Stealing Indians

by John Smelcer

  It was a body.

  And although it was face down, with one arm projecting awkwardly from beneath, they knew it was the body of Jimmy Red Cloud.

  They tied the rope they had brought to a nearby tree, and Elijah lowered himself into the pit, while Simon, Lucy, and Noah peered over the edge, Simon training the yellowish beam of his flashlight on Elijah’s descent. Once down, Elijah reached out to the neck of the body to check for a pulse, just in case the boy was not dead. The instant he touched the body, Elijah saw Jimmy’s death. He saw it as clearly as though it were springing fresh from his own memory.

  Elijah saw the boy dancing on the field around a great bonfire, at night, surrounded by other Indian boys and girls from the school. He recognized several of the faces. Most of them were older, juniors and seniors. They were dancing Indian-style, just as they had danced back home, back wherever they had come from. Several boys sat on a log beating homemade drums and singing, their smiling brown faces lit by firelight.

  Elijah had heard about this place, but he thought it just a rumor. Sometimes, he overheard older kids talking about going to “the dancing place” in the woods to dance at night. The place was far enough away so that they would not be caught. It had to be done in secret because Indian-style dancing, like speaking their native language, was prohibited at the school. According to the rumors, students at Wellington had been coming to this place ever since the school first opened. It was an underground movement, an act of defiance, one of the reasons their culture was never fully stripped from many of the children at Wellington.

  In the vision, Elijah saw Jimmy wipe sweat from his forehead and walk off into the edge of the woods alone. He was cooling down from the strenuousness of dancing when he inadvertently fell into the hole nearly covered by overgrowth. Elijah saw the boy falling, smacking the earth littered with rocks, which had worked loose over the years from the shaft’s walls and tumbled to the bottom. He saw Jimmy lying there, crumpled in a broken heap, his one arm twisted backward, blood trickling into his eyes.

  And then the vision went black, and he knew that Jimmy had died alone, frightened he would never be found.

  That was why his spirit sought Elijah.

  Elijah climbed out from the musty-smelling hole and described to his friends what he had seen, while a thin, ghost-like layer of fog rolled lazily over the ground, glowing eerily in patches of moonlight.

  The friends talked about what they should do. If they told school officials where to find the body, they would surely discover the field of secret dancing and shut it down forever. On the other hand, the ghost of Jimmy Red Cloud made it clear that it wanted its body found.

  It wasn’t simply a matter of right and wrong. The situation was more complicated than that.

  On the way back to the school, Elijah decided that he would tell some of the older students that he and his friends had stumbled upon the body. He couldn’t tell them about his visions. They’d just think he was weird, and they probably wouldn’t believe him anyway.

  The next day Elijah tracked down five of the older boys he had seen in the vision and told them about Jimmy’s body. He gave them a crude map, indicating the location of the pit relative to the dancing field. That night, under cover of darkness, the boys slipped out of their dorms, crossed the asphalt road and the wide, fallow field, making their way to the secret dancing place. From there, they used Elijah’s map to find the body, which they managed to lift from the hole using the rope Elijah assured them was securely tied to a nearby tree. They laid the body on a stretcher made of a heavy dorm-room blanket tied between two long poles.

  The boys took turns carrying the stretcher, two at a time.

  When they returned to the school, the impromptu pall bearers passed quietly through the rusted, iron gates and leaned the stiff body against a headstone in the cemetery of dead Indian children, close to the sidewalk so that that school officials would find him in the morning.

  Just as the older boys had predicted, there was no investigation, no sounding of alarm. There was only the brief ceremony and the burial to come. Such events happened.

  Elijah saw the ghost for the last time that night. It stood beside his bed, looking down at him, smiling as it faded into a memory. He didn’t have to say a single word.

  Two days later, Jimmy Red Cloud’s body was buried in the school’s cemetery, adding his name to the hundreds of Indian names already carved into headstones. All of his friends, Noah, Simon, Lucy, and Elijah included, stood in a close circle, singing hymns, as the simple pine casket was lowered into the ground.

