The Color of Lightning (4 page)
i n th e c h i l l
and rainy dawn the men from Elm Creek came to the formations known as the Stone Houses. The segmented stone cores jutted up out of the rolling steppe lands and from a distance they seemed to be the remains of some sort of ancient structures. They were a mile apart and around them sandstone slabs like paving stones lay half-hidden in the long grass. Britt Johnson, Moses John- son, the Peveler brothers, and the Wilsons climbed to the top of one of the stone knobs that so resembled a fort or place of sacrifice, a ritual city half begun and then abandoned and gone to ruin.
They stood at the top in the rain, looking north. The rain streamed down out of heaven, obscuring and filling every crevice, dripping from their hats, pouring down the fractured stones, de- stroying the tracks they had been following for two days. They had come nearly a hundred miles with only a brief rest at night in a fire- less camp. They had no more food and the rain was washing away all sign. The horses below were trembling and had trouble walking. Out there in the flatlands and the low swaley valleys the Comanche and the Kiowa could be waiting in ambush and so they could go no farther.
Along the way they had found remnants of the flesh of Susan Durgan’s scalp and hair where someone had trimmed the scalp into a small round thing to be fitted onto a hoop. To be tanned and decorated with beads and small hawk bells, carried on a pole like a decoration, a heraldic banner.
“We have to turn back,” said Britt. He felt himself subject to a rage he had never known. It was like a strong fever that burned his lips and forehead but left him poised and still. Contained like some kind of unignited explosive. He turned and slid down from the top of the Stone Houses from rock to rock, smeared with yellow and red clay mud. The others followed him.
He walked through the heavy, wet grass to his bay horse and for a moment he was outlined against a gray wall of rain. He put his hand across the saddle seat and leaned his head on his forearm.
“It was Comanche,” he said. “The ones they call Comanche.” “Probably.” Old man Peveler nodded.
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 labo- rious upstrokes.
Britt watched them, streaming overhead, towing their insubstan- tial 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.
W
T
h e m e n w h o
decided the fate of the Red Indians lived in the east, under roofs of slate and shingle. There were win-
dows paned with large sheets of glass that looked out comfortably on a dense and busy world. The roofs lined up in slanting layers of coal smoke on each side of narrow streets and these streets were full of hurrying people and vehicles at all hours. Around these great cit- ies, fields like chessboards in snowy whites and tans and the orderly drift of orchards with naked winter limbs. The bells of Philadelphia called out daily in measured peals of the arrival of important ships on the Delaware River. January of 1865 and four degrees of frost. The ice was thick enough on the Schuylkill River at Lemon Hill to support skaters and sleighs and fires made of scrap lumber. Quaker ladies moved across the ice in sweeping skirts. The skates gave them the treasured illusion that they had no legs. They were afflicted with a sort of shy and happy vanity with their own gliding in the smoky snow.
One of the younger Quaker girls waved at Samuel Hammond, whom she had last seen at the Orange Street Meeting in a trance of praying with his eyes open or thinking of something secular. He did
not see her and stalked on through the snow with his collar up and a tall, cold silk hat pulled low on his forehead.
Samuel Hammond was a small man who had just come back from the war. He walked on and caught a streetcar and then disem- barked. He entered the house at Fourth and Delancey with a stiff feeling, as if he were breasting a hard current coming from a distant spillway. He did not like to refuse the men whom he had come to meet and speak with, and especially he did not like to be seen to re- fuse a work of such necessity and such urgency, work that had been allowed to fall into the ruinous hands of oily grafters who thought of government money as loose miraculous treasure that came from no- where and nobody. Money an alchemical miracle come from noth- ing, without labor. He handed his tall, formal hat to the small butler at the door. The young man grasped the hat and bowed with a jerk that made his reddish bangs fly out.
“They are upstairs, sir!” he said. “I will follow you.”
