The Color of Lightning (5 page)
silence, like a species of violence-prone Quakers, while thoughts and images streamed through their minds. The Indians seeking a sign from their dream spirit and Friends waiting for the Inner Light.
The door creaked open, and the young butler tilted forward into the room and straightened himself smartly with a chair back.
“There’s lamb,” he said. “And tea and all.”
Joseph Kane sat back so that the butler and another serving-man could lay his plate of lamb in front of him. Kane shifted and tugged down his brown coat sleeve and seemed about to say something but then didn’t. He touched his watch in its watch pocket in a habitual, compulsive gesture. His mind seemed to tick over like the works of his timepiece.
Dr. Reed talked about the new Indian Bureau. He ate sparingly. Who could keep an eye on what was happening in the distant western lands when Atlanta was burning and a million freed black slaves were following the Union armies and men were dying by the thousands all over the South? It was not the kind of thing that had a high priority in 1865.
He spoke of the incredible corruption in the Office of Indian Affairs and what had happened to the men who ran it.
Nothing. Nothing, not a thing. 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. How could they expect human beings to remain at the agency and live on remnants, leavings, garbage?
The new Indian Bureau was going to be handed over to the vari- ous religious denominations, and that would take care of the cor- ruption. He hoped. A man can always hope. Dr. Reed had some doubt about the Methodists, but the Episcopalians were fairly solid. However, the Baptists might end up holding wild camp meetings with the red men out there somewhere in the Rocky Mountains
and who knew what would happen then? He thought about asking for some regulations that Indian agents not be allowed to speak in tongues.
“The salary for the Indian agent at the Comanche Agency will be provided by the government and managed by the Society of Friends Indian Committee,” he said. “We have convinced this Con- gress to dissolve the Office of Indian Affairs, and so assign each of the tribes, or tribal areas, to various religious denominations.”
Samuel looked up with his fork in his hand, surprised.
“I would have thought it impossible that Congress would ever dissolve any government agency,” he said.
“Well, they have. Now, the Episcopalians are taking the Sioux.” “Really?”
“And, let’s see, the Methodists have—” The shipowner paused. Peter Simons said, “They have the Ojibway.”
Samuel was surprised in a reserved and expressionless way. They had convinced the government to disband the Office of Indian Affairs and then the government, out of its ability to call into be- ing these bureaucracies as if conjuring them up from some book of magic, invented the Indian Bureau.
“And what tribe does the Society of Friends have?”
“The Comanche and the Kiowa, and a group called the Kiowa- Apache,” Lewis Morgan said.
The green mint jelly sparkled on the tender meat. Samuel was hungry, and so he ate steadily and quietly.
“And what do we know about these tribes?”
Morgan lifted his fork. “Ah, let’s see now. The Kiowa are one thing, and then there is this group of some kind of Apache that lives with them and has for many years. They are called Kiowa-Apache. They don’t speak the same language but they always live together.” “The salary is adequate,” said the accountant. “We want an hon-
est agent who does not have to make up years of absence from his home by illicit trading. It is five thousand a year.”
“That’s very generous,” said Samuel.
Dr. Reed nodded his white head and put his papery hands into
his lap. “This committee has met now for a good many years. Our hearts have gone out to the suffering of the Indian people.” He thought for a moment. “I was born in 1789. I remember my par- ents talking about the Shawnee Wars in Ohio, and the Pennsylvania militia’s murder of ninety Moravian Christian Indians at Gnaden- hutten. Used hatchets on them while they knelt and prayed. Lord Amherst’s distribution of smallpox-infected blankets. What treaty have we not broken with these people?”
“Yes,” said Peter Simons, and there were murmurs of assent around the table. “Have you read the reports about the massacre in Colorado? Colorado State troops falling upon a peaceful village of Cheyenne.”
Morgan nodded. “I read them last week.” “Did you know any of them, Lewis?” “No. What does it matter?”
“All women and children. They did fiendish, fiendish things. How can this go on?” Simons looked around the room. “The colo- nel should be taken under arrest.”
“And the Georgian’s attacks on a civilized, literate people, the Cherokee,” said Dr. Reed. “Our Meeting raised funds for them and sent relief, and they died and wept all the way to Oklahoma Terri- tory.”
“I know.” Samuel laid down his fork.
“ ‘What owest thou unto thy Lord?’ Psalm Fifty-two. And so Elizabeth Fry asked of us all.”
“Yes, of course.”
Beyond the library window came the sound of the great bell in the Swedish church. The clanging wavered over the rooftops and drifted in troubled tones through the glass of the windows. Some important ship had come into the docks on the Delaware. Then a rooster shrieked in the stableyard behind the house, again and again.
“That is a fighting cock,” said Rivers, the accountant. “That boy.
He was warned he would be fired.” “I would imagine,” said Simons.
“He fights them down there with the Irish in Southwark.” “Well, he is young and Irish himself,” said Kane.
“What ship would that be?” said Samuel. “That they are ringing the bell for?”
Dr. Reed waved away the ship and the fighting cock and the Irish boy butler.
“Samuel, our confidence in thee is very strong. I have prayed about this. I have taken it to the Lord.”
“Confident in what way?” said Samuel.
“Thou hast not wavered in thy beliefs in this past year?”
“No.” Samuel said it without hesitation. His beliefs remained true and perfect in an icy, remote way. And he, Samuel, had ob- served 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 crystal- line 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.
