Children Are Bored on Sunday

by Jean Stafford

  But Jim could not remember any of that coolness when he went out of the shade of the maples into the coach. Mrs. Wilkins had put up a lunch for him; when he ate it later, he found a dead ant on one of the peanut-butter sandwiches and the Baby Ruth had run all over the knobby apple. His nose had felt swollen and he’d got a headache and the green seat was as scratchy as a brush when he lay down and put his cheek on it. The train had smelled like the Fourth of July, like punk and lady crackers, and when it stopped in little towns, its rest was uneasy, for it throbbed and jerked and hissed like an old dog too feeble to get out of the sun. Once, the nigger man had taken him into the baggage car to look at some kind of big, expensive collie in a cage, muzzled and glaring fiercely through the screen; there were trunks and boxes of every shape, including one large, round one that the nigger man said held nothing but one enormous cheese from Michigan. When Jim got back to his seat, the fat man with the little girl had bought a box lunch that was put on the train at Sedalia, and Jim had watched them eat fried chicken and mustard greens and beet pickles and pone. The next time the train stopped, the nigger man had collected the plates and the silverware and had taken them into the station.

  Jim had made the train wheels say “Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam,” and then he hadn’t been able to make them stop, even when he was half asleep. Mr. Wilkins had said that Uncle Sam wasn’t one of your fair-weather friends that would let a Cherokee down when all his kin were dead. It was a blessing to be an Indian, the preacher had said, and Mrs. Wilkins had said, “It surely is, Jim boy. I’d give anything to be an Indian, just anything you can name.” She had been stringing wax beans when she’d said that, and the ham hock she would cook with them had already been simmering on the back of the stove. Jim had wanted to ask her why she would like to be an Indian, but she’d seemed to have her mind on the beans, so he’d said nothing and stroked the turkey wing she used for brushing the stove.

  It was hot enough to make a boy sick here in this cinder place, and Jim did not know what he would do if someone did not come. He could not walk barefoot all the way back to Missouri; he would get lost if he did not follow the tracks, and if he did follow them and a train came when he was drowsy, he might get scooped up by the cowcatcher and be hurled to kingdom come. He sat on his heels and waited, feeling the gray clinkers pressing into his feet, listening to the noontime sleep. Heat waves trembled between him and the depot and for a long time there was no sound save for the anxious telegraph machine, which was saying something important, although no one would heed. Perhaps it was about him—Jim! It could be a telegram from Mr. Wilkins saying for them to send him back. The preacher might have found a relation that Jim could live with. The boy saw, suddenly, the tall, white colonnade of a rich man’s house by the Missouri River; he had gone there often to take the brown bread and the chili sauce Grandma used to make, and the yellow-haired lady at the back door of the big house had always said, “Don’t you want to rest a spell, Jimmy, here where it’s cool?” He would sit on a bench at the long table and pet the mother cat who slept on the window sill and the lady would say, “You like my old puss-in-boots, don’t you? Maybe you’d best come and live with me and her, seeing that she’s already got your tongue.” Sometimes this lady wore a lace boudoir cap with a blue silk bow on the front, and once she had given him a button with a pin that said, “LET’S CRACK THE VOLSTEAD ACT.” The stubborn stutter of the machine could be a message from her, or maybe it was from Miss Bessie Ryder, who once had told his fortune with cards in a little room with pictures of Napoleon everywhere; the English ivy growing just outside made patterns on Napoleon’s face, and in the little silver pitcher in the shape of Napoleon’s head, there was a blue anemone. Or it could be the Wilkinses themselves sending for him to come and live in the attic room, where there was the old cradle their baby had died in and a pink quilt on the bed with six-pointed stars.

  Jim cried, catching his tears with his gentle tongue. Then, a long way off, a bell began to ring slowly and sweetly, and when it stopped, he heard an automobile coming with its bumptious cutout open. He went on crying, but in a different way, and his stomach thumped with excitement, for he knew it would be the people from the school, and suddenly he could not bear to have them find him. He ran the length of the depot and then ran back again, and then he hopped on one foot to the door and hopped on the piece of tin. He screamed with the awful, surprising pain. He sat down and seized his burned foot with both his hands, and through his sobs he said, “Oh, hell on you, oh, Judas Priest!” He heard the car stop and the doors slam and he heard a lady say, “Wait a minute. Oh, it’s all right.” Jim shut his eyes as feet munched the cinders, closer and closer to him.

