Tisha (16 page)

“I didn’t ask for it.”

She buttoned up her coat. “You got it nevertheless. I’d advise you to watch your step. I’m willin’ to look the other way on this. Other folks won’t. You’ll find that out.”

She walked out without saying good-bye.

The next morning I couldn’t wait for the class to arrive, wondering if they were all going to show up. If they didn’t I didn’t know what I was going to do. By the time it was a quarter to nine I was a nervous wreck, and I swore to God that if the whole class came, from then on I’d cause the least trouble to Him of anyone who was ever born. They all showed up though, even the Vaughn girls, and when we sang that morning you could have heard my voice clear over to Steel Creek I was so glad.

But I found out right away what Maggie meant about people not looking the other way. There was a couple named Dowles who lived in two separate cabins down near the end of the settlement. Even though they were married they hadn’t talked to each other in years. The wife was a little bird-like woman and she’d loaned me a wash boiler. She scuttled in during the morning and said she needed it. I had some clothes simmering in it and I told her I’d give it to her after school if that was all right. Then about 11:30 an old sourdough who lived all alone on the other side of the creek came in and said would I mind letting him have the two chairs he’d loaned me. He was expecting company, he said. I gave him the chairs. My dishes went next, when Elvira came up to me before she went home to lunch. “My father says could you give us back the set of dishes we lent you? We need ’em for our own use.” She was all red and blushing and I felt sorry for her. She was the nicest one in the whole family, but every time there was some kind of a dirty job to do she was the one who was sent to do it.

I tried not to let the way people felt bother me, but
it did. I wanted to get along with everybody and have them like me. But here I’d been in this place no more than ten days and already I’d made people antagonistic over what I’d thought would have been the last thing I’d find on a frontier—prejudice.

Not everybody, of course. Along with some others, Uncle Arthur and Mert Atwood were on my side. Uncle Arthur said it didn’t matter that much one way or the other, but Mert was hopping mad. He was in the classroom when Elvira took the dishes home and right then and there he made me go over to Mr. Strong’s store with him and bought me a whole new set. I didn’t want him to because I knew he didn’t have much money. None of those old-timers did. They pulled maybe five or six hundred dollars worth of gold out of the ground in a season, which just about got them by, but Mert insisted.

Joan Simpson’s parents invited me over for supper a couple of nights after it happened and they thought it was funny. A young couple out of Idaho, they’d built themselves a sturdy little cabin on Forty-five Pup. A pup was just a little creek that branched off a bigger one, and Forty-Five was so named because it branched off of Chicken Creek at a forty-five degree angle. They’d made a nice life for themselves. Tom Simpson had been a carpenter and his wife Elizabeth had been a seamstress, so they were pretty self-sufficient. I spent a nice evening with them.

“Don’t pay it any mind,” Tom said. “That Vaughn gink is just a blowhard. I heard that when he lived up at Fort Yukon he was all for forming a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, but he couldn’t get any takers.”

The one person who surprised me was Mrs. Purdy. “I think you have make mush trouble for yourself, Ahnne,” she said when I was over at the house one night. “Many people not like what you have done.”

“That’s not the half of it,” Fred said, smiling. “I can tell you in one word what they think—ugh!”

Mrs. Purdy frowned. “I do not see the joke, Frayd. It is bad for this Indian boy to be in the school.”

“Why, Mrs. Purdy?”

“Can you not see, Ahnne? He is dirty, ignorant
What you call a … a …” Her hand fidgeted in the air as she tried to think of the word.

Fred leaned his cheek on his fist. “Bad example,” he said.

“Yes. Thank you. It will be different, Ahnne, if Chuck is clean, neat. He is not. He is dirty and smells bad.”

“That’s simple,” Fred said to me. “Tell him to take a bath.”

“I’ve been thinking of it.”

“Mary’s got to pack water pretty far,” Fred said, “but even if she didn’t she wouldn’t force him if he didn’t want to. Indians are kind of easy on their kids.”

“Think she’d mind if I gave him one?”

“Not at all.
He
would, though, I’d bet.”

Mrs. Purdy shook her head. “It would be better, Ahnne, if you leave this boy Chuck alone. People look at him and think all native children are like him.”

Fred groaned. “Ah, Ma …”

“‘Ah, Ma,’ you say. I say I would like Mary Angus to go back to Indian village and take her children with her.”

