The Color of Lightning (19 page)
“Especially if your people are reduced to a tenth. Imagine it.” Grierson nodded. “Various realities out here unknown in the
East, as I have learned.” He cleared his throat. “Here is the legal situation. It is illegal for Texas state troops or ranger companies to cross the Red River into Indian Territory and onto this reservation. It is against our orders to pursue raiding Indians over the line as well, even in hot pursuit. Once they come onto the reservation they are not to be confronted. In addition the reconstruction government in Texas is forbidding any state militia or ranger companies at all. The new requirements are that we cannot use force in any way. I am very happy with that. Believe me. But they do raid down into Texas, and they take captives. They say that was their hunting and raiding country long before we came. Then the parents and relatives come here to the agency and want the agency to get their children back, or whoever, but unless we offer money and trade goods we’re bolloxed.”
“This is all new to me,” said Samuel. He crossed one boot over the other and dust sifted into the air. “I was never told about this when I agreed to take on this task.”
Grierson lifted his shoulders. “I can’t imagine why not.”
“Well. Can you give me an idea of how many captives are out there?”
“Well, most seem to be children.” The colonel pulled another worn and folded paper from his pocket and opened it. “Let’s start with boys. Let’s see, here. Joe Terry and the Elams boy from the hill country. Adolph Korn from the same area. All about the same
age. Rudolph Fischer, grown by now, a warrior. Cherry and Jube Johnson, Millie and Lottie Durgan, they were taken along with two adult women last fall. Another girl, Alice Todd. Martha Day, a girl. Minnie Caudle, same, Temple Field, Dorothy Field, Martin Fielding, Elias Sheppard, let’s see. Various reports here and there of children sighted, names unknown. We get reports here and there. Communications are so poor . . .”
Samuel started to say something, but Grierson went on reading. “There were three white children seen by a trader named Charles Whittaker with some Comanche up in Kansas, one of these could be Fremont Blackwell, aged seven, then an unknown white girl, and then there’s Elonzo White, Thomas Rolland, Ole Nystrel, a
Norwegian boy, Dave Elms—” Samuel raised his hand. “Stop.”
“Yes, sir. Excuse me, but I might add that over the years, from what Onofrio says, they have taken thousands of Mexican captives.”
“What has the Mexican government done about this?” “I’m not sure.”
Samuel stared blankly out the window. Then he said, “Make me a list of those you know of, with their ages. And who has them, as far as you know.” He paused. “I am appalled.”
“As best I can, sir.” “Are they all young?”
“That’s what I hear. They seem to take children from around two years to thirteen or so. Adults and babies usually don’t make it.”
“Any adults at all?”
“Well, as I said, this Elm Creek raid last October, they got two adults. Women. A colored woman and a white woman. They may still be alive.”
“Very well,” said Samuel. He stood up.
Grierson rose as well. “Let me know what it is you want me to do about it.” He paused. “People say they are different when they come back. The captives.”
“I would expect so!” Samuel reached for his hat. “After their experiences.”
“Ah, yes,” said Grierson. “Yes. But I have to tell you that some- times they don’t want to come back.”
“No,” said Samuel. “How can that be?”
Grierson paused for a moment to think. “I don’t know,” he said.
a w e e k l ate r
Grierson came for breakfast and then after they had eaten, he bowed and extended his arm, inviting Samuel to pre- cede him out the door. And so they walked out together to inspect the construction. The schoolhouse was blank and clean, of new-cut stone. The stone had been prised out of a sliding bank of sand- stone on Cache Creek. Boluses of coal the size of kettles tumbled down with the ledges of broken rock and were knocked into pieces and burned in the stoves at the military post and in the buildings of the agency. Stonemasons banged the sandstone into squares and these into walls and veranda floors. The window frames were sawn from oak from the Wichita Mountains. The raw wood had a marshy smell. In the springtime light, clear and watery, things stood apart from one another. Everything around Samuel seemed provisional, temporary, and indifferent.
They went to the blacksmith shop and the farrier greeted them with a quick wave of his hand and went back to the strap hinges he was hammering out on an anvil while his helper squinted and dodged.
