by Howard Fast
“The devil you say!” Officer Muldoon exclaimed. “You’re going to let that heathen sit there?”
Up until that moment Father O’Conner had been of a mind to say a few reasonable words that would be persuasive enough to move the Indian away. Now he abruptly changed his position.
“Maybe I will,” he declared.
“Thank you,” Lightfeather said.
“Providing you give me one good reason why I should.”
“Because I am here to meditate.”
“And you consider this a proper place for meditation, Mr.—?”
“Lightfeather.”
“Mr. Lightfeather.”
“The best. Do you deny that?” he demanded pugnaciously.
“What is meditation to you, Mr. Lightfeather?”
“Prayer—God—being.”
“Then how can I deny it?” the priest asked.
“And you’re going to let him stay there?” Muldoon demanded.
“I think so.”
“Now look,” Muldoon said, “I was raised a Catholic, and maybe I don’t know much, but I know one thing—a cathedral is made for worship on the inside, not on the outside!”
Nevertheless, the Indian remained there, and within a few hours the television cameras and the newspapermen were there and Father O’Conner was facing no less exalted a person than the Cardinal himself. The research facilities at the various networks were concentrated upon the letter m—m for meditation as well as Mohawk. Chet Huntley informed millions, not only that meditation was a significant, inwardly directed spiritual exercise, an inner concentration upon some thought of deep religious significance, but that the Mohawk Indians had been great in their time, the organizing force of the mighty Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. The peace of the forests was the Mohawk peace, even as the law was the Mohawk law, codified in ancient times by that gentle and wise man, Hiawatha. From the St. Lawrence River in the north to the Hudson River in the south, the Mohawk peace and the Mohawk law prevailed before the white man’s coming.
Less historically oriented, the CBS commentators wondered whether this was not simply another bit of hooliganism inflicted by college youth upon a patient public. They had researched Lightfeather himself, learning that, after Harvard, he took his Ph.D. at Columbia—his doctoral paper being a study of the use of various hallucinogenic plants in American Indian religions. “It is discouraging,” said Walter Cronkite, “to find a young American Indian of such brilliance engaging in such tiresome antics.”
His Eminence, the Cardinal, took another tack entirely. It was not his to unravel a Mohawk Indian. Instead he coldly asked Father O’Conner just what he proposed.
“Well, sir, Your Eminence, I mean he’s not doing any harm, is he?”
“Really carried away by the notion that God owns the property—am I right, Father?”
“Well—he put it so naturally and directly, Your Eminence.”
“Did it ever occur to you that God’s property rights extend even farther than St. Patrick’s? You know He owns Wall Street and the White House and Protestant churches and quite a few synagogues and the Soviet Union and even Red China, not to mention a galaxy or two out there. So if I were you, Father O’Conner, I would suggest some more suitable place than the porch of St. Patrick’s for meditation. I would say that you should persuade him to leave by morning.”
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“Peacefully.”
“Yes, Your Eminence.”
“We have still not had a sit-down in St. Patrick’s.”
“I understand perfectly, Your Eminence.”
But Father O’Conner’s plan of action was a little less than perfect. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon now, and the streets were filled with people hurrying home. As little as it takes to make a crowd in New York, it takes less to dispel it; and by now the Indian was wholly taken for granted. Father O’Conner stood next to Lightfeather for a while, brooding as creatively as he could, and then asked politely whether the Indian heard him.
“Why not? Meditation is a condition of alertness, not of sleep.”
“You were very still.”
“Inside, Father, I am still.”
“Why did you come here?” Father O’Conner asked.
“I told you why. To meditate.”
“Why here?”
“Because the vibes are good here.”
“Vibes?”
“Vibrations.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a question of belief. This place is filled with belief. That’s why I picked it. I need belief.”
“For what?” Father O’Conner asked curiously.
“So I can believe.”
“What do you want to believe?”
“That God is sane.”
“I assure you—He is,” Father O’Conner said with conviction.
“How the hell do you know?”
“It’s a matter of my own belief.”
“Not if you were a Mohawk Indian.”
“I don’t know. I have never been a Mohawk Indian.”
“I have.”
Father O’Conner thought about it for a moment or two, and in all fairness he could not deny that a Mohawk Indian might have quite a different point of view.
“His Eminence, the Cardinal, is provoked at me,” he said finally. “He wants me to persuade you to leave.”
“So you’re bringing back the fuzz.”
“No, peacefully.”
“Before you were with me on this being God’s pad. Has His Eminence talked you out of that?”
“He pointed out that the Almighty has equal claim to the Soviet Union. I suppose wherever it is, the tenants make the rules.”
“All right. Spell it out.”
“I hate to be a top sergeant about it,” Father O’Conner said. “How long were you planning to stay?”
“Until God answers me.”
“That can be a long time,” Father O’Conner said unhappily.
“Or an instant. I am meditating on time.”
“Time?”
“I always think of time when I think of God,” the Indian said. “He has His time. We have ours. I want Him to open His time to me. What in hell am I doing here on Fifth Avenue? I’m a Mohawk Indian. Right?”
