Arilla Sun Down

by Virginia Hamilton

  Dad saying, “The spirit wolf never comes. Maybe it knows. Whether or not, that isn’t why I come.”

  “Why do you come, Dad?”

  “Oh, people do what they will,” he says. “Some will go bowling — you think that’s so different? It’s a way of releasing themselves. Or skiing. Or hunting far out in the woods to wait for animals to kill. I come here, to release myself.”

  I know what to ask him, but I want to see his face when I do. I must know for sure. There are some things said that have to be the truth. I know to wait, but I am bursting with it. Knowing better, I just burst out with it. Ashamed to have to say what no one has ever asked him.

  “Dad. Would you ever come back home if and ever one of us didn’t come here to get you?” For fear it is the worst thing to ask him.

  But from asking, the air so close around us seems to clear. Dad lets out a jagged sigh. Puts his arm around my shoulder again. Walking that way, and a long silence as we pass light sprinklings in creases of hills. Now onto a road surface that is no longer snow-iced over gravel. He clutches my shoulder and is silent. I know he is never going to tell me. He tells me.

  “How can I put it,” he says, “when I don’t know the answer myself?”

  “It must be either yes or no,” I say, so full of fear. Never have talked to my dad like this. It makes me feel older.

  “It’s a circle,” he says.

  That slows me in my tracks, staring at him. Wasn’t I thinking it just a while ago that life was a circle?

  “I go and come here,” he says. “Someone goes and comes here after me. I go back and they go back with me. You do not break the circle,” he says.

  “You allow it,” I say.

  “Truth,” he says. “You accept it.”

  There is no yes or no. Only what goes and comes back.

  We go through icy streets, narrow and poor. Men stand in the cold in front of neon signs. They blow on their hands and lean from one boot to the other.

  “Why do they hang around and freeze themselves?” I ask Dad.

  “Why not?” he says.

  Soon we are on Third Street and almost to Luze Montana’s. Dad says, “When Sun Run comes here, we go where you saw the men and we play pool.”

  “Sun knows how to play pool?”

  “And very good, too.”

  “I wouldn’t like it, around so many poor men,” I tell Dad.

  “I wouldn’t take you there,” Dad says, “but not because they are poor. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving!”

  We cross the street and walk up to the hamburger place.

  “You want to eat inside or take it out?” Dad says.

  “Take it out, if it’s all right.” Inside, it is so bright,

  “We’ll eat at Luze’s, in the room.”

  We go in and we order food to carry out. It’s a place where Amerinds come and order food to carry out. I see none of them sitting down to eat the food. We order big cheeseburgers and chocolate malts, and four packages of french fries. I’m going to die, waiting to feast on all that wonderful food. The smell of cooking is making my stomach turn over. No bowl of soup now. I want a feast.

  It seems to take them a whole month! Finally we get the feast and hurry it through the cold to the Montana Inn. Looking like an oasis in some painted desert. Red neon in the almost empty street. Small towns seem to empty when night falls. Except for towns with Amerinds. Amerinds are walking around. Walking themselves forever in circles. Two of them come walking out from Luze Montana’s as we walk in. Holding the door, they don’t look directly at us. It’s not polite to look or to smile foolishly.

  You have to allow knowing and never knowing how you know.

  In Dad’s room we have the feast. Little talking while we eat, and that’s fine with me. Dad wants only half of his cheeseburger and that makes more for me. I get so stuffed, my stomach aches. But I sip and sip until the malt container has only a little foam. Dad and me sitting cross-legged on the floor facing one another. We get to giggling at the fun of it. I bet Sun and him never sat and ate like this.

  Later I ask Dad is there a bathroom. He shows me where out in the hall. I go and come back, and take a seat in the one chair in the room. Taking off my boots to let my feet slide on the carpet, warming them good.

  “So Sun saved my life when I was little,” all at once I say.

  Dad nods, sitting there with his arms folded across his chest.

  “So I saved his life, too, when he got hurt in the glen.”

