Little Big Man Page 17

  So there we was, out to the creek next day in fairly miserable weather where the air was like a big sponge full of water and no sooner had we reached the stream when someone squeezed it and rain begun to pour down. We had come out in a buckboard, with Lavender driving and only he had sense enough to bring protection against the inclemency, for he had a big toe that was infallible as a weather gauge.

  I could see right off that the Reverend didn’t know anything about fishing from the way he put a doughball on the hook—that was what we used, for Lavender claimed he couldn’t find worms in late November. And the day was sufficiently unpleasant to drive off a fellow who was crazy for the sport. But Pendrake had said he was going fishing, and that’s what he fixed to do, the water swirling around his hatbrim and running off his black coat. He was dressed in his usual, by the way, with no provision for leisure.

  Lavender offered us his umbrella in insincere fashion, for which I didn’t blame him, but Pendrake said no, he didn’t require it, so Lavender kept it over himself and put a blanket underneath a tree and set there and looked at an illustrated paper someone had give him though he couldn’t read, but seemed to get more out of it than those who could, for he was laughing at it.

  Me and the Reverend went down to the bank a ways along by some willows which was now brown and he says: “What’s your opinion of this location, boy?”

  “It’s as good as any,” says I. My hair was all matted from the rain and water coursed down my cheeks; it seemed ridiculous in view of what we was supposed to be doing to have a good time, but I never minded the soaking as such, having been wetted down plenty as an Indian inside as well as outside the lodge, for tepee skins generally leak after they been in use for a while, especially at the seams.

  But here he looked at me out of that black beard and said with genuine feeling, for which his voice was less ponderous: “Ah, boy, you’re getting wet.” With that he drew a big handkerchief and wiped my face right gently.

  I guess I can’t explain it, but that was one of the truly kindest things anybody’s done for me, ever. It didn’t matter none that I wasn’t distressed or that his sudden discovery of the rain after it poured some minutes might have been foolish. He put his big hand on my damp shoulder and looked sorry out of all proportion. I hadn’t seen him straight ever before. His eyes was hazel and didn’t have too much of a lid. Without the beard he would have looked to lose much of his force, though he surely had enormous strength of muscle.

  “We don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” he said. “We can go on back. It was an unfortunate idea.” He shook his head like a buffalo bull and droplets flung off the beard and he turned away and stared at the muddy creek, and says: “He sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

  “Who?” asks I, for I didn’t know.

  “Why, our Heavenly Father, boy,” says Pendrake and, closing up grim again, throws his line in the water, which was so disturbed by the pelting rain that the bobber was dancing all the time and you would never tell from it if you caught a whale.

  The Indians has always fished with a spear, which is to me a more interesting endeavor than hook and line. Also the rain was now getting to me: I had softened up in only a month or so. However, I didn’t want to hurt the Reverend’s feelings, so I presented him a bright suggestion.

  Acting on it, he had Lavender run the wagon down on the bank, which was wide enough and flat for such accommodation, unhitch the horse and take him back under the tree, and we crawled beneath the buckboard, letting our fishpoles stick out, and thus had a roof against the elements.

  Any fool could have figured this out, but the Reverend was greatly impressed by what he called my “acumen.” He seemed relieved that I was no longer getting soaked. As to himself, it was more complicated: you see, his trouble was he couldn’t allow himself any pleasure aside from eating. He would have preferred to be dripping and uncomfortable—that’s the only reason I could dream up as to why we come in the open wagon at all rather than the closed buggy which he also owned. I never could study out why Lavender was there, except that maybe the Reverend was uneasy with me by himself.

  It was a tight squeeze for a man of his bulk underneath the buckboard. We set there a time smelling of wet wool, during which the current intermingled our lines and swept them useless into the bank and no doubt soon melted off the doughballs.

  At length Pendrake said: “Boy, from what you asked before about the rain, I understand my delinquency.” He was cramped in there with his beard against his rising belly and looking on to the stream through the sheet of water coming from above.

  “I have left you to live in the ignorance of an animal, though I have been specifically charged with leading men to a knowledge of God. Yesterday,” he goes on, “it came to my attention that you are swiftly approaching the province of adulthood, that soon the boy will be the man.”

  For a minute I was scared he seen me on his wife’s bosom and misinterpreted that event.

  “Mrs. Pendrake,” he began, and I gathered my legs under me in case I had to run for it, “Mrs. Pendrake, being a woman, is altogether innocent of these matters. She was not a party to a lie. Looking at you through the eyes of a mother, she saw no blemish in the boy she knows, and that is a credit to her.

  “But I am a man, and as such, no stranger to impurity. I myself passed through the years in which you find yourself. I know the Devil, boy, I have shaken him by the hand, I have embraced him and smelled his stinking breath and thought it the finest perfume.”

  He got himself exercised with these remarks and pressed his head against the buckboard floor, squashing his black hat, while the wagon lifted several inches out of the mud.

