Tisha (30 page)

“C’mon, Anne,” Nancy said, “we gotta do it. Give ’er somethin’ to eat now, she’ll throw it right up.”

“But suppose she gets a heart attack or something?”

“If anybody’s gonna get a heart attack, it’s gonna be us,” Nancy said. “You ready?”

“Would you rather I held her?”

“If I thought you could I’d let ya. She’s a wildcat, this one. I’ll hold, you cut.” She got Ethel in a good strong grip. “Start cutting,” she yelled.

I started, shearing both sleeves up to the neck, then cutting and ripping down to her ankles, peeling the garment as I went. Finally it was all off. Naked and screaming, she looked more animal than human, her hair matted, her whole body just one mass of caked dirt and excrement.

Nancy picked her up, and together we brought her over to the tub. I tested the water. It was just right. We lowered her into it. As soon as we did, all hell broke loose. If she was frightened before, she was horrified now. I’d never have believed that a little child could have had as much strength as she did, but she went into a rage. As if we’d dumped her into a tub of ice cold
water, she let out a shriek, started striking out and clawing at the two of us, and before we could stop her, water was flying in all directions and she was out of the tub. I managed to grab her wrist and the next thing I knew she was trying to bite me. If anybody had walked in just then they would have thought Nancy and I were a couple of white savages bent on killing and cooking a little Indian girl. Ethel must have thought just that, because she dodged around the room as we went after her, overturning chairs and screeching horribly. Before we were able to grab her finally, I nearly fell in the washtub and Nancy almost got a black eye.

In she went finally, fighting and clawing in a berserk rage. We didn’t dare try to wash her. It was enough just to hold on to her. There wasn’t but half the water left in the tub. What wasn’t on Nancy and me was all over the floor, and some of it near the wall was already frozen. Ethel kept struggling to get out, thrashing around and fighting so hard that I was almost ready to give up. Until suddenly Ethel just sat back, choking out sobs, all the fight gone out of her. Nancy and I looked at each other in relief. I didn’t know anything about the way I looked, but if I looked half as bad as Nancy I was a mess.

We started to wash Ethel and she let us do it. She’d done all she could and now the battle was over. She whimpered and talked to herself in Indian, even tried to tell us a couple of things, but she didn’t lift a hand to stop us when we used the washcloth. She was a little scared when I added some hot water after about ten minutes, but it was only to look at me with soft liquid eyes, silently pleading with me not to hurt her.

She’d looked pretty bad when we started washing her, but once we’d shampooed her hair and washed her face even Nancy was taken with her. “Gee, Anne, if you didn’t know she couldn’t speak English, you’d think she was like any other kid. She’s a beauty.”

She was too, with skin like a dusky rose and shining black hair. By the time we were ready to take her out she was playing with the water, trying to poke holes through the layer of scum on the surface. When we stood her up and started to dry her she looked so frail
and helpless I’d have given anything to be able to tell her she was safe and that we weren’t trying to hurt her.

We put her in bed to keep her warm, then rummaged through the stuff Maggie had brought, but there were no clothes for her. Whatever she owned she’d had on.

“I’ll have to go over to the store and see what I can dig up,” I told Nancy. Ethel had disappeared under the blankets and crawled down to the foot of the bed right alongside our sack of potatoes. I went over and listened.

“Sounds like we have a gopher,” I said to Nancy. “Can you eat potatoes raw?”

“I don’t know. I never tried ’em.”

Not wanting to take any chances I pulled the blankets back. Sure enough, she’d gotten into the sack and was munching away on one. I took it away from her and she cursed me roundly before she dived back under the blankets.

I couldn’t find too much in the store to fit her, a pair of bib overalls that were a little big, some long underwear, socks and a corduroy shirt, but at least she had clean clothes.

On the way back I picked up Chuck. He watched without saying anything while Nancy and I dressed Ethel. We had to roll up the bottom of the overalls and she looked lost in the shirt I’d bought, but she really looked cute. Even Chuck thought so. “Jesus Chris’, Tisha,” he said. “She one pretty girl, I t’ink.” He went over to her and examined her carefully, then sniffed her. “Smell good, too,” he added approvingly.

“Maybe you ought to introduce us,” I said.