“Yeah,” Fred said drily. “You want her to go back so bad you were the first one to say I ought to bring her over some wood. Tomorrow I’ll go over and haul it all back.”

Mrs. Purdy didn’t think it was funny. “We must help those who need our help. We cannot let her freeze. But she does not belong here and the boy does not belong in this school. It was the same with Rebekah Harrington when she came to the school. That was not good,” she said to me.

“How about the old-timers then? They drop in whenever they like. If they can do it, why can’t Mrs. Harrington?”

“Rebekah is different,” she said. “People do not respect her.”

“If they don’t, then what does it matter what she does—whether she comes to school or anything else? As far as I’m concerned, as long as she doesn’t disturb the class she has as much right to sit down in that schoolroom as anyone else.”

Mrs. Purdy shook her head. “Ahnne, you are young. You do not know what is in the heart of people here. I know. My children know. You must be careful.”

She was really upset, and it made me realize something. She wanted to fit in, be like everyone else, and any native who didn’t was a reflection on herself. And suddenly I realized too why Mr. Purdy acted the way he did, never saying anything when I was around and just going off by himself. He’d done the same thing tonight. He was ashamed of Mrs. Purdy, ashamed that she was Eskimo, and Mrs. Purdy knew it. It was hard to believe, but I knew down deep it was true, and I felt sorry for him.

Later on Fred walked me home. The ground was as hard as concrete and slippery with leaves. The trees were so bare now that during the day you could see the game trails running through the woods. I put the hood of my parka up right away.

“Your mother really worries about what people think of her, doesn’t she?” I asked Fred.

“Well, it took her a long time to make friends around here.”

“I kind of felt bad arguing with her.”

“You didn’t say anything wrong.”

I slipped on some leaves and he grabbed me. When he let me go we were both a little self-conscious. We kept trying not to bump into each other all the rest of the way. When we reached the schoolhouse we were walking a couple of feet apart.

“Anything you need to have done in the classroom?” he asked me.

“You’ve done so much I don’t like to ask you.”

“I’ve got plenty of time till trapping season.”

I told him I could use some cubbyholes for the kids to put their stuff in, and he said he’d come by some time in the next few days.

Chuck stayed.

How he was able to put up with the way the other kids treated him, I didn’t know, but he stayed. They made life miserable for him. The only thing I couldn’t blame them for was not wanting to sit near him in class. He smelled something awful. It was partly my
fault, because with everybody giving him such a bad time, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him he smelled as bad as Ben Norvall.

If the kids talked to him at all it was just to make fun of him. They mimicked his accent and called him Ol’ Man Yiss. “Are you half-baked or half-breed?” they’d ask him. “You got a siwash bitch for a mother and a father who don’t even know your name.” “Go back to Louse Town,” they told him. “That’s where you belong.”

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could have held his own with them, but when they made him mad he couldn’t think fast enough in English to talk back to them. He’d just stand there getting red in the face with fury and wind up stomping off.

No matter how many times I talked to them about it, it didn’t do any good. Once they even waylaid him after school and threw rocks at him, chasing him all the way home to his shack. When I mentioned it to Mr. Vaughn and Maggie Carew they said they couldn’t do anything about it. Mr. Vaughn hated him so much that sometimes I even thought he put the kids up to some of the things they did.

One afternoon, after Chuck had left the room, he dragged Chuck back in by the scruff of his neck. Chuck was terrified. His pants were open and he was trying to hold them up and keep from tripping at the same time.

“Here’s your star pupil,” Mr. Vaughn said. “He’s so civilized he doesn’t know enough to use the privy. I caught him squatting out in back.”

He walked out leaving Chuck standing in front of the class, his own waste all over his pants and the class laughing. He looked so pathetic I didn’t know whether to burst into tears or go out and tell Mr. Vaughn exactly what I thought of him. I took Chuck into my quarters and cleaned him up as best I could, but he smelled awful—worse than he had before. I told him to stay in my quarters and when school was over I did what I should have done when he first came. I got all my pots out, filled them with water and put them on the stove. Then I took him over to the store with me.
There we picked out a couple of good warm flannel shirts for him, two pairs of bib overalls and some socks. He loved them, but back in my quarters, when I told him he was going to have a bath before he could put them on his jaw dropped.

“Aw no, Tisha.”

