The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (52 page)

“He wants to work I'll put him to work and pay him for doing it,” said Jimmy's grandfather. “Chopping cotton, fifty cents a day. It ain't near as hard work as spading in the ground. Fifty cents a day. Save it up and buy yoreself something nice. Damn foolishness to work for nothing when you could be earning pay. Buy yoreself a twenty-two rifle. A banjo. Get you a bicycle, then you can carry a paper route, earn money all year round. Tell you one thing, sonnyboy: prices of goods what they are today, if you was mine you wouldn't be out there wasting time when you could be bringing in a little something towards yore room and board and yore education.”

Lest his wife say it first, Jimmy's father said he believed they could manage without that.

“Do you think I've grown, Mother?” asked Jimmy.

“I think you're looking thin,” she said.

“I knew you were going to say that!” said Jimmy.

“Thin and flushed,” she continued, ignoring the interruption. “Not well at all. I wonder if you're not coming down with something?” Truth was, she herself felt flushed and as though she might be coming down with something. She felt terribly out of sorts.

“It's because I'm excited,” Jimmy said. “It's my birthday!”

He was excited. Something was going to happen. He had no inkling of what it would be—perhaps something not at all pleasant. But something momentous, he knew. It was imminent in the air like a break in the weather. This birthday would not end without bringing about some fundamental change in things.

“Well,” said his mother, “you've had enough to be used to them and you've got a great many more to come. So you'd better begin calming down.”

“But this one is special! This is my thirteenth birthday. Today I become a man.”

“What! Is that what you think? Ha-ha! You've got a long way to go before you get to be a man, my son. You're still just a little boy. And I advise you not to forget it.”

There was a birthday cake with fourteen candles—one to grow on—and when “Happy Birthday” had been sung Jimmy blew them all out with one breath. The presents were then opened and admired. Afterwards Jimmy's father said, first submitting a glance to his wife, “Yes, I can remember digging in that old mound myself when I was your age. Though like I say, I never had any luck. So you're interested”—another appeasing glance towards his wife—“in the Indians. Well, that's natural. Most boys are. Let's go and see just what you've been up to. Mother? Let's go and see what Jimmy's dug up, shall we?” He was being the peacemaker. Show a little interest in the boy's hobby, said the look to his wife, which Jimmy caught.

“You really don't want to see,” said Jimmy.

“You mean you really don't want us to see,” said his mother. “Well now, I think I do want to have a look. Maybe you've got hold of something you ought not to have.”

“Why, Mother,” said her husband. “What sort of thing could you have in mind?”

“I have in mind,” she said, fixing him with her look, “something nasty. We all know what the Indians were like.”

His indignation rose with a taste as sour as gorge. Yet she demeaned only herself. They were beyond her spite, as they were beyond her understanding; nothing she might say could smirch them. And he felt slightly dizzied. Again as previously he had known the instant before what his mother was about to say. He had actually heard her words seconds before they were spoken. It was like what happened sometimes with the phonograph, when you heard distantly the opening bars of the music before the record actually began to play. It had happened several times today, so that now Jimmy had the sense of being clairvoyant. It was as though he were in some sort of occult communication with his mother's unconscious mind. But if, for all her quarrelsomeness, his mother had been delivered into his power, Jimmy did not feel like gloating. It was too uncanny.

Once today his mother had read Jimmy's thoughts. He did not want his parents to visit the mound. Not for the reason his mother suspected but because it was hallowed ground and they were infidels who would profane it, the one with his idle curiosity, the other with her hatred and scorn. But both were determined now to be taken there, his father intent on making peace, his mother on making mischief.

