Hod hacks at the chalky ground as tow-headed Mormon boys crawl beside him. Big Ten is over two rows, backing up as he stabs his shovel down, leaving a jagged rut behind. The older Mormon boys have long-handled hoes, crouching to block out plants from the tangled mat of sugar beet, making them into separate islands of green, while the smaller ones crawl after them, rags wound around their bony knees, chopping each cluster back till only the thickest stem remains. The air is dry heat and flies and fine dust coughing up from the mat like a rug beaten on a line and flies, always flies this time of year, worrying your eyes and nose, frantic in your ear as you hack baked soil into yet more dust. Sweat runs off Hod’s face, cutting salty rivulets down his mask of dust and crisping away in the dry oven heat before it can reach the thirsty ground. Other young men, Saints, scrape out irrigation rows off to the right, joking and calling out to each other, keeping a cautious distance from him and the big Indian. Big Ten wears a bowler mashed down on his head and barely sweats, chopping his shovel down as if killing snakes.
Hod’s ditch is uneven but the first run of water will smooth it out. Saints got just enough sense to plant their stand near the American Fork, he thinks, and have jiggered all kinds of canals and gates, reservoirs and tanks to bring it close. There is no water at the moment, though, the little boys charged with running buckets making a wide arc around Hod and Big Ten to serve their own people, Hod’s tongue a dusty hank of wool stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands have blistered and cracked and blistered again, the gloves he bought in Reno worn through and tossed away two states ago, and there is sticky blood beneath his palms on the wood of the hoe.
“You been to Chicago?” asks Big Ten.
They’re not supposed to talk much, Indians, but this one never heard about it. In the barn at night Hod pretends to snore so he’ll shut the mouthworks down.
“Never got that far.”
“I tried it a few years back.”
“Find a job?”
Their blades fall into rhythm as they chop and shovel, Hod moving forward, Big Ten backing up.
“Oh, there’s plenty of work, you got a strong back and a weak mind.” He says he’s from Wisconsin, that he’s Ojibwe and Cree and at least half French. “Only it’s too jumbled-up there.”
If you don’t shift your hands on the shovel, just keep them clamped tight the same way, they won’t hurt so much.
“You ever been in these beets through a harvest campaign?”
Hod has bucked barley and wheat, has husked corn and dug potatoes, chopped and picked cotton, loaded melons and cut cane in Texas, even picked strawberries once. “Can’t say I have.”
“You turn the crop up, it’s a big fella—” the Indian works methodically, regular as a steam-hammer, “—slice the tops off for the sheep, knock away the dirt, and you got a nice fat sugar beet. Only sometimes it got the root-crazies. Then it isn’t just one taproot, it’s dozens of em, hundreds maybe, all twisted over and around each other. Make your stomach feel funny just to look at it.”
“I never seen that,” says Hod. “I come up, we had turnips, and they’d get the knot gall.”
Big Ten shakes his head as he chops. “Chicago they got so many different kind of people living all up against each other, over and under each other—if you know who you are when you get there you bound to forget it pretty damn soon.”
“A big city.”
“I kilt hogs there.” The shovel blade slams down and a chunk of crusted earth breaks free. “In the winter the steam come up from the blood when it’d blow out of em, then it froze hard on the ground. Hogs’d shit, scream, kick, and die. Haul that one away, there’s another thousand pressing down the chute to take its place. I come back nights, somebody look at me wrong, I just as well cut their throat too.”
There is no anger in the telling, the Indian fixed on the hard ground at his feet, chopping and digging.
“Believe I’ll give it a pass then,” says Hod.
Big Ten wears huge clodhopper brogan shoes with twine for laces and black pants and a black undertaker coat he never takes off even in the middle of the day with the old dusty bowler crammed down over his ears. He chops the shovel blade into the hard ground the Mormon boys have exposed with their thinning, twists and flicks the soil aside. Hod is slashing with a hoe, the heaviest he could find in the barn, and would be swinging a rock pike if they’d offered him one. He can’t recall how many days he’s been cutting this ground, can barely remember, in the heat and the dust and the constant flies, how he came to be here.
“Only thing a place like that is good for,” says Big Ten, “is if you got to disappear.”
Disappearing is not Hod’s problem. There is a little piece of mirror glass, a jagged triangle stuck in one of the stall posts in the barn that he can’t help but look at least once a day while it is light, and the thought is always the same.