“Dis Tisha,” he said pointing to me. “Tisha. An’ dis Nancy.” He said something to her in Indian, then pointed to us again, but Ethel didn’t say anything. Chuck nudged her impatiently. “Tisha … Nancy,” he said warningly.

“She’s a little scared, Chuck. Give her time.”

“No no. She say.” He said something to her in Indian again and stabbed a finger at me. “Tisha.”

“Tisha,” she said.

“An’ Nancy.”

“Nassy,” she mimicked.

Nancy and I applauded. “That’s wonderful. She’s very smart, Chuck.”

“You bet,” Chuck said. “I tell her she no say I give one big smack.”

One thing we didn’t have trouble with was getting her to eat. She wolfed down two thick slices of bread for supper and a good helping of moose roast and beans. She didn’t like having her face and hands wiped, though. That made her cry.

Maggie Carew came by right after supper. “Joe brought the mother over,” she said. She looked at Ethel admiringly. “Kid doesn’t look half bad now. Havin’ any trouble with ’em?”

“None at all.”

She put a paper sack down on the table. “Some of Willard’s old clothes. They might fit the girl.”

I thanked her and before she went out she said, “If the two of ’em are too much of a handful maybe I could put the girl up in the bunkhouse.”

“They’re no trouble at all, Mrs. Carew.”

“Nice of you to keep ’em here.”

“I don’t mind a bit.”

The clothes came in handy. There was a small flannel nightie in the sack and even some diapers and rubber pants. When it came time to put Ethel to bed, though, she raised a howl and wouldn’t let us. We asked Chuck to explain to her about pajamas, but he didn’t understand the idea himself. He and Ethel had always slept in their clothes. She had to have the diapers, though, because she’d be sleeping between Nancy and me.

“Maybe if Ethel saw you change your clothes she wouldn’t mind so much,” I told Chuck. He said it was all right with him, so back I went to the store for a pair of pajamas to fit him. He was fascinated by them, liked them “too much,” but Ethel was still suspicious, so we made a compromise for her—diapers under outer clothing. Before we put the diapers on her we had her go to the toilet in the cache. She was afraid of the toilet seat, though, and we finally had to settle for letting her do her business on newspaper.

We put them both in the big bed so that Ethel
wouldn’t be scared. When Nancy and I were ready for bed a little later we’d transfer Chuck to the couch. We’d built the fire up in the schoolroom so we could work in there and let them sleep, but as soon as we went inside and started to close the door Chuck wanted to know where we were going. I told him we’d be in the schoolroom, but he said he’d be scared if we went, so we stayed. Nancy worked away on a reading comprehension test I gave her while I drew some outlines for hand puppets the kids wanted to make. Chuck and Ethel tossed and turned for a while, murmuring to each other, then they were quiet. I thought they were both asleep, but Chuck wasn’t. He called to me, and I went over to him. He was still trying to understand what had happened.

“My mudda, she catch die,” he said.

“Yes.”

“She all by herself’s in cabin. Priddy lonely, I t’ink.”

“They’ve taken her out.”

“Where they take?”

“They put her in the cache—in back of the roadhouse.” I tried not to get choked up, but it was hard.

“Still priddy lonely.” He started to get up. “Maybe I go see. She not be lonely.”

“She’s not lonely, Chuck. She’s sleeping. And she’s very happy.”

“You ti’nk so?”

“I know it. She’ll sleep forever now. And she’ll never again be cold, or hungry, or sad.”

“You no tell lie? She never be hungry, be cold?”

“Never. That’s the truth. Her spirit is up in Heaven now. She’s very happy.”

“She have big cook?”

“What’s big cook?”

“Kill big fat moose. Have big cook. Eat.”

“Oh yes. She has everything there.”

“I like dat. She one good mudda me. You good mudda me too, Tisha. You take care me like real mudda.”

“You’re a fine boy, that’s why. Now you go to sleep. Good night.”

“Night.”

My eyes were so wet that I could hardly see when I sat down. I looked over at Nancy. Her face was all twisted up and she was trying her best to hold back her tears. Finally she got up and went into the schoolroom. I went in right after her and the two of us stood like fools, crying silently so that Chuck wouldn’t hear us.

