by John Smelcer
“It’s okay. I’ll be right over there.”
At the front of the first long tables, a woman asked Noah his name again, while another woman rifled through a registry, her finger dragging down the page until she found his name.
“Boyscout. Here it is,” she said checking off his name and then looking up. “Ninth grade. You’ll be housed in Lathrop Hall. Please remember that name. Lathrop Hall.”
The woman rifled through a folder and pulled out a form with Noah’s name already typed across the top.
“Take this form and go to the next room at the end of the hall. Give it to the school nurse. She’ll tell you what to do.”
Noah walked over to Lucy and waited beside her. There were only two other people in front of her. She went through the same processing and was given the same form.
“Eighth grade,” said a woman. “You’ll be housed in Moore Hall. Please remember that name.”
Together, they walked into the next room and stood at the end of another seemingly unmoving line.
While they waited, Noah looked at the form. It had all kinds of information about him: where he came from, which tribe, which reservation or agency, his mother’s race, his father’s race and occupation, how much land his family had been allotted by the government. It even offered a section on his health: height, weight, vision, vaccinations, hearing, and general fitness. Places were reserved for photographs and for teachers to write grades and remarks, which clubs he would belong to, and which trade skills he should learn.
Noah tried but failed to wrap his mind around that paper as his future. His mind remained as blank as the back of the complicated form.
When they came to the front of the line, Lucy and Noah were split up by gender, apparently to simplify the task of health officials in evaluating and marking their records. A long, white linen drape formed a separating wall, about seven feet tall—girls on one side, boys on the other.
The doctors and nurses tested the Indian children’s eyes, making them read letters on a poster; gave them hearing tests, asking them to raise their left or right hand when they heard variously pitched beeping sounds; measured heights and measured weights; asked them to cough, to hold their breath. They checked scalps for lice and fleas and gave them a battery of vaccinations against polio, tuberculosis, measles, and tetanus. They tested their reflexes, examined their eyes and ears, and took temperatures and blood pressures, all the while writing numbers and remarks on the records of the quiet, unresisting children.
The enrollment process worked with remarkable efficiency. It had been refined over decades. So well-considered was every station of the process that none of the children seemed pressed to ask questions. And none of the staff found it necessary to speak to the children, other than to instruct them in an examination procedure or to request information.
At the end of the testing, a short man in thick, black-framed glasses collected the forms from the passing children and told them, in groups of eight or ten, to go straight through the back doors to the building on the other side of the parade field. He pointed to the building as he told them to stay on the walks and not to trample the lawn. To each small group he concluded in the same way, in the same practiced tone, “It’s the cafeteria.”
Lucy and Noah were hungry. They had spent most of the day standing in one line or the other, their resentful stomachs growling louder and louder.
The cafeteria was an expansive, open space filled with long tables and chairs. A bank of high windows ran along two walls. One of the ubiquitous “English Only” posters was fixed to the wall inside the entrance. A directing arrow mounted on a small wooden pillar just inside the door pointed to the serving area, which was preceded by stacks of plastic trays and a table with flatware, plates, and napkins. Another arrow pointed to a row of servers, all dressed in white, scooping meatloaf, white beans, and cabbage with long, metal ladles from heavy pots. None of the servers spoke to the children holding their plates out before them. At the end of the serving row stood a table with stacks of sliced white bread and pale margarine.
Lucy had never seen so much food. She only knew her meager diet of scrawny rabbits and wild Indian potatoes. Then she noticed the basket full of red apples, and she suddenly remembered the dream she had shared with her mother, the Indian boys and girls sitting at the table full of food.
Goose bumps raised on her arms.
Noah and Lucy both grabbed extra slices of bread and an apple and cautiously made their way across the room—careful not to spill the contents of their trays—to an almost empty table at the far end. They sat across from two boys about their age. Both had already eaten most of their supper. Each table was provided with yellow-plastic pitchers of milk and blue-plastic pitchers of water. As the children ate amid an increasingly noisy din of talk and clatter, young Indian girls, dressed in white aprons, continuously walked about replacing empty pitchers with full ones.
After eating just enough of the colorless food to tamp down his hunger, Noah looked up at the two boys sitting across from them.
“My name is Noah. I’m a freshman,” he said, smiling as he wiped his chin. “This here’s Lucy. She’s in eighth grade.”
The two boys nodded and smiled across the heavy wooden table.
“My name’s Simon. This is Elijah. We’re also freshman.”
The four sat for a long time finishing their meals and talking about their adventurous journeys to the school. They all commented on how Simon’s shiny, black hair was almost as long as Lucy’s.
“Simon Longhair,” Lucy said, half in fun, half in admiration. “I think it’s wonderful.”
An announcing voice came over the loudspeaker saying that the cafeteria would soon close. The man’s monotone directed the children to check in at their assigned dormitory. The voice said that if any student had already forgotten which dormitory had been assigned, he or she could consult a list posted on the wall in the front of the cafeteria. Only Noah remembered his dorm. The other three needed to check the list.
