A Moment in the Sun (27 page)

After dozing a few hours the sheep-stink is too much and Hod climbs the ladder to put his head out through the access hatch. The train is climbing to the top of the world. They are well above the tree line and the mountain air is a sharp jab in his lungs as he hauls out and uses a grab iron to anchor himself and look down off the edge of the boxcar. Far below them there is a river twisting through a canyon, frothing white over rocks and shoals. An eagle drifts halfway between, making a perfect floating cross in the air, the late-day sun glistening on its back.

It has been pleasant enough the few times Hod has ridden the cushions, paying his fare and drowsily rocking in his seat with the countryside rolling past, but it never felt like this—clutching the back of his own great snorting beast, master of it all, the rails opening up ahead of him, opening, always opening. He sits, pasha-like, on the roof of a train climbing to the top of the world till he is chilled to the bone and has to crawl back in.

Big Ten is awake.

“We in Colorado yet?”

“No telling. It’s just mountains.”

“Never cared for the mountains,” says the big Indian, rolling up on an elbow. “We’re lake people.”

“Paddled your canoes.”

Big Ten narrows an eye. “Yeah. We did that.”

“
By the shores of Gitche Gumee
,” Hod recites, “
By the shining Big-Sea-Water—
”

“Gichi Gami.”

“What?”

“In Ojibwe. Gichi Gami. Lake Superior.”

“You’re shittin me. So the poem—”

“Is a load of manure. You ever try to read it?”

“The whole thing? Hell no—”

“For one thing, Hiawatha was an Iroquois. Got nothing to do with us.”

“But your people hunt and fish—”

“Lots of that, yeah—”

“Take some scalps—”

Hod means it as a joke but the Indian doesn’t smile. “That’s the Sioux. We sent them packing before the white people showed up.”

“My brothers and me used to look for arrowheads,” says Hod. “When we were supposed to be plowing.”

“We did that too. You’d be surprised how many you find laying around where Indin people live.”

Hod settles back in on the bags of fleece. “What did you hunt?”

“Whatever was around. Birds paid the best.”

“You shot birds.” Hod tries to imagine hitting a flying crow with an arrow.

“There was a white fella had a summer house out on Madeline Island,” says Big Ten. “Called him Colonel Archibald. Don’t know if he was a real colonel, but he lost a leg in the War. Ornery son of a gun. Once or twice a year the wild pigeons would come in and feed, the big flock. Cover the woods halfway to Iron County, branches bust from the weight of em, birdshit up to your ankles on the ground. First time I seen it, I’s just a chap, I thought it was the end of the world and run home crying. All them beaks and wings—”

“They come over our farm once,” says Hod. “My brother Luke and I kilt a dozen, just throwing rocks up into the air.”

“We’d help my father drag the fishnets in, he’d rig em up this way he had—what you do is catch one and tie his leg to a stake in the ground with a mess of grain scattered around. He’ll eat a little, flap around a bit, eat a little more—see, a pigeon got no more sense than a farm hand.” Big Ten smiles bitterly. “The rest of that flock will see him and come down to get what he’s feeding on, and that’s when you trip the nets. We’d catch three, four hundred a day like that and we didn’t have nothing like the rigs the professional bird men did. Me and my brothers’ job was to pull em out one by one and pin their wings so we could bring them out on the ferry to the colonel.”

“Alive.”

“Of course alive. He wouldn’t pay for dead ones.”

“What’s a man do with that many pigeons?”

“Shot em. He let us watch, sometimes. Him and his friends would get to drinking and then this half-breed fella that worked for him, Petey, would load a bird into the trap and snip their wings free and then the old boy would yell ‘Pull!’ for Petey to spring that catapult trap and sometimes the pigeon would just flop out with a broken neck, but mostly they would start off on the wing and
bam!
the colonel or one of his friends or all of em shooting together would blow it apart with buckshot.” Big Ten frowns at the memory. “They’d kill the whole lot of them we brought between lunch and suppertime.”

Hod feels a hard pain just behind his right eye. Air getting thin, he thinks, or just hungry again.

“Any ever get away?”

