Two Roads Page 6

  Pop was close behind her. “Let’s go,” he said.

  That F got turned into a B. I can’t say that Miss Knowlan liked me after that. Matter of fact, she pretty much ignored me. Which was fine by me and a whole lot better than being called ridiculous in front of everyone.

  That memory takes no more than a heartbeat to go through my mind as I listen to what Pop is saying.

  “There came a time,” Pop said, “when it was decided that fighting Indians and trying to just kill them off was not the best idea. Part of it was that some white people were sympathetic to what they called the plight of the Indian.”

  Pop pauses. He looks up and to the left. That always means he is remembering something. He takes a breath.

  “To be honest, though, it wasn’t conscience that led the government to change its mind about what to do with Indians. Mostly it was money. You know how much?”

  I say nothing. Pop’s asking this question just to set up his own answer to it.

  He presses his lips together. “One million dollars,” he says. “Per dead Indian.”

  I cannot help but whistle at that. A million dollars. More money than I’ve ever imagined. No workingman could ever earn that much in ten lifetimes, even at a whopping two bucks an hour.

  “So,” Pop says, “they figured it was a whole lot cheaper to send them to school and educate everything Indian out of them. First place was this school called Carlisle.”

  “Jim Thorpe went there,” I blurt out. I can’t help myself, him being one of my biggest heroes. Like I mentioned earlier, I was even compared to him by my track coach in fifth grade before our school got shut down.

  Pop nods. “Yes, he did.”

  My father pauses for a second to look up and away, lost again in some recollection before he resumes.

  “It was rough at a government Indian school. Being taken from your family and shipped far away from home. First thing that happened after an Indian boy got off the train at Carlisle—and every other government Indian school that came after it—was that they cut off the long hair that the Creator gave him. Then they dressed him in a uniform, and taught him how to march like he was in the army. When the bugle sounded at five in the morning, an hour before breakfast, he had to be up and out on the drill field. Just imagine a little kid holding one of those great big Enfield rifles from the Spanish-American War and going through close order drill.”

  Pop holds up his hands as if he has a gun in them.

  “Attention! Present Arms! Shoulder Arms. Forward March!”

  Pop’s voice has gotten loud, barking out those commands like he really was on a drill field.

  It takes me back to one time when we were rolling through Kentucky. Pop and I had to hold a dark-skinned man named Lucius down. He thought he was back on some Belgian battlefield and was trying to jump out the door of the speeding boxcar. As he struggled he was yelling out words in a language Pop later told me was French.

  Everyone in our boxcar cringes when Pop shouts out those commands. They’re afraid he might get violent as ex-doughboys sometimes do. The other ’boes in the car may be thinking that Pop is having some sort of episode like Lucius did. Some of the men who ride the rails—even men who did not serve—are real fragile in their heads. They can hurt themselves or others when they have an episode.

  Pop sighs and shakes his head. His voice drops down low again.

  “Things were hard at Indian school. Idea was to get rid of everything in you that was Indian. Drill it out of you, teach it out of you, beat it out of you. Told you never ever speak Indian again. Punish you hard if you forgot, uttered even one Indian word. Just saying hers’ce would earn you a whipping or two nights in the guard house.”

  Hers-key? Where did that word come from?

  “A simple howdy-do in Creek language,” Pop says, as if hearing my thought. “Good word to know. Not as good, I suppose, as mu-to. That means thanks in Creek. Mu-to.”

  Mu-to, I think. Mu-to. I feel the word lodge itself in my head, alongside of hers-ce.

  It’s always been that way for me. Say a new word and my brain just grabs it like a frog snagging a fly with its tongue.

  But now I have to ask.

  “Jim Thorpe was Creek?”

  “Nooo,” Pop says, speaking real slow. “I was.”

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  HOPPING OFF

  My mouth is wide open.

  Pop smiles at me. “Trying to catch flies, Cal?” he asks.