On the way out the front door, Simon accidentally bumped into a larger, older Indian boy carrying his loaded tray toward an empty table. The impact sent the tray crashing to the shiny floor.
“Gee, I’m sorry,” Simon said, his voice sincere.
“Why don’t you watch where you’re goin’?” the older boy yelled as he shoved Simon.
One of the older boy’s friends came up beside him. Both had obviously been at the school for several years. They were juniors, near the top of the class hierarchy. Both wore letter jackets displaying their role as members of the football team.
“Pick it up,” the first boy commanded.
Simon knelt down and picked up the tray in one hand, collecting the silverware with the other. He stood up, holding the tray.
“What about the food on the floor?” the boy said, looking down at the mess. “I’m not going to clean it up.”
His friend jumped into the taunting.
“You clean it up,” he said. “Eat it off the floor.”
Simon looked at both of them and then down at the mishmash of food splattered on the polished floor.
“Go ahead,” the second boy said again. “Eat it.”
Noah, Elijah, and even Lucy stood by Simon. Noah spoke first.
“He said he was sorry. It was an accident.”
Elijah joined in. “Yeah, it was just an accident.”
Little Lucy came and stood directly in front of Simon, looking up at the two older boys, knitting her black eyebrows together in an effort to look menacing.
“He said he was sorry,” she said sharply, her little fists clenched.
The boy who had carried the tray shoved Lucy aside and grabbed Simon by the shirt. He had drawn back a balled-up fist when two staff members came by and broke up the squabble, calling the older boys by their last names.
“Highmountain! Lame Deer
!”
The adults sent the four young friends away while keeping the older boys behind to speak to them about their behavior to underclassmen. When Simon was safely out of the cafeteria and standing before the list of dormitory assignments posted on the outer wall of the hallway, just to the right of the door, he turned to his group of new friends and quietly thanked them for standing by him.
All of them, even little Lucy, patted Simon on the back or shoulders.
Sometimes it takes people years to make friends. Sometimes the best friends are made swiftly, in an instant rather than over weeks or months. All four children seemed to gather that at a place like Wellington, the closest friends are sometimes those made early on. Certainly, they would get to know one another better in the days and months and years to come, but all four already felt a bond.
A map of the campus was posted beside the dormitory assignment list. By happy coincidence, all three boys were assigned to the same dorm, Lathrop Hall, but Lucy was assigned to Moore Hall, which was appointed for girls. The boys agreed to escort Lucy to her dorm first, and then they walked two buildings over to their own. The sun was just setting behind the farthest building when they walked through the heavy double doors of their new home.
In the center of the well-lit lobby two older men sat behind a long table.
“Names!” one of the men called as the three boys walked toward the imposing table.
Elijah saluted and announced the names: “High Horse, Lone Fight, Boyscout,” while the old men slowly and methodically looked up and down their long lists ticking off the names. They gave the boys their room assignments. Though all were different rooms, all three were on the same floor.
The balder of the two men announced to the boys a summary of instructions. “Your floor monitors will go over the house rules at 8 p.m. Until then, you are free to inspect your rooms, but you may not leave the building.”
The man said nothing more after that. He simply turned and pointed toward the wide staircase behind him, one of those “English Only” posters pasted to the wall on the first landing.
At the floor meeting, held for the benefit of new and returning students alike, the residents were given a variety of instructions, everything from curfew hours, to how to make a bed, to how long to shower. There were strict rules against taking long showers. The floor monitors warned them not to speak their Native languages or to dance Indian-style dances or to do anything Indian. After dismissal, the boys all went to their assigned rooms for the night. Each room was the same, each framed within dark-paneled walls. Each was supplied with a single small window, two beds, two desks, and two small closets. On each narrow bed rested a pillow, a stack of neatly folded sheets, a dark blue blanket, and two white towels.
Whenever the steam heat kicked on, the radiator in every room made fitful popping and hissing sounds.
All the new boys and girls slept restlessly, tossing and turning, kicking at their stiff sheets, dreaming of home, wherever that home had been. Late into the night, while the children slept, the staff readied themselves for the year to come, the kitchen staff sharpening their knives, the faculty sharpening their lesson plans, all of them sharpening their skills at instructing without conversing, supplanting any sense of compassion with the sense of purpose.
Chapter Four
THE SECOND DAY at Wellington began with the usual commotion of boarding school: floor monitors calling out and banging on dorm room doors, some students crying after waking up and realizing where they were, kitchen staff stacking plates and preparing breakfast, the JROTC units shouting out cadence songs as they jogged and slogged around the sodden track half asleep, each young cadet trying to keep rhythm in the half-dark.
Within thirty minutes all the children had washed, dressed, straightened their rooms, and made their uncomfortable beds, the corners tightly tucked as they had been instructed the night before. The floor monitors told the boys to assemble at the main administration building in five minutes, the first building they had entered the day before, where they had been examined and prodded by health officials.
When Elijah, Simon, and Noah arrived at the building, almost a hundred boys were already standing in line in front of the dark, thick doors.
The drizzle had stopped during the night, but the morning was still cold and gray and wet.
