Arilla Sun Down

by Virginia Hamilton

  Besides the fact that she had credit, Mom was what my dad called “a beautiful woman.” It’s true, too, you don’t see many people out here with that kind of stage beauty she has. Mom never goes even to the supermarket without her face made to look glowing and with the eylashes, not too long, but full and soft. Tall, with a dancer’s lean strength; and hair, kind of kinky-long down her back, or pulled up in a full, crinkly pony tail like a question mark on her neck. She has the longest, slimmest legs I have ever seen on anybody’s mom.

  Last Fourth of July we all four — Mom and Dad and Jack Sun Run and me — went over to the Spangler Park for the celebration, and to sit on the hill to watch the fireworks as soon as it got dark. Everybody in town seemed to be there, and we walked in to the field all dressed up like everybody else. It was one of the few big occasions since Lilly Adams moved back to town. She was already some famous for her classes, and the local News and the Fairmont Gazette had already done stories on her. How she had her own group down in Cincinnati when she was so young and had even taken it to New York. How she toured the whole country after that. And how she quit for a while after she’d married. I guess I was proud she was my mom, but I did get disgusted the way all the kids, from the littlest girl to the biggest boy, kept running up to her at the Fourth of July: “Hi, Miss Lilly! Miss Lilly, I’m all ready for tomorrow. I practiced real good, Miss Lilly!” Enough to make you barf.

  “Arilla, you are a disappointment,” Mom always did say. “Every girl in town who’s anybody, and the ones who want to be somebody. And you won’t even do the warm-up.”

  Probably I would’ve joined The Dance if it hadn’t been for the fact that kids who dance are always so slew-footed and like they are swayback. Besides, leotards cause my legs to itch something awful. I know I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on what Mom was teaching for scratching. It’d be awful for her to have me so short and stubby next to her. I’d just be an embarrassment, and I’ll never be tall, even if my legs are long.

  Anyway, we came to the Fourth celebration with Mom dressed in the nicest green chiffon dress anybody ever saw. She was holding on to Dad’s arm and he was walking slow and careful, the way he always will. Dad has his airs, too, but they are nice airs. Mom is five-foot-eight and Dad is just under five-eleven, and he walks like he is walking on cotton, kind of creeping. Or sometimes like he will be careful not to snap some twigs underfoot. His shoulders are strong and thick. His arms never swing, his hands being most of the time deep in his pockets. His hair is black and sleek down to his shoulders, which some kids say is too long for somebody’s father, but I like it. Just combed back like a mane of a lion, when a lion’s mane is black and bouncy. He had on this white suit Mom bought him. He didn’t much like any suit, but he wore this one like he dressed so fine every day. People might say Dad looked just like Cochise playing the part of a movie star. Dad was even more handsome than usual because he was feeling good about having this job as supervisor of the food-service crews in the dining halls of the town’s technical college. Of course, we didn’t know how long he would last. Dad is what Mom calls erratic.

  It’s true, tomorrow Dad might take it in his head to walk off the job and keep walking until he is back in Cliffville where we used to live. He did that every once in a while for no reason I knew of. Sun Run would have to catch a ride and bring him on back home. Each time Dad left, he’d’ve squandered some pay and Mom would be good and depressed for a month. Otherwise, I loved him a lot, though I did worry some that he might go and not come back.

  All the time I’m thinking, I’m sitting on the concrete slab waiting for my Birthday girls to gather. When all at once they are there and I don’t recall the rest of them coming out of school, although I guess I must’ve spoken to them. I feel so downhearted today, I can’t tell why. So I stand up, looking around. Being twelve isn’t like I thought it would be. When I was eleven, I thought being twelve was really big, like these girls. But yesterday is the same as my Birthday. It’s not being big or little, it’s like dangling at the end of a rope and not being able to let go.

  These girls are so peculiar. They think I’m waiting for something when I’m not. They think I’m waiting for Sun Run.