“We know, first of all, that you would be that person which you would ask another to be. That you would help the red man to ques- tion his distance from God and point out that the distance might be closed. Only after the Indian people confess to their Creator,
I have used violence in my life to carry off what was not mine,
would they come to see that violence keeps mankind from God’s own light and His presence, and that light, and that presence, is far beyond anything we might value here below. Far beyond.”
“I understand that,” said Samuel.
“Thou art needed,” said Dr. Reed. “These people have need of thee.”
Lewis Morgan watched Samuel while Dr. Reed spoke in that ancient, thready voice. Everyone nodded. After a long pause Mor- gan turned to Samuel and said, “These are unsettled tribes you would have to deal with. I believe they only came onto the plains when they got horses from the Spaniards. Before that they were ap-
parently on foot and unable to penetrate the Great Plains where the buffalo lived. Now they have become rich and strong. They have a tight, and I would say almost impenetrable, network of kinship. Their lives are lives of action.”
Samuel nodded with a polite expression. He was the youngest man at the table, and the less he said the better. He lowered his head and gazed up at Morgan. “But I have not said I would deal with it at all, yet.”
Morgan nodded. “I understand.”
Joseph Kane raised a finger. His hands were speckled brown with age. “By kindness. By reasoned argument.”
“Of course,” said Samuel.
The shipowner said, “So much violence has been used against the red man. The Texans will be coming home from the war, in- ured, accustomed to scenes of slaughter and violence we still have trouble comprehending. They have driven the red man from his own hunting grounds before the war, and they will continue to do so after it. An enormous reservation has been set aside for our red men, the—” He paused.
“The Comanche, the Kiowa, and the Kiowa-Apache,” said Mor- gan, patiently. “And I believe some Wichitas.”
“Who has the Wichita?” The elderly doctor leaned forward.
“I think they are more or less tossed in with the others,” said Morgan.
Joseph Kane still had his finger in the air. “As I said, an enormous reservation set aside for these tribes. The Texans are to leave them alone, and not to encroach on their hunting grounds. Now, there will be a military presence.” His hand fell to his side and touched the ticking watch. “But the soldiers are for the purpose of prevent- ing the Texans from taking the Indians’ land.”
“What if they decide they don’t want to be on a reservation?” said Samuel.
“They will see that it is to their advantage. It is to prevent them from being abused by the white settlers.” He sat back. “Samuel, at
last we have a chance to do things another way than by military force, or any force.”
Samuel glanced at Lewis Morgan, but Morgan regarded Samuel with a blank, steady stare.
“Is this not what we believe in?” Kane shifted his brown coat and looked around at the others.
“It is,” said Samuel.
“In no way will you present them with guards or with punish- ments.”
Samuel glanced down at his plate as the manservant took it away.
Dr. Reed said, “Early in the fifties a large force of Texas Rang- ers attacked a perfectly peaceful reservation and slaughtered women and children sleeping in their beds. Now it will take a long time before the Indians of Texas ever trust a white man again. But that trust can be regained.”
Samuel said, “I want to thank you for considering me.” He moved the salt cellar around in a circle and lifted his head as the furious rooster beyond the window hammered at the windy spring air.
“And we have especially considered you,” said the accountant Absalom Rivers, “because you have lived through the violence of Sherman’s campaign for ten months and several weeks. Some dis- agreed with your decision to drive an ambulance, but I did not. I certainly did not. You will not be terrified or unstrung by loud ex- plosions, gunfire, or expressions of violence, or the art of bookkeep- ing.”
Samuel stared at the crystal salt cellar. “The art of bookkeeping.” Then he said, “But I have my life to put back together again. I have invested in a cargo for England and half-interest in a ship. That is money committed.”
“I know,” said the shipowner in his brown suit. He waved one hand. “I know.”
“And when these things are taken care of and my finances se- cure, perhaps in a year or so, I would consider it.”
Joseph Kane nervously took out his watch and didn’t look at it and put it back. Peter Simons the glossy draper with his white hair looked down at his shoes. Dr. Reed coughed like the burning of paper. Lewis Morgan looked around curiously.
Joseph Kane said, “Samuel, the ship you have invested in, the
Monongahela,
is on the rocks of the Cape Tipman bight. I received the telegram this morning. The cargo is thrown overboard. I don’t believe any of it is salvageable.”
Samuel said, “No.” “Yes.”
The great bell of the Swedish church rang on and on, a warning that a Philadelphia ship was reported in peril on the sea.
W
T
he
M
ONON G A H E L A
ca m e
into the docks with four inches of freeboard and three jets of water leaping out of her innards into the Delaware River. The bells of the Swedish church rang out once again in celebration of her return home, in whatever condition. The pumps belowdecks kept her afloat long enough to creep into docking, throwing out great arcs, a ton a minute. 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.
After the meeting with the Friends’ Indian Committee, Sam Hammond had received telegram after telegram in his office at the Old London Coffee House at Front and Market concerning the
Monongahela
’s progress past one port after another. Now he could see her coming in like a whale about to beach itself, her broken mainmast lashed down on the deck with only a foresail and a sprit- sail flying. The ship’s lee rail foamed five inches above the Delaware. He had raised the money to purchase the cargo and had borrowed the money for an interest in the ship itself.