The Color of Lightning by Paulette Jiles

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