While the Locust Slept

by Peter Razor

  “Not long now,” Dale said. “Half hour, maybe.” He took the water bottle, peered out, then stepped down. “Let’s go,” he said, heading toward the village. I stepped down, squinted up and down the track, and followed him.

  No one was out as we walked up the main street. A community hand pump on a village green seemed our only source of water. Two boys of high school age appeared from an alley across the street and paused to stare. We ignored them and I began pumping. The handle worked loosely and dry scraping was heard from deep in the bowels of the pump, but no water came.

  “Must be dry,” I muttered, giving the handle a shake.

  Dale tried pumping, but to no avail and stood silent behind me. He suddenly gripped my shoulder and pointed toward the boys across the street. “They’re comin’ after us, looks like,” he said.

  Thinking they might be only curious, we let the boys approach, but when they were close enough, each grabbed one of us.

  I cried out. The taller one seemed surprised. “I’m just holding your arms,” he said.

  “I’m sunburned. Can’t you see?” I squawked.

  “Yeah, we didn’t do nothing,” Dale said. He seemed ready to fight, but contained himself.

  “Hey, yer Indian,” the tall boy exclaimed.

  “So?” I replied.

  “Didn’t think Injuns got sunburned,” the boy said. “Yer both dirty hoboes, looks like to me.” He looked hard at me, then at Dale.

  “Gypsies came through here last year. You’re not them coming back?”

  The shorter boy let go of Dale. “Injuns don’t run with Gypsies,” he said. “They’re on their own, all right.”

  “You gonna call the cops or let us go?” Dale asked, squaring off to the boys. “We’re looking for work and stopped for water.”

  The tall boy murmured thoughtfully, “That’d be your freight then.” He nodded toward the tracks.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  The boy holding my arms released me. “How come an Indian and a white boy are running together?” he asked.

  As I shrugged in response, a train whistled far to the north.

  “Here, I’ll help you get water,” the taller one interrupted. “Better hurry, the freight takes off soon’s the passenger train is gone.”

  “We tried getting water, but the pump’s broken or something,” Dale said.

  The tall boy grinned, pointing to a pail of water near the pump. “It’s called priming. You gotta pour water in the top and pump quick until the water comes. Then pump until the water looks clear. You could get sick if you drink bad water.”

  The boys watched as we filled the bottle, then waved us off. “Good luck,” the taller boy called after us.

  “Thanks for the help,” Dale called back. I nodded.

  Soon, we stood in the door of our boxcar looking out. The sleek diesel passenger train rounded the bend north of town and passed us only yards away.

  Twilight faded as our train chugged north and the countryside dimmed to now familiar blacks and grays. In less than half an hour the train stopped at another small town. It wasn’t clear why the train stopped, but boot steps soon approached and stopped one car down. We pressed into a corner on the door side of our car as the boot steps were again heard, closer. They stopped outside our doorway and the dim outline of a man’s head and shoulders leaned in the doorway. The man disappeared from view, and I shivered as the door slammed shut encasing us in blackness.

  Soon, the engine chugged and our car lurched into motion. We tried to open the door, but could not coordinate efforts in the dark. After much pushing and prying, we abandoned our efforts and went to sleep.

  I couldn’t help thinking we might die from the cold. The constant rumble and the engineer’s mournful warning for highway crossings became a constant reminder that we were trapped with no escape.

  At dawn a sliver of light glimmering about the door stirred us awake. Using the wood ends from the fruit crates, we pried and pushed until we cracked the door enough so both of us could get a hand on it. In spite of fatigue, we forced it open, then sat in the open doorway taking in the sun-flooded landscape. The sun soon warmed the car and once more we fell into a deep sleep of exhaustion.

  A whistle screamed, waking us. After kneeling and staring numbly at the passing landscape, I realized it was late afternoon. Dale breathed more deeply after resting, though his blistered face still looked terrible. The train slowed to a horse trot. He roused, moaned quietly, then crawled on hands and knees to the door. He stood against the frame, leaning out.