“Very well!” The boy paused as if disoriented and then laid Sam- uel’s top hat on the hall table with a careful gesture and then began a precise walk up a flight of stairs. Samuel Hammond followed him up the stairs, into a hallway. The January light poured in at the far end through a tall window and the panes danced with the disqui- eted shadows of bare limbs.
The boy butler headed into the library at a tilt; he took hold of the door handle and paused and said, “Samuel Hammond!”
Samuel knew all of the men in the room; for the most part he knew them from that leisurely life before the war when people were sure of things. Merchants, a government accountant, all of them of the Society of Friends Indian Committee except for Lewis Henry Morgan, who was of some other Protestant denomination and had become an Indian expert. The young butler paused and then turned himself precisely 180 degrees until he was facing the hallway and marched out and shut the door behind him.
Dr. John Reed held out a fragile hand. He spoke to Samuel in the old-fashioned informal second person.
“Thou hast a grim expression on thy face, young man.”
“Dr. Reed,” said Samuel. To the rest of the men who had risen, smiling, he said, “Lewis, I am glad to see you. Peter, Absalom, Jo- seph, delighted.”
The fire in the library fireplace had burned down to coals. They had been here an hour or two before his appointed time. He took a chair. Samuel was in his mid-thirties, five foot seven, thin and clean-shaven, without scars or wounds despite a year as a volun- teer ambulance driver with Sherman’s army in Georgia. Some near misses. No real hits. Samuel had a habit of lowering his head slightly and gazing up at people from under his eyebrows. It made him seem considering and grave and mistrusting. Over the fireplace was the full-length portrait of Thomas Cope with his hesitant smile and a wall of books behind him and beyond the books in abstract space a merchant ship in a storm.
“We have invited you to plague you once again about the agency,” said Peter Simons. He was nearly sixty and heavy in the waist and shoulders, a draper and importer. His white hair stuck up in a cowlick that was coming unplastered, and it made him look like a red-cheeked toy. Simons and Samuel had twice shared their con- signments in the same ship’s holds. Simons laid his hands on a stack of folders on the library table. “But this time we have new horrors for you to think about.”
Samuel smiled and pinched up his trousers at the knee and sat down.
“What?” he said. “More corruption?”
“A great deal more,” said Absalom Rivers. He had a permanent ink-stain on his forefinger from filling out government forms in triplicate. “We are shocked, of course.” He seemed to be counting up the number of shocks and dividing them by four. “Their de- pravities are without number.” He reached for a folder. “The latest: 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.” He looked up. Absalom had a full head of dark hair, and it seemed to Samuel that he was such a complete ac- countant that, as it was said in Matthew, every hair of his head was numbered. He had been elected clerk of the business committee at the Yearly Meeting of Friends for his dry obsession with columns of figures as well as his occasional visitations of the Inner Light. Samuel wondered if he had attempted to calculate its speed.
“That’s terrible,” said Samuel. “The army contractors were nearly as bad.” He jiggled his foot and then stopped and placed both shoes flat on the floor.
“Yes, yes.” They nodded and murmured. It was a subject loaded with explosive and combustible matter.
Joseph Kane slid forward in his seat. “The war will be over in a few months. We must not only live in the present but look ahead.” He raised one finger. His brown and gray hair glistened in the win- ter light and his voice was a high, thin tenor. “Looking ahead, we have succeeded in urging the Peace Policy and appointing Friends as Indian agents.” His eyes were brown too, or hazel; his coat was chocolate-colored. He turned to Lewis Henry Morgan. “Lewis, say something.”
Morgan was a handsome, restless man. “Samuel, they have me in a headlock. I am supposed to be the final clinch in convincing you to take the Indian Agency out in Indian Territory.”
