IT IS A PITCHOUT AROUND THE RIGHT END, JESSE TUCKING THE ball and putting his head down, seeing that the corner hasn’t been fully blocked and planting his foot for a sharp cut back in, knee locked when the player, a Mandan from D Company, puts his shoulder into it. Everybody on the field can hear the snap and then Jesse is down and screaming, still holding the ball clutched against his belly as he lies on his back, undamaged leg bent and pushing at the ground, the other twisted at an angle that is hard to look at. Antoine, who had been watching idly from the sideline, is one of the three who lift Jesse up and carry him, gasping the same phrase in Pawnee over and over, toward the hospital. Someone stuffs a rolled handkerchief in his mouth to bite on, and Jesse makes rhythmic noises through his teeth as they hurry along.
Clarence comes in to wait outside the examination room with Antoine and a few of the other boys, Captain Pratt arriving a few minutes later, saying nothing to them. When Dr. Hazzard comes out he looks grave, speaking only to the Captain.
“Compound fracture, torn ligaments—he might lose that leg.”
Pratt nods grimly, turns to the boys.
“That is the end,” he says. “There will be no more football at Carlisle.”
The tall white man, Skinner, is standing in the doorway, waving with his arm.
“Come on out. Your time is up.”
Trouble looks to the two Apache boys, who smile and make shooing gestures to him. It is just as cold outside as it is inside the guardhouse, not a leaf left on any of the trees, a stiff wind blowing from the west. Skinner takes him straight to the spray bath, where water shoots down from above when you turn the metal, and waits on the other side of the low wall, not looking, as Trouble lets it fall on him and uses the soap, careful to keep it from getting into his eyes. When he is done there is a towel hanging over the low wall and a fresh set of uniform clothes sitting folded on a chair. His old clothes are nowhere to be seen. Skinner leans against the wall, arms crossed in front of his chest. When Trouble is all buttoned in, Skinner walks him to the entrance of the large boys’ dormitory, and watches him climb the stairs, not another word passing between them.
The others are still at class when Trouble comes into the room and lies down on his bed. He is hungry, and will go out to muster when the bugle blows for dinner. In the guardhouse he kept thinking, maybe even dreaming, about his father’s horse. His cousins told him it was the envy of all the small boys, who bragged how they were going to find and steal a horse like that from their enemies. After his father was killed, the horse was prepared with special paints, special designs, feathers woven into its mane and tail, all the while being told what was about to happen. His cousins said that when the horse was led to his father’s scaffold to be killed, it pranced and held its head high, displaying its pride at the honor.
Trouble lies on his bed and pictures the horse, wondering if when all the Lakota who have ever been before return to the land of the living, chasing after the great herd of buffalo, his father will be riding on its back.
Miss Redbird has suggested that the students rehearsing for the Thanksgiving celebration be allowed to do so in the assembly hall this evening, so they have a sense of its size and of how powerful a voice will be required to be heard by all. She sits in the extreme rear row as Lizzie Cloud stands on the platform that will be expanded into a stage, singing Love’s Sweet Song. Grace and Antoine sit in the first row, waiting their turn, Grace with her eyes closed and her lips moving as she goes through her lines.
“He’ll be on crutches for who knows how long,” says Antoine, “but they’re not going to amputate.”
Grace opens her eyes, looks annoyed.
“And you were in on it.”
“I wasn’t even playing.”
“But you were there. Wasn’t there something in the newspaper saying the football boys were getting out of hand—”
“You always follow the rules—”
“I attempt to. Did you ever work on a farm?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Did you?”
“A couple times, for wages—”
“How did you like it?”
“Not much.”
“If you don’t do well with your schoolwork, if you make yourself a nuisance, they’ll send you for an Outing. Maybe permanently.”
“Not until I’m here for two years—”
“For you they might make an exception.”
“And you’d miss me terrible, wouldn’t you?”
Grace has to smile at this. “I doubt I could bear it.”
“Your roommate, that Wilma, she went—”
“She went because she thinks the teachers are all against her.”
“Do you think that’s true?”
Grace considers—
“Not all. But enough.”
Lizzie has stopped singing and Miss Redbird is telling her how to stand to get more from her voice.
“I would, really,” says Grace, looking away from him. “I would miss you.”
THE FLIES ARE THE WORST OF IT. Big, lazy, biting things, they should be dead from the cold by this time of year, but in the closed barn the heat from the cows is likely keeping them alive. There are at least a half dozen of them worrying each drowsy heifer’s swinging tail, another few crawling on their faces. Wilma’s favorite activity on the farm so far is killing them, a swatter made from a stick and a patch of wire screen always at reach. She tries to get five—whap! whap! whap! whap! whap!—before she even thinks about her other chores.
Today is Saturday and the farm mother’s sister and her family are coming, which means a hen for dinner, and the birds are running around up in the loft. Wilma climbs the ladder and it is a worse smell than the cows or even their old wagon horse, a sharp smell, and she croons to them in Absaroke as if she’s just come for eggs. She knows which one she wants.
