The General Zapped an Angel: Stories

The Mohawk

When Clyde Lightfeather walked up the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, he was wearing an old raincoat of sorts; and then he took it off and sat down cross-legged in front of the great doors. Underneath he was dressed just like the bang-bang man in an old Indian medicine show—that is, he wore soft doeskin leggings, woods moccasins, and nothing at all from the waist up. His hair was cut in the traditional central brush style of the scalp lock, with one white feather through the little braid at the back of his neck. He was altogether a very well-built and prepossessing young full-blooded Mohawk Indian.

A crowd gathered because it doesn’t take anything very much to gather a crowd in New York, and Father Michael O’Conner came out of the cathedral and Officer Patrick Muldoon came up from the street, and the gentle June sun shone down upon everyone.

“Now just what the hell are you up to?” Officer Muldoon asked Clyde Lightfeather. There was a querulous note in Officer Muldoon’s voice, for he was sick and tired of freaks, hard-core hippies, acid-heads, pot-heads, love children and flower children, black power folk, SDS, sit-ins and demonstrations-out; and while he was fond of saying that he had seen everything, he had never before seen a Mohawk Indian sitting cross-legged in front of St. Patrick’s.

“God and God’s grace, I suppose,” Clyde Lightfeather answered.

“Now don’t you know,” said Muldoon, his voice taking that tired, descending path of patience and veiled threat, “that this is private property and that you cannot put a feather in your hair and just sit yourself down and attract a crowd and make difficulties for honest worshipers?”

“Why not? This isn’t private property. This is God’s property, and since you don’t work for God, why don’t you take your big, fat blue ass out of here and leave me alone?”

Officer Muldoon began to make the proper response to such talk, Mohawk Indian or not—with the crowd grinning and half disposed toward the Indian—when Father O’Conner intervened and pointed out to Officer Muldoon that the Indian was absolutely right. This was not private property but God’s property.

“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.”