  “Don’t touch me!” he shrieked, not opening his eyes, and there was a silence like the silence after the district nurse in Missouri had looked down his throat. They did not touch him, so he stopped crying, and the lady said, “Why, the train must have come long ago! I will positively give that stationmaster a piece of my mind.”

  Jim opened his eyes. There was a big man, with very black hair, which fell into his face, wearing a spotted tan suit and a ring with a turquoise the size of a quarter. The woman had gold earrings and gold teeth, which she showed in a mechanical smile, and she wore a blue silk dress with white embroidery on the bertha. They both smelled of medicine. The man touched Jim on the arm where he had been vaccinated; baffled by everything in the world, he cried wildly. The woman bent down and said, “Well, well, well, there, there, there.” Jim was half suffocated by the smell of medicine and of her buttery black hair. The man and woman looked at each other, and Jim’s skin prickled because he knew they were wondering why he had not brought anything. Mr. Wilkins had said you didn’t need to, not even shoes.

  “Well, honey,” said the lady, taking his hand, “we’ve come a long way all by our lonesome, haven’t we?”

  “A mighty long way,” said the man, laughing heartily to make a joke of it. He took Jim’s other hand and made him stand up, and then they started down the cinder path and around the corner of the depot to a tall, black touring car, which said on the door:

  DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR INDIAN SERVICE

  In the back seat there were two huge empty demijohns and a brand-new hoe.

  “Hop in front, sonny,” said the man. The black leather seat scorched Jim’s legs, and he put his hand over his eyes to shut out the dazzle of the windshield.

  “No shoes,” said the woman, getting in beside him.

  “Already noted,” said the man. He got in, too, and his fat thigh was dampish at Jim’s elbow.

  Jim worried about the telegraph machine. Would it go on until someone came to listen to it or would it stop after a while like a telephone? It must be about him, because he was the only one who had got off the train here, and it must be from someone saying to send him back, because there was nothing else it could be about. His heart went as fast as a bobbin being filled and he wanted to throw up and to hide and to cram a million grapes into his mouth and to chase a scared girl with a garter snake, all at once. He thought of screaming bloody murder so that they would let him get out of the car, but they might just whip him for that, whip him with an inner tube or beat him over the head with the new hoe. But he wouldn’t stay at the school! If there was no other way, he would ride home on a freight car, like a hobo, and sleep in the belfry of the church under the crazy bell. He would escape tonight, he told himself, and he pressed his hand on his heart to make it quiet down.

  From the other side of the depot, you could see the town. A wide street went straight through the level middle of it, and it had the same kind of stores and houses and lampposts that any other town had. The trees looked like leftovers, and the peaked brown dogs slinked behind the trash cans in an ornery way. The man started the car, and as they drove up the main street, Jim could tell that the men sitting on the curb were Indians, for they had long pigtails and closed-up faces. They sat in a crouch, with their big heads hanging forward and their flat-fingered hands motionless betw
een their knees. The women who were not fat were as lean and spry as katydids, and all of them walked up and down the main street with baskets full of roasting ears on one arm and babies on the other. The wooden cupola on the red brick courthouse was painted yellow-green and in the yard men lay with their hats over their eyes or sat limply on the iron benches under the runty trees, whose leaves were gray with dust or lice. A few children with ice-cream cones skulked in the doorways, like abused cats. Everyone looked ailing.

  The man from the school gestured with the hand that wore the heavy turquoise, and he said, “Son, this is your ancestors’ town. This here is the capital of the Cherokee nation.”

  “You aren’t forgetting the water, are you, Billings?” said the woman in a distracted way, and when the man said he was not, she said to Jim, “Do you know what ‘Cherokee’ means?”

  “No,” said Jim.

  The woman looked over his head at the man. “Goodness knows, we earn our bread. What can you do with Indians if they don’t know they’re Indians?”