Later on we transferred him to the couch, then we both got in on each side of Ethel. We’d left the oil lamp on so they wouldn’t be scared if they woke in the middle of the night. Ethel was in a deep sleep, a lock of long black hair curled across her cheek. I pushed it back. She was lovely.

Outside a wind rose and little drafts of freezing air nipped in. I thought of Mary lying cold and alone in the dark cache. There was nobody to take care of Chuck and Ethel now, nobody at all. They were all by themselves. Back in the shack, when everybody had been standing around trying to decide what to do with them I’d wanted them right away. The longer I’d stood there listening to the whole bunch of them talking about Chuck and Ethel as if they were dirt, the more I wanted them. Maybe it was because nobody had ever wanted me either when I was a little kid—nobody except Granny. They needed Somebody to take care of them, and I could do it.

“You awake, Nancy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What do you think about keeping Chuck and Ethel here?”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t want to send them back to the Indian village. Not now anyway.”

“How long do you want to keep ’em?”

“As long as I can.”

“Yeah, but I mean how long?”

“I’ll give you one guess.”

When what I was getting at finally dawned on her, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

“Anne—you saying you want them for your
own?”

“Yes.” Up to then I’d had doubts about it myself,
but saying it out loud made them all disappear. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know … That’s up to you,” she said.

I asked Nancy not to tell anybody about it. Besides the fact that it was going to start a ruckus, they were still Joe Temple’s children and I’d have to talk to him before I could go ahead and keep them. If he said no, there wasn’t anything I could do. I wanted them, though, I knew that for sure.

For the first few days Ethel never let Chuck out of her sight. Everything was new to her and she was scared, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way she acted. Not that she didn’t cry. It took hardly anything to set her off. She’d start crying as soon as Chuck left the room, or when school Was over and the kids left, things like that. But otherwise she was about the most self-possessed little girl there ever was. She was timid, but she had every right to be. She couldn’t understand a word of all the English flying around her head.

One thing that helped was that the kids in class were nice to her—much nicer than they were to Chuck. It was partly because she wasn’t any competition for them and partly because they knew she was an orphan. They didn’t make fun of her or try any of the nasty things they’d tried with Chuck. In fact they all went out of their way to get her interested in something.

She and Willard took to each other from the beginning. The first morning she came in he wanted her to sit at his table. She sat down alongside of him and he started babbling to her right away, until I finally had to tell him to be quiet. By afternoon he had her coloring with crayons and making paper chains. He also had
her eating the flour paste and licking the window. The first one I didn’t mind too much, but the second was dangerous. It was his favorite sport, getting his tongue to stick to the window just enough so he could still pull it away easily. He’d lost a sliver of tongue doing it once and there’d been blood all over the place. I stopped it fast.

Ethel wandered around so calm and quiet most of the time you’d have thought nothing in the world bothered her, but it wasn’t so. After a couple of days we started finding bits of food hidden all around. One time I found a piece of bread in my sock. Chuck explained to her that there would always be plenty of grub, but it didn’t stop her. She kept stashing bits of meat and everything else here and there.

I’d always heard that mothers had a lot of trouble getting their kids to eat, but with Chuck and Ethel there wasn’t a problem in the world. The only time Ethel didn’t have an appetite was at supper the first day. She just stared at her plate until the rest of us finished, then right after that she threw up chunks of every color in the rainbow—all the crayons she’d been coloring with.

Having the kids around all day helped her a lot, and in a few days she was repeating words all over the place—book, sandwich, eat, dish. She was as fastidious as they come, too. Chuck always gulped his food so fast I had to keep telling him to slow down, but Ethel ate like a little princess. After we finished supper one night she put her hands out and said, “Hello?”

“Well, hello,” I answered. It was the first time she’d ever said a word by herself.

She looked at Nancy and repeated it, so Nancy said hello to her too. She shook her head, got down from her chair and went over and pointed to the cupboard. “Hello?” she piped.

I went to it and looked inside. She wanted jello, I finally realized.

The fourth night she woke up screaming, throwing her arms around my neck and holding on as if there was a devil after her. Even after Nancy fit the gas lamp she was still too terrified to go back to sleep and she
wouldn’t let me go, so I got up and sat in the rocker with her, until an hour later her eyes closed.