Return of Little Big Man (17 page)

Each group or troop was led by the white person who had sat at the head of their table, and now I noticed most of the latter was women, even if their unit was boys. The Major had managed a miracle if he could put Indian males under such a spell they could be marched around by a female of any race.

Then without another word, the Major strode out in his brisk stride, followed by the rest of the school, marching in a column of twos. I hoped I had not made a bad mistake by coming here, for I was sure out of my element, even, from the look of them, the Indians.

I says to Amanda, “All right, where am I going to get something to eat?”

Though being of the type of person who always has to get ahead of you, she would respond to genuine indignation. “I’ll take you to the kitchen,” she says without additional comment, and does so, at the other end of the building.

Now what had happened before we showed up, as I found on getting into the schedule next day, was that the students on marching in to eat went directly through a mess line at the end of the kitchen, took their trays to the dining-room tables, and after eating, which was timed for seventeen minutes, they marched back again, in units, to leave the trays off in that area of the kitchen where some big tubs was for washing up, went back into the dining room, and sat down again until the Major was ready to stand them up for the prayer.

Me and Amanda now passed them steaming tubs, where a number of young Indian girls was washing the trays and utensils while others was doing the drying with empty flour sacks, and went back to the big brick oven built into the far wall, where a substantial-sized woman of the colored race, hair covered with a blue bandanna, was about to heft one of the big wood paddles used by bakers, loaded with loaves of risen dough, and fill the racks above the glowing hearth, which was so hot you could feel it on your face from ten foot away.

When she sees us coming the woman scowls and says, “I got to git this braid a-bakin’.”

I says, using a familiar turn of speech in them days, “Auntie, I’m real hungry. I was wondering if—”

“I ain’t you aunt, little man,” says she, real peevish, pronouncing it “awnt,” like she was English, “and I’ll thank you not to call me out of my name.” She’s still holding the laden paddle, which took more strength than I would of had, but then she were a head taller than me and twice as wide.

“Yes, ma’am,” I says quickly. “I didn’t mean no disrespect. I’ll use your proper name when I know it.”

Amanda give me a dirty look. “It’s Mrs. Stevenson.”

“I apologize, Mrs. Stevenson. I’m a coarse man, been living with no-counts and lowlifes.”

The big cook studies me briefly, then she says, “Give you some nice hot braid if you kin wait.”

“Why, that will be just fine, Mrs. Stevenson.”

“You don’t have to say the name ever’ time,” she tells me and finally shoves that paddleful of loaves into the oven.

As it happened I never learned her first name even though I met her husband on various occasions, for he too called her Mrs. Stevenson. The Major had hired her for the job on account of her husband had formerly served under him in the Tenth Cavalry. The Stevensons lived not far from the school in a town that, like the enlisted men of the Tenth, was all Negro. There was more than one of these towns, the best known of which was called Nicodemus, which had been created by freed slaves what had come north to make a life for themselves and figured they were likely to do it better if they made common cause. Hezekiah Stevenson was one of the more prosperous citizens with his Army pension, a nice little grain-and-feed business, and he was also the local postmaster.

This husband of hers was about the only person Mrs. Stevenson admired. Most everybody else she considered a fool, but she had a soft spot in her heart for me because I greatly favored the food she would of cooked for them all had anybody else, beginning with the Major, cared for it, but they did not, especially them students, all of who just had a taste for what was simply boiled till it fell apart, and that included even the fresh vegetables they growed in the school garden, for that’s the only way the Indians of them days knowed how to cook, so that’s what their children liked. Though Indians might at times eat flesh that was utterly raw, like the liver cut out of a game animal at the time he was brought down, the only alternative was boiling for hours, with maybe some fried dough, which they had learned to make from the whites and consisted of just a hunk of flour-and-water paste in a greased skillet.