She hadn’t really thought through a hard winter when she signed on for Outing. They have a good, deep well here, and it’s her job every morning to go out and drop the bucket down, tilting it just right so it will crack through the layer of ice that forms overnight, then let it sink till it fills and haul it up hand over hand. Then pour the bucket into the pails, one, two, three, and bring the pails in for the morning’s cooking and cleaning. One time she got the bucket trapped under a thicker than usual layer of ice and Mr. Hauptman had to come to yank it free. There is a crank pulley over the well opening, but it’s broken and Mr. Hauptman hasn’t gotten time to fix it yet.
Wilma turns quickly and snatches the hen, a surly barred Plymouth Rock with one eye pecked out, holding it upside down by the legs, the bird gibbering and flapping till the blood goes to its head and it becomes dead weight. Then she quickly flips it up, grabbing the neck in two hands to give a hard twist—
The other chickens complain and flutter back into their roosts, feathers left hanging in the air, and Wilma backs carefully down the ladder, taking up the flyswatter again when she reaches the bottom. There were always flies around the camp ponies when she was a little girl, but those were kept away from the tipis, hobbled so they could move to graze but not easily run away, and she used to love to watch the boys and young men run out to catch them in the morning, the animals making a kind of game of it. She envied them so. Her father had several horses and she knew each by its spots or blazes, even by their gait, but he and her brothers were the ones who got to go catch them, to ride them. The closest she got was helping her mother load everything on their backs when they moved camp, and then the flies seemed to understand when you had too much in your hands and couldn’t drop it and they were free to bite you at will.
Wilma flops the bird onto the block, whacks its head off with the cleaver, swiftly guts it with the knife Mr. Hauptman keeps extra sharp, and hangs it on a hook over the enamel basin to bleed out. She listens for a moment, hears nobody crunching over the ground outside, then pulls the rag out from her blouse and lets a few drops fall in the center of it. She carefully wads the rag up, stuffs it back into her blouse, and heads back to the house where things are boiling.
The water in the big pot on the iron stove is starting to roll and will be ready to scald the bird for defeathering. She walks through the house quickly, noting that Mrs. Hauptman is sitting by the fireplace darning socks, then goes out the side door toward the woodshed, a good-sized fire already set under the washing tub, which is filled with a heap of sodden overalls and a few of her own unmentionables. She pulls the bloodied rag out and tosses it in, grabs the paddle and gives the wet clothes a stir around, using all her strength.
Still doing laundry.
She watches the rag swirl around, ready to pluck it out when there’s still a pinkish stain in the center. It’s only the second one she’s missed, so it might not be the worst, but she knows they—or at least the missus—are watching her. No word from or sign of Sweetcorn. She doesn’t even know if he’s still at Carlisle.
Wilma dips the paddle to pull the rag out, letting it steam in the air. She’s been given her own little clothesline on the side of the house where Mr. Hauptman and the boys don’t often go—“privacy for your ladies’ items,” Mrs. Hauptman called it. But Wilma knows there is no hiding from the school, that the Man-on-the-Bandstand is probably up on a tree limb watching her right now, and she wants to be sure the missus sees the rag and its stain hanging out on her line, telling its story, like one of the foreign flags they were shown in geography class—which one was it?
Maybe Japan?
THEY ‘VE BEEN CALLED TOGETHER for a “special demonstration,” thirty of the older new boys, crowded into the metalworking shop with Mr. Boswell, who the veteran boys call Boz and who is hard to look at because the lenses of his spectacles are so thick they make his eyes look far too large.
He beckons them to crowd around a compact dynamo with lots of gleaming copper wire wound around a shaft, many attachments hanging from it.
“The simplest form of electrical charge is what we term static electricity,” he says, taking up two cables that hang from the device, each attached to a kind of hand grip. He looks around, chooses Trouble—
“If you’ll just hold these for me—”
Trouble takes the grips in his hands, clearly confused about what is being explained. Mr. Boswell begins to turn a crank on the machine.
“Though it has limited practical use, we can generate this form of charge—”
Smokey realizes that this is some sort of a joke, and knows that Trouble is the wrong person to play it on. Boswell begins to crank harder—
“Don’t worry, it won’t bite you—”
Trouble’s hands and arms begin to tremble rapidly, his hair standing straight out from his head till the boy shakes the grips violently from his cramped fingers with a tiny bolt of lightning crackling from each to his hands, sending him reeling backward to the wall, terrified—
“—though it might shock you a bit!”
Half of the other boys laugh and half are equally shaken by the phenomenon. Trouble stares at his hands to see if they’ve been burned.
“Now if we wish to channel that electrical energy into a current—”
Asa is glad that Trouble is back, but the boy barely looks at him or the other roommates. Asa watches him, sitting cross-legged on his bed, doing something to his nightshirt. Asa wants to go home too, but knows he’ll never make it by running.
There are other ways.
Asa lies on his back, checking to see that neither Smokey nor Antoine are looking, then reaches his hand down between the mattress and the springs to find the leather pouch with the buds in it. He only had time to find a few dozen before he was sent away, hiding the pouch in the bottom of the carpetbag he carried on the train. He works his fingers to dig out four, slips them into his mouth, chews, wincing at the bitter taste.