  “I always knew I was an Indian,” said the man.

  “And so did I,” said the woman. “Always.”

  Jim sat, in this terrible heat and terrible lack of privacy, between their mature bodies and dared not even change the position of his legs, lest he hit the gearshift. He felt that they were both looking at him as if a rash were coming out on his face and he wished they would hurry and get to the school, so that he could start escaping. At the thought of running away after the sun was down and animals and robbers started creeping in the dark, his heart started up again, like an engine with no one in charge.

  The car stopped at a drugstore, and the man got out and heaved the demijohns onto the sidewalk. In the window of the store was a vast pink foot with two corn plasters and a bunion plaster. Next door was an empty building and on its window lights were pasted signs for J. M. Barclay’s Carnival Show and for Copenhagen snuff and for Clabber Girl baking powder. The carnival sign was torn and faded, the way such signs always are, and the leg of a red-haired bareback rider was tattered shabbily. How hot a carnival would be, with the smell of dung and popcorn! Even a Ferris wheel on a day like this would be no fun. Awful as it was here, where the sun made a sound on the roof of the car, it would be even worse to be stuck in the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when something went wrong below. A boy would die of the heat and the fear and the sickness as he looked down at the distant ground, littered with disintegrated popcorn balls.

  The lady beside Jim took a handkerchief out of her white linen purse, and as she wiped the sweat away from her upper lip, he caught a delicate fragrance that made him think of the yellow-haired lady in Missouri and he said, “I want to write a letter as soon as I get there.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” the woman said. “Who do you want to write to?” But the man came back, so Jim did not have to answer. The man staggered, with his stomach pushed out, under the weight of the demijohn, and as he put it in the back seat, he said savagely, “I wish one of those fellers in Washington would have to do this a couple, three times. Then maybe the Department would get down to brass tacks about that septic tank.”

  “The Department!” ejaculated the woman bitterly.

  The man brought the other jug of water, and they drove off again, coming presently to a highway that stretched out long and white, and as shining as the piece of tin at the depot. They passed an old farm wagon with a rocking chair in the back, in which a woman smaller and more withered than Jim’s grandmother sat, smoking a corncob pipe. Three dark little children were sitting at her feet, lined up along one edge of the wagon with their chins on the sideboard, and they stared hard at the Indian Service car. The one in the middle waved timidly and then hid his head in his shoulder, like a bird, and giggled.

  “Creeks!” cried the woman angrily. “Everywhere we see Creeks these days! What will become of the Cherokees?”

  “Ask the boy what his blood is,” said the man.

  “Well, Jim,” said the woman, “did you hear what Mr. Standing-Deer said?”

  “What?” said Jim and turned convulsively to look at the man with that peculiar name.

  “Do you remember your mother and father?” said the woman.

  “No, they were dead.”

  “How did they die?”

  “I don’t know. Of the ague, maybe.”

  “He says they may have died of the ague,” said the woman to Mr. Standing-Deer, as if he were deaf. “I haven’t heard that word ‘ague’ for years. Probably he means flu. Do you think perhaps this archaism is an index to the culture pattern from which he comes?”

  Mr. Standing-Deer made a doglike sound in his throat. “Ask me another,” he said. “I don’t care about his speech at this stage of the game—it’s the blood I’m talking about.”

  “Were Mama and Daddy both Indians?” asked the woman kindly.

  “I don’t care!” Jim said. He had meant to say “I don’t know,” but he could not change it afterward, because he commenced to cry again so hard that the woman patted his shoulder and did not ask him any more questions. She told him that her name was Miss Hornet and that she had been born in Chickasha and that she was the little boys’ dormitory matron and that Mr. Standing-Deer was the boys’ counselor. She said she was sure Jim would like it at the school. “Uncle Sam takes care of us all just as well as he can, so we should be polite to him and not let him see that we are homesick,” she said, and Jim, thinking of his getaway this night, said softly, “Yes’m, Mr. Wilkins already told me.”

