The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (51 page)

“What I want to know is, why didn't anybody ever tell me about this before?”

“I'd of told you if you'd ever of ast me. Whether yore mother liked it or not. Think I wouldn't? Tell anybody. Not that it's anybody else's business but my own. Son, what a man is born don't matter a hill of beans. It's what you make of yoreself that counts.”

“If you're not what you are then what are you?” said Jimmy. “You're not anything. Tell me now about myself.”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell about your father. My great-grandfather. The Indian.”

“Why, what do you want to know about him?”

“Everything! I want to know all there is to know.”

“Well, he was not what you would call a big man. Neither was he a little man. More what you would call middling-sized. Bothered with stomach trouble all his life, though what killed him was not that but something else. Died of—”

“What kind of Indian was he?”

“What do you mean, what kind of Indin was he?”

“I mean like Comanche, or Cheyenne, or Apache. You know. What tribe?”

“Oh. Well, I wouldn't know nothing about that. Indin, that's all I can tell you, boy.”

“What was his name?”

“His name? Mr. George P. Hawkins, same as mine.”

“If he was an Indian, where did he ever get a name like that—Mr. George P. Hawkins? That's not an Indian name. Indians are named names like Rain-in-the-Face or Crazy Horse, or something like that. I expect he just never told you his true name.”

“Must of been a Hawkins in the woodpile back somewheres along the line, just where and when I can't tell you, 'cause I wasn't there myself. I can tell you one thing though: I'm grateful I haven't had to go through life named George P. Crazy Horse. Yes, sir, I'm sure grateful I haven't had to go through—”

“How about your grandfather? Tell me about him.”

“Never knowed the man. Dead 'fore ever I was born.”

“Didn't your father ever tell you about him when you were a boy?”

“When I was a boy I never had no time to waste setting around talking about my granddaddy. And I ain't got none for it now. Maybe he was the Hawkins.”

Another renegade. It ran in the family. Jimmy felt he had much to atone for.

IV

Before the coming of the white man, the northeastern part of Texas where Jimmy Hawkins lived with his father and mother was the domain of the Caddo Indians. The local tribe was one which, although he was born and raised there, and notwithstanding all his Indian lore, Jimmy had never heard of until he began delving into his pedigree.

To learn that he belonged to such an obscure tribe was a surprise, and for a moment something of a disappointment. He had rather set his heart on being a Comanche. However, he liked the name Caddo. He knew he was one: he felt a thrill of recognition the first time he read the word.

Specimens preserved in various museums, he read in the small guide book in the small town library, proved the Caddoes to have been the most talented potters of all the Indians of North America.

But who were their famous chiefs? Who were the Caddo Pontiac, the Caddo Sitting Bull, the Caddo Geronimo? Who were their most renowned warriors? Where were their great battles fought?

The Caddoes it was, he read, who had reared the numerous large burial mounds still to be found in that part of the state and adjacent Louisiana (in the one on his grandfather's farm did his own forefathers lie sleeping?), which, along with the name of nearby Caddo Lake, were at this late date (the book had been published in 1907) the only reminders left of this once large and powerful tribe.

Where had all the Caddoes gone?

Like the Mohicans, the Caddoes were no more. Their numbers depleted by their war against the white settlers, and by the diseases which the settlers brought with them, their last surviving remnant had been forcibly removed to Oklahoma in 1854 and resettled on government reservations, where, through intermarriage with and adoption into other tribes, the Caddoes had lost their separate identity.

The little book told no more; none other told as much.

He had been orphaned of his entire nation. He was the last of the Caddoes.

