The Color of Lightning Read Online Free PDF

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