The Color of Lightning (32 page)

“Jesus,” he said. “It’s powerful.” He collapsed it and put it in his pocket. “Much appreciated. Now I can spy on you,” he said. “I can blackmail you.”

“I wish,” she said. “I ain’t that lucky. If you run onto a loose man tie him up and deliver him. But not if he’s married. I don’t believe in bigamy. I never did.” She sat down again. “Only twenty-five dollars. I’ll show them goddamned savages.”

Britt looked down. He lifted a hand to his mouth and coughed. “I’ll bring Mary and the children. Then they can go into Belknap two days a week for the black school.”

“By God if that woman don’t have a spine. Bashed in the head and ever word she ever knew knocked right out of her brain pan and here she is teaching school.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Britt. The gate of the palisade as yet had no upright logs around it but stood alone like a doorway to nowhere. Dennis and Paint yelled at him. Paint wanted to know if he was go- ing to stand there and talk all day. Dennis added that the world was waiting on them with money in its hand. Vesey Smith in the second wagon lifted his head to the sky and sang a song about Appalacky Town.

And so they went on in the hammering brutal heat of the sun on the broad open plains, the wagon wheels and axles rumbling down into the valley of the Brazos with its obscuring timber. They skirted Indian Mound Mountain to deliver their load of tools and hay and grain to Fort Concho and then turned around without rest to drive to Weatherford carrying buffalo hides in unfleshed stinking bales. In Weatherford they unloaded the hides and took on barrels of flour and a shipment of eight-day clocks in crates, loads of slaked lime and cement in paper sacks and cedar poles, the Fort Griffin regi- mental surgeon’s trunk of drugs and medications.

Britt bought a Smith and Wesson .44 revolver that took ready- made metallic cartridges. For Paint and Dennis and himself he bought the new Spencers out of the surplus firearms market that came about after the war ended. They were .52 caliber and loaded seven shots and also took the new self-contained metallic cartridges

and so they no longer had to mess with loose powder and percussion caps. Britt watched the horizon as he drove; the long thin galleries of timber along the Brazos and Elm Creek and the lifts of sandstone rises. He had the wind in his face and the shimmering broad grassy world rolling under his wheels and ahead of him the pointed ears of the Fitzgerald bays nodding in their hard, racketing gallop.

Chapter 25
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W

M

ar y sat i n
the front room and shelled the Indian corn into a white bowl and then separated the kernels according

to their color. All the blue-black ones in one place and the red ones in another heap and the yellow ones she poured out of her hand into an ironstone cup. The school needed them for counters. This was how Sergeant Earl taught the scholars arithmetic. The dark ones were tens and the red ones fives and the yellows were one. Mary sat beneath the advertisement for Jaguar Varmint Traps that Elizabeth had framed and fixed to the plastered wall. Mary did not know why Elizabeth treasured this colored lithograph of a snarling, spotted great cat but did not feel she ought to ask.

Lottie stood in the doorway and watched Mary counting out the kernels. It was a damp December with a low cloud cover. A strong gust of wind shot impelled streams of cold air under the doors and through the spaces around the windows. The bitter air made the girl’s skin pale and so the tattoo in the middle of her forehead stood out like a dense and secretive third eye the color of a blue-black grain of corn. She was seven now, or eight.

“Lot-tie,” said Mary. “How old years are you now don’t you?”

Lottie stared at her. “You talk funny.”

Mary smiled and nodded. “Yup,” she said. “How old?”

“I am seven,” said Lottie. “Grandma wants me to wear that apron.” Mary kept on separating grains. “So I don’t get my dress dirty.”

“Hmmm,” said Mary. She picked up another cob of corn and the sheller and began to tear off the grains into a wooden dough tray.

“She wants me to wash dishes.”

“Well, dishes need wash,” said Mary. “Wash and wash. Every day.”

Lottie’s nose grew red and her eyes filled with water and she stared with a blank face at Mary. Then she turned and ran away and sometime later Mary heard Lottie scream
No!
And the dishpan turned over and dishes smashing on the floor and Elizabeth’s voice in a howl.