“The pigeons?” Big Ten shrugs. “Oh, now and then. They’re beautiful flyers. Fast. Like what an arrow must of looked like, back when Indins shot arrows. Me and my brothers would holler and cheer when one flew off clear and the colonel would call us a pack of damn ignorant savages and threaten to pepper our hides. We’d run and hide then, wait till they all fallen asleep on the screen porch so we could sneak back and fetch some of the broke-neck ones home to eat. The rest had too much shot in em to bother with.”

“They tasted good, pigeons, what I remember.”

“Tasted fine.”

Hod’s stomach does a turn and he tries to remember when he ate last. He has the hunk of yesterday’s bread but it isn’t so big and half of it will be smaller. He wonders if the birds that got away found another flock or if they just stayed scattered. Lost.

Big Ten stretches, yawns. “Yeah, I was a regular little wild Indin. Went barefoot every summer up until the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration got holt of me.” He pauses, listening for a moment. “We going downhill now.”

“Feels like it.”

It’s getting cold in the boxcar. Hod and Big Ten can see their own breath as they divide Hod’s bread from the Saints and a tin of sardines the Indian bought in Lehi.

“This Sister Ursula,” says Big Ten, “she took a shine to me, figured I could be an example to my people.”

Mostly when there is someone in the boxcar with you their story is pretty much the same as yours and poor entertainment. Hard times, low pay, dumb bosses, no hope. Except for the cranks and bughouse escapees, who all have their version of the Big Picture and you’d better stay awake and close to the exit.

“Example of what?” asks Hod.

“That we could talk English instead of just Ojibwe and French like my father. That we could be taught to act civilized enough not to make the white people nervous. That we could cut all our trees down and put up some sorry excuse for a farm.”

“She run the school, this Ursula—”

“Your General Custer had some of them Franciscan nuns with him,” says Big Ten, “he’d still have his hair. German ladies, mostly. Lift you clear off the ground by your ears.”

“You learned to read.”

“I learned ever damn thing they wanted me to. That way they never shame you in front of the others.”

They have both pulled scraps of raw fleece to wrap themselves in now, wool side turned in. It is dark up top, and it has been a long way since the train last stopped.

“When I learned everthing they had to tell me, Sister Ursula put me on the train to the Industrial School in Pennsylvania.”

“Your father let them do that?”

“My father was mostly a white man to look at him, French and Irish, but he lived Indin his whole life. When the government started the allotments in ’87 the Agent says Armand, that was his white name, Armand, he says, you don’t get no quarter section cause you cain’t prove you’re an Indin. And that means none of his sons get their forty acres cause even through my mother is a direct line down from old Chief Buffalo that makes us half-breeds, which their status was yet to be figured out.”

“He tried to cheat you.”

“Tried, nothing, there was folks never even seen that lake before who showed up claiming they was eligible for an allotment, the same ones standing in line with money in their paws when the surplus land got sold off.”

“White people.”

“All different colors, just like us, but they sure wasn’t Ojibwe. Anyhow, my father gone to Père Clochard and asks what can he do, and the Père says well if you had a boy at this Carlisle School he would be qualified for an allotment and the annuity payments from the old treaty and be a Ward of the State, which would make you an Indin
ex post facto
which is Latin for the cat is already out of the bag. I was the youngest and the one he could spare the easiest and Sister Ursula was champing at the bit for me to go so he borrowed Charlie Whitebird’s wagon and team and took me down to Eau Claire for the train. They put me on a special car and it was all Indin kids, boys and girls—Blackfeet kids and Gros Ventre kids and Sioux kids and lots more Ojibwe from Minnesota and then we took on a load of Oneida kids from up by Green Bay and that’s when I first seen Gracie Metoxen.” Big Ten shakes his head. “All the things I went through at that school, the only thing I ever had on my mind was her.”

Hod lets this sit for a moment. The food is gone and he is still hungry.

“I could speak English and been around white people plenty already, but them horse Indins from out west, they was scared. The first thing when we got to the Industrial School is they put us through the barbers and cut all our hair off. The Sioux boys got all upset cause this meant their parents must’ve died and then they took our clothes and had us wear these soldier-looking uniforms. Now an Ojibwe,” says Big Ten, wiggling to burrow between two sacks of fleece, “got about as much to do with a Mohawk or a Crow as a Dutchman does with a Hawaiian. And every one a them tribes think they got the direct line to the Great Spirit and all the others is just dogs with two legs. So you can imagine it wasn’t no picnic when they stuck you in a room where none of the other three boys talked your language.”

