Cherokee

by Giles Tippette

  I said, “What about a white man? Can he go up to the north end?”

  The waiter was a grim-faced sort of man about fifty who looked like he could use a shave and a bath. He said, “Yeah. Hell, they dyin’ fer us to come down there an’ spend our money. Yeah, a white man can go all over town, git anythang he wants.”

  Hays said, “Thet don’t seem very square.”

  I gave him a quick look, but the waiter kind of leaned forward and said, “Talk like that around here gen’lly comes from folks lookin’ fer trouble. Messin’ in other folks’ business.”

  I jumped in before Hays could say anything. “We’re just passing through. I’m lookin’ for a fellow and figured to ask at the Tribal Council about him.”

  The waiter relaxed a little. I guessed he figured we were sticking our nose in where it didn’t belong. He said, “Yeah, it’s that big building at the north end of town. If yore man’s Injun or married to Injun they’ll know. Got records go way back. Ah’ll say this fer them Cherokees. If I got to put up with Injuns the Cherokees be the best of the bunch. Even if the gummit does mollycoddle the shit outten ’em. All Injuns is lazy, worthless bastards, but yore Cherokee is ’bout the best of a poor lot.”

  Hays said, “You said they couldn’t get a drink this side of town. Ah didn’t see no saloons lookin’ north.”

  The waiter said, “Huh! They got they saloons. Jest don’t call ’em that is all. They’s a place up the street called the Cigar Store. Only don’t go in there ’xpectin’ to buy a smoke. Place sells whuskey. You kin git all the whuskey you want on the Injun side. Cheaper too than crost the line. Thet’s wha’r I buy mine to take home. Course they ain’t suppose to have it. Law says they ain’t supposed to be none on the reservation ’cept what’s controlled by white men. This end of town is knowed as a sutler’s store. All of it. The very hotel you a-sittin’ in. In fact, oncet, it was jest a sutler’s store. Gummit give who owned it hunnert acres. Town growed up round it an’ it jest natcherly growed. Line down the middle of town is the property line fer the sutler’s place. So all this is private prop’ity. Injuns jest tacked on they part of it at the line.”

  Hays said, “Well, if the law says they can’t have it, where they get it? An’ how come it’s cheaper?”

  The waiter moved away, toward the kitchen. He said, over his shoulder, “Ast them Injuns. Beats the hell out of me.”

  We ate our breakfast when it came and didn’t have no more words with the waiter. I didn’t really know what good it was going to do to ask at the Tribal Council for Charlie Stevens since he wasn’t an Indian, but Lew Vara said they kept up with just about everybody, and especially anybody that would have had much dealings with the Indians. I figured a sawmill operator would have had to have had a few Indian customers. But it didn’t make much difference. The train had brought us here, and it wasn’t going to take more than a few minutes to ask and it certainly couldn’t hurt anything.

  I paid our score and we walked out of the hotel buttoning our jackets. It seemed to have warmed up, though I didn’t know if it was the weather or the good breakfast we had in our belly.

  Hays said, “That ol’ boy wadn’t especially fond of Injuns, was he?”

  “You got to remember, Hays, wasn’t that long ago that an Indian wasn’t much different than a panther or a cougar or a bear except they were a hell of a lot more dangerous.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve knowed some Cherokees. Even worked oncet with one on a ranch up in the Panhandle. Damned good cowhand. They suppose t’ have been a sight more civilized than even some of the whites or Mes’kins round here.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that,” I said. “Howard said they were a far piece from the Comanches or some of them other tribes would just as soon skin you alive as look at you.”

  “So where does that ol’ boy waitin’ tables git off actin’ so high and mighty about them? I don’t see whar he’s got all thet much to brag about, hustlin’ hash an’ pourin’ coffee.”

  “His kind have always got to have somebody to look down on so they won’t know how low they really are. Anyway, keep your mouth shut about the subject. We ain’t up here doin’ good works for the church; we’re carrying this here worrisome gold and I’m in a hurry to get shut of it.”

  While we were putting the saddlebags back on the horses he looked across at me and said, in that sneaky way of his, “You know, I can see whar that ol’ boy didn’t want to give you no breakfast. You was to let yore hair grow out and braid it an’ git a little paint on yore face, why, you’d be right at home in a teepee. I never noticed it before it was called to my attention. I reckon I’d better call you ’Chief’ from now on instead of Boss.”

