The Indian in the Cupboard (6 page)

Omri actually saw him go white, and his knees gave way under him. He uttered a few sounds, half curses and half just noises. He dropped the bag and hid his face for a moment. Omri said hastily:

“Please don’t be afraid. It’s all right. I—” Then he had an absolute inspiration! “I’m a dream you’re having. I won’t hurt you, I just want you to do something for me, and then you’ll wake up.”

Slowly the little man lowered his hands and looked up again.

“A dream, is it? Well … I should’ve guessed. Yes, of course. It would be. The whole rotten war’s nightmare enough, though, without giants and—and—” He stared around Omri’s room. “Still and all, perhaps it’s a change for the better. At least it’s quiet here.”

“Can you bring your bag and climb out? I need your help.”

The soldier now managed a rather sickly smile and tipped his cap in a sort of salute. “Right you are! With you in a tick,” he said, and picking up the bag, clambered over the edge of the cupboard.

“Stand on my hand,” Omri commanded.

The soldier did not hesitate a moment, but swung himself up by hooking his free arm around Omri’s little finger. “Bit of a lark, this,” he remarked. “I won’t half enjoy telling the fellows about this dream of mine in the trenches tomorrow!”

Omri carried him to the spot where Little Bear sat holding his leg, which was still bleeding. The soldier stepped down and stood, knee deep in carpet pile, staring.

“Well I’ll be jiggered!” he breathed. “A bloomin’ Indian! This
is
a rum dream, and no mistake! And wounded, too. Well, I suppose that’s my job, is it?—to patch him up?”

“Yes, please,” said Omri.

Without more ado, the soldier put the bag on the floor and snapped open its all-but-invisible catches. Omri leaned over to see. Now he really did need a magnifying glass, and so badly did he want to see the details of that miniature doctor’s bag that he risked sneaking into Gillon’s room (Gillon always slept late, and anyway it wasn’t seven o’clock yet) and pinching his from his secret drawer.

By the time he got back to his own room, the soldier was kneeling at Little Bear’s feet, applying a neat tourniquet to the top of his leg. Omri peered through the magnifying glass into the open bag. It was amazing—everything was there, bottles, pill boxes, ointments, some steel instruments including a tiny hypodermic needle, and as many rolls of bandages as you could want.

Omri then ventured to look at the wound. Yes, it was quite deep—the horse must have given him a terrific kick.

That reminded him—where was the horse? He looked around in a fright. But he soon saw it, trying forlornly to eat the carpet. “I must get it some grass,” thought Omri, meanwhile offering it a small piece of stale bread, which it ate gratefully, and then some water in a tin lid. It was odd how the horse was not frightened of him. Perhaps it couldn’t see him very well.

“There now, he’ll do,” said the soldier, getting up.

Omri looked at the Indian’s leg through his magnifying glass. The wound was bandaged beautifully. Even Little Bear was examining it with obvious approval.

“Thank you very much,” said Omri. “Would you like to wake up now?”

“Might as well, I suppose. Not that there’s much to look forward to except mud and rats and German shells coming over. … Still, got to win the war, haven’t we? Can’t desert, even into a dream, not for long, that is—duty calls and all that, eh?”

Omri gently picked him up and put him into the cupboard.

“Good-by,” he said. “Perhaps, sometime, you could dream me again.”

“A pleasure,” said the soldier cheerfully. “Tommy Atkins, at your service. Any night, except when there’s an attack on—none of us gets any sleep to speak of then.” And he gave Omri a smart salute.

Regretfully Omri shut and locked the door. He was tempted to keep the soldier, but it was too complicated just now. Anyway, he could always bring him back to life again if he liked … A moment or two later he opened the door again to check. There was the orderly, bag in hand, standing just as Omri had last seen him, at the salute. Only now he was plastic again.

Little Bear was calmly pulling on his blood-stained leggings.

“Good magic,” he remarked. “Leg feel good.”

“Little Bear, what will you do all day while I’m at school?”

“You bring bark of tree. Little Bear make longhouse.”

“What’s that?”

“Iroquois house. Need earth, stick posts in.”

“Earth? Posts?”

“Earth. Posts. Bark. Not forget food. Weapons. Tools. Pots. Water. Fire—”

There were no quarrels at breakfast that morning. Omri gulped down his egg and ran. In the greenhouse he found a seed tray already full of soil, well pressed down. He carried that secretly upstairs and laid it on the floor behind the dressing-up crate, which he was pretty sure his mother wouldn’t shift even if it was her cleaning day. Then he took his penknife and went out again.

Fortunately one of the trees in the garden had the sort of bark that came off easily—a silvery, flaky kind. He cut off a biggish strip, and then another to make sure. (How long
was
a longhouse?) He pulled some grass for the horse. He cut a bundle of thin, strong, straight twigs and stripped off their leaves. Then he went back to his room and laid all these offerings beside Little Bear, who was seated outside his tepee, apparently saying his prayers.

“Omri!” came his mother’s call from downstairs. “Time to go!”

Omri took out of his pocket the corner of toast he’d saved from breakfast and cleaned out the last of the corned beef from the tin. There was some corn left as well, though it was getting rather dry by now. He filled up Action Man’s beaker with water from the bathroom, pouring a little into the horse’s drinking lid. The horse was munching the fresh grass with every sign of enjoyment. Omri noticed its bridle had been replaced with a halter, cleverly made of a length of thread.

“Omri!”

“Just coming—”

“The others have gone! Hurry up, you’ll be late!”

One last thing! Little Bear couldn’t make a longhouse without some sort of tool beside his knife. He’d need an ax. Frantically Omri rummaged in the biscuit tin. Ah! A knight, wielding a fearsome-looking battle-ax! It wasn’t right, but it was better than nothing and would have to do. In a second the knight was locked in the cupboard.

