They were told they could come for him anytime after seven the next morning. Money being a little tight, and neither of them feeling much like sleep, they passed the night sitting in the waiting room of the depot. They did not know the exact hour of execution. But when at shortly past five the lights in the station dimmed they reached for one another’s hand and sat holding them until, after about four minutes by the clock on the wall, the lights brightened again. At seven at the penitentiary gate they found a truck waiting with a casket on the bed. They were given Jesse’s effects, his guitar, his clothes, and a bale of tinfoil from the inner wrappings of ready-rolled cigarettes, each sheet rubbed out smooth as a mirror, at the sight of which his mother could not keep back a tear.
They were given a ride back to the depot in the cab of the truck. There the casket was put on the scales and weighed and Will paid the lading charges. Then it was put on a cart and rolled out to the end of the platform. They went back to their seats in the waiting room. There remained in the shoe box which Vera had put up for their trip some biscuits and meat, but neither felt hungry. When the train came in they watched the casket loaded into a freight car. Their seats were in a coach in the rear. The overhead rack being too narrow for it, the guitar rode across their laps. And still though they sat, in four hundred and fifty miles it happened now and again that one or the other would brush the strings, drawing from them a low chord like a sob.
A Good Indian
WHEN I WAS a boy I was ashamed of the color of my skin—ashamed for my family, for the whole white race. From that red Oklahoma earth which we walked upon and called ours had sprung the red man; we palefaces were aliens and usurpers. On our farm you could not plow ten feet, especially not after erosion had laid the soil bare and the dust storms had flayed it rawer still, without turning up a flint arrowhead, and while I treasured them, they were a reproach to me. The name “Sooner,” so proudly worn by our state, to me was an emblem of infamy; and although at school we were taught to glorify that day in 1889 when our forefathers had gathered on the borders of what was then called Indian Territory, poised themselves, and at the crack of the starter’s pistol swarmed in and staked their claim to however much they could pace off and fence in, I was not a bit proud of my grandfather’s part in that adventure. My father might sigh and say he wished Papa had gotten more while the getting was good; to me it was evident at an early age that Grandpa must have stolen our fifty acres from some poor Indian brave, perhaps the very one who, in leaving, had sown the earth with dragon’s teeth in the form of his arrowheads, and whom I pictured as proud and noble and sad, like the one on the head of the nickel.
Whenever I had a nickel, and bought myself a magazine, I sided with them—the Apaches, the Blackfeet, the Cheyennes—against my own people, and excused their cruelties. And when we kids played cowboys and Indians, I always took the part of Geronimo or Quanah Parker, and sometimes I came near to drawing blood with my stone tomahawk in trying to lift the scalp of my fallen paleface foe.
That tomahawk, by the way, was the genuine article. Like everybody else in our parts, we had an Indian burial mound on the property, and over the years ours yielded me, in addition to the tomahawk, stone grinding pestles and scraps of painted pottery, knucklebones, a skull, skinning knives of flint and obsidian, worn-down bits of antlers, and always arrowheads of all colors and of sizes for every variety of game, from tiny ones hardly bigger than a grain of corn, to great broadheads which I liked to think had once brought down two-ton buffaloes.
Feeling always something of a renegade (for stories of the Indian Wars were still told during my boyhood), I read all I could lay my hands on of the history of the Indians. The record of the white man’s greed and perfidy was hardly to be believed. From the very beginning, in Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, those original owners of the entire American continent welcomed the invaders as friends and neighbors, and where they did not make them outright gifts of land enough to live on (the Indians all had a very backward and undeveloped sense of individual land ownership and did not believe that one man could own what belonged to all men—what belonged, in fact, to no man, but instead to the Great Spirit), they sold it to them at fair, not to say overgenerous, prices. And then the whites (I thought of them in those days as like white mice, with the quick, grasping paws and the sharp, busy teeth and the greedy little red bug-eyes of white mice) overran the Indians like a plague. In every state of the Union those who had once owned all saw it nibbled away and gobbled up until they were dispossessed of their ancient hunting grounds and herded into pens called reservations. Where they resisted they lost, and were punished for defending what was theirs. Where they conferred, and went voluntarily, with treaties guaranteeing the bounds of the reservation in perpetuity, they saw, in the same generation, in the same decade, often by the very signatories, every treaty mocked and broken. Mice do not know how to share; what’s yours is theirs—all of it. And so the Indians were moved off these reservations to others farther west, on land belonging to yet other Indians, and given a treaty guaranteeing that it would never happen again.
