The Color of Lightning (6 page)

Below his window on Front Street an entire circus was unpack- ing itself. They had come from England to gladden and entertain the people of Philadelphia now that the war was nearly over, to amaze them with women in tights and men with red noses. The Liberty horses staggered in the street from the unaccustomed feel of solid ground after their sea-crossing, and some predator in a draped cage was being loaded onto a dray. Samuel would also be liable for the repair of the ship as well as the lost cargo and the cost of the ship’s recovery. He pressed his hands against his eyes as the circus disentangled itself and went off down the street with trumpet and drum. He thanked the Lord for this chastisement. He prayed he would learn and understand whatever it was the Lord meant for him to understand by this, and by many things when you came to think about it.

He would sell his experimental farm in Germantown. Its or- dered, quilted little fields and the regimented orchard. Then he would accept the position of Indian agent to the Comanche and Kiowa and the Kiowa-Apache in Indian Territory.

Perhaps this was what the Lord was trying to tell him with the

wreck of the
Monongahela.
This was Providence at work in his life, taking him in charge for its own great purposes. A rainy February wind, spangled with drops, drove over the waterfront. The jury- rigged foresail and spritsail of the ship rattled down from their yards and the anchor chain roared like a metal waterfall and the slosh- ing sailors flung ropes to the bollards. Other sailors in other ships watched the
Monongahela
come sloppily in and greeted her with jeers and bits of rude songs.

Samuel rode the horsecars down Fairmont. From the window he listened to the shouts of the street vendors, selling fish and white wine by the glass to passersby. Small Irish boys cried out
’Ot paday- das, ’ot padaydas!
The car rumbled over the granite cobblestones. He jumped off at Twenty-second Street and walked to Mount Vernon Street, its row of elegant brick houses. The three-story structures with their neat white steps, their brightly painted doors and brass knockers, pressed close to one another. They were both small and long, and elegant as miniatures.

He came into the house on Mount Vernon and rested his arm on the gray granite mantelpiece. The girl had lit the fire not long ago. The fireplace was elegantly carved, and he thought how before long he would be sitting in the open again before a heaped pile of burning sticks.

He went to the back garden to sit in the cold on the cast-iron bench under the one slim walnut tree. Around his small garden tall brick walls looked down. He held his grandfather’s Bible between his two hands like a great directory, himself a man trying to recall a certain address before opening it. The
Monongahela
and its ruined strakes and the tons of good New England flour heaved into the Atlantic sent outrage like a small tidal wave into his brain.

People did not really understand who they were until they had been tested, and then came the terrible surprise that they did not know who this new person was either. A succession of strangers, in- terlopers, banged through the door of the mind without knocking. He recalled the pressurized sound of a mortar shell, and sometime later he found himself wandering peacefully about in the Georgia woods

singing a filthy song about a widow from Baltimore. A thoughtful, quiet soldier with a head injury woke up in the MacGuire mansion among the other wounded and turned into a loud and aggressive man who could not count to ten. If God meant for us to praise and worship Him, why did He not give us a single self?

When he was twenty he stood up in the Orange Street Meeting on First Day to denounce John Joseph Gurney’s idea that justifica- tion and sanctification were two separate things. Now he could no longer remember the dispute. It had been intricate and consuming but he could not well recall it.

He did not doubt that Christ had died for him, but which one of him? The adamantine young man bright as a blade and full of theological certainties, or the Samuel Hammond on a wagon seat, worn and brown and chewing tobacco in the rain, waiting for the wounded? And what of himself now, an urban man of Philadelphia in a prewar suit and deeply in debt?

After a while the light filtering through the leaves fell around him and into his very self. If you ask and ask sincerely you will be granted that inner light. He had to ask and ask again. Time passed. Finally he opened his Bible to Psalm 139.

You have hedged me behind and before and laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it. Where can I go from Your spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend unto heaven You are there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me.

a f ew w e e k s
later Samuel took the horsecars to Front and Market, where the cars stopped because the grade of the street down to Water Street was too steep for the horses. He and Lewis Mor- gan walked down the slippery cobblestones on a bright March day.

