The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

Long, attentive lines of timber ran like lost regiments along the rivers and creeks. Everything was strange to them: the cactus in all its hooked varieties, the elusive antelope in white bibs and black antlers,

There are no mornings anywhere like mornings in Texas, before the heat of the day, the world suspended as if it were early morning in paradise and fading stars like night watchmen walking the periphery of darkness and calling out that all is well. Mary’s lessons scraped clean from the thin boards, and bread baking in a skillet.

And so they started and the water of the creek flashed up in sprays around them, flew out in arcs from the passage of the wheels, the pools dotted with cottonwood leaves. Overhead the sandhill cranes and the great white egrets drifted like ash in shifting planes, heading south.

In the bright, manic and arid night air thorn branches were seized by fire and burned into black script.

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.

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.

January of 1865

The January light poured in at the far end through a tall window and the panes danced with the disquieted shadows of bare limbs.

the superintendent of the Office of Indian Affairs has spent twenty thousand, four hundred and ten dollars and, ah”—he flipped over a sheet of paper in the stack—“forty cents that was to have gone to a farming project for the Osage tribe in Kansas on a home for himself in Westchester County.”

Nobody was ever charged. They promised the red men clothes and they sent out two hundred men’s summer suits and every one of them was large enough for a three-hundred-pound man, and so the Indians cut the sleeves from them and made leggings for the children. They had sent flour that was full of weevils and bacon that had turned green and portable soup in chunks

that boiled up into something like wallpaper paste.

His beliefs remained true and perfect in an icy, remote way. And he, Samuel, had observed with interest as his own former personality contracted and then realigned itself and changed. After a while he became a skilled and fearless ambulance driver who had no idea who he was. His beliefs turned, suspended in the air, lit by another light in crystalline majesty, and in quiet moments of exhaustion or sleep and the dreams that came to him then, he saw them shining beyond his reach. There was always a sort of grieving in his mind.

“Early in the fifties a large force of Texas Rangers attacked a perfectly peaceful reservation and slaughtered women and children sleeping in their beds.

Dr. Reed coughed like the burning of paper.

She had come to grief on the rocks of Cape Tipman, bilged with sixteen feet of water in the holds. The two hundred passengers were got off safely, but her cargo was lost. It had been thrown, barrel by barrel, into the sea. Salt and flour streamed out into a gale-force wind. She had been raised by hiring a salvage crew to force empty, sealed oil barrels through the gaping underwater hole and into her hold. They then fothered the hole with one hundred and eighty feet of canvas in an enormous bandage around the entire waist of the ship, and as it passed over the wounded strakes the canvas was drawn in and clung to the hole in an interior bulge and sealed it. The pumps and the barrels full of air began to lift the rocking body of the ship. This during a storm. The men who went down into the water could hear the grinding noise of the Monongahela’s keel on the stone ledges. A terrifying sound, the noise of the Atlantic itself, as it ground up men and ships on unseen rocks and then tilted them over into the bottomless sea. The divers were hauled shaking to the deck and offered hot tea. Since the ship’s owners belonged to the Society of Friends, they were not allowed spirituous liquors, and the divers cursed the goddamned Quakers and drank their scalding milky tea in offended silence.

He had raised the money to purchase the cargo and had borrowed the money for an interest in the ship itself.

Samuel would also be liable for the repair of the ship as well as the lost cargo and the cost of the ship’s recovery. He pressed his hands against his eyes

He thanked the Lord for this chastisement. He prayed he would learn and understand whatever it was the Lord meant for him to understand by this, and by many things when you came to think about it.

People did not really understand who they were until they had been tested, and then came the terrible surprise that they did not know who this new person was either. A succession of strangers, interlopers, banged through the door of the mind without knocking.

If you ask and ask sincerely you will be granted that inner light.

Finally he opened his Bible to Psalm 139. You have hedged me behind and before

and laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it. Where can I go from Your spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend unto heaven You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost pa...

low sea-clouds scudded overhead at a rapid rate and bars of sunlight flashed between them.