Jube and Cherry walked silently into the feed barn to see the calves. There were three of them standing behind their mothers and smelling of milk. Jube wanted to shoot them. He wanted to drive an arrow into their thin sides and see them go down in the straw and manure. To cut them open and eat the clotted milk from their stomachs. Cherry whispered in Kiowa that he should not and Jube strolled through the barn strumming on his bowstring as if it were a harp. The two of them also seemed to have developed a light, hid- den contempt for all the devices of civilization.

For a life that must be maintained by washing things made of textiles and china and wood in water that had to be heated and soap that had to be made, for the elaborate techniques of making bread and fermenting vinegar and protecting chickens from preda- tors when wild eggs lay in nests for the gathering. Contempt for the digging in the ground to make outhouses, for the footings of palisades, furrows, postholes, to extract rock for permanent and im- movable walls. They seemed to have forgotten the years of child- hood that preceded their life with the Kiowa as if it had only been a time of exile from their true lives in movement across the face of the great high-hearted plains and its sky and its winds. The smell of

horse, the spartan lives, the unaccountable gifts of food that fell to the hand from nowhere. The men in a state of war from the moment they were born as if there were no other proper human occupation. Jube would have grown to be an aristocrat on horseback, silent and honed and lethal, and yet he had been returned to the nation of houses with roofs and white men, to the country of devices and printed books.

Mary heard from a distance the singing tones of Kiowa and knew it had only been her presence with them during that time that held them here with her. Only for her had they come back.

Mary put the sheller down. She was beginning to see little flashes of light. It happened when she turned her head too quickly. When she was worried. When she remembered.

She stood up. She would put a cloth of cool water on her fore- head. When she dreamed now it was of herself speaking. Talking unrestrained. In her dreams words came to her in an intricately and perfectly linked series of constructions called grammar. She knew she could do it again if she dreamed it, if she prayed. She dreamed of herself praying.

Elizabeth came in snorting.

“I am the only parent she has. And I will smack the child if she does something like that again. I can’t stand to smack her.”

Her loud, harsh voice made the small flashes of light wink on and off in Mary’s vision.

“Tell me,” said Mary, and waved her hand as if bidding the rest of the sentence to come to her.

Elizabeth softened.

“Yes, Mary, tell you what?”

Mary pointed to the tintype over the mantelpiece. A great fire was burning. It was the winter of 1869. A sudden and distant crack of thunder came to them and they both hesitated.

Then Elizabeth said, “That was Mr. Carter.” “I know,” said Mary. “Tell me him.”

“Ah.” Elizabeth put her fists on her hips and stared at the tin- type as if Mr. Carter had done everybody a deliberate disservice by

getting himself killed. “He was half black and half white. As you can see. My daddy was a preacher and when I run off and married Mr. Carter I thought he was going to set himself on fire. That was back in East Texas. So I come out here where a person can live the life they want.” She sat down. “If they live.” Elizabeth pulled heavily at the heliotrope brocade skirts to settle herself in the chair. She spilled over the edges. “Mr. Carter’s father and him, the two of them was more interested in getting rich than looking out for themselves. They took a lot of chances. His daddy married a white woman too, and his grandfather before him. In New Orleans. They was all half black and half white for a bunch of generations. I don’t like that word
mulatto
. Sounds like some kind of a pudding.”

Mary laughed. Elizabeth looked over at her and was surprised,

and smiled.

“So they got rich. Like old man Goyens. I had the best of what- ever they could buy but before long somebody laid in wait for them and shot my husband and his father deader than Santa Ana.” She stood up again and pulled at the strings of her apron. “And I got fixed on the proposition of staying here anyway with my boy and girl. And the Comanche got both of them.” She lifted her broad, stained hand and wiped at her eyes. “And I am rich and they can all go to hell.” She lifted her shoulders and held them there for a moment and then turned to Mary again. “Now I want you to practice talking.”

The daylight diminished moment by moment and the faint tum- bling roar of thunder somewhere to the south sounded again. Mary nodded. The lights were blazing through her vision like comets. There was the matter of Mr. Fitzgerald but Mary was now beyond curiosity and no longer cared about Elizabeth’s succession of disap- pearing husbands.

“Don’t just nod. Just talk. Say anything. I don’t care if it makes sense or not, just talk. Talk a lot.” Elizabeth turned her head to the sound of thunder. It made her hands sweat. “You hear.”

Mary felt the familiar trembling now all through her body. It would go on when the unbearable headache came upon her and then it would go away.