  I gave him a look. “You better be worrying about what I call you. How about ’out-of-a-job’?”

  We mounted up and rode slowly down the street toward the big log building at the end. I could almost tell when we passed the line in the middle of town, though there wasn’t a single marker. I guessed it was just something everybody knew about and understood. I agreed with Hays; it seemed like a damn poor way to treat some folks who, from all appearances, were doing a pretty good job of being civilized.

  We tied up in front of the big building that I had guessed right was the Tribal Council. I left Hays to watch the horses and the gold and went inside. It was plenty light enough to see. They had a whole rack of windows opening on the north and some back to the east. I went into a kind of outer room. There were three or four desks and some men sitting behind them working over papers. They were all dressed in regular clothes, and only one of the men had long hair in braids. I picked out an older-looking man and went up to him. He looked up as I approached. There was a chair beside his desk. He said, “Howdy.”

  The man had some gray in his black hair, but his face didn’t look much older than mine. I said, “Howdy. I’m looking for a fellow. Hope you can help me. He’s an old friend of my father’s and I’ve come up from Texas to find him.”

  The man said, “Is he Cherokee?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Is he Indian?”

  “No.”

  “Married to Cherokee?”

  I smiled slightly. “A friend of mine who used to live up here said the Tribal Council kind of kept up with everybody. I hate to waste your time.”

  “Oh, you’re not wasting my time. That is what I’m here for. Sit down and tell me the name of this person. Maybe he is in our files. Who can say?”

  When I sat down he said, putting out his hand, “My name is Joe Slowfox.”

  I shook hands with him and told him mine.

  He said, “So you have come up from Texas. A long distance?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I live down in the south.”

  “Then this must be important business to bring you so far. Tell me this man’s name and I will do my best to help you.”

  “Charlie Stevens.”

  Mister Slowfox laughed. “Oh, I don’t have to look in my files for that one. Charlie is an old friend of my people. In fact Charlie was married to one of the tribe.”

  “He was?” I wasn’t particularly surprised, considering where I was and that the bulk of the people, including women, were Cherokee. I was just mainly surprised that Howard hadn’t mentioned it. It would have made my job a lot simpler if he had told me. But I reckoned it hadn’t occurred to him.

  Mister Slowfox said, “The girl was not full blood of the tribe. But her mother was Cherokee, and when the mother is Cherokee we consider that to make the baby Cherokee also.”

  “Not the father?”

  Mister Slowfox shook his head. “The bull casts many seeds but the calf comes only from the cow.”

  “I see,” I said. “If the mother’s full-blood Cherokee, then you know damn good and well the offspring is at least half-blood. I do that with my cattle as a matter of fact.” I suddenly thought I might have given offense. I rushed to say, “I didn’t mean no disrespect making it sound like I was comparing my cattle to your people.”

/>   He smiled. “Why should that bother me? It is a good way to do it, right? A sure way.”

  I nodded, glad I hadn’t put my foot in it. “Would you have any idea where Charlie Stevens would be?”

  “Certainly. Your father must have told you he had a sawmill in Anadarko?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Indian held his palms up. “He still has it.”

  “And he’s there now?”

  “So far as I know. Charlie was here but a few days ago. We buy a lot of lumber from Charlie. He said he was going home and Charlie speaks with a straight tongue.”

  I gave him a look and he smiled slightly.

  He said, “I put that last in at no extra charge.”

  I got up. “You didn’t have to. I believed you were an Indian. What do I owe you?”

  He shook his head. “For telling you where to find an old friend? Nothing, of course. Do you need any other help?”

  I shook my head. “No, I got a pretty good idea where Anadarko is. Due west.”

  “And a little to the north.”

  “Well, much obliged.” I turned to walk out, and then paused. “One thing I would like to ask you . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Well . . .” I was a little embarrassed. “I was kind of wondering where ya’ll got those names. Like Slowfox.”

  He smiled. “If I told you my real name you could not write it down. That is my name in English, but it means the same. My father named me Slowfox because he saw some dogs catch a fox the night before I was born. Our names are taken from dreams or from what is seen in nature. Some people think that a name such as Swiftdeer would mean the man who is named that can run very fast. But that is a stupid way to think because the man was named before he could even walk. He might be as slow as Christmas.”

