Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History

by Tananarive Due

  Thomas nodded. “I’d like to see my children.”

  Mrs. Fotheringham cleared her throat. “Yes, I understand. May I ask how you heard they were here? We had no idea how to reach you when we received word your wife had died.”

  The lump in Thomas’s throat made his words thick. “I asked around.” He swallowed hard. “I’d like to see them. They need to come home.”

  “When was the last time you saw them?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

  “Wintertime. At Christmas.”

  “I see.” She smoothed a crease in the lap of her dress. “I don’t believe that school was a good place for them.”

  Thomas’s heart began to pound. Was it really going to be this easy? “We’ve been trying to get them home for years,” he said. “For good. But the priests and the government men say we can’t, not even when I’m making good money. How did you come to take them here?”

  Her smile was brittle. “My sister is a nun who teaches at the school.” He face fell and she looked to the empty fireplace. “They had… an outbreak of tuberculosis.”

  Thomas didn’t need the keen nose of a wolf to tell him her scent was off, and so was her story.

  But the mention of the disease brought back the thought of his wife and a roaring filled his ears. He saw his wife Clara’s face again, pale and still. He wiped a sweaty hand over his eyes. Stop it. She’s gone.

  Mrs. Fotheringham’s voice slowly intruded. He’d missed what she had been saying. “–seemed for the best. We had made arrangements for them to have a tutor – as we would if we had children of our own – but recent events have made that difficult.”

  “What did you say?”

  “We planned to continue their education. Of course, you may–”

  Thomas gripped the wooden corners of his chair’s arms and leaned forward. “What happened?”

  Mrs. Fotheringham licked her lips. “Where?”

  “At the school. They weren’t happy about going there but they stopped talking about it, to us. We heard they were beaten if they spoke our language, or sang the songs we taught them. We saw the marks on my daughter’s back. Now she won’t show us. Me. She wouldn’t let us see, the last time they came home.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know anything about that.”

  Thomas surged to his feet. “You’re lying!”

  Mrs. Fotheringham shrank against the back of her chair. “Mr. Greyeyes, please–”

  The clack-clack of shoes announced the arrival of the maid. “Ma’am?” she said sharply, darting her face into the room.

  Mrs. Fotheringham waved her off without looking away from Thomas. “When visiting my sister there last month,” Mrs. Fotheringham said in a low voice, “I could see the children were unhappy. Whether it’s because they aren’t used to a civilized education or due to something else, I could not tell. The sisters and the principal said they were doing their best to teach them. I offered to take some of them should the need arise. And when we got word–”

  Thomas shook and spoke through his teeth. “They let a white woman walk in and take our children when she wants to, but not their own parents who have been trying to get them back for years?”

  Mrs. Fotheringham’s eyes glistened but her mouth was set in a straight line. “I am not in charge of the schools, Mr. Greyeyes.”

  He stalked to the door, reentering the electric glare of the lobby. “They’re coming with me,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Wait–”

  But Thomas was already heading up the stairs. “John! Marie! It’s your–” his voice gave out suddenly when he saw their beautiful faces peering down the staircase from the second floor. He spread his arms even though his chest suddenly ached. “Niniichaanisak!” he said. They both flinched at the sound of his voice, throwing their hands up as if to ward off a blow. He hesitated.

  “What is it?” he said.

  Neither of them spoke. They looked older now, especially his daughter, even though she was the younger of the two. Something about her eyes – the deep brown in them used to sparkle, but now it just seemed dark and hollow.

  Mrs. Fotheringham came to stand in the middle of the lobby, waiting silently below Thomas.

  “Kipaapaa niin,” he said. They flinched and turned their faces, taking a step back. “I am your father,” he repeated. “I’ve come for you.”

  His son glanced down as if he could see through the floor to where Mrs. Fotheringham stood. Thomas knew that look: it was the same face a junior soldier made when he didn’t know which commanding officer to listen to. Thomas turned to Mrs. Fotheringham. “I’d like to speak to them alone.”