Fact is, I was fond of the fried dough and boiled flesh I ate with the Cheyenne, but being born hungry I liked most of what else was handed me to chew on, my life long, though you’d never know it to look at me, for no matter how much I ate I never gained a pound. I guess I was a challenge to Mrs. Stevenson, whose husband and five kids was also heavyweights. What I would do is take only a small amount on my tray at mealtimes, at which I was obliged as a staff member, one of the few males around, to sit at the head of a boys’ table. Then after I marched my bunch out, I would go back to the kitchen and get something special that Mrs. S. had cooked up for herself but was happy to share with me, the cheese biscuits, country ham with redeye gravy, roast chicken, spoonbread, spicy greens, also all kinds of creamed vegetables made with the products from the little dairy herd maintained by the school.

Mrs. Stevenson was helped out in the kitchen by them Indian student girls, as part of their studies in what was called domestic science, and I guess she was supposed to teach them to cook the white way (which in her case was actually black, but then the Indian name for Negro was Black White Man), but according to what she told me, she gave up the attempt after a while on account of they was hopeless at it, being too stupid to learn anything of civilization. Mrs. Stevenson was a fine person who treated me like a mother, but she had in her a good deal of what nowadays in the 1950s they call racial prejudice, but in the 1870s was just the way most people not themselves Indian, and not having had a special experience with them like me, looked at the red man and woman. And of course her husband as a veteran of the U.S. Cavalry was unlikely to be an Indian-lover, especially after the Custer fight.

Now, where I was quartered was in a private room on the top floor of the boys’ side of the big building Amanda showed me first, at the end of a big dormitory full of metal-framed cots, at the foot of each of which was a little trunk of the type the Army called foot lockers, and back of each cot, against the wall, was a rack for hanging clothes.

My own room was better than the one in that hotel I had lived in during my time in Dodge City, with a cot like the ones used by the boys and an upended wood crate for a washstand, with bowl and pitcher that was, like the mirror over it, uncracked though the thunder mug under the cot was not, and a beat-up chest of drawers.

Amanda was prohibited from stepping into the male side of the building, so I had been taken there by one of the teachers, a man named Charlevoix, ending in an
x,
which I would of pronounced had I first seen it written, but having only heard it instead, I believed he was named Charlie Vaw, and I politely called him Mr. Vaw a couple times till he put me straight as to the French origin of the name. He claimed descent from one of the French trapper-explorers who had been throughout much of the West before any English set foot in the region and usually got on well with the natives, even taking wives amongst the tribes they encountered, and he allowed as how he might of had a great-grandma who was of the red race, and maybe so, but he himself come from back East and never knew a word of any Indian language and had fairish hair and light-colored eyes, so I don’t know. He come West for his health, having weak lungs or the like.

Charlevoix told me that while I had a climb to my top-floor room, it would be made up for by having fewer boys to manage than he had on the floor below.

“Oh,” says I, thinking he had mistook me, “I ain’t no teacher. I was hired as an interpreter.”

“That’s right,” says he. “At least you will be able to talk to them and understand what they say in return.”

It took more explanation for me to finally get the idea that I was expected to control the boys lodged on my floor, see they obeyed the school rules as to personal appearance and conduct, which included keeping the place neat and clean, and didn’t make noise or act disorderly such as young male persons of any race take their greatest pleasure in doing, especially in the years just before they officially become men.

I tell you I hadn’t been at this school for more than a couple hours when I was ready to leave for the second time. I never had no experience keeping big kids in order, my own white child having been carried off by the Indians when he was two, and the baby I had with my Cheyenne wife Sunshine disappeared, with his Ma, after the Washita battle.

The place was empty at the moment, for after supper the students had to return to the schoolrooms for a study period in which they did homework, them boys what didn’t have evening farm chores and the girls who was not occupied in the kitchen or other housekeeping duties like laundering and ironing the school linens in the washhouse. The way the Major operated the place, it was supposed to be self-sustaining, using student labor, for there was never sufficient funds to pay anybody except the staff, and in fact none of us ever got paid in full and on time. I don’t think the Major himself took any wage.