  “You did well,” Dad says.

  “Sun thanked me for it.”

  “We all thank you,” Dad says.

  Looking around. Dad has wiped off the sled runners and has hung the sled back on the wall. The dirty cleaning cloth is tied to one runner.

  Seeing the leather belt hanging on its hook.

  “I looked in your trunk,” I tell him. “Those are some beautiful things — hope you don’t mind that I looked.”

  He laughs. “Arilla, you are so polite.”

  Then he says, “Things I have collected over the years. From people who I knew well and who have died. The old way was to bury the things with the body. You still might bury a few things, but most are given away these days. Most given to friends to be used. I keep them here.”

  “And only to see them when you come here?” I ask him. “I bet Sun Run would sure like to take a look at that silver bridle.”

  Dad puts his hands palm-flat on the floor. Watches his hands, then eases them back under his folded arms.

  “I thought to hide these things,” he says, “away from your mother. Away from our life.”

  “But why? They’re so beautiful.”

  “Well, a man can learn something, too. I’ve learned, I guess. You can’t cut yourself away from things. The blood is still there behind my eyes.”

  I caught his meaning, I sure did. “Is it … is it behind my eyes, too?”

  “That will be up to you,” he tells me.

  “Like it is with Sun.”

  “Your brother has been playing around with it. Sun Run making a game with it, for years.”

  “He’s a phony, you mean?”

  His hands again palm-flat on the floor. He watches them and doesn’t take them away. “I think your brother hides a lot of hurt,” Dad says. “He boasts with games to protect himelf.”

  “From what?”

  “From whatever it is that scares him to death.”

  “Oh.” I know about being so scared, but I never figured that was what is eating my brother. Anyway, I’m getting tired. The whole thing is too much of a great mystery for me to even think about.

  “Where will I sleep?” I ask Dad.

  Finally he says, “We could go on back tonight. We could start out — might as well — and be home in the wee hours.”

  “Really? Aren’t you worn out?”

  He smiles. He still has his hat on and his hair is straggly around his face. “You have to understand about coming and going,” he says. “After I come here, I have the need to leave, too. It’s the nomad in us — do you know, there are kids, when listing their occupation or somewhat, will write ‘nomad’? And they mean it. They mean that’s what they do, going from one place to another. I don’t like it better here than at home. I like it best to be moving.”

  “But don’t you worry about your job?” I sure worry about it. “About you might get yourself fired?”

  “It’s a way of thinking,” he says. “What you have to do comes first. You need to remember that, Arilla. Believe it.”

  “Okay, I will,” I tell him. But I’m getting awful tired out.

  And then he says something I don’t really understand.

  “Your mind may forget the past. But it always remains inside. You can find it out, Arilla, in your heart. Remember that.”

  “I will,” I tell him. “But can we go now?”

  “For sure, we can go right now.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “I’ll go see Luze
to account,” he says.

  When Dad comes back, I’m ready for him. Have already locked my suitcase, and grab my shoulder bag. “Can we take the sled?” But he sees through that. Knows I am trying to get everything that belongs to him out of here. I still have to. “There’s the hill of the standpipe in Spangler Park.”

  “There are no hills like the one here,” he says.

  “Well.” Figuring some more and getting nervous, but having to ask anyway. “Sun would dearly love to see the contents of your trunk.”

  Dad throws back his head and laughs.

  “You know he would,” I tell him, “you know it!”

  “For sure,” Dad says. “All the time he’s come here, he never once looked into my trunk. You guessed it. And never once took it on himself to go through my things. You’re the character, the one with the gift of curiosity.”

  “Can we, Dad? Take it on home?”

  “Your mother …”

  “But it’s yours. You said, ‘What you have to do must come first.’ Didn’t you say that?”

  “You’ll have to help get it down, then.”

  “Man! Sure!”

