Tisha Read online

  “What’s that cooking in there?” I said.

  “Fish head, animal guts, rice. It’s the dog pot. For them.” She waved a hand toward one of the dogs. The old woman sat down on the ground and began eating. “That’s Lame Sarah. That little boy who’s going along with you—Chuck—he’s been living with her. As you can see, he hasn’t been eating steak and potatoes. She can barely take care of herself. Thank God he’s getting out of here.”

  When we were ready to leave, the old woman and Chuck were standing by one of the mules, which had an old beat-up saddle on it. She was buttoning up Chuck’s mackinaw. When she finished, she hugged him to her, murmuring endearments. He was only half listening, though. His eyes were on the mule and he looked worried. It towered over him the way Blossom did over me, and I knew exactly what was on his mind. The old woman let him go.

  “Up we go; Chuck,” Cathy said to him. She tried to lift him into the saddle, but he pulled away from her. “No!” he yelled. He was scared and I didn’t blame him. A few of the kids were looking on, kind of anxious and envious at the same time. Cathy kneeled down in front of him. “Chuck, if you want to see your mother you’re going to have to ride that mule.”

  Mr. Strong came over and asked what the matter was.

  “He’s a little afraid to get on,” I said.

  “Is that right,” he said. Without another word he grabbed the back of Chuck’s mackinaw, lifted him bodily and plunked him down on the mule’s back. “You stay put,” he warned him, “savvy?”

  Terrorized, Chuck didn’t answer, but he looked as though he were about to cry.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Cathy said. I didn’t say anything, but I agreed with her. Mr. Strong acted as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “We are about ready to go, madam,” he said to me. He glanced down at Cathy’s feet. “Are you too destitute to buy shoes, Miss Winters?”

  Before we left her house she’d slipped on a pair of black rubbers over her moccasins. I noticed that a few of the Indians were wearing the same thing.

  “What makes you ask?” Her voice was cold as ice.

  “I know the Indians are accustomed to wearing such footgear, but I’ve never seen respectable white women do so. They prefer shoes. From the rear I might have taken you for a squaw.”

  “Nobody asked you to look at my rear.”

  He got red, and I almost blushed myself. I would never have been able to say anything like that to an older person. Not that Cathy was being fresh or disrespectful. She was just giving tit for tat, but if it had been me I would have just shut up.

  “Are you ready, madam?” he asked me.

  After he boosted me up, he went down the line once more for a last check of everything.

  “Do me a favor, Anne,” Cathy said. She tossed her head in Mr. Strong’s direction. “For all he cares, Chuck is just another piece of baggage—maybe less. Look after him, will you? He’s hardly ever gone further than a few miles out of this village and he’ll be scared to death.”

  “I’ll look after him.”

  Cathy spoke to him in Indian, pointing to me a couple of times. “Remember,” she said, “if you need anything you speak English. If you get scared, or you have to go to the toilet, you tell the teacher here, savvy?”

  “Aha,” he said.

  “No more aha,” Cathy said. “From now on it’s yes, understand?”

  He nodded.

  “I say yiss and I tell Tisha.”

  She reached a hand up to me. “Good luck.”

  “Good luck to you, Cathy. I wish we’d had more of a chance to talk.”

  “Drop me a line when you get to Chicken if you feel like it.”

  I told her I would.

  The pack train moved out then. We followed the curve of the river, and the last I saw of the Indian village before it disappeared behind us was the white wooden cross that stood on top of the church. Then that disappeared over the tops of the trees. I was glad when it was gone. The whole place was awful, and I just couldn’t see any reason why they couldn’t clean it up. I didn’t want to say it to Cathy, but I wouldn’t have stayed there for five minutes.

  Mr. Strong slowed down and let the pack train move ahead. “I trust you’re feeling much better, madam,” he said when Chuck and I reached him.

  “Much.”

  “Good. I would like to make up for some of the time we have lost.”

  “It’s all right with me, but I don’t know about Chuck.”