It was almost an hour before Simon, Noah, and Elijah had passed through the doors, wound around the corner, and come within view of their destination. They could see the line turning into a brightly lit room about halfway down the long hall. They wondered at the buzzing, electrical sound that began to drift from the room. Occasionally, the lights overhead flickered on and off. Eventually, after much speculation, they could see into the buzzing room. A dozen chairs were placed in two neat rows. At each chair a solemn barber was shaving a distraught Indian boy’s head, the hiving sound of electric hair clippers echoing against the high walls and closed windows. A stern, gray-suited, stolid woman with chin whiskers and gray hair stood at the end of the line, pointing to vacant chairs whenever a barber was done.
“Next!” she’d shout, leading a boy by the arm and pointing across the loud room.
A door was propped wide open at the far end. Through it a single-line stream of boys steadily passed, each rubbing a hand across a newly shaven scalp, all of a death-gray tint of skin unused to light. From a distance, they all looked the same. Two older Indian boys, both seniors, stood on either side of the door.
When the three young friends came to the front of the line, panic began to well up inside Simon. His heart began to race. His stomach felt so tight that he thought he might vomit. His mother always loved Simon’s long hair. His father was always proud of it, saying what a good little warrior Simon was. His long hair wasn’t just part of his appearance; it was part of who he was.
Simon stepped behind Noah and Elijah, buying time. When the whiskered woman finally indicated that it was his turn, Simon darted across the bustling room toward the open door.
But before he made it, the two seniors caught him and dragged him back to an empty chair, holding his arms, twisting them painfully behind his back as Simon screamed his terror. He wriggled in the chair, trying to break free, but the two boys held him fast while the barber did his job, handfuls of shiny, black hair tumbling down his arms and back, spilling onto the growing heap of hair already lying on the smooth floor of shiny black-and-white linoleum tiles.
Simon screamed so loudly that boys still behind in the hallway lines thought surely someone was dying. Everyone stopped to see what the commotion was. Barbers held their idle electric clippers in their idle hands, curious boys still in line edged close together trying to peek into the room, along the outside wall of the building, boys, including Noah and Elijah, and groundskeepers stood tippy-toed trying to look through the windows.
Crows lifted out of the great oak in the cemetery, and song birds stopped singing.
The sky began, once again, to drizzle.
While the electric clippers sheared his hair, Simon closed his eyes, trying to make it all go away like a bad dream, trying to make Wellington go away. He thought about home on the reservation and about his grandparents, trying desperately to replace the moment with happier thoughts.
LUCY SAT ACROSS FROM SIMON at breakfast. Simon did not speak the entire time, quietly staring at his plate, tears occasionally dripping onto his pancakes. Elijah and Noah didn’t know what to do or say. After a while, Lucy reached across the table and held his hand. She squeezed it firmly but said nothing. Simon raised his head, and Lucy saw the despair in his eyes, saw it lying there like a still, black pool. Suddenly, she too began to cry. Outside, the drizzle picked up its pace, and the low, gray clouds burst open, releasing a torrent of rain. The winds gusted, the few trees around campus bent double like old men, and every last leaf was torn from every limb until the trees, too, looked shorn and naked. The fall was disappearing and making room for
the coming winter.
Noah asked Lucy how her first night went. All three of her friends awaited her reply, but the question made her nervous. She looked down at the table, pulling a wadded strand of her hair.
Finally, she looked up and whispered, “I overheard some of the other girls talking before bedtime. They were talking about how sometimes male staff members or teachers sneak into a girl’s room late at night. They were talking about what happened to some of the girls last year.”
The boys could tell that Lucy was worried.
After discussing the problem for a while, the boys thought of a way to help protect their friend. Finally, they agreed that she could snatch some empty cans from the cafeteria’s garbage bin, peel off their labels, wash them, and stack them neatly against her door so that they would fall over in a clamor should someone try to enter her room at night. Elijah thought for a moment and then warned Lucy she would have to explain things to her roommate, who might otherwise accidentally trigger the make-shift alarm going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The three boys laughed, leaving Lucy a little embarrassed at first.
The idea of the cans seemed to lessen Lucy’s anxiety. Before they left the cafeteria’s grounds, all four rifled through the dumpster. With her arms full of half a dozen cans, Lucy smiled for the first time since bedtime the night before.
The boys escorted her back to her dorm, where she hid the cans under her bed for the time being. Afterward, all four made their way across campus to the instruction building, where all students were given their semester class schedule. After that, the headmaster held convocation in the gym. The bleachers were packed with young Indians from all across the nation by the time the faculty solemnly took their places on the stage, all wearing long, black gowns, and their faces bearing no sign of anticipation or excitement. The headmaster spoke for almost an hour about patriotism and what it means to be a good American citizen. He talked about the importance of education and training. Even the faculty seemed uninterested in his droning voice. Noah nudged Simon and pointed to a teacher on the back row who was blatantly asleep; others of the faculty looked down at their hands folded neatly in their laps. To Simon, they looked like they wished they could be asleep, too.