“It’s a relief to have another man on hand,” Charlevoix told me. “There haven’t been enough of us to put anybody on the top floor, and without supervision the boys have had things their own way up here.” He raised his thin eyebrows and snickered sadly. “They’re probably not going to be pleased when they see you. But as I say, at least you can speak their language. They’re Cheyennes. None of the rest of us know theirs or in fact any other Indian languages.” He shrugged in exasperation. “But the Major doesn’t want the teachers to speak anything but English anyway. How else can the students learn English unless they are forced to use it? He had a point, but these boys haven’t learned a word, so far as I can see, and we can’t even find out what’s wrong. Aren’t we teaching the right way? Perhaps you’ll be able to find out.”

I said I was thinking for the second time that I might of made a mistake in accepting this job without finding out more about it, but what he said appealed to my pride. It hadn’t been often in my life up to that time that anybody treated me as though I might know something of value to them, and here it looked like maybe I could help out both sides. Also I admit I wouldn’t of minded accomplishing something that might impress Amanda.

So I put the contents of my carpet bag into the chest of drawers, and Charlevoix pulled out his watch, and saying it was about time for the boys to return, he went downstairs.

He was right, for everything around here happened on schedule, which was more remarkable for Indians than it would of been for white students, for the notion of time as measured by a little machine carried in your pocket was altogether foreign to them. I never met an Indian who could understand how 5:00
P.M.
, say, could be the same in winter when the sky was dark as in the bright late afternoon of summer.

So up the stairs, taking two at a time, come running the young fellows what bunked on the top floor. They was no longer in the stunned condition in which they had sat at the dining-room tables, but was laughing and hooting and chattering like persons their age of any race, added to which these boys had been stifled all day by that routine that meant nothing to them except that they was compelled to follow it, and now at last they could let go until tomorrow morning.

Well, I sympathized with them, but I had a job to do, so when I had judged by ear that all of them had arrived, I stepped out of the doorway of my room and, waiting a second or two till the din died down, announced my presence.

Notwithstanding that I spoke in Cheyenne, they all immediately seemed to fall back into the suppertime trance, and this was rather comical in that already most had stripped off their uniforms and was all but bare-arsed naked, down to the breechcloths they wore instead of the underwear I later found out that they was issued but never took out of the foot lockers, not having any idea of what it was for.

“Can it be,” I asks, “that the Human Beings when amongst white men forget their native speech, which is the finest language of all, because it is spoken by the bravest of all men?”

The lads now peered at me, and the tallest amongst them says, “We speak our language all the time to one another.” He had the kind of slanty eyes and high-boned bronze face that should of been framed with long hair, but here he stood in his leather breechcloth, his head shorn as close as a white man’s who worked in a city bank, an odd combination.

Now he had broke the ice, the others come out of the coma but let him do the talking, as them grown-up Cheyenne had let Wild Hog speak for them back in Dodge. This was courtesy. Indians was less likely than any other race I come across to follow their leaders in lockstep, being by nature of an anarchistic temperament, but they was also the politest and most respectful.

“I am relieved to hear that,” I told him, “for I was worried you had been deprived of speech by some trickster.” Now, in Cheyenne that last word,
Veho,
is the same term used for “white man.”

This lad, whose name I might as well use here though I never learned it till later, was Wolf Coming Out, he scowls in thought and says, “But you are yourself white. Are you therefore a trickster? And if you are, maybe you are trying to trick us by using that name and getting it out of the way before we can accuse you of being one.”

“You might not have learned much else since you’ve been here,” says I, grinning, “but maybe you have begun to think like a white man.”

“I really hope not,” he says, “else I could understand why you would try to make friends by insulting me first, and I don’t want to understand that. Nor do I want to know how and why you speak the language so well, because I can see no other reason than to use it to deceive us.”