  * * *

  After a time they turned into a drive, at the end of which was a big, white gate. Beyond it lay terraced lawns, where trees grew beside a group of buildings. It was hushed here, too. In spots, the grass was yellow, and the water in the ditch beyond the gate was slow. There was a gravelly space for kids to play in, but there were no kids there. There were a slide and some swings and a teeter-totter, but they looked as deserted as bones, and over the whole place there hung a tight feeling, as if a twister were coming. Once, when a twister had come at home, all the windows in Mr. Dannenbaum’s house had been blown out, and it had taken the dinner off some old folks’ table, and when Jim and his grandmother went out to look, there was the gravy bowl sitting on top of a fence post without a drop gone out of it.

  Jim meant to be meek and mild until the sun went down, so that they would not suspect, and when Mr. Standing-Deer got out to open the gate, he said quietly to Miss Hornet, “Are the children all asleep now?”

  “Yes, we are all asleep now,” she said. “Some of us aren’t feeling any too well these hot days.” Jim stole an anxious glance at her to see if she were sick with something catching, but he could tell nothing from her smooth brown face.

  The buildings were big and were made of dark stone, and because the shades were down in most of the windows, they looked cool, and Jim thought comfortably of how he would spend this little time before nightfall and of all the cool things there would be inside—a drink of water and some potted ferns and cold white busts of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and rubber treads on the stairs, like those in the public school back in Missouri. Mr. Standing-Deer stopped the car by one of the smaller buildings, whose walls were covered with trumpet creeper. There had been trumpet creeper at Grandma’s, too, growing over the backhouse, and a silly little girl named Lady had thought the blossoms were really trumpets and said the fairies could hear her playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on them. She was the girl who had said she had found a worm in a chocolate bar and a tack in a cracker. With Lady, Jim used to float nasturtium leaves on the rain water in the tubs, and then they would eat them as they sat in the string hammock under the shade of the sycamores.

  It was true that there were ferns in the hall of the small building, and Jim looked at them greedily, though they were pale and juiceless-looking and grew out of a sagging wicker-covered box. To the left of the door was an office, and in it, behind a desk, sat a big Indian woman who was lacing the fingers of one
hand with a rubber band. She was wearing a man’s white shirt and a necktie with an opal stickpin, and around her fat waist she wore a broad beaded belt. Her hair was braided around her head, and right at the top there was a trumpet flower, looking perfectly natural, as if it grew there.

  “Is this the new boy?” she said to Miss Hornet.

  “Who else would it be, pray tell?” said Miss Hornet crossly.

  “My name is Miss Dreadfulwater,” said the woman at the desk in an awful, roaring voice, and then she laughed and grabbed Jim’s hand and shouted, “And you’d better watch your step or I’ll dreadfulwater you.”

  Jim shivered and turned his eyes away from this crazy woman, and he heard his distant voice say, “Did you get Mr. Wilkins’ telegram?”

  “Telegram?” boomed Miss Dreadfulwater, and laughed uproariously. “Oh, sure, we got his telegram. Telegram and long-distance telephone call. Didn’t you come in a de-luxe Pullman drawing room? And didn’t Uncle Sam his own self meet you in the company limousine? Why, yes, sir, Mr. Wilkins, and Uncle Sam and Honest Harold in Washington, and all of us here have just been thinking about hardly anything else but Jim Littlefield.”

  Mr. Standing-Deer said wearily, “For Christ’s sake, Sally, turn on the soft music. The kid’s dead beat.”

  “I’m dead beat, too, Mr. Lying-Moose and Miss Yellow-Jacket, and I say it’s too much. It’s too much, I say. There are six more down in this dormitory alone, and that leaves, altogether, eight well ones. And the well ones are half dead on their feet at that, the poor little old buzzards.”

  There was something wrong with Miss Dreadfulwater that Jim could not quite understand. He would have said she was drunk if she hadn’t been a woman and a sort of teacher. She took a card out of the desk and asked him how old he was and if he had been vaccinated and what his parents’ names were. He wanted a drink of water, or wanted at least to go and smell the ferns, but he dared not ask and stood before the desk feeling that he was already sick with whatever it was the others were sick with. Mr. Standing-Deer took a gun out of his coat pocket and put it on the desk and then he went down the hall, saying over his shoulder, “I guess they’re all too sick to try and fly the coop for a while.”