The Color of Lightning (29 page)

Britt turned to Tissoyo. “Tell him I know the woman. She works hard, she is strong. I know he will be glad to keep her.”

Tissoyo translated and then listened to what Eaten Alive had to say to this. He said to Britt, “He says that the little girl was the one they loved the most. The woman they don’t care all that much about. They already stole all her cattle and horses so they got all the good out of her.”

Britt thought about this for a long moment. He had been watch- ing Tissoyo to see if he would pull that trick again, of signing one thing and saying another. It was admirable, amazing. But Tissoyo translated straightforwardly and in a modest manner.

Britt was not sure of how much advantage he had. They could always kill Elizabeth. They did not need to sell her to get rid of her. “Twenty-five dollars.”

Then Tissoyo said in that quick, slurred Spanish, “They think she is a witch, she frightens them.” And at the same time he signed
Eaten Alive will think about the twenty-five dollars.

“Damn,” said Britt.

“What?” said the major. His hip joints felt like they were on fire.

“Later,” said Britt to the major, in English, and then turned to Tissoyo and said in slow, measured Spanish, “Tell him that I will pay twenty-five dollars but I also want the big bay horses, the ones that sweat in leopard spots. The ones you took from her ranch.” Britt saw subtle changes in Eaten Alive’s face. They knew his thoughts. They knew he was thinking about when they had killed his son and raped his wife. Thoughts have power. They can drift through the air unhindered. Ill will and hatred, the lust for revenge, can detach it- self from the person who generates these thoughts if that person has a certain power from some being. Even after the person is dead.

Eaten Alive lifted both palms to the air and said something in an exasperated voice.

Tissoyo took on a light and somewhat haughty expression. “He says, soon you will ask him to pay you, to take her away.”

“Tell him I was thinking about it.”

Tissoyo did not laugh, with some difficulty. “He says you can have her, and the horses, for twenty-five dollars, but then you have to give him a four-point Hudson’s Bay blanket.”

Britt turned to the soldiers. “Give them the red blanket and seventy-five dollars in silver. Do it nicely.” The sergeant glanced at the major, and the major gave a brief nod. The sergeant brought out the four-point Hudson’s Bay blanket and laid it out on the ground, bright red with its four wide stripes. Then he sat on his boot heels and counted out seventy-five dollars in silver Spanish milled dollars, stacked in three piles.

To Major Britt said, “We’re done. Let’s go.” “Did you get both of them?”

“Yes. And he gave me two draft horses into the bargain.”

e l iz a b e t h d i d n o t
believe she was free and safe even when she and Lottie were seated in the wagon with soldiers riding on either side of them. She would never feel safe again. The major glanced down at her; a raped woman, a captive redeemed. Lottie sat silent and staring. What was happening to her now? There was no telling. The four-year-old watched the soldiers in a state of fear with her thin hands clutched in the remains of Elizabeth’s skirt. Two soldiers led the big bay horses, now much reduced in weight. The draft horses turned constantly and called back to the herd of Comanche horses.

Elizabeth said, “What did you have to pay for me?” Britt rode alongside.

“Twenty-five dollars and that red four-point blanket.”

“What?” Elizabeth shouted and Lottie closed her eyes. “Only twenty-five dollars?”

“That’s it,” said Britt.

“Goddamnit, I’m worth more than that!” Elizabeth glared at the major.

“I got you cheap, Mrs. Fitzgerald,” said Britt. “But remember the horses.”

“You can have them,” said Elizabeth. “Take both of them.

They’re yours.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Britt. “Much appreciated.”

“Twenty-five dollars,” Elizabeth said. “If they paid me by the hour for all the skinning I did there wouldn’t be enough money in the goddamn federal mint to get me back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’ve paid more than that for a boar pig.”

Britt kept his eyes steadily on Cajun’s mane. Finally he said, “Actually, it was twenty-six.”

“That don’t make me feel a bit better, Britt Johnson.” Elizabeth wiped her hands on her dress. “So just shut up.”