  “Children,” called Mrs. Fotheringham, “show him to the room where your things are. But make sure you’re all packed.”

  Marie looked at him, her head bowed, then turned and went through a door near the edge of the second-floor landing. John did the same. Thomas walked up the second set of stairs and followed his children in. He closed the door behind them.

  The drapes were closed and only light in the room came from a kerosene lamp, its glass flute already blackened with soot. John and Marie huddled next to a dresser with its top drawer empty, a half-packed suitcase by their feet on the hardwood floor. The flame cast deep shadows up the sides of their faces as they stared at him.

  It had been more than three years since the Indian Affairs agents had come with the representatives from the school to take away his children and many of the others on the reserve. Thomas’s tongue felt thick with all the words left unspoken since then. They were strangers now, and yet so clearly descended from his people, and Clara’s; his ancestors’ voices seemed ready to burst forth from their mouths. But they had shied just now when he spoke in their native tongue. Clearly at the school they had been taught to keep those voices silent.

  He pulled up a chair draped with unpacked clothing – there seemed to be mountains of it in the room, more than he and his family had ever owned – and sat, leaning forward as he had when they used to sit around the campfire. They stared mutely back at him. “I would like to invite you to come home.” He tried to speak the way his grandmother would, not the demanding way that worked better with city-dwelling white folks.

  He paused but the two barely breathed, their nostrils twitching.

  “There are some things I would like to tell you–”

  Marie jerked forward. “Why didn’t you come to get us?”

  “I was unable to leave when, when your mother died.” It was only partly true, but there were only so many things he could tell them about at once.

  “No, before!” she said, tears welling in her eyes. Her beautiful black hair, still cropped short the way the nuns had cut it, was a jagged raven’s wing of shadow in the lamplight. “You never came! They said we’d never go home until we could learn to be good! Why didn’t you come?”

  “I was away–”

  Marie interrupted again, her chin jutting forward in a way that made Thomas proud even as it frightened him. Here was the girl’s spirit he remembered, but now it raged at him. “Why was that more important?”

  John put his arm across her body, holding her back. “Marie–”

  “No!”

  Thomas put up his hands. “We tried, your mother and I. They said if we took you out without permission we would go to jail. We wrote letters, I worked to make more money, and then the war–”

  John stepped forward. “It doesn’t matter. Mrs. Fotheringham got us out.”

  For a second, Thomas’s heart soared, but then he saw the unforgiving set of his son’s jaw.

  “She’ll take us to their country house, she said. When the strike is over, we’ll come back. Then they’ll have us in a real school.”

  Thomas’s throat was suddenly so dry he could barely speak. “You have a home already. I can take you back.”

  “No!” said Marie. “You can’t make me be Indian!”

  “But I–”

  She shook her head and crumpled, pulling her fists up to cover her f
ace and ears. “I don’t want to go into the shed! Please!”

  Thomas’s heart pounded as he recognized the tone in her voice. That same terror ripped from his own throat when he would relive his friends being blown apart by shrapnel, the whistling shriek of an incoming shell –

  But there she was, even as her brother held her tight to soothe the shudders that wracked her body. She had known horror while he was away.

  Thomas lurched out of the chair and fell to his knees, crawling toward his children until he could wrap his long arms around their shivering backs.

  John tried to throw his arms away, but Thomas hugged them tighter. “I know. I don’t know what, but I know it. I know it.”

  “You can’t,” said John.

  Thomas wanted to tell them, he knew what it was like to be sneered at for being Indian, how the white men in his unit had welcomed him the least and the last. How he’d had to go the extra mile, literally, in his recon duties, to prove himself. The only comments had been about how he was older than most of them; but the unspoken remarks were what lingered. Indian. Illiterate. Savage. His first sergeant had assumed Thomas could only read animal tracks, that he fed himself by hunting with a bow and arrow and wouldn’t understand tire tread marks, boot prints, or the sound of German soldiers creeping through the muck of no-man’s-land.

