The Color of Lightning (34 page)

Britt stepped down from Cajun. From time to time he rode alongside the wagons, or far out in front, scouting. He tied the big bay to an upright under their small warehouse. Then he climbed into the wagon to help unload.

“What are you doing out of school?” Britt said. “Isn’t this a school day?”

Jube stood in silence. His father had not even greeted him. Then he said, “Yes, sir.”

Then it seemed Britt came to himself and he put his arms around the boy and held him for a moment.

“I want you to stay in school, is all,” he said. “I hate school.”

“Why?”

“I feel shut up.” Jube twisted inside his tight collar. “There’s too many white people here.” He took his father’s hand. “Did you have to go to school?”

“When I was young we were not allowed,” said Britt. “But I learned anyway. In secret. And here you got your own school right out in the open.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, did I ask you if you wanted to go to school or not?” “No, sir.”

Britt took off his hat and wiped the tight, short hair of his sweat- ing head and then put it back on. “Where is your mother?”

“At Sergeant Earl’s barbershop. It’s the day they wash all his linen for him. Because he puts the money in the school.”

“I’m glad you know that,” said Britt. “And I guess you consider the work your mother does and I do so you and Cherry and the rest of them can have a damn school. So get back there. Apologize. Ser- geant Earl ain’t there for his health.”

Britt walked through the fort, past the parade ground and out the south entrance to the town. His shadow was a deep black inten- sity in the bald sun. Hackberry trees whose rough leaves were per- petually noisy even in the springtime shaded small houses of picket and frame and in the shade of one particularly large tree was a min- iature building painted dark green with white trim and a striped barber pole in front.

Mary stood up and turned to him. Three of her came to their feet in the broad mirrors and they all had an expression of delight. Several other women turned to him as well in greeting and the tiny barbershop seemed a vast hall of moving figures in bright calicoes.

Mary stood on her toes and stretched up to kiss him. He stood with his hat in his hand and said hello to Mrs. Earl and Mrs. Sutton and Miss Thrim. These three glanced at one another with signifi- cant glances and stepped significantly on one another’s toes and said they had to get the linens and towels ironed and so they left. The bright white linens were bundled in wads in their arms.

Britt sat down in the barber chair.

“They are hauling themselves out of here to give us time alone,” he said. He glanced into the mirror at Mary where she stood behind him, her hand laid on his shoulder. Mary would not look at herself in a mirror. Had not done so for a long time. “We need some time alone, baby girl.” He reached up to his shoulder and touched her hand. “Mary, say something. Anything.”

Her eyes shone and she lifted her hands and retied the ends of the headcloth. All the mirrors made this gesture seem that of an eight-armed Hindu goddess lifting in some mysterious sign or gesture. The bottles of bay rum and Tiger Balm glittered in the bevels.

“I can’t much,” she said. “The McGuffey blue already I said. I did.”

“Good!” Britt said this in a false, bright tone as if to a child and then heard himself. He closed his eyes for a moment. He took her hand again. He heard the bugle’s stuttering music for pay call and a dim and general roaring emerge from around the stone barracks. It would not be long before some of the men were here for hot water and haircuts and shaves and lotions. “I will sit and you will read it to me,” he said.

“All right,” she said. She stood behind him, very still. Her hand closed on his shoulder and he could feel that it was cold. “Britt, they are shooting at you.”

“No, Mary. No, baby. We are so armed we scare ourselves. They tried once and they won’t try again.” He drew her around to face him. “We need some time alone.”

Mary looked at the floor. “Britt, Britt.” She slowly leaned for- ward until her head and its white headcloth pressed on his shoulder. “I can’t.”

Over the big mirror facing him was an advertisement for Niagara Star Bitters. He studiously read it. He lifted his hand to the back of her neck. Felt her sweet, moist breath on his shoulder and the fine bones beneath his hand. A breeze washed through the hackberry leaves and then it was still again. “It’s all right,” he said. He longed for his wife and yet she was wounded and damaged and only she

could say when those wounds had healed and still he wanted her. She knew it.

