Read Online The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles - Free Book Online

name meant Eaten Alive.
    He had two wives, and the skinny woman was the older one. Elizabeth called her the Dismal Bitch. The younger had a round, plump face with a broad smile. Elizabeth saw her turn that happy face away when the Dismal Bitch turned on Elizabeth with her pony goad and left long bruises the shape and color of burned sticks on her arms.
    Elizabeth Fitzgerald worked to make herself useful and needed so she could save Lottie’s life. The women’s lives were very hard. They were hard on others and hard on themselves. Eaten Alive’s skinny first wife lifted the massive fresh buffalo skins that weighed close to a hundred pounds with hands whose two forefingers were missing at the first joints where she had cut them off in grief over dead relatives. A brother whose raw half-broke pony ran him into a copse of trees on the drainage they called the Caddo’s Hand and knocked his brains out on a live oak branch. Her mother and father had perished in the great die-off of the spotted disease when wagon trains came through Comancheria on their way to California, and brought with them a killing fever, spirits that burned up so many people that there was hardly anyone left to hunt or pray. It left the people diminished and angry as hornets and perpetually hungry.
    They came upon a small group of buffalo walking southward with their breath smoking from their wide muzzles, with their sweet and grassy smell. Their beloved outline of humped back and low- carried heads a template in the mind for tens of thousands of years. The men ran them down and killed them for the heavy autumn
    hides, to make moccasin soles and rawhide boxes and the stiff mit- tenlike horseshoes for the stony plains ahead. For winter robes and buckets and rope. The women ripped off the weighty hides as they would strip blankets from a bed.
    Elizabeth had diminished within the ragged remains of the yellow-and-pink-checkered dress. She was lank and hungry and forty years old. She lifted the moist, bloody skins onto travois at the killing grounds and walked behind them to the camp. She went around the edges of the skins and hammered in small stakes and then raked the skins clean with a cast-iron scraper. She tore off the white connective tissue in great swaths. She broke into skulls with a stone and pulled the brains out and folded the shivering gray pud- ding into the damp skin. She was silent and furious at this filthy work and the primitive process. Why didn’t they get themselves a tanner’s beam and a big two-handed fleshing knife? They liked to kill themselves working, that’s why. She ripped at the skin as if it were one of the men who had raped her.
    Every evening she was weary beyond feeling and still she car- ried water in buckets made of buffalo stomach until it was dark. Somewhere in camp were captives from villages in New Mexico but Elizabeth knew she was not to speak to them or see them and how she knew this was hard to say but she kept her head down with an acid feeling of willed subservience. She fed Lottie pieces of raw marrow out of her greasy hands. She did not know what was wrong with the child. The three-year-old’s head lolled on her shoulders as Lottie struggled to hold her head upright. Perhaps it was some spiri- tual collapse, a shrinking of the mind against the world in which she found herself.
    Lottie did not cry. She was silent. No one adopted her because they were afraid of what disease she might have. Perhaps she was inhabited by some hostile entity, something living in her and look- ing out at the Comanche encampment from behind her gray three- year-old eyes. They made her sleep at the tipi entrance, and people stepped on her and shouted at her when they came inside. Eaten Alive’s youngest wife lifted her hand and told people to be careful
    but the Dismal Bitch turned a blank, predatory stare on the Happy Wife and so the young woman deflated in a breath and went back to her stitching.
    When they moved on northward that