The Indian in the Cupboard (7 page)

“Why not?”

“Mum’s having guests,” Omri mumbled. He didn’t tell lies very well, and Patrick knew at once it was a lie and was hurt.

“Oh all right then, be like that,” he said, and stalked off furiously.

The afternoon ended at last. Omri accomplished the walk home, which with normal dawdling took half an hour, in a little over ten minutes. He arrived sorely out of breath and greeted his surprised mother (“Have you developed a jet engine, or have you been expelled?”) with a lot of gasping and a request to go straight to his room without waiting for tea.

“What have you been up to, up there? There’s an awful mess on the floor—looks like bits of grass and bark. And where
did
you get that beautiful little Indian tepee? I think it’s made of real leather.”

Omri looked at her, speechless. “I—” he began at last. Telling lies to Patrick was one thing. Lying to his mother was quite something else and he never did it unless the emergency was dire. But mercifully the phone rang just then, so he was spared—for the moment. He dashed upstairs.

There was indeed a fair old mess, though no worse than he often left himself when he’d been working on something. Little Bear and the horse were nowhere to be seen, but Omri guessed where to look—behind the dressing-up crate.

A wonderful sight met his eyes. A longhouse—not finished, but no less interesting and beautiful for that—stood on the seed box, whose smooth surface was now much trampled over. There were hoof—as well as moccasin—prints. Omri saw
that a ramp, made of part of the bark, had been laid against the side of the wooden box, up which the horse had been led—to Omri’s delight (odd as it may seem), a tiny pile of horse manure lay on the ramp as proof of the horse’s passing. And there he was, tied by a thread to an upright twig hammered (presumably) into the ground, munching a small pile of grass that the Indian had carried up for him.

Little Bear himself was still working, so intently that he didn’t even notice that he was not alone. Omri watched him in utter fascination. The longhouse was about half finished. The twigs, which had been taken from the birch tree on the lawn, had been stripped of their bark, leaving them shining white. Each one had then been bent into an arch, the ends thrust into the earth, and crosspieces lashed to the sides with thread. More and more twigs (which were stout poles to the Indian) had been added, with never a nail or a screw needed, to strengthen the structure, and now Little Bear had begun to fix flakes of bark, like tiny tiles, onto the crosspieces.

He was seated on the roof itself, his feet locked around the main roofpole, which ran the length of the house, hanging these bark tiles, each of which he would first carefully shape with his knife. The knight’s battle-ax lay on the ground beside an unused pile of twigs. It had clearly been used to chop and strip them and had been made to serve Little Bear’s purpose very well.

At last Omri saw him straighten up, stretch his arms toward the ceiling, and open his mouth in a tremendous noisy yawn.

“Tired?” he asked him.

Little Bear got such a fright he almost fell off the longhouse roof, and the horse neighed and tugged at his rope. But then Little Bear looked up and saw Omri hanging over the crate far above him, and grinned.

“Little Bear tired. Work many hour. Look! Make longhouse. Work for many braves—I make alone. Also not got good tools. Ax Omri give heavy. Why no tomahawk?”

Omri was getting used to his Indian’s ungrateful ways and was not offended. He showed him the tepee he’d made. “I suppose you won’t want this, now you’ve got your longhouse,” he said rather sadly.

“Want! Want!” He seemed to have decided tepees had their uses, after all. He circled it. “Good! Give paints. Make pictures.”

Omri unearthed his poster paints. When he came back with them, he found Little Bear sitting cross-legged on the earth, facing the figure of the chief that Omri had put next to the tepee. Little Bear was clearly puzzled.

“It’s plastic,” said Omri. “I bought it in a shop.”

“Plasstick?” Little Bear stared at the figure with its big feather headdress. “You make magic, get bow and arrows from plasstick?”

“Yes.”

“Also make feathers real?” he asked, with a gleam in his eye.

“You like that headdress?”

“Little Bear like. But that for chief. Little Bear not chief till father die.”

“But you could just try it on?”

Little Bear looked doubtful but he nodded.

“Make real. Then see.”

Omri shut the Indian chief into the cupboard. Before he turned the key, he leaned down to where Little Bear was examining the (to him) enormous pots of paint.

“Little Bear, are you lonely?”

“Huh?”

“Would you like a—a friend?”

“Got friend,” said the Indian, jerking his head toward the horse.

“I meant another Indian.”

Little Bear looked up swiftly, his hands still. There was a long silence.

“Wife?” he asked at last.

“No, it’s a man,” said Omri. “The—the chief.”

“Not want,” said Little Bear immediately, and went back to his work with a bent head.

Omri was disappointed. He had thought it might be fun to have two Indians. But somehow he couldn’t do anything Little Bear didn’t want. He would have to treat this chief as he had treated the knight—grab the weapons and turn him back into plastic again at once.

Only this time it wasn’t quite so easy.

When he opened the cupboard, the chief was still sitting on the shelf, looking about him in bewilderment, blinking as the light struck his eyes. Omri saw at once that he was a very old man, covered in wrinkles. He took the bow out of his hands quite easily. But the quiverful of arrows was hung around him on a leather thong, and as for actually lifting the feathered headdress clean off his gray old head, Omri found he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. It seemed so rude.

The old man gazed up at him, blankly at first, and then with dawning terror. But he didn’t get up and he didn’t speak, though Omri saw his lips moving and noticed he had hardly any teeth.

