Nemesis (17 page)

Bucky's Indian outfit had been gathered together for him by the crafts counselor. Like the faces of the others, his had been darkened with cocoa powder to simulate an Indian's skin tone, and he had two diagonal stripes—"war paint"—applied to either cheek, one of black drawn with charcoal and the other of red drawn with lipstick. He sat next to Donald Kaplow and with the rest of the Comanche boys, who were seated farther down along the bench. Everywhere the boys loudly talked and joked until two campers carrying calfskin drums got up from the benches and walked to the stone surround of the campfire logs and, facing each other, began to solemnly bang on the drums while those carrying rattles shook them, no two in the same rhythm.

Then everyone turned to look toward the teepee. Mr. Blomback emerged from the oval doorway in a feather headdress, white feathers with brown tips all around his head and trailing behind in a tail down to below his waist. His tunic, his leggings, even his moccasins were elaborately decorated with leather fringe and bands of beadwork and long
tufts of what looked like human hair but was probably a woman's hairpiece from the five-and-ten. In one hand he carried a club—"Great Chief Blomback's war club," Donald whispered—that was replete with feathers, and in the other hand a peace pipe, consisting of a long wooden stem ending in a clay bowl and strung along the stem with still more feathers.

All the campers stood until Mr. Blomback stolidly made his way from the teepee to the center of the Council Ring. The drumming and the rattling stopped, and the campers took their seats.

Mr. Blomback handed his war club and peace pipe to the two drummers and, dramatically folding his arms over his chest, looked around at all the campers on the encircling benches. His heavy application of cocoa powder did not altogether cover his prominent Adam's apple, but otherwise he looked astonishingly like a real chief. In years gone by he had saluted the braves Indian fashion—using an upraised right arm with the palm forward—and they would collectively return the salute, simultaneously grunting "Ugh!" But this greeting had to be abandoned with the arrival on the world scene of the
Nazis, who employed that salute to signify "Heil Hitler!"

"When first the brutal anthropoid stood up and walked erect," Mr. Blomback began, "—there was man! The great event was symbolized and marked by the lighting of the first campfire."

Donald turned to Bucky and whispered, "We get this every week. The little kids don't understand a word. No worse, I guess, than what happens in shul."

"For millions of years," Mr. Blomback continued, "our race has seen in this blessed fire the means and emblem of light, warmth, protection, friendly gathering, council."

He paused as the roar of an airplane engine passed over the camp. This happened now round the clock. An army air corps base had opened at the beginning of the war some seventy miles to the north, and Indian Hill was on its flyway.

"All the hallow of the ancient thoughts," Mr. Blomback said, "of hearth, fireside, home, is centered on its glow, and the home tie itself is weakened with the waning of the home fire. Only the ancient sacred fire of wood has power to touch and
thrill the chords of primitive remembrance. Your campfire partner wins your love, and having camped in peace together—having marveled together at the morning sun, the evening light, the stars, the moon, the storms, the sunset, the dark of night—yours is a lasting bond of union, however wide your worlds may be apart."

Unfolding his two fringed arms, he extended them toward the assembly, and in unison the campers retorted to the stream of grandiloquence: "The campfire is the focal center of all primitive brotherhood. We shall not fail to use its magic."

The drummers now took up their tom-tom beat, and Donald whispered to Bucky, "An Indian historian. Somebody Seton. That's his god. Those are his words. Mr. Blomback uses the same Indian name as Seton: Black Wolf. He doesn't think any of this is nonsense."

Next a figure wearing the mask of a big-beaked bird stood in the front row and approached the ready-laid fire. He bowed his head to Mr. Blomback and then addressed the campers.

"Meetah Kola nayhoon-po omnicheeyay nee-chopi."

"It's our medicine man," whispered Donald. "It's Barry Feinberg."

"Hear me, my friends," the medicine man continued, translating his Indian sentence into English. "We are about to hold a council."

A boy stepped forward from the first row carrying several pieces of wood in his hand, one shaped like a bow, another a stick about a foot long with a sharpened end, and several smaller pieces. He set them on the ground near the medicine man.