  I shut my mouth, but I am no less bamboozled.

  Indian? Creek Indian? What is Pop talking about? That just makes no sense at all. Indians do not look like he does. They ride horses and live in tipis and hunt buffalo. They use bows and arrows and tomahawks, and they don’t speak English. And they sure as blue blazes do not ride the rails or go hoboing.

  Or do they?

  I look Pop up and down. Not a sign of anything Indian in what he is wearing. Just the ordinary well-worn clothes any workingman might have on, not a bead or a feather to be seen. But then I look at his face. It’s a face so familiar to me that I guess I’ve never looked at it that close. I see—as if for the first time—just how brown his skin is, how his hair that he always wears down to his shoulders is as dark as a crow’s wing, how from the side he sort of looks like the Indian chief on one of those brand-new copper nickels, the ones with the buffalo on the back.

  Then I think of what I have heard folks say about me—that I am the spitting image of my pop. I have the same hair, the same brown skin, the same bent-nosed profile.

  No! I shake my head—like I was trying to clear it of spiderwebs. No!

  I’m not an Indian. No way, no how. Despite some of the things Pop said—like when he confronted that teacher of mine—there’s nothing positive about being Indian. It’s not me. Not him.

  Every picture I’ve ever seen of an Indian, every image of Indians, has been either stupid or scary. I’ve seen them in movies, whooping and hollering and getting shot off their horses. I’ve never met a real Indian. I’ve never even thought about there still being Indians. Until Pop started his crazy talking about Indians I thought they’d all been killed off by the army.

  I feel as if my body has been frozen in place. My head is aching now. I can hardly even think.

  “Pop,” I say, “you’re kidding me. Right? You’re not an Indian.”

  Pop shakes his head. There’s no sign of a smile on that face of his. He makes the gesture he makes when he’s saying an emphatic no, sort of holding his hand out palm up and swinging it out like he’s tossing something away.

  “Cal,” he says, “I’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  He surely does. But I’m not sure if I want to hear what he has to say. What I truly want is for this to all be a bad dream.

  And there’s something else that is just as upsetting as what he’s telling me about him being Indian. It’s that he wants to send me away from him. Send me to school.

  I’ve been just fine so far not going to school. Hasn’t Pop said I’ve learned more about being a knight of the road in a year than most men do in ten? I like this life we’ve been living together. I don’t want to go to school. I don’t need to go to school. Not Indian school or any other kind of school. What I want is to stay with my father, go with him to Washington.

  I’ve always trusted Pop in the past to do what’s best for us both. But now I feel like my brain is split into two sides fighting with each other. One half is saying I have to trust my father like I’ve always trusted him in the past. The other side of my brain is just saying No! No! No! No!

  “I know,” Pop says, as if he’s reading my mind. “We really need to talk, son. But we can’t do that right now.”

  He jerks his head to the side, the way he does whenever he want to point something out to me, using his chin or his lips. Never a finger point the way most do.
>
  I look that way, out the door of the open boxcar, and see what he means. The car’s slowing down—the rattling rhythm of the train’s wheels on the steel rails has changed. We’re coming to a rail yard. A sign by the tracks tells us where.

  FAIRVILLE, ARKANSAS

  Arkansas. Three states since Virginia, which we left yesterday. There’s no faster or finer way to travel than by rail. It’s like one of those magic carpets I read about in the One Thousand and One Nights. Except there are no genies or magic lamps. Just bulls with clubs and pistols—and a hatred of hoboes.

  I’ve never been to Fairville before. Pop has told me about it, though. There are towns like this all over the country. Not a lot of them, fortunately.

  A good many towns don’t pay that much attention to us wandering souls. As long as we stay outside the city limits, we’re tolerated. Others are more friendly. In such places you’ll find a cross carved into one of the lower boards on the wall of a church or a mission, meaning that you’ll get fed after listening to a sermon. That same cross on a house, along with a smiley face, means there’s a doctor inside who’ll treat a hobo free of charge. Some cities, like Chicago, are known for being more understanding. They have soup kitchens where you can line up for free food and shelters where you can spend the night.