“I have lights and they are going,” said Mary. “Lights in my eyes and going hurt and the day and see when everything can see.” She put her hand to her forehead. “Hurt.”

“Oh dear,” said Elizabeth. “The affliction has come upon her.”

She went outside in the increasing wind to the water butt and soaked a cloth in the freezing water. She was suddenly afraid to be outside. She needed to be inside under a roof and with strong im- movable walls around her. To the south, beyond the stiff live oak, a long light flashed sideways on the horizon and disappeared and then the thunder spoke again. In the back bedroom Elizabeth placed the wet cloth over Mary’s forehead and then went and shook out the last three drops of laudanum into a glass of water. Mary drank it with her eyes closed and lay back down. She was trembling in a high vi- brato of muscle and nerve.

“It’s because Britt is a day late, isn’t it?” Mary nodded.

“He’s all right, Mary. He’ll come home.”

Mary placed her hands together, palm to palm.

“Yes. I am praying too.” The thunder was like distant gunfire or some atmospheric traveling herd of horses that proceeded toward them in a low rumble. The windows lit up and then were dark again and then the thunder came again. “Mary, do you and Britt have a married life?”

Mary lay with her eyes closed and then shook her head. Elizabeth sat in heavy silence with the cold cloth in her hands.

She dipped it in the basin and wrung it out. “What do you remem- ber?”

“It all,” said Mary. “So many days there was two of me and I wasn’t one but I was the other one.”

It was strange weather. A cold wind and the lightning and no rain.

“All right,” said Elizabeth.

“And for Britt I can’t.” Mary shut her hands together like hinges closing. “I can’t.”

“All right.”

Mary set herself to think of when the headache and shaking would be over, to think to the other side of it when she would feel very well and would get up and help Elizabeth and sing and talk and when Britt came she would try to read out loud to him from the newspaper, chasing the print with her eyes as it crawled in an insect stream off to the margins. When the headache and shaking were over with, she thought of all the good things that would happen.

After the children ate their supper they carried blankets and quilts to sleep in front of the fireplace where it was warmest.

As it grew on to black dark the wind increased. It shook every- thing that was not secure. Mary listened to it. She began to be afraid and the fear came on her like something creeping. Something she could not make go away. It was a spreading stain across her mind. She could not make the fear go away with prayer nor memorized verses of Saint Luke nor counting. In the uproar of the windstorm she thought she heard the sound of a hundred horses at a full gal- lop. She heard the door splintering on its hinges and all the precious civilized collection of objects thrown against the wall, everything broken, everything smashed, people and dishes and bottles and pic- tures and windows and clocks and dresses and bone and brains and tables and chairs. Her fear was so intense it was like being struck by lightning. They are coming, they are coming.

She sat up, alone in the small bedroom. It was very cold and she was sweating. Her headache had been reduced to a light tinny singing in her head. She darted out of bed and pulled off a quilt pieced in a confusing pattern called Broken Dishes and wrapped it around herself and felt her way to the door. Then on her cold bare feet through the main room where the children slept in the last dim glow of the fire in the fireplace and to the other side, to Elizabeth’s bedroom where she slept each night alone and fat in her tentlike nightgown.

“Elizabeth, Elizabeth.”

The big woman was sitting up on a chair in the dark. Mary could see her by the dim light from the fireplace. Elizabeth wiped her sweated palms on her striped nightgown.

“I got six men staying and working on this place. It’s just the wind. Lightning.”

“We must guns,” said Mary. She sat down on Elizabeth’s bed. “Load the guns.”

“It’s just the wind making us crazy.” “They could come in the wind.”

“I know it.” Elizabeth reached to the wall where her heavy wool overcoat hung on a nail. “It’s stupid but I got to do it.”

So Elizabeth struck a light to her kerosene lamp and went out to the front room where her long guns were kept on pegs over the door. She took down the twelve-gauge shotgun. It was a muzzle-loader. She poured in a good charge of powder and then rammed home a load of double-aught buck. She took up the heavy revolver from the mantelpiece as well and then walked back to the bedroom and handed Mary the revolver and sat with the loaded shotgun between her knees. And so they sat all night while the windstorm tore like a Viking at the edges of the roof. Sat with their loaded arms and felt safe for a while with their weapons in their hands.