Samuel’s hair stood up in brown peaks and low sea-clouds scudded overhead at a rapid rate and bars of sunlight flashed between them. The waterfront smelled of salt and sewage and the piercing odor of creosote.

He carried brown paper packages of stout serge cloth, portable soup packed in squares between sheets of waxed paper, hard, un- melting spermaceti candles. The sailors’ arms were hideous with tattoos from the Sandwich Islands, dark and strawberry-colored designs of naked women and the names of ships and wives and girl- friends, anchors and palm trees, blue-black on human skin.

“And their language?” said Samuel.

“I have no idea,” said Morgan. “I can’t think of the name of the fellow who is trying to classify the Indian languages. Schoolcraft has done quite a lot on the Chippewa.”

They walked past the ancient salt and fish warehouse with its checkered English brick, and stopped to stare up at Irwin and Young’s ship carvings, fastened to the outside wall of the second story. There were women with naked breasts and pink nipples and a grim, toothy sailor in bright paint that seemed to have thrust him- self through the window and was grinning at the far shore of the Delaware with teeth like piano keys. Third and Dock was dense with warehouses and markets and foot traffic, donkeys lifted from their feet between the shafts as more and more layers of stiff, papery dried mackerel were thrown onto their carts.

“And their beliefs?” Samuel stopped to look in the window of Bingham’s Fish and Provisions. “Does this dried soup look better than the stuff I bought at Levin’s?”

Morgan put his hand over his forehead like a visor and leaned against the glass and squinted against the reflections. “No, it’s got flies in it.” They walked on. “No one knows. We have studied the tribes on the Upper Missouri because they are accessible. We can get to them, you see. You can take a steamboat. These southern plains tribes lie great distances overland with no water transporta- tion. No water. One creeps from waterhole to river to waterhole, as I have heard.”

“They take scalps,” said Samuel. “What in God’s name for?”

Morgan lifted his eyebrows and held up a forefinger. “Now that is interesting. At our latest meeting a fellow named Gaynor, Charles Gaynor, he is a natural philosopher and antiquarian just come back from the Russian Far East. He went there with Gennady Nevelskoy to the Amur River. Lord, how I envy him.” They strode onward on the smooth rounded cobblestones. “Myself with a recently bereaved family.”

Samuel touched his arm. He could think of nothing to say that would not have to be shouted over the noise of the passing vehicles. “It’s all right. Thank you. Anyhow . . .” Morgan cleared his throat. He paused. Then he said, “Gaynor did some excavation there on the coast of Sakhalin in Siberia. At the risk of his life. Shoveling around in the ice and dirt in a burial mound. Found four mummies of very ancient provenance that had been scalped and the

scalps sewn back on.” “Really.”

“Just so.”

“I see.”

“He said his thought about it was that the mummies, you know, when they were live persons, had been scalped in some sort of war, or attack, and then their own people or tribe had most likely gone to a great deal of trouble to recover the scalps and sew them back on. Thus it is a safe conclusion that it has something to do with a person’s soul, ascent of the soul and so on.”

They dodged a coal wagon and walked on. Samuel said, “There must be some similarity between the Comanche and the tribes you have visited.”

“What I have heard from the Mandan and Sioux is that the Comanche are perpetually in a state of war with everybody. A Brulé Sioux man, an old man, said they had come from beyond the Rocky Mountains and simply leapt on everybody like tigers. Now you need a spirit stove and a sou’wester.”

“No I do not, Lewis. I need a broad-brimmed hat. A good hat you can live under. My old one was lost going into Savannah. It was the best hat I ever had. I miss it.”

They found one on Dock Street at a slop draper. It was brown, of beaver felt with a grosgrain ribbon around the edge of the three- inch brim. Samuel set it firmly on his head. “I am ready for arrows and runaways.”

They trudged upward again, back up Market to the horse- cars. Samuel and Lewis Henry Morgan stood back while laughing young women fought with their skirts on the step, and filled their seats with their packages and budgets and gloves and yards of skirt hems. The air was heavy with sea mists, and the sliding tilt of gulls overhead in their ash-colored jackets. A sea breeze sprang up out of the northeast, and on Queen Street white curtains were sucked out of the open windows and gestured frantically with em- broidered hems.

