Two Roads

by Joseph Bruchac

  “Stahitkey,” said Grasshopper as he and Little Coon joined us.

  Grasshopper is the narrow-faced boy in Bear Meat’s gang who is always chewing on something—grass, tree rosin, Wrigley’s spearmint gum, paper—then spitting it out like that insect. As if to live up to his nickname, Grasshopper ejected from his mouth a piece of the eraser he’d just gnawed off his pencil. “White boys no belong here.”

  “At least it’s better than being staluskey,” Bear Meat chuckled. “Innit, Little Coon?”

  Little Coon, whose name on the school’s records is Louis Oliver, pretended not to have heard him. Of all the boys in what I suppose I can now call “our” gang, me being included now, Louis seems the most thoughtful and the most sensitive. He’s also the one most likely, too, to do something diverting or funny whenever things get too serious.

  “Oh my,” Little Coon said, turning to direct our attention east. “Take a look at what those old turkey buzzards are doing. Just a-circling over the old lockup like they thought it was something dead.”

  “Maybe,” Possum said, rubbing the scar on his cheek with one finger—a gesture he seems to make without knowing he’s doing it. “Old HD is over there and those buzzards, being close relatives of his, are swooping in for a family reunion.”

  We all laugh, but it’s not all that funny. That head disciplinarian is no laughing matter. I’ve felt his gaze settle on me a time or two during the short period I have been here. I’d bet he wishes the new rules brought in by Superintendent Morrell weren’t in effect.

  Horse whipping and the like are forbidden now. I know that for a fact because just yesterday the HD grabbed Grasshopper—who was chewing gum—out of line at the morning roll call.

  “YOU!” he roared, lifting Grasshopper up by his collar with his left hand as if he weighed no more than a puppy. The man’s face was red as a beet. He raised up his big flat right hand.

  The big ring the HD wears on his right hand glinted as it caught the light of the rising sun. That ring had slipped around on his finger so that it was inside his palm. Slap a man’s face with a ring turned that way and it’ll leave a gash. Out of the corner of my left eye I saw the look on Possum’s face. And I knew right then who my friend’s scar came from. Possum looked ready to step in. If he had, I would have been right beside him.

  “Mr. Bayner?”

  It was Superintendent Morrell. His calm voice made the HD stop, close his palm hiding the sharp-edged ring. He lowered Grasshopper back to the ground and turned toward his boss.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Caught this one chewing gum.”

  Superintendent Morrell nodded. “Cannot have that,” he said. “Rules are rules.” He looked at Grasshopper who was standing head down between the two of them. “Spit it out into your hand.”

  Grasshopper did just that.

  “Now stick it onto your nose and leave it there for the rest of the morning.”

  It was clear from the look on the HD’s face that he was not happy about being stopped. But he went along with it.

  While Grasshopper spent the rest of the morning standing at attention, the gum stuck on his nose and a sign reading GUM CHEWING IS A FILTHY HABIT hung around his neck. The only good thing about it, he said later, was it was more interesting than Mr. Pond’s class that he got to miss.

  Mr. Pond is the math teacher here at Challagi. He’s a big, horse-faced man. In the classroom where he’s supposed to be teaching, he hardly looks at any of us. Instead, at the start of each class, he writes a bunch of problems on the board.

  “Do these,” he says in his deep sarcastic voice. “Though I doubt that any of you dummies can.”

  Then he sits down, takes a swig of the cough medicine he keeps locked in the middle drawer of his desk, leans back in his chair, folds his hands over his chest, closes his eyes, and goes to sleep until just before the bell rings. That’s when Mr. Pond wakes up, sort of gradual, stands, stretches, and points to his desk.

  “You idiots, put your papers there. Now get out of here.”

  I hate seeing the others treated that way even more than I hate being treated like a moron myself. It’s not right.

