There’s a moment of silence between them.
For some reason, though I’ve never had that thought before, I’m thinking about the fact that Pop’s face is just about as brown as Corporal Dart’s. Indian brown? And that what the corporal said about himself not getting a job because of his skin color might be as true about my pop? That people would treat him different if they thought he wasn’t a white man?
I shake my head a little, confused about the kind of thoughts I’m having that I never had before.
Finally, Pop nods, looks around. “Where do we go?”
“Over there’s the mayor,” Esom Dart says, pointing off to his left. “He’s a good old gent, and a vet at that. I was directed to him right off, and he didn’t hesitate about giving me permission to stay.”
Pop and I both look. There, a hundred feet away, a gray-whiskered old man is sitting on a box in front of a little cabin made with mismatched boards.
As Pop and I approach, the elderly gent with the whiskers holds up his hands and claps them together.
“As I live and breathe!” the old man says, his voice raspy. “Be this me old pal Railroad Will a-coming my way? Been so long since I seen yeh, my lad, I was a-feared yeh was in the bone orchard after having greased the tracks.”
“Nope,” Pop says. “I have not caught that westbound yet, Cap.”
“And who might this here road kid be?” Cap says, grabbing hold of my right forearm with an iron grip so tight it almost makes me wince. He shakes my arm, then lets it go.
“Tough nut, ain’t he?” Cap says with a grin that discloses a number of gaps where pearlies once resided. “Guess that would make him yer boy, right?”
“My son, Cal,” Pop says, putting an approving hand on my shoulder.
Cap nods, holds out his right hand. “Put ’er there, son.”
I hold my own hand out, expecting it to be crushed. But the old man’s grasp this time is as soft as one of my father’s handshakes.
“Sir,” I say.
“Pleased to meetcha,” Cap replies. “Welcome ye both to Hard Times Township.”
“You the mayor here?” Pop asks.
Cap grins even wider than before, slapping an open palm against his chest. “Me?” he says. “Well, there is some who might say that. Anyhow, no friend of mine—nor his boy—need fear any jungle buzzards while they be here. No yeggs be allowed in Hard Times Town. Yeh are welcome to be calling in, warm yerself by me fire, share the mulligan. No need to make the moon yer blanket tonight.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
A FINE MULLIGAN
It’s later in the day.
From the position of the sun in the sky, and by what Pop calls my internal timekeeper, I reckon it to be about six in the p.m. Time for dinner. Cap has dragged out a pot. He starts sloshing the water I just lugged in an old galvanized pail from the nearby creek he pointed out to me. When it’s half full he hangs its handle on an iron tripod over the fire in front of his shanty.
This fire, burning brightly, has been made using wood so dry that no telltale smoke is rising up from it. The wood stacked around it has been just as carefully chosen. No wet logs whose moisture would turn into thick clouds of water vapor like the Indian smoke signals I saw in a western movie.
Cap sits back on his packing crate. That fire, the pot, the water in it, and a handful of salt is all that he plans to contribute. Pop reaches into his pocket and pulls out three potatoes.
“All right!” Cap says. “Earth apples is a great start.”
Fine, firm spuds, like the ones he produced earlier in the boxcar to add to the professor’s little frying pan. The rest of those given him by Miz Euler. They’re good-sized and solid and red-skinned.
Pop doesn’t peel them, just cuts them into chunks with his knife and plops them into the pot.
Another ’bo comes up to join us, holding something green in his hands. He leans toward the pot, but Cap puts up a hand to stop him.
“Show us what yeh got first, Shorty,” Cap says.
Which is a good idea. I have, in the past few months, seen one mulligan stew nearly spoiled when a half-lit rum-dum ’bo tried to pour in a double handful of smelly dirt.
“Greens,” Shorty says, opening his palms. “Green wild onions just pulled. Washed ’em good, Cap. Real good.”
Cap gestures toward the pot, and Shorty dumps in his contribution.