He hears Antoine muttering the prayer he always has on his lips, the only word Asa recognizes, having heard it again and again, sounds like “Hiawatha.” Maybe something in Ojibwe, not English.
Asa swallows, waits for it to happen. The thing that carries you grows in your stomach at the beginning, fighting to get out, and when he first ate the buds he thought you had to fight to keep it in. There is a white bowl on the floor next to his shoes, just in case, but he has made this journey before and is rarely sickened by it.
Smokey also mutters, always struggling to read until the bugle makes them turn the lights out. If they ask him to stop he will, but still moves his lips as he works his way across the pages. They are not his family, Antoine, Smokey, and Trouble, not even his friends, really, but they are surviving this together.
And then he is looking down at himself lying on the bed on his back, eyes closed. It always amazes him how when he starts to expand, the room knows to grow bigger—
—as Trouble sits cross-legged on the bed, bending over with the brush he took from the sloyd class in hand, carefully painting a thunderbird on the back of his nightshirt. Antoine brought him the red ink from the room where they make the newspapers, not even asking why he needed it. Tomorrow he will bring the brush back and try to hide a knife or scissors in his pocket so he can cut the shirt shorter and make fringes at the bottom. One of the old medicine men at Standing Rock has a shirt like this, with a thunderbird and stars and a medicine wheel painted on it, but that shirt is made of deer hide. What Trouble is making will never have as much power, but if he wears it beneath his uniform at all times it will help to protect him. He knows one of the songs, taught to him in secret by the older boy who shovels coal, and sings it quietly as he paints—
—while Miss Burgess sits at her desk in the print shop, boys secure in their dormitories, machines at rest. She slants her letters in the opposite direction when she writes, hoping to disguise her hand, though she believes at least young Cato is wise to the true identity of the Man-on-the-Bandstand. This week something laudatory—
The MOTBS reads with pride the reports from the host families of our students in the Outing Program.
—she scribes. Dear Annie writes to her almost daily when she is on her supervisory circuit, complaining mildly of the weight she’s gained from too many hearty farm lunches, writes of the progress or petulance of the girls, of her loneliness at night. She spends those nights at the farms if necessary, or at the homes of concerned Friends in the vicinity, saving the school a good deal of outlay. With the shorter days, Miss Burgess has been going to bed earlier.
Steady work, good manners and a cheerful attitude elicit praise and occasional offers of permanent employment. There are no handouts in our modern world—
—and certainly not for never-married women of a certain age. The acceptable professions—teaching, nursing in some areas of the country, domestic work for those of that station—are few, and public opinion, assuming that you are somehow a failure, generally harsh. Her mother speaks of the multitude who wore their widow’s weeds with no little pride after the terrible culling of the Civil War, the wealthiest even trading their more colorful stones for jewelry fashioned of jet—Mother termed them the Black Legion. This was, of course, almost unheard of among Friends, with so few of their men willing to abandon their principles by picking up a rifle, no matter how strong their abolitionist sentiments. Miss Burgess often thinks of widows as retired military officers—encouraged to sport the uniform but no longer required to serve.
We only regret that our classmates in the field will miss our Thanksgiving festivities. The speakers, the various exhibitions, and of course the marvelous dinner.
Though it is not, literally, a Christian celebration, Thanksgiving is a wonderful way to introduce the least civilized of the students to the holidays celebrated by white America. They play an important role in the story, after all, and she enjoys the annual pageant with a handful of the students attired in bits and ends of Mrs. Pratt’s collection of native finery, standing with an equally bronzed and black-haired group of early settlers in pilgrim hats and buckle shoes.
We belong together is the message of the festival, she believes, though she knows in most minds it signifies nothing weightier than a large cooked bird on a platter.
She is encouraged by the subscriptions for Stiya that have come in thus far, and is still campaigning with Mr. Ellenbee to have him include it as required reading for his advanced literature students. Her little cautionary tale is not Shakespeare by any means, but with the folly on the reservations exciting national headlines every day, the students can well use a warning about the dangers of returning to the blanket—
We here at Carlisle, sheltered from the hysteria sweeping our Western reservations, have so much to be thankful for.
AGENT ROYER WAS HOPING, if only for the symbolic value, that the next Issue Day could be delayed till Thanksgiving. Perhaps a few of the more progressive Sioux on the reservation, or those who’ve come back from the eastern training school, could then explain the history of the festival to the hostiles, perhaps even explain the concept of “thanks.” Though it may be the weather, a hard, cold wind blowing steadily from the west, the present gathering lacks the festive air that has been described to him by the few holdovers in his service. Yes, many of the incorrigibles have consented to ride in from their camps, with their red wagons and their scrubby little ponies and their scrubbier little children. Yes, there are greetings and laughter as friends and relatives are reunited, though the last Issue was only two weeks ago, Commissioner Morgan weakly conceding to beg, in Agent Royer’s opinion, for peace through provender. But there is a sense of tension beneath it all, tension that has been building since the day he arrived to take over the agency at Pine Ridge. He has made himself extremely visible today, making a short speech that took far too long to translate, a smile on his lips as he nods and waves to sullen groups of his charges, posing for a photograph next to an impressive pile of commodities—it is important that all remember these goods do not just fall out of the sky, and that it is he who controls their dispersal—but he has asked Captain Sword to keep a pair of his policemen within sight at all times. The aspect he was not fully aware of till he arrived to take this post, the fatal oversight in policy that he still can barely believe, is that by treaty these savage people have been allowed to keep and carry their weapons.