  His daughter’s words, You can’t make me be Indian, dredged all that back up.

  After long moments of sobbing, he quieted and their breathing became less ragged. He didn’t know how long Mrs. Fotheringham would give them before coming to claim his children, but so far her footsteps still echoed only from the first floor.

  “Niniichaanisak,” he said, before switching to English, “you don’t have to be anything but what you are. And you are beautiful. If you could see the way your ancestors’ faces shine in yours, you would be proud. As I am of you. You are so strong. And we can be strong together, not pulled apart to be put into other people’s places.”

  Marie looked up at him, her dark eyes hard and her cheeks glistening. “I can’t go. They took my baby. They might do something.”

  Thomas glanced to the side; his hearing wasn’t as good as when he was a wolf, and it had been worse since the thunder of the war, but he was pretty sure not even the maid was close enough to hear through the door. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Pimaatisi giniichaanis. We hid her, your baby. Your mother and I. The teachers at the school think she died in the hospital, but we took her. She’s with your uncle, now, back home.”

  “What?”

  “Shh, shh, we had to keep it a secret. Until we could get you out. Both of you. Will you come?”

  Marie’s lip trembled and she made a choking sound.

  John grabbed Thomas’s upper arm. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “We were afraid, too.”

  The sound of an automobile growled and sputtered to a halt from the street out front. In the lobby downstairs, footsteps clattered across the tile floor.

  “They were coming to take us in a car tonight,” said John.

  “You don’t have to go,” said Thomas. “You can come with me.” He cracked a tiny smile. “But you’ll have to walk.”

  His son and daughter shared a long look.

  Thomas caressed their shoulders and backs roughly. “There is more power in you than they know. And there is something else I can share with you, when the time is right. Think of some of the stories we shared when you were little. You know the ones. The ones you wanted to be part of, about the mahiinkanak.”

  Slow remembrance of driven-out words crinkled Marie’s brow. “The… the wolves.”

  Thomas nodded. “I couldn’t tell you everything then, because sometimes a story has to be told at different times. But if you want to come with me, that story is waiting for you. You’re already a part of it, and you cannot be made to feel less than human in it. I don’t have a big house. Or much money. But I can give you that.”

  “Children!” called Agnes from the staircase landing. “Grab your things.”

  There were deep voices from the entrance downstairs and quick feet clattered up the staircase.

  Thomas held his breath as his daughter and son broke their gaze and turned to look at him.

  “We’re coming,” said John and Marie. Together they went to the door and opened it. Agnes stepped back, startled. “Are you ready?”

  John raised his chin and looked at her, the spitting image of Clara’s father facing down an Indian Affairs agent thirty years ago. Confusion pinched her face. John and Marie started down the stairs. Thomas turned to Agnes and said, “Goodbye,” and followed his children.

  Two men waited for them on the main floor. Their shirtsleeves were rolled up and each carried what looked like a section from a wagon-wheel spindle, long as a baseball bat. Their dark eyes locked on to Thomas as he stopped on the tiled lobby. He knew by the straight-backed air of authority coupled with the rounded shoulders: they saw themselves as above the law. Given their neckties, vests and matching trousers, he guessed these were two of the “special constables” who had replaced the police.

  Mrs. Fotheringham’s hand was still on the doorknob, and the two men brushed past her.

  “This the one?” said the taller of the two, glaring at Thomas.

  “There’s no need for trouble,” said Mrs. Fotherinham. “Thank you all the same, sirs.” She threw a glance at Thomas, cutting around in front of the burly men. “I did not call these men here, I assure you. Agnes! Offer our guests some tea while I speak to Mr. Greyeyes.”

  The constable ignored her. “All right, chief, let’s go.”

  “It’s OK,” Thomas said with a slight smile, “you can call me Corporal.”