  He was still scared stiff, just barely managing to hang on.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Mr. Strong said. “These Indians can take anything … What did you think of that young lady back there?”

  “I liked her.”

  He was still angry, and I thought he was going to say something about her, but he changed the subject. “We will stop for lunch in a couple of hours, then push on until nightfall. We will spend the night at the O’Shaughnessy roadhouse. I trust you will bear up until then.”

  I would, but I didn’t know about Chuck. Indian or whatever, he was only a little boy and he was going to need rest along the way.

  He made out all right as long as we stuck to the river bank, but once we veered off and started going through rough country he looked as though he was going to be sick.

  “Do you want to stop, Chuck?” I asked him. Pale and sweating, he was too miserable to answer.

  A few seconds later the mule jumped over a dead tree and he went tumbling off. He landed on his hands and knees and didn’t get up. Instead he started to retch. By the time I was able to get Blossom to stand still long enough to get off, Chuck had thrown up and was crying.

  I led him over to the tree, sat down with him and put an arm around him.

  Mr. Strong made his way back to us a few minutes later leading both Blossom and the mule.

  “He fell off,” I said.

  Mr. Strong wasn’t too happy. “Is he hurt?”

  “No, but he’s pretty badly upset.”

  Mr. Strong waited until he was able to stop crying, then he said, “Chuck, I think maybe you go back home, huh? I give you your stuff, you go home.”

  Chuck looked stricken. “You no want me?”

  “You fall off mule. No can ride. We ride far, sleep tonight long distance from here, ride more tomorrow. Too tough for you.”

  “I ride,” Chuck promised. “You take me I no fall down no more.”

  Mr. Strong raised a finger. “You fall once more you go home, savvy?”

  He tried as hard as he could and my heart went out to him for it, but it was a losing battle. He managed to stay on for another mile before he fell off again. It made me wince, but he scrambled right to his feet and ran after the mule, trying to get it to stop. It wouldn’t though, and he stood in the trail, tears of anger streaming down his face. “Sumbitch mool!” he called after it “Dirty black sumbitch white mool!”

  I stopped Blossom. In a couple of minutes Mr. Strong would be coming back. “Chuck, do you know your way back to the village from here?”

  “Yiss,” he said.

  “Maybe you can try again when Mr. Strong comes through next time.”

  He wrung his hands. “Tisha,” he said earnestly, “you talk Mista St’ong me? You talk him? Say one more time Mista St’ong he let me come I stay on goddamn mool. I stay on, Tisha, I stay on.”

  “I’ll talk to him, but I don’t think he’ll listen to me.”

  He wrung his hands again, glancing up the trail, then dropped his hands in defeat. I felt terrible for him.

  There was a big boulder a short distance away. I headed Blossom over to it and stopped him beside it.

  “See if you can climb up and get on with me.”

  He clambered up and somehow we got him on in back of me. Then we rode on, his arms tight around my waist. Up ahead, Mr. Strong came in sight. He looked at me questioningly.

  “He asked me if he could ride with me for a while,” I said. “I’m getting pretty good now. I don’t mind.”

  Whet
her he believed me or not, he wheeled his horse without saying anything. Chuck’s head leaned against my back.

  “Tisha?”

  “Yes?”

  “You one helluva good white woman,” he said, tightening his arms around my waist. It made me feel good when he did it.

  Somehow we made it to the next rest stop. How I didn’t know, but we did. This time it was a sagging old cabin that had sunk into the ground about a foot. I had to stoop down when I went through the door. Inside it was dark and dingy, half of it floored with planks and the other half dirt. A man and his wife owned it and from the way they acted you’d have thought they’d taken vows of silence. After the man asked Mr. Strong how the trip had been they hardly said anything. The man gave Mr. Strong and me a basin of water to wash with while the woman began ladling out some stew she had on the stove. When Mr. Strong finished washing, the man threw the water outside. He didn’t fill the basin for Chuck. I said that Chuck would probably want to wash up too, but he didn’t pay any attention to me. Mr. Strong sat down at the table and indicated the other place that had been set. “Sit down, madam.”

