The Color of Lightning Read online

  Mary sat up and watched them with interest. She did not seem to care about the men who came to her and shoved themselves inside her. Now she watched their faces in the firelight and their gestures and listened to their edged, dangerous voices. She sat beside Elizabeth and absentmindedly patted her head as if she were a child or a pet. Then she turned and circled little Millie under one arm and Cherry under another. Jube sat with Lottie. Then Mary took Cherry’s hand and made her pat Elizabeth on the forehead. Mary hummed a little and then as Elizabeth began to make groaning noises she pressed her hand over the white woman’s mouth. She knew the men were arguing about them; that the men had begun to lose the luminous aura that had sustained them in their ride and their attacks and their war-fury. It was drifting away. They were like men who had been very drunk and were now falling into the gray and ashy world of sobriety and were not yet hungover. To get out of that gray and ashy world and back into the wild light of sheer aggression they might rape the little girls. But somehow she could not put this into words, even in her mind.

  Mary kept her hand tight over Elizabeth’s mouth and after a few moments the older woman stopped groaning. She sat up and held her arms across her breasts as if the pressure might help relieve the pain.

  “Mary,” she said. “I want to die.”

  “Too, too, when too,” Mary whispered, and lifted a hand to her head wound.

  Elizabeth could not make sense of this. Esa Havey and another man spoke loudly and signed to a crowd of the other men and boys in front of the fire. They used the Plains sign language. They did not all have hair alike. A tall man with a slightly receding chin got up and started on a determined walk toward the captives. Even though Mary threw out both hands above Lottie Durgan’s head he grasped Lottie by the arm and knocked Mary aside. Esa Havey came up and shoved the man backward until he let go of Lottie. Elizabeth crawled forward and took hold of her granddaughter’s skirt and drew her into her weakened arms.

  They stopped arguing. The silence was chilling. Each man turned and saddled his own horse and they threw the women onto barebacked ponies. By this time Elizabeth’s arms and face and throat were blistered with the sun and netted with bloody hash marks by the stiff creosote and blackbrush stands. Esa Havey took Lottie Durgan and put the little girl behind him. Lottie did not cry or look at her grandmother. The man with the receding chin came and handed the eighteen-month-old Millie to Mary after he had glanced at Elizabeth and saw her barely clinging to the pony’s mane. Then he took Cherry behind him and someone else took Jube. They went on in the night without moon or starlight and the horses carried their heads low to see the ground before them. They moved north under heavy cloud cover, in damp, thick air that seethed with incipient lightning.

  IN THE CHILL 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 Johnson, 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, destroying 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 fireless 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 laborious upstrokes.

  Britt watched them, streaming overhead, towing their insubstantial 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.

  Chapter 3

  THE MEN WHO decided the fate of the Red Indians lived in the east, under roofs of slate and shingle. There were windows 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 cities, 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 disembarked. 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 refuse 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 nowhere and nobody. Money an alchemical miracle come from nothing, 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 Samuel’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
disquieted 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, Joseph, 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 volunteer 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 consignments 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 depravities 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 accountant 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 winter 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, shipowner, 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 another 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 removed his fingertips and folded his hands together. “Your year was hard. I know.”

  Samuel nodded. “The title of your work is Systems of Consanguinity, 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 shoelaces. “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 someday he would marry and have a family and must think about providing 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 commandments. Quakers had the gift of making people uncomfortable. Especially other Quakers. Especially himself. He would hav
e 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 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?