  When the memorial service was over, a lone grounds-keeper filled the grave with shovels full of earth, as the first snowflakes of winter began to fall, cold and silent as the remorseless cemetery.

  Chapter Eight

  NOVEMBER WAS ALWAYS a hard month at Wellington. The thin, white blanket of snow did nothing to hide the harshly institutional outlines of the school. If anything, it somehow made the institution look more colorless, more black and white, with intermediate shades of gray, as if the place were empty of life. The ground was gray, the roofs were gray, the barren shrubs and naked trees looked black or gray or some lifeless shade between, and the gray-black smoke billowing from the chimneys and smoke stacks was the only movement on the bleak, wintry scene.

  Even the sky seemed steel-like and gloomy.

  It was a sad and depressing time for many of the recently arrived children, who, traditionally at this time of the year, experienced their most intense bouts of homesickness. Only during the Christmas season would the gnawing pain be worse. It was the lonely month of abandonment when even the sports fields were forsaken—the football and baseball uniforms and equipment put away for the season, the track field and basketball courts buried under a thin mantle of crusted snow and ice. What little hope and happiness had risen from—or survived—this new life, for whatever reason, seemed to have deserted the brooding dorms and classrooms, the gray woods and sky.

  Simon Lone Fight was homesick. He came from a reservation in the Four Corners region, that wide-ranging expanse of the American Southwest long the domain of the Navajo, the Zuni, the Hopi, and other Indian peoples. And what Simon missed the most, besides his dead mother and father, were his bent-over grandparents, his dog, and hearing the increasingly distant sounds of his Indian language spoken around the house, in the stores and gas stations, at the bingo hall, all over the reservation. Those sounds, coming from the throats of his family, the mouths of relatives, or the lips of perfect strangers, were part of him. The words tumbled inside his heart, ran the winding course of his veins. Unlike many of the students at Wellington, Simon still spoke his language, heard it clearly in his dreams of rocky, red canyons and soaring eagles, of cool, shadowy caves in steep cliff sides.

  He had met some other students who were Navajo, though none of them were from his reservation. Sometimes, they would sit together whispering in Navajo, careful not to let teachers overhear them. If caught, younger children had their mouths washed out with lye soap, or were forced to lick the floor, or were paddled and sent to their dorm room without supper—sometimes a combination, sometimes all of the above.

  The punishment for older students was of a different order. There were rumors of having needles pushed through tongues as discipline.

  One morning at breakfast, Lucy shared a story she had heard from a girl her age, named Ada Lame Deer, whose room was across the hall from Lucy and Maggie.

  “Ada told me about a girl named Franny, who graduated last year but who used to room with Ada. Franny once told Ada that early one morning while she was taking a shower, she was caught singing a song her grandmother had taught her. The song was full of Indian words with the names of animals. While she was in the shower, the water suddenly went off. When she rubbed the soap from her eyes and looked, the dorm matron was standing there, right in the shower stall.”

  Simon stopped eating hi
s cold scrambled eggs.

  “Holy cow!” he said. “Right there in the shower?”

  Lucy nodded and then continued her story.

  “The old lady told Franny that she would have to come to her office as soon as she got dressed. When Franny went into her office, the matron closed the door and began lecturing her on how wrong it is to speak or even sing Indian words. Then she opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a small, flat box and opened the lid. She showed the box to Franny and asked, ‘Do you know what these are?’ Inside the box were about half a dozen hat pins, each with a little black ball attached at one end. Franny knew what they were. Ada told me that Franny had nightmares about the pins and that she was afraid to sing anymore after that.”

  The school’s long and clouded history included persistent stories—perhaps rumor, perhaps recollection—of punishment even more severe, meted out for the crime of speaking a Native language, punishment that had resulted in the accidental deaths of several children, their bodies, like Jimmy Red Cloud, deposited in hastily dug graves in the cemetery, the records of their deaths falsified.