  “Hey, there’s a bridge up ahead,” he said. “Gotta go.”

  He leaned on the vertical frame of the doorway and faced out.

  “Better watch it or you’ll really be Chief Rain in the Face.”

  “Flush the pot, I gotta go, too,” I said.

  Dale gave me a painful sunburned smile.

  The engine rounded a sweeping bend and squared off on its approach to the bridge, a fragile structure with no guard rails and long, spindly poles supporting a narrow track bed. I worried that a train—our train—would be too heavy for such a structure. But our car passed the center of the span with no thundering collapse, and the scene from an open boxcar became a beautiful panorama of forested hills and valleys. The stuff of slide shows at the State School auditorium.

  By late afternoon, feeling numb, I felt helpless to face more problems. Though I had planned to leave the boxcar and make my way to the reservation, I had lost my nerve. I couldn’t leave our home until it quit taking us where it was going.

  The air was crisp as our train entered the outskirts of a larger town at dusk.

  “Superior,” Dale mumbled as we passed the yard sign. He sounded dejected.

  “Superior is in Wisconsin,” I said, “I’ve never been here. Think there’s a place for a person to go for the night and leave in the morning?”

  “A movie showed the Salvation Army givin’ people food an’ a place to sleep,” Dale said.

  “That’d be salvation, all right,” I said. “They have to sing hymns first, don’t they?”

  “Yeah,” Dale agreed.

  The train rumbled slowly into town and after backing up, stopped in a railroad yard alongside other strings of cars. The sky had turned black, like it would on a cold, moonless night in February. We stepped into a world of tracks and twinkling stars, walking stiffly between rows of boxcars. The diffusion of city lights dimly outlined boxcars. Reaching into open cars, I felt the floor around the doorway. I reached inside one car and palmed along the floor.

  “Hold it,” I said. “Paper insulates, right? There’s long sheets of it here.”

  Stiff, smooth paper stretched as far as I could reach.

  “It’s heavy and maybe two layers thick, I think.”

  I climbed into the car and, on all fours, explored the extent of the paper. One at a time, we held one end of a sheet of paper, rolled over and over wrapping ourselves in layers of paper—a cocoon. We slid out, retrieved the remaining fruits and vegetables, then climbed into our paper tubes to escape a deepening chill. Faces to the air, we crumpled the paper about our shoulders to hold in the heat. I fell hard asleep.

  “Come out of there!”

  The voice jarred me awake.

  “Come out! We know you’re in there!”

  The words were loud and sharp. I shoved my head into the cold and blinked into strong lanterns flooding the car. I peered at Dale, propped on elbows, who also squinted into the light. I don’t know whether the men stalked or accidentally found us. Two figures leaned in the door. It sounded like more were nearby. I held my hands out to shield against the blinding lights.

  “Snap it up!” someone barked.

  Two hands grabbed for my wrists. I flinched my arms up, tried to sidestep, but the hands flew down and grabbed my ankles. As I fell out the door, I was caught by others and set on the ground gently enough, but one man would not release his painful grip on my upper arms.

  “My arms are sunburned,” I sa
id. The man shone his light on my arm, then grabbed my wrists which were the least burned.

  “We didn’t do anything wrong, let us go, and we’ll leave your railroad,” I said.

  “Kids yer age can’t run loose. Ain’t healthy.”

  With our odyssey ended, I sobbed, quiet at first, then uncontrollably, harder than anytime in years. It was embarrassing, crying so hard in front of the men and Dale, but I couldn’t stop. I looked up through watery eyes at Dale who also sobbed. We had never seen each other cry. The men did not talk while we cried, but held our wrists so we couldn’t wipe our eyes. They were gentler after we sobered.

  “Hey, we got an Indian here,” one man said. I glanced up at him.

  “Those are bad sunburns,” another said.

  “How long you been gone from home?” the man holding my right arm asked. “Can’t talk, huh?” He reached toward me. I flinched sideways and banged my head against the car.

  I winced and bent away from the man.

  “You all right?” the man asked, talking softly. “Pretty touchy. Let me look at your head.”