“You want those new clothes?”

“Yiss.”

“You want to come to school?”

“Yiss.”

“Then you’re going to have to take a bath.”

In he went, and while he was bathing I went over to the store and picked out a couple of pairs of long underwear. The pair he had on were shot.

When he was finished and all dressed up he looked like a different boy. I let him see himself in the big piece of mirror I had. “Like yourself?” I’d given him a shampoo and combed his hair.

He smiled. “Look too much good.”

“We’re going to do this once a week,” I said. Even with scrubbing we hadn’t been able to get all the dirt off him. Some of it was just too deep. The water in the washtub was black and scummy. After he helped me throw it out in back, we sat down and had something to eat.

“What bastid, Tisha?” he asked me.

“A bastard?”

“Yiss.”

I tried to think of a way to explain it without hurting his feelings, but finally I just had to come out with it. “Well, a bastard is somebody whose mother isn’t married. There’s nothing bad about it. As a matter of fact a lot of famous people were bastards.” That didn’t come out the way I meant, but Chuck didn’t care.

“Evelyn and Jimmy call me one bastid. Say I no got fodda.”

“Sure you’ve got a father. Everybody’s got a father.”

“Why them kids they no like me?” he asked me.

“They don’t know you yet, Chuck. That’s the way kids are sometimes. You’ll just have to give them time
to get used to you. When they get to know you better and see what a fine boy you are they’ll like you a lot.”

“You know me?”

“I think so.”

“I wait. Pretty soon them kids they know me too.”

When the kids saw him the next day they almost didn’t recognize him. It didn’t make them any friendlier to him, though. When they found out I’d given him a bath and got him some new clothes they called him teacher’s pet. But he kept coming. Whatever he had to put up with it was better than just hanging around that awful shack he lived in. I thought I’d been poor when I was a kid, but he didn’t have anything. The lunches he brought were the worst I ever saw—stringy rabbit that was half-cooked, or fried bannocks that were little more than flour and water. After a couple of days I started making him sandwiches.

I had to admit that I was fond of him. I couldn’t help it. There was just something about him that was so good and steady that it made me furious when the kids picked on him.

He dropped over to see me on Saturday and brought his little sister with him. She was a beautiful little thing, long black hair, delicate nose and big brown inquiring eyes.

“She name Et’el,” Chuck said. He tried to get her to say hello to me, but she was too afraid. She hid in back of him. “She like too much you give brode.”

I cut a slice of bread I’d baked that morning, smeared it with butter and honey and gave it to her. She gobbled it down so fast I was afraid she might throw it back up. She didn’t though. Two more slices disappeared the same way.

Chuck brought her into the schoolroom and showed her some of his work, his leaf book, a couple of spelling papers and a picture of a moose he had drawn.

Before the two of them left I asked him where he liked it better—the Indian village or here.

“Indian village,” he said. “Kids no play me here.”

“I guess you’ll just have to give it more time.”

“I don’ know, Tisha. I wait and wait and wait for them kids know me. They never know me.”

“Sooner or later they will.”

He sighed. “I hope maybe you be right. I wait too long I be old man like Uncle Arthur.”

“Is it time yet, Teacher?”

I looked at my watch. It was one minute to twelve. “Almost. Everybody’s books and papers put away?”

They all answered yes, anxious to get out. The pack train was due in some time after lunch and this time I’d told them they could have the afternoon off. The first time Mr. Strong came in I’d kept school right up to the last minute, not wanting the school board to feel I was shirking my duty. But there’d been no point to it. All the class had done was waste time.

Mr. Strong hadn’t been fooling when he said that the pack train coming in was a big day for the settlement. It was the only link we had with the outside world, with newspapers and magazines, mail from friends and relatives Outside, and supplies we’d ordered from the general store in Eagle. Everybody primped up a little, maybe not in Sunday clothes, but in the best and cleanest weekday ones, and the women put on a little rouge. Outside the schoolroom it was usually quiet during the day, with maybe just the sound of somebody sawing wood or doing some hammering, or a dog barking. But when the pack train was due in the miners for miles around drifted in starting about eleven o’clock, and the dogs all over the settlement had to take note of each arrival and try to out-howl each other about it. The whole settlement livened up and the class was too excited to work. Not that I blamed them. I was pretty excited myself. Today especially, because Nancy was coming in.