by Howard Fast
Maude walked past me and said: “I guess that learned you.”
I just looked at her, without answering. I took out my jackknife and began to pare at one of the wagon boards. Then my eyes traveled to the water keg.
I got up and went around to Ma. She was still standing there, staring off across the prairie in the direction Pa had gone.
Without turning, she said to me: “Seen anything of your Pa?”
“No.”
The sun was westward now, a splotch of red that blazed the whole prairie into a fire. I could get a little of how Ma felt; I could see the loneliness.
“Get a fire going,” she said. “He ought to have enough sense to come back early. Stop that whimpering. God help a woman when a man has itching feet.”
I gathered chips and started the fire. When I took water from the keg for mush, the keg was just about empty. I didn’t mention that to Ma. She went about preparing supper slowly, awkwardly, and Maude watched her, frightened.
Ma kept glancing at the west.
“Be dark soon,” I said
“Guess Pa’ll be here any minute,” Ma said dully. I could tell that she didn’t believe that.
“I guess so,” I nodded.
We ate without speaking much. Ma didn’t eat a great deal. As soon as we had finished, she went into the wagon.
Maude was saying: “I don’t see how I can clean dishes without water. You fetch some water, Dave.”
“There ain’t no water,” I said.
Maude stared at me, her eyes wide and frightened. She had heard stories, just the same as I had, about pilgrims who ran out of water. She opened her mouth to say something.
“What about Ma?” I asked her quietly, nodding at the wagon.
“Why don’t Pa come back?”
“Ain’t no sense thinking about Pa if he ain’t here. What about Ma? I guess it won’t be long.”
She shook her head.
“You don’t need to be scared,” I muttered. “It won’t do no good to be scared. I reckon the worst part of this trip is over.”
“Where’s Pa?” she whispered. “What happened?”
“How do I know what happened? You girls make me sick. I never seen anything to beat you girls.”
I got up and went over to the water keg. I shook it, hoping, without having any reason to hope. I knew it was just about empty. We had plenty of food—dried meat and meal and dried beans—enough to last a month, I guess. But Ma would need water.
Maude was crying.
“Why don’t you go to bed?” I said. “Go in and sleep with Ma. I’ll stay out here.”
“You’re not big enough to stay out here alone,” Maude said, but I knew she was afraid to stay inside the wagon with Ma. I knew how she felt, and I didn’t blame her for the way she felt, she was such a kid, with Ma petting her all the time. We couldn’t talk it over between ourselves, and that would have made it a lot better. But we couldn’t.
“I’m plenty big enough,” I said.
Inside the wagon Ma groaned, and out on the prairie a coyote was barking. There’s nothing like a coyote barking to make your insides crawl. I was all shivers, and I could see that Maude wanted to stay close to me. But that wouldn’t have made it any better.
“Get in the wagon, damn you!” I cried. I was glad Ma couldn’t hear me swear. Ma would lick me good and plenty when I swore like that.
Surprised, Maude stared at me. Then, without a word, she went into the wagon.
I stood there, outside, for a while. It had grown quite dark. In the sky there was a faint reflected light of the sun, but it was quite dark. I walked over to the wagon and picked up one of the mule blankets. It was a warm night, summertime; I decided to put the blanket under the wagon and lie down on it.
I heard Maude saying her prayers in the wagon, but no sound from Ma. I couldn’t say my prayers. Usually, Ma saw to it that I did, but tonight I couldn’t say a word aloud. I tried, opening my mouth, but no words came out. I thought them, as much as I could. I tried not to think about Pa. Spreading the blanket, I lay down on it, holding the carbine close to me. It seemed a part of Pa and all that was left; I hugged it.
I couldn’t sleep. I tried for a long time, but I couldn’t sleep. It was quite dark now, with no moon in the sky. The mules were moving restlessly; probably because they wanted water.
I think I dozed a little. When I opened my eyes again, the moon was just coming up, yellow and bloated. I felt chilled thoroughly. Bit by bit, what had happened during the day came back, and now it was all more real than it had been in the daytime. While I lay there, thinking about it, I heard horses’ hoofs; at first not noticing them, and only becoming aware of them when the horses bulked out of the night, two men riding slowly.
They were in the moonlight, and I was hidden in the shadow of the wagon. They didn’t see me. They stopped just about a dozen yards from the wagon, sitting on their horses and eyeing the mules. The mules moved restlessly.
When I realized they were Indians I couldn’t move, just lay there and watched them. They were naked to the waist, with their hair in two stiff braids to their shoulders. They both carried rifles.
I thought of Pa. I thought of screaming to wake Maude and Ma. I thought: “If they shot Pa—”
They were cutting loose the mules.
I felt for the carbine, twisted around, so I lay on my belly. One of the men had dismounted and was coming toward the wagon. He held his gun in one hand and had drawn a knife with the other. I sighted the center of his breast and fired.
I remember how the sound blasted out the silence of the prairie. In the wagon, someone screamed. The Indian stopped, seemed to stare at me, swayed a bit, and crumpled to the ground. I remember the sharp pain in my shoulder from the blow of the recoil.