  I think back to what it was like when I was on the road with Pop. There was none of that back then. Pop would not allow it. And more often than not it was true of the majority of men who were hoboes, true knights of the road. Thinking that makes me ache to be on the road again, living that free life, feeling the wind in my face as I leaned out of a boxcar while Pop was fixing up grub behind me. What a life that was! Even though Pop’s aim was to have us a farm of our own again, I have to admit that I hardly ever thought about being back on our farm after our first month riding the rails together.

  If it wasn’t for my promise to Pop, I’d be having serious thoughts right now of heading for the hills. Or, to be more accurate, the rail yard. There’s one in the nearest town where we got off with the horses, the one Pop and I walked from. Unlike other kids who’ve run away in the past, no one would be able to predict where I was headed. I’d be on the first fast freight, a hundred miles gone before they knew I was missing.

  According to Possum, more Indian kids have run away from Challagi than have ever actually graduated. That ratio may be sort of skewed seeing as how there are a bunch of kids, like Pop, who ran away again and again.

  “Back ’bout four year ago,” Possum said, “they tried punishing kids who run away more’n once by expelling them. Think of that? Punishing someone by telling them they can’t come back to the place they was trying to escape in the first place?”

  Possum chuckled. “Like Old Rabbit said. Please don’t throw me into that Briar patch, Mr. Bear!”

  That expulsion policy ended when C.B. and a group of school staff—all former students themselves—asked for a meeting with the old superintendent.

  “Giving a boy what he wants isn’t what we’d call punishment,” they pointed out.

  “Why, I never thought of it that way!” was his response. The expulsion policy for runaways was abolished the next day.

  To be fair, there are some here, more than you’d think, who actually chose to come to an Indian school. Bad as a lot of the so-called education is here, Challagi—like Pop said—is first rate when it comes to teaching farming. Some Indian students who’ve gone here, I’m told, are managing to do a lot better at farming and stock rearing using the modern methods they learned here.

  There are other reasons why some Indian families—especially those who were Challagi students themselves—have sent their children here. They’ve done it to give them a sense of belonging.

  Skinny’s one of them. He’s never tried to run away.

  “Where would I run to?” he said. “Back where my family lived, we were the only Indians for miles around. The one school I went to, I was the only one with a brown face. Had to put up with other kids war-whooping when they saw me. Calling me Sitting Bull. Asking where my tipi was? Round here nobody treats me like I’m a wild Indian or a freak. Plus I got football here. Little town where my family lives don’t have enough kids to form a team.”

  Being accepted as an Indian. That’s what a lot of the kids here feel good about. And that’s what some wish they could be. Those mentioned earlier. Stahitkeys and staluskeys. White kids and black kids. Especially the staluskeys. Too dark to pass for white, they might do better in this world by passing as Indian.

  “Phonies. Trying to get free room and board and an education all paid for by the government.”

  That’s how Bear Meat sees the darkest-skinned students here.

  Others, like Little Coon and Possum, are nowhere near so judgmental. Being my pop’s son, I fall on their side of the issue. Far as I am concerned, it’s what a man does and not how he looks that counts. I doubt that most of them really are fakers. They just come from families where there’s both Indian and some other blood. Just like me. As far as the real dark
ones are concerned—like some of those Cherokees from North Carolina—runaway slaves got adopted and married in over the years.

  Actually, though those words stalitkey and staluskey get spoken now and then, it seems like no one ever goes out of the way to be mean to those labeled that way. They just don’t always get invited into groups like our Creek gang. And in school activities like athletics or drilling, everyone gets treated alike. If some boy who’s real black looking is a good football player, like Will Houma from Louisiana who’s the starting right tackle, you can bet he is going to be welcomed on the school team.

  Still, as I enter the mess hall with my friends, I can’t help but notice that two tables—one in the boys’ section of the huge mess hall and one in the girls’ side—are occupied entirely by those dark-skinned kids labeled as staluskey.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  ANOTHER DAY AT WORK

  Another bugle call. The end of the noon meal and the start of the industrial part of my day. My academic sessions run from just after breakfast till lunch. Seven thirty a.m. till noon.

