The Key to the Indian

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “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?”

  Omri put the book down. “Have you found out if it’s true, what Little Bull said? Were the English being rotten?”

  His dad was silent for a moment. “You know, Om, we British were top dogs in the world for quite a long time, but top dogs often think that power is enough, and that hanging on to power is more important than behaving well. We haven’t as much to be ashamed of as a lot of colonial powers, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t anything to blush for. Have you ever heard the expression ‘Perfidious Albion’?”

  “No? What does it mean?”

  “Well, Albion was an old word for England, and perfidious of course means treacherous. In two words, it means promise-breakers, double-dealers. Englishmen always prided themselves on being men of their word, but our rulers haven’t always lived up to that. I’m sorry to say that our treatment of the Indian tribes that helped Britain in its colonial wars was not a shining example of honour.”

  “So we kind of owe them.”

  “Yes. We left our Indian allies in the lurch all right, round about 1783. But there were still decisions for the Indians to take, bad ones that led to extinction and not-so-bad ones that led to survival, at least for some. You don’t know how badly I wanted to find a way to help Little Bull to make the right one.”

  8

  A Different Tribe

  The following weekend was fixed on for the preliminary camping trip.

  There was no reason at all, now, why Gillon should be excluded, and Omri had the decency, through his bad mood, to be glad of that, anyway – it would have been necessary, but mean, to scheme to keep Gillon at home if they’d been – going.

  So their mother packed them all sorts of food and drink, and they put the old tent and their grotty old school-trip sleeping bags into the boot of the Ford (their dad borrowed Adiel’s). They put on tough ratting clothes and piled wash things and spare trainers and underclothes and sweaters ready to stuff into a big rucksack their mother promised to produce from somewhere.

  And produce it she did – triumphantly, shaking the dust and spiders of ages off it in the yard. A huge, heavy thing adorned with numerous pockets, buckles and cracked leather straps.

  “It’s been among my family stuff for years. I found all sorts of strange things in it – an old solar topee and some really lovely old stuff from India.”

  Omri fingered it. It was very old indeed, and looked as if it must be about to fall apart, but when he tested it by pulling hard on the straps, nothing gave.

  “They made them to last in those days,” his mum said approvingly.

  “What’s a solar topee?”

  “A pith helmet.”

  Omri looked blank.

  “I’ll show you – follow me!”

  Omri gave the knapsack to Gillon – who stood in the yard with it dangling from his hands, as if Omri had dumped a dead dog in his arms, staring at it with incredulous disgust – and followed her into the big barn that had once been used for pigs. A room at the end was filled with his mum’s ‘family stuff’. She picked up an old cotton bag, and lifted out of it one of those thick sun-stopping hats that explorers in the tropics used to wear. It, like the knapsack, looked old and none too clean – it even had some spots of paint on the brim – but still usable.

  “It must have been your grandfather’s,” Omri said.

  “Matt’s. Yes, it was. All the Indian things are his.” She picked up a strange thing like five upside-down bowls made of bronze, engraved with dragons, with a cord going through the middle of them. Attached by a rotting piece of string was a stick. His mother held them up and struck them one by one. They made a pleasant bell-like sound, each a little higher than the last, till the smallest bowl at the bottom made a final musical ping.

  “Why don’t you hang that indoors, Mum? It’s nice.”

  “Okay! I’d forgotten I even had it till I looked inside the knapsack.”

  “Was there anything else in there?”

  “Yes, quite a lot. It’s all wrapped up. But I opened this – look.”

  She took some yellowing tissue paper off a tiny statuette of a black elephant about five centimetres high.

  “Ebony,” she said. “With ivory tusks. Isn’t he sweet? Here, you have him.”

  “Thanks, Mum!” Omri took it from her and put it into his pocket, thinking he would stand it on one of the shelves in his room. “Did you know you had all this?”

  “Well, yes and no. I remember some of it. Granny Marie used to let me play with some of these things when I was a little girl. There were more elephants then, they stood in a line on the mantelpiece, biggest first, smallest last. Maybe they’re all here somewhere! I really must go through all this stuff one day… And this gong-thing hung in the hall and everyone who came to the house wanted to have a go with it. You’d hear it chiming faintly and know that someone who’d slipped out of the room had sneaked into the hall to try it out. Only very old and stuffy people resisted… Granny used to call it her young-in-heart chimes.”

  The weather was quite warm for October, but on Dartmoor it might well be different – you never knew. “Very bleak, Dartmoor,” said their dad. They managed to fit all their extra clothes except wellies and anoraks into the big knapsack. Gillon thought it was revolting and said he’d be ashamed to be seen with it – “If only we’d had time to order some new stuff! Oh well, when we do the real trip, with Ad, we’ll have a decent nylon one. Let’s go somewhere where there’s nobody but us, Dad. They’ll think we’re paupers or something, carrying a lump of old junk like this around!”

  Nevertheless, he put the knapsack on the back seat, which he’d “bagged” because he always fell asleep on car-journeys and, despite his disgust, he wanted to use it to lean against. That suited Omri, who far preferred to sit up front.

  At long last – it was nearly noon by the time they were finally ready – their mother kissed them all through the various windows, and then ran off because she thought she heard the phone ringing from across the lane.

  “Ready, boys? Right. We’re off.”

  And their dad put the key in the ignition and switched on the engine.

  The next moment, Omri wasn’t in
the car any more.

  He had the most extraordinary jigging, jumping sensation. He seemed to be being pulled from his head, from his hands – even his feet were being lifted and dropped to a strange rhythm. He was dancing! But not of his own free will. Someone, or something, was making him dance.

  His eyes, which a moment before had been looking through the windscreen of the car into the deeply-shadowed back of the parking bay, were suddenly blinded with bright light so that he screwed them shut. But his body kept up this senseless rhythm, his arms and legs flying, his head bobbing.

  And now he could hear noises. Squawking music like a tinny horn, loud, strange voices, but most clearly of all – a drumbeat, quite close to him. It was drumming out the rhythm he was dancing to.

  He was terribly shocked and frightened. But he had to see what was happening. He opened his squeezed-shut eyes a crack – and then wider.

  An amazing scene met his eyes.

  He was out in the open air – hot air, blazing with sunlight. Before him was a colourful crowd of people, women, men, children, most of them staring at him. They were brown people with black hair. Many of the men wore white turbans and baggy clothes. The women wore—

  The women wore saris.

  Omri knew a sari when he saw one. They brought just one word into his addled aching head: India.

  India. Indians. What had happened? Could the magic make a mistake like a person – take him back to the wrong Indians? The notion was so bizarre that if he had’nt been so completely shocked and scared, he would have burst out laughing.

  The thought only lasted a nanosecond, and after that for a while his brain simply refused to function. All he knew was that he mustn’t show these staring people that he was alive. The forcible pulling and dropping of his limbs and head went on to the throbbing of the drum and the tootling of the music. He let himself stay limp, and just tried to orientate himself.