The mounted man’s horse had wheeled about. He pulled it back, and fired at me. The shot threw sand in my face. I had a few cartridges and caps in my pocket, and I tried frantically to reload. The cartridges slipped through my fingers.
Then the Indian was gone. He had taken the other horse with him, and I heard their hoofs thundering across the prairie. I dropped the carbine. My shoulder ached terribly. Inside the wagon, Maude was whimpering, my mother groaning.
I climbed from under the wagon. The Indian lay on his back, his face hard and twisted. I stood there, looking at him.
Maude climbed down out of the wagon. “What is it?” she cried. Then she saw the Indian and screamed.
“All right—I shot him.”
She stood there, holding her hand to her mouth.
“You get back in the wagon. I guess he killed Pa, all right. Don’t tell that to Ma.”
She shook her head. Ma was groaning. “I can’t go back,” Maude said.
“Why?”
And then I knew. I should have known from the way Ma was groaning. I went up to Maude and slapped her face. She didn’t seem to feel it. I slapped her again.
“Get in there!” I yelled.
We had lanterns on the outside of the wagon. I took one and lit it. I wasn’t trembling so much now. I gave the lantern to Maude, who was still standing the way she had been before.
“Go inside,” I said.
Maude climbed into the wagon, taking the lantern with her. Then I cried. I crouched under the wagon, clutching the carbine and crying.
Finally, I went over to the Indian. I forced myself to do that. He lay half across the rifle he had carried. I pulled it out, and it was my father’s rifle, all right.
I don’t know how long I stood there holding the rifle. Then I put it under the seat, along with the carbine. I didn’t want to look at the wagon.
I walked over to the mules. It was hard to harness them. When it was done, I ached all over, and my shoulder was swollen where the carbine had rested.
I climbed to the driver’s seat. The curtains were down, and I couldn’t see into the wagon, but the light still burned. Taking down Pa’s whip, I let it go onto the mule’s backs. I had seen Pa do that and sometimes he let
me try. The whip was fourteen feet long and I couldn’t do much with it, but I got the mules moving. They had to keep moving. We had to find water.
At night, under the moon, the prairie was black and silver at the same time. Somehow, it didn’t frighten me the way it had during the day. I sat there thinking, I guess, of nothing at all, only awfully aware of the change inside me.
We drove on like that. I kept the mules at a slow pace, so the freighter wouldn’t roll much. I was very tired, and after a while I didn’t use the whip at all.
Then Maude came out of the wagon, sat down next to me. She looked at me and I looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. She pressed close to me.
I whistled at the mules.
Inside the wagon something was whimpering. It made me tremble to hear that.
“Reckon we’ll find water soon” I told Maude.
She nodded mechanically. Her head kept nodding and I dozed, myself. I guess I kept dozing through the night, fell asleep toward morning.
Maude woke me. The wagon had stopped, and the sun was an hour up. The mules had stopped on the bank of a slow, brown stream, lined with cottonwoods as far as I could see.
Maude was pointing at the water.
“Don’t you start crying now,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“I won’t,” Maude nodded.
Ma called me, not very loud: “Dave, come here.”
I climbed inside the wagon. Ma was lying on the bed, her arm curled around something. I peered at it.
“Do you know?” she said.
“I reckon I do. I reckon it’s a boy. Girls ain’t much use.”
Ma was crying—not much; her eyes were just wetting themselves slowly.
“Where are we?” Ma asked me.
“We been traveling through the night. There’s a river out there. I guess we don’t need to worry about water.”
“All night—Pa back?”
I said slowly: “I killed an Indian last night, Ma. He had Pa’s gun.”
Then she just stared at me, and I stood there, shifting from one foot to another, wanting to run away. But I stood there. It must have been about five minutes, and she didn’t say anything at all. The baby was whimpering.
Then she said: “You harnessed the mules?”
“Uh-huh. Maude didn’t help me—”
Ma said: “You don’t tease Maude. You don’t tease Maude, or I’ll take a stick to you. I never seen a boy like you for teasing.”
“Uh-huh,” I nodded.
“Just like your Pa,” Ma whispered. “It don’t pay to have a man whose heels are always itching—it don’t pay.”
“No use cryin’,” I said.
Ma said: “What are we going to do?”
“Go on west. Ain’t hard now to go a few hundred miles more. Reckon it won’t be hard. Pa said—”
Ma was staring at me, her mouth trembling. I hadn’t ever seen her look just like that before. I wanted to put my head down on her breast, hide it there.
I couldn’t do that. I said: “Pa told me. We’ll go west.”
Then I went outside. I sat down on the wagon seat, looking at the river. I heard the baby making noises.
I said to Maude: “A man feels funny—with a kid.”
The Little Folk from the Hills
THIS THING HAPPENED to me in an old, old land, where I had been riding forever with a tech sergeant, a staff sergeant and two thousand pounds of United States mail. The train stopped every six miles or so, and each time there was no real certainty that it would ever start again. We were at Agra or Lucknow or Patna or some place like that; it doesn’t matter very much, and one town looks like another in such a land. When we rolled into a town to stay for an hour or six hours or maybe all night, a bearer in a green and red and white uniform, with a great piled white turban topped by a splendid feather, more imposing than a Coldstream Guard on dress parade, leaped onto the running board outside of our compartment and said, “Tea, sahib?” or “Tray, sahib?”