V

What Jimmy Hawkins had always known was now confirmed: he was meant for no common fate. He had been born with a horror of the ordinary, and had always known he was not what he seemed to the world to be. He had often wondered who he really was, and had felt that like the changeling prince in the fairy tale he had been cheated of his birthright and brought up in a meaner station of life than fate and his gifts had intended him for. The reason, as he now knew, was that he was the last of the Caddoes: rightful heir to all that he surveyed, with blood in his veins that cried out for vengeance: a dangerous person, a permanent threat to those who had wronged him. So they must have been warned by the bad fairy (herself Indian) who was not invited to his christening but who appeared at it all the same. “You may bleach him whiter than the snow, give him a white man's name, and bring him up in ignorance of his people,” she had pronounced in a raspy voice, shaking a bony brown finger at them, “he is what he is. What will be will be.” So Jimmy had always known he was ordained, marked out, chosen to perform some bold feat; now he knew it would be something to vindicate his dispossessed, destroyed, and all but forgotten race. He awaited the revelation of what it would be. Once he knew the name of his tribe he felt the constant presence of his red forebears molding him, training him, preserving him until such time as he should be ready and his mission be revealed to him.

They taught him to see what before he had overlooked, what others, outsiders, still overlooked: the relics everywhere of their immemorial stay in the land from which they had been driven out. In plowed fields they showed him arrowheads that generations of plowmen, though their eyes were seldom lifted from the ground, had not seen. In stones that the unknowing took to be just stones he recognized the mortars in which his people had ground their maize and the pestles with which they had pounded it, the flint knives with which they had skinned their game, the tomahawks with which they had brained their foes.

He felt them most powerfully in the woods. In the green stillness he could see their spirits flitting among the trees and in the whispering together of the branches could hear their voices. He knew no fear, for they were with him. They were the lords of the forest and he their only son, their sole survivor, the last arrow from the once-full quiver of their wrath. And when at home or at school he was whipped for his disobedience, they lent him fortitude. With them at his side he could endure without flinching whatever any white man could mete out. Not a whimper could they draw from him; he sneered in the faces of his tormentors. The last of the Caddoes brought no stain of dishonor upon the spirits of his proud dead.

If to be an Indian was a career in itself, to be the last of one's tribe was a calling. To be the sole repository of a nation's history, its traditions, its laws, its beliefs, and its rituals, and to know nothing of that history, those traditions, laws, beliefs, and rituals, and to be just twelve years old, was to carry an almost crushing weight of responsibility. No wonder Jimmy was aged and sober beyond his years. That with all this on his mind he should have no time for friends, for games, or for schoolbooks.

His confirmation time was fast approaching. He would turn thirteen that summer, would enter upon his manhood, and as soon as school was out Jimmy obeyed the call he had heard to make a pilgrimage to his ancestral shrine: the Caddo burial mound on his grandfather's farm. He was to spend the summer in the country. His parents were relieved to see him go, glad of a rest. The prospect of having him always about the house, of a whole long summer of wrangling, was more than his mother could face. It was his own idea; she need not accuse herself of getting rid of him. After a few months' separation maybe they would get along a little better. Hopefully, a summer in the open, swimming, going fishing, exploring the farm, would make a happier boy of him, a better pupil when school reopened in the fall.

VI

“He don't do a thing but dig in that damn dirt pile,” his grandfather reported when Jimmy's parents drove out to celebrate his birthday. “He's at it all day long every day and Sunday. Can't even get him to stop long enough to eat his dinner. If you all weren't here he'd be out there right now. Wouldn't you?” Over his shoulder the old man flung a scowl at the great mound of earth that rose like a single gigantic grave out of the field below the house.

“Well, I must say it seems to have done him good. He's so changed I wouldn't have known him. Would you, Mother?” said Jimmy's father, and turning to his wife, received a look that blazed with exasperation.

For no, she would not have known Jimmy, he was so changed, and she was in torment while his father beamed. It was not her boy but a stranger she found awaiting her, a stranger whom she had brought into the world with her pain on this day of the year. He had grown like a weed, had in just these few weeks away from her shot up half a head taller. The last of the baby fat had thinned from his cheeks, which now showed their bones, and his baby fairness was gone: he was as brown as a penny. No longer was he the soft round ungendered little sausage she remembered; his shoulders had wedged out, his little pot been trimmed away neat and flat and hard. The change in his chemistry had coarsened his skin, his hair, thickened his muscles, deepened his voice. Yet though his mother ached to be proud of his new manliness, she could not. She was no part of it. She was a little afraid of him. She felt the misgiving every mother feels when suddenly one day her son comes to present her with his bill for the many slights and indignities of his boyhood.