  The man took a step nearer.

  “Only a scratch and bump. It’ll be all right,” he said.

  A police car arrived at the end of the yard, two men got out and approached down the aisle. Held behind the men, up to then, I was suddenly jerked into the glare of an officer’s flashlight.

  “This one’s Injun,” one proudly stated. “Seems both are from the same place. Good thing we found them, poor kids.”

  “Going to get real cold tonight,” another man said.

  “What did they do?” the officer asked.

  “Sleeping in the boxcar,” a man said.

  “Is that all? If we put everyone in jail that slept in a boxcar, we’d have the jails full.”

  He pointed at the man holding me.

  “Do you need to hold them? They don’t look dangerous. I’m sure county social services will know what to do. Looks like they’ll need clothing and a bath and something for those….” He peered closer at Dale, “Looks like, sunburns. I’ll have to report to the sergeant first.” He motioned us toward his car. “You look cold. Better jump in the car and warm up.”

  We limped to the car. We told the officer our names and about the State School on our way to the jail. I knew it was over.

  Near midnight we stood awkwardly between the two officers before a high desk. The intake officer, called from home to officiate, appeared surprised and leaned over his desk staring down at us.

  “What’s the charge?” he asked, louder than necessary.

  The kind officer from the railyard looked at us, then to his companion, “I … I’m not sure,” he said, shrugging, “Would it be running away?”

  “We have no facilities for runaways at this jail,” the intake officer boomed. He lowered his pen and stared at us.

  “Put them in the back cell with double bunks until Owatonna sends for them.”

  The kind officer acted surprised.

  “Lock them up? They haven’t done anything.”

  Flushing with poorly controlled anger, the intake officer leaned over his desk, his pen pointed at us.

  “We can’t have juveniles running loose around town now, can we? Lock ’em up!”

  “They need a bath, clean clothes…. And those burns,” the officer persisted. “With no charge, shouldn’t we call social welf—”

  “They look all right to me, lock ’em up!” He entered our non-arrest in the blotter. “The cell on the end.”

  The jailer, apparently called in to work as well, herded us to the end cell of the empty three-cell jail. Dale faced him as we passed him.

  “Kin we have somethin’ to eat?”

  The jailer locked the door, paused, and stared through the bars.

  “Breakfast is in the morning.”

  Though it was our first night inside a building since leaving Owatonna, it was cold in the jail and the jailer departed before we realized the bunks had no blankets.

  “Hey, anybody there?” Dale yelled into the corridor. “We got no blankets, and the window’s broke. Hey, it’s cold in here.” Only silence, no sounds of life anywhere in the jail.

  10

  Miss Monson loathed me. She hated my sullen silence, my quiet disrespect. To punish me, when I was barely ten years old, she made me sit for hours in a cramped mop closet. I was concealed there, knees tight to my chest. I would wrap my arms around my legs, or sit on my hands, when the cement floor was cold, to keep my rump warm. I have no memory of why, but I sat entire evenings there, beginning soon after supper, listening to the sounds of play through the vents low in the door. Sometimes I dozed, head on knees. After the other boys went to bed, I sat in eerie quiet. Just before she was ready to go to sleep, Miss Monson would pull the door open.

  “Get to bed,” she’d say. “Next time you’ll behave, won’t you?” It was painful, after hours of squatting, to stand quickly, but to avoid a shove or a whack, I shuffled hastily, stiffly, to bed.

  …

  We were the sole occupants of a three-cell jail. When the jailer left, one hall light remained on, and the jail grew tomb-quiet.

  “Everyone’s gone for the night,” Dale said.

  “Probably. There’ll be nothing doing ’til morning, then,” I said.

  “If the place burns down, we’re goners,” Dale grumbled.

  “Wouldn’t mind the heat,” I said, smirking.

  That night was a struggle to survive the cold. Dale took the thin mattress off the top bunk, and laid it on the bottom mattress. We then squeezed between mattresses, against each other. We mumbled about returning to the school until sleep quieted us.