Omri somehow felt he should offer the old chief some friendly word to reassure him. So he held up one hand, as white men sometimes did in films when they were treating Indian chiefs with politeness, and said, “How.”

The old Indian lifted a trembling hand, and then suddenly he slumped onto his side.

“Little Bear! Little Bear! Quick, get onto my hand!” Omri reached down and Little Bear climbed onto his hand from the longhouse roof.

“What?”

“The old Indian—I think he’s fainted!”

He carried Little Bear to the cupboard and Little Bear stepped off onto the shelf. He stooped beside the crumpled figure. Taking the single feather out of the back of his own headband, he held it in front of the old man’s mouth. Then he shook his head.

“Dead,” he said. “No breath. Heart stop. Old man. Gone to ancestors, very happy.” Without more ado, he began to strip the body, taking the headdress, the arrows, and the big, richly decorated cloak for good measure.

Omri was shocked.

“Little Bear, stop. Surely you shouldn’t—”

“Chief dead. I only other Indian here. No one else to be chief. Little Bear chief now,” he said, whirling the cloak about his own bare shoulders and clapping the splendid circle of feathers onto his head with a flourish. He picked up the quiver.

“Omri give bow!” he commanded. And it was a command. Omri obeyed it without thinking. “Now! You make magic. Deer for Little Bear hunt. Fire for cook. Good meat!” He folded his arms, scowling up at Omri.

Omri was quite taken aback by all this. While giving Little Bear every respect as a person, he was not about to be turned into his slave. He began to wonder if giving him those weapons, let alone letting him make himself into a chief, was such a good idea.

“Now look here, Little Bear—” he began, in a teacherish tone.

“OMRI!”

It was his father’s voice, fairly roaring at him from the foot of the stairs. Omri jumped, bumping the cupboard. Little Bear fell over backward, considerably spoiling his dignity.

“Yes?”

“COME DOWN HERE THIS INSTANT!”

Omri had no time for courtesies. He snatched Little Bear up, set him down near his half-finished longhouse, shut and locked the cupboard, and ran downstairs.

His father was waiting for him.

“Omri, have you been in the greenhouse lately?”

“Er—”

“And did you, while you were there, remove a seed tray planted out with marrow seeds,
may I ask?”

“Well, I—”

“Yes or no.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And is it possible that in addition you have been hacking at the trunk of the birch and torn off strips of bark?”

“But Dad, it was only—”

“Don’t you know trees can
die
if you strip too much of their bark off? It’s like their skin! As for the seed tray, that is
mine
. You’ve no business taking things from the greenhouse and you know it. Now I want it back, and you’d better not have disturbed the seeds or heaven help you!”

Omri swallowed hard. He and his father stared at each other.

“I can’t give it back,” he said at last. “But I’ll buy you another tray and some more seeds. I’ve got enough money.
Please.”

Omri’s father had a quick temper, especially about anything concerning the garden, but he was not unreasonable, and above all he was not the sort to pry into his children’s secrets.

He realized at once that his seed tray, as a seed tray, was lost to him forever and that it was no use hectoring Omri about it.

“All right,” he said. “You can go to the hardware shop and buy them, but I want them today.”

Omri’s face fell.

“Today? But it’s nearly five o’clock now.”

“Precisely. Be off.”

O
mri was not supposed to ride his bicycle in the road, but then he wasn’t supposed to ride it on the pavement either, not fast at any rate, so he compromised. He rode it slowly on the pavement as far as the corner, then bumped down off the curb and went like the wind.

The hardware shop was still open. He bought the seed tray and the seeds and was just paying for them when he noticed something. On the seed packet, under the word “Marrow,” was written another word in brackets: “Squash.”

So one of the “three sisters” was marrow! On impulse he asked the shopkeeper, “Do you know what maize is?”

“Maize, son? That’s sweet corn, isn’t it?”

“Have you some seeds of that?”

Outside, standing by Omri’s bike, was Patrick.

“Hi.”

“Hi. I saw you going in. What did you get?”

Omri showed him.

“More presents for the Indian?” Patrick asked sarcastically.

“Well, sort of. If—”

“If what?”

“If I can keep him long enough. Till they grow.”

Patrick stared at him and Omri stared back.

“I’ve been to Yapp’s,” said Patrick. “I bought you something.”

“Yeah? What?” asked Omri, hopefully.

Slowly Patrick took his hand out of his pocket, held it in front of him, and opened the fingers. In his palm lay a cowboy on a horse, with a pistol in one hand pointing upward, or what would have been upward if it hadn’t been lying on its side.

Omri looked at it silently. Then he shook his head.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want it.”

“Why not? Now you can play a proper game with the Indian.”

“They’d fight.”

“Isn’t that the whole idea?”

“They might hurt each other.”

There was a pause, and then Patrick leaned forward and asked, very slowly and loudly,
“How can they hurt each other? They are made of plastic!”

“Listen,” said Omri, and then stopped, and then started again. “The Indian isn’t plastic. He’s real.”

Patrick heaved a deep, deep sigh and put the cowboy back in his pocket. He’d been friends with Omri for years, ever since they’d started school. They knew each other very well.
Just as Patrick knew when Omri was lying, he also knew when he wasn’t. The only trouble was that this was a non-lie he couldn’t believe.

“I want to see him,” he said.

Omri debated with himself. He somehow felt that if he didn’t share his secret with Patrick, their friendship would be over. He didn’t want that. And besides, the thrill of showing his Indian to someone else was something he could not do without for much longer.