Samuel went to bed at nine. Then there was a tumult in the night, the night of a damp, lukewarm wind that brought a fine rain with it and a distant howling. Samuel bolted out of bed and struck a light into a hurricane lantern and ran toward the corrals. The gate was open and fifteen horses and mules had been driven off. He stood there in his nightshirt and the coat of coarse ducking that had been waxed and oiled and was called a slicker. Five enlisted men and their sergeant came up in the dark.
The sergeant held his lantern down to the tracks. Samuel heard a fluting tone; it was the wind singing in the windows of the stable like a silver whistle.
“Well, sir,” said the sergeant. “They do it for fun, you know. The young men. Sometimes the old men too.” He was shouting into the wet dark wind.
“But my wagon team was among them.” “Well, there you are,” said the sergeant. “Do they do this often?”
The sergeant nodded. “Yes, sir.” “I want my team back.”
“I’ll see what I can do.” He lifted his shoulders. “If you offer them something for them. Like maybe flour, sugar, that kind of thing.”
“But those are rations.”
“Yes, sir, that’s right. Rations.” The sergeant wiped rain out of his eyes. “I will put a guard here at the corral for the rest of the week if you don’t mind.”
Samuel went back to the agency house and dried himself. For fun. Surely there were other ways they could have fun. He would put a chain and lock on the gate. That was not punitive, it was not unreasonable force. He sat at his desk and began writing a report by candlelight. It helped. His anger drained away in the specifics of official language.
Finally at two in the morning he was back in his bedroom. It was not the horses and mules he minded so much as the paperwork. He opened his Bible for a moment. The wind had a slow resonance and it sang at the ill-fitting window frames in several tones, one after the other.
When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches. Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings I will rejoice. My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.
so l d ie r s c l imb ed u p
on wagon beds and barrels to watch. At the gate of the corral a hundred or so Comanche and Kiowa men sat on their ponies with rifle butts resting on their thighs. A Kiowa man with a loud voice stood beside Samuel. As each Texas longhorn
was released from the corral it ran for its life out to the plains and the Kiowa shouted out the name of the man to whom it belonged. That man bolted forward on his horse after he had given the steer a running lead and shot it down.
Samuel sat silently and watched as the prairie earth before him for half a mile was littered with dead animals and the women slash- ing open their bellies to drag out the liver and the gallbladder and the long intestines. They and the small children ate these things on the spot. A young woman stood up in the watery spring sunlight and her silky black hair floated like a banner and her mouth and chin and hands were covered with tattoos and blood. Her fingers were slim and elegant and several rings gleamed out of the blood that covered them. She bent down with sweet words and soft whis- pers to her child and opened her hand to him so that he might take the piece of liver that trembled there like a jelly.
“Esa Havey!” The gate was thrown open and a piebald longhorn bolted out. The longhorn tipped his head from side to side and the great horns like turning spears shone in the sun. A man galloped out after him and the steer hooked his horse. It was not Esa Havey. It was a young male relative of Esa Havey that the older warrior had sent in to kill beef on his behalf. The man named Milky Way in the English language did not want to come in and be bothered about his captives. He did not want to have to sit and be lectured by the annoying new Indian agent.
The longhorn handled his massive horns like a desperate man with a saber. When the pony went down the longhorn turned with- in seconds and caught him in the gut and ripped through the cinch. The pony got to its feet with its entrails trailing.
“Shoot him, shoot him!” yelled the soldiers.
Esa Havey’s nephew ran from the longhorn on foot. The piebald bull hooked at him and turned and spun with the agility of a deer. Esa Havey’s nephew was unable to stop dodging long enough to cock his rifle. Then with the rifle in one hand the young man bent down and grabbed a handful of sand with the other and flung it in the steer’s eyes. This gave the boy enough seconds to cock his rifle
and shoot it in the forehead. He shot standing on his toes, a lean and beautiful body upheld on sinew and bone with his long black hair loose from its braids and flying in heavy shooks. Then he turned and shot the pony. The little buckskin fell straight down, its legs folding under it, and then rolled to one side in a sliding glitter of intestines.