She hated the thing, the mound, on sight. Before, hearing of Jimmy's dedication to it, she had viewed it as no more than a red rag of his meant to taunt her with. But seeing it sitting there so squat and alien and old she hated it. Brown and bare, it rose like a single enormous grave out of the field of dazzling white cotton. That it was man-made was obvious; no one could ever have mistaken it for a natural mound. Rectangular in form, it stretched two hundred feet, was fifty feet wide, rose twenty feet from the ground. She pictured the dead savages inside it packed like sardines in a tin, and she shuddered with revulsion. Such promiscuous burial offended her as not only uncivilized but obscene. If she had her way these ugly reminders of barbarism would all be leveled to the ground. And her son was under its spell. She could see it working in the dark depths of his eyes. It was an atavism in him, a taint in his blood.

But the place had a power. Undeniably it did, if even she was forced to acknowledge it. Standing to adjust her vision inside the black shadow it cast upon the glaring cotton she could feel its solemn spell. The single grave of a whole clan of people! She felt herself belittled by its bulk and its antiquity, and despite herself, reverent. She could gauge the power it had to attract her son by the power it had to repel her. Her sight sharpened and she saw him going ahead, his pace quickening with each step, drawn to it like an iron filing to a magnet, and her heart misgave her. She felt they were hopelessly sundered. As if a snake had coiled at her feet to strike, she sensed something stir somewhere nearby. The sensation was overpowering that her approach had alerted the hostile hosts of the dead. Her courage, born of her contempt, forsook her, and for a moment she stood quaking with superstitious dread.

Jimmy's father was impressed by the size of the opening he had made in the mound. More than impressed, he was awed, dumbfounded. Starting at about the middle of one of the long sides, at the spot where, on his first visit to the mound, he had received the command to dig, he had removed a slice six feet wide and six feet deep all the way down to the base. There was nothing slipshod, nothing boyish about his excavation; it was all quite amazingly professional-looking, like a photograph in
The National Geographic
, which was where he must have gotten his ideas from, of a field camp on the site of a “dig” of an archaeological expedition. He must have dug furiously, almost frantically, and yet his cuttings had been made systematically and with care—indeed, they had been made with reverence; his findings sorted and labeled and cataloged. To house them he had erected a tent on top of the mound. He had cut in the face of it a flight of steps leading there.

On the tent floor laid out in rows were neat stacks of human bones each crowned by its grinning gap-toothed skull. With each stack was carefully preserved its owner's beaded medicine bag, his tomahawk, his clay pipe, and in those cases where it had survived intact, the pouch containing parched corn that was to have fed him on his journey to the happy hunting grounds. Being but freshly unearthed, the skulls were not bleached white but were still a waxen yellow. To some adhered coverings of pursed brown skin drawn back from toothless gums in everlasting howls. Nobody to hear them but one thirteen-year-old boy of mixed blood and divided loyalties. And his was but one of many such mounds. They were numerous throughout that part of the state and adjacent Louisiana. Sights for tourists, spots for picnickers, curio seekers. On their slopes children romped and around their bases farmers gathered their crops while a nation groaned underground and no one heard. Only he heard. To him each and every skull he uncovered screamed its plea for pity, its demand for justice. It all came down to him. He was all they had. His heart was their last war drum; on it they beat night and day.

Asked by his father what he meant to do with all these Jimmy replied that he meant to put them back where he found them.

Put them back? his father wondered.

Wasn't that what he would do? One of those might be his great-great-grandfather.

In her hands Jimmy's mother held a clay jug, one of the few he had managed to salvage unbroken. Perfect in condition, perfect in form and in decoration, it demanded to be picked up and handled, demanded it even of a person in whom it produced an aversion exceeding what she felt in looking at the grimacing yellow skulls. It seemed fresh from the hand that had made it centuries ago. The design was of diamonds in bands that coiled about it shrinking and expanding in conformity with its shape, a treatment that must have been suggested to the potter by his own procedure in coiling his rope of clay. If, as has been said, the soul of a people is to be found in its pottery, then the soul of the mound builders, as expressed in this piece, was one of boundless self-assurance, superb and haughty, implacable and utterly without remorse, possessed of some inner harmony that gave them a careless mastery of life. Unconquerable, the spirit of the people who could produce one such thing!