Still here?
“You got a reason to make yourself scarce?” asks Hod. The Indian has hinted before that he is some kind of fugitive.
Big Ten lifts his chin at something behind him. “Garvey comin.”
Hod sneaks a look back and there is Elder Garvey wandering through the beet-vacation boys, pretending to be looking over their work. Never good when the boss man steps into a field.
Hod puts his head down, chops at the earth. The stand of plants stretches to the horizon, flat and dusty green. It’s best never to look at the work ahead, just punish the little bit of it lying at your feet.
“You two!”
Hod blows flies away from his ear and turns to face the farmer. “I’m just loosenin it up,” he says, defensively. “Then I come back through with the shovel and scoop it out.”
Elder Garvey looks off past him to the untamed crop. They look you in the eye to holler orders and argue pay, but when they look away—
“I got kin showed up,” he says.
Hod has to peel his hands off the shaft of the hoe.
“You want us to finish the day?” asks Big Ten. He is still chopping the blade of his shovel down, still backing up as he digs.
“Figured you’d want time to find something else.”
Meaning we’re let go, thinks Hod. Meaning off the property by nightfall.
Big Ten drops his shovel in the jagged trench he has dug and starts to walk away.
“If it wasn’t kin,” mutters Elder Garvey, looking off to the other side of Hod. He told them there was work all the way past the harvest campaign. Back then there was fruit to pick down by Provo, there were shovel jobs for the railroad, but he promised them that this would last through the winter. “Pay you for a half-day,” he adds.
Hod nods and steps around the old man, carrying the hoe on his shoulder. The nickel-a-day thinners don’t look up as he passes, fixed on their little patch of pain, and the older boys turn their heads away and keep blocking. He drops the tool and catches up with the big Indian.
Grasshoppers and beetles scatter in a frenzy on the ground before them, uncovered by the tow-headed boys, and a flock of lake gulls feast on the insects, rising and falling like a white blanket flapped by the wind.
“Make a white man feel like a nigger,” Big Ten grumbles when Hod catches up. Hod chooses not to point out he is the only white man been fired this day, and gingerly pulls his fingers straight.
When they reach the yard, Normal, Garvey’s oldest son, has a plow laid upside-down and is sharpening the coulter with a file. “I got your pay,” he says without looking up. “Gon’ pick up some lumber at the station later, I could run you in.”
Big Ten grunts and they step into the barn. There is a family spread out around the bunks along the wall, a hungry-looking bunch with hair bleached near white from the sun and blue eyes so clear that at first Hod thinks they’re blind. His little pile of things is already laid out on the floor on a blanket, right beside Big Ten’s.
“We had to get settled,” says the one who looks like the father, scrawny and unshaven. Some of the anti-Manifesto crowd most likely, the kind where you can’t tell if the middling-sized girls are daughters or wives. Near a dozen of them if you count the twins chasing the cat across the floor and the one nursing from his mama on the bottom bunk. “Say if there’s anything you’re missing.”
Big Ten pokes his pile with the toe of his shoe, then wraps the corners of the blanket around it to make a bundle.
“Sorry,” says the man.
“Aint none of your fault,” says Hod. Scabs back in Montana had this look, hollow-ribbed people with their bodies set tense, staring big-eyed past the militia boys protecting them. They can always find somebody hungrier to replace you.
“We come in just this morning from Tooele,” the man says, “and he told us to get settled then get on out there in the field. Sorry to touch your belongins.”
Norm has the wagon hitched when they come out with their bundles. They climb onto the bed.
“Met your cousins,” says Hod, arranging his bundle so he can sit on it.
“No relations of mine.” Norm switches and the bay mare starts ahead. Norm looks like his old man, thin and hard-mouthed, dry as the soil. “It’s just you can’t be feeding Gentiles when your own turn up needing work.”
“I aint a Gentile,” says Big Ten, stretching out to lay his head on his own bundle. “I’m a Ward of the State.”
The people in Lehi barely poke their heads around the door before they close it again. There is no work for them at the stone works or the rolling mill or from any of the farmers who stop by the lumberyard, and the sugar works won’t hire again till harvest. Hod wonders if it would be any different if he wasn’t with the Indian, but mostly if they see a lone man knocking they think you’re on the bum and pull their pies in from the window. It is late afternoon by the time Hod and Big Ten get themselves hid in the ditch just south of the railyard.