Then positively the last resettlement was proposed—at gunpoint—to them. All the Indians, from all over, would be brought together in one large tract, and this land would be theirs for as long as the sun should shine: here was a treaty to show for it, hung with red ribbons and seals like tassels. And from the shrunken reservations which were all that remained to them of the land of their fathers, in Alabama, in Tennessee and Carolina and Mississippi and Florida, they were herded like winter cattle, and thousands left dead along the trail, to Oklahoma. It was not much good, this land; but it was theirs. The treaty was signed by the Great White Father in Washington, D.C. But Great White Fathers come and go, and that one was no sooner gone than the mice were running in the walls and boldly scampering out to thieve by night, and breeding and clamoring to get in; and the sun went down in the land which was to be theirs for so long as the sun should shine, and the red men were herded onto the last reservations, little pockets of the leanest land where the best was none too fat, and all the rest declared to belong to whichever white man got there “sooner” and staked his claim.
When you are a kid, you can get so carried away that those olden times seem more real to you than the times you live in.
I was scarcely able to look an Indian in the face whenever I met one on the street in town on a Saturday afternoon, when they came in from off the nearby reservation. I could scarcely believe they were Indians. They were parodies of white men, as a scarecrow is a parody of a man. Instead of beaded moccasins they wore broken-down old bluchers that the poorest poor white would long since have thrown away—possibly had. (I noticed the feet first, no doubt, because I hung my head and kept my eyes cast down.) Instead of fringed buckskin hunting shirts, they wore frayed and threadbare imitation-chamois work shirts, and over them wore baggy overalls of railway-engineer’s pattern, black-and-white-striped. Instead of war bonnets of eagle feathers, they wore greasy old wool caps with pinched and broken bills or sweaty-banded old black felt hats with uncreased crowns. No bareback pinto ponies did they ride, but came in creaky old swaybacked wagons drawn by swaybacked mules with collar and trace galls and flyblown sores around their scrawny necks and down their slatted sides from pulling a plow. Along the tailgate of the wagon would sit a row of dark, runty children, stiff and impassive as a row of prize dolls in a carnival tent.
When, aged twelve, I accidentally opened our family skeleton cupboard one day and discovered hidden therein the fact that I myself had Indian blood, I at first did not know which to be, overjoyed or infuriated. I felt like the changeling prince in the storybook must have felt on discovering his true birthright, and discovering simultaneously that he had been done out of it, stolen and brought up by peasants as a peasant. I reproached my kin for having kept me in ignorance of this most important fact of my heritage. I begged for further knowledge. They seemed to know little and to care less. She was a Cherokee or a Choctaw, no one was sure whic
h, and the man who had brought her into the family was dismissed as the squaw man. Possibly even she had been a half-breed (they seemed to prefer to think so), and so my share was only about one sixteenth, an amount to which most everybody in Oklahoma would probably have to own. Better just forget it, they said. Family matters, they seemed to be telling me, were best kept in the family. I vowed that when I grew up I would join a tribe and become an Indian.
Well, I grew up, all right, and in the process I lost my desire to become an Indian. Dirty pigs! My God, a white man may be poor, but if he’s got any self-respect at all, he keeps himself clean, at least. They haven’t got bathtubs? No running water? We never had, either. We toted the water in by the bucketful from the cistern, heated it in kettles and pots on the range, bathed in a number-three washtub on the kitchen floor. But we bathed. Every Saturday night. When we got done, and Mama got done reaming out our ears, and we stepped out, the water in that tub looked like blood, like a hog had been scraped in it, from that red Oklahoma dirt. We might have been poor, but we were always clean.