“Not quite. Not quite. In a way.” Kane’s rich browns were like imported cocoa. “Not quite the final one. But Lewis is here to give us some of his insights into the nature of the red man. Having spent so long among them.” Joseph Kane owned three merchantmen and had just bought his first steam-driven bottom a month ago. He was related several times over to the Cope family and had that family’s sturdy probity; he shared their long history in both the Society of Friends and in Philadelphia’s shipping community. Thomas Cope smiled blindly from his frame over the mantelpiece. Quaker, ship- owner, railroad magnate, who proved that a man could serve both God and Mammon. A deeply kind man. An example to them all, except he had not been faced with a civil war.
Samuel twisted in his chair. “I see. Lewis is here to give us some insights into the nature of the red man.” He paused. “Why not ask a red man?”
He watched them sit back in their chairs and make very small wavering, defensive gestures. Their minds turned somersaults down the center aisles of their egalitarian beliefs. They turned to one an- other but no one said anything.
Morgan laughed. “You are cruel, Samuel.” He put both sets of fingertips on the library table and shifted the papers. “We had a wonderful summer among the Seneca when you were fifteen.”
“We did.” Samuel smiled.
“I am free now to travel up the Missouri River, and pursue my studies, my deepest interest, and I urge you to do the same.” He re- moved his fingertips and folded his hands together. “Your year was hard. I know.”
Samuel nodded. “The title of your work is
Systems of Consanguin- ity,
isn’t it?”
“
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family.
Miraculously saved.” Morgan had been prepared to deliver his monumental work of fifteen years on the nomenclature of personal relationships of various Indian tribes to the Smithsonian when a great part of the Smithsonian building had burned down a month past, in December.
“God had other plans for thy work,” said Dr. Reed, “than to be consumed in a fire.” Morgan bowed slightly to the aged doctor. “And Samuel, he has other plans for thee.”
Samuel inclined his head in a short nod. “It is the same as last time. I have business interests to attend to after my year’s absence. I find that I must look to the future as well as all of you.” He shifted again in the chair. Everything was so clean. The year with the army had been several centuries of mud and blood and uniforms in rags, a time of smoky campfires and rain falling unregarded on the eyes of the dead, men nodding in comatose sleep with their socks over their rifle muzzles. Hospital tents smelling of dirty flesh and excrement. He had come back amazed at the cleanliness he had always taken
for granted. The spotless, ironed cuffs of the men before him. His own spotless ironed cuffs. The clean suits and the noiseless room, a shining wood floor and the sparkling glass of the lamp chimney. Everybody’s shoes of unbroken leather and two pairs of whole shoe- laces. “Is this supposed to be good for me or good for the Indians?” “The Indians,” said Dr. Reed. “God is asking thee to serve yet
more.”
“Who else from the Friends?”
“Two, both in Indian Territory. Kansas and the area they call Oklahoma.”
Samuel shook his head. “I must look to the future.”
He was on the very edge of saying something more, that some- day he would marry and have a family and must think about pro- viding for them. But Peter Simons, the red-cheeked and glistening draper with his sober-colored, rich coat, his spiky white forelock, was the grandfather of a young woman who a year ago had sent Samuel’s ring back to him. This because he had volunteered as an ambulance driver. Her letter was acerbic and replete with single and double underlinings on such phrases as
the sinfulness of supporting this barbaric war in any way and I see you have abandoned your Quaker upbringing to aid and comfort those who fly in the face of God’s com- mandments.
Quakers had the gift of making people uncomfortable. Especially other Quakers. Especially himself. He would have said the same thing two years ago.
Peter Simons knew what he had been about to say and slowly closed his eyes and then turned to the library fire and opened them again on the red piling of coals. He ran his hand through his spiking snow-white hair. Simons was her grandparent and could not tell the little beast to keep her opinions to herself.
There was something more that no one was saying. Samuel waited them out. He waited, and so did they, in the comfortable sort of silence to which they had all become accustomed. Four of them because they were Friends, and Lewis Henry Morgan because he had spent so many years traveling among the Seneca, the Ojibway, the Sioux, the Crow, and the Mandan, people who often sat in total