“Eastbound or westbound?”
Big Ten lifts up as if to take in the lay of the land. “How much Utah is there to get through going west?”
“Bout the same as east, only it’s all desert.”
“Colorado, then.”
The tracks above the ditch have three rails, converted from narrow gauge and polished with constant traffic. They duck down and wait while a couple little bobtails hauling local freight and an engine hauling passenger cars pass by.
“When the last time you bought a ticket?”
“Can’t say,” answers Hod after a moment’s thought. “Me and the railroad got an agreement.”
“But only you know about it.”
The men laugh. Hod has been on the bum too many times, alone and without a job, and it is no good. Bad enough when the other citizens look through you, but when you got to pinch yourself to know you’re there—
“Freight coming.” Big Ten peeks up over the edge of the ditch. “Pulling a full load.”
“What line?”
“Denver and Rio Grande.”
Hod grins. “Through the Rockies, Not Around Them.”
“Don’t care how they go, long as we get clear from the Land of Milk and Honey here.”
They let the engine pass, sneezing short bursts of hot steam as it picks up speed, then scramble out of the ditch, bundles tied to their arms, and run up the bank to the railbed. This part always makes his heart pound. Big Ten grabs the side ladder at the head of a boxcar and vaults up on the stirrup below it, graceful despite his size, but the train is really rolling now, thousands of rumbling tons, an avalanche on wheels that Hod sprints to keep up with till the best he can do, panicking, is catch the grab irons at the back of the car and swing his legs up off the railbed.
The moment he is borne away he knows it is folly. Unless the train slows again he is stuck, no way up, no way around to the coupling that won’t put him under the wheels. Big Ten shoots a doleful look back, then hauls himself up the ladder with one hand, the other holding his hat on his head, and disappears. Hod watches the bank fly past, hoping for a spot soft enough it won’t kill him when he lets go. It is all jagged rocks and piles of crossties this close to the yard, and the wind shifts to blow black smoke back on him from the stack, cinders clattering against the boards and stinging his face. Only question now is which and how many of his bones are going to be shattered. Hod’s arms are trembling, just about to push away, when a rope made from clothes tied together dangles down above him. He makes a snatch for it and hopes that somewhere the Indian learned how to jerk a decent knot.
Big Ten has to grab Hod’s belt to get him over the top. Hod lies on his belly hugging the wood of the roof for a moment, catching his breath.
“Where’d you learn how to nail a rattler?” Big Ten hollers over the wind.
“Haven’t tried it for a while.”
It is a long train, maybe thirty cars, but the grade is flat and straight and anyone looking ahead from the doghouse cupola will see them. Hod lays his hand on Big Ten’s shoulder to steady himself, knees still wobbly, as they cross the roofwalk to the front of the car. The access hatch is open. Hod takes a last look as the engine swings left toward the Wasatch Range looming ahead, then squeezes through and climbs down.
The hold is crammed with jute bags full of grease wool.
“Bit gamey,” says Big Ten, “but she’ll be a soft ride.”
The odor of sheep is rank in the box, which rocks gently on the long turn, rails clicking underneath. There are towns ahead where there may or may not be work. At some point there will be railroad bulls to dodge and it will be cold and Hod has only a hard lump of bread wrapped in a handkerchief and seven dollars and change in his pocket. But for now they are moving, compliments of the D&RG, rolling on company iron to the Wasatch Mountains and Hod feels a warm rush of contentment course through him. Luxury to be neither here nor there but in the neutral embrace of travel.
“Can’t beat these side-door Pullmans for comfort.”
“Yeah,” answers Big Ten, shifting huge bags of fleece to make a bed, “we’re a pair of kings.”
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.”
“So why do they eat them?”
“For their religion. You’re supposed to see things.”
“Things.”
“Visions. Indin stuff.”
“Eagles and snakes.”
“Hopi things if you’re a Hopi, Navajo things if that’s what you are. Me, I just left.”
“You ran away?”
“I flew.”
They are coming to rest, a wave of sound rolling back as the couplings knock together.
“I flew out the window—we were on the second floor—flew across the parade ground. Not flapping my arms or anything, just—your body lifts up and goes wherever you think. So I flew in through the window of the girls’ dormitory and Gracie Metoxen was there warm and smiling in her bed, awake while all the other girls were sleeping, waiting for me, smiling that smile, but she was too heavy to carry away so I just lay with her awhile and then right before the sun come up I flew out the window again and never stopped.”