And poor as we were, we held on to our morals. We got pretty hungry, too; but we never stole, nor let our children thieve right out of the store bins in town. We’d have starved sooner than do that. And sooner than see our daughters and our sisters do what some of those Indian girls did for money, we’d have killed them first.
You can’t help people that won’t help themselves: that’s another thing I learned in growing up. You’ve got to have ambition. Whenever we got a dollar ahead, we didn’t come into town with it and buy a quart of white lightning from some bootlegger in a back alley, get drunk and go crazy and start taking the place apart, wind up in jail with a head caved in from the constable’s billy club, no use to ourselves or our families for the next thirty days. Indians just can’t hold their liquor? In that case they ought to let it alone. I’ve heard it said they drink because they’re downhearted. Because they’ve had it rough. Had a raw deal. We’ve all had it rough. We’ve all had a raw deal. But did we sit around moping about it forevermore? We bettered ourselves.
And just how rough did they have it when it was really rough all over? Living out there on the reservation all through ’31, ’32, ’3, ’4 on a steady government dole? Not much of a dole? Well, it was more than we got—and we paid taxes! They never had to worry that the bank was going to come around one day and say, “Well, Ed, old friend, you’ve been here a long time, and I hate to have to say it, but looks like you’ll have to get off, you and your wife and kids.” Best landlord in the world, good old Uncle Sam!
An Indian won’t work. And don’t give me none of that stuff about not having incentive. The answer to that argument is here: in 1935 a law was passed that the tribes could no longer hold the reservation lands in common (which is socialism) but it had to be divided up and parceled out among the members. The idea was to drag them into the twentieth century. Give them some incentive. Teach them what it means to a man to own his own little plot of ground, and to want to increase it, come up in the world. To weed out the freeloaders and give the real hustlers a chance to rise to the top of the heap. Did those lazy, good-for-nothing Indians work that land any harder when it was their own? They did not.
Now 1935, the year that law was passed, just happened to be the year when oil was first brought in around our section. I am not saying there was any connection; but once each Indian owned his own piece of land he was free to sell it if he had a mind to, not be told by the tribal council that the land didn’t belong to him, couldn’t be traded. And how do you suppose they spent the money they got for the sale of their land? Well, I got my share. If they didn’t have any better sense than to spend it with me, that was their lookout. They wanted what I had to sell, and if I hadn’t taken their money, there were plenty more who would have.
I had set up in business for myself in ’33. I had the local distributorship for Cadillac. As you can just imagine, a man was not getting rich selling Cadillacs to Oklahoma tenant farmers in 1933 and ’4. But all of a sudden the smart alecks who wouldn’t let me in on the small family cars just a year or so before were all laughing out of the other sides of their mouths. For when a redneck who has followed a plow all his life lays down the traces and picks up a fortune in oil one day, he don’t want him no Ford nor Chevrolet, he wants him a car—the longest, fastest, gaudiest thing on wheels. And there was I, with just what he was after. “The car you never thought you’d own”—that was my motto.
I sold them with all accessories already on. Radio and heater, chrome tailpipe, Venetian blinds, seats upholstered in leopard, zebra, spotted calf. The only thing that was optional was the steer horns on the radiator grille. I stocked Cadillacs in fire-engine red, oyster white, sky blue; but my hottest number of all was a bile yellow that sharpened your teeth like the smell of a sour pickle. That was the wagon that really got the braves from off the reservation.
Some people—especially those on whose own farmsteads one after another dry hole had been drilled—were complaining in those days that the Indians had been given all the oil-rich land. Others were not just sitting on their hands and howling, they were busy buying the redskins out. Some of those Indians sold out without even waiting for a drilling sample. Show them a few thousand dollars and that was all they needed to see—especially if they were seeing double. Others were told yes, no doubt about it, there was certainly oil lying under their land. But who knew how much? It might turn out to be a million barrels, and then again, it might not. It was a gamble, either way, but a bird in the hand … And there was I, or one of my men, before the ink on their X was dry—in line, I might add, with the Packard, the Buick, and the Pierce-Arrow dealers.
