Since then the only boxing he’s done has been as a coach—in between his main job of running the harness and shoe repair shop. He’s as good a coach as he is a harness maker—which is saying something. Though he does sometimes go on a bit about how this sport came to be in England with its Marquis of Queensbury rules.
England. That’s where Pop and his regiment of 3,800 men went first before being sent to France. I remember Pop describing how it looked as they got close to the English shore.
And I’m on that boat. I can see the white chalk cliffs of Dover ahead of us as our troop ships near the land. I can smell the salt spray, hear the harsh voices of seagulls as they circle around us. . . .
“BIRD!”
I open my eyes.
Mr. Handler is staring at me and holding out a pair of boxing gloves.
“Your turn,” he says.
Against who? I’m thinking as I slip on the gloves. Then I see who’s stepping into the circle that is serving as our boxing ring. It’s Bear Meat, a big grin on his face.
Oh my!
“Go get him, Jay!” Possum yells. Bear Meat, the leader of our gang, outweighs me by a good fifty pounds. From the grin on his face this is going to be all in fun—for him, at least. But I do not think he is going to pull his punches.
The other forty boys gathered around us are echoing what Possum said in various ways. Except none of them are cheering me on.
“Go to it, Bear!”
“KO in the first, Chief Bear!”
Mr. Handler ignores them all.
“Remember today’s lesson?” Mr. Handler whispers to me, right hand on my gloves, left on Bear Meat’s. Then he raises both hands.
“Touch gloves.”
Bear Meat thrusts his gloves against mine so hard that it makes me take a step back. If that had been a jab to my chin it would have knocked me into next Tuesday.
Mr. Handler clicks the stopwatch he uses to time the two-minute round we’ll be boxing—unless I get knocked silly a whole lot earlier.
“FIGHT!”
Bear Meat steps in with a lazy, looping roundhouse right. I duck under it and dance back, gloves up in front of my face.
“Come on, Jay Bird,” Bear Meat growls, still grinning. He steps forward with a left jab that knocks my right glove back into my nose. It stings, but doesn’t keep me from hopping to one side and avoiding the right cross that jab set up. This time, I circle to my right.
“Finesse it, Jay Bird,” Possum hollers, using the word I taught him today out of my Webster’s. That he pronounced it “fin-essey” doesn’t take away from the pleasure of knowing I’ve got at least one person rooting for me.
The sudden thudding of Bear Meat’s left against my right shoulder diminishes any pleasure I’d been feeling. I stagger to the left where my ribs—THUD—are greeted by Bear Meat’s right hook.
That hurt. But despite having half the wind knocked out of me, I do not go down.
Bear Meat knows he’s got me, though. He’s no longer trying that hard. He’s just pushing me around. He grabs me in a clinch.
I try to remember what to do. I dip my right shoulder, pivot up from my hips, and throw the punch we learned today. A right uppercut.
It lands square on Bear Meat’s jaw, but all it does is just about break my own knuckles. Bear Meat steps back half a step and throws another punch of his own. A hard left hook.
WHOMP!
It lands square on my chin and knocks me flat on my backside.
I’m only there for a moment. I’m up on one knee, trying to keep going when I hear Mr. Handler yell “TIME.”
I’m pretty sure it is well short of two minutes, but I’m glad he’s taken pity on me. I was not going to quit, but if Bear Meat hit me again with one of those pile-driver punches it would have scrambled my brains.
Possum and Little Coon are helping me up. Bear Meat is walking around with his hands raised. He’s got the right to do that. No question who whupped who.
Then he comes over to touch my gloves. There’s a grin on his face and he’s saying something. Maybe okay.
Mr. Handler’s pulling off my gloves. The ringing in my ears is letting up enough that I can make out his words.
“I’m not going to ask you to join my boxing team, son. We got enough punching bags. But I give you credit for hanging in there. You got sand, son.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
STOMP DANCE
Despite all the hard physical work we have to do and nonstop schedule every day, there are warm nights when we still have enough energy to sneak out to the one place at Challagi that’s truly free.
The woods.
It’s where we can hunt with no one watching. Some of it with Possum’s bow and arrows. Cook the game we get. He’s a real William Tell when it comes to knocking down a squirrel from a high branch. And sometimes with his single shot .22—which he’s been letting me use.
We can catch catfish from Challagi Creek, where it meanders through the trees. Sometimes—but not too often—a chicken finds its way out of the school hen yard and into our pot. We can eat better food here than is ever served in the dining hall.
The woods are where you can get away, where you’re no longer here.
Deacon is the one who said that first to me.
Of all the boys in our Creek gang, Deacon’s the best rock thrower. He’s like a major league pitcher. He can knock a can off a fence from a hundred feet away with that side-arm delivery of his. He is also the most thoughtful of us, saying things that make you think. That’s why he got that nickname, a nickname that’s not entirely a joke. Like all the nicknames here at Challagi, it makes some sense. More sense than the discipline and stupid rules.
Like the one about dancing.
No dancing.
Not just here at Challagi, but everywhere. The Indian service actually published a broadside forbidding all Indians to dance. Because dancing is a waste of time. It encourages heathen behaviors.