These are much on display at the moment as the Indians crowd around the government corral, climbing up on the wooden rails, shouting and pointing, adding to the consternation of the long-horned beeves crowded within. Pistols in belts, lever-action Winchesters in hand—even some of the children seem to be armed with knives. Some might explain that this is normal for the beef issue, but Agent Royer believes it to be a conscious attempt at intimidation, the wards hoping to put their new warden in his place.
If so, they have underestimated Dr. D. F. Royer.
Young Humphrey, his good friend Weisbacher’s son who he has appointed as the agency quartermaster, is trying to decipher the hieroglyphs of the previous fellow, which are meant to assign a certain number of cattle to specific heads of household. Being new, however, the poor lad is at a loss as to whether Miss Shining Path or Mr. Crockery Face are indeed eligible to collect bounty for the absent Mr. Sings While He Walks. Agent Gallagher, notoriously a pushover, no doubt learned all their blood relations and thus curried favor—Royer plans instead to enforce a system of tightly controlled chits and receipts, and on the future issue days it will be no tickee, no washee.
The first three recipients are announced to a good deal of cheering, as if they have won a raffle, and the sorry spectacle begins. A bar is lifted, a quartet of steers driven out from the corral, and then with much yipping and whooping and raising of dust the animals are chased down on horseback and shot, often by two or three excited bucks at the same time, till they fall in a heap. Then the squaws and unmounted men crowd in with knife and axe, the butchered sections wrapped in bloody hide and loaded onto horseback and wagon. A nostalgic reminder of their glory days upon the plains when the slaughter of bison was the key to their livelihood, but another indulgence he will soon be able to curtail. Captain Sword advised him that ending the custom summarily would incite resistance his small force could not hope to control, so until the military chooses to honor Agent Royer’s desperate request for troops, he will have to delay that satisfaction.
What he’d had in mind, what he was just short of promised when he threw his energies into the campaign for Dakota statehood, was registrar of the land office, sure to be a nexus of influence as white homesteaders rush in to settle newly liberated farmlands. But when the worm turned in Washington and prizes were being handed out to the faithful, this was the best he was offered. Not a bad salary, said Senator Pettigrew. You’ll be something of a king down there, said the backroom power brokers. Do a good job, whip that bunch of recalcitrant redskins into submission, and you’ll be a hero in our new state, not to mention Nebraska—look at the national attention the press is bringing to the situation—and then who knows where it might lead you.
Agent Royer throws a glance toward the national press, the lay-abouts from the Hotel de Finley all here to watch, smoking and cheering the riders and thoroughly enjoying themselves. They are a persistent thorn in his side, and as he does possess somewhat dictatorial powers on the reservation, he has considered banishing the lot of them.
How much easier, he thinks as another terrified steer is hustled out to its doom, to do the entire slaughter and rendering within the corral—some of these bucks could even be paid wages for the service. He has experienced a slaughterhouse in Kansas City, a narrow chute and a Swede with a sledgehammer replacing all this shouting and shooting, this excitement on the very edge of anarchy. Disarming the troublemakers will be no easy task, of course, especially with this ghost dancing insanity, this recrudescence of paganism, infecting so many of his charges. He notes that several of the ringleaders are not present today, no doubt having sent minions to transport their entitlements back to their respective camps.
Much excitement now—one of the bullet-riddled steers, its tongue pulled out and partially severed from its base, suddenly revives and struggles to its feet, managing to hook one of the older squaws and then totter several yards before being brought down a second time in a hail of lead, which, fortunately or not, somehow fails to strike any of the host of enthusiastic spectators. William Cody himself could not have staged a more thrilling bit of Wild-Westing.
And people, mostly easterners, mourn the passing of this “noble” mode of existence.
When I get my soldiers, thinks Royer, we’ll have some order here. Let them collect their government handouts—but only in person. Let them refuse to have their children educated—and suffer the consequences. Let them go back to their old ways—with bows and arrows.
And tinned beef might be an option—
THE CELEBRATION IS HELD in the old gymnasium, a huge turkey made of batting covered with real feathers suspended from the rail of the overhead running track, students seated in wooden bleachers with the faculty in folding chairs carried in for the occasion. On the performance platform the Invincibles face off with the Standards, team members alternating in debate. Wesley Cornelius has the podium—
“The red man should not be expected to remain an Indian just because he is born an Indian,” he declares to the audience, “no more so than a man who is born in sin should remain a sinner.”
Original Sin, thinks Miss Redbird, who had the Catholic faith explained to her during her New York City sojourn. A champion debater herself, she is impressed with the young man’s ability to appear so committed to an argument that must repel him.
“Those who wish to preserve him in his present state would shelter a wild, untrained animal, having never been bitten by one.”
