by John Smelcer
“You got to go with these men,” he said, his voice filled with sadness.
“But I want to stay with you!” Simon cried, still trying to free himself.
The old man swallowed his love for his grandson, swallowed his love of his own dead son, and swallowed a thousand years of pride.
“You must go to school,” he said. “It’s the law.”
The sound of those words made Simon hate the school already, whatever it was, wherever it was.
On an imitation leather seat aboard the train’s passenger car, the young Indian boy who loved to run, who could outrun everything but this moment, looked out the window as the train started to move. The powerful engine picked up speed, and Simon watched as the only world he had ever known began to slide away: the mesas, the dull-pink earth beneath the vaulted sky, the arroyos and canyons, the thirsty fields, the hogans, and the government housing that all looked the same.
Simon watched his faithful dog running beside the train, barking at it as if he might turn the great machine around, just as he sometimes did wayward sheep. Simon watched him struggling to keep pace, until he could run no longer and slowed to a trot and then stopped altogether and sat in the middle of the tracks and howled.
For many rattling miles, Simon Lone Fight stared out the smudged glass, quietly crying, his heart bursting, his small brown hands pressed sadly against the latched window, closed tight as a fist.
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