The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

They moved north under heavy cloud cover, in damp, thick air that seethed with incipient lightning.

Then the sun came clear of the eastern horizon, reluctantly, as if its red light somehow adhered to the level earth.

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 Comanche and Kiowa had reduced the Wichita to a fearful client people. As they came up West Cache Creek into the mountains Elizabeth saw their beehive grass houses, with thready trails of smoke rising from haystack crowns. There were people there but they scattered so quickly they were like mourning doves surprised at their feeding and they vaulted into the brush and the tangled black trees.

This time First Wolf had made a mistake or the mistake had made itself, and then the mistake had lain in wait for him and his people.

be pulled out easily. The barbed steel arrowheads were for people.

The moon washed the landscape with an intense light.

This was a world unto itself that lay between the Canadian River and the Rio Grande as if it had been designated on the day that God made it as the place where men would come to fight and kill one another. The Texans had brought their women and their children and their slaves right into the middle of the war land and expected to set up houses and fields and herds and live as if they were in Maryland, and were surprised on moonlit nights like this when Comanche arrows sang through the air in the dark.

the minute winking of a fire.

Oil. It’s rock oil that has caught afire. If it had drawn him to itself then it could draw others. Britt eased himself down on his heels and searched out every jittering shadow. The entire slope was alive with them and they seemed to flow and crawl, surfaces blazed and shone red and then disappeared as the flame sank to a sapphire blue and then rose again. As he sat he could smell sulfur and the reek of oil.

Interesting phenomenon

There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”

Here is the book title. Beautiful and dangerous.

met Mother Bickerdyke, that remarkable woman.” “Ah well, so did I! January of ’64. I had switched over to the Chicago Tribune. I was there outside of Chattanooga when she tore down the breastworks for cooking fires. Saved the wounded from freezing entirely. It was a terrible storm.”

What a woman!

Lee drowned in a butt of malmsey.” Samuel said, “It seems to me the nation was too

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.

“Yes. From what I read in old reports, at one time they were ten times more. Maybe thirty thousand. But reports of cholera and smallpox epidemics on the plains started to come in in the fifties. I guess it was when the gold rush wagons went through. Nobody heard about it until about ’fifty-one. ’Fifty or ’fifty-one.”

Terrible pandemic for the Native Americans who had no immunity for these diseases

When all the people got sick and died, they say it was like the end of the world. A world with no Comanches in it. That would be evil. Without us to inhabit and think and to mourn for what was lost. For who we were. That would be evil.

It was the coal fumes.

The coal gas was drifting downward; coal gas was heavier than air and it had soaked their lungs and blood all night. It was a miracle he had awakened. Some driving, alert part of his mind had reached through the coma and shook him and said You must live, you must.

with wet handsful of wadded grasses.

vagina dentata,

spatulate fingertips

it in a bottle, and began bringing something to life with quick, calligraphic slashes. “We spend our lives in worlds remote from one another.

“How many human beings remain in this world, unvanquished and at liberty in plains like these? So few, so few. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

But still I will reason. They cannot take captives or kill women and children. It is insupportable.” Deaver put the portrait away and sat back with his eyes half closed. “They are our great mystery. They are America’s great otherwise. People fall back in the face of an impenetrable mystery and refuse it. Yes, they take captives. Sometimes they kill women and old people. But the settlers are people who shouldn’t be where they are in the first place and they know it and they take their chances.”

Perhaps we can regard this as a tragedy. Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not amenable to reason and we are fixers, aren’t we? We can fix everything.”

We can’t fix this.

The black horse tried to graze with its dry mouth, one step at a time. The world grew lighter. Jube sat in the bed of grass where he had slept the night and watched as a heavy layer of rain cloud gathered and moved and strung itself out and gathered again in blue-gray foam to the east, dragging after it long, bending columns of rain.

Satank said, No one gives land to anyone else. This was not Washantun’s to give. It is ours. I never touched the pen to any paper where that was written. We told that to Big Pants who was here before him and we will tell him as well.

A clashing of two completely different cultures with opposite values who understood nothing about the other.

Eaten Alive snorted out smoke. We came down long ago from very far to the north, from the Snake River, a very long time ago. We drove out the Wichita and the Osage and the Lipan Apache and the Tonkawa from Texas. And so it is ours. I know the country, every canyon and cave from the Canadian River to the Rio Grande. I could travel that country in the dark. I have done so. I could tell you every spring of water from here and on beyond the Mexican towns. Why should we stay here? Big Pants wanted us to stay here too. Now he is gone. This man will go too, sometime in the future. I am not a man to turn over dirt. He is going to ask us to stay here and turn over dirt.