Whether he said tea or tray depended upon what arrangements we had made with the same kind of person ten or fifty miles back. The time of day had nothing to do with it. In that sun-kissed land which the British had civilized, it was always teatime, in the middle of the night and at dawn, too, and if the man with the turban said, “Tea, sahib?” he had the tray on his hand; a juggler, acrobat and waiter rolled up together but he never missed, and he always knew if there was a dirty empty tray in the compartment.
We talked a lot about it, about this amazing piece of organization in an essentially unorganized land. In the compartment behind us, two English officers were riding, and I even talked to them about it. One was a subaltern, as they say, and the other was a colonel.
“Never thought about it,” the colonel said. “I don’t see why you chaps should be so disturbed.”
“It’s like a game,” I explained. “When you got nothing else to talk about.”
“You might ask the station commissioner next place we stop.”
“That’s too easy. Then we got nothing to talk about.”
The two Englishmen were very nice and very pleasant. Every now and then I’d spend a couple of hours in their compartment. They had a few bottles of Scotch and gin, and they made you feel that nothing made them happier than for you to be drinking their liquor. But they didn’t understand our ways or our methods of thought. The older one, for instance, the colonel, had been in India for thirty years, but it never occurred to him to question how, over a system of maybe a thousand towns and villages, they kept track of those tea trays. It impressed us as organization, perhaps the best piece of organization in the entire theater, but they weren’t impressed that way by organization.
The tech sergeant and the staff sergeant didn’t like the Englishmen and weren’t convinced by what I said about their being nice.
“Limeys are nice,” the staff sergeant admitted. “They crap on you with niceness.”
“Everything nice,” the tech sergeant said. “They live nice. They fight a war nice. They cut your throat nice.”
“If they’re so damned nice, why don’t you ask them if this rattler has a schedule?”
“They say shedule,” the tech sergeant said.
“I asked them. They think maybe it had a schedule, but not in wartime.”
“Like the train from Laredo to Mexico City—you add thirty-two hours to the schedule and then chop it up. But you got to be an Einstein to figure it out.”
“Did you ask them about the bloody tea trays?”
“They don’t know. They suggested I ask the station commissioner next place we stop.”
“Isn’t that just like a Limey?” the staff sergeant asked.
“Well, they seem interested now. That’s the way they are—it takes a little time for them to get interested in something. I’m going to have tea with them and we’re going to talk about it some more.”
I had tea with them and was in their compartment when we pulled into the station where it happened. I really liked them because they talked so pleasantly about small things. When they asked you a question they didn’t really expect any sort of a serious answer; they knew how to talk about things and make conversation. The colonel said he liked Bengal because the hunting was good, but when he learned that I didn’t hunt or care anything about it, he sort of apologized. They never said anything that could hurt your feelings. But in a way it put you at a disadvantage.
If you said that the folk were poor, they agreed. “Bloody poor,” and with sympathy, speaking of the people with respect and consideration, not as GI’s would have spoken about them. The subaltern, who was twenty or twenty-two, had a blond mustache and pink cheeks, and a gentle sweetness that was never disturbed by anything around him. Not by the filth, the misery, the hunger, the heat, the bodies of famine victims along the right of way being eaten by vultures as we watched; not even in Lucknow, where they had three or four hundred dead British soldiers laid out under an awning, plague victims—such a sweetness was all over him, a p
art of him, that he was nice to the two sergeants, even though they were enlisted personnel. The tech sergeant, commenting on that, said he was a swish.
“A what?” I had asked.
“A swish—a loop.”
“A queen, he means,” the staff sergeant said. “A rosebud, a pansy.”
“He’s a gentleman, that’s all.”
“And who says a loop can’t have nice manners?”
But he wasn’t that, I said to myself on this day, just a nice young fellow. We were slowing down from what was our usual lightninglike sixteen miles an hour to come into a station, and the subaltern thought it was Crumar, but said so apologetically with a deprecating smile.
“I try to memorize the stations.”
“Too many of them,” the colonel said.
I thought that someone must know them, the conductor or somebody. “Or timetables,” I said.
“A bloody waste of time,” the colonel thought.
And anyway, the stations are all the same. In the north there are deserts and in the south there are rice fields, but always a wooden platform with the three tanks of water, one for Hindu soldiers, one for Moslem soldiers and one for British soldiers. Always the food vendors, when there is food, the water vendors, the soft-drink vendors. Always the crowds, the endless stream of people going somewhere or coming from somewhere. Wrapped in white, clean white and dirty white, men in white and women in white, they mill around the stations. They come early; they bring their food; the smell of curry fills the air, and they wait and wait. When the train comes in, they make a rush for it, stuff themselves into the compartments, hang onto the running board. They did it this time, but with a new element, for there were a hundred or so little people, dark and naked, carrying spears and little leather shields, and bows and arrows, too, making a great rush for the train, but a rush that had in it a tired note of hopelessness that you saw at the first glance.