  Then he eased and spoke gentle. “I heard that colloquy through my study door. I am aware that you had the knife, boy, and I can imagine only too well your motive for using it against another.… The girl’s identity is of no interest to me. I am willing to believe that although you were doing the Devil’s work you did not recognize him in his female attire. Does she have velvet cheeks, boy, and satin hair and long-lashed eyes undershot with damask? No matter, behind that mask is a skull of white bone with hollow sockets, and that soft pink mouth is the cave of death.”

  I just flicked my line as if I had a bite, for whatever could I say to that? As to the girls I had been thrown with so far, they was ten years old in that school class.

  “I don’t condemn you, boy,” Pendrake said. “I tell you I know the fire that rises in the loins and sweeps upward consuming all before it. I know the primitive peoples among whom you spent your boyhood make a sacred thing of this conflagration. But that is our difference, is it not? that we harness our bestial energies. That we do not defile but preserve. Woman is a vessel, and it is within man’s power to make that vessel a golden chalice or a slop bucket.”

  Along about here, Lavender come down to the bank under his umbrella and toting an enormous basket covered with oilcloth. He scrooched down and peeked at us under the wagon.

  When talking to the Reverend he assumed a lazy, whiny, idiotic style that I happened to know he reserved for just that purpose, for he was otherwise very sharp though illiterate as I said.

  “Your Honor,” says he, “would … you all … be wantin’ … thisheer lunch?”

  “Put it down, that’s a good fellow,” answers Pendrake in a clipped way that he probably figured would stimulate Lavender to move faster but seemed to have the reverse effect.

  When Lavender finally trudged away, Pendrake said: “There is a case in point. Can you understand that Lavender and Lucy would have lived in common, defying the ordinances of God and man, had I not insisted on marrying them?”

  I might say at this point and then we won’t mention it again, that I do not know whether Pendrake was Abolitionist or Proslavery. He had freed Lavender, if that meant anything. And if he was Abolitionist, why his reason would have been that freedom would make the colored people less lusty. Now I know you can read in history books that the slavery issue
was hot in Missouri of this date, and there was private wars over it and shootings in the dead of night, a reign of terror and so on. Well that ain’t no lie, but you could be living right in the middle of it like me and never know it was going on. Remember that next time you read something. I knowed many a man who went all the way across the prairies during the Indian wars and never saw one hostile savage. That’s the way reality operates. I wasn’t ever interested in politics, so I never saw any. In them days there was always somebody getting shot or knifed, and you wouldn’t think nothing of it. And then I have an idea that Pendrake was so respectable that he might not have had to take a loudmouthed stand either way.

  The Reverend broke off at that point and pulled the oilcloth from the basket. Lucy had packed us more food than all of Old Lodge Skins’s band ate during one whole winter. There was two or three cold fried chickens, a great hunk of ham, about a dozen hardboiled eggs, two loaves of bread, and a chocolate cake, just to mention the larger items.

  We hadn’t done nothing so far but sit under the wagon, and I wasn’t too hungry. I was also feeling a little queasy from being damp in wool; among the Cheyenne you wear leather, which takes the rain almost like your own skin. Or maybe I might have been embarrassed at Pendrake’s jawing about matters that should be private. I guess I already knowed it at ten, before I went with the Indians, but I had forgot how the conjunction of men and women is looked upon as dirty by the whites, so they got to involve it with law. Lucy and Lavender shared the same room, but it was against the laws of God and man until Pendrake said a few words over them, after which it was O.K.

  Well, it was an entertainment to see the Reverend consume that lunch. I ate a wing, an egg, and a piece each of bread and cake and felt myself uncomfortable full at that. All the rest went soon enough into Pendrake’s great belly. What was left of the contents of the basket was a pile of cleaned bones and eggshells within fifteen minutes.

  Then he brushed his beard with his fingers, though I never in my acquaintance with him saw him drop a crumb into that underbrush—he was neat about food, I believed, because he wasn’t going to let a morsel escape his mouth—and picked his teeth and cleared his passages with a huge draught from a jug of water that Lucy had included.

  “It has been a great satisfaction to me to have this talk with you, boy,” he says then. “And I hope and trust you will derive some value from it. We have not before had the opportunity to know each other, for while I am your father upon earth, I am much occupied with serving my own Father in heaven. But He is also yours, and in serving him I am serving you, if I do it properly. That effort leaves me little time for the delightful sport we are enjoying today, though to enjoy oneself moderately is surely no sin.”

  I haven’t mentioned how I had to sit Sundays in church and listen to Pendrake’s gab. The only consolation was that Mrs. P. had to go as well, wearing her fine clothes, and it was a proud thing to sit alongside the most beautiful woman in town, with the men, including the ancient elders, stealing looks at her and their women all peevish. But them sermons! Pendrake’s trouble was he didn’t have no fire. Unlike my old man, he didn’t get no release from his religion, but rather was further bottled up by it. That might have kept him from getting killed by savages, but maybe it is worse never to open your spirit up to the wind.

  Anyway, he always said a good deal about “sin,” and what I got to wondering now we was sitting there, was what in his opinion constituted such. You may remember with my Pa it was cussing, chewing, spitting, and not washing your face. It seemed likely Pendrake had another view. Anyway, we obviously wasn’t going to catch any fish, and lunch was over, and despite the Reverend’s remarks on the satisfaction afforded by our little talk, he was still uneasy-looking. I reckon a man who puts out words all the time gets to wondering whether they are ever being received.