Chapter 22
‌

W

T

he c a p t i v e gi r l
was about fourteen. Maybe older. She spoke no English and sat in the office of Samuel Hammond,

in the agency house, stiff as a pasteboard figure on the edge of a wooden chair. She was packaged in a corset and long stockings and a dress with a tight waist over the corset and her thin neck thrust up out of the collar of the dress with its tiny lace band edging. She had that wide fixed look in her eyes that Samuel had come to see in the Indian people themselves when they thought they were in danger. When they were disturbed and angry and frightened. The Mexican-Comanche housekeeper sat beside her but it did not com- fort her. The woman had come from Fort Sill to help, and there was no way to help her.

A band of Kiowa had come in for rations. They were hungry and thin. They had been in some kind of a conflict out on the plains. Samuel told them through Onofrio that there would be no more rations nor beef nor issue of any kind until they brought in what- ever captives they had. He heard himself withholding supplies from those in need. His own voice refusing food to starving people.

Then they had brought her in, with her hair loose and muddy,

barefoot. They said the girl had come from somewhere far south in Texas where there was timbered country when she was very young, very young, but her adoptive parents had died in the battle with the Utes, which was just last month out on the plains. Then they had come through a great burned area and could not find buffalo and they came out of it black to the knees and starving. Now there was no one to take care of the girl and so they handed her over for two horses and several brass kettles and a supply of flour and lard and several beef cows that they killed on the spot and ate.

The girl walked behind Samuel with a stony expression and tears running down her face. The laundresses at the fort had bathed her and dressed her. For the second time she had been torn from a culture and a language she knew, from people she loved. Once by violence, once from the bitter necessities of hunger.

Samuel had a list in front of him of all the captives’ names that he was able to garner. The black child named Jube, Britt Johnson’s only surviving son, sat on a chair beside him, a thin cap of tight black hair on his head and his booted feet placed precisely together. “Tell her we only want to help her,” said Samuel. “We will help

her go back to her own home, her own parents.”

Jube translated this and listened to the reply and said, “She says her parents, the Utes killed them a month ago.”

“No, I mean her real mother and father.”

But they died.

“All right.” Samuel paused and then smiled. “What is your name?” Samuel listened as the young black boy spoke in the tonal language of Kiowa, with several explosive consonants, clicking glot- tal stops, rising and falling tones.

“She says her name is Good Medicine. They say in Kiowa the name of a plant, Good Medicine.”

“Her English name, Jube.” “She doesn’t know.”

Samuel smiled again. “I will read these names and see if she recalls one.” Jube nodded and spoke to the girl. Samuel pronounced each name several times, slowly and carefully. “Alice Todd.” A blank

stare. “Mahala Fussell.” Nothing. “Susan Murdoch.” The girl’s eyes shifted to Jube and then back in a wide, dry stare at the Indian agent. “Susan Forster. Mary Ann Findlay. Charlotte Sanger. Fran- ces Lee. Vera Mae Grandin.”

“Ah,” said the girl. She turned her eyes to Jube and spoke quickly in the musical notes of Kiowa, those strange lifts and the explosive unvoiced
th!,
the descending tones.

Tell him that was my name. Vela Mae Glandin, Vela Mae Glandin, yes.

“Where did she come from?”

I remember a very tall bluff of stone down south in Texas. We lived on a river. Sabinal, Sabinal. That was the name of the river. It was clear water. Up above our house there was a very tall cliff.

“Do you remember what happened when they took you captive?”
The horses came running in, they were frightened. They came run- ning toward the house. Then the Koiguh came in the house and shot my father and mother. They took me and my little brother and my aunt. My little brother would not stop crying and so they killed him. They did things

to my aunt and then they killed her.

The girl’s face was impassive as she said this. Jube flushed a little at his cheekbones as he hesitated a moment and then finished her last sentence.

“What were your parents’ names?”

Mama and Papa.

“Oh. Yes. Well, what was your aunt’s name?”

The girl frowned slightly and stared at the floral carpet.
Aun-tie Flo.

Samuel watched the girl for signs that she was tiring, or too frightened to reply coherently. That he should stop the question- ing. The girl’s hair trembled in raw, newly washed locks around her neck.

“You said your last name was Grandin. Or Glandin.” “They can’t say ‘r,’ ” said Jube.