That broadside was printed here in the Challagi print shop by Indian students. It was one of the first things Deacon showed me when I was rotated to the print shop after my two weeks in shoe repair and harness making. Him showing it to me sure made me laugh.
Not that the no dancing rule is funny.
What’s funny is that anyone would imagine dancing as being a bad thing. Also, as I mentioned earlier, one of the things they encourage here at this school is the Indian Club doing western Indian dancing for visitors and performing around the area to create goodwill and raise money for the school.
The funniest of all, which brings me back to Deacon, is that they can’t stop us Challagi boys from dancing. We just have to get far enough away into the woods along the upper reach of Challagi Creek. That’s where Deacon leads our stomp dances.
Deacon is not much to look at. Average height, average build. His arms are long, though, which is one reason why he is such a good stone thrower. His skin’s about the same color brown as mine. His hair is jet black, his face round and a little flat—though not as flat as the face of Pancake, who looks like he got hit by a frying pan. Aside from me, Deacon’s the quietest one in Bear Meat’s gang. But even though Bear Meat is our leader—some even call him “Chief” in a half-joshing way—once we get into the woods around the fire, it’s Deacon who takes the lead. He grabs up a rattle and shakes it.
“Oh-pan-ka-ha-ko!” he shouts.
Stomp dance!
As soon as he yells that he looks about two feet taller. And everyone lines up behind him.
One of the strange things about Challagi, which might be hard for an outsider to understand, is how much freedom we boys have once we get off the main campus. All we have to do is be back in our beds before the first bugle call. But when you consider the fact that there’re thousands of acres around the school with little hills and valleys, woods and
fields, there’s no way the authorities at the school could ever hope to keep total control weekends and during the nights. Some of those who run the school just seem to turn a blind eye.
Even old Mr. Rackett, who is the assistant disciplinarian and always looks like he is sucking on a lemon, ignores what happens in the woods or after dark. He’s the one you see perched up on the water tower, the sun glinting off the binoculars he uses to spy on us.
Matter of fact, some of the Indian staff members, especially those former students who now work here themselves, not only tolerate our going into the woods campus but sometimes even take part themselves.
Mind you, it’s only the boys. Not the girls. Those matrons in the girls’ dormitories watch over them like hawks all through the day and owls all through the night. No one is allowed to sneak out of—or sneak into—those houses at night. It makes me feel sorry for those girls.
But we boys have a kind of freedom in the woods that’s almost as good as what I felt riding the rails with Pop. Almost.
Even though I’ve been here two months, I haven’t heard from Pop yet. I still wake up some nights whispering his name. Listening for his breathing, trying to smell him, to reach out and try to touch his back. But not as often as during the first month I was here.
Someone pokes me. Of course, it’s Possum.
“Jay Bird, move your feet!”
I’ve been standing stock-still, even though the stomp dance has started. Daydreaming at night.
I do as he says, breaking into the shuffling rhythmic steps of stomp dancing.
I no longer feel like an out-of-place white boy, the way I did before. I feel like I belong to our gang. Maybe I’m not totally Indian, but I’m not the same as I was before. I’m seeing things another way.
And stomp dancing.
“Heee-yah heee,” Deacon calls out.
“Whey-ya-hey!” the twelve of us all chant back as we shuffle around the bonfire we’ve built in the clearing a little ways back from the creek.
“Heee-yah hee!”
“Whey-ya-hey!”
“Heee-yah hee!”
“Whey-ya-hey!”
“Heee-yah hee!”
“Whey-ya-hey!”
It keeps on like that, us dancing, repeating that chant as Deacon shakes his rattle that he made from a Number 3 can with river stones put into it. If you’re not doing it, it might seem like it would be boring. But it’s not.
The first night the gang brought me here to their camp along Challagi Creek was a warm Saturday night, the second week I was here. We’d left dummies made of old blankets in our beds to fool anyone other than C.B., who might make a visit to look in on our dormitory. No one worried about C.B. causing trouble about our being out at night. C.B. had been a student himself. He’d climbed down the Virginia creeper more times than any of us. He turned a blind eye to what we did at night, especially on weekends.
But every now and then Superintendent Morrell himself would visit the houses after bedtime to check on his charges. He never did more than just pause at a door and peer inside. Actually coming in a crowded dormitory, sometimes sort of rank with the smell of unwashed boys passing gas after a meal heavy with beans, was something that did not appeal to him.
Walking the trail by the light of a full moon that first time I felt like I was walking not just into the woods, but back in time. The only one with a lantern was Bear Meat, the rest of us trailing behind. Me the last in line. The rest of our group looked like shadows more than people. But I was comfortable with that. After all, I had behind me all those nights Pop and I spent camping back away from roads where no one could find or bother us.
Before long we came to the long creek that runs through Challagi’s woods and the prairie. And now there were more lights to be seen than the moon and the distant stars in the sky above us. Along at least a mile of the creek I saw the glow of small fires, just about every hundred yards or so. I stopped to look at those campfires, squinting my eyes as I counted them. One, two, three, four.