  So to oblige him, with the same motive I had called Mrs. P. “Mother,” I asked about sin. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and he had wiped off my face. I am like an Indian in that if I am treated nice I’ll try to make a return.

  He had a wider-sweeping definition of sin than my Pa’s, and a longer list of specifics than my old man had give, probably because Pa was an amateur at preaching and couldn’t read. For Pendrake’s roster wasn’t properly his own but rather, as he admitted, that of the Biblical Paul.

  “The works of the flesh,” answers the Reverend. “And ‘the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like.’ ”

  It was a funny thing, the most important years of my rearing so far had been handled by my second father, who was Old Lodge Skins. Now you take away “envyings” from that list—for he didn’t covet much, owing to his belief he had everything of importance already—and you had a perfect description of that Indian’s character. Yet he was as big a success among the Cheyenne as a man could be.

  As to myself, I had performed only a few of them crimes; on the other hand, I was still young.

  For the rest of the day, though, I stayed fairly pure and even extended the period for several weeks on. That’s what white life did to me. First time I got soaked in civilization, I come down with pneumonia.

  CHAPTER 10 Through the Shutter

  I WAS REAL SICK, such as I had not been since earliest childhood. I don’t mind being wounded, but I hate to be sick. I mean, I don’t like to get a wound, but if you have to pay a penalty I’d rather it were that than any type of illness which will put you to bed. I don’t care to lay around unless some part of my flesh is missing and I can watch it knitting up.

  You see there what I said about penalty. Despite my cynical ways as I approached the age of sixteen, the Reverend had got to me with his bluenose talk, and I had had dreams the night after the fishing expedition, in which I was doing my damnedest, though I knowed it was wrong, to make the golden chalice of woman into a slop bucket like he said.

  You might say he give me the idea, just as he give me pneumonia by that outing in the rain, for that’s what I had in the morning though at first it seemed like just a cold and I got up as usual. But I felt so poorly at breakfast and got dizzy when Pendrake lit into his great mess of eggs though he was neat as always, so Mrs. P. puts her cool hand against my forehead, which was flushed at the same time that I was chilled to the bone.

  Shortly I was back in bed, and an old doc with white whiskers come eventually but he didn’t have the medicine of Left-Handed Wolf, I can tell you. I was sick for about three weeks, and understood later that it was believed I should die during the first few days and the Reverend come and prayed over me.

  Lavender told me that. He dropped in frequent when I started to improve. I remember the first time I saw him standing alongside the bed as I woke up from the napping with which I put in most of that time, I had the delusion I was back among the Cheyenne. He was very black of countenance, but the Indians sometimes painted themselves that color: anyhow, he wasn’t white.

  So I made a remark in Cheyenne.

  “Pardon?” says he, widening his eyes, and then I seen who he was and felt embarrassed.

  “Now then,” he says, “you just rest easy. Don’t you worry none about old Lavender. He just come to see how you was.”

  He generally referred to himself in that style, as if he was talking about a third person. I guess he had some theory that you wouldn’t suffer him to say “I” or “me.”

  I says: “I thought you was an Indian.”

  Sometimes one remark will make you a friend, and it generally ain’t planned to do so, for I have found that you can seldom intentionally make up a successful compliment. I don’t mean I was enemies with Lavender before saying that; it was rather that we took each other for granted as kid and servant. I reckon he had come to visit me out of curiosity.

  He says: “I snuck up here while everbody but Lucy’s not to home, and Lucy don’t know I did
or she’d be riled.”

  I had a room all my own on the second floor, with a big soft bed that took me a while to get onto sleeping in without taking down seasick.

  “Ain’t you never been here before?”

  “I carried up furniture,” Lavender says, “and washed the windows, but never come for socializing. I suppose if it be known I was here now, you might say you ast me.”

  “Sure,” I told him, and then you know how a person will feel self-pity when he’s sick: “I reckon you’re the only one who cares whether I live or die. You’re the only one who come.”

  “You just don’t recall,” he says. “The Lady was here all the time, and the Reverend made his prayers and I reckon had he not you’d be stone-cold and they’d have dug a hole in the ground and drapped you in and shoveled the earth back on and stomped it down.”

  “Well,” I says, “so long as it didn’t happen I wish you wouldn’t go on about it in such detail. Do you figure it was God who saved me when asked by the Reverend?”

  Lavender gets a sly look. “That doctor ain’t likely to have done it when he run Lucy off from giving you any of her tonic what is made from roots and suchlike and will cure any ailment. I tell you, there was a time when everything I et turned to poison and my stomach felt like a fishnet. Lucy give me her tonic and inside a week I could chew up and swally a bone like a dog and never tell the difference from a bowl of mush.”

  I said: “Why don’t you set upon the chair there?”

  “I wouldn’t mind it a-tall,” says he and does as much, a little stiff at first and then gradually taking his ease. “Say now, that was a funny thing, you taking me for an Indian. I never knowed they was black.”

  I just realized I had a mustard plaster on my chest, because it started to itch, and so I was scratching while we talked.