Or maybe, after eight years of Carlisle, he believes it.
Trouble, absent from the festivities and thankful for nothing, walks into the glow of a streetlight in an unfamiliar part of town, wearing the ghost shirt under his uniform jacket but not feeling invulnerable. Sweetcorn gave him a street name, wrote it on a piece of paper and handed it to him, and whenever he comes to a sign he holds the paper up to see if the writing shapes are the same. He hears music playing in a building across the street. He pauses to study a wooden statue, carved and painted to look like an Indian wearing a feathered headdress, holding a tomahawk in one hand and a small bundle of cigars, also carved in wood, in the other. Three young white men step out of the building with the music and begin to look at him the way he is looking at the wooden statue.
Don’t stare at me, he tells them in Lakota.
“What’s the matter, chief?” calls one of them. “Can’t find your wigwam?”
The Messiah says that if white soldiers come to arrest him he will only have to spread his arms wide and they will sink into the ground. And the ghost shirt, if made properly and given power by the songs, will keep the white man’s bullets from breaking his skin.
Trouble turns and walks straight toward the three.
“Aren’t you red boys supposed to stay inside the fence at night?”
Trouble makes a fist. He has seen the way they fight, two drunken traders back on Standing Rock making their hands into hard balls and clubbing each other. He punches the closest of the young men in the face—
—as Cato Goforth defends the opposite, pro-Indian view—
“Without the Indian,” he says, “the first white men who came to this land would have starved, would have been eaten by beasts or frozen to death in the long winter.”
White men’s debates, thinks Miss Redbird, never last as long as those in hunting camp or on the reservation. The point here is to tie your opponent’s hands and stifle his mouth with your logic, with the precision of your words. Indian debates are conducted so everybody understands clearly what the issues are, which paths are open and what dangers may lie down them. There are not meant to be winners or losers—those who disagree tend to do what they want to, even if the majority stand on the other side of the tree.
“Without the Indian, there would be no Thanksgiving in this country, or Christmas, or New Year, or Independence Day—”
—maybe he made the shirt in the wrong way, or it is meant to stop only bullets. Trouble lies on the ground, covering his head and genitals as best he can as they kick him. They wear hard shoes. He feels something snap in his side and then they stop. He hears shouting, uncovers enough to see, and there is Sweetcorn, throwing the white boys to the ground like they are broken saplings. When they can stand they back into the building with the music, yelling curses. Sweetcorn offers his hand to Trouble—
Stand up, he says in Lakota.
He helps Trouble to his feet, looks across to the building with the music.
We’d better move on.
Clarence Regal speaks last for the Invincibles, able to alter any prepared speech to refute what his opponents have stated earlier. There is a bit of a sneer in his voice—
“Name me one invention of the Indian vital to our age of machinery and progress,” he challenges. “What has he given us but tobacco, which rots the lungs and confuses the mind—”
Miss Redbird, close to tears now, knows how the Lakota boy feels. Each of the white man’s great inventions, when she first encountered them, both thrilled her and made her vaguely ashamed. There was the steam locomotive—what Indian mind could even imagine such a beast? And the rail that it thundered upon, reaching north, south, east, west, penetrating like an arrow into flesh, carrying the slaughterers of buffalo, the breakers of prairie sod. And the telegraph lines that followed beside the track, allowing men who might never meet to speak together, their words translated into woodpecker taps—
“The Indian consumes but does not produce, copies but does not innovate—”
Kills, thinks Miss Redbird, but does not destroy—
—and now the room that Sweetcorn has taken Trouble to is full of black men. The one Sweetcorn works with feeding the fires, Otis, sits beside them at the long counter, laughing and shouting out to other men he knows who he can somehow see through the smoke in the air. The black man behind the counter brings each of them a third bottle of beer.
“You know it’s against the law, servin’ Indins,” he says. “You got to behave.”
“I ever give you trouble?” asks Sweetcorn.
Trouble recognizes his name, wonders what they are saying about him.
“No,” says the bartender, pointing at Trouble, “but this one—”
“He be fine,” says Otis. “It’s whiskey they can’t handle, not beer.”
The bartender sniffs and drifts away. Sweetcorn swivels on his stool to look at the bruise on Trouble’s cheek, speaks in Lakota.
You should learn not to start a fight you know you’re going to lose.
Then we’d never fight at all, says Trouble.
Sweetcorn takes a pull on his bottle, switches to English. “Maybe so. Nowadays.”
Leslie John, the photographer’s assistant, finishes for the Standards.
“Is it moral,” he asks, “is it permissible to exterminate the race who have been the faithful stewards of the land upon which your prosperous government stands?”
Antoine, in his buckskin and single eagle feather, waits to the side of the platform, listening. The other Invincibles have been teaching him about something called rhetoric, which is a weapon that can be used by anyone able to pick it up, used to explain or to confuse, for good purposes or bad. His mother has told him of the treaties her great uncle felt forced to agree to, twisted pathways full of words meant to fool you, to trap you.
“Is there no gratitude?” pleads the Puyallup boy. “Is there no humanity?”