  “Breakfast.” It was a different jailer, and he clanged the bars noisily, rudely, with his key ring.

  I opened my eyes to see him staring straight at me, his face pressed against the bars. He held two cups and a paper plate. The jailer’s obesity was exaggerated by a short wide frame, and he had a dull look to his face.

  “Come on, I ain’t got all day. If you don’t want it, I’ll go,” he growled.

  I sniffed, but our breakfast had no odor. Dale took a cold sandwich, which contained one slice of bologna smeared with a white spread. The jailer then handed him a cup of warm brown drink.

  “This all we get?” Dale said.

  “Lucky you get that. Give it back if you don’t want it.”

  “We can do better on our own,” Dale said. The jailer looked at me but did not offer the sandwich. I poked Dale from behind—however meager, it was our first meat and bread in a week.

  “Here, Chief,” the jailer said.

  I took the sandwich, ate ravenously, and drank the awful coffee, simply because it was warm. Dale and I talked briefly after eating, then slept on individual bunks until awakened later by the same man rattling his keys on the bars. He seemed to enjoy harassing us.

  “Dinner time, come and get it,” he said in a sarcastic singsong.

  Dale went quickly to the door, grabbed a sandwich and cup. Stepping back, he waved the sandwich over his head. “Food’s a fancy name fer this thing,” he said.

  “Don’t get smart with me!” the jailer snarled.

  “We didn’t ask to be here,” Dale said.

  “Nobody does.”

  “Well, we did nothing wrong,” Dale said. “Running away from that hell can’t be illegal. And how come we got no blankets? It’s cold in here.” He slurped, spilling some of his drink on the floor. I extended my hand for the sandwich, which the jailer did not offer. Instead he glared at me, and I pulled my hand back.

  “What you got to say, Injun?” he sneered, but he gruffly shoved the sandwich through the bars. “Here.”

  A more civil jailer brought supper, after which Dale and I talked until we grew sleepy.

  Almost immediately, it seemed, it was morning and we were awakened by the obese jailer. “Yer breakfast,” he said. Our diet never varied. Sleeping against the wall, I kneed Dale, who rolled out and reached for a sandwic
h. I took my sandwich, and we ate sitting on the bunk.

  The jailer did not leave and continued to stare at us. He coughed and his midsection jumped. I looked at Dale who had also stopped eating and we both stared.

  “What you looking at?” the jailer said. He sounded piqued—childishly piqued.

  “Nothin’,” Dale replied, calmly biting his sandwich.

  “Yer leaving today,” the jailer said.

  Dale and I sat up looking at each other. “When?” I asked.

  “Now,” the jailer said as he unlocked the door. He suddenly stared hard at me. “Hey, the Injun can talk English.”

  “You can eat on the run,” he said.

  Dale dumped his drink in the basin as he started toward the open door. “What was that junk anyway?”

  The jailer faced me, “You don’t like our food, neither, I suppose?” he growled. “Git, before I change my mind.” Following Dale, I pulled my head low to my shoulders, as I passed the jailer.

  Halfway down the corridor, Dale looked around at me. “A week in here, and we’d starve to death,” he said.

  I laughed to myself. “Forsooth, twas the hemlock and nigh to do us in,” I said. The heavy steps behind quickened and I was shoved hard in the back. Still limping and without energy to resist, I stumbled awkwardly into the main room where I caught myself against a chair. That might have grown nastier were not others present in the intake room. Though no one had checked on us in the jail, a small crowd gathered to witness our departure.

  “We’re getting rid of them,” came a whisper from my right.

  No sooner had I straightened from the shove, than I saw the social worker. I knew him by his surprise. He had been walking in our direction when I burst into the room. Now he was stopped dead in a forward lean.

  Straightening, the social worker shot a disdainful look to the obese head jailer, then looked back to us, drawing a deep breath. “You’re Peter, and you must be Dale,” he said, scrutinizing us. Our necks, arms, and faces were smudged with dirt, our hair matted, and we wore filthy ragged clothes and disintegrating sneakers. The social worker looked back to the head jailer.