  “Isn’t Chuck going to eat?” He’d sat down on the floor beside the stove and was leaning against the wall.

  “You hungry, Chuck?” I asked him. He nodded up and down a few times.

  Mr. Strong said, “I am not being paid for his transportation, madam. I’m doing it out of charity. Rest assured, he can take care of himself.”

  “I’ll be glad to pay for his meal,” I said. “Is that all right?” I asked the woman. She looked at Mr. Strong and he nodded, so she got a bowl for Chuck, cut a slice of bread and handed them to him where he sat. He finished off every bit of it.

  We had a half hour before we were to leave and I spent part of it showing Chuck how to ride the mule. “You say whoa when you want him to stop, say giddap and give him a little kick when you want him to go.” It took a little while for him to get it, but once he saw he could control the animal, he stopped being afraid. By the time we were ready to go, he was having fun. “Giddap, mool,” he said, and we were off.

  The longer we rode together, the more I liked him. If he was sore—and he had to be—he didn’t complain about it. Instead he’d jump down every so often and lead the mule along. Walking didn’t seem to bother him at all. Sometimes, when the horses had tough going, he even drew way ahead of us. When we caught up with him, he’d lead the mule over to a rock or a log and clamber back into the saddle without any help.

  “I told you, madam,” Mr. Strong said to me the first time he did it. “These Indian kids are hardy.”

  Our next overnight stop was the O’Shaughnessy road-house. It was run by a pleasant Irishman with a thick accent. Since I was a woman he gave up his bedroom, and I shared his bed with his wife, a plump Indian woman who saw to it that Chuck was well fed and bedded down in a warm sleeping bag in our room. I tucked him in and was going out when he called to me. “Tisha … You talk me?”

  He wanted company. He was scared being in a strange place. I sat down on the sleeping bag. “I bet you’ll be glad to see your mother,” I said.

  “Oh yiss,” he said.

  “She must be very nice.”

  “She beyoodeeful, Tisha—like you.”

  “I’ll bet. Is your father in Chicken too?”

  “Yiss.”

  “What kind of a man is he?”

  “Big man,” he said. “Got plenty guns, lotsa things. Got big glass eyes see far.” He curled both his fists in front of his eyes to make binoculars. “I no like him,” he added.

  “Why not?”

  “He no like me and Et’el.” “Is Ethel your sister?”

  “Mmm … You got nice school?” he asked drowsily.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “You let me come?”

  “Sure. Do you like school?”

  “Like too much,” he said enthusiastically. “School plenty warm. Big. Miss Wintuhs make good grub for kids. You make good grub you school?”

  “I never have, but I probably could. What do you like to eat?”

  He didn’t answer. He’d fallen asleep.

  IV

  We were up at five the next morning and on our way an hour after a hearty breakfast.

  Right from the start Chuck was lively as a squirrel, riding that mule as though he’d done it all his life. In fact a couple of times he gave me a turn, slapping the mule to make him jog and pretty near falling off in the process.

  He was comfortable around me, but not around Mr. Strong. For the whole trip I never heard him say a word when Mr. Strong was in earshot. Not that he talked much when we were alone either. Aside from the talk we had before he went to sleep the previous night, the only real conversation we had was about George Washington.

  “You know Geo’ge Wash’ton?” he asked me.

  “I’ve heard of him,” I said.

  He started giggling. “He chop down cherry tree.”

  “What are you laughing at?” I asked him.

  “Cherry tree. Fun-ne-e-e.” He kept giggling.

  “Why is it funny?”

  “Cherry grow on tree. I no believe.”

  “They do, though.”

  “You see?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “See apple tree?”

  “Loads of ’em.”

  That really made him laugh. “How apple get on tree?”

  “They just grow there. Oranges, pears—they all grow on trees.”