  So we take hold, but then Dad remembers he’s left some clothes. He gets what’s left out of the closet, throws it on top of the stuff in the trunk. I carry his work shoes. We take hold of it again. It’s some heavy but not too bad if we drag it. A man we run into coming up helps us back down the stairs. We make a lot of noise; and by the first landing, just above the lobby, Mrs. Montana comes to take a look at what is going on.

  “Well!” she says and gives me that kind look she has. She knows not to question. Just looking and standing out of the way as we come on down.

  “So,” she says. “I’ll be seeing you.” To me, in that husky voice.

  No time to think about it. I only smile because I want to get the trunk on in the jeep before Dad maybe changes his mind.

  Dad thanks the man helping and stands at attention a minute before Luze.

  “Luze, thanks again,” he tells her.

  “Never you mind,” she says, kidding. I can tell she’s a great kidder. I can tell something else, too. Mom says there are some grown women who think Dad is romantic-looking. Luze Montana is sure one of them, I can tell. But I don’t mind. I know Dad is ours.

  “You take care, you hear?” Dad says to her. “And keep up the good work.”

  “Oh, I got to,” Luze says. “Go easy now.”

  Outside, I stand with the trunk at my feet while Dad goes off to get the jeep down the way. He soon comes back and double-parks it in front of me out in the street.

  We hassle the trunk on in the back seat. I throw his shoes on top. Then we sit there in the car to warm it up.

  “How long will it take?” I ask him.

  “Depends. See how the roads are,” he says.

  “Let’s don’t take any back roads. I can’t stand those curving back roads. Makes me kind of ill.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he says. “We are superhighway drivers.”

  “For sure.”

  And we take off. Me in the front seat right next to him. Smelling the way cold cars and upholstery smell. Once we get out of town, the only lights are from the dash and the headlights. I watch the headlights cut on through the dark. Nice. I sit just so still and shivering a little, and full of excitement. Man!

  Once we are on the road going east, making for the I-75 North, Dad turns up his beams. We can see more of fields and hills. Snow-covered. Ice patches. We skid over them and on through fast. I’m not scared with Dad driving. I sink on back, feeling the heater turning the car warm. Feeling myself deep tired and almost all through exhausted. My eyes are wavering.

  “Will you fall asleep?” I ask him.

  Turning to me. “You mean, if you close your eyes?” And back to the road. “I never have yet. Go on to sleep. We got a ride ahead.”

  “I want to see the highway first.”

  So I wait. A half-hour later, about, we come to the on-ramp approach and soon stream into traffic of headlights.

  “This late,” I say, “cars and trucks still going.”

  “Just like I told you. The nomad,” Dad says.

  There’s nothing like gliding down a super-road. The motor roaring and wind whooshing by — or you cut through it, I don’t know which. Finding a lane where you can travel without changing speed. And getting in ahead of trucks when you can.

  “Rolling warehouses,” Dad says as we pass three of them in a row, hugging the outside lane.

  “They don’t worry a thing about speed limits,” I tell him. Dad doesn’t, cither. Getting on ahead so he has the empty road. Dad is driving like he’s late for life.

  “Slow down.”

  “There’s not a soul on up there,” he says.

  “Just some ice waiting for us, if we’re unlucky”

  “Okay.” And slows it close to seventy. Free on up our lane. Rolling. And how much skating is like this.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you ever wonder what I need for the nomad in me, too?”

  A long piece of land going by, lit up first and next vanishing behind before he says a word. Don’t say you’re sorry, you haven’t had the time to think about me.

  “So tell me,” he says.

  Okay. “Roller-skating is what I love to death, I really do,” I tell him.

  “You know how to roller-skate?”

  No need to tell him. He figures it out. Sun going out and probably that I go with Sun and Angel, too.

  “So you have kept up your night wandering. Wait till I get your brother!” he says.

  “Don’t blame it on Sun. But I need to roller-skate in the daylight. Like every Saturday, when Mom is at the studio. I don’t have to stay so shut up in the house. What’s gonna get me? I need to skate and I don’t need so much horseback riding. Just skating once on the weekend and maybe once in the week. Like maybe on a Wednesday from six to eight until you get home. We can eat together.”