Voices pass outside the boxcar. If they start to open the door, thinks Hod, we can burrow down into the sheep’s wool.
“You went home?”
Big Ten shakes his head. “First thing they do, they wire the Indin Agent where you live, and he puts the law out on you. If you’re a Ward of the State and you leave Carlisle without they let you, you’re an outlaw. I just kept going.”
Big Ten looks toward the door as if just realizing they have stopped. “We’re here.”
“Where?”
“It don’t matter. Time to get out.”
The Indian stands and peels his fleece off.
“The girl,” says Hod, getting up as well. “Gracie—”
“I run into an Oneida fella up in Oregon picking apples,” says Big Ten, stepping up on the access ladder. “There was a spell of consumption went through the School, it took her and some of the others. They got their own little cemetery out back, the white-people kind with the stones. Probably where she is now.”
It is a division yard, big, with lots of other freights on the sidings and lots of car-knockers hurrying to and fro with their lanterns. Hod and Big Ten get down off the side of the boxcar and creep low along the train trying to get their bearings, feet on the crossties so they don’t crunch the ballast.
The railroad bull is standing hidden on top of a coupling, with no lantern and a shotgun in his arms.
“Run and I blow your damn heads off.”
Hod glances to Big Ten, who turns to stone.
“Where we at, Mister?” asks Hod without turning around.
“You’re in my freight yard is where you’re at. March.”
He brings them to the switchman’s shed that is lit up and has a sheriff’s deputy and another fella wearing some sort of badge inside, both drinking from a pint bottle and in a playful mood.
“What we got here?” says the deputy, feet up on the desk.
“Got this broke-nosed tramp here,” says the railroad bull, “and the Last of the Mohicans. Or maybe the Next to Last.”
“You come in on that freight?” asks the deputy.
“You know, it did cross our mind to jump on it,” says Hod. It is always a negotiation with the bulls. If you’re too scared they walk all over you and if you’re too bold they crack your skull. “But we had second thoughts.”
“You trespassing on railroad property. That’s a crime.”
The other one stands up then and looks them both over, putting his face too close.
“Ever do any mining?”
“Some.” Hod answers him. “I can handle a Burleigh and I can work the timber, and hell, anybody can lift a shovel.”
“How bout you, Chief?”
Big Ten takes a long time to answer, considering his options, and when he speaks he looks at Hod instead of the man in front of him. “They’ll stick me underground when I’m dead,” he says. “No need to push my luck.”
The deputy and the other man with a badge and the railroad bull all laugh at this, then the deputy puts the irons on Big Ten and takes him off to jail. The Indian doesn’t look back. They aren’t friends, exactly, but when you travel with someone for a distance—
The man whose badge is for the Ibex Mines leads Hod outside and off in the other direction.
“What’s your name, son?”
They are stepping over the shunt tracks and in between cars being shifted back and forth, the business of the yard continuing despite the threat of two hungry, jobless men stealing a ride on a boxcar. For an instant Hod considers giving his real name but then thinks better of it.
“Metoxen,” he says. “Henry Metoxen.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Polish.” The headache is back now, worse than before, and he is having a hard time catching his breath. “We’re pretty high up, aren’t we?”
“This is Leadville, son. The Cloud City.”
There are lots of lights up on the hill they have started to climb, and from the flats off to the right Hod can hear music. They pass a little cemetery, crooked stones and crosses leaning into the slope, and he thinks of the Indian girl behind the school. He thinks of his mother’s lonesome grave back on the old man’s folly of a quarter section, the Mennonites shaving a little closer to it with their plows every year.
“You’ll make two-fifty a day—three dollars if you really can run a drill. First week goes to the deputy down there—that’s your fine.”
“Thought the silver kings all went bust.”
“We’re still pulling gold out of the Little Johnny, lots of it.” He indicates ahead of them. “This is Carbonate Hill—we’ll put you up in the company barracks here, charge a dollar a day.”
“Meals?”
“That’s your lookout.”
Hod wishes there was more air to breathe, and he made three-fifty back in Butte, but he’s done enough jail for a lifetime. The mine dick gives him a look as they climb.
“You a drinking man?”
Kansas was dry and his old man a temperance fiend and somehow that has stuck with him. “No sir.”
“You stay in Leadville,” smiles the man with the badge, “you’ll want to take it up.”