  The message scratched into the lower edge of that Fairville sign indicates how far from friendly this town is. Two interlinked circles. Handcuffs. It means that any bum caught here by the law gets dragged off to jail.

  Most hoboes avoid this place like the plague. But there are times when, headed one place or another, you have to end up here. It’s a major intersection of tracks coming in from and going off to the four directions.

  Don’t get noticed. And don’t ever go into town. Stay in the jungle deep in the woods far out of the town. That’s especially true if your skin is dark. A white hobo caught for loitering—which means doing nothing more than breathing the air here, precious air—will spend a few days in jail. He’ll probably be let go with nothing more than bruises from the beatings served up with bread and water each night. A black hobo caught here may never be seen alive again.

  No time for any more talking. In less than a mile we’ll be in the rail yard where this train comes off the main. To get where Pop wants us to go we have to catch another train headed west. That train won’t be coming through until tomorrow.

  The other men are already taking the lead. Leaning out the door to grasp a handrail, they’re hopping out to go running along, then peel off into the heavy grass. The professor is just ahead of us.

  “Geronimo!” he says as he lets go, rolls, and comes up on his feet like a circus acrobat. Quite a nimble feat for an old man surely no less than fifty years of age.

  He turns back toward us and does a bow, then spins on one heel. I lose sight of him as he hurries away from the tracks.

  “Your turn, Cal,” Pop says.

  “Wait,” I say.

  I’ve just noticed something out of the corner of my eye. Over behind a pile of boxes in the back corner of the car I’ve just seen something move. A booted foot?

  I walk back to take a quick look. There’s a man hidden back there, just as I thought. Sleeping with his face turned toward the wall of the car.

  “Mister?” I say in a loud whisper. “Mister? We’re stopping!”

  The man turns his face toward me. The corner of the car is shadowed but I can see that he is exactly the same size as Pop and wearing the same cap on his head and similar clothes. What used to be part of an army uniform. There’s even a pair of medals pinned to his chest. But I can tell from his hair and his brown skin—a shade darker than Pop’s—that he’s not a white man. He looks surprised being roused, but has come totally awake in an instant. The way Pop always does. There’s intelligence in the way the man looks up at me, as well as concern.

  “Where?” he whispers back.

  “Fairville,” I say.

  “Arkansas?”

  I nod.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God!” the man says. He leaps to his feet like a big cat, takes two strides, and goes flying out the door of the car as my father slides aside to let him by. I look back down the tracks and catch sight of the man’s back disappearing into a field.

  Pop squeezes my arm. “You did a good thing, Cal. Now go.”

  I drop off. No fancy rolls for me, just an easy trot seeing as how the train has dropped so much speed. The screeching of the brakes against the wheels is so loud it about deafens me. Pop is already beside me. Bum leg or not, he hops off a train with as much grace as an able-bodied man ten years younger than him. It almost always makes me swell a bit with pride at how capable Pop is at just about anything.

  But we’re not in the clear yet. There’s a man in a black uniform standing up on the platform fifty yards ahead. He hasn’t seen us yet, but there’s a mean look on his face and what looks like a gun holstered on his side.

  We run low and fast back away from the rail yard. Awkward as his stride may be because of his stiff knee, Pop moves at a good clip. As do I. Despite my shorter legs, he doesn’t urge me to keep up even once.

  We pass a gray-shingled house where the professor turns off and we keep a-going. Round one bend and then another, we run a mile or more before Pop holds up his right hand. We’ve come to a place where the brush and trees are thick off to the left. He looks down and so do I. Most, unless they were fellow knights of the road, would not be looking for what I notice right away. Cut into one of the wooden cross ties is an arrow. Its point indicates a trail ordinary folks would never know was here.