“So you’d have to speak English.”

“That was the idea.”

“Seems reasonable.”

“I throw you in a room with a Italian, a Swede, and a Polack and say you got to talk Chinese, how you like it?”

Hod finds a bare patch of floor and stamps his feet a few times. He rode a gondola car through Idaho once with a bindlestiff who’d had all his toes frozen off, and ever since is worried when he can’t feel his own.

“
To save the man
,” says Big Ten, putting his hand over his heart to quote, “
you got to kill the Indin
. That was the motto of the fella who started up the School. And they done their level best, believe me. The first day, if you don’t already have a white name you got to go up to a blackboard and point one off a list. So in my room there was Jeremiah Fox Catcher and Clarence Red Cloud and Henry Yamutewa and me. Clarence was there mostly like a hostage, to keep his old man and uncles on the reservation with the rest of the pacified Sioux.”

Hod gives Big Ten a once-over. If you didn’t notice he never had to shave he could almost pass for white, Black Irish, with his hair cut short under that bowler and skin no more burned than Hod’s from a month in the fields.

“It was an old fort, see, with barracks, and then the first bunch of students that was prisoners from the Indin Wars put up some other buildings. They had me in the carriage shop. I didn’t mind the work none, I always been able to work, but the way you had to muster out to the horn in the morning and keep your bed a certain way and eat your food at the same time and then lights out—you ever been in the Army?”

“No,” says Hod. “Not the real one.”

“There was a boy my first year, Piegan boy from Montana, got so down he hung himself. That aint no way for an Indin to die.” Big Ten has his arms wrapped around himself, rocking slowly as he speaks. “I would have done the same it wasn’t for Gracie.”

“She was pretty?”

“She had the life spirit. They let the girls keep most of their hair and had them in their own kind of uniform dresses, which wasn’t so nice, but whenever I seen her she smiled and it lift me right up off the ground. Boys that age, all I could ever think of to say was ‘How are you doing?’ and always she would give me that smile and say ‘I am getting better every day.’ That was the other motto at the School, they had it writ on top of all the blackboards and it was in every other sentence in the newspaper we put out.
We are getting better every day
. You stay in a place four, five years and you get better every day, you get an idea how bad you must have been to start with.”

“You were there that long?”

“I aint proud of it,” says Big Ten. “It was great for some, they learnt a trade or went on to be lawyers or whatnot at the Dickinson College just down the way. Indins from all these different places, all these different ways of living, they was thrown together and seen what about them was alike. That changes the way you look at the world, you know? But for me—I was just there so my family could keep their land.”

Hod feels the train start to slow, no brakes yet but they are on flat ground and the bursts of steam outside are more sighs than snorts. Big Ten doesn’t seem to notice.

“The last night I was there, we got to talking in the room and Clarence Red Cloud says how he wants to go home and Fox Catcher says it’s the same for him, and then Henry who’s from one of them blanket tribes down in the southwest Territories he says he goes all the time. Now Henry is a fella can go months without he says a single word and we know he don’t go home even on the vacations they give us, Christian holidays, because he don’t have the jack for the train fare and they don’t trust him to come back. So we start to ridin him a little, especially Fox Catcher cause his Apaches got a long feud with these Hopis and that’s the kind of thing you tease someone at the School with, ‘Hey, my grandfather lifted your grandfather’s scalp back in ’65,’ or ‘What happened to that dog you was pettin? You didn’t eat it, did you?’ even though you might really be friends and stick together against the Sioux boys cause there was so many of them, and Henry gets riled and brings out this package his people sent him from the mission P.O. down there. He dumps out these little cactus buttons on his bed and Fox Catcher’s eyes get big and he says I know what
those
are. ‘You want to go someplace, chew on one of these,’ says Henry Yamutewa.

“Well, you know how young fellas is, they get together and someone lays down a dare. There wasn’t any spines on these buttons, they’d been pulled up and dried, and I chewed down four or five of em before I felt a thing other than Henry’s people must have an awful lot of time on their hands to bother with this nonsense, and then I got sicker than a dog and lay on the floor holding my stomach in. Never lost my chuck, but that made it worse.”