Little Big Man Page 16

  As to the men we encountered, I don’t believe a one of them could have told you later whether I was tall or short, for they kept their eyes fixed on Mrs. P. She had quite an effect on them. I don’t believe I done her justice in the description, which I have tried to tell from my point of view that first day. As I had spent my formative years among the Indians, my basic taste in women was for black hair and dark eyes. She was also supposed to be my adopted Ma, so I was restrained somewhat from looking at her purely as a woman. But it’s only fair to say that with white men I reckon Mrs. Pendrake was thought to be indeed a beauty, and most of them we met that afternoon acted like they’d have got down on their knees and hung out their tongues if she’d of asked them to.

  CHAPTER 9 Sin

  OF COURSE I HAD to go to school there in that town, and it may surprise you to hear I didn’t mind it much. Sitting on a hard seat for long hours was the worst part, and I wasn’t thrilled none by the sour old spinster who taught us, and it was also embarrassing to be put with the tiny children, for I never had much learning up to that point. I could read a little before I went with the Indians, and I could count, and I understood that George Washington had been President though I couldn’t have said when.

  Let me just say I labored diligently at my studies, and Mrs. Pendrake tutored me at home, and by spring I had advanced in reading to where I could do the work of twelve- or thirteen-year-olds and in composition right well though spelling was never my strong point, but in arithmetic I stayed virtually a baby. But that was ever so many year ago and I didn’t go to school long, so if the man who is listening to this story of mine copies it down the way I am saying it, you will read the memoirs of a uncultivated person, that’s for sure.

  The Pendrakes must have talked some to each other in my presence, but I swear I can’t remember any such occasion. As I see them back over the years, we’re sitting to supper in the dining room, the Reverend at the head of the table, Mrs. at the foot, me along the side, Lucy putting down bowl after bowl of steaming food. After grace, Pendrake’s voice not loud but so penetrating that I reckon it could soften tough meat, he’d dig into his chuck. He was a prodigious eater, outdoing even a Cheyenne in that respect, for while an Indian will stuff himself most wonderful there is much of the time that he has to go hungry; it evens out over the course of a month, say, to somewhat less than the average intake of a white man who never misses his three square.

  But Pendrake laid into it day in and day out, and I’m going to tell you what he’d eat on any one of them, for you won’t have an idea of that man without knowledge of his appetite.

  For breakfast Lucy would fry him six eggs, a great mass of potatoes, and a steak about the size of his two giant hands put together. By the time that was chawed up and had been washed down to his belly with a couple quarts of coffee, she’d deliver the griddle cakes, ten or twelve surmounted by a hunk of butter big as an apple and dripping with molasses. For lunch he’d eat two entire chickens with stuffing, potatoes, couple vegetables, five pieces of bread, and half a pie swimming in cream. In the afternoon he’d make calls on sick parishioners, and they wouldn’t never be so under the weather that they couldn’t see to it he got an enormous hunk of cake or a dozen cookies along with coffee or tea.

  Then came supper. He’d drink a bowl of soup into which he broke so much bread it was more solid than liquid. Next would be a platter of fish, then a huge roast of beef which he would singlehanded reduce to the bone after me and Mrs. Pendrake had maybe a slice each; a mountain of potatoes, a swamp of greens, and boiled turnips and black-eye peas and steamed carrots, four cups of coffee and about five pounds of pudding, and if there was any pie left over from lunch, he’d drive that home as well.

  Yet for all that gluttony he was the neatest eater I ever seen. He wouldn’t put a finger on any type of food but bread; for the rest he used knife and fork as nicely as a woman does her needlework. And when he was through the plate shone as though fresh washed, and such bones as was left rose in a little polished stack in an extra bowl he had Lucy lay by for that purpose. It was a real show to watch him take a meal, and I got some pleasure from filling in the time that way, left over after I satisfied my own appetite.

