Two Roads Page 5

  Then, what Pop usually does is just shake his head and say, “Some day, somehow. But I guess you’re okay for now.”

  However, that is not how he answers the professor. Instead, he says something that surprises me. “Lately, Professor, I have been thinking about a way to remedy that.”

  I look hard at my father. Remedy that? How? My school is closed and gone forever. And from what I know of schools, they’re for those who live near them. People with homes, not folks always on the fly. People with money go to school, not hoboes. It makes no sense.

  But Pop says not another word and, as always, I do not attempt to break his silence.

  We settle into one corner of the boxcar that’s shared, in addition to Boney and the professor, by three other men. None of them know Pop, which is not all that surprising. There are so many of us riding the rails these days. Not just hundreds or thousands, but millions.

  I lean back against the boxcar wall, combing my hair. The thrumming of the rails makes the wall vibrate against my back. The sound of the steel wheels beneath me is as familiar as the babbling of a brook is to one who lives by a stream. Pop’s next to me, his shoulder warm against mine. His familiar scent is comforting to me as we lean against each other. It’s a mix of wood smoke and soap. His body odor, even when he’s all sweaty, somehow always smells clean. I close my eyes and start counting backward from a hundred as I always do at night. I’m asleep before I can get to ninety, comforted by the sound of my father breathing beside me.

  Next thing I know I am back home. It is time for breakfast. I can smell Mom’s cooking downstairs. It’s bacon and eggs. Toast made from bread she baked yesterday. My bed is so warm and comfortable that I don’t feel like leaving it. But now, for some strange reason it’s vibrating under me. There’s a sound of rumbling and rattling. I’d like to keep sleeping. But that grub sure smells good.

  A light tap on my toe wakes me. Pop is leaning over me. I’m no longer home—back at that house that’s no longer ours. Back when Mom was still with us. I’m on a train.

  I feel sad for a moment. The dream that took me over this time was gentle, a place I’d rather not leave. But it’s gone now, gone as that home where we were a family of three. I push it away, beyond the back of my mind. A man can’t live in what’s past.

  It’s not real dark inside the car now. The moon’s shining in through the open door. As Pop pulls me up, I see another light coming from a corner. The flame of a portable stove. Little, but big enough to fry up whatever it is I’m smelling. Fried potatoes and bacon!

  The professor, the apparent owner of both stove and pan, is bent over, stirring the mix.

  “Care to share some of this repast?” he asks as we walk over to where he’s cooking.

  I nod my head. I’m always hungry these days—because I am growing like a weed, Pop says.

  Pop holds out his banjo—the little frying pan he carries in his bag along with the trenching shovel. The professor spoons out a pile of steaming hot bacon and fried potatoes. I’m pretty sure the potatoes in the pan were my father’s contribution—given him by Miz Euler. Pop and I pull out the metal spoons we always carry and dig in. Before I know it we’re scraping the bottom of the pan.

  Only the three of us share that little meal. The other four in the car stayed in their corner. Add to a meal, you get to share it. When you don’t, you don’t. Unless you’re truly in dire straits. Rule number fifteen.

  Help your fellow hoboes whenever and wherever needed; you may need their help one day.

  The professor and I wash our food down with water from Pop’s army canteen. Boney and the other ’boes are passing a small bottle around, but Boney knows enough not to offer it to Pop. My father does not object to the drinking of others, unless they get so liquored up as to be bothersome. But no alcohol ever passes his lips.

  I make a pillow out of my coat and lay back next to Pop on the wooden floor of the car. There was a time, when we first took to the road months ago, when sleeping on a hard surface was not easy for me. I’d been pampered too long by having my own bed. But my body got used to the change. Plus being outdoors in the fresh air makes sleep come faster to a man. Now all I need do is close my eyes and listen to Pop’s breathing. With him by my side, it’s easy to drift off to slumber land. I wonder, just before I fall back asleep, if that dream of home is going to come back. I start counting. A hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . .

  When I open my eyes, it feels like no time’s passed at all. But it has to have been hours. Dappled morning sunlight is streaming in through the open door. That tells me we are heading southwest. Pop, sitting next to me, has that newspaper open and is reading it. As always I’ve just opened my eyes a crack. Nothing’s moved but my eyelids so I do not think he knows I am awake. As I watch, he reads and then rereads the page he’s holding up in front of him. He’s looking at it so intently that it seems as if his eyes might burn a hole into it.

  “Washington,” Pop says in a whisper. He lowers the paper.

  “You’re awake,” he says.

  I sit up and nod.

  “Good,” he says. “Remember Joe Angelo, son? I told you about him last year?”

  I nod again. I have a good memory, as Pop knows. Joe Angelo was a vet. Like Pop he survived the Great War. Mentioning him might mean Pop’s about to share more memories about being over there. This’ll be the second time this week that my father has decided to talk about the war. He doesn’t do that often. But lately it seems to be on his mind a lot.

  “Met Joe in 1918 after the big battle on the Meuse-Argonne line. He was in the 327th tank division. When their commander, Major George Patton, was wounded, it was Joe who dragged him to safety, patched him up, and then ran Patton’s orders from one group of tanks to another.”