  Every student spends half the day in academic and half the day in industrial. In my case, the industrial part’s in the afternoon from one p.m. to five p.m. That suits me fine. Those who have industrial in the morning are often so worn out from the hard labor that they fall asleep in their afternoon classes. Not that there’s that much to stay awake for.

  In eighth-grade geography class, where the red-mustached, bald-headed teacher is Mr. Mallett, we learned the startling news today that the earth is round and called a planet. Also, that North America is a continent. Then Mr. Mallett put his feet up on his desk and went back to reading one of the magazines he buries himself in during every class.

  Like the other awful teachers here, he’s been working for the Indian education service for years. Teaching for him just means coming in to class each day, taking the roll, saying a word or two, and then spending the rest of his time sucking his mustache and reading cheap magazines. He doesn’t even give tests. All we are expected to do is not interrupt his concentration on the pictures in the Police Gazette until the bugle sounds.

  We don’t do much studying. There’s not enough geography books for every student—only five or six battered texts older than Mr. Mallett himself. So most of the students stuck in here every day either stare out the window or lower their heads down on their desks and doze off. Today when I looked around the room the only person awake aside from me was Possum, reading The Call of the Wild. He’s a slow reader, mouthing every word and going back to read every page twice. But he’s told me half a dozen times he loves the book. Especially the freedom in it.

  Me, I’ve used the time to scribble in this journal I’ve started keeping—sort of like the one Pop kept. Writing in it makes me feel closer to him. Also it helps me to think about what I might say in another letter to Pop.

  Another boring day, I start writing. How did you stand it when you were here, Pop?

  I’ve written a full page of thoughts like that by the time the academic building’s annoying buzzer sounds. It goes off half a minute before the bugle. Despite the fact that I’ve had a month to get used to it, it still irritates the heck out of me when it goes off. It’s pitched so loud it makes my teeth feel like they’re being attacked by a dentist’s drill.

  Possum walks next to me as we head to our industrial class. Our Challagi schoolbags with our books and school supplies are over our shoulders. The bags are more like burlap sacks. The pack I arrived with is a lot better. But that pack was taken from me. Like such personal items as family photos, good clothing, keepsakes, and jewelry other Indian students arrived with at the start of the year, my pack is in “safe storage” in the basement of Building Four.

  “Safe storage,” Little Coon explained to me, “means anything valuable’s about likely to still be there when you’re allowed to look at your things as a baby chick dropped into a hawk’s nest.”

  That pack of mine is empty. The only keepsake I really care about is that France Victory Medal I put in Possum’s hidey-hole. And I’ve never owned a photo of Pop. I don’t need one. All I need to do is just close my eyes to see his kind face in front of me.

  But so far I’ve not been able to “see” what he’s doing or about to do. That gift of mine of precognition—sort of viewing the future—only kicks in rarely.

  “You look like you are cah-gee-tay-tin about something,” he says.

  Cogitating is his word of the day. In exchange for his continuing to show me the ropes here, being the Virgil showing me the way through the underworld—like Aeneus—I have been finding him a new word each day from my dictionary.

  I just nod.

  “So what are you cogitating about, Jay Bird?”

  “Nothing much,” I say.

  In fact, what I am still thinking about is what I might say in my next letter to my father. I’ve written two of them to him so far. But I haven’t sent them. That’s because I haven’t heard from him yet, so I have no way to know where to mail them. I have them both—written on pages I tore out of my journal—folded up safe inside my copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology—right next to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. I’ve reread that story three times since I’ve been here. It makes me wish I could find a magic thread that I could follow to get out of the labyrinth of this Indian school. But then again, it was not Theseus’s father who took him into that maze and told him to stay there. I almost mentioned that in my first letter to my father. But I didn’t.

  Nor did I mention the dreams I keep having of being in that dark place. A place without light. Where I can’t open my eyes or hear . . . or breathe.

