The Color of Lightning

by Paulette Jiles

She had come to grief on the rocks of Cape Tipman, bilged with sixteen feet of water in the holds. The two hundred passengers were got off safely, but her cargo was lost. It had been thrown, barrel by barrel, into the sea. Salt and flour streamed out into a gale-force wind. She had been raised by hiring a salvage crew to force empty, sealed oil barrels through the gaping underwater hole and into her hold. They then fothered the hole with one hundred and eighty feet of canvas in an enormous bandage around the entire waist of the ship, and as it passed over the wounded strakes the canvas was drawn in and clung to the hole in an interior bulge and sealed it. The pumps and the barrels full of air began to lift the rocking body of the ship. This during a storm. The men who went down into the water could hear the grinding noise of the Monongahela’s keel on the stone ledges. A terrifying sound, the noise of the Atlantic itself, as it ground up men and ships on unseen rocks and then tilted them over into the bottomless sea. The divers were hauled shaking to the deck and offered hot tea. Since the ship’s owners belonged to the Society of Friends, they were not allowed spirituous liquors, and the divers cursed the goddamned Quakers and drank their scalding milky tea in offended silence.