Return of Little Big Man (16 page)

She said this in her usual flat, apparently calm fashion but I begun to sense a real strong emotion underneath.

“Well, Miss, let’s just say I’ll be proud to help out if I can. If you want me to do some translating, like I done between Wild Hog’s bunch and the legal authorities, I’ll be happy to do it, and there won’t be no charge.”

She had still been staring at me with them big indigo eyes, but now she blinked in what I took for a slight softening of manner, and she says, “We certainly wouldn’t expect you to work for nothing. We will provide quarters and food and a stipend of...” She proceeded to name so low a figure I can’t even recall what it was, these many years after, but it didn’t seem to matter, for I repeated that I wouldn’t charge anything, having adequate income from my present situation.

The fine flanges of her pale nose flared slightly as if she smelled something unpleasant. “You’ll have to give up tending bar,” said she, revealing she knowed more about me than her Ma did.

“Ours is a boarding school, in ——,” naming a place some distance away, which I won’t identify for reasons that will be self-evident.

Now I could of ended the discussion at that point, unless I really wanted to forsake a profitable job pouring whiskey for cowboys who bought more the drunker they got, and go to a religious boarding school for Indians at wages that was less than the colored fellow, an ex-slave, got for mopping out the Lone Star. It wouldn’t be long before I built up another nest egg and started thinking again of opening that place of my own. Why, I might go on to become another Dog Kelley, the businessman-mayor, and get married to a young future Mrs. Epps or Mrs. Teasdale, and have an offspring like Amanda, who somewhere within her severity was not only a young girl but, I recognized, a basically handsome one who however could use some fattening up as well as a realization of what was eating
her.

But I have said I was sick of the side of Dodge I knowed and was coming to see that hanging around that church was not a successful alternative, having little in common with the folks there, with the exception of this Amanda insofar as she was involved with Indians. I was also aware of her femininity, probably more than she herself was at this time. I’ve had a remarkable partiality to the ladies all my life, as is no secret by now to the reader of this life story of mine. Young white women can be vexsome, owing to an abundance of expectation, but I consider myself fortunate to have knowed them when I did, which was long ago, for when a man gets past ninety the only females around him tend to be nurses.

Anyway, I ended up taking the job offered by Amanda, and thus begun my involvement, such as it was, in educating Indians to be white people.

I
NEVER SAID GOODBYE
to Bat Masterson, for he had previously left Dodge himself, without a goodbye to me, to go to Leadville in Colorado Territory, where they had lately struck silver. As when he headed for the Deadwood gold strike, getting only as far as the town of Cheyenne, his primary interest was gambling and not prospecting. I was not unusual for the time in wandering throughout the West. Everybody done it—everybody that is who didn’t settle down on some land and make a go of ranching or farming and raise children, so I expect I ought to say everybody who didn’t do nothing much to civilize the place, everybody, that is, you’ll pardon the coarse saying, with a wild hair in his arse. This sure included Wyatt Earp, who also left Dodge, in his case to go to Tombstone in Arizona, where he was soon followed by the painless but lethal and consumptive dentist Doc Holliday.

To get to the mission school, me and Amanda traveled by railroad, finally getting off at a town where we was met by an old colored fellow driving a wagon. Amanda lost no time in climbing up to sit right beside him, which got her stares from the other people on the platform and from the windows of the train as it pulled away, for a white woman didn’t properly place herself on an equal level with a man of a darker race, and that included Mexicans.

She had not sat next to me on the train, placing a number of bundles on the seat alongside her, and having paid for a bath at the barbershop I hoped it wasn’t because of my odor, but we could not of conversed anyhow. In them cars the noise of the steam engine was deafening, and you had to keep an eye open for the glowing cinders that blowed in through the windows along with those that was not burning, just dirty. I was filthy by the time we got off, but oddly enough, especially given her pale skin and gold hair, Amanda still looked spotless.