One by one, others add to the stew. Esom Dart is among them. He hands Pop a number two can with twenty ounces of kidney beans. The next man contributes a good-sized turnip that Pop cuts into thin slices. A number three can of sliced tomatoes, then six carrots.
The mulligan is already smelling heavenly to me—though I suspect with the appetite I have worked up from not eating all day that boiled shoe leather might also seem appetizing. But it’s not yet finished.
Cap reaches down under his crate and pulls out a bag of flour.
“Thickener,” he says, stirring in a couple of sizable scoops with a big spoon he also produces from under his wooden seat.
“Would a bit of meat be welcome, good sirs?” a familiar voice asks from behind me. “Courtesy of my sibling’s eldest offspring?”
I turn to look at the professor. He is holding up a ham hock, displaying it as if it was some sort of prize, which of course it is. Every one of the seven of us gathered round Cap’s fire express their assent.
“You bet!”
“Yessirree, Bob!”
“Ah-yup!”
“For sure.”
“Indeedy-do.”
“Thank you, Professor.”
Those last words being, of course, from Pop. To which I add a hearty nod.
The ham hock boiled into the mix, the stew seems all set. But Cap adds a few more surprises in the form of spices. Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a top hat, he makes pepper and dill appear and artfully stirs them in.
My mouth is watering. But I remember my manners—as does everyone else. No one tries to dig in. Finally after half an hour has passed, Cal raises his wooden spoon like a baton.
“Time to test ’er,” Cap rasps. He dips the big spoon into the stew and then, to my surprise, holds the full spoon out to me.
I blow on the spoon and take a taste. It’s so good I feel as if I am about to faint. Somehow, I manage to hand the empty wooden spoon back to our gray-bearded cook without gnawing on the wood.
“Well, young feller,” he says. “What be yer verdict?”
I hold out both my hands and do a double thumbs-up.
“All righty,” Cap says. “Time to chow down.”
Everyone starts to lean in, except for Pop and me whose lead I always follow.
“Hold yer horses,” Cap says. He pulls out a series of mismatched cups, some chipped and cracked, but serviceable.
“Wash ’em in the stream once yer done,” he states.
One after another, Cap fills the cups and passes them out.
Each of us refills our cups more than once until the last of the mulligan is gone.
“We’ll clean the pot for you, Cap,” Pop volunteers.
“Thankee, Will,” the old man says, beaming a gap-toothed grin through his whiskers. “You are a blowed-in-the-glass ’bo, for sure.”
I have to smile at that compliment. It’s the highest one knight of the road can give another. To be called blowed-in-the-glass means being recognized as true blue, someone you’d trust with your life.
“We’ll take all those cups, too,” Pop says. “Right, Cal.”
I nod and collect the cups. They’re already near as clean as anyone might get them from using not just spoons, but index fingers to scoop out every last drop of the mulligan.
We shoulder our bindles as we stand up. It’s not likely anyone would steal them while we are gone, But a ’bo who takes it for granted that everyone el
se is as honest as he is, is a ’bo who believes in mountains made of rock candy.
Despite the dark—which never bothers Pop or renders him near blind like most men confronted by a lack of light—we make our way sure-footed back to that little brook, which I hear babbling fifty yards before we reach its edge.
We have emerged from the shade of the trees, and with the light from the moon, it’s brighter here by the water. Near as easy to see as if it was day. The creek is no more than a few feet deep and ten feet wide. There’s a flat rock by a small waterfall where I filled the bucket during my first trip to the stream. I kneel on it and rinse out each cup—after Pop has scoured it with wet white sand from the creek bed. Last of all, I lever the heavy pot—almost too big to lift—into the swift flow. I hold the handle with my left hand and run my right hand around the inside of the pot. Then, dumping out the water, I give up the handle to Pop who lifts the weighty pot effortlessly from the brook.