  But the Indian-speaking students found one another nonetheless. And like those students who stayed connected to their tribal traditions by dancing at the secret place in the forest, they found places to gather in secret where they could once again hear the beautiful, ancient words of home, despite the many posted signs and lectures warning them to speak only English.

  After his demoralizing encounter with Mr. Hand, Simon began noticing that many of the school staff, easily half or more, were immigrants or at least descendants of immigrants, like Mr. Weil. Most spoke with strange accents. Simon was right. Many of the staff, or their parents or grandparents, had come from Poland or Germany or Sweden, from Italy or Hungary, from Korea or China or Japan, from Mexico or unfamiliar countries in Africa. Simon had heard some of the kitchen workers singing songs in their parents’ language, but none of them was ever punished, as far as Simon could tell, for speaking in any language other than English, or, apparently, for clinging to old ways.

  Indians, whose forebears had lived on this land for ten thousand years, were punished for speaking a single word of their language, and yet, Simon was taking Latin. He hated it. The classroom walls were adorned with posters of Latin root words, and yet, right above the teacher’s desk hovered one of the ubiquitous “English Only” posters.

  Occasionally, Simon shared his observations and his mounting concern over this issue, mostly with Noah and Elijah, but sometimes with other classmates. No one, not even those who secretly spoke in their Native language, seemed willing to talk about the subject and most seemed a little offended that Simon would bring it up. It was one thing to hang on to a few words and to share them in secret, but it was quite another to complain about “the problem” in a more general sense. Noah even warned Simon once, “You gotta keep that stuff to yourself, Simon. You could get us all in into trouble.” So, Simon didn’t talk.

  Simon brooded.

  He seldom paid attention any more in English class. What was the use? But he took a dark interest in geography. Whenever he had the chance to check out a library book, it was always about geography. He was interested in place names, the names of rivers and creeks; of the origins of the names of states. Simon made A’s on his geography tests. He soon learned the state capitols, all of them. He was the only one in class who could immediately distinguish between the capitols of North and South Dakota, the only one who could correctly spell Connecticut, the only one who could name all eight states bordering Tennessee.

  And yet Simon brooded.

  On the one hand, the nation sought to eliminate Indians, moving them every time the land-hungry nation needed more land. Still, the new nation wanted a sense of connection to the land, something that made the land-stealers feel as though they had been part of the continent since the beginning, almost mythic. So they kept the Indian names for everything—for rivers and creeks and lakes and even towns and states. Indian names litter the maps: Massachusetts, Mississippi, Connecticut, Utah, Talladega, Tallahassee, Tuscaloosa, Seattle, Milwaukee . . . there are thousands of such names.

  One day after lunch, while waiting for gym class, Simon was sitting on a bleacher in the gymnasium and quietly speaking in Navajo to George Pancake, both boys from time to time nervously looking over their shoulder, unaware that the gym teacher, Mr. Koprowski, a second generation Polish-American who still spoke Polish to his grandmother at home, had been watching them from afar, suspicious of their actions.

  Koprowski’s demeanor toward the Indian children was difficult for the students to understand. In many ways he was an admirable role model—tall, muscular, athletic, full of commanding self-confidence—everything a young boy wants to be. Even the female teachers and staff seemed attracted to him.

  “Boys are men in progress,” he often said, a kind of tin slogan.

  And most of the boys appreciated the premise. Nevertheless, Koprowski was, in their minds, mean. Not tough. Mean. When a boy couldn’t climb the rope or do enough pull-ups, Koprowski belittled him until the boy lost all self-respect, until some of the younger boys who couldn’t perform properly broke down and cried, until some of them threw up the next time they even looked at a rope or a high bar.

  Mr. Koprowski crept beneath the bleachers, quietly making his way through the framework until he hunched directly beneath Simon and George, where he could hear Simon talking to his friend in Navajo.