“Omri!”

“One second!”

“What are you
doing?”

Crash! The ax was being used on the inside of the cupboard door!

Omri wrenched it open and snatched the ax from the startled hands of the knight, who had just time for one horrified look before he was reduced to plastic again by the slamming
of the door. Never mind! He had looked most unpleasant, just as knights must have looked when they were murdering the poor Saracens in Palestine. Omri had very little time for knights.

The ax was a beauty, though! Shining steel, with a sharp edge on both sides of the head, and a long, heavy steel handle. Omri laid it at Little Bear’s side.

“Little Bear—”

But he was still in a trance—communicating with his ancestors, Omri supposed. Well, Little Bear would find everything when he came to. There was quite a trail of spilt earth leading behind the crate. Omri flashed down the stairs, grabbed his parka and his lunch money, and was gone.

H
e got to school early by running all the way. The first thing he did was to head for the school library shelves for a book on Indians. And to his joy, he soon found one, under the section labeled “Peoples of the World”—a book called
On the Trail of the Iroquois
.

He couldn’t take it out because there was nobody there to write him down for it; but he sat down then and there on a bench and began to read it.

Now, Omri was not what you’d call a great reader. He couldn’t get into books, somehow, unless he knew them already. And how, as his teacher never tired of asking, was he ever going to get to know any more books until he read them for the first time?

And this
On the Trail of the Iroquois
was not exactly a
comic. Tiny print, hardly any pictures, and no fewer than three hundred pages. “Getting into” this was obviously out of the question, so Omri just dipped.

He managed to find out one or two fairly interesting things straight away. Iroquois Indians were sometimes called “The Five Nations.” One of the five were the Mohawks, a tribe Omri had heard of. They had indeed lived in longhouses, not tepees, and their main foods had been maize and squash (whatever they were) and beans. These vegetables had, for some strange reason, been called “The Three Sisters.”

There were many mentions of the Algonquins as the Iroquois’ enemies, and Omri confirmed that the Iroquois had fought beside the English while the Algonquins fought for the French sometime in the 1700s, and that both sides had scalped like mad.

At this point he really began to get interested. The book, in its terribly grown-up way, was trying to tell him something about
why
the Indians had done such a lot of scalping. Omri had always thought it was just an Indian custom, but the book seemed to say that it wasn’t at all, at least not till the white man came. The white man seemed to have made the Iroquois and the Algonquin keen on scalping each other, not to mention white men, French or English as the case might be, by offering them money and whiskey and guns. … Omri was deep in the book, frowning heavily, several minutes after the bell had rung. Someone had to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to hurry in to Assembly.

The morning lasted forever. Three times his teacher had cause to tell Omri to wake up. At last Patrick leaned over and whispered, “You’re even dreamier than usual today. What’s up?”

“I’m thinking about your Indian.”

“Listen,” hissed Patrick. “I think you’re putting me on
about that Indian. It was nothing so marvelous. You can buy them for a few pence in Yapp’s.” (Yapp’s was their local news agent and toyshop.)

“I know, and all the equipment for them! I’m going shopping at lunchbreak. Are you coming?”

“We’re not allowed out of school at lunch unless we eat at home, you know that!”

“I’m going anyway. I’ve got to.”

“Go after school.”

“No, I’ve got to go home after school.”

“What? Aren’t you staying to skateboard?”

“Omri and Patrick!
Will you kindly stop chattering?”

They stopped.

At long last lunchtime came.

“I’m going. Are you coming?”

“No. There’ll only be trouble.”

“I can’t help that.”

“You’re a twit.”

Twit or not, Omri sneaked out, ran across the playground, through a hole in the fence (the front gate was kept locked to keep the infants from going in the road), and in five minutes, by running all the way, he had reached Yapp’s.

The selection of plastic figures there was good. There was one whole box of mixed cowboys and Indians. Omri searched till he found a chief wearing a cloak and a full feather headdress, with a bow in his hand and a quiverful of arrows slung across his back. Omri bought it with part of his lunch money and rushed back to school before he could be missed.

He showed the chief to Patrick.

“Why get another Indian?”

“Only for the bow and arrows.”

Patrick was now looking at him as if he’d gone completely screwy.

In the afternoon, mercifully, they had two periods of handicrafts.

Omri had completely forgotten to bring the tepee he’d made, but there were plenty of scraps of felt, sticks, needles, and thread lying about the handicrafts room and he’d soon made another one, much better than the first. Sewing had always bored him rigid, but now he sat for half an hour stitching away without even looking up. He was trying to achieve the patched look of a real tepee made of odd-shaped pieces of hide, and he also found a way of bracing the sticks so that they didn’t fold up every time they were nudged.

“Very good, Omri!” remarked his teacher several times. “What patience all of a sudden!” Omri, who usually liked praise as much as anyone, hardly heard her, he was concentrating so hard.

After a long time he became aware that Patrick was standing over him, breathing through his nose rather noisily to attract his attention.

“Is that for my Indian?”

“My
Indian. Yes.”

“Why are you doing it in bits like that?”

“To be like a real one.”

“Real ones have designs on.”

“So will this. He’s going to paint proper Iroquois ones.”

“Who is?”

“Little Bear. That’s his name.”

“Why not call him Running Nose?” asked Patrick with a grin.

Omri looked up at him blankly. “Because his name’s Little Bear,” he said. Patrick stopped grinning. He frowned.

“I wish you’d stop this stupid business,” he said peevishly, “going on as if it weren’t a joke.”

Omri went on looking at him for a moment and then went
back to his bracing. Each pair of sticks had to have another, short stick glued between them. It was quite tricky. Patrick stood a minute and then said, “Can I come home with you
today?”

“No. I’m sorry.”