  Pop puts aside the newspaper he was reading. Then he reaches into his pocket to pull out the folded article he carries there next to his Compensation Certificate.

  I’ve seen it before, but Pop wants me to look at it again. I unfold it carefully and read the headline.

  VETERAN, WEARING MEDALS, JOBLESS, STIRS COMMITTEE

  Below it is the picture of a skinny man wearing his army uniform, serviceman’s cap on his head, eight medals pinned to his chest. His face is thin, starved-looking. His eyes are huge, dark, and haunted.

  “He’d just testified,” Pop says, “in Washington D.C., to the House Committee on Ways and Means, which was considering whether us veterans could take out loans against our Compensation Certificates. Joe walked all the way from his home in Camden, New Jersey. Took him three days on shank’s mare.”

  Pop takes the article back from me, reads what Joe Angelo said.

  “‘I come to show you people that we need our bonus. I represent eighteen hundred men from New Jersey. They are just like myself, men out of work. I have got a little home back there that I built with my own two hands after I came home from France. Now I expect to lose that little place. Why? My taxes are not paid. I have not worked for two years and a half. Last week I went to our town committee and they gave me four dollars for rations.’”

  Pop looks at me, biting his lip. “Sound familiar, son?”

  I nod.

  Pop shakes his head. “Makes me feel as if I ought to do something. If one Joe Angelo could stir those congressmen, what about ten thousand of us? All of us in Washington and asking nothing more than to be treated fair and square for the sacrifices we made? Joe told them he was making good money—a dollar twenty-five an hour at the DuPont Powder Works. But he chose to enlist—not drafted like some—for army pay of a dollar a day.”

  Pop folds the article with the care of someone folding a flag. He slips it into his pocket and lifts up the newspaper. His lips are pressed together as he looks at it. We rattle on for another ten miles or so. Then he turned it toward me so I can see the headline.

  VETS MARCHING ON D.C.

  “Washington
,” he says, tapping the newspaper with one finger. “Men like Joe and me are going there now. Vets asking for a fair shake. They figure that if enough of us show up, Congress and the president will have to do something. They’ll have to give us our bonuses! And me too.”

  Pop’s voice has been getting more excited as he’s been talking. He looks straight at me and says that name.

  “Wash-ing-ton!”

  Says it like a magician chanting Abra-ca-dabra before he pulls a rabbit out of his hat.

  “Wash-ing-ton! Me in Washington? Can you imagine that, Cal?”

  I don’t say anything, but I can. I have one of those rare moments when I can sort of see the future.

  There are all of those soldiers marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. Pop is marching with them.

  But I don’t see me there.

  “Yes, sir,” Pop says, bringing me back to the present. “Yes, sir!”

  His voice is softer. He’s talking to himself now. “That’s it. I need to join my brother soldiers. One last campaign. One last march.”

  His mind’s made up. Once Pop decides on something, nothing stops him. Not hell or high water. And now I am feeling excited, too. If Pop is going to Washington I’ll surely be going there as well. Me taking care of him. Him taking care of me.

  Washington, D.C. I’ve never seen that place, but I’ve read about it and it sounds wonderful. The Capitol building, the big memorials, the White House, all sorts of museums, and the nation’s biggest library.

  But then Pop lowers the paper and looks straight at me. The expression on his face has changed. It’s no longer excited. It’s thoughtful.

  “Son,” he says, “I have been thinking.”

  The tone of his voice has changed, too. It’s serious in a way that worries me.

  “Now that I am going to Washington.”

  Now I am confused, especially because of the way he emphasized that one word I. Not we.

  “I,” I say. “Pop, won’t we both be going?”

  He shakes his head. “No, son. If this is going to be a campaign, then I have to go it without you. It might be dangerous and I want you safe while I’m gone. It’ll be me and other vets doing this. It’s time for you . . .”

  He pauses, looking out the door at the trees and telegraph poles whizzing by. The train’s going over a rough spot in the tracks. The two of us rocking back and forth with the motion of the boxcar.

  “What, Pop?” I ask. “Time for what.”

  “School,” he says. “I have been thinking about this ever since we hit the road. It’s not right you missing out on schooling. You need to get back to being educated, Cal. And I know how to do it.”

  That confuses the dickens out of me. Back to being educated? Back to school? I cannot imagine any way on God’s green earth that can be done. The school I was going to is closed. No other school is going to take in a hobo boy just hopped off a freight train. Nor do we have any money for such things as books and school supplies. And where would I live while going to school? It makes no sense.

  “How?” I say. Then, because I am feeling so totally befuddled I say it again. “How?”

  For some reason, that makes Pop chuckle. “Exactly,” he says. He lifts his head to look straight at me. Then he does something strange. He holds out his left hand and strokes the back of it with the fingers of his right.

  He’s done sign language before, especially when it’s been necessary for us to keep quiet—like when we’re hiding from a railroad bull. Sign language comes in handy at such times.

  But what he just did was a sign I haven’t seen before. I don’t understand it. It’s not like lifting his index finger up and dropping it down for yes or holding out an empty palm for no.