  Except in that dream I also know I’m not me. I’m someone else.

  I pushed that dream away, like brushing a spiderweb from my face, as I wrote.

  Pop,

  How are you? I am fine. But I miss you so much. I am doing okay. I have a couple of friends. One of them is Possum. Remember him? He’s the one who showed me around.

  I guess you know what life is like here, so I don’t have to say much about my days. Nights are hard. I have a hard time getting to sleep what with all the noises from the other boys around me. It seems like there is always at least one boy who is crying or wakes up calling for his mom. That is how I learned the word in Creek for mom, after hearing it so many times. Ic-ki. I have been learning other Creek words, too. I guess that is funny, isn’t it? Here at Challagi you get punished for saying even one word in Indian. But whenever the staff is not around, the guys in my gang are always talking Indian. So I came here speaking English and now I am learning Indian.

  I am keeping out of trouble. So far I have only earned a few demerits. And I make sure to stay away from you know who. He was bad when you were here, and he’s still bad. All the boys talk about him as if he was the boogeyman.

  I have learned some useful things here, especially about farming. English is not bad and I have also done well in penmanship. I bet you can see that from my handwriting in this letter, can’t you?

  But the agricultural science classes have been very good. I have learned a lot about poultry. When we have our farm I think I can be very useful because of what I have been learning. Also on the weekends I have learned some things from the other boys in our gang. One of them, Little Coon, knows all about animals. We hunt together.

  I have written a lot in this letter about me. But what I want to know is about you. You must have been in Washington for quite a while now. I saw something in a Tulsa newspaper here at the school about the men like you coming to Washington. It said that they were Reds and they wanted to bring down the government. I know that must be wrong. I bet they are just men like you who want a fair deal.

  I will send this letter to you as soon as you have written me so I know your address.

  I love you, Pop. I will do my best to make you proud of me.

  I am you
r faithful son,

  Cal

  Possum and I take as roundabout a path as we can to get to the harness shop, but not far enough out of the way to make us late. Plus, from the glint of light I see from the top of the water tower, I know we are being watched for any sort of infraction that will add marks to our red cards.

  We don’t want to get any of those demerits that used to earn a boy a whipping back in Pop’s time. Now the only official punishments are to be assigned extra work or lose privileges—like being able to go into town on a weekend once a month or take part in get-togethers.

  But both of us want to breathe the fresh air, listen to the birds that are flocking in ever-increasing numbers back into the trees and fields. So we take the route that leads us closest to the near meadow. Little Coon and I heard a meadowlark singing there just yesterday morning, and we saw the yellow of its breast before it disappeared into the tall grass beyond the cattle barn.

  “Hear that,” Little Coon said. “It was talking Indian. Imi-tik-tanki, imi-tik-tanki. Free time, free time.”

  No meadowlark is singing for us today, though. No geese fly over, honking at us to remind us how free they are in their open sky. As we approach the harness shop I find myself opening and closing my fists, trying to loosen them up. I’m already building callouses on my palms from the leather work. I sometimes wake up nights with my hands curled up like claws from the work of grabbing and manipulating the stiff horse harnesses we’re making.

  “Maybe,” Possum says, looking down at my feet, “we’ll get shoe repair duty today.”

  That would be nice. Shoe repair is easier work than the harness making.

  Then Possum chuckles. “And maybe pigs are going to fly.”

  I chuckle, too, but I am now looking at my feet too. His words about shoes have reminded me just how uncomfortable mine are getting. I haven’t been able to buy a pair of sneakers like his. We earn a few pennies a day from our industrial work. But I have nowhere near enough to buy shoes. I’m stuck with the bullhides I was issued my first day here. They’ve heavy, but not sturdy. They were so badly made out of already cheap material that they are starting to fall apart after weeks of my feet being tortured by them. I do have the polished black shoes I wear for marching—as do all the other cadets. But that is all those shoes are for. Either sneakers or work boots have to be worn for the rest of the day.