The ground is unsteady. Trouble holds his arms out from his sides, as if he is crossing a stream on a narrow log. Somewhere he has lost Sweetcorn, but he thinks he knows which direction the school lies in, though none of the white people buildings around him are familiar. He wants to do it at the school—
Antoine goes over his lines, his story, in his head, while Lizzie Cloud plays something rolling and stormy on the piano. He is amazed by her, so many of the black and white keys to choose from, the sound the instrument makes able to be high and low at the same time. Not amazed that she is an Indian, who have music in their lives every day, but that anybody could pull such a complicated song from such a complicated machine.
He can look across the platform, past Lizzie at the big wooden instrument, and see Grace, shifting nervously from one foot to the other in her fringed buckskin dress and moccasins and beads, her hair parted in the middle and twisted into a pair of long braids. When he catches her eye, she puts her hand over her heart and takes a deep breath. He gives her a smile, signs that there is no worry.
Grace is the one who has been on a stage in front of people before, often white people, but she seems more worried than he does. At some point he realized that he knows the story well, that he could tell it in its entirety to anybody he met on the parade ground, so if he forgets a word or even entire lines he will just look at the people and tell them what is happening at that moment. He assumes that nobody watching will know the poem by heart, except maybe Clarence Regal, who told Antoine he played the role three years ago, opposite a Stockbridge girl who has since graduated. And if there is a bad lapse it is not him out there but Hiawatha, who is not even really an Ojibwe.
If you can’t act you won’t survive at the Carlisle School.
Lizzie Cloud finishes and he joins the audience in clapping his hands. It is a strange custom, and at first he didn’t understand why the white people couldn’t do it in unison—some lack of rhythmic sense in the race, perhaps—and then understood it as a polite response, like many in his life back home. No relative or stranger ever set foot within their cabin without his mother asking if they would like to eat, even if she knew they had just come from a feast.
Six younger boys come out now in blue pants and white shirts, sleeves rolled up, and perform a complicated drill with what the white people call Indian clubs, though they seem useless for any practical purpose, especially warfare. The school’s brass band plays something with a lot of huffing tuba and somehow the boy with the cymbals crashes them together exactly when one of the clubs is dropped, as if he had rehearsed it with the gymnasts.
An equal number of girls holding tambourines move up around him at the side of the platform. The Song will be right after the tambourines, once the tipi and the trees nailed to flat wooden stands have been placed.
He is a noble huntsman. He is Hiawatha.
He looks across, past the flying, spinning clubs, to see Grace, and realizes that none of the boys will be looking at him.
Hiawatha is in love with Minnehaha.
He looks toward the audience, finds Asa and Smokey a few rows back, Smokey not smiling but waving to him. They both make the sign they have agreed on, Antoine as a question and Smokey as an answer, fists pressed against temples and pushing in—Trouble.
—Trouble, who worries that he’ll rip his jacket going over the fence, takes it off, getting it a little tangled on one arm, and tosses it up to snag on one of the wooden points. He sees that his ghost shirt has a bloodstain from the fight with the white boys. He can hear the brass band playing from a building on the other side. A train whistles, passing behind him—westbound, he can tell, and not even stopping at the station. Freight train.
Trouble is still dizzy, and when he reaches up he realizes he can’t touch the top of the fence.
And that the moon is full.
It takes a moment to form a plan. Without a ladder, something he has no idea where to find, there is only one way. Trouble backs up, steadying himself, then runs as fast as he can toward the fence, leaping up when he gets to it to grab hold of his jacket, which he can hear tear a bit as he hauls himself up by it and over, wooden points digging into his belly and legs, then awkwardly hanging by his hands before letting go. He hits the ground hard, stays seated with his back up against the wall. Nothing feels broken besides the ribs that were kicked before.
Trouble whoops at the moon—
“Would he come again for arrows
To the Falls of Minnehaha?”
—Grace asks the audience, reclining on a straw-covered gymnasium mattress just in front of the extra-wide opening of the Sibley tent that has been decorated like a Plains tipi.
“On the mat her hands lay idle,
And her eyes were very dreamy—”
Cato Goforth, unable to hide his embarrassment, sits just outside the tent, wrapped in a Navajo blanket to play Minnehaha’s father, the ancient arrowmaker.
“Through their thoughts they heard a footstep,
Heard a rustling in the branches,
And with glowing cheek and forehead,
With a deer upon his shoulders—”
—and Grace does blush, Antoine having decided to play this moment without his shirt on. The deer, always a problem, is represented by a tan cotton sack stuffed with rolled-up clothing. He mimes his actions as Grace looks toward him, both hands held over her heart now, as if it might fly out of her chest with excitement—
“Suddenly from out the woodland
Hiawatha stood before them.”
Miss Redbird is smiling. Though she is no admirer of the poem, which the author could only have written satisfied that its protagonists were safely lost in the mists of time, the boy and the girl are clearly smitten with each other. She has seen this developing during her chaperone duties, fascinated to watch male and female patiently reveal themselves to the other without the traditional intermediaries. Her own troubled courtship, with an Indian physician presently working in the far west, has been variably aided and thwarted by the national postal system—
“At the feet of Laughing Water,
Hiawatha laid his burden,” says Antoine, letting the sack slide to the floor in front of Grace—
“Threw the red deer from his shoulders—”
“And the maiden looked up at him,” Grace interjects,
“Looked up from her mat of rushes
Said with gentle look and accent,
You are welcome, Hiawatha!”