We finally reached the school after jolting some miles in that wagon with me riding not up on the seat with the driver and Amanda, not having been invited to do so, but in the bed of the wagon with the luggage and lots of sacked supplies the driver had picked up in town. The school consisted of one big whitewashed three-story building and several smaller structures, all appearing fairly new, and some distance off, a weatherbeaten barn with a few head of livestock visible and beyond them fields of tawny grain rippling in the breeze. Between the buildings would of been the usual dust of that part of the world, but rain had fell overnight and instead it was the comparably usual mud.

The wagon crawled slowly up to the big building and came to a sticky stop. Amanda steps down into the mud and sweeps her white hand towards the grounds. “It’s still raw,” she said. “One of the projects the boys are working on is getting a lawn to grow from seed, but as you know that takes a long time and Indians are impatient.”

I agreed, though knowing nothing about domestic grasses, and added, “When it comes to plants they pick what grows by itself.”

Amanda was frowning, an expression she wore a lot. “We have our work cut out for us.” She nodded her smooth steep forehead at the building before us. “This is the dormitory: boys’ side to the left, girls’ to the right.”

As I found out later, there were two distinct entrances and though it was a single structure, a partition divided the interior. From one side you couldn’t get to the other without going outside to the other door, either in front or back.

Amanda told me now I would be shown to my personal quarters later, but it was suppertime at the moment and though we was already quite late we shouldn’t be no later, and she hikes off in the mud, besliming her shoes and the lower hem of her dress, so I had to do so too, regardless of a fairly new set of boots, and we reached the one-story building that turned out to house the dining hall and kitchen.

Not a soul but us had been seen till now, but there the whole school was at long tables inside the big bare-board room, all the swarthy-faced, black-haired young Indians, which given my experience was not in itself an unusual sight were it not that I had never seen so many members of that race arranged in alignment, seated on chairs and not the ground. But there was an even more unusual feature: they was all dressed alike, according to sex, the girls in blue-figured gingham dresses, the boys in blue-gray uniforms like soldiers’, with short tunics buttoning to the neck and navy stripes up the pants. In addition, all of them, boys and girls, had their hair cut short.

As if this wasn’t enough, there didn’t seem to be no talking amongst them, and Indians was not naturally a quiet folk when with their own kind, all the less so when eating, which they did fairly enthusiastically. Given the relative rarity that they could count on having enough food, they tended to chew and swallow wolf- or bear-style when nourishment was before them. But these lads and girls looked more like they was in a class than at a meal, with rigid spines against the chair backs and no expressions of face.

At the head of each of the tables, which was either for all boys or all girls, was a white person of the staff, and at one side of the hall, at right angles to the others, was a shorter table at which sat a whiskered, bald gent in, I’d say, his late fifties. He didn’t grow no hair on his scalp but had a bushy gray beard which concealed whatever kind of collar and tie he wore. He showed a stern look when no other was called for, so on first meeting up with him you might of thought he would necessarily be disagreeable, but he could be real pleasant, as now when Amanda Teasdale brung me to him, and he stood up smiling politely while she apologized for being late to supper but says she is happy to be able to deliver the sum of money collected by her church in Dodge, where she also found that translator of the Cheyenne language they had been looking for.

“Major,” she says, surprising me for he wasn’t in no uniform and I took him for a preacher, “this is Jack Crabb.”

He works my hand like a pump handle, but just twice. “Mr. Crabb,” says he. “We are pleased to see you here. Won’t you sit down?” He did so himself. When me and Amanda did the same, I noticed there wasn’t no plate nor eating tools before him as yet, which relieved me some, for I was right hungry by then. “It might seem paradoxical to you at the outset,” he goes on, “when I say that the purpose of your fluency in Cheyenne for us is to discourage the students from speaking that language.” He smiled as if what he meant was self-evident.

“Major,” says I, “I was wondering if you could make sense of that for me.”