A tragedy of enormous proportions.

Britt said, “Agent Hammond, I am going to look for Elizabeth Fitzgerald and her granddaughter Lottie. I would like a cavalry escort. I know where I’m going.”

They knew he was thinking about when they had killed his son and raped his wife. Thoughts have power. They can drift through the air unhindered. Ill will and hatred, the lust for revenge, can detach itself from the person who generates these thoughts if that person has a certain power from some being. Even after the person is dead.

Thoughts are things

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.

The captives learned to like the Indian lifestyle. They preferred their freedom to roam in place of confinement. We don’t see out homes as jails but rather as safe places.

Union troops. They kept their personal loyalties to themselves. They did

quenching vat

THE LEAN AND resilient young men of the Kiowa and the Comanche had trained relentlessly as warriors from the time they were very young. They were graceful beyond description, and their speech and symbolism and dreams were of war, ardent soldiers in an anarchic, leaderless army. The Kiowa-Apache had developed a form of speech used only during raids and conflicts, the backward language. In which all precepts of peace were turned around and all concept of human behavior was reversed. The shout for retreat meant Stand your ground. And through this fearful country and this state of undeclared war Britt was determined to drive his freight wagons.

How smart they were.

The streets were channeled with slow-moving lava flows of red mud.

Must have been awful.

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,

So here we have prejudice all around. You would have thought the blacks and whites would gather their forces together to unite against a common enemy. Ridiculous people

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.

through the window, through the gaps in the boards of the wall. Cascades of water spanged on the roof.

“It is the Fifteenth 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 servitude. That means colored gentlemen.

Thus force always brings about unintended consequences, but a contrite heart brings great blessings.

Then he saw among the short trees a bright whiplash of some silky stuff fly up into the air and then subside.

The red and white splashes of the Medicine Hat paint came into the round gelatinous lens, a blue edge trembling around it.

Britt watched a few more minutes; he was sure it was Tissoyo’s Medicine Hat.

They did not live in the same world of time that Samuel did. There were no hours. No birthdays.

portfolios that were much the worse for wear. Samuel sat on a spindly chair in front of a long table with bottles on it. Lone Star Bitters and

Treated to antelope chops and cold Krug, and I sat and observed starving Indians begging at the Wichita station.” Deaver slammed the newspaper down on top of his sketchbook. “How is it?” he asked. “How is it we do this to the original inhabitants of this continent?” Deaver ran his hand through his thick, dark brown hair as if he would tear at it.

“Well, well.” Simonton nodded. “You came here to bring peace and brotherly love, and you are going to preside over their destruction. My my.” “I have merely arrested four men who have admitted to murder and kidnapping.” Samuel sat with both hands loose in his lap. “There was nothing else I could do.” “Why should they be charged with murder? This is a war. They are at war with the Texas settlers, and now you are handing them over to Texas juries. Have you heard the news from Washington?”

“The free life on the plains. No other people like them anywhere,” said Deaver. He turned to Samuel, and Samuel saw that his eyes were glistening. “You will send the army after them. You know they kill the women and children. You know about Sand Creek and the battle on the Washita. Will you preside at the hangings?” “What hangings?” Samuel stood up and reached for his old brown wide-brimmed hat. “Are you quite sober, James?” “No, I am not,” said Deaver. Simonton silently poured out another measure of gin for the illustrator. “I am merely here to see them tried and then strangled on a rope. A carnival of crime on both sides. Which side are you on?” Deaver wiped at his face and took up his glass. “You are going to force them to live within the reservation,” said Deaver. “I find this melancholy. It will kill them.”

Dallas was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and the town was like some hostile nation that had within its borders treasures of cloth and bales of gloves and kegs of kerosene and lightning rods and he had to go in and deliver the salt and limestone and pick up the return load and get out before anything happened.

BRITT, DENNIS, AND Paint were found the following day by fellow teamsters and were buried where they had fallen. Their grave marker was cut by hand into native stone and it is in the middle of a field and it is not easy to find. Some reminiscences taken down in the early 1900s say that the men were scalped, other accounts say they were not. Some say the cavalry found them and buried them and others say they were found by other freighters. No one knows who made the headstone.