She pats the straw beside her, and Antoine steps into the tipi, ducking his head slightly—
“Very spacious was the wigwam,” he says—
“Made of deer-skins dressed and whitened,
With the Gods of the Dacotahs
Drawn and painted on its curtains—”
Given the current frenzy of superstition in the West, thinks Miss Burgess, there might have been more supervision of the tent’s decorations. She recognizes an eagle, some horselike figures, and either a crescent moon or a hunting bow, all applied in red, the color of war. Other designs, though seeming rather abstract, might have sinister meaning for some of the students present, and thus do not belong in a ceremony meant to attract them to the path of peace and civilization. And then the young brave baring his torso—if this story is enacted next year it should be by less physically mature students.
Antoine has taken to one knee, pleading with the ancient arrow-maker, who frowns with arms crossed beneath his blanket—
“After many years of warfare
Many years of strife and bloodshed,
There is peace between Ojibways
And the tribe of the Dacotahs.”
The Ojibwe aren’t dancing, Clarence has heard, at least not yet. They have never had open war with the U.S. Army, and have lost considerably less territory than the combined bands of the Sioux. Not dancing, perhaps not so desperate—perhaps an explanation for LaMere’s ability thus far to bend with school rules without breaking under them—
Antoine turns to face the audience now, arms held out wide, addressing them directly—
“That this peace may last forever,
And our hands be clasped more closely,
And our hearts be more united,”
—then turns again to Grace and Cato Goforth—
“Give me as my wife this maiden,
Minnehaha, Laughing Water,
Loveliest Dacotah woman!”
He says this last line looking into Grace’s eyes. Lizzie Cloud, back in the audience, sighs out loud, several of the girls in the row echoing her.
The door of the stable is forced open with a cracking of wood. Trouble squeezes in, jams the door shut. His favorite of the horses swings its head over the top of its stall.
Don’t look at me, says Trouble in Lakota. He moves to where they keep the ropes and harness leather—
—while an Arapaho chief stands on the platform in ceremonial buckskin and feathers, directing his speech to the students as the interpreter who has traveled with him translates into English.
You are not at home, he says. You are at the white man’s school to learn of the white man’s ways. Listen to your school father, Captain Pratt. Obey those who teach you. Work hard, learn all you can. The campfire of the red man is very low—it gives smoke, but very little warmth.
The chief takes a long moment to meet the eyes of all the students. You young ones must not let it die.
Trouble, with the rope over his shoulder and noose already tied, climbs the slats of the hog pen, the pair of black Berkshires inside raising their pink snouts with vague interest. Though still unsteady from the beer, he thinks he can manage to lean out and tie off on the lowest overhead rafter, then jump and swing his legs out—
—as Grace, still tingling from the performance and the applause it garnered, is waiting just on the other side of the standing screen the male performers change costume behind, excited conversation and scraping chairs heard from out front. She beams when she sees Antoine coming—
“You were the perfect Hiawatha!”
She kisses him, quickly, but on the lips, and hurries behind the scenery to the girls’ side. Antoine is still a bit stunned when Smokey appears.
“You seen Trouble?”
“Wasn’t he in the audience?”
“No.”
“Maybe he’s hiding out in the room—”
“He ask me in the morning if you can ride alla way to Dakota on one horse.”
Antoine hurries to button his shirt. “How many horses do they keep in that stable?”
Asa has joined them by the time they reach it, finding that the door has been forced. Trouble is swinging from a rope over by the hog pen, his legs pumping as if he’s trying to run up a hill. Antoine rushes to get his shoulders under Trouble’s feet, grabbing his ankles in case he starts to kick, as Smokey runs to grab the axe hung by the hay rakes, tossing it up to Asa, already balanced on the top rail of the pen. Three strokes of the axe and Trouble falls, Antoine going to the floor with him.
By the time they leave the barn the grounds are full of students and instructors, talking in small groups, full of Thanksgiving turkey. They can see Mr. Skinner planted between them and the dormitory, loudly regaling two well-dressed town merchants with his favorite story.
“They take the train all the way to Washington to see the Great White Father,” he says, “not one of the chiefs who’s ever slept in a four-poster bed before, and they check into the hotel they’ve been told about, and go upstairs, four to a room. Only one of them really speaks English, and nobody at the desk thinks to explain the gas lights in the rooms to them. So one of the chiefs, when it’s time to sleep, thinks ‘Well, I guess it’s time to blow these lamps out—’ ”
“They thought they were oil lamps?”
“Whatever they thought, he somehow manages to get the flames out, but doesn’t pay any attention to the hissing sound that’s still going on—”
Antoine has one of Trouble’s arms over his shoulder, nods for Smokey to take the other, and they half carry Trouble toward the dormitory.
