John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Hod lets this sit for a moment. The food is gone and he is still hungry.

“I could speak English and been around white people plenty already, but them horse Indins from out west, they was scared. The first thing when we got to the Industrial School is they put us through the barbers and cut all our hair off. The Sioux boys got all upset cause this meant their parents must’ve died and then they took our clothes and had us wear these soldier-looking uniforms. Now an Ojibwe,” says Big Ten, wiggling to burrow between two sacks of fleece, “got about as much to do with a Mohawk or a Crow as a Dutchman does with a Hawaiian. And every one a them tribes think they got the direct line to the Great Spirit and all the others is just dogs with two legs. So you can imagine it wasn’t no picnic when they stuck you in a room where none of the other three boys talked your language.”

“So you’d have to speak English.”

“That was the idea.”

“Seems reasonable.”

“I throw you in a room with a Italian, a Swede, and a Polack and say you got to talk Chinese, how you like it?”

Hod finds a bare patch of floor and stamps his feet a few times. He rode a gondola car through Idaho once with a bindlestiff who’d had all his toes frozen off, and ever since is worried when he can’t feel his own.

“ To save the man ,” says Big Ten, putting his hand over his heart to quote, “ you got to kill the Indin . That was the motto of the fella who started up the School. And they done their level best, believe me. The first day, if you don’t already have a white name you got to go up to a blackboard and point one off a list. So in my room there was Jeremiah Fox Catcher and Clarence Red Cloud and Henry Yamutewa and me. Clarence was there mostly like a hostage, to keep his old man and uncles on the reservation with the rest of the pacified Sioux.”

Hod gives Big Ten a once-over. If you didn’t notice he never had to shave he could almost pass for white, Black Irish, with his hair cut short under that bowler and skin no more burned than Hod’s from a month in the fields.

“It was an old fort, see, with barracks, and then the first bunch of students that was prisoners from the Indin Wars put up some other buildings. They had me in the carriage shop. I didn’t mind the work none, I always been able to work, but the way you had to muster out to the horn in the morning and keep your bed a certain way and eat your food at the same time and then lights out — you ever been in the Army?”

“No,” says Hod. “Not the real one.”

“There was a boy my first year, Piegan boy from Montana, got so down he hung himself. That aint no way for an Indin to die.” Big Ten has his arms wrapped around himself, rocking slowly as he speaks. “I would have done the same it wasn’t for Gracie.”

“She was pretty?”

“She had the life spirit. They let the girls keep most of their hair and had them in their own kind of uniform dresses, which wasn’t so nice, but whenever I seen her she smiled and it lift me right up off the ground. Boys that age, all I could ever think of to say was ‘How are you doing?’ and always she would give me that smile and say ‘I am getting better every day.’ That was the other motto at the School, they had it writ on top of all the blackboards and it was in every other sentence in the newspaper we put out. We are getting better every day . You stay in a place four, five years and you get better every day, you get an idea how bad you must have been to start with.”

“You were there that long?”

“I aint proud of it,” says Big Ten. “It was great for some, they learnt a trade or went on to be lawyers or whatnot at the Dickinson College just down the way. Indins from all these different places, all these different ways of living, they was thrown together and seen what about them was alike. That changes the way you look at the world, you know? But for me — I was just there so my family could keep their land.”

Hod feels the train start to slow, no brakes yet but they are on flat ground and the bursts of steam outside are more sighs than snorts. Big Ten doesn’t seem to notice.

“The last night I was there, we got to talking in the room and Clarence Red Cloud says how he wants to go home and Fox Catcher says it’s the same for him, and then Henry who’s from one of them blanket tribes down in the southwest Territories he says he goes all the time. Now Henry is a fella can go months without he says a single word and we know he don’t go home even on the vacations they give us, Christian holidays, because he don’t have the jack for the train fare and they don’t trust him to come back. So we start to ridin him a little, especially Fox Catcher cause his Apaches got a long feud with these Hopis and that’s the kind of thing you tease someone at the School with, ‘Hey, my grandfather lifted your grandfather’s scalp back in ’65,’ or ‘What happened to that dog you was pettin? You didn’t eat it, did you?’ even though you might really be friends and stick together against the Sioux boys cause there was so many of them, and Henry gets riled and brings out this package his people sent him from the mission P.O. down there. He dumps out these little cactus buttons on his bed and Fox Catcher’s eyes get big and he says I know what those are. ‘You want to go someplace, chew on one of these,’ says Henry Yamutewa.

“Well, you know how young fellas is, they get together and someone lays down a dare. There wasn’t any spines on these buttons, they’d been pulled up and dried, and I chewed down four or five of em before I felt a thing other than Henry’s people must have an awful lot of time on their hands to bother with this nonsense, and then I got sicker than a dog and lay on the floor holding my stomach in. Never lost my chuck, but that made it worse.”

“So why do they eat them?”

“For their religion. You’re supposed to see things.”

“Things.”

“Visions. Indin stuff.”

“Eagles and snakes.”

“Hopi things if you’re a Hopi, Navajo things if that’s what you are. Me, I just left.”

“You ran away?”

“I flew .”

They are coming to rest, a wave of sound rolling back as the couplings knock together.

“I flew out the window — we were on the second floor — flew across the parade ground. Not flapping my arms or anything, just — your body lifts up and goes wherever you think. So I flew in through the window of the girls’ dormitory and Gracie Metoxen was there warm and smiling in her bed, awake while all the other girls were sleeping, waiting for me, smiling that smile, but she was too heavy to carry away so I just lay with her awhile and then right before the sun come up I flew out the window again and never stopped.”

Voices pass outside the boxcar. If they start to open the door, thinks Hod, we can burrow down into the sheep’s wool.

“You went home?”

Big Ten shakes his head. “First thing they do, they wire the Indin Agent where you live, and he puts the law out on you. If you’re a Ward of the State and you leave Carlisle without they let you, you’re an outlaw. I just kept going.”

Big Ten looks toward the door as if just realizing they have stopped. “We’re here.”

“Where?”

“It don’t matter. Time to get out.”

The Indian stands and peels his fleece off.

“The girl,” says Hod, getting up as well. “Gracie—”

“I run into an Oneida fella up in Oregon picking apples,” says Big Ten, stepping up on the access ladder. “There was a spell of consumption went through the School, it took her and some of the others. They got their own little cemetery out back, the white-people kind with the stones. Probably where she is now.”