Father O’Conner nodded.
“I don’t know,” the Indian said. “We’ll give it the old school try, and then you can call the fuzz. How about it? Until morning?”
“Until morning,” Father O’Conner said.
“I’ll do as much for you sometime,” the Indian said, and those were the last words he was heard to say. The newspaper reporters came down and the television crowd made a second visit, but the Indian was through talking.
The Indian was meditating. He allowed thought to leave his mind and he watched his breath go in and out and he became a sort of a universe unto himself. He considered God’s time and he considered man’s time—but without thought. There are no thoughts known to man that are capable of dealing even with man’s time, much less God’s time; but the Indian was not so far from his ancestors as to be trapped in thought. His ancestors had known the secret of the great time, which all white men have forgotten.
The Indian was photographed and televised until even the networks had enough of him, and Father O’Conner remained there to see that the Indian’s meditation was not interrupted. The priest felt a great kinship with the Indian, but being a priest, he also knew how many had asked and how few had been answered.
By midnight the press had gone and even the few passers-by ignored the Indian. Father O’Conner was amazed at how long he had remained there, motionless, in what is called the lotus position, but he had always heard that Indians were stoical and enduring of pain and desire and he supposed that this Indian was no different. The priest was gratified that the June night was so warm and pleasant; at least the Indian would not suffer from the cold.
Before the priest fell asleep that night, he prayed that some sort of grace might
be bestowed upon the Indian. What kind of grace he wasn’t at all sure, nor was he ready to plead that the Indian should have a taste of God’s time. The notion of God’s time was just a bit terrifying to Father O’Conner.
He slept well but not for long, and he was up and dressed with the first gray presence of dawn. The priest walked to the porch of the cathedral, and there was the Indian exactly as the priest had left him. So erect, so unmoving was his body that, were it not for the slight motion of his bare stomach, the priest might have thought him dead.
As for the Indian, Clyde Lightfeather, he was alert and within himself, and his mind was clear and open. Eyes closed, he felt the breezes of dawn on his cheek, the scent of morning in his nostril. He had no need for prayer; his whole being was a gentle reminder; and that way he heard a bird singing.
He allowed the sound to pass through him; he experienced it but did not detain it. And then he heard the leaping, gurgling passage of a brook. That too he heard without detention. And then he smelled the smell of the earth in June, the wonderful wet, sweet, thick smell of life coming and life going, and this smell he clung to, for he knew that his meditation was finished and that he had been granted a moment of God’s time.
He opened his eyes, and instead of the great masses of Rockefeller Center, he saw an ancient stand of tulip trees, each of them fifteen feet across the base and reaching so high up that only the birds knew where they topped out. Thin fingers of the dawn laced through the tulips, and out of the great knowledge that comes with the great time, the Indian knew that there would be birch-bark canoes on the shore of the Hudson, carefully sheltered for the day they would be needed, and that the Hudson was the road to the Mohawk Valley where the longhouses stood. He waited no longer but leaped to his feet and raced through the tulip trees.
The priest had turned for a moment to regard the soaring majesty of St. Patrick’s; when he looked again, the Indian was gone. Instead of being pleased that he had accomplished what the Cardinal desired, the priest felt a sense of loss.
A few hours later the Cardinal sent for Father O’Conner, and the priest told him that the Indian had left very early in the morning.
“There was no unpleasantness, I trust?”
“No, Your Eminence.”
“No police?”
“No, sir—only myself.” Father O’Conner hesitated, swallowed, and instead of departing, coughed.
“Yes?” the Cardinal asked.
“If I may ask you a question, Your Eminence?”
“Go ahead.”
“What is God’s time, Your Eminence?”
The Cardinal smiled, but not with amusement. The smile was a turning inward, as if he were remembering things that had happened long, long ago.
“Was that the Indian’s notion?”
Father O’Conner nodded with embarrassment.
“Did you ask him?”
“No, I did not.”
“Then when he returns,” the Cardinal said, “I suggest that you do.”
The Wound
Max Gaffey always insisted that the essence of the oil industry could be summed up in a simple statement: the right thing in the wrong place. My wife, Martha, always disliked him and said that he was a spoiler. I suppose he was, but how was he different from any of us in that sense? We were all spoilers, and if we were not the actual thing, we invested in it and thereby became rich. I myself had invested the small nest egg that a college professor puts away in a stock Max Gaffey gave me. It was called Thunder Inc., and the company’s function was to use atomic bombs to release natural gas and oil locked up in the vast untouched shale deposits that we have here in the United States.
Oil shale is not a very economical source of oil. The oil is locked up in the shale, and about 60 percent of the total cost of shale oil consists of the laborious methods of mining the shale, crushing it to release the oil, and then disposing of the spent shale.
Gaffey sold to Thunder Inc. an entirely new method, which involved the use of surplus atomic bombs for the release of shale oil. In very simplistic terms, a deep hole is bored in shale-oil deposits. Then an atomic bomb is lowered to the bottom of this hole, after which the hole is plugged and the bomb is detonated. Theoretically, the heat and force of the atomic explosion crushes the shale and releases the oil to fill the underground cavern formed by the gigantic force of the bomb. The oil does not burn because the hole is sealed, and thereby, for a comparatively small cost, untold amounts of oil can be tapped and released—enough perhaps to last until that time when we experience a complete conversion to atomic energy—so vast are the shale deposits.