His manner confused and disarmed her. She had expected on his birthday to find him cocky and impertinent, and had come prepared to overlook it for the occasion. Her forbearance would not be wanted, thank you. Instead she found him subdued, withdrawn, grave. This gravity grated her as no amount of impudence would have done. How dared he treat her with such cool courtesy, as though there were no history of any troubles between them! To learn now that he had spent his time digging so fanatically in that old Indian mound instead of in the harmless pastimes she had imagined made her feel she had been betrayed and mocked.

“Must think he's going to find some buried treasure. Well, you're in for a big letdown if you do,” said Jimmy's grandfather. “The Indins, why, they were all so piss-pore they never hardly had enough to eat, much less any silver or gold. What have you found? Just what I told you you'd find. Nothing but skeltons and a lot of old broken crocks.”

Jimmy was used to his grandfather's disapproval of his project. The burial mound sat square in the middle of his grandfather's cotton patch. While Jimmy dug on top of the mound his grandfather chopped the cotton in the field below. Whenever the old man's progress down the row brought him parallel with the mound he would stop and rest and watch Jimmy dig. He refused ever to face the mound, he would only lour at it over his shoulder, leaning on his hoe handle with one foot crossed over the other and his behind stuck out. But if the sight of his grandson's foolishness disgusted him, the sight of his grandfather's degradation filled Jimmy with shame and despair. Commanded by the voice of his people to know himself through knowing them, Jimmy had bared the buried history of the Caddoes, delving backwards in time from their end to their beginning. He had measured the antiquity of his lineage in countless shovelfuls of earth. The handiwork of his tribe had shown him the strangeness of his heritage, his own difference. From the mound's topmost layer, where the bodies, unceremoniously interred, had been so closely packed (“their numbers depleted by their war against the white settlers”) that the bones were inseparably mixed, and where the little bones of children were numerous (“and by the diseases which the settlers brought with them”), he had dug down to the splendid rotting cerements, the broken, once-magnificent urns, the weapons of flint and obsidian worthy to accompany a great chief to the happy hunting grounds, of the days of their greatness: from desolation down to grandeur that made the desolation all the keener. Then to look down and see his grandfather, the man with more of the blood of the Caddoes in his veins than any other living man, hoeing his way down the rows of scraggly cotton: it was a constant reminder of how art the mighty fallen.

“I remember digging in there myself when I was a boy,” said Jimmy's father. “I never found anything worth keeping.”

“Maybe you didn't dig deep enough,” said Jimmy.

“Why, what all have you found?”

“Oh, things.”

“What sort of things?”

“Oh, just things.”

“Well, some people collect old Indian things. Mr. Will Etheridge in town, for instance. He'll pay a dime apiece for flint arrowheads. Whole ones, that is, of course. I'll speak to him about you next time I see him. You can take and show him what you've found, see if he'll offer you something for it.”

A laugh came from Jimmy's mother like the sound of breaking glass. “Jimmy isn't after buried treasure,” she said. “And he wouldn't think of selling any of the things he's found. Would you, dear?” she said, turning to him with a spiteful simper. “They're sacred, isn't that right? Yes. You see, I'm the only one who understands, aren't I, my little Hiawatha? I can read you like an open book.”

“Are we going to fight on my birthday, Mother?” asked Jimmy.

“Why, what better day for it?” she cried, regretting what she said even as she said it. “I was only trying to be friendly, but if you want to fight, what better day for it than your birthday?”

It was a shocking thing to say. She herself was quite taken aback. She had not known she was going to say that, it had just come out by itself. Thus she was all the more taken aback when Jimmy said, “I knew you were going to say that, Mother.”