Samuel was refreshed by the wind. He was going somewhere unknown, the western lands that lay beyond the politics of religion, the interminable splits of the Society of Friends. Beyond prisons, beyond cities, armed with a good hat and portable soup.

In the silence of his little house on Mount Vernon Street he went over the map. It remained resolute and graphic in its inked lines for towns, cities, railroads, until it came to those western lands beyond the Missouri River, and then it faded into vast unmarked spaces, like a door left ajar with a storm coming and the wind blowing in at will.

He went to Germantown to visit his mother and father, his sturdy farmer brother and his brother’s wife and children. Their hundreds of acres of wheatland and orchard near Lancaster. They nodded and said very little when he told them he was once again leaving Phila- delphia. At prayer together that night his father asked the Lord to make clear His purposes and to help him, Nathaniel Hammond, to understand the paths of the wayward.

Samuel sat with the men of the Society of Friends Indian Com- mittee and went over the paperwork he would be required to com- plete. Every draft of money and all orders had to be written out in triplicate to avoid the corruption of the old Department of Indian Affairs. He must receive, verify, and then distribute the annuities.

He must see that the annuity goods were shipped out of Leaven- worth in due time. He must hire a clerk, workmen, perhaps a physi- cian, with luck a schoolteacher, and all of these employees’ names must be submitted to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs and ap- proved.

The Kiowa and Comanche were to receive $30,000 worth of goods according to the treaty they had signed. These goods were to consist of blankets, brown muslin, satinet, calico, hosiery, needles, thread, suits of men’s clothes, butcher knives, iron kettles, frying pans, hoes, and small axes. In addition, rations were to be issued every two weeks; beef, bacon, flour, coffee, sugar, soap, tobacco, and soda. These would be given to the chiefs, who would distribute them among the women of each family. The beef was to be issued alive. The live cattle were to be given to a headman of each family, who had a signed receipt in hand.

The members of the committee went over these stipulations care- fully, as if what were written there would bring order and obedience. As if the issuing of calico and sugar would cause the Comanche and the Kiowa to become content, delighted, grateful. That it would inspire them to take up farming and eat vegetables.

“The Indians are what we have made them,” said Dr. Reed. “Ev- ery war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.”

Samuel said, “God made them, sir. I do not think we of Phila- delphia have taken on the task of creation.”

Dr. Reed stared at him in silence. The kindliness shrank out of his face. After a moment he said, “I see.”

Samuel flushed. “I’m sorry, sir. I have spoken out of turn.”

Dr. Reed nodded. “It is all right, Samuel. I have known thee from thy schooldays.” He turned in his chair and turned back again. “If the Texans would cease to crowd them,” he said. “If they would leave the red man alone. There is room out there for all.”

W

sa mue l b e ga n to
pay attention to newspapers. He read every news report from the far West that he came upon. The stories were brief and vague, half a column here and there in between head- lines about Grant’s disjointed army piling up, one regiment after another, in Richmond. The
New York World
and the
Times
both had correspondents with Grant, and their headlines ate up the front pages. News from Texas consisted of clips from other papers. Union troops landing in Indianola and Corpus Christi. Savages shot down in their villages. Long quotes from local officials about exterminat- ing the red vermin.

Samuel understood that the Society of Friends was troubled by the Texans because the Texans were so clear and straightforward in their speech. They did not seem to need to hide their intentions be- hind deceptive and gentle phrases. They came to take the land and they meant to keep it. They would take it from red men as they had taken land from the Shawnee and Cherokee in the Carolinas and before that the wild Irish in Ulster and before that whatever croft or patch of rocky land they could hold against the lairds in the low- lands, and if they could not hold it they rode with the lairds against the neighbors to raid other neighbors’ cattle and had been doing so for centuries before the birth of Christ, who was the Prince of Peace, and they intended to keep on doing it, for as long as it took.