The Key to the Indian (6 page)

He remembered in a flash an occasion in the old house, when he’d left Patrick alone with the cupboard. Despite his bad leg, Omri took the stairs two at a time.

He knew exactly where his dad was.

O
mri burst into his bedroom. Sure enough, there was his dad. He had his back to him, blocking the cupboard, and he appeared to be concentrating on something in his hand.

When he heard Omri come in, he turned. His face was pale and a look almost of anguish was on it.

“Dad! What on earth’s wrong?”

Without a word, his father held out his hand to Omri, palm up. As Omri walked towards him, he noticed the cupboard door was open. Jessica Charlotte’s figure was standing on the shelf. But it was different. The key was no longer in her arms.

“Dad! You brought her! Where’s the new key?”

“Here it is,” said his dad in an odd, flat voice.

Omri looked into his hand. It was completely empty.

“Where is it?”

“It’s there. Jessie assured me, it’s there. She put it into my hand. She could see it, apparently, but I can’t. It’s too small.”

Omri stared at him, open-mouthed. “Too small to
see
?”

“I don’t think we thought it out properly, Om. When she got back, the key was miniaturised. Right? It would have been very small compared to her, because everything that goes through the cupboard gets small. She said she had a terrible time trying to copy it. When she poured the lead into the tiny mould she’d made she couldn’t be sure it would take such a small impression. She was absolutely
bent
on doing her best for us, and she worked ‘like a jeweller’, she said, using a magnifying glass and tiny watchmaker’s tweezers and file that she bought specially.

“But of course, what none of us stopped to realise was that the
copy
came from
her
time. So when it came forward to us, when she brought it just now,
it got smaller still
. Now it’s a miniature of a miniature. Does that make sense?”

Omri was totally confounded. Of course it made sense. It was obvious. But what a shock – what a disappointment! The key they’d been counting on! Invisible to the naked eye, and completely useless.

His father was showing him his other hand. In that lay the original car key that they’d sent back, full size, part metal, part plastic.

“The original key became big again when I brought her, so big it tore free of her pocket and fell on to the floor of the cupboard.” He put it into his pocket.

Omri sat down sharply at his desk. There was a long silence. “I am
so stupid
!” he suddenly shouted.

“Shhh! No, you’re not—”

“Why didn’t I
think
?
Of course
the copy would be small. Smaller than small. She made it. It had to get smaller still when she brought it back through the cupboard.”

“That’s it, then,” said his dad dully. “That’s it. That was our last hope.”

Omri looked at Jessica Charlotte’s figure. He picked it up. “Did she say anything else?”

“She just said she was glad to have met me. She tried to save face, telling me how hard she’d tried, but I think she sort of realised she’d failed us. She said, ‘I fear it won’t be any use. I did my utmost, but my gift can’t overcome the problem of proportion.’ I think I thanked her… I know she thanked
me
.” After a moment he added, “She sent you her love. She said she wished she’d had a son like you.”

“We won’t see her again,” said Omri sadly.

“No. But there’s one good thing. She won’t try to kill herself again. It’ll be terribly hard for her. But at least she knows Lottie grew up and had a baby.”

“Good she doesn’t know she died so young.”

“She found that out at the end of her life, when she poured the lead for herself. It was in the Account.”

They were silent.

“So we can’t go, then,” said Omri hopelessly.

“It doesn’t look like it.”

“What about Little Bull? Maybe we could give him some advice from here.”

His father frowned. “I’m not so sure we should give him any. Who are we to give the Indians advice? It’s like the missionaries, who told them what to believe, and rubbished their religion, destroying everything that had ever held them together.”

“But he asked. Because he knows we know how things are going to turn out.”

His father said nothing. After a while, Omri felt the need to comfort him. If he himself felt this disappointed, he could only guess how his dad must be feeling.

“Well, we could always go camping properly,” he said.

His father snorted. “A wet tent on Dartmoor! Fat comfort!” he said violently.

For the next two weeks, Omri had a lesson.

He didn’t realise it straight away. But what gradually dawned on him, watching his father, was that he had been wrong and smug to think for one single moment that he, Omri, was the grown-up one here. Being grown-up was
attitude
, not size. His dad proved that
he
was the grown-up.

Omri, for his part, fell into a steep depression. He couldn’t be bothered with anything. He did no work at school except what he was forced to do. He was rude to his mother. He had a fight with Gillon. He excused himself to himself by
thinking that he was desperately worried about Little Bull; but what he was really doing was giving way to a terrible mood, because they couldn’t go, because their adventure was cancelled.

But his dad was quite different. You’d never have thought he’d had a bitter disappointment.

He carried on just as usual, and was his usual self. He didn’t appear to be particularly moody or sad. He didn’t say a word more on the subject to Omri. The only way Omri knew he was still thinking about it was that he began to sketch Indians.

A pile of books appeared in the end room, the one at Omri’s and Gillons’ end of the house, the TV-free zone. Omri saw this one day when he was passing through from the stairs to the dining room. He paused to look. They were from the London Library, which sent out books to members. They were all about Indians. Some of them were illustrated. It was from these pictures that his dad was sketching.

But he wasn’t working much in his studio, which was highly unusual. He spent most of his free time in the end room, reading.

Omri sensed he didn’t want to be disturbed or questioned. But he couldn’t help himself. After a few more days, he just had to ask. He felt so bad, and it seemed his dad didn’t.

“Dad?”

“Hm?” said his dad, from the depths of a book called
The
Ambiguous Iroquois
.

“What’s the point?”

His dad understood at once, and looked up at him. “The point, bub,” he said, “is to learn all I can.”