In a whisper she said, “There are women some you know. Britt are others than me.”

“Hush.” She stepped back and he stood up out of the barber chair. “No.” He put one hand on her upper arm and with the other hand flicked a small dry leaf from her collar. “Not ever.”

She caught the leaf and crushed it in her hand. A sparrow flew onto the doorstep and spied around itself out of the irregular black stripes that streamed down from its bill as if it had been feasting on roofing tar. Mary pulled off her white headcloth and shook it.

“Bad luck,” she said. “That bird in the house, go, go.”

Britt waited until the sparrow flew away. Then he said, “Mary?”

She lifted her head. “Oh Britt, find another,” she said. She pressed her hands to her eyes.

He took her arm and sat her down in the barber chair. “You saved my children.” He held her upper arms in both hands. “If you had not been there with them they would have died, or they would never have come back to us. I owe you everything.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. He let go of her and stepped back. “You are very beautiful. When I saw you and Cherry in the camp up there walking to me I almost broke down. In front of those men.”

She took hold of the arm of the barber chair. “And I saw you, I saw you.”

“I’ll wait as long as I have to wait.” He did not raise his hands to her again. “Forever if that’s how it is.”

She said nothing but she ran her hand down his shirtsleeve. Then she took his arm with both hands and leaned her head against it.

“Britt.”

He smiled and then stepped on the pedal again and again and the chair rose in jerks into the air. “How far does this thing go up?”

“Stop! Stop!” She began to laugh.

He took hold of the chair arm and spun her around and in all the mirrors Mary’s laughing face and the figured blue print of her dress

whirled as if she were a merry-go-round of eight women with lifted hands and flying skirts.

He caught her and stopped the chair. “I’ll wait,” he said. “Hard work takes your mind off things.”

Chapter 27
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A

nd so h e
kept on. Britt asked seventy-five cents a hun- dredweight and he got it because of the danger of the roads. Sometimes they had orders to carry to Fort Worth where the stage- coaches of the Butterfield route laid over and repaired. For the stagecoaches they brought thoroughbraces and window blinds and new wheels from Waco and then they took on mail and packages for the forts. They loaded an organ for the Methodist church in Palo Pinto and bales of red drapery for Lottie Deno’s establishment in Jacksboro. In that town they rested for two days once when it was raining so hard that the creeks were up and they could not move. Dennis and Paint watched from under their hat brims to see if Britt would go to seek out some other woman, being so long separated from Mary, but he stayed with them under the wagon covers, laid back atop the load, reading a seed catalogue. He licked his thumb and turned the damp pages from rutabagas to Red Chief tomatoes. There were four other freight outfits also marooned there, the men bored and impatient, smoking behind the running curtains of rain that poured from the eaves of the buildings. The streets were chan-

neled with slow-moving lava flows of red mud.

Britt was restless when they had to stay in town for any length of time. He was wary of the white men. It was better on the road, trav- eling free of any rules and away from ex-Confederates and strange men come into the country from distant places. It was better to travel and sleep under the wagons with no company but their own. The road was like a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche.

Britt and Dennis and Paint stood at the open window of the large frame building where people had gathered to hear Captain Kidd recite the news of the day. The building was used for town meetings and storing wool and voting. It was still misting rain and they kept their hats on.

Captain Kidd was an elderly man who read all the newspapers he could find in Dallas and then he traveled from town to town and told the news both foreign and domestic. The crowd smelled of damp fabrics and tobacco. They were silent and intent.

Captain Kidd sat on a high stool and called out to the crowd that the Franco-Prussian War had begun. That the delicate Frenchmen with their thin mustaches and ancient guns were whipped soundly at Wissembourg by the Germans, who wore no toilet water scents and slept in the rain. Huge blond men grown strong on pork sausages had made mincemeat of the French army. Also the French could not traverse their guns. He said that a canal called Suez had been driven between the land of the Israelites and the valley of the Pharaohs and now the great ships were sailing on salt water to the land of Punt, where there were spices and turquoises and exotic diseases.