"Now light we the council fire," the medicine man said, "after the manner of the forest children, not in the way of the white man, but—even as Wa-konda himself doth light his fire—by the rubbing together of two trees in the storm, so cometh forth the sacred fire from the wood of the forest."

The medicine man knelt, and many of the campers stood to watch as he used the bow and the long, pointed drill and the other odd bits of wood to attempt to ignite a fire.

Donald whispered to Bucky, "This can take a while."

"Can it even be done?" Bucky whispered back.

"Chief Black Wolf can do it in thirty-one seconds. For the campers it's harder. They sometimes have to give in and do it in the way of the helpless white man, by striking a match."

Some of the campers were standing on their benches to get a better look. After a few minutes, Mr. Blomback sidled over to the medicine man and, gesturing as he spoke, quietly gave him some tips.

Everyone waited several minutes more before a whoop went up from the campers, as first there was smoke and then a spark, which when blown upon, ignited a small flame in the tinder of dry pine needles and birch bark shavings. The tinder in turn ignited the kindling at the base of the logs, and the campers chanted in unison, "Fire, fire, fire, burn! Flames, flames, flames, turn! Smoke, smoke, smoke, rise!"

Then, with the mournful loud-soft-soft-soft beat of the two tom-toms, the dancing began: the Mohawks did the snake dance, the Senecas the caribou dance, the Oneidas the dog dance, the Hopis the corn dance, the Sioux the grass dance. In one dance the braves jumped strenuously about with their heads high in the air, in another they did a skipping step on the balls of their feet with a double hop on
each foot, in a third they carried deer antlers before them, made of crooked tree limbs bound together. Sometimes they howled like wolves and sometimes they yapped like dogs, and in the end, when it was fully dark and the burning fire alone lit the Council Ring, twenty of the campers, each armed with a war club and wearing necklaces of beads and claws, set out by the light of the fire to hunt Mishi-Mokwa, the Big Bear. Mishi-Mokwa was impersonated by the largest boy in camp, Jerome Hochberger, who slept across the aisle from Bucky. Jerome was wrapped in somebody's mother's old fur coat that he'd pulled up over his head.

"I am fearless Mishi-Mokwa," Jerome growled from within the coat. "I, the mighty mountain grizzly, king of all the western prairies."

The hunters had a leader who was also from Bucky's cabin, Shelly Schreiber. With the drums beating loudly behind him and light from the fire flashing on his painted face, Shelly said, "These are all my chosen warriors. We go hunting Mishi-Mokwa, he the Big Bear of the mountains, he that ravages our borders. We will surely seek and slay him."

Here a lot of the little kids began to call, "Slay him! Slay him! Slay Mishi-Mokwa!"

The hunters gave a war whoop, dancing as though they were bears on their hind legs. Then they set out looking for the trail of the Big Bear by conspicuously smelling the ground. When they reached him, he rose with a loud snarl, eliciting screams of fright from the small boys on the nearby benches.

"Ho, Mishi-Mokwa," said the leader of the hunters, "we have found you. If you do not come before I count to a hundred, I will brand you a coward wherever I go."

Suddenly, the bear sprang up at them, and as the campers cheered, the hunters proceeded to club him senseless with war clubs of straw wrapped in burlap. When he was stretched across the ground in the fur coat, the hunters danced around Mishi-Mokwa, each in turn grasping his lifeless paw and shouting, "How! How! How!" The campers' cheering continued, the delight enormous at finding themselves encompassed by murder and death.

Next, two counselors, a small one and a tall one, identified as Short Feather and Long Feather, told a series of animal tales that made the younger children scream with feigned horror, and then Mr. Blomback, having removed his feather headdress and set it down alongside his peace pipe and war club, led the boys in singing familiar camp songs for some twenty minutes, thus bringing them down to earth from the excitement of playing Indian. This was followed by his saying, "And here's the important war news from last week. Here's what's been happening beyond Indian Hill. In Italy, the British army broke across the Arno River into Florence. In the Pacific, United States assault forces invaded Guam, and Tojo—"

"Boo! Boo, Tojo!" a group of older boys called out.

"Tojo, the premier of Japan," Mr. Blomback resumed, "was ousted as chief of the Japanese army staff. In England, Prime Minister Churchill—"

"Yay, Churchill!"