  “We’d better get going. It’s time,” I tell them. Should’ve taken a bus, but the buses all have gone. They give a glance to one another and shake out their hair. It’s fun to pretend I don’t know very much who they are. The truth is I know all about them. I’m acting cool because I want them to think I have everything together. But I didn’t know Sun wasn’t coming. I was sure he’d come and take over, parading the girls through town.

  We start out, walking the long way over to Mom’s studio, which is now called the Beaux Arts, and which she moved to Ryder Ripple Road off South Ekker Avenue. The party girls and I just sort of fill up the sidewalk in no kind of order. I walk out on the edge near the curb so they won’t think some of them have to be with me. I’ll feel better away from school. School has all these banks of glass doors in front tinted bronze. You can see out, but you can’t see in. Even when you wait outside, you know people are watching you. It watches you. School has a mind of its own. It watches me and everyone, and puts me and everyone into a slot that is never-changing.

  The Birthday girls are talking in little bursts, not to one another, but like lines going side by side and never touching or crossing. We walk by the Spangler Park, which, in this late fall going into winter, is full of soccer players. The girls slow down to look at boys. I wonder if any of them is thinking about that Fourth of July when Mom and Dad, Sun and me were all together and feeling fine in that park?

  That is, Mom and Dad and Jack Sun were feeling swell. I was feeling self-conscious, as usual. We came into the Spangler Park with people on every side and with the hillsides — that huge green standpipe is at the top of the hill — already covered with folks and kids. Blankets with beer hidden under them. And Coke and other soft drinks, and food to help everybody, even the babies, enjoy the fireworks as soon as it was dark.

  We walked in and, I swear, every head on the hillside turned to look at us. I guess we were a sight. I know we were, what with Jack-Run prancing on his show horse in the lead and with me holding back, bringing up the rear. I was so jumpy that day, I could have covered my head with sixteen pillows and it still wouldn’t’ve been enough. Because Jack Sun will always try to put folks on. By this time everybody in town had at least heard of him. They thought he was crazy-wild, but smart and put-on wild. Yet, if anybody could get away with a prancing show horse on a hot Fourth after folks had spent hours washing and polishing their “hogs” out of respect for the celebration, Jack Sun Run Adams could. Maybe.

  Folks had filled up the parking areas with their polished hogs, even when some of them lived only a block away from the park. They’d dressed themselves up, too, casual but trying to look expensive in light-weight jackets and wash-’n’-wear slacks. And here is my brother, Sun, wearing nothing above the waist; wearing cowhide leggings and Wellington boots, with his bare arms, shoulders and back shining like antique gold from his sweat. You might say Sun Run had polished himself. And wearing one thin band of black leather around his head to match his boots, with one eagle feather sticking out of the headband in the back.

  When the kids on the hillside see him, they started in doing what they thought was some Indian war whoop. Like that really high and shrill yell made from their hands hitting their open mouths. I was about embarrassed to death. But my brother wasn’t. He didn’t pay them any mind at all because he knew all about them. He knew if he showed their noise bothered him, well, they wouldn’t think he was for real.

  I’m not sure Sun is serious about being an Indian. I mean whether he for certain believes what he pretends. I know I don’t believe it, but I don’t really know what he is, either. If he’s an Indian (I mean Native American — he usually will call himself an Amerind), then what am I supposed to be? I don’t much look like Mom and I surely don’t look like my dad. I just have Mom’s coloring
. I’m a throwback to someone else, I guess. Or secretly adopted.

  Sun Run says I probably came from the moon, and laughs. He says Mom came from the moon, too. Says she’s a light-skin, like people will say red-skin, and laughs again. He says that’s what people around here probably call her behind her back — light-skinned. And that it’s because even now they can’t bring themselves to say black out loud, since they already spent so much time hating the word and what it stood for. Sun Run says this town never got itself beyond the 1940’s; and that here you can’t even tell the 1960’s ever happened. Maybe he’s pretty right, too. But this town is still a pretty relaxed place to kind of pass the time. It may have its Saturday-night rip-offs and a drug bust about once a year. But there’s nothing here you could call some organized, for-real and bad-scene crime. Even if the only fame it has is its technical college, Dad says it’s still a good college.