She tore her eyes from it to look at her son. He stood gazing at the vessel in her hand with an expression that shrank her heart. There was nothing of pleasure, nothing of fond possession in his look—rather the reverse: a look of his belonging body and soul to it, and an ineffable sadness: the look a priest might give to the chalice of the mass or the reliquary of the founder of his order. A shudder of revulsion shook her soul, she dashed the jug to the ground, where it burst like a grenade, and as Jimmy drew back—for he had already heard the words she was about to utter—she hissed, “A snake in your mother's bosom, that's what you are! A snake in your mother's bosom!”

They stood staring into one another's eyes in mute wonder. She was merely aghast, but he was both aghast and enlightened. What was to have happened had happened. On his thirteenth birthday an Indian boy becomes a brave, a man, and is given his man's name. The spirits of his ancestors, speaking through their enemy's own mouth, had just told him his.

VII

Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom, in whose new name was contained his mission, returned home in September after his summer in the country most unwillingly. He dreaded ever to see his mother again. He was not afraid of his mother, he was afraid for her, and thus for himself.

He knew now that his mother's telling him about his Indian blood had been no accident. She had been tricked into it against her will by her enemies, the spirits of his dead tribesmen. And he knew why. If he had not known before, he knew now, after excavating the mound—that hive that like hornets had lived and died all for one and one for all. Digging down through layer upon layer, generation upon generation, he had come to know the importance to them of preserving the tribal continuity, the sacrilege it would be to them should ever the chain be broken, especially in its last link. He knew now how inexhaustible was the Indian patience in waiting for revenge, the refinements of Indian cruelty in exacting it. He had not read these things written on buckskin or bark or carved in stone. He had seen them in the grin of Indian skulls, in the incisions on Indian jugs, in those geometric designs endlessly repeated that always came full circle, returning in the end to their source. His mother's crime against them was to have brought him up in ignorance of them. For this she must be made to pay, and Indian justice decreed that her punishment was that her son be a snake in her bosom, Indian subtlety that out of her own mouth must come the discovery that he was theirs, that she herself must bestow upon him his tribal name, that out of her very mouth must come—That was what he dreaded. What message would they next transmit through her to him? Not knowing what she was saying, what would she say next?

One thing his mother was determined never to say again was that he was a snake in her bosom. She regretted saying that. It was a terrible thing to say. Dreadful! She had meant to hurt him, and could see that she had; but not nearly as much as she had hurt herself. What made it doubly awful was that it was also rather laughable. Stiff, stagey, like something out of an old-fashioned play, like “Never darken my doorway again!”—not at all her usual way of expressing herself. And this comical old-fashioned stiffness somehow made the memory of it all the more embarrassingly painful. Her excuse was, she had not really meant to say it. She had gotten carried away and it had just popped out. If only she could have kept her vow never to repeat it! Before he had been back home two days, however, she did, provoked by his sullen refusal to answer to his name.

But that was not his name. Not anymore. He was Jimmy Hawkins no longer and never again would he answer to that name. When called by it, at home or at school, he would await silently and with a maddening little smile the question or the command that followed, but he would not answer to that name though beaten for his surliness until the principal's arm ached, until his father begged him to be allowed to quit. Hostile as he felt towards his mother, she was still his mother, and even the last of the Caddoes shrank from his terrible new appellation. But his people had spoken. Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom they had called him: Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom he must be. That the name fit him he had to admit. It fit him like a skin. And painful though it was, there was also strong medicine in the name. It encased him in an armor of scales. It enabled him to slink in silence. It gave to his brain the serpent's subtlety. It equipped him with a forked tongue for speaking to the enemies by whom he was surrounded. It armed him with fangs.

Because he would respond to none other, his mother was often goaded into calling him a name that was painful to her. Thus things went from bad to worse.

They could not be together for half a day now without a quarrel breaking out. Though she charged him with being the one who always started it, in fact it was she herself. In dread of what she might say, he wanted peace, no more quarrels. Yet he was Snake-in-His-Mother's-Bosom. And of course when riled he struck back. But she began it. The spirits egged her on.