The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

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.

fall leaves the color of lemons.

Rain drifted to the south in long columns. Then the sun came clear of the eastern horizon, reluctantly, as if its red light somehow adhered to the level earth. With full light a flock of great birds came up out of the valley of the Red River to the north, their calling noisy and joyful. Hundreds of sandhill cranes lifted from their feeding places out in the flooded bottoms, kiting in the updrafts with laborious upstrokes. Britt watched them, streaming overhead, towing their insubstantial shadows behind them, and he heard the low, flat call of their archaic voices as they sailed along some million-year-old migration path. With long necks stretched out they skimmed overhead and called out in their hoarse voices of the joy of air and light and their simple lives of clouds and wind and death by predator at every hand and still they soared and sang. Then there were only a few stragglers and then they disappeared toward the south.

he was such a complete accountant that, as it was said in Matthew, every hair of his head was numbered.

His mind seemed to tick over like the works of his timepiece.

Dr. Reed coughed like the burning of paper. Lewis

Samuel understood that the Society of Friends was troubled by the Texans because the Texans were so clear and straightforward in their speech. They did not seem to need to hide their intentions behind deceptive and gentle phrases. They came to take the land and they meant to keep it. They would take it from red men as they had taken land from the Shawnee and Cherokee in the Carolinas and before that the wild Irish in Ulster and before that whatever croft or patch of rocky land they could hold against the lairds in the lowlands, and if they could not hold it they rode with the lairds against the neighbors to raid other neighbors’ cattle and had been doing so for centuries before the birth of Christ, who was the Prince of Peace, and they intended to keep on doing it, for as long as it took.

The rain dropped thin as mist on the trees in the draws and painted their trunks dark as some unrefined ore, dark as slag coal.

Had set the ramparts of Medicine Bluff and the Wichita Mountains and smoothed the plains as if fleshing a great hide, and set the sun overhead on its indifferent burning wheel that dragged the Comanche’s crawling shadows behind them like dark and sacred hair over the wide earth.

Lord look down and have mercy, he said. Have mercy on my wife and children. God now seemed to be a cold force, a great wheeling being, the world’s axletree turning above his head in worlds upon worlds of light.

Sometime in the distant past the Indian people had known these immense beasts. Maybe they had hunted them or prayed to them. For the first time he understood that the red men had myths and histories of their own going back to the beginning of human time. That these myths had nothing to do with Europeans. Nothing.

The nighttimes were alive with distant noises, with disembodied beings, with great stars wheeling overhead.

grew very dark. Vagrant sheets of fire blew into the air like burning laundry and disappeared. Other flames crawled low to the earth and roared when they fell upon fresh fuel. Sparks shot forward out of incandescent green brush whose stems were full of spring sap. In the middle of the hottest flames long thin ropes of fire tornados moved, bright pink and alive.

cold front came down on them, out of the north, a hard spring chill in a transparent wind and a cloudless sky. It blew Britt’s coat open and he had to grasp his hat to his head.

Her familiar face and the lovely wavy dark hair filled his entire vision for a moment and his heart thudded in one loud report that he thought must have been audible to everyone around him.

Jube repeated this. Even though he knew she was not afraid of going hungry, or of starvation. She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself shut in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun.

They seemed to have forgotten the years of childhood 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.

As it grew on to black dark the wind increased. It shook everything 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 gallop. 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 pictures 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.

The Holy Spirit was hidden in the vast plains and would not come to him even though he asked and asked again.

Dust boiled away from the hooves of their horses as if with every step they took they set the ground on fire.

He sat quietly in the ruin of his own personal philosophies as if they were smoking timbers in a heap and felt as if he had just murdered someone, or perhaps abandoned someone in a burning building.

“But think. The young Comanche men go alone to the mountains or some deserted place and fast and cry for a spirit to guide them. Do you not seek the Inner Light?” Simonton leaned forward in the chair. He was interested.

Samuel glanced up at Simonton from beneath his eyebrows. “You know very well we do.” “So do the horse Indians. Now, consider. Both Quakers and Comanche stand alone before the Divine Presence and seek to be taken, or moved, by the spirit.”

“Well, it seems to always get bigger.” Paint lifted his forearm and looked at it. “I tried to color myself with hair dye but I couldn’t get the color right. It was always darker or lighter. So I give up.” The old man nodded. “The Lord sends to each of us some chastisement. Some burden, so that we may turn to him.” “Yes sir,” said Paint. “Yours is to turn into a white man.”

The prairies between the two towns were damp with apricot-colored grasses that steamed in the noon sun, and the frost shadows of isolated live oaks shrank and wilted. Britt wished he had brought a saddle horse with him to ride through the shallow sunlight and the crisp air. He

The Kiowa galloped like circus riders in an invisible ring. They called out and sang and there was a kind of fire streaming around them. They were lethal and beautiful and they had come bearing the mystery of death for mankind to puzzle over. They were adorned with the flight feathers of eagles and their horses were outlined in sunlit manes.

All he had was the story of his life, which was as good as any other man’s, and in the end it is all we have.