  He shook his head. It was hard for him to accept. “Potato?” he said mischievously.

  “No, not potatoes.”

  “Leddus?”

  “No, lettuce grows right out of the ground. You know that.”

  He laughed so much he had me giggling about it. When you saw it from his point of view, big pieces of fruit hanging from a spruce tree, or a birch, it did seem kind of funny.

  Around noon, Mr. Strong stopped the pack train as we were making our way through a dense growth of cottonwood. The cowbells that had been clanking all the way down the line were quiet all of a sudden, and all I could hear were the merry waters of the meandering creek we’d been crossing and recrossing for a while.

  “There it is, madam,” Mr. Strong said. “That is Chicken.”

  I could barely make it out through the trees—a settlement about a mile away and a little below us. It was too far to really see what it was like.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Strong, I’d like to change my clothes.”

  “What is the matter with what you have on?”

  Miss Ivy had always told me that first impressions were important. “Always look your very best,” she said to me once. “No matter where you are you must try to be a lady.”

  “I’d feel more comfortable if I were more properly dressed.”

  Mr. Strong dismounted. “Will you want to wash up too?”

  “I’d like to.”

  He was nice about it, unpacked the suitcase I asked for and brought it to the edge of the creek.

  “We camp here?” Chuck asked.

  “No,” I said, “I’m going to change and wash up.” I took off the army coat, Chuck watching me, interested. I asked him to turn around before I took off my shirt and knickers. “And don’t look until I tell you to.”

  “Why I do this, Tisha?” he asked with his back to me.

  “It’s not important,” I said. “Just stay that way until I tell you it’s all right.” It would have been too much trouble to explain. When it came to modesty he didn’t have any, urinating and moving his bowels in full view without embarrassment.

  After I finished I put the army coat back on and brought my suitcase back. I’d changed into a long black skirt, cotton stockings and white blouse. “You look quite nice, madam,” Mr. Strong said gallantly.

  He put my suitcase back, then started moving down the line, checking the loads for the final time. “When we break out of these trees,” he said, “the animals are going to be in a hurry.”

&n
bsp; There weren’t as many as we’d started out with, about ten left now. The rest had been left along the way.

  I looked off at the settlement, my stomach doing flip-flops. This is it, I thought. I’m almost there. I’d come to a far place, just as my Grandmother Hobbs used to tell me I would. When I was a little girl back in Colorado I used to hate the places I lived in: Blazing Rag, Big Four, Laveta, Evansville. Mining towns full of company shacks, they were all ugly. I felt sure I’d be living in them forever, but Granny said no I wouldn’t and she’d been right.

  “You be a teacher, Annie,” she used to tell me, “an’ you can go anywhere in the world you want.”

  When I thought about her now I could see her as clearly as if she were right in front of me. As a little girl I used to wish that when I grew up I could be just like her. She wasn’t like anybody else in our whole family. The rest of us were light skinned and had blue eyes—or gray eyes like mine—and we were all very serious most of the time. But not Granny. She was a full-blooded Kentuck Indian and her face had been brown and broad, with wonderful black eyes that usually sparkled and laughed. If it hadn’t been for her I couldn’t think of what might have happened to me. More than likely I’d be sitting around somewhere feeling sorry for myself—the one thing Granny wouldn’t ever let me do.

  My father had never cared anything about me, nor my mother either for that matter, but Granny had adored me. Every time my father lost his job or left the house I was sent to live with her, and I couldn’t wait to get there. I’d sit on the train coach overnight with my cardboard suitcase on the seat beside me and I could barely sleep for being so happy. She had a little farm in Deepwater, Missouri that had hardly any kind of a house on it at all, just a little ramshackle place in the backlands, but I thought it was wonderful. It made me smile just to think about it now. All the house had was one tiny bedroom that, even though it was three feet above the kitchen, had no stairs to it. Whenever Granny and I went to bed we had to shinny ourselves up. She must have been close to seventy the last time I was there, but she was able to scramble up almost as fast as I.