“Beautiful dreamer,” sings Antoine, repeating one of the ballads Lizzie Cloud had thrilled the audience with earlier in the evening, “wake unto me—”
Smokey joins him singing, and Asa, following along, hums in tune.
“Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee—
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day
Lulled by the moonlight have all passed away—”
“Is he all right?” calls the disciplinarian as they pass near him.
“Too much to eat,” Antoine calls back.
“Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song—”
Trouble helps them a little bit getting up the stairs, pushing with wobbly legs, his face slowly resuming a proper color, and they get him laid out on his bed, Asa stashing the torn jacket and severed noose in Antoine’s footlocker. Smokey studies the designs on Trouble’s ghost shirt.
“So that’s it, huh?” he says quietly. “That’s the thing they’re up to.”
There is a knock on the door. Antoine hesitates, steps over to open it a crack. Clarence Regal stands outside.
“Open,” he says.
Maybe Clarence is the Man-on-the-Bandstand, thinks Antoine. He misses nothing.
Clarence steps in, signaling Antoine to close the door behind him. He goes over to Trouble, takes up the one burning oil lamp to hold it close enough to examine the rope burns on the boy’s neck. He grabs a chair, sits on it beside Trouble.
“Look at me.”
Trouble looks at the master sergeant, angry and ashamed and not at all drunk anymore. Clarence speaks to him in Lakota—
Hanging is no way for one of us to die! Think of the shame it would bring your parents.
He thumps his own chest—
You have murder here. I know how that feels. But we have to fight with our wits now. Learn what you can here, then go home and be a warrior for our people!
Clarence stands and looks around at the others.
“Not a word of this to anyone.”
He steps out. The oil lamp, left on the floor, throws their shadows high on the walls and ceiling.
Asa moves to the side of the bed then, touches the palm of his hand to the Lakota boy’s chest and then to his own.
“Hermanos,” he says. “Brudda.”
Antoine gives Smokey a look, and then they both step in to put a hand on each of his shoulders.
“Brother,” says Antoine.
“Brother,” says Smokey.
“You’re not alone here,” Antoine tells him.
“That’s right,” adds Smokey. “We’re a tribe. Carlisle Indians.”
Trouble, trying manfully not to weep, looks to them and slowly brings his index and middle fingers up to touch his lip, making the sign—
Brother.
THE BOYS IN THE BOXCAR have five candles lit now, and have arranged a comfortable space for themselves, sitting on and surrounded by crates. After-hours in the dormitory at Carlisle they’d roll a blanket up and stuff it across the bottom of the door, keeping their voices down. Here in the freight car Antoine and the white boy speak over the dull rumble of the train and the clack of rails beneath the floor.
“So this Trouble fella is—?”
“Lakota. You call it Sioux.”
“Like at the Custer massacre.”
“His father was at the battle.”
“Jeez—”
“On the winning side. Along with the Cheyenne, Arapaho—”
“There’s a big difference?”
Antoine looks the white boy, Jimmy, over.
“Where your people come from again?”
“Poland.”
“The Cherkowski tribe.”
Jimmy grins.
“Any difference between you and the Italians?”
“Hell yeah—guineas drink vino, we drink beer. Well—my old man always starts with beer, then it’s whatever he can find that’ll knock him on his ass. Can’t hold their firewater, the Polish.”
They ride in silence for a moment.
“So,” says Jimmy, “you headin’ home, or what?”
“I don’t know,” says Antoine. “Maybe. I’m a fugitive from the government.”
“You mean you’re playin’ hooky from school.”
“If you head straight back home, they wire ahead and catch you. I been working some places, begging handouts—”
“Whattaya mean, they catch you—”
“We’re not citizens.”
“Sure you are.”
Antoine shakes his head.
“Wards of the state. Like crazy people they lock up.”
“But you were here first.”
Antoine shrugs.
“Crazy,” says Jimmy, then pulls a soiled handkerchief out from his pocket, unwrapping it to reveal a hunk of corn bread. He offers half to Antoine—
“Here.”
Antoine hesitates, then nods and accepts the food. Each boy tries to eat slowly, staring at the candle flames—
“Ice will be breaking up on the lake now,” says Antoine when he’s finished. “People at home fix up their canoes, get out after the fish. Sometimes we’ll go out at night with torches, spear them in the shallows—”
“I got no home.”
Jimmy’s statement hangs in the air, and then they notice that the rhythm of the clacking has changed—they’re slowing down.
Jimmy quickly grabs a rag and begins to douse the candles, sticking them back into the crate they came from.
“Get behind something.”
Antoine arranges a wall of crates with just enough room for him to crouch behind as the last candle is snuffed out.
Darkness.
Banging of the couplings as the train comes to a halt.
Voices outside, then suddenly the rumble of the side door being hauled open. A flashlight beam stabs into the darkness and for a moment Antoine can see Jimmy only a few feet away from him, trying to hold his breath. The light beam twitches around the interior, Antoine hoping there is no hanging smoke left from the candles. The boys lock eyes just before the beam swings away and the side door is banged shut.
Darkness again. Voices, fading.
“So,” comes Jimmy’s voice in a whisper, “the Sioux kids hangs but he don’t die—”