He piles the seven cups carefully into the pot. Then, instead of starting back to the jungle, he sits and leans back on his bindle.
I’m glad of that. This is a peaceful place. The music of the little stream is nearly as soothing to my ears as the rhythm of a boxcar’s wheels on rails of steel. I could close my eyes and fall asleep here, secure that I’d be safe with Pop by my side.
I’m also glad because Pop sitting down means he is ready to talk. Maybe he’s finally going to answer those questions that have been buzzing through my brain like bees most of the day.
Pop stretches his bad leg straight out in front of him. He rubs his knee with both hands. I am sorry to see that. It means it has been paining him. He never complains, but I’ve seen how his lips get tight when he does that.
“So,” he says, straightening back up, “where was I?”
I do not venture an opinion. That was not a real question. Just what Pop says when about to start speaking on one topic or another.
“Where do I begin?”
Another question that isn’t. So I wait.
“Well,” Pop says, “you know a good bit of it already. What happened, that is, which leads us to where we sit at this moment in time. It’s just you didn’t know what my story was. Which, so to speak, is also your own.”
When my father begins talking in this roundabout way, it might be frustrating to some. Luckily for me, I am used to it. It’s the way he might begin if he were to tell me more about over there in the Great War. I take his verbal maneuvering as a good sign and settle back farther.
“I am talking,” Pop finally says, “about my family. Our family. Your great-great-grandparents. They were full-blood Creek, as were my own parents. One of the Five Civilized Tribes. Forced to leave our homelands in Georgia, leave behind a good-sized farm where they had hundreds of acres of crops, herds of cattle, and a fine living. Leave for no other reason than they were Indian and white men wanted their land. Sent to Indian Territory. Which is where I grew up as Will Blackbird. Blackbird, not Black. That is my real last name and yours, too.”
Blackbird, I’m thinking. I actually like that name better than just plain Black. Somehow it seems more right for Pop and me. But something else is happening. As Pop talks I’m finding myself somewhere else. I’m seeing people dressed in old-fashioned clothing, men and women and children, people with faces as brown as Pop’s. Those people are calling out to one another in a strange language I almost understand. Men in uniforms and carrying long guns are pushing us out of our log cabins. Fires are burning. We’re being driven from our homes.
I shake my head and I’m back sitting by my father’s side. The light from the half moon is throwing a shadow across his face. Around us the forest is a dark haze. The sounds of the stream and the calling of night birds from the trees make this all seem as much like a dream as the vision I just had. Am I really here. Am I awake or asleep? Is my father, who I thought I knew better than any other person in the whole world, actually telling me this? He actually is an Indian? Why have I never heard this till now?
Instead of answering my questions, he’s just adding on more. I have to ask something now. One question in particular. A question that’s beating its wings like a bat stuck inside my head.
“Why?” I say. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Pop turns toward me. Because the moon is in the sky behind him, it casts his whole face into darkness. I can’t see his eyes or his lips moving as he speaks.
“We did it,” Pop says, “your mother and I, to protect you.”
If any of the confusion in my head can be seen on my face I must look as uncertain as a deer caught in the headlights of a car. Pop reaches out to grasp my shoulder.
“I know, Cal,” he says. “It’s a lot to have to take in.”
I nod.
“Thing is,” Pop says, “it’s not easy being Indian. People look at you different, treat you different. This may be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but when you are seen as a brave you are a lot less free.”
I know Pop means that as a joke, but it’s not really funny. I just nod again.
“There’s too many out there who think Indians are stupid and backward, worthless drunks, dirty and uncivilized,” he says, his voice soft. “It’s not much different from how they see a man who’s black. I wanted to get you away from that. No matter what you do, as an Indian you’re never as good as a white man. In their minds it is only white men who are created equal. Not long ago, if you were Indian you couldn’t vote. But you could fight for this country. Indians weren’t even American citizens until 1924. But if people think you are white, it’s different. White men have all the rights. If our family could pass—if you could pass—for white there might be no end of opportunities.”