And then, a few months later, after they had run out of money to buy gas to put in them, or after they had driven them without any oil in the crankcase, you might see on a country road one of those Packards or Pierce-Arrows or Cadillacs hitched to a team of mules with the brave sitting on the hood on a blanket holding the reins, while inside, with the windows all rolled up regardless of the heat, sat the squaw and the papooses. Drive on a little farther down that same road, and you were apt to pass three or four more big-model automobiles upside down in the ditch or crumpled against telegraph poles.
But for running through cars, the Indian I am going to tell about holds the record.
One day one of my salesmen brought in a prospect known to everybody around town as John. If he had a second name, I had never heard it. John had sold out that very morning. Not being a very convivial sort, even in his cups, John had held out for and had gotten nine thousand dollars—plus a second bottle—out of the men who bought him out. He was a big buck with a face like a stone on the bottom of a creek, flat and featureless, and just as full of smiles. Underneath his arm, the one without the bottle, he carried a bundle wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine, which I knew to recognize. They always insisted on cash, and they wanted it always in ten-dollar bills, possibly because those of larger denomination did not look like money to them, and a ten really did.
Our demonstrator was one of those yellow dogs, and my man had brought John in, at around eighty-five miles per hour, in it. That was what he wanted, and he wanted it now. I had sitting out back some three dozen jalopies and homemade pickups cut down from old passenger sedans and coupés and touring cars—Stars, Moons, and so help me, one Marmon V-16. I had buggies, I had buckboards, I had I don’t know how many wagons, I had me about half the mules in that county, for I’d seen booms before and I’d seen busts, too, and I was hedging against the day when they would need those wagons and teams again; I drew the line only at travois. On this deal, though, I wasn’t going to have to take any trade-in.
I had on the showroom floor one exactly the same, but no, John here wanted that demonstrator. She had a few thousand miles on the speedometer, and I supposed he wanted that particular car, thinking he would get a little something off on the price. Little was what he would get, all right; but I was prepared to powwow. However, John did not
want to bargain. He wanted that car the way he might have wanted a particular woman for a squaw and not her twin sister. He had seen what the one could do. I took his parcel from him (this had to be done cautiously—no sudden movements—like taking a bone from a dog), untied the string, and counted out four hundred and twenty ten-dollar bills. I told him that was what I wanted for my automobile. John studied the stack I had made for a time, then he stacked the rest alongside and studied the two of them. After he had my car he would still have more money than I would have. With a grunt, he pushed the smaller stack towards me. The bottle, too. To close the deal I had to drink with him.
While I was drawing up the bill of transfer, the salesman took the customer out for his driving lesson. This was a little service I offered, free of charge. They were gone about half an hour. When they returned, Doyle—Doyle Gilpin, my star salesman, himself part Kiowa—had a big purple knot over one eye. John X-ed the contract where I showed him to and I turned his ignition key over to him. I counted out to Doyle his commission, locked the money in the strongbox, locked the strongbox in the safe, and went to the show window to watch. The other salesmen, the parts-department man, and the mechanics from back in the shop all came out and joined us. These performances were always a sketch.
To see that Indian come up on that automobile was worth the price of a ticket. He carried the key hidden behind his back, as if it were a halter, and Doyle swore he was talking to that automobile under his breath all the while he sidled up to it, to coax it into standing still. Though he had been behind the wheel for his driving lesson, old habit was strong, and now he did not come at her from the driver’s side because, unlike a white man, an Indian mounts a horse from the right. He stood stroking the door panel for a minute, then opened the door, saw he was on the off side, nodded to himself, shut the door, and, holding on to her all the while, made his way around the front end—never go behind them: that’s where they can kick you.
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 25