Such at least was the way Max Gaffey put the proposition to me, in a sort of mutual brain-picking operation. He had the utmost admiration for my knowledge of the earth’s crust, and I had an equally profound admiration for his ability to make two or five or ten dollars appear where only one had been before.
My wife disliked him and his notions, and most of all the proposal to feed atomic bombs into the earth’s crust.
“It’s wrong,” she said flatly. “I don’t know why or how, but this I do know, that everything connected with that wretched bomb is wrong.”
“Yet couldn’t you look at this as a sort of salvation?” I argued. “Here we are in these United States with enough atom bombs to destroy life on ten earths the size of ours—and every one of those bombs represents an investment of millions of dollars. I could not agree more when you hold that those bombs are the most hideous and frightful things the mind of man ever conceived.”
“Then how on earth can you speak of salvation?”
“Because so long as those bombs sit here, they represent a constant threat—day and night the threat that some feather-brained general or brainless politician will begin the process of throwing them at our neighbors. But here Gaffey has come up with a peaceful use for the bomb. Don’t you see what that means?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” Martha said.
“It means that we can use the damn bombs for something other than suicide—because if this starts, it’s the end of mankind. But there are oil-shale and gas-shale deposits all over the earth, and if we can use the bomb to supply man with a century of fuel, not to mention the chemical by-products, we may just find a way to dispose of those filthy bombs.”
“Oh, you don’t believe that for a moment,” Martha snorted.
“I do. I certainly do.”
And I think I did. I went over the plans that Gaffey and his associates had worked out, and I could not find any flaw. If the hole were plugged properly, there would be no fallout. We knew that and we had the know-how to plug the hole, and we had proven it in at least twenty underground explosions. The earth tremor would be inconsequential; in spite of the heat, the oil would not ignite, and in spite of the cost of the atom bombs, the savings would be monumental. In fact, Gaffey hinted that some accommodation between the government and Thunder Inc. was in the process of being worked out, and if it went through as planned, the atom bombs might just cost Thunder Inc. nothing at all, the whole thing being in the way of an experiment for the social good.
After all, Thunder Inc. did not own any oil-shale deposits, nor was it in the oil business. It was simply a service organization with the proper know-how and for a fee—if the process worked—it would release the oil for others. What the fee would be was left unsaid, but Max Gaffey, in return for my consultation, suggested that I might buy a few shares, not only of Thunder Inc., but of General Shale Holdings.
I had altogether about ten thousand dollars in savings available and another ten thousand in American Telephone and government bonds. Martha had a bit of money of her own, but I left that alone, and without telling her, I sold my Telephone stock and my bonds. Thunder Inc. was selling at five dollars a share, and I bought two thousand shares. General Shale was selling for two dollars, and I bought four thousand shares. I saw nothing immoral—as business morality was calculated—in the procedures adopted by Thunder Inc. Its relationship to the government was no di
fferent than the relationships of various other companies, and my own process of investment was perfectly straightforward and honorable. I was not even the recipient of secret information, for the atom-bomb-shale-oil proposal had been widely publicized if little believed.
Even before the first test explosion was undertaken, the stock of Thunder Inc. went from five to sixty-five dollars a share. My ten thousand dollars became one hundred and thirty thousand, and that doubled again a year later. The four thousand shares of General Shale went up to eighteen dollars a share; and from a moderately poor professor I became a moderately rich professor. When finally, almost two years after Max Gaffey first approached me, they exploded the first atom bomb in a shaft reamed in the oil-shale deposits, I had abandoned the simple anxieties of the poor and had developed an entirely new set tailored for the upper middle class. We became a two-car family, and a reluctant Martha joined me in shopping for a larger house. In the new house, Gaffey and his wife came to dinner, and Martha armed herself with two stiff martinis. Then she was quietly polite until Gaffey began to talk about the social good. He painted a bright picture of what shale oil could do and how rich we might well become.
“Oh, yes—yes,” Martha agreed. “Polute the atmosphere, kill more people with more cars, increase the speed with which we can buzz around in circles and get precisely nowhere.”
“Oh, you’re a pessimist,” said Gaffey’s wife, who was young and pretty but no mental giant.
“Of course there are two sides to it,” Gaffey admitted. “It’s a question of controls. You can’t stop progress, but it seems to me that you can direct it.”
“The way we’ve been directing it—so that our rivers stink and our lakes are sewers of dead fish and our atmosphere is polluted and our birds are poisoned by DDT and our natural resources are spoiled. We are all spoilers, aren’t we?”
“Come now,” I protested, “this is the way it is, and all of us are indignant about it, Martha.”
“Are you, really?”
“I think so.”
“Men have always dug in the earth,” Gaffey said. “Otherwise we’d still be in the Stone Age.”
“And perhaps a good bit happier.”