I’ve seen how black men are treated. Seen it more times than I’d like. I believe and have always tried to live by what Pop has told me ever since I could understand words. We all are the same under the skin. One man’s blood is just the same color as the next man’s. And you can never judge any person or any thing by how they look on the outside. Some of nature’s deadliest creatures are really pretty to look at—like the black widow spider whose bite is poison.
“That’s why, when I joined the army, I kept quiet about being Indian. I would have been treated different. That’s for sure. I just told people who asked why I was so tan that it was my Italian blood.” Pop chuckles. “Not that I had any.”
“Did Mom know?”
Pop smiles. “I was never able to hide anything from your mother. The second thing she asked—right after asking me to marry her—was about that. Except it was more a statement than a question. Sort of like her proposal. ‘You are an Indian,’ she said to me. Just like that.”
Pop shakes his head, looking off to his left as he does when he remembers things. “Your mom had a gift, Cal. Seems like you have it, too. She had this way of knowing things no one else could know. Sometimes even seeing things before they happened. So I had to fess up to her about how I was passing for white.”
Pop stays quiet for a long time.
“What did Mom say then?” I finally ask.
“She said she understood. How it was a little like being foreign or an orphan and having people look down on you. She also said that it was probably better for people not to know. If we were going to get a mortgage on the farm we were going to buy the bank would be more likely to give it to a white couple who are a tanned war veteran and a nurse and not an Indian and a dirty immigrant. We always planned to tell you some day, but we were so happy together. And we thought it would make things easier for you. Even though your mom could see things, she never saw the worst of what was going to happen to us.”
Pop goes silent again. The way the moon is shining on his face I can see that his eyes are moist. I’m having a hard time not crying myself.
I understand now why Pop reacted that way when Boney called him “Injun Joe.” I can see how it must hav
e hurt him to be lumped in with that picture of an Indian as a murderous, drunken savage.
Okay, I think, so Pop is Indian.
Or rather he was Indian till he joined the army. And then he and my mom decided he should keep passing as white to get our farm.
Maybe I can accept that, though it’s a lot to wrap my head around. But what does his being Indian, even former Indian, make me? Indian, too? Half Indian?
I look at Pop, about to ask another question. But he beats me to it.
“Why now?” Pop says. “Is that what you are wondering, Cal? Why tell you now about your blood?”
And why talk about Indian school? I think.
Pop nods. I suspect that nod is as much to himself as it is to me.
Somewhere back in the forest an owl whoootooluls. Pop cocks his head in that direction. Pretty soon, another owl answers farther off to our left. I’ve always liked hearing the call of an owl, though it can startle you some. That’s what it’s meant to do if you are something small an owl likes to eat. Make a mouse jump, rustle the leaves enough so that owl can swoop in on silent wings and grab it.
“My grampa,” Pop says, “told us that an owl calling like that might be a bad omen. A warning that something bad was about to happen. At Challagi they taught us that an owl was just an owl.”
Pop shakes his head. “Challagi,” he says again. “Hah! You should have heard the stories the older boys told us about owls and witches when none of the teachers or disciplinarians were around. Especially the Cherokee boys. Those scary stories made you pull the covers over your head once you were in bed. Mason Bushyhead—he was eastern Cherokee and fifteen years old. He told us little boys about something that happened in House Four, the dorm where the younger boys lived back then. It happened back when he was my age, which was eight at the time.
“He said something woke him up in the middle of the night. It was the sound of someone eating. He peeked out from under his covers and what he saw chilled him to the bone. There was a green light hovering over Charley Cornsilk, four beds down from him. And he could see a shape floating in the middle of that light, a person it was. And that person was holding something bloody in its hands and chewing on it. Then that witch, for that was what it had to be, reached a bony hand down, shoved it into little Charley’s side, and pulled out another piece of his liver.
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