two bone combs with very fine teeth. They stayed near the broken red ridges where Punta de Agua Creek came into the Canadian. The ridges bled red sand into the river, ridges edged with brush and stunted cedar. In the valleys, scattered groups of buffalo were still moving south in the autumn cold. The band of Kiowa stayed there for two weeks. The buffalo carcasses seemed to lie in hills and heaps of hills. Mary cut through the heavy hide from neck to vent and along each leg, stripped out the good liver and entrails and kidneys. Getting the head off was like hewing down a small tree. The meat was cut into round pieces that could be spiraled out into jerky. Gonkon told Cherry to tell her mother that someday they might be so hungry they would come back here to boil up the bones and the feet.

The work was very hard but now Mary had all she wanted to eat and she was stronger and if she was careful she could hide the fact that she sometimes lost her balance and that her vision was blurry.

The man who had smashed her head with a rock after he had raped her often passed her by without looking at her. He had a sun tattoo on his chin as if he spoke to this deity daily, and maybe he did. She pretended not to see him. She made him invisible.

A group of men rode toward them one day and stopped a dis- tance from the encampment. The crier came through the tipis with that jaunty and important way of walking that criers always have and shouted that they were Kiowa-Apache. They came to visit and smoke and after a day or so they and five or six men rode off to the Alibates flint quarries to see what they could find. Everyone was far away from the soldiers and the Indian agent and all the irrita- tion and frustration that came from dealing with those people, and so they would enjoy themselves. Jube stood and watched them ride off. He wanted to go with them very much. To ride in that careless company of young men. Old Man Komah walked past him and then stopped and touched Jube’s shoulder.

“Someday you can go with them,” he said. “But you have to get your dream first. You don’t have any protection now. You got to get your dream person.”

Jube stood in the dry grasses as they went past, and saw that every one of them had some invisible phantom riding with him, a transparent being that shone in transient sparkles around their heads, over their scalp locks. A protector and guide. Jube deeply wanted one of those beings to come to him and tell him,
I will be with you always.

a m o n g th e k i o wa- apa c h e
was a young white captive. Jube saw him sitting on his horse among the other warriors when they returned from the Alibates with pieces of flint striped and spotted in many colors like layered candy. The boy was burned brown by the sun but he was somehow pale beneath this and very thin. His body had no fat on it, and his long bones were prominent and his knee- caps were like cylinders. His stomach and abdomen were flat. His fair hair hung in two braids to his waist, and he wore the stiffened

bangs of the Kiowa-Apache, and heavy earrings. He spoke their language easily as if he had no other and moved among the young men of that tribe as one of them. They laughed and rode past one another to bang the convex fronts of their shields in a kind of play- fighting. The young white warrior’s shield had a tossing light-brown scalp pendent from its center like a tassel.

When he slid from his horse into the cold pools of Palo Duro Creek his elongated reflection shimmied in the breeze as if it were his spirit detached from himself, paler and thinner and lost. Among the other young men he seemed the replica of a plains warrior that had somehow been left unfinished or perhaps something not yet begun. He stood stroking the horse’s neck while it drank.

Jube followed him and sat on an outcrop of red stone. The young man looked up.

“Hello,” said Jube.

The young man said something to him in a language he had never heard.

“Can you understand me?” said Jube.

The boy said
underwater person
in Kiowa. He stared at Jube with a wide hostile stare.

“Where are you from?” said Jube.

The boy bent down and picked up a handful of rocks and with a quick bend of his wrist shot them at Jube.

“I no English,” he said. “No.”

Jube ducked and jumped off the rock and ran backward.

The young man sat down on the ground then, cross-legged with his parfleche boxes, and drew out a rawhide-wrapped package of steel lance heads. He selected one and turned it over in the sun along the sight of his right eye, and its edge was clean as a razor and shone like a line of fire.

Jube approached him again as he would a feral animal. He stepped carefully over the crackling shallows of new ice. The boy suddenly sprang to his feet in one motion and slashed at Jube with the lance head. His eyes were like blue glass.

Underwater boy,
he said in Kiowa.
Go, go
.

Jube turned and ran a few yards. He turned back again. “What is your name?” he said. He said it in English.

The young man lifted his chin and stared downward at Jube from half-shut lids, his eyes fringed in bleached lashes. “Mat-thiew.” Then he laughed and turned back to the lance heads.

Jube stood for a moment and then walked back to the village of Kiowa lodges and he was disturbed and he did not know why.

un d e r m a r y ’ s h a n d s
the thick winter hides changed from something that had come from a bloody wreck of an animal to soft pliable blankets. In them a person would be safe against all the win- ter snow and cold. If she worked hard enough she might be allowed to keep one. Mary turned the edge in her fingers and saw that the short hairs of the buffalo were thick and dense, more so than any other animal hide she had ever seen.

Gonkon had already chosen two hides from seven-month-old cows for Millie and Cherry and worked several hours making them a Kiowa bed, a couch of basketwork. The little girls were like dolls to her. She combed the lice from Cherry’s and Millie’s hair with a porcupine-quill lice comb and with a quick flick of the wrist snapped the lice into the fire where they burned up in sparks. She oiled Cher- ry’s hair with fat and twisted it into ringlets. Mary and her daughter both had wavy hair. Jube’s hair was a mass of kinks like his father’s.