  Mrs. Pendrake only picked at her own victual, which was no wonder because she didn’t do no work for which she’d have to eat much. Now I was used to Indian women who stayed busy from dawn until they rolled into their buffalo hides, and before that, my own Ma who even with the help of my sisters complained the day wasn’t long enough in which she could finish her duties. But Mrs. P. had Lucy to cook and there was another colored girl who come in frequent to clean though didn’t live in, and that Lavender, he did all the gardening and run errands and whatnot outdoors. So here was this perfectly healthy white woman, in the prime of life, with nothing to do except for the hour or so she spent in helping me with my lessons when I come home from school.

  Now having been reared by savages, I had manners that may not have been polished but they was considerate. I certainly didn’t step up to Mrs. Pendrake and say: “It strikes me you are useless around here.” But that’s what I thought, and it wasn’t no criticism for I liked her and helped her when I could. She had this idea of being my Ma, so to oblige I’d pretend now and again to need mothering.

  In the first months of school I took a bit of jeering from the other boys my age for studying with the ten-year-olds. I let it go awhile, and you know how that works: they give it to me stronger when they believed I had no defense, and throwed in some stuff about “dirty Indian.”

  Finally the whole bunch was waiting one afternoon at the corner of an alley on the route home from school. As I come along, they begun to taunt me for being an Indian, which had a unjust side you might not get until you realize they thought I had been captured and kept prisoner for five year. You might say I deserved their needling more than they knew, but I don’t think they should be forgive on the basis of accident.

  I kept on walking without comment until one of them stepped out before me. He was about five foot ten at sixteen years of age, and had a few pimples.

  “There ain’t a day,” he says, “when I can’t lick a dirty Indin.”

  I was willing to believe that when it come to fisticuffs, which the Cheyenne didn’t practice. Indian boys wrestle some, but as I have indicated to a sufficiency, they don’t have much reason to fight among their friends when the enemy is generally just beyond the next buffalo wallow. And when they tangle with the enemy, it is not to show him up or make him eat dust, but rather to kill him altogether and rip off the top of his head.

  Thus I just looked at this boy in contempt and pushed by him, and he hit me with his loutish fist underneath my right ear. I must have staggered off to the bias for eight or ten feet, being his hand was large and on the end of a weighty arm, and dropped my books along the way. Them other lads hooted, cawed, and whistled. I hadn’t had any action now since the saber charge and wasn’t used to it in town like that, a person tending to go by the custom of where ever he’s stuck, so I clumb onto my knees slow, thinking, and that fellow run over and swung his boot in the direction of my hindquarters.

  That puts a man off balance: he should have knowed it if he was going around kicking people, but he learned it then. I just rolled under the lifted foot and pulled the other leg loose. He fell like a bag of sugar. I stuck my hoof into his neck and got the scalping knife from under my shirt.…

  No, I didn’t even scratch him with it. For that matter, I could have let him suffocate had I not lifted my foot off his neck eventually, for it choked his wind and he was turning purple. But I wasn’t no Indian, and figured I had proved it by putting my knife away, gathering up my books, and going on.

  When I got home the angle of my jaw there below the ear was swoll as if I was squirreling a cheekful of nuts. Mrs. Pendrake saw it right off, and says: “Ah, Jack, I must get you to the dentist.”

  I says no, it wasn’t no wisdom tooth. We was in the parlor then, where we always did the tutori
ng although it was far from the best place in the house for that purpose because you could hear the Reverend muttering in his study nearby, but I guess she supposed I liked it.

  Then what could it ever be, she asks. She was wearing a rich blue that day, which become her a great deal, especially when her eyes in sadness took on the exact shade of the dress. Late in the year the buffalo grass turns tawny and when you are climbing an elevation with the sun slanting on it, that’s about the shade of her hair. We was sitting as usual side by side on that plush loveseat, with me as far away as I could get, on account of next to that fine lady I always worried that I still stunk though while I was with the Pendrakes I took a bath every Saturday whether I needed it or not.

  “A fight,” says I. “A boy hit me there.”