“Are the pharaohs still there?” whispered Paint. Dennis lifted his thin shoulders. “I don’t know.”

A white man in the doorway signed to them to come in. “You boys better hear this,” he said. “Shem, Ham, and Japeth are all a- sailing down the Suez Canal.”

The three black men entered cautiously and stood against the back wall with their hats in their hands, looking at no one.

Captain Kidd had a white chin beard and a five-dollar hat. He sat

260
paule t te j iles

in a shaft of faint rainy light pouring through the window, through the gaps in the boards of the wall. Cascades of water spanged on the roof. The tall stool made him seem an illuminated figure in a waxworks. Beside him on the floor his pile of newspapers, the
New York Herald
, the
New York Times,
the
Chicago Times,
the
Philadel- phia Inquirer,
the
London Daily News,
the
Cincinnati Times,
and the
Boston Morning Journal
. All of them of varying dates and full of maps, engraved illustrations, and advertisements.

“And now an amendment has been got up between the several states,” said Captain Kidd. He stared out over the men and the women with their pancake hats, their bonnets, as if in a trance. He seemed to be receiving messages from another world. “It is the Fif- teenth Amendment to our glorious Constitution which Constitution was written under threat of arrest and execution by our forefathers who signed their names and their honor and their sacred fortunes. This Fifteenth Amendment allows the vote to all men qualified to vote without regard to race or color or previous condition of servi- tude. That means colored gentlemen. That means the sons of Ham. And now a report from the joining of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads where Progress has lifted the locomotives on Her Mighty Wings to traverse the land of the savages despite their murders of survey crews and the small Chinese people toiling and toiling with the laying of the ties and so on.”

Captain Kidd continued straight on with fact after fact and re- ports one after the other as if he had been wound up and set to work- ing despite murmurs or cheers or boos or hissing from the crowd. Dennis and Paint and Britt slipped out and went to their wagons. Heavy wagon sheets waxed and waterproofed were tied over the loads, and other sheets laid over the horses where they stood in a faint aura of steam from their warm bodies as water ran off the sheet hems.

“Let’s try the crossing at Keechi Creek,” said Britt. “It might be down.” He stroked the wet necks of the leaders, checked the trace chains and the tongue hounds. The wood of the wagons and all their complex parts had swollen with the rains and so were tight and

secure. The sides of the wagons and the horse’s rain sheets were dot- ted with mud. Men went past in flapping slickers with rain running from their hat brims.

“What do you think, Britt?” said Dennis. He stood long and thin, very dark and drenched in his black coat and hat. All the dim houses of Jacksboro were blurred lines in the rain and mist, the oc- casional yellow lamp at a window.

“About Keechi?” “No.”

Britt nodded. “About the Fifteenth Amendment. I don’t know.

It may take a while before I can put a ballot in a box.” “It’s legal.”

“Wait,” said Britt. “Wait and see how things turn out.”

Chapter 28
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a m ue l s t e p p e d do w n
from his buggy in front of the ad- jutant’s office where several enlisted men sat on the veranda steps opening envelopes. It was mail day. One man was reading aloud to another in a halting Irish voice the way a child reads; he studiously pronounced
the
and
a
and hesitated over
nuptials.
Samuel tied his buggy horse by the lead rope and walked up the steps. The men

looked up and were not sure whether to stand up or not. “It’s all right,” said Samuel. “Good day, men.”

“Good day to you, sir,” the soldier with the letter in his hand said. “And could you tell me then, sir, what is a nuptial?”

“A wedding,” said Samuel.

“It is as I thought,” said the one being read to.
“Biodh se am- hlaid.”

All the buildings were completed now and they were bright with the uneven surfaces of new-cut limestone in the cream color of the stone of the Indian Territory. Each had a veranda against the sun and the weather. It was the spring of 1870. A rainy winter behind them. The long parade ground was lined on one side by the enlisted men’s barracks with a fireplace at one end and private quarters for a