The Color of Lightning (15 page)

The horse surged forward. It was as if he were digging out a canal. The whole bank ran with water around and under the gravel and it continued to collapse under them. It was worse than quick- sand. Britt sank to his thighs alongside the horse and felt the myr- iad clickings as the small stones gave way under him and muddy red water filled the holes that Cajun stove in the shoal. Britt forgot about the packhorse. Cajun fought so hard to get clear that he was

bucking; his legs and hooves made sucking noises as he charged forward. It nearly broke Britt’s hold but his large hands gripped the saddle horn and held, his veins seeming to lift and burst out of his wrists and arms.

At last Cajun struck on an underlying layer of stone or hard clay with his front hooves. He bent his back in a high curve and clawed up onto it, still up to his knees in the soupy gravel but his front feet were on some buried hard surface and he charged forward, dragging Britt alongside.

The packhorse was already across and stood calling to them in a shivering high whinny. He had got across and run up the bank among the trees. Britt came to him, streaming water, and patted his wet neck and then unwrapped the revolver and the rifle. He wiped them carefully and then broke open the barrel of the Henry and blew it out and then snapped it closed again. He ran his hands down Cajun’s legs. He had pulled them both out of that collapsing sink and there he stood unhurt and ready for travel. Britt loosened the cinch for a moment and let both horses rest and then went on. They passed through the belt of tall sycamores and cottonwoods of the north bank, then into brushy bottoms and up onto the plains again.

As he went on he felt in his back and knees how tired he was, and he rode with his feet out of the stirrups to relieve the pressure on his knees. He saw that the land on the north side of the Red River was a country of long waves of land that sometimes rose to broken ridges. Here and there a dark streak where a few trees grew along a dry watercourse. He rode on with a chill April wind in his face and shivered uncontrollably in his wet clothes, but he did not stop.

br i t t c a m e u p o n
Tissoyo at noon on the day he crossed the Red. Just beyond the lifting prairie stood the Wichita Moun- tains, blue and remote, dreamlike. In front of these distant peaks the young man sat on his horse combing his hair, keeping watch over a herd of more than a hundred horses. Britt stopped immediately,

pulling back on the packhorse’s rope. The horses were going to call out at any moment.

Tissoyo drew a quill comb through his hair. He had parted it be- hind and had thrown each half forward over his right and left shoul- ders and was combing the right part, the silky black hank in his hand, stroking the comb through over and over and singing. Above his head chill and massive ranges of clouds blossomed upward, tier upon tier, and among them vultures sailed effortlessly.

Britt had heard that the Comanche and the Kiowa and the Kiowa-Apache possessed some kind of bottomless and efficient magic that carried them through all the years of their wars on the settlements, that kept them ahead of Rangers and cavalry alike, and this magic had to do with their hair and with other people’s hair. He watched for a few moments as the young man tied up the right braid with a thong and then wrapped it in a long shank of otterskin. Before he could dress the other braid the packhorse called out in a wild, long whinny and Cajun called out as well. Britt held both hands out into the air on either side of himself.

They sat and looked at each other for a long time. The Coman- che sat on his horse with one braid done up and the other loose on his breast. He had stopped singing. Britt sat without moving and his hands out to either side. The young man searched the country be- hind Britt but it was wide open and no concealing trees or brush in sight, only the bending new grass and the horizon and great clouds soaring upward, white as porcelain and crisp at the edges. The black man was alone in all that wide and limitless space.

Slowly Tissoyo began to wrap his undone hair. When his second braid was wrapped in otter like the other he lifted his hand and made a come-on motion, cupping his hand toward himself.

Britt rode slowly toward him. The herd of horses grazing on the side of the slight rise lifted their curious heads to Britt’s horses and several called out with their ears pointed. Britt was not sure what to do. There was no telling what he ought to do. Neither man reached for a weapon. The distance between them closed.

“Unha numuu tekwa eyu?”

Britt shook his head. He stopped within speaking distance.

“Habla español?”
Britt said.

“Ah, si, si.”
The Indian watched him for a moment. Then he said in Spanish, “Are there others with you?”

“No one.”

The young man sat on his buckskin horse and considered. He wore a revolver in a holster and a bandolier over one shoulder, a buckskin shirt and moccasins with leggings.