Samuel Hammond and Colonel Grierson walked back to the agency warehouse for the clothing issue. They passed a tipi where a woman in a brilliantly ribboned shirt slashed the throat of a small spotted dog and then held it out at arm’s length to let the blood drain.
“Kiowa,” said Grierson. “The Comanche don’t eat dog.” “I see,” said Samuel.
He thought it would be better with the clothing issue. The coats and shirts and hats at least would not be shot or have their throats slit.
Samuel had asked that a great washpot of coffee with sugar be served out, and pilot biscuits and meat roasted on spits. Grierson had told him that the Indians believed one should never talk to a hungry man. The army was happy to butcher the beeves and serve up the feast since the enlisted men got to eat a great deal of it before it reached the trestles. The young people fell to play-fighting with the serge suit jackets and tore the arms off. Esa Havey’s nephew ran after a lovely young woman and pretended to beat her over the head with a pair of argyle socks. She grabbed them away and filled one with sand and circled it around and around her head as if winding it up and flung it at him and missed. A little boy pranced past with the seat of a chamber pot around his neck, singing in Kiowa,
Here is a good-looking young man.
Two elder women nearby who were eating pilot biscuits laughed themselves helpless and had to beat the cracker flakes from their breasts.
The translator Onofrio Santa Cruz was the son of a Mexican trader and a Comanche mother, raised in San Idlefonso, New Mex- ico. A jaunty short-brimmed hat sat on his narrow head. He had some sort of a vision problem; he squinted and stared around him- self with narrowed eyes.
Samuel gave a speech through Onofrio to bored and impatient headmen. Some of the men were old, and sat regarding him from under drooping eyelids, with noncommittal faces. Behind them were the younger men with paint in artistic and intriguing designs, and hawk and eagle feathers in their hair. Onofrio named them, but Samuel could not remember their names. The little boy with the toilet seat around his neck had fallen asleep in the lap of a big bony warrior with a receding chin.
Samuel said that when the annuity goods arrived he hoped more of the people would come in. He was very glad to meet them and his heart was turned to them and he wished to do right by them. The soft wind was heavy with grass pollen and the smell of frybread cooking in kettles. Samuel would, as their agent, see that the settlers no longer intruded on Indian land. They had been crowded and dispossessed but things were going to change. So there was no need to raid the agency for horses. No need. Now he would like to have his team back. Today he had added fifty pounds of rice and fifty of cane sugar, to say how much he wanted his team back.
Onofrio translated. Several headmen spoke among themselves in short sentences, in which language Samuel could not tell.
Onofrio said, “They say all right.”
Samuel hesitated, and then asked, “Was that all?” “That’s about it.”
That night Samuel sent the guards back to Fort Sill. He would not have uniformed army soldiers anywhere near the agency build- ings. He would win over these people with patience and kindness. They would understand that white men were no threat to them and would not attack them, or take their land, and thus they would leave off their raiding. He sat for a while and read
The Pickwick Papers
and found himself laughing aloud in an empty house, transported to the wet, rich fields of Kent, and fell asleep in the chair, and forgot to turn to Psalms.
W
T
h e y r o d e o u t
on the broad plains with nothing to sleep under, nothing to make a roof against the weather. Only
themselves and the horses. Tissoyo rode a small buckskin, and his two spotted horses trailed along behind. It was possible that he sim- ply liked to look at them, that they were like some fine embroidered linen, too beautiful to use. The loose horses paused and grazed and then when they found themselves left behind called out wildly and ran to catch up and stopped to graze again. Britt kept his revolver clean and the Henry carbine loose in the scabbard. They rode to the northwest. The air was fine and damp and the grassland rolled away for mile upon mile, differing in the colors and textures of grass as the soil changed, as they rode down northern slopes and up the southern ones. The big-headed brushy bluestem had broken out in stiff shakos, the Indian grass in violently swaying plumes. Every- where the central stems of yucca burst out into tall stalks of flowers and sometimes an entire hillside would be covered with their waxy white candelabras.