The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles

Author:Paulette Jiles
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061970993
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 18

SAMUEL HAMMOND WALKED among the tipis as some of the Comanche came in for their rations. He tried to remember their faces, who was there and who was not. A cold front, a norther, had fallen upon the springtime plains, and it was wet and chilling and the force of it shivered the pointed smoke flaps of the Comanche tipis.

Samuel came to the campfire of a headman named Kicking Bird, and asked him to come with him to see the new shipment of farming tools that had come from Lawrence, Kansas. Corn planters, double-shovel plows, rakes and harrows. Onofrio walked to one side, a slight linguistic shadow, and repeated whatever was said in a kind of trance.

Kicking Bird ran his hand down the skeletal tines of a hay rake in the bars of sunlight that came through the loose boards of the drive shed. His hand was weathered dark and worn as driftwood. A thick callus lay on the insides of his right forefinger and middle finger from drawing a bowstring, and there was a high muscle on the upper left arm that had come about from holding a bow at full length.

He regarded the plow blades with a kind of confused sadness. They had taken women’s work and women’s tools and made of them an enormous vagina dentata, this biting device that ate into the earth to tear up the grass roots and into the red body of the ground.

He walked slowly from one farm implement to another. They were things so alien he had no words for them. Their steel surfaces perfectly machined into curves and angles. They had claws and mechanical arms that lifted up and let down. He touched the perforated seat of a corn planter that gleamed with green paint in a shaft of sunlight. This was where a person sat to operate the machine and it seemed to him that after a while the man would do the machine’s bidding. It was better to die than to become the servant of these things. They would take the core of one’s self and change it to something else. They would obliterate a person before he had a chance to stand before the sun and declare aloud the name that had been given to him, and then no one could ever rescue the tenuous and wavering self from disappearance and cold and eternal emptiness.

To Onofrio he said, This is terrible. He walked forward a few steps and stood before the lift arm of a toothed harrow. These are terrible things.

Onofrio was eating peanuts out of his hat. He brushed at his mouth and then said, “He finds all this very interesting.”

Samuel said, “Farming is hard work, it is true. But once the people learn how, there is a great deal of tradition to it. I myself had a farm back in the East.”

Then why did you leave it?

“Because I felt a call to come here and do what I could to help. My beliefs. I felt a call from Christ to come here and speak to you, to your people, to do what I could to help.

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