"—predicted that the war against Germany could come to end earlier than expected. And right here in Chicago, Illinois, as many of you know by now, President Roosevelt was nominated for a fourth term by the Democratic National Convention."

Here a good half of the campers came to their feet, shouting, "Hurray! Hurray, President Roosevelt!" while somebody beat wildly on one of the tom-toms and somebody else shook a rattle.

"And now," said Mr. Blomback when it was quiet again, "bearing in mind the American troops fighting in Europe and the Pacific, and bearing in mind all of you boys who, like me, have relatives in the service, the next-to-last song to end the campfire will be 'God Bless America.' We dedicate it to all of those who are overseas tonight, fighting for our country."

After they had stood to sing "God Bless America," the boys raised their arms in their fringed sleeves, draped them around one another's shoulders, and, with one row of campers swaying in one direction and the rows of campers in front and behind swaying in the other, they sang "Till We Meet Again," the anthem of comradery that calmly brought to a close every Indian Night. When it was sung for the last Indian Night of the season, many of the homebound campers would wind up in tears.

Meanwhile, Bucky alone had been brought to tears by the singing of "God Bless America" and the memory of the great college friend who had not been out of his thoughts since he'd learned of his death fighting in France. Bucky had done his best
throughout the ceremonies to attend to what was going on around the fire as well as to listen to Donald quietly kibitzing beside him, but all he could really think about was Jake's death and Jake's life, about all that might have become of him had he lived. While the boys were hunting down the Big Bear, Bucky had been remembering the statewide college meet in the spring of '41 when Jake had set not just a Panzer College record but a U.S. collegiate record by throwing the shot fifty-six feet three inches. How did he do it, a reporter from the
Newark Star-Ledger
had asked him. Grinning widely—and flashing at Bucky his trophy with the tiny bronze shot-putter perched atop it, frozen at the point of the shot's release—Jake told him. "Easy," he said with a wink. "The left shoulder is high, the right shoulder is higher, the right elbow is even higher, and the right hand is the highest. There's the scheme. Follow that, and the shot takes care of itself." Easy. Everything for Jake was easy. He would surely have gone on to throw in the Olympics, would have gone on to marry Eileen as soon as he got home, would have garnered a job in college coaching ... With all that talent, what could have stopped him?

Round the campfire
'Neath the stars so bright,
We have met in comradeship tonight.
Round about the whispering trees
Guard our golden memories.
And so, before we close our eyes in sleep
Let us pledge each other that we'll keep
Indian Hill's friendships deep,
Till we meet again.

After the singing of the farewell song, the campers buddied up in pairs and followed their counselors down from the benches around the dying campfire, which a couple of junior counselors stayed behind to extinguish. As they headed back to their cabins with their twinkling flashlights disappearing into the dark woods, an occasional war whoop went up from the departing boys, and some of the blanketed little ones, still under the spell of the blazing fire, could be heard gleefully shouting "How! How! How!" A few, by shining their flashlights upward from their chins while grimacing and widening their eyes, made monster faces to scare each other one last time before Indian Night was over. For close to an hour the voices of laughing and giggling children could be heard reverberating from
cabin to cabin, and, even after everyone was asleep, the smell of wood smoke permeated the camp.

I
T WAS
six untroubled days later—the best days at the camp so far, lavish July light thickly spread everywhere, six masterpiece mountain midsummer days, one replicating the other—that someone stumbled jerkily, as if his ankles were in chains, to the Comanche cabin's bathroom at three
A.M.
Bucky's bed was at the end of a row just the other side of the bathroom wall, and when he awakened he heard the person in there being sick. He reached under his bed for his glasses and looked down the aisle to see who it was. The empty bed was Donald's. He got up and, with his lips close to the bathroom door, quietly said, "It's Bucky. You need help?"

Donald replied weakly, "Something I ate. I'll be okay." But soon he was retching again, and Bucky, in his pajamas, waited on the edge of his bed for Donald to come out of the bathroom.

Gary Weisberg, whose bed was next to Bucky's, had awakened and, seeing Bucky sitting up, rose on his elbows and whispered, "What's the matter?"

"Donald. Upset stomach. Go back to sleep."