The air was heavy with sea mists, and the sliding tilt of gulls overhead in their ash-colored jackets.

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.

Elizabeth was at the edge of starvation and near a fatal exhaustion, and in her weightless daze she felt he was speaking to her. A creature at the far edge of his range, or beyond it, solitary and lost but somehow surviving. A vision. She had been granted a vision.

The descending song of the canyon wren spilled down the granite slopes.

His dead older brother had left an empty space and Jube came to fill that space within days, flowing into its blank silhouette like powder smoke.

The night sky was cloudless so that the cold fell out of it like dew

His mule swiveled one ear and then the other, and hoarded the world in its dark eyes.

Jube had quickly learned Kiowa words, and the most important was ahô, said with a falling tone at the end, which meant Thank you, not to be confused with ahó, said with a rising tone at the end, which meant Kill him.

The young man sat down on the ground then, cross-legged with his parfleche boxes, and drew out a rawhide-wrapped package of steel lance heads. He selected one and turned it over in the sun along the sight of his right eye, and its edge was clean as a razor and shone like a line of fire.

And so Jube got the name Fights in Autumn. This was a joke that it took Jube some time to understand.

Then with the wisdom of a child who had seen her brother shot dead, watched her mother raped and beaten to the edge of death, who had been dragged along the ground by one arm by a man on horseback until he finally decided to throw her up on the horse behind him, she folded her small hands and quit while she was ahead.

Since Gonkon was a rich woman she had a tipi liner: a six-foot-high band of canvas that was strung all around inside and the skirts of it were pegged down to the floor with parfleche packing boxes and

stones or whatever came to hand. Then Gonkon could lift the outside tipi skins a few inches between each tipi pole and fresh air roared up between the liner and the outside wall, drawing the smoke up with it. The people in Gonkon’s tipi sat warm on the draftless floor.

and then it was full night and the wind and snow bore down on the Kiowa and all their animals with a great noise.

The fire smoke shot upward, carried by the chimney of air that rose between the liner and the walls. It blossomed up into the smoke flaps and out. Whirling eddies of snow sifted down between the flaps and flashed in the light of the fire, and vanished. The fire threw shadows of moccasins hung up to dry so that they seemed to walk against the tipi walls,

The bare limbs of the cottonwoods and the sumac, the twisted mesquite, were like iron calligraphy against the cold sky.

Britt walked away from his shadow in the house.

He had told Mary to go away with the little ones and leave Jim with him, and that was what had happened.

He told Jim that he would set the old grass afire in two months, as soon as the cold and the random freezes were gone in late March, and then the new green grass would grow up thick as a carpet.

Around him the slow lifting prairies of grass like old straw. But when those remains were set afire the grass came back. It came back like the fulfillment of some

ancient promise, a treaty made with the world time out of mind. It seemed that the new grass even now was forming and trembling just under the surface of the earth.

Out of the dark plains to the north came the liquid, collapsing sound of some night bird casting about in the air.

Moses Johnson came and laid a package on the chair in the yard. He laid it down carefully as if it contained secrets or prophesies.

Tall white-bodied sycamores whipped toward the southeast and their new leaves streamed like sequins into the wind. Lightning forked out of the clouds and in its brief catastrophic flash he saw the tree trunks become incandescent. The heaps of crumbling flood debris and jittering small leaves of the chokecherry lit up as if with pale fire.

He splashed into the Brazos River in a blaze of moon reflections at a ford that he had used before.

The trail led him out of the valley of the Brazos into a landscape of new grass colorless as ash under the tearing clouds with a half-moon breaking through and the incessant, sulky noise of draining water. On his left side a low escarpment sat in black shadows thick as a pool of tar. The world smelled of earth and wet grass. The moon washed the landscape with an intense light. The clear plains air made it seem as if it were light that came out of the landscape itself. A great yellow star hung in the northeast and it turned on a sparkling axle over a world of moonlight and grass and a northern horizon drawing away even as he and the horses rode toward it.

In the remote distance several rising stars spread out as if they had been spilled, and the three stars that shone in a line together lifted up out of the eastern horizon.