  We don’t take it right away, though. Pop points ahead with his lips. I follow him fifty feet farther off the tracks uphill into a thick patch of dry brush and stunted trees. Little clouds of gray dust swirl under our feet as we scramble up the loose gravel. We crawl in under the bushes and crouch down, concealed by the low branches of a twisted cedar. Then we wait, making sure no one is following us—such as that mean-eyed man in the black uniform.

  Minutes pass. A blue jay, unaware of our presence, lands on a branch two feet over my head, preens itself with its beak, flaps unhurriedly away. That, in itself, is sign enough that no one else is approaching. But we still wait longer, the sun moving a hand’s width across the sky. Finally Pop nods and motions for me to follow him back to the hidden trail. He pushes a branch aside, we take a few dozen strides, and then the path appears before us.

  Pop is a great tracker. As I think that, another thought comes to me. Is it because he’s Indian that he’s so at home in the woods? That thought stops me in my tracks. All the confusion and uncertainty I’ve been feeling since Pop told me about himself comes rolling back into my head like a fog.

  “Cal,” Pop whispers, “catch up.”

  I start walking again, hardly feeling the ground under my feet.

  After ten minutes of walking, the trail opens up. There’s a clearing in the thick woods. The narrow, twisting trail we followed is the only way into this hidden place. It’s a spot that would be lonely were it not for the fact that we’re far from alone. There must be at least forty men and boys in this hobo jungle that’s been carved out of the forest. Rough shelters of every sort are scattered here and there. Cardboard boxes, cobbled-together lean-tos, even a few little cabins made of scavenged lumber. If this were a safer place there’d be fires going. But not here. Rising smoke might give away the fact that this little sanctuary exists.

  A few raise a hand in greeting as Pop and I pass. They either know Pop from the past or are just being friendly-like. Pop nods to each of them, including one person I recognize. He’s sitting on a rock next to a tree with no shelter of any sort. No surprise since he got here only minutes before us. It’s the light-skinned Negro man I had to wake up in the boxcar. I still can’t believe he actually dared stop over near this town that’s the opposite of its name.

  “Good to see you, Co
rporal Black,” the man says, standing and holding out his hand to my father. His voice is deep and warm. “Didn’t get a chance to thank the boy back in the car.”

  “Esom Dart,” Pop says, taking the man’s hand in both of his. “Good to see you, too, Corporal. This is my son, Cal.”

  Corporal Esom Dart shakes my hand. His palm is hard and calloused from a life of hard work. “Thanks for pulling my fat out of the fire back there, Cal,” he says. “It is a true pleasure to meet you.”

  “You, too, sir,” I say.

  He holds my eyes for a moment longer, long enough to make sure I know just how sincere his thank-you truly is. Then he lets go of my hand to turn back to Pop.

  “Long way from the Marne here,” Corporal Dart says.

  “You could say that,” Pop replies, “just not as friendly.”

  Corporal Dart snorts out a laugh as he looks back up the path.

  “Never intended to end up here. Fell asleep in that car and missed hopping off a hundred miles and a whole state line back. I’ll be flipping the first freight north tomorrow morning.”

  Pop nods.

  The corporal notices me looking at the medals on his chest. He lifts his left hand to tap first one and then the other with his index finger.

  “Know what these are?” he asks.

  “Yes, sir,” I say. “French medals.”

  “Right as rain,” he says. “France Victory Medal and a Croix de Guerre.”

  I know what a Croix de Guerre is and why the medals he’s wearing are not from the U.S. Army. At the start of the war black men were not allowed to sign up. So a group of them joined the French Army. The Harlem Hellfighters is what they were called.

  Pop said those Negro soldiers he encountered over there were some of the bravest and most honorable men he ever knew.

  “Well earned,” Pop says.

  “I suppose so,” the corporal says, shaking his head. “But they have done nothing to make my row any easier to hoe. Medals do not get a man a job. Especially if his skin is brown.”