  The shorter constable, whose face was dark with stubble, stepped forward and pulled a revolver from his pocket. “I don’t take orders from savages. Push off!”

  The taller constable grimaced at his partner. “What the hell are you doing? Think we can’t handle this the old way?”

  “After them Bolsheviks pushed us around Tuesday, the boss said we should let ‘em know who’s in charge. Well, this is it. Come on, chief. Outside.”

  “Gentlemen, please–” Mrs. Fotheringham said, holding out her hands.

  “It’s all right,” Thomas said to her softly. “We were just leaving.”

  “What?” Mrs. Fotheringham’s eyes flicked to Thomas’s face and then to his children. “John? Marie? Is this true?”

  “We’re going,” said John. “And no white man is going to stop us.”

  The constable cocked his gun. Thomas’s pulse quickened. He knew how badly things could go and the sooner they were outside, the better, even if the constables followed them out. As a wolf, he’d have had no trouble; but there was no time to change. “No one asked you, kid,” said the armed constable.

  “Sir!” said Mrs. Fotheringham, her voice carrying a note of panic. “I must ask you to leave. This is not a police matter.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said the taller man. He pointed his great stick directly at Thomas’s face. It brought back the image of a German rifle Thomas had stared down for a split second before ducking – one of the times as a wolf he had prowled too close to enemy lines and been spotted. That shot still rang in his ears, even though it had missed him. “You,” said the constable. “Outside. The little brave and the little squaw can stay here.”

  Thomas fought to keep his mind clear. He couldn’t afford a flashback to the war now. “It’s fine,” he said weakly, then repeated himself, more loudly, and added, “I’ll go.”

  He stepped toward the constables, his hands up. They wouldn’t know to make him put his hands behind his head like he’d done with POWs; these two didn’t seem like veterans of anything but street brawls.

  Mrs. Fotheringham moved as if to put her hand on his shoulder but the constables still had their weapons up and she hesitated. “Mr. Greyeyes, I do apologize. Please stay.”

  “It’ll be better if I go,” he said, looking th
e taller constable in the eye. Without rank insignia, it was hard to know which of them was boss, but when in doubt it was always best to take out the bigger opponent.

  The tremors rippling through his body subsided and Thomas slowed his breathing. He’d come back later for his children. They’d wait for him, after he’d dealt with the constables. It was going to be all right.

  Suddenly John leapt from the foot of the stairs, knocking Mrs. Fotheringham back as he grabbed for the constable’s truncheon. “You can’t take him!”

  Thomas shouted “Don’t!” as the other constable fired.

  Thomas watched his son crumple and fall. Other soldiers who had come back with shell shock might collapse into a ball, covering their ears, or attack the source of the disruption. But for Thomas, much deeper instincts kicked in, twisted by the horrors of modern war. He changed.

  His clothes bulged and ripped beneath hulking furry shoulders. The revolver thundered again in the small space, but Thomas was already lurching right at the smaller constable, pushing him down, and the shot went wide. Something hard crashed down on his back and head, again and again: the other constable’s truncheon. But now his clothing hugged him in shreds. He was the mahiinkan.

  The constable fired uselessly at the wall, unable to free his arm from Thomas’s teeth; the sound brought back memories of the trenches. At any moment a shell would come screaming out of the sky and destroy them all.

  He shook the man like a rabbit. Bone snapped, the constable yelled, and the weapon clattered away on the floor. Thomas wheeled to face the other, still raining blows down on him with wild shouts he could barely hear in the fading echo of the revolver shots. Turning his great lupine snout to the side, he seized the man’s rib cage in his jaws and crushed it. The constable gasped and crumpled.

  Mrs. Fotheringham screamed and ran back into the sitting room. Thomas was conscious of his son’s body on the floor beneath them, unmoving, and using his massive neck muscles he hauled the constable away from him. The urge to tear the man to pieces gripped him, but Thomas paused. He sought the quiet he’d sometimes known in the boreal forest long ago, a deeper echo of who he was.