  “So,” he says.

  After a minute I tell him, “I’m not really asking.”

  “I gather that,” he says.

  “Will you tell Mom?”

  “Can’t you tell her?”

  “I have to tell her about the trunk.”

  He lets out a soft howl. “Thanks for sharing the dirty work.” And laughs.

  That’s it. It’s what I’ve been getting up the nerve for, more than anything else. Now I can rest, watching us eat up the highway. Glance at the speedometer. How I love cars!

  And wondering, do I write this trip for my autobiography? You could change it and make some stories out of it. Say that I had to go to my first hometown to pick up some stuff we left there. Say it, write it, after how Sun got himself hurt. But change his name to this boy I know who gets hurt and I have to go on a bus ride. Maybe that is writing, changing things around and disguising the for-real. They say dreams you have are some disguising of what happens to you and what worries you. Or what you wish for.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t you ride with me some, now that Sun Run can’t? Jeremiah needs some exercising and you could see how good I’m getting. Will you?”

  “Maybe if you take me skating.”

  “Really? Mom’ll kill us!”

  “We’ll take her skating, too,” he says.

  I just fall over, cover my face, and laughing. “But don’t tell her all at once.”

  “I won’t,” he says.

  “Maybe a little bit at a time over a couple of weeks.”

  “So she won’t notice it,” he says.

  “Yeah!” And laughing my head off. Just a picture of Mom at the rink on a pair of skates is enough to split my sides.

  “And maybe teach her to ride, too,” Dad says.

  “Oh! Oh, my goodness, you’ll never get a dancer on a horse!”

  “You wanna bet?”

  And laughing myself silly. Even a worse picture of her, riding backward, facing
the tail end. Or slipping to the side, staring at her other foot up in the air. Like saying, What is it doing up there! Oh, Mom, I love you, don’t get mad.

  Well, I could write Mom on a horse just like I could write her as a dancer, or even on skates. I could have a name for myself more than Sun Down. It’d be what I gave myself for what I do that’s all my own. I sure will have to think about it.

  “Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Slow down.”

  “You want to get home, don’t you?”

  “But not as a ghost.”

  He howls a comic wolf for a second. “Spoken true,” he says.

  And we fly on down the road.

  Author Note

  Dear Readers,

  I’ve always been interested in my part AmerIndian ancestry. My great-grandmother, Mary Cloud, my grandfather Levi’s mother, was said to be part Patawatami Indian. My Grandmother Lurhetta, who married Grandpa Levi, was said to be part Cherokee. She had long black hair that she could sit on. My mother had black hair just like her mother’s.

  At some point, I began to wonder what would happen if within a family that was both African-American and Amerindian, the Amerindian “traits” and identity became as strong as the African-American. Supposing a girl, Arilla, had a brother, Jack Sun Run, who really thought of himself as an Indian warrior and acted like one, but lived in this mixed-race family. And his sister, Arilla, couldn’t figure out where she belonged or to which group. The mother, Lily, had a strong African-American identity and the father had a conflict between his past life and history and the present. I wondered how Arilla would work it all out.

  Well, that’s how the book Arilla Sun Down came to be. I had to write the story. I had to imagine the brother, Jack Sun Run, all of the characters, James False Face, Luze Montana, and Axilla’s father and mother. And most of all, I had to feel for and follow Arilla’s difficult coming-of-age as she found her way to her true identity. It was not easy, but I’m very fond of this book. I love the language and the characters. They have always seemed very real to me.

  A Biography of Virginia Hamilton

  Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) was the author of forty-one books for young readers and their older allies, including M.C. Higgins, the Great, which won the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, three of the most prestigious awards in youth literature. Hamilton’s many successful titles earned her numerous other awards, including the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, which honors authors who have made exceptional contributions to children’s literature, the Coretta Scott King Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, or “Genius Award.”