  The town kids waiting for something to happen to them will copy the college kids down to the blue jeans, beer and long hair. But none of them, including the college ones, can look as out-of-sight cool as Jack Sun Run. Mom says Sun has an “aura” about him. It’s true, because about every sidewalk sale they have in the spring, when they close off the streets downtown, folks will stop what they are doing to watch Sun parading Jeremiah. Sitting so still in his skins, like he is taking a long ride through a painted desert — it will seem like the day is holding its breath until he is finished showing off. Anytime something seems to be missing, or some event is going to turn into a real bore, all of a sudden here comes Jack Sun Run and the day just sucks its breath, then breezes in place around him.

  So here we come into the Spangler Park with every head turned to look at us and then the war whoops; finally comes a large silence growing as thick and worrisome as flies. Sun stops Jeremiah’s prancing and lets him show-walk, his black mane sort of trailing in the hot breeze. Telling you true, a girl never had a more exciting brother to watch, nor a worse enemy to contend with, either, than Jack Sun Run Adams.

  Sun had already passed by these three men standing on the grass just beyond the parking lot into the park. Mom and Dad had barely passed them. They didn’t even notice me coming by. Nobody ever does. But just then one of them turned to the other two and said, to my complete surprise, “Lilly Perry always was the best-looking light-skinned woman in town. You can take the breed or leave him, they say he ain’t that bad. But that kid of theirs is about the nastiest son-of-a-snake this side of Geronimo.” Then he laughed, rocking back on his heels, with the other two joining in.

  Well, that man had to say it. Didn’t he know, with the kind of keen sense Sun and Dad have, they’d have to hear him? I could’ve died. I wished I was dead so I wouldn’t’ve had to witness what I knew was going to come down.

  Mom and Dad, strolling along looking swell, with Run parading Jeremiah right in front of them. When all of a sudden Dad turned around, walking the way we had come. And Sun wheeling Jeremiah so that he was moving the same as Dad. Just the two of them, mind-readers. Dad moving fast but in that creeping, cat-cautious way he can do. In a second he is standing in front of the three men. Sun Run and Jeremiah are right with him, with Jeremiah’s nose snorting and giving whinnies over Dad’s right shoulder. They were so still, with Sun and the horse and Dad not moving a muscle, you could tell the “aura” had curled itself around the three of them.

  So that the man who had talked about Lilly Perry kind of touched his Adam’s apple and commenced grinning like a maniac. “Hello, there!” he shouted to Dad, as silly as he could sound.

  Dad spoke so soft and polite: “Mrs. Lillian Adams is the best-looking woman’s name,” he says. “My son’s name is Jack Adams. Meet Jack Sun Run Adams. Say hello to him, mister.”

  Then Sun Run had to raise Jeremiah up on two legs. That big, gorgeous stallion with his hooves tapping air above my dad’s head. The man’s mouth flew open in disbelief. Shaping the word hello or oh, it was awful hard to tell. I mean, that horse was a terrifying sight almost even to me, with those dangerous hooves about to kick out Dad’s brains. Yet Dad didn’t move a muscle. Sun Run didn’t either, it looked like. He, Jeremiah and Dad kind of made this tableau, Mom said later, with the three men scared to move an inch and all the people on the hill watching.

  The scene only lasted a moment. And it would’ve been the end of the whole thing — Dad with Sun on his show horse scaring three dudes to death. Only, Sun Run didn’t know when to let go. He never did know when something was finished. He always had to go too far.

  Dad just turned on his heel. People on the hill could tell words had passed and maybe a little something extra, but that was all there was to it. They weren’t laughing at Dad, just kind of snickering at the men for looking so scared of a horse. Mom had been sort of rushing back and forth in a small space of grass. And now she rushed around Sun and Jeremiah and took Dad’s arm.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t make a scene.”

  That was a laugh. What’d she think he’d been doing? She took hold of Dad’s arm again and they started on toward the hill and all the folks up there watching pleasant, not unhappy to have Lilly Perry back in her hometown, when they noticed her at all.

  When Jack-Run had to go too far.