He raised his still dark eyebrows in apparent wonderment, but said, in a paternal way, “It’s simple when explained—as I always told my boys in the Tenth Cavalry.” His eyes twinkled. “They were Negroes.” He makes a solemn gesture with his beard. “Our purpose here being to exterminate the wretched savage”—he waited a little, smiling ever broader, to let the provocation of that comment settle in—“
and replace him with a fine man,
we must begin with the fundamentals, of which language is primary, I hope you agree.” He never waited till I answered, which was just as well, for I didn’t have no idea whatever of where he was aiming. “What seems paradoxical is that to teach a man to quit his old language and adopt a new one, he must first be addressed in his original tongue, else he will never grasp the idea.” The Major blinked his eyes. “I know: we tried that. But we are learning. Hence you are here.”

There still hadn’t been a sound throughout the dining hall that I heard and nobody was showing up with food. I had caught a faint smell on entering, but that had diminished. As I figured the meal might be waiting on this conversation, I was quick to respond in a way you do when a point’s been well made. “Kee-rect.”

“Mr. Crabb,” said the Major, “having served as an Army officer for a number of years before becoming a minister of the Gospel, I am accustomed to being addressed as ‘sir.’ As all my other staff observe this practice, it would be awkward if you did not. This is not a military institution, true. But you
are
my subordinate.”

Actually he said this in a real nice way. I don’t want to give the impression that the Major was a bad fellow, though you might call him a fool.

“I don’t mind, sir,” I says. “And I take it you prefer to be called Major over Reverend.”

He waves a finger at me. “You are quite right, Mr. Crabb! It is simply explained: were I only a parson, with a Sunday sermon to deliver each week and visits to the sick and infirm in between, ‘Reverend’ would of course be more appropriate. But directing this school has more in common with an Army command. Also, in the realm of language ‘Major’ has more dynamic connotations than does the other term.”

Now Amanda was sitting right next to me, taking all this in and, despite her opinionated nature judging from her attitude towards me, she is saying nothing. Partly to needle her, and partly because it seemed polite, I included her in what I said next. “Sir, I was wondering if we might get a bite to eat. Me and Miss Teasdale just had a railroad ride all day without any food.” Amanda wasn’t the kind of woman who provides or even thinks about meals, and the train, which, in them days before dining cars, used to stop at a town and let the passengers off to feed at mealtimes, hadn’t done so on this trip, having to make up for a delay up the line.

“Aha,” the Major says, as if at a revelation, “but you see we finished our meal a few minutes ago.” He swept his coat back and went into a vest pocket and brung out a big silver turnip of a watch, which he studied. “Six and a half, to be exact. The tables were then cleared. Were it not for your appearance, the benediction would have been offered by now and the students would have filed out. I’m afraid you must wait for tomorrow’s breakfast, Mr. Crabb. We dine here precisely on time and do no eating between meals. If this seems stern, there is a reason. The Indian is a shiftless soul in his natural state, knowing no order, no direction, no principles. He lives as the wind blows—namely, at random—eating when he has food, abstaining when he has none, like an animal and not a human being. But he is
not
an animal, Mr. Crabb. He is a man, and as precious in the eyes of God as any other. To despise him is sinful. To help him realize himself as God’s creation is our duty as Christians.”

I should say right here that the Major was real sincere in his beliefs, and his interest in the red man was honestly based on his religious faith. He weren’t putting contributions to the school into his own pocket, he never had carnal connections with the female students or them on the staff like at some other institutions of the kind (nor was he a
heemaneh),
and he didn’t show any ambition to move on to a higher post in either education in general or his church in particular.

But I didn’t take kindly to the idea of going without food all day and all night, in the support of opinions not my own, and I might of quit then and there had I not been in country unfamiliar to me, without weapons or transport.

The Major now gets to his feet, followed by the rest of the assemblage—damn if it were not a strange sight to see Indians do anything in unison!—and gives a loud, clear, but real boring prayer that went on forever, after which the students line up in military order, table by table. Now Indians was normally quite curious about what went on around them: you got to be if you’re living off the land. But these young people didn’t pay no attention to one another or their surroundings, and from their expressions or lack thereof, they didn’t seem preoccupied by anything else either. They seemed in a kind of spell, which in fact was not in itself an unusual state for a redskin, who in the sun dance for example would get into a trance in which he didn’t feel it when he tied thongs to his chest skin that subsequently got ripped out.