The Color of Lightning (2 page)

br i t t t r i e d n o t
to favor Jim over the other two but already at age eleven the boy was both manly and kind. Jim bent over the pages of the Bible by firelight, entranced by words like
reigneth
and
strowed
. His mother made him spell them out. That spring Jim rode with his father searching out the wild cattle that grazed along the Clear Fork of the Brazos and when they came upon buffalo they sat on their horses and watched them, looking for some clue as to their nature. One of the white men who had lived in the country for ten years led them to see a herd moving north in the cold spring rain. They were dark and woolly and stood high at the shoulder, they moved down the slopes of the Brazos Valley wreathed in their own steam and water dripping from their half-moon horns, free and un- tended. No human beings owned them or directed their movement. They went where they meant to go in their own minds. They spread to the bald horizon under a drifting animal mist, and they smelled good.

“I wonder if they have regular teeth,” said Moses.

“Like cows,” said old man Peveler. “They just have regular teeth like cows.”

“How do they eat?”

“They eat very well. The tongue especially.”

Young Jim wanted to ride down among them but Britt laid his hand on the boy’s forearm and shook his head. A calf turned to stare at them. It was a bright rusty red. Its mother turned and called to it and the calls from the herd of thousands in low explosive grunts made a ceaseless web of sound as the herd made their way north by the notions they held unspoken and secret, some ageless living map written out invisibly in their hearts.

They turned back toward Elm Creek. Old man Peveler had been in the country a long time and carried the scar of an arrow wound in his neck. The red men live in the north, he told them. Past the West Fork of the Trinity and on beyond the Red River, which is four days’ ride north of here. That is their land and this is their raiding coun- try. They raid for fun. The young men love it. Then they ride back north across the Red and they are safe there, so keep your firearms loaded and to hand.

And so they stayed. In Kentucky there was nothing but war and no safe place. To the north and west were the wild Indian lands of plain and canyon. Now that they had arrived they found that there was no other place to go. There was no retreat. No going back.

Britt worked for old man Peveler, driving freight, carrying sup- plies from Weatherford over the rolling prairies to Fort Belknap and Concho, supplies to the Ledbetter Salt Works. This way he learned the roads and the freighting business. The men at these places told him that he should be careful. But Moses Johnson said he hadn’t seen a red man since they had arrived. Judge Wilson said it was true, there had been some kind of Indians close by at some time but he did not know of what persuasion they were and they were gone now, and with nearly two hundred civilized people in the county it was not likely they would return.

They were alone now. All those who had come from Burkett’s Station, Kentucky, were alone, each family in its own house on the

ocean of grass. Their cabin windows sparked in the night like the distant ports of small craft on unfamiliar seas. They were not sure what lay to the north and west, perhaps some veiled landscape or na- tion of people who had once owned the land where they themselves now lived. But these people were gone and were not coming back.

br i t t l ay do w n
his tin shears and listened. It was a heavy dark night with a haze about the three-quarter moon, hot and close. The dog stood up and stalked slowly into the yard with the fur of his back rising hair by hair. Mary and the children were asleep. The trumpet vine crawled down over the doorway and in it some persistent ticking insect clocked the seconds. Britt stepped to one side of the open door, into the shadow where he could not be seen, with a half-made candle sconce in his hands. A wind came up out of the grasslands and moved down into the valley of Elm Creek and rattled the cottonwood leaves over the cabin. The dog stood stiff- legged, staring at the far bluff of the creek where the stone circle was. A man stood there. In the blue moonlight Britt could see that the top half of his face was painted black. His hair drifted in the wind. Then he was gone.

th e m o r n i n g o f
October 13, 1864, Britt bridled his team of horses. The men were going to Weatherford for supplies and a few other things like hard candy and Mrs. Fitzgerald’s hair dye. There are no mornings anywhere like mornings in Texas, before the heat of the day, the world suspended as if it were early morning in para- dise and fading stars like night watchmen walking the periphery of darkness and calling out that all is well. Mary’s lessons scraped clean from the thin boards, and bread baking in a skillet.