  “I don’t know that sign, Pop.”

  He smiles, strokes the back of his hand again. “It means Indian,” he says. “Pointing out how Indian skin is darker than that of a white man.”

  Indian?

  Then he holds out his hands, side by side, open palm up. That’s a gesture I understand. It means book. But I still cannot grasp what he is telling me.

  Finally, as if it explains everything rather than making me even more baffled, he says two words.

  “Indian school.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  INDIAN SCHOOL

  “Indian school?” I stare at Pop. I’m so confused the words are spilling out of my mouth like water from a tipped bucket.

  “Indian school? They teach you there how to be an Indian?”

  Rather than giving me an answer, Pop starts laughing. So hard he throws his head back against the boxcar wall behind him.

  BANG!

  But it doesn’t stop his laughing, even though he reaches up to rub where there’s surely going to be a bump.

  “Oh my,” Pop says, getting enough breath back into his lungs to actually say something. “Wouldn’t my old teachers at Challagi have a fit if they heard that? A school where they teach you how to be Indian?”

  Pop lets out a short laugh like a horse snorting. Then he shakes his head.

  “Nope, son. You could not say that. It is au contraire, as they put it over in France. Just the opposite. Understand?”

  I surely do not. But I am not about to say anything for fear it will start Pop off on another bout of laughing. I just do what I usually do when I have a question. I look at him and raise my left eyebrow.

  Pop smiles. It’s not one of his happy smiles, but one that can best be described as rueful. “Of course you don’t understand, son. How could you after the way you’ve been raised thus far?”

  Raised thus far? That provokes the desire in me to ask what in blue blazes that might mean. But I hold my tongue. Pop is going to explain those strange remarks of his. All I need to do is what he said his own father—a grampa I never met—taught him.

  If you want to hear something, don’t talk.

  So that is what I do. Or rather do not do.

  Pop looks straight at me. That sad smile’s gone from his face.

  “Cal,” he says, his voice so soft no one else in the boxcar but me can hear—especially those who turned their heads our way when Pop had that attack of guffawing.

  “Cal, there’s a lot of explaining I have to do. Your sainted mother and I agreed it was best to raise you . . . like we did. But the time has come for me to explain a thing or two.”

  I feel like I’m standing with my feet stuck in mud, with water rising around me. But even though I don’t know what’s going on, I can sense that my life is about to change. That scares me.

  “Let me start,” Pop says, “by explaining what Indian school is. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I reply, my throat so tight the word comes out as a hoarse whisper.

  “There was a time,” Pop says, “when this United States was at war with the Indian tribes. You been taught about that in school, right?”

  I nod my head, remembering some of those stories. They told how this country was won from the savage Indian tribes who were the enemies of civilization and progress until they were all subdued. Manifest Destiny. How things were meant to be.

  But I’m also remembering how when I came home and told my parents about what I’d learned about Indians, Mom would get a funny look on her face. And Pop would say “There’s more to it than that.”

  Then he’d tell me other stories. How when the first white settlers came to America, they were helped by the Wampanoags. How during the American Revolution nobody would assist General Washington at Valley Forge till the Tuscaroras and Oneidas brought tons of food and saved his army from starving to death. How the Five Tribes of the South—the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—became so much like their non-Indian neighbors with cattle herds and their own schools, even dressing like white people. But then they were driven off their land and sent on the Trail of Tears t
o Indian Territory. How every promise made between the United States and Indian tribes was always kept by the Indians and broken by the government.

  So, even though I never met any real Indians, I grew up feeling different about them than the other kids in my classes. My thoughts of them were always friendly-like.

  Not that I said anything in class. Silent Cal was what I was called. But I did write an essay in fourth grade that led my teacher, Miss Knowlan, to ask me where I’d learned such things that were certainly not in any of my books.

  “My pop,” was all I said.

  It resulted in two things. First was my paper getting a big red F scrawled on top of it along with the word “Ridiculous!”

  Second was Pop paying her a visit after I brought that paper home.

  I was by his side when he walked into the school, a book under his arm. Both my parents had been invited, but it was one of those days Mom was too sick to leave the farm.

  I watched Miss Knowlan greet him. There was a bigger smile on her face than I ever saw in our classroom.

  “Mr. Black,” she said. “I am so pleased to meet a real-life war hero.”

  Pop said nothing, just held the door open for her.

  I stayed in the hall, on the bench where students always had to sit when parents had conferences with her.

  Pop nodded at me before he shut the door behind them.

  I heard the chairs scrape as they sat down, followed by a question from Miss Knowlan.

  “Now, where did your boy get those outlandish ideas?”

  Pop started answering her then. His voice was so deep and low that I could not make out all the words. What I did hear clearly, when he paused now and then, was what Miss Knowlan said. And kept saying.

  “Oh.” Just “oh.”

  I began counting. She said that “Oh,” fourteen times during the twenty minutes—by the hall clock—they were in there.

  Then there was a moment of silence before Miss Knowlan came out of the room. She had the book Pop had been carrying in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. Her face was all red. She walked right past me without saying a word.