“But now we can’t
go…
”

“I know. It’s tough. But I just feel I – owe it to him, somehow.”

Omri edged closer. “What have you found out?”

His father closed the book on his finger and leant his head back against the chair. “It’s a damn shame Little Bull didn’t belong to one of the tribes further west. Of course in the long term they were no better off, but the crunch hadn’t come for them in Little Bull’s time. There were still plenty of Indians living their lives in the old way, all across the American west, and that went on for decades, till ‘the West was won’, as the old movies say.

“But in the east things were different, and worse, because that’s where the first settlers from Europe landed. It was where the French and English wars happened, which the eastern tribes were involved in. By Little Bull’s era the settlers were really spreading west and the tribes were being driven away. Some were in danger of being wiped out.”

“Not the Iroquois!” exclaimed Omri in a shocked voice.

“How much have
you
read about the Six Nations?”

“A lot.”

“So you know that they had a seriously democratic type of government.”

“Oh, yes! Some people say the government of the US was based on it.”

“Well… I’m not so sure about that. But they made a confederacy with other tribes, that were related to them, in order to have peace and to co-operate with each other. They had laws and customs that, in some ways, were better than what white people had. The white settlers called them savages, but by the end of the eighteenth century the boot was on the other foot.”

“They used to be terribly cruel,” Omri said doubtfully. “I read—”

“Yes. Many of the tribes were cruel – they were very fierce and war-like. The Iroquois had a fearsome reputation. But according to the accounts of the few unprejudiced white men who travelled among them, they could show us a few things about civilized behaviour. Listen to this, I must just read you this – it really struck me.”

He put his book down, and picked up another called
North American Indians
. It had a number of slips of paper in it, marking particular places.

“The man who wrote this, George Catlin, was an artist. God! I’d love to think that if I’d lived then, I’d have done what he did! In the eighteen-thirties he travelled and lived among the tribes in the West, the ones who were still living as they always had, who hadn’t yet been shoved around and missionised and corrupted by the whites. But of course Catlin knew they were going to be. He’d seen what happened to the ones in the east. This whole book he wrote is full of sadness because he believed that the people he was painting the portraits of, and making friends with, were on the edge of
extinction. He used words about them like ‘noble’, ‘honorable’, ‘gentlemanly’. And ‘religious’ – their own religion, not the priests’. He liked and admired them in a lot of ways, but he didn’t like everything about them.

“Once, he had this conversation with a chief of the Sioux. He was saying how bad it was, the way they tortured their prisoners, and when he finished some pretty outspoken criticism, the chief mentioned that he’d heard that white people choked wrongdoers to death like dogs on the end of a rope – not enemies, but their own people. And Catlin said, yes. And did they shut each other up in prisons for most of their lives, sometimes because
they couldn’t pay money
?
So
Catlin said yes to that, too.

“Then the chief said that he’d visited white men’s forts and seen soldiers taken out and whipped almost to death, and heard that they let themselves be treated like that by their own comrades just to earn a soldier’s pay. And could it be true that white people hit their own children? Catlin had to say they often did.

“And the chief just kept quietly asking about other white people’s customs, such as robbing graves and abusing their own women, and Catlin kept making notes and keeping his head down and feeling more and more uncomfortable, and at last the chief asked if it was true that the Great Spirit of the white people was the child of a white woman and that white people had killed him, referring to Jesus, of course. When Catlin had to say yes to that, the chief simply couldn’t believe it, and said: ‘The
Indians’ Great Spirit got no mother – the Indians no kill him, he never die.’

“At that point, Catlin writes, he was ‘…quite glad to close my notebook, and quietly to escape from the throng that had collected around me, saying (though to myself and silently) that these and an hundred other vices belong to the civilized world. Who then are the
cruel and relentless
savages
?’”

Omri took the book out of his father’s hands and leafed through it, looking at the pictures, which had all been painted by the author. They were beautiful and striking. Omri was struck by how different the Indians looked from each other, how differently they dressed. Some of them looked almost Chinese. Others looked quite European. This surprised him. He’d always somehow thought about Indians as being all more or less like Little Bull.

“Are there any portraits of Iroquois?”

“Page three hundred and thirty-seven,” said his dad, consulting a notepad.

Omri turned to that page and saw a picture of a man called Not-o-way, an Iroquois chief. He was magnificent, with a burst of mixed feathers on his head, a beautiful tunic, buckskin leggings and moccasins, a blanket over his left shoulder, ornamental armbands and belt, and a tomahawk in his right hand. Omri stared at him, playing with the wonderful notion that he might, just might, be Tall Bear’s son. Little Bull’s grandson.

He glanced at the opposite page, and read that George
Catlin had admired Not-o-way – ‘an excellent man’ – and was told by him that the Iroquois had conquered ‘nearly all the world: but the Great Spirit being offended at the great slaughters by his favourite people, resolved to punish them; and he sent a dreadful disease amongst them, that carried most of them off, and the rest were killed by their enemies.’

Omri’s heart sickened. “Weren’t there any Iroquois left at all?”

“That was what Catlin thought,” said his dad. “He was very doomful about the outlook for all the Indian tribes; that was partly why he wanted to paint them before it was too late. But they weren’t all wiped out, not a bit of it, so don’t despair. And,” he added, under his breath, “I don’t want Little Bull to despair, either, however bad things look.”

“‘His favourite people,’” said Omri slowly. “The Iroquois thought they were the Great Spirit’s favourite people.”

“Yeah,” said his father quietly. “The Chosen. Where have we heard
that
before?”