“Where are you going?” “Here,” said Britt.

“Hm. Where do you come from?”

“The Brazos River.” Britt placed both hands on his saddle horn, one on top of the other. “Tell me your name.”

The young man told him his everyday name, Tissoyo, and said that he was a Comanche,
Nemernah.
He continued to gaze at Britt and Britt knew the man was trying to place him in some category where armed and mounted black men took up their social space but could not.

Tissoyo wanted to know if Britt had brought things to trade. Britt said that he was not here to trade, but was looking for things that had been stolen and wished to recover them, and he told Tis- soyo his own name as well. Britt.

“No lead bars? Do you have caps for a Nah-vee Golt?” Britt shook his head. “No.”

“Then you are not a Comanchero. We are waiting for them to come from Santa Fe with ammunition. It’s spring, it’s good grass time and time for people to travel.” He gestured at the land, and then bent forward with one forearm on the saddle horn and in- spected Britt closely. “What lost thing are you looking for?”

“The women and children that were taken on Elm Creek south of here, near Fort Belknap.”

“Ahhhhh.” Tissoyo nodded. “Brrreet.” He said Britt’s name over and over. Britt sat quietly and brushed away the mosquitoes that had begun to land on his horse’s neck and his own neck. He did not know what sort of customs this man lived with or how he

thought inside those customs and traditions and so he proceeded with great caution into an alien landscape of the mind and the mind’s eye.

“It was the fight where Little Buffalo was killed,” Britt said. Tissoyo lifted his eyebrows very high. “So I heard,” he said. “They have my wife and two children and they are black like

me.”

Tissoyo lifted his eyebrows once more and once more said, “So I heard.”

Britt loosened his hand. He had shut his hand around the saddle horn in an iron grip and his fingers were cramping. That was what the lift of the eyebrows meant; it meant,
So I heard.

The Comanche stuck out his lower lip and lifted his chin to-

ward the northwest. “There. That is where they are,” he said. Britt nodded. “Your wife and two children. A week away. With the Koi- guh.”

“The Koi-guh.”

“You have come a long way,” said Tissoyo. “Yes.”

Tissoyo smiled brightly. “Stay with me,” he said. “I was sent out here to look after Esa Havey’s horses because I threw flowers at his wife. Do you understand Via Láctea?”

“No.”

“The Mexicans say Via Láctea.” Tissoyo threw his head back until he faced the cool blue spring sky overhead and stuck out his lower lip. That was how they pointed at things, Britt thought. You never knew in what gesture or sign or object did magic lie, hidden maledictions or a bewitching that might be started up unawares like a jackrabbit bounding out from under your horse’s feet. Sprinting toward trouble and horrors on the grassed earth. “That up there, at night, stars without end in a long river across the sky, the Mexicans call it Via Láctea.”

“Ah,” said Britt. “I understand.” He meant the Milky Way. “We Nemernah, we say, Esa Havey. Same. Via Láctea, Esa

Havey.”

Britt lifted his eyebrows in the assenting gesture. This seemed to make Tissoyo happy.

The Comanche dropped both hands and patted his horse on either side of its neck. He said, “The camp chief, the civil chief, said I was a troublemaker and making eyes at Esa Havey’s wife was im- moral and immodest and somebody would end up having to pay a great many horses to make somebody else feel better when his honor was wounded. So I might as well look after Esa Havey’s horses un- til when the strawberries are so big like the tip of my little finger because if this kind of thing kept up I would end up in debt to him anyway. And here I am all by myself. What do you have to eat?”

Britt smiled. “Probably about the same as you.” “Do you have sugar?”

“Yes, I have brown sugar.” The horses shifted beneath them, try- ing to touch noses and smell of one another’s breath. Britt glanced toward the horse herd. Several horses had Moses Johnson’s brand and others carried the brand of Elizabeth Fitzgerald. In the noon sun they had broken out in a slight sweat that looked like leopard spots on their necks. He said nothing.

“Do you have coffee?” said Tissoyo. “Yes. But it is green.”

“We will roast it. I have a square of metal so big, thus, it is from an army train. It was the top off of a box of ammunition. We can roast it on that. Come with me.”