  She formed an O with her mouth, which stayed half open so you could see just an ivory trace beyond her pink lip, and she put her cool hand on the back of mine. She was trying to be a mother, see, but didn’t really know how. For fighting, a Ma will swat at you if you ain’t hurt, or doctor you if you are. But Mrs. P. figured the thing was to be sad, for she had an ideal conception of everything.

  Here’s what I mean when I said I helped her: I let my eyes fall to the swell of her bosom, and I lifted her hand to my jaw.

  “How it thumps,” she says. “Poor Jack.” And you know how them things go, I couldn’t tell if it was mostly her or me, but soon I had my face against her breasts and my thumps was alternating with those from her heart.

  I expect you are thinking what a nasty little fellow I was. Well, believe what you like, but remember Mrs. Pendrake was only about ten years older than me. It was hard to think of her as a Ma, but at the same time I never before that moment figured her as a girl if you know what I mean. When it came to idealism, I had quite a bit of my own. I have told you the Cheyenne was prigs, and that fighting takes the same kind of energy as sex. It’s peace that is the horny time. Most of them fat merchants in that town was real sex fiends compared to an Indian brave. And them other white boys my age was already slipping into brothels or laying the maids.

  With the inactivity I was undergoing and all, and especially that studying—I don’t know much about scholars but I should judge them a carnal lot, because in my experience with the life of the mind, though I was interested in it, after a bit a tension would build up owing to the invisible nature of that which was studied. You can’t see it nor put your hands on it, yet it claims your absolute attention. It’d make me nervous in time. Then I would think of girls as a relief.

  There you have the background to this incident, before which I never had an indecent thought towards Mrs. Pendrake. And you can get off the hook now, for nothing else happened here. She was a fine lady: if I hadn’t knowed that otherwise, I could feel it in the hardness of her bosom, which if anything hurt my sore jaw. She was all laced up in whalebone. If Buffalo Wallow Woman pulled you against herself, it had been like sinking into a pillow.

  For another, at that moment a little delegation showed up at the house: that boy I had fought, his Pa, and a town constable, ready to hang me, I expect, for assault with a deadly weapon.

  Though Mrs. P. as a mother left something to be desired, in this type of situation she couldn’t be bettered. In polite relations, as you might call them, she was the Queen of England.

  First place, she kept them people in the hall while me and her continued to sit upon the loveseat. I don’t mean she said Stay out there; she just had that force of will. So the constable, a beefy individual, filled the whole doorway and if the boy’s Pa wanted to say something, had to step aside. They was always bumping into one another. We never saw the boy at all.

  “Missus,” the constable says, “if it be discommoding to you, why they ain’t no reason why we cain’t come back another time.” He waited for a bit, but Mrs. Pendrake never answered such commentary. “Well then, I got a lad here, Lucas English, son of Horace English what owns the feed store—”

  “Is that Mr. English behind you, Mr. Travis?” asks Mrs. P., and then the constable and English, a fellow in vest and sleeve-garters, do that little dance of interchange and Travis drops his helmet, and English says: “Yes’m, and there ain’t nothing personally involved in this matter, Mrs. Reverend, for I been obliged to the Reverend for many years for supplying his wants in the way of feed—”

  Mrs. Pendrake says there with her cold smile: “I believe you refer to the wants of the Reverend Pendrake’s animal, do you not, Mr. English, and are not suggesting that Mr. Pendrake eats oats.”

  English gasps with false laughter, which gets his hoof further down his throat, and the constable pushes him away and steps into the doorframe.

  “It’s like this, Mrs.,” says he. “There seems to be a fight between two lads. One lad’s got him a knife, and according to the statement of the first, says he will get him the other’s scalp with it like the redskin practice.” He grins. “Which of course ain’t within the law.”

  Mrs. Pendrake says: “The poet tells us to err is human, Mr. Travis. I’m sure the English boy did not intend to use his knife on my dear Jack, but simply to make a childish threat. If Jack can forgive him, I shall not prefer charges.” She looks at me and asks: “Dear?”