  Both boys were as happy to speak their language as they were frightened of being caught. They loved to hear the words spoken, every syllable a reminder of home. In the guttural sounds they could feel the blazing sun, see wary jackrabbits emerge in the night, and smell the red desert after rain.

  In their enthusiasm, neither of the boys noticed the gym teacher beneath their feet or saw him crawl out the far side and climb onto the bleacher, bounding two steps at a time, up toward them.

  Mr. Koprowski grabbed Simon by the arm, yanked him to his feet, and dragged him down the steps, across the polished hardwood floor, and down the hallway to his office, where he called the headmaster, Dr. Dichter, the son of a German immigrant who still spoke German among his family, despite the fact that his country of heritage had twice waged a war against all of Europe, dragging America and her sons into both conflicts.

  The students and some of the school staff had an obvious nickname for him.

  Dr. Dickhead.

  Five minutes later, Simon and the gym teacher were both standing in the headmaster’s office, the terrified Simon apologizing profusely, the headmaster yelling, spitting as he screamed, pounding a fist on his desk, knocking over a cup full of yellow pencils, each sharpened precisely to the same dark point.

  “I caught him red handed,” the gym teacher said, proudly, as though he were describing how he stalked and shot a deer. “I heard him loud and clear. Didn’t I, Shrimp?” he said, leaning close to Simon’s face, his breath rancid like soured milk.

  Simon tried to apologize.

  “I’m sorry, really. I just forgot. I won’t do it again, honest. I just forgot.”

  Dr. Dichter came around the desk with a wooden paddle in his hand. Mr. Koprowski grabbed Simon and bent him over the desk, holding pressure on his neck and arms so that he couldn’t move.

  “We’re not fools, Lone Flight,” the headmaster mispronounced Simon’s name as he yelled and smacked the paddle against Simon’s behind. “You think we’re stupid, that we don’t know what you’re doing. You Indians think you can hoodwink us into believing that you’ve forgotten your language, but we know better.”

  He beat the boy between sentences, pausing only long enough to take a deep breath amid strokes.

  Simon held back his tears, held back his screams. He closed his eyes and imagined running through canyons, the sun hot on his neck, his dog at his side.

  “You think you don’t have to listen to us, but you w
ill. You think you can outlast us, but you won’t.” With that the headmaster finished beating the boy, set down the paddle, and wiped away sweat running down his temple.

  Dr. Dichter pulled out a Bible from a drawer and dropped it heavily on the desk top.

  “You see this?” he said, pointing to the thick, black book. “If English is good enough for the Bible, it’s good enough for America and good enough for you.”

  Simon knew better. He resisted as best he could beneath the force of Dichter’s sarcasm. He stared at the dense, gold-leafed book, his eyes welling up with tears.

  Dr. Dichter reached into the same drawer and retrieved a ring of keys, maybe twenty or more. He looked hard at the boy before he spoke to the gym teacher.

  “Bring him along. I know how to break him,” he said, his voice hard and flat. “We’ll make an example of him.”

  Mr. Koprowski seized Simon’s thin arm, bent it behind his back, and pushed him through the office door.

  The angry men led Simon out of the administration building and across the school grounds toward an old maintenance building, while hundreds of Indian eyes watched from classroom windows. All the older students knew what was happening. The same scene had unfolded hundreds of times in the preceding seventy years. The helpless spectators knew what awaited Simon inside the building.

  Some of the girls wept.

  Some of the boys looked away.

  But inside each of them—every last one—resentment smoldered like white smoke from a burning sage bundle.

  Simon had heard the stories and feared what lay on the other side of the chained door. He shuddered while the headmaster struggled to open the padlock and pull the clanking chain through the welded brackets.

  Fear rose in the boy, diluting his resolve. He wanted to be strong. He had not cried when they beat him, and he tried to keep his silence now. But the fear and uncertainty broke him.