Little Coon walked back to me, chuckling. “Ayup,” he said. “That’s how it is on a nice Saturday night like this’n. We got us a whole bunch of stomp dances tonight. More’n half the beds’ll be stuffed with blankets back at the houses.”
Possum came to join us. “Older Creek boys got their stomp grounds there,” he said, nodding his head toward the closest fire. “Next there’s two or three Cherokee gangs, a couple of Choctaw crews. The catfish in the creek won’t be getting much sleep tonight.”
When we got to our place along the creek, the moon was bright enough for me to make out the shadowy shape of a small cabin set back near the woods edge. That had to be the clubhouse Possum told me about. It had been built with boards liberated from the cast-off pile back of the carpentry shop. The roof was salvaged from an old building being torn down that would have just been burned. The moonlight glinted off the tin roof.
We went to the very middle of the clearing where I could make out a rough fire circle surrounded by stones.
“Fire keeper,” Bear Meat said.
Little Coon stepped forward. “Present and accounted for,” he said, his voice so mock serious that it was clear he was sort of making fun of our morning military drills. Then he tugged at my sleeve.
“Know how to make us a fire, Jay?” he said.
I didn’t bother to say ehi. I just reached out and took the hatchet and the box of lucifers he was holding out to me.
There were dry pieces of plank cut into short lengths piled by the side of the fire pit, along with bigger logs. I took my time, splitting the planks down into pieces almost matchstick thin. Other pieces I shaved with the blade so that there were curlicues of wood all along their length. I arranged them into a conical shape, piling bigger pieces around them so the heat of the fire would rise up into the center of the little structure I’d made.
Then I knelt down low, struck the wooden match on a stone, sheltered that flaring match between my palms and gently thrust it in the center. The thin pieces caught right away, then the lengths with the shavings on them, then the bigger pieces. Before you could count to a hundred, the whole pile was blazing.
“All right,” Bear Meat said, turning to Deacon.
They all knew I’d never stomp danced before. I’d told Possum that and he’d just given me that split-face grin of his.
“Shucks,” he’d said, “that’s true of half the boys who come here. And no wonder seeing as how not just their parents but maybe even their grandparents went to Indian schools. You just watch and join in when you feel like it.”
I’m not sure how long I watched that night or when it was I joined in. I just know that I found myself in that circle, dancing around that fire, and feeling fine.
* * *
• • •
We finish our first round of dancing. I’m breathing hard, but the night air is cool and clean. Just as it was on the first night I stomp danced. I feel almost contented as I put some more wood on our fire. That’s the job that has fallen to me since that first night our gang let me be the fire maker.
As I pile on one piece of wood and then another, I find myself thinking about all the nights I tended a fire for Pop and me. Is he somewhere sitting next to a fire now?
The feeling of contentment leaves me. Once again I am wondering and worrying. That one question that came to mind was like opening a door. At first there’s just a crack and then it swings wider. A cold breeze blows in from the other side. But all it brings me are more questions I can’t answer.
What is my father doing now? Is he in Washington? Is he part of the growing army of Bonus Marchers I read about in the old newspapers I check every time I can get to the school’s little library—which is a windowless room only a little larger than a closet. Sometimes those papers—which I now know are donated by Mrs. Tygue after she reads them—carry articles about the Bonus Army.
Whenever I read one of those articles all I can think about is Pop. Is he okay?
Is he ever going to come back for me?
That last question opens up a whole other door. Now I am not just worrying about him but about me.
How long am I going to be here?
Deacon has handed his rattle to Little Coon. Little Coon gives that rattle a shake. We’re about to start another round of stomp dancing.
“Hold on,” Bear Meat says, holding up his hand. He peers into the darkness around the big sycamores at the woods edge. “Who goes there? Step out and show yourself.”
A shadow detaches itself from the other shadows and moves slowly forward.
“It’s that white boy who keeps tagging along behind us,” Dirt Seller says.
It’s Tommy Wilson. The moonlight shines on his pale, uncertain face.
“Hunh,” Bear Meat growls. “What you doing here, staluskey?”
“Just . . .” Tommy says, “just watching.”
“You don’t belong here, staluskey,” Bear Meat says. “Get gone!”
Tommy lowers his head and mumbles something.
“Hold on.” Little Coon asks, “What you say?”
Tommy lifts his head and repeats the word. “Isti-cah-ti,” he says, clearer this time. It’s a word I know because Possum taught it to me. Isti-cah-ti. Indian.
“What?” Bear Meat says. “You saying you are Indian, white boy?”
“Muskogee,” Tommy says, his voice even stronger. “That is what my dad says we are. Me, too. Even if my mama is white.” He squares his shoulders. “I got Indian blood. Cal knows I’m Indian.”
“My, my,” Little Coon chuckles. “Don’t that beat all? But what you doing here, Muskogee Boy? Why you follow us tonight?”
“Stomp dancing,” Tommy says. “I like it. We did not have any Indians around where we live, but my dad taught it to me. I know what song you just did. He called it ‘The Old Rooster.’”
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