  “Sure,” I says, feeling real queer to hear her call me that for the first time.

  “Ah then, Mr. Travis,” Mrs. P. says. “So far as I am concerned, there’s an end to it.” And thanked him, and called for Lucy to let them out.

  Now I figured after that handsome performance I owed Mrs. Pendrake something. Oh, I suppose even at the time I knew she had never done it for me, though it was obvious to a clever woman like her that I had the knife. She just wasn’t going to let no man take her to task even indirectly. The fact I belonged to her gave me absolute immunity, the way she saw it. I had never before known a woman, white or red, who had that type of opinion of herself, which was power though you might say used negatively. Had it been used in the positive fashion, she’d have been manly, but nobody could ever take Mrs. Pendrake for anything but 110 per cent female though you might not confuse her with your Ma.

  But right now, I thought I could please her by pretending, anyway, to make that very confusion. It might have been play-acting on her part to call me “dear,” but I’ll tell you I liked it in front of those slobs.

  So I says: “Mother”—“Mother” is what I says—“Mother, which is the poet what wrote that particular motto?”

  Well sir, the word did a lot for her, though I might not have pronounced it with much confidence this first time. Of course she didn’t let on, but went to a bookcase and brought back a volume.

  “Mr. Alexander Pope,” she says, “who also wrote: ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’ ”

  She read me some of that man’s verse, which sounded like the trotting of a horse if you never paid attention to the words or didn’t understand most of them like me. What I did savvy seemed right opinionated, like that fellow had the last word on everything.

  My only complaint was that for a poet he wasn’t any too romantic. Now you take a boy who lived my kind of life, you’d figure him to be about as realistic as any, if not altogether cynical. That may be so, but it never applied to women, or at least not to beautiful white women who was useless for practical purposes.

  I fell into an infatuation for Mrs. Pendrake right then. I guess even at my present time of life, I am still weak on the subject of elegant and gracious ladies. Authority is also involved, as in her handling that constable and feed merchant, and having a knowledge of fine aspects, like the way she held the works of Mr. Pope, with her head inclined against the afternoon sun from the west window so that the margins of her nose and forehead was crystalline and her hair old gold. She always knowed the right thing so far as civilization went, like an Indian knows it for savagery. And I saw then that uselessness was a necessary part of it. If you put such a woman to work, you’d lose that which was her special value, like if you made a hitching post of a statue.

 
I figured to have got the idea of white life, right then. It hadn’t ought to do with the steam engine or arithmetic or even Mr. Pope’s verse. Its aim was to turn out a Mrs. Pendrake.

  I said infatuation, but you can call it love, and directly I was awed by it and moved over to my end of the bench again.

  Just about then, while I was sliding my butt across the plush, in comes the Reverend from the door behind us which connected with his study. He had stopped rumbling there when the men had showed up. Now he moves ponderously around in front of us, and for some moments his wife kept reading whatever poem she was on then, so he waited till she was done. Then he spoke to me.

  “Boy,” he said, real kindly. “Boy, it is my opinion that you have labored earnestly at your studies in these three months since coming to this house.” The next thing he done was to falter and stroke his beard. The wonders of this day was never-ceasing. After that first afternoon, he had no more spoke to me than to Mrs. Pendrake in my hearing.

  “I do not want you to have the misapprehension,” he finally said, “that we here see life as all duty. Therefore tomorrow, which is Saturday, and if Mrs. Pendrake does not require you and if you are favorably disposed to the project, I should be willing to take you fishing.”

  Now, it being November of the year and while not winter as yet the weather was cold and damp and not the time any sane person would have fished for sport, I lost no time in accepting the invite. Add to the other reasons against so doing that I really couldn’t stand the Reverend except when he was eating, and you won’t understand why I did until I say that if he seemed to be in his wife’s debt, I had just now got to feeling in his.