Mary walked out into the cold shallows of the Canadian. She went in the late afternoon when the sun was warmest. She made soap from the yucca root and soaped Jube’s hair. Then with her sharpened butcher knife she shaved it off very carefully. “Mama you scalping me,” he said. Mary smacked him lightly on the back of the neck and kept on. They would be more welcome in the lodge if they looked better, she and Jube. These Kiowa were a vain and cleanly people whenever it was possible. They admired good looks and shining hair.

She was not called upon to work that day because the other women saw what she was doing and one came down with the loan

of a kettle. It was the older woman who seemed to be related to Gonkon and was called in Kiowa
grandmother
. But all older women were called grandmother. Mary boiled their clothes. She stirred the water with a sycamore sapling pole and she and her son stood wrapped in their ragged blankets. She made an ointment of the poi- sonous mountain laurel beans, boiled and then mashed into fat. She plastered her head and her body with it and then washed it out. The powerful toxic alkaloid made her tongue tingle and her hands shake and the lice all died. Thick wads of Jube’s hair wafted off across the sandy flats. They looked like the clustered tatters of the buffalo bulls’ forelocks that were sheared off when they fought and crashed into one another head-on in the spring.

Aperian Crow rode by. He was magnificent in large abalone shell earrings and a bright plaid turban, a new soft buffalo robe thick with winter hair, moccasins to the knee beaded in the dis- tinct Kiowa floral patterns. His shirt had been freshly boiled and his flashy dappled gray horse wore an embroidered saddlecloth. The band had shifted suddenly from poverty to wealth now they had found the main buffalo herd. Everyone was well fed and strong. They were celebratory and kind, they wore their best clothes. He said something in the tonal Kiowa language that made him sound as if he were singing, or beginning some melody that was never completed. He smiled and lifted his chin and gestured toward Jube’s sheared hair that the wind was taking away, toward Jube’s now-bald head. And so Jube got the name Fights in Autumn. This was a joke that it took Jube some time to understand.

Mary and Jube stepped into the open oval entrance of Gonkon and Aperian Crow’s lodge. Mary’s vision underwent some strange shift as she entered, in that everything became many times larger in some indescribable way, and then shrank down to normal again, but she maintained her balance and they stood quietly to one side without moving. Aperian Crow laughed at the sight of them, their newly boiled ragged clothes sewn together with the agave thorn and its thread, Jube’s shaved head shining and Mary’s tightly waved hair twisted and packed into the two combs. Their brown arms and legs

shone with oil. Aperian Crow indicated that they should sit down in the place of lowest status, to the left of the door, and they did so and then she and her son ate from the bowl that was passed around from hand to hand, meat and dried wild peas and mesquite beans. Mary turned to look at her daughter.

Cherry sat with Millie on their bed made of willow withes, thick with buffalo robes. Cherry tossed a dried, inflated grouse air sac to the two-year-old. She felt important and petted since she was now six and had also been adopted. They batted it back and forth. It was thin and light, a transparent balloon. Two small elegant people decorated with tiny bone rings on their hands and glass beads in their ears and bright red paint dotted all along the parting of their hair. Millie was now called Sain-to-odii.

When they had all eaten, Gonkon handed two buffalo robes to Jube and Mary and indicated that they should spend the night and Cherry called out, “Mama, she says you-all are sleeping inside.”

Mary signed her thanks. “Mama, you pretty,” said Cherry. Mary nodded and smiled.

When the fire had burned low a man stepped inside and waited to be acknowledged. Aperian Crow looked at him carefully and made a gesture for him to sit down. It was one of the visiting Kiowa- Apache. He wore straight bangs over his forehead that had been stiffened until they stood out in a spray. He began to sign to Aperian Crow and so the two men smiled and talked and told jokes in sign language. Mary watched the signing as long as she could, trying to understand and remember, but then her head drooped forward as sleep overcame her. She jerked upright again as she heard them laughing and over the crackling of the fire she also heard Cher- ry’s laughter. Mary looked up, alarmed. Gonkon had said Cherry’s name, which was something about a fish, “Ohn pi.”

Cherry was signing rapidly. She was making the two men and Gonkon laugh. Her hands signed a story out of the dense and smoky air, threw shadows on the hide walls. She signed with fingers that spoke of falling in the river and chasing the grouse and Gonkon

chiding them. She imitated Gonkon’s frown and her admonitory finger. The men laughed again. Then with the wisdom of a child who had seen her brother shot dead, watched her mother raped and beaten to the edge of death, who had been dragged along the ground by one arm by a man on horseback until he finally decided to throw her up on the horse behind him, she folded her small hands and quit while she was ahead.

After a moment she turned back to Millie and the balloon, and they bunted it into the warm air with their fingertips. Mary watched the glinting air sac. Is this not how people speak with one another? Is this not the way those who can speak lift and balance words be- tween them and send them into the air to one another and keep the speaking afloat? Mary sat quietly outside the gates of any language. They were closed to her. She watched as the air sac floated and drifted in the currents of hot air from the fire and tumbled back and forth between the girls’ fingertips.

th e b u ffa l o w e r e
moving south again. Back to their caves in the remote south and so the people harvested them while they could. They took down enough buffalo to see them through the winter and although it seemed a great deal to Mary she also knew that this supply would dwindle down to starvation levels before the herds came back in the spring and she would try to survive until then because then Britt would come and get them. Mary did not reason out how this could come to be. When they crested a low, sloping ridge she could see the immense distances of relentless plain that lay between her and Britt. He was now a faint image hard to recall, his face and voice were fading and elusive.