“All right. Your last name was Grandin, and what was your aunt’s last name?”

I don’t know. Aun-tie Flo.

Samuel lowered his head for a moment, resting it on his hand. He said a small, brief prayer for help. How to do the right thing. The girl lifted her hand to Jube and went on speaking.

Jube said, “She wants to know if she can go back to the Kiowa.

And if not, can she go and live with the Comanche.”

Samuel stared at the boy for a moment. “They killed her little brother and her mother and father, and then mistreated her aunt and killed her too. Why does she want to go back?”

Jube did not address this to the girl. He considered it himself. “It’s all right, sometimes,” he said. “It’s hard but it’s kind of fun.”

Samuel folded his hands together between his knees. “Yes?” “The Indians, they don’t ever whip their kids. You can kind of

do what you want.”

“I see,” said Samuel. “And what you want to do is not very com- plicated, is it?”

Jube tipped his head to one side and shrugged. “Well, we ran around on horses all the time. Us boys.” He sighed nervously and searched for words. “And we could hunt whenever we wanted to. Us boys. The girls carried the water and stuff.”

Samuel sat and waited for a moment. Jube fell silent. “Then why didn’t you want to stay?”

Jube said, “Because my mother was with us the whole time. They didn’t kill her. My mother was with me and Cherry. She did every- thing to help us. No Indian woman came to be our mother. This girl here, you know, she didn’t have a mother and father anymore after they killed them, so then she got an Indian mother and father.”

Samuel leaned back in his chair with folded hands to think about this. He said, “And wasn’t there another little girl with the Kiowa? About two years old?” Samuel bent his head to his list. “Yes, Millie Durgan.”

“She died,” Jube said. He tapped his fingertips and the tip of his thumb together. “Some others took her away north and she died.”

“All right.” Samuel put the list away. “Ask her if she remembers how long it took for her to be carried to the camps of the Indians.”

I don’t know. We rode a long time. My father wrapped me up in

a blanket and kept me warm and when we got there, there was a lot to eat.

Samuel nodded. A second birth of a kind; bloody, violent, noisy, appalling. And there you were, a new terrified person in a new and terrifying world and somebody gives you something to eat.

He placed his hands on his kneecaps and turned his gaze out the window. He did not want to stare at the girl but she was so odd and anomalous. It was hot inside the agency house and he thought about going with the two children to sit beside Cache Creek. Maybe they would feel more at ease in the shade of the cedar elms.

The girl’s hair was medium brown now that it was freshly washed and her eyes a watered gray, her eyelashes dense and black. Her face and hands burned brown. It was the expression on her face, the way she held herself, that he had never seen in a white person. A wary stillness in the eyes, a silent withheld aggression. She was utterly unaware of her own appearance and face, uninterested in the image she projected and not concerned with impressing him by gesture or posture. She had no interest in appearing fashionable or charming. White children, white people in general, had expressive faces, their thoughts reflected instantly. The children were winsome and eager to please. This girl had faced death and starvation at a very young age. She had never been corrected or denied anything her adop- tive parents had in their power to give. She had never been struck or spanked. She was both spoiled and underprivileged, famished and indulged, her emotions sheared off as if with a knife or kept in silence and secrecy like an irreplaceable treasure. She was elfin, otherworldly.

“Jube, ask her if she would like to have a white mother and father again. If she does not want to go back to her old home and have nice dresses like she has now, and a roof over her head and good food.”

No. I don’t like to sleep in a house. I don’t like the roof. It makes me afraid.

“Why are you afraid of the roof?”

It might fall down. It might catch fire and I could not get out.

“Do you like your new dress?”

No.

Samuel Hammond closed his eyes briefly. He ran his hand through his pale, thin hair and patted it down. She could not go back. She was not Kiowa. She had been stolen from her culture and her religion. Hammond went to his desk and took up a pen and paper. He dipped ink and began to write down the particulars for the Austin and Fredericksburg newspapers. Any of the new journals that had just started up in towns where the populace still might be attacked by bands of young men from the Comanche and Kiowa, where the newspaper offices themselves might be burned, the win- dows shot full of holes and the typecases scattered.