John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Big Ten narrows an eye. “Yeah. We did that.”

“ By the shores of Gitche Gumee ,” Hod recites, “ By the shining Big-Sea-Water— ”

“Gichi Gami.”

“What?”

“In Ojibwe. Gichi Gami. Lake Superior.”

“You’re shittin me. So the poem—”

“Is a load of manure. You ever try to read it?”

“The whole thing? Hell no—”

“For one thing, Hiawatha was an Iroquois. Got nothing to do with us.”

“But your people hunt and fish—”

“Lots of that, yeah—”

“Take some scalps—”

Hod means it as a joke but the Indian doesn’t smile. “That’s the Sioux. We sent them packing before the white people showed up.”

“My brothers and me used to look for arrowheads,” says Hod. “When we were supposed to be plowing.”

“We did that too. You’d be surprised how many you find laying around where Indin people live.”

Hod settles back in on the bags of fleece. “What did you hunt?”

“Whatever was around. Birds paid the best.”

“You shot birds.” Hod tries to imagine hitting a flying crow with an arrow.

“There was a white fella had a summer house out on Madeline Island,” says Big Ten. “Called him Colonel Archibald. Don’t know if he was a real colonel, but he lost a leg in the War. Ornery son of a gun. Once or twice a year the wild pigeons would come in and feed, the big flock. Cover the woods halfway to Iron County, branches bust from the weight of em, birdshit up to your ankles on the ground. First time I seen it, I’s just a chap, I thought it was the end of the world and run home crying. All them beaks and wings—”

“They come over our farm once,” says Hod. “My brother Luke and I kilt a dozen, just throwing rocks up into the air.”

“We’d help my father drag the fishnets in, he’d rig em up this way he had — what you do is catch one and tie his leg to a stake in the ground with a mess of grain scattered around. He’ll eat a little, flap around a bit, eat a little more — see, a pigeon got no more sense than a farm hand.” Big Ten smiles bitterly. “The rest of that flock will see him and come down to get what he’s feeding on, and that’s when you trip the nets. We’d catch three, four hundred a day like that and we didn’t have nothing like the rigs the professional bird men did. Me and my brothers’ job was to pull em out one by one and pin their wings so we could bring them out on the ferry to the colonel.”

“Alive.”

“Of course alive. He wouldn’t pay for dead ones.”

“What’s a man do with that many pigeons?”

“Shot em. He let us watch, sometimes. Him and his friends would get to drinking and then this half-breed fella that worked for him, Petey, would load a bird into the trap and snip their wings free and then the old boy would yell ‘Pull!’ for Petey to spring that catapult trap and sometimes the pigeon would just flop out with a broken neck, but mostly they would start off on the wing and bam! the colonel or one of his friends or all of em shooting together would blow it apart with buckshot.” Big Ten frowns at the memory. “They’d kill the whole lot of them we brought between lunch and suppertime.”

Hod feels a hard pain just behind his right eye. Air getting thin, he thinks, or just hungry again.

“Any ever get away?”

“The pigeons?” Big Ten shrugs. “Oh, now and then. They’re beautiful flyers. Fast. Like what an arrow must of looked like, back when Indins shot arrows. Me and my brothers would holler and cheer when one flew off clear and the colonel would call us a pack of damn ignorant savages and threaten to pepper our hides. We’d run and hide then, wait till they all fallen asleep on the screen porch so we could sneak back and fetch some of the broke-neck ones home to eat. The rest had too much shot in em to bother with.”

“They tasted good, pigeons, what I remember.”

“Tasted fine.”

Hod’s stomach does a turn and he tries to remember when he ate last. He has the hunk of yesterday’s bread but it isn’t so big and half of it will be smaller. He wonders if the birds that got away found another flock or if they just stayed scattered. Lost.

Big Ten stretches, yawns. “Yeah, I was a regular little wild Indin. Went barefoot every summer up until the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration got holt of me.” He pauses, listening for a moment. “We going downhill now.”

“Feels like it.”

It’s getting cold in the boxcar. Hod and Big Ten can see their own breath as they divide Hod’s bread from the Saints and a tin of sardines the Indian bought in Lehi.

“This Sister Ursula,” says Big Ten, “she took a shine to me, figured I could be an example to my people.”

Mostly when there is someone in the boxcar with you their story is pretty much the same as yours and poor entertainment. Hard times, low pay, dumb bosses, no hope. Except for the cranks and bughouse escapees, who all have their version of the Big Picture and you’d better stay awake and close to the exit.

“Example of what?” asks Hod.

“That we could talk English instead of just Ojibwe and French like my father. That we could be taught to act civilized enough not to make the white people nervous. That we could cut all our trees down and put up some sorry excuse for a farm.”

“She run the school, this Ursula—”

“Your General Custer had some of them Franciscan nuns with him,” says Big Ten, “he’d still have his hair. German ladies, mostly. Lift you clear off the ground by your ears.”

“You learned to read.”

“I learned ever damn thing they wanted me to. That way they never shame you in front of the others.”

They have both pulled scraps of raw fleece to wrap themselves in now, wool side turned in. It is dark up top, and it has been a long way since the train last stopped.

“When I learned everthing they had to tell me, Sister Ursula put me on the train to the Industrial School in Pennsylvania.”

“Your father let them do that?”

“My father was mostly a white man to look at him, French and Irish, but he lived Indin his whole life. When the government started the allotments in ’87 the Agent says Armand, that was his white name, Armand, he says, you don’t get no quarter section cause you cain’t prove you’re an Indin. And that means none of his sons get their forty acres cause even through my mother is a direct line down from old Chief Buffalo that makes us half-breeds, which their status was yet to be figured out.”

“He tried to cheat you.”

“Tried, nothing, there was folks never even seen that lake before who showed up claiming they was eligible for an allotment, the same ones standing in line with money in their paws when the surplus land got sold off.”

“White people.”

“All different colors, just like us, but they sure wasn’t Ojibwe. Anyhow, my father gone to Père Clochard and asks what can he do, and the Père says well if you had a boy at this Carlisle School he would be qualified for an allotment and the annuity payments from the old treaty and be a Ward of the State, which would make you an Indin ex post facto which is Latin for the cat is already out of the bag. I was the youngest and the one he could spare the easiest and Sister Ursula was champing at the bit for me to go so he borrowed Charlie Whitebird’s wagon and team and took me down to Eau Claire for the train. They put me on a special car and it was all Indin kids, boys and girls — Blackfeet kids and Gros Ventre kids and Sioux kids and lots more Ojibwe from Minnesota and then we took on a load of Oneida kids from up by Green Bay and that’s when I first seen Gracie Metoxen.” Big Ten shakes his head. “All the things I went through at that school, the only thing I ever had on my mind was her.”