Britt came in and took up a smoking hot triangle of cornbread from the skillet and lifted it to his mouth. Then he bent forward with a confused expression to a piece of paper lying on the clothes trunk. All over the margins of the paper were sums.

Their freedom papers.

She had been using the margins of their freedom papers to teach the children to write sums with a pen.

Britt slung the cornbread back into the skillet and shouted her name. How did she ever think she could do such a thing? What white man would now believe these papers were real? Mary shouted to him he could go and get another set. How were the children sup- posed to learn how to use a pen? There wasn’t any other paper. She stalked across the cabin with her chin in the air and her hair coming unpinned from under her headcloth. She banged the skillet onto the hearth and pieces of cornbread flew up and scattered.

Britt stormed outside and threw his dray whip across the yard. He turned and went back in again. How could he go and ask Moses Johnson for another set? And let him know how he did not value them, but let the children scribble and blot ink all over them? Moses Johnson nearly got himself lynched for wanting to free his slaves, his life’s mortal end could have been in those papers. Look at them. Just look. He held up the manumission papers. Seven times nine equals sixty-three, seven times seven equals forty-nine. Divide by three. A hot feeling rose into his chest and then to his face.

“You were looking for a better life than I could give you,” he shouted. “You’d rather be a house slave to old Mrs. Randall than to be free in Texas with me.”

If she didn’t like the way he lived his life she could go back to Kentucky to her mother and take the children with her, war or no war. The children hid in the washhouse and spied with fixed stares out the cracks between the logs and whispered to each other about the progress of the fight between their parents.

Britt lowered his head and bit his upper lip to keep from saying anything more, and when he raised it again Mary had run over to the window and thrown open the shutters. Her arms were crossed and she was staring out at the grapevines draping over the heavy green water of Elm Creek.

“And stop looking at yourself in the mirror,” he said. “And when you go, leave Jim with me.”

Mary took the mirror from the wall and threw it on the floor. It broke up into many angled pieces. Each piece reflected something of their house and the clothing of their children hung on pegs on the wall, and one large piece shone with the image of the sky and its early- morning adornment of cottony clouds overhead tumbling southeast in the early breeze and the bright dots of cottonwood leaves.

Two married people found themselves on separate and barren planets, alone in a place called Young County in the remote land of Texas. In an instant they realized that the bonds between them were not strong at all, but very fragile, and if these were broken they would be solitary and isolated for all eternity, and all that they had made together and the children they had made between them would be thrown out on long orbits like minor comets.

“I don’t want the damn thing and I never wanted it the minute you brought it home. Don’t ask me if I’m sorry because I ain’t sorry and I never will be sorry.” She kicked at the broken pieces. “There ain’t nothing wrong with those papers because I could scrape it all off if I wanted to, Britt Johnson, and besides they are going to end the war and free everybody and those papers won’t mean nothing, nothing, listen to me. You never listen, Britt. You are half deaf, I don’t know which half, maybe it switches from one ear to the other depending which side I am standing on. And I wouldn’t mind going home at all, no sir I would not. Next wagon going east I would, I can cook and earn my way as well as anybody.”

“Woman, will you never shut up?”

They were both caught up in a rage of destruction, both hoping that at some point the other would realize how serious this was.

Britt turned and left. He walked straight out to the corral and pulled the lead rope from its pullaway knot and got on Cajun’s back. He caught up Duke’s lead rope in his right hand. He bent his head for a moment and thought about the other black people he would see in Weatherford. He named them to himself as if the names were a kind of secret, personal magic against the desolation he saw in front of him which was his life, if she indeed were to leave, without her, and without Cherry and Jube. At the last moment young Jim bolted

out of the washhouse and in one clean leap sat himself on Duke’s back.

Mary stood in the doorway. She was crying. “And don’t bring me back nothing,” she said.

He turned the leader out onto the road. “All right,” he said. “I don’t want to go back to Kentucky,” she said.

“All right.”

at t h e f i t z g e r a l d
home Britt slid off his saddle horse Ca- jun and lifted his hat to the people gathered there. Young Jim lifted his hat as well but remained on Duke’s back.

“Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mrs. Durgan,” Britt said. “Good morning, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Peveler, Judge.”

“Good morning, Britt,” they said.

“Well, Britt, I hate to see you hitch up that good saddle horse,” said old man Peveler.

“I’ll have me a team,” said Britt. “Before too long.” He lifted the harness onto Cajun’s back.

Mrs. Fitzgerald was a large woman who had been married in East Texas to a man named Carter who was half black and then she was widowed in some dubious way, and had come out to the Red River country with her son and daughter and son-in-law and two granddaughters. After Carter died then she married a man named Fitzgerald and then he died of tertiary fever. Her ranch house was two stories, built of horizontal logs and plastered over an eggshell white. It had a wide veranda all around and immense cottonwoods sighing overhead now illuminated by fall leaves the color of lemons. She had a view toward the architectural arrangements of red stone in the bluffs of the Brazos and Indian Mound Mountain. Her son- in-law had been shot dead in some kind of argument over property lines. Elizabeth Fitzgerald now ran the place single-handed with her powerful, carrying voice and bottomless energy. Her daugh- ter, Susan Durgan, and the two granddaughters stayed close to the ranchhouse while Mrs. Fitzgerald rode out sidesaddle to harass her

hired hands all day. Her twelve-year-old son Joe Carter rode out with her but stayed twenty yards behind. At present Elizabeth was boxed into a stiff, loud dress, and her vast waistline was armored with a whalebone corset.

“Don’t you give Mr. Graham any more than five cents a pound for that dirty salt of his!” she shouted.

“Yes ma’am,” said Moses Johnson. His voice was low and re- signed. He cleared his throat.

Two of Fitzgerald’s heavy wheelers stood in the corral unhar- nessed and calling out to the other horses. The Fitzgerald team were solid bays and when they sweated the sweat came out in rosettes on their necks like leopard spots. They were her best horses and she would not permit them to be used for a short trip to Weatherford and so instead they backed a pair of half-broke chestnuts into the traces and then placed Britt’s light leaders in front of the two-ton freight wagon.

Jim jumped down and stood aside as his father’s horses were backed into place. The men got aboard. They would cross Elm Creek and the water would swell the wood of the freight wagons, the felloes and the axles. They would journey on for a day to Weath- erford with tight wheel spokes and undercarriages.

“Didn’t Mary send you with no dinner?” Elizabeth Fitzgerald stormed up to Britt where he sat on the wagon seat and peered at the space at his feet. Her big yellow-and-pink-checkered skirts flew out around her feet.

“No ma’am,” he said.

“Well, Britt.” Elizabeth nodded. “Y’all been fighting. I won’t have it, I won’t have it.”

“Mrs. Fitzgerald.” He lifted a hand. “I can fight with my own wife if I want.”

“Leave young Jim with me,” she said. “I’ll get something for you.” She turned back to the house. When she came out with a par- cel of food wrapped in a tea towel she said, “Leave young Jim here. I’ll send him over to bring Mary and the little ones to stay with me while you’re gone.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Britt. “Jim, you hear?” He watched as his son Jim, in bitter disappointment, wrung his hat between his hands and stalked off to the house.

“Joe ain’t going either so no sulking!” Elizabeth shouted after him.

Joe Carter and Jim slunk away toward the creek in a loose ado- lescent walk and kicked at stones and horse manure.

Moses Johnson glanced at Britt and then to Judge Wilson.

“I guess she don’t care for you going all the way to Weatherford.” Moses’ raspy low voice was thick with the heavy pollen in the air. His lips worked with the effort of not saying anything more.

“It ain’t that,” said Britt.

“Well.” Moses shifted the reins from hand to hand. The two lead horses shifted the straight-bar driving bits in their mouths. They were impatient to go. The cool wind was inviting.

“You could bring her back something fine from Weatherford,” he said.

Britt looked ahead at the road. “Maybe that would help. I don’t know.”

And so they started and the water of the creek flashed up in sprays around them, flew out in arcs from the passage of the wheels, the pools dotted with cottonwood leaves. Overhead the sandhill cranes and the great white egrets drifted like ash in shifting planes, heading south.