Chapter 12
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W

T

he y r o d e t o wa r d
a shallow valley in the distance. A small and shallow little creek valley with pecan trees, the

grass grazed short by the buffalo until it seemed it had been care- fully mowed. Not a stick of underbrush. Just the naked smooth grass and the stand of pecans and here and there fallen limbs. The gray trees with their bark as corrugated as runs of ancient lava. The pe- cans lifted brilliant, lime-green leaves no bigger than a snail’s shell up to the sky as if washing them in the cool air. The two of them set about gathering wood and when the fire blazed in transparent blue flames they stood in the smoke to rid themselves of mosqui- toes. Britt unsaddled Cajun and lifted the pack from the pack pony’s back. The two of them shook themselves and then dropped down on their front knees carefully, like old people, and then flopped over on their sides and rolled with deep grunts of pleasure. Cajun wal- lowed on his back and his big hooves pawed with delicate gestures in the air. They got up and shook again and sent grass and dirt fly- ing. Then they trotted over to the Comanche horses.

When the fire was down to coals Tissoyo set the metal lid of the ammunition box over them and Britt shook out green coffee beans

onto the lid. They banged and jumped as they roasted. Britt took up a stick and began to turn the beans and shift them around.

She was alive. The children were alive. Britt felt as if he stood before the opening of a deep cave in which a great treasure was hid- den. A treasure made up of all the things that made life worth liv- ing. If it would get his wife and children back he would have taken up his rifle and shot his new friend in the back without a moment’s hesitation but he had to enter this perilous and occult cavern with his hands empty of weapons.

“How are we going to grind them?” Britt asked.

“Here, I have this thing.” Tissoyo turned to a rawhide box and poked around in it. The pack box was painted with careful and bril- liant designs along each seam. Loving work. Tissoyo held up a sau- sage grinder.

Britt nodded. It was Elizabeth Fitzgerald’s sausage grinder. The wooden handle had a chip out of it at a certain place. He had seen Mary use it many times.

“All right,” he said.

So he sat and ground up the roasted beans in the sausage grinder and although it was very coarse they still got good coffee out of it.

“The Americans do excellent things with wheels.” Tissoyo turned the handle of the sausage grinder.

“Yes, they do.”

He saw that Tissoyo had not bothered to set up a tipi. He was young and unmarried and he did not have a wife to set it up for him and so he was living the bachelor life in the way of bachelors all over the world and in every age; things in a muddle and careless with the remnants of food and his extra moccasins and a shabby wool coat hung on a tree limb. The Comanche drank the black coffee out of a tin cup and gestured toward dried meat hanging from the rack in cinnamon-colored ribbons.

“Now take some of that and put brown sugar on it and eat as much as you like and tomorrow we will go out and find a buffalo calf.”

“Good,” said Britt. He saw a Spencer repeating rifle in a deco-

rated rawhide scabbard and a hard box of untanned leather beside it for the ammunition.

“You came through the raiding country,” said Tissoyo. “The place where we raid.”

“Yes, I did.” Britt took a pinch of brown sugar out of its bag and sprinkled it on a strip of jerky. “Honey is even better,” he said.

“Yes, but we don’t have the hives up here like they do down in the hills,” said Tissoyo. He pinched up a sticky clump of brown sugar from the bag that Britt pushed toward him and dropped it on the dried meat. He crushed up the sugared jerky between his strong white teeth. The fire ref lected on the small pools of water that lay in the shelving creek bed.

“Yes, there are plenty of hives down there,” said Britt. “Down where there are big trees. Where are the white women and chil- dren?”

“The white woman? White. Ah,
taibo.
She and the little girl are with Esa Havey, with us Comanche.” Tissoyo swallowed. “Very good. The
taibo
woman is a slave to the first wife of Eaten Alive. The first wife of Eaten Alive is my mother’s sister’s child. They got into a big fight. The big loud
taibo
woman was in the water, on the Washita River, to bathe her tits because her tits were so big and swollen where Hears the Dawn and That’s It had beaten on them down in the raiding country. She was sitting in the water to cool her tits and Eaten Alive’s wife came and told her to get out of the water and threw a digging stick at her and hit the
taibo
woman over the left eye.” Tissoyo tapped himself over the left eyebrow. “So then the big loud woman got up and took her stick away from her and smashed my cousin in the head.”