  Sun rode Jeremiah with a good roping saddle, although there never was much rough riding in our part of the country. It was hand-tooled leather with a full leaf design. He kept it oiled, rubbed and polished, and the dally horn could hold two ropes, although Sun never used more than one. Its cantle was a Cheyenne roll with a three-inch rise so Sun could mount and dismount as quick as he wanted. What with its full-size skirts and fenders, it was maybe too much saddle, a cowboy might say — too much of a put-on. But Sun loved it. It cost him more than three hundred dollars on the layaway plan. He paid it off in about eight months working for my dad. Sun is about the best waiter in town, and being so polite to the students and out-of-town customers, half of the price of the saddle he made in tips.

  Just when everyone on the hill was about to settle down to their own private eating and drinking, Sun takes his rope from the saddle horn. That rope was about a forty-five-foot nylon lariat and waxed to make handling with it easy. He commenced to twirl a running noose of the rope until he had a full circle above his head.

  The three dudes Dad had talked to had already turned away and were sauntering off. One of them must have sensed something, for he stopped in mid-stride. Maybe he heard the sound as Sun let the lasso go. It whirled through the air with a low whizzing, like a giant band spun out of the sky. No sooner did the rope start dropping down over the three dudes than Sun took his end and looped it around the pommel and wheeled Jeremiah in the opposite direction. By the time that lasso was at the level of the dudes’ shoulders, Sun had played out most of the length of it. That circle tightened around the dudes so fast, they didn’t have a chance to duck out of it. They were stone caught, squeezed facing one another so that they looked like they were preparing to kiss.

  Oh, it was a sight, for sure. A shout went up in the crowd on the hill; and a whoop and a holler from high-school kids at the base of the standpipe. Every one of them up there got to their feet to get a better view. That was all my brother needed. He had a look in his eyes like I’d only heard about. It was a combination of murdering anger and killing righteousness, like the time Mom says when I was six and he was ten. We were in Cliffville and Sun had let a sick mother rat have her babies on the kitchen floor right next to the stove. When Mom saw what it was, she gave Sun a backhand that spun him clear out of the house. And she threw the rat and babies in the stove to burn to a crisp before she thought. They say the smell was awful. And Sun stood outside with that look in his eyes. Shaking from head to foot, he grabbed the door and held it open for fifteen minutes, screaming, “Come on in, flies! Come on in, flies!” over and over. I can just hear him, too.

  But right there in the Spangler Park, Jack-Run went beyond too far.

  “Hur’m up, Jeremiah,” he said, real soft. And in a
second they were off in a run. The three lassoed fools began to fall in one piece. I saw the whole thing like it was in slow motion, like the men were falling from a long way up. The day was so sweltering hot and I was so ashamed and excited all at the same time, I was about ready to pass out in a dead faint.

  “Timberrrr!” some smart kid yelled from the standpipe.

  The three dudes fell — ku-whun-nuk! — on the grass. Two of them on their backs and the other one kind of sandwiched halfway between the other two, facing the ground. All three of them twisting and turning and kicking, trying to get free of that rope. It wasn’t any use. Sun had the rope played out taut enough to snap it if it hadn’t been as good a rope as it was. And then he dragged those men. He had Jeremiah in a lather in all of the heat, with hooves straining and running, inching along now and dragging those three men over the ground.

  The crowd hushed. It had been screaming and laughing up to then. But the three dudes looked like they might be hurting. Big men, the two on the bottom were getting their heads bumped along the ground something fierce. Their faces had turned beet red.

  Mom had broken away from my dad and was running back and forth along the taut rope this time, like she didn’t know which way to go.

  “Sun! Stop it, my god!” she yelled.

  But Sun would play it to the end, just the way he had played out that rope.

  One, and then two, and a few more men began to move off of the hill, standing up and brushing the new-cut grasses from the seats of their wash-’n’-wears. Then picking their way down through the crowd. They started out kind of slow and self-conscious, but coming off that hill faster and faster. Until they were standing at that taut line of Jack-Run’s lariat, where he was still dragging the fallen in larger circles in that open space of grass and field below the hill.