  “Well, I was one of them stupid people that thought thataway. I appreciate you straightening me out.”

  I give him a little salute and went on out. Hays was leaning against a post, smoking a cigarillo and waiting. I said, “Let’s go,” and we mounted up and turned our horses north.

  Just a little beyond the edge of town we struck a road running mostly to the west. We took it and started off across the rolling land. The country was so stark it looked like I’d never seen its kind before, even though I’d seen even worse out in west Texas. I figured it had been so long since I’d been away from the gentle land of the coast that I was just shocked by the change. The country looked almost bare. You’d look ahead and see a patch of ground and think it was just yellow clay, but when you got up to it, you could see it was dried grass that had been cropped off so close, either by cattle or game, that it was nearly down to the roots. We saw a good many trees, poplar and elm and osage, and lodgepole pine and even some oak. But except for the pine, they were all as bare as fence posts, and just kind of stuck up in the cold sky like so many skeletons.

  The country rolled, as I say, and then made little hills and shallow valleys, with here and there a butte rising kind of stubbornly straight up from the prairie. It just wasn’t the most welcoming country I’d ever seen. But then, I had to remember that I was just come from an area where grass nearly grew all year round and a hard freeze was a seldom thing. That was one of the drawbacks of railroad travel; it was just too fast, it didn’t give you time to adjust. You get on the train one morning and the weather is mild and every tree is still in full leaf. Then next morning, you find yourself in a country that has suddenly been frozen over and doesn’t appear as if it could grow anything but icicles. Of course I knew I could come back to this same place in the spring and wouldn’t even recognize it.

  Hays said, “Where we a-going?”

  “Anadarko. Town about twenty miles away.”

  “You git directions in that Injun house?”

  I shook my head. “Naw. Lew Vara told me.”

  “Lew Vara? He here?”

  I gave him a look. “Of course not, you ninny.”

  “Call me a ninny! You tell me you got directions to this here place, Anna what?”

  “Anadarko. Lew gave me the directions back in Blessing.”

  He just looked at me.

  I said, “Lew knows this country. He knew we had to come to Chickasha on account of the Tribal Council. He said Anadarko was just west of there. You satisfied?”

  “I figured you found Sitting Bull in thar and he told you where to go. How’d you get along with them Injuns? You talk sign language?”

  I said, “I only saw one ’Injun,’ as you call him. And was I you, I wouldn’t get in any spelling bees with him. I would reckon he is a little more up on his reading and writing and ciphering.”

  “Well, never mind about all that,” he said. “I want to know if you found out anything about this Charlie Stevens we’re lookin’ for.”

  “Man said he was in Anadarko.”

  Hays looked at me. “You mean we might ride on about fifteen or sixteen more miles and run across this hombre, and hand him these sacks of lit dynamite and turn around and head for home? Just like that?”

  I gave him a hard look. “Goddammit, Hays, don’t you have better sense than to put your mouth on our luck?”

  He realized immediately what he’d done. “Damn my mouth! Justa, I’m sorry.”

  “With you saying that, he will have just got on a train and left the country for a month! Goddammit, Hays, you know better than that.”

  “I know,” he said. He hung his head. “I know it. Damnit!”

  We had been riding for about an hour. I got out my watch and looked at it. It was about half past nine. “Let’s kick these ponies up and make a few miles.”

  We put the horses into a slow gallop, the packhorse staying right up and not having to be led. It was a good road, straight and flat, but then it didn’t have much to curve around. As we rode we now and again met a farmer in a buckboard or a man and woman in a buggy. You could tell they were Indian, but they were dressed just as proper as anyone you’d want to see. I didn’t understand this reservation business, and one of these days I was going to have to ask somebody about it. I couldn’t figure if the reservation was intended to keep the Indians in or the whites out or both.

  It was strange seeing an occasional teepee, though these now were made out of canvas rather than buffalo or deer skins. Usually they were set in the middle of a big patch of drying and dead corn stalks.

  Now and again we’d see a cabin, the lower half made out of logs or rough-sawed timber and the roof out of canvas. Most of them had a corral outside with a few horses standing around with their heads down. Like the teepees the cabins looked weather-beaten and lonesome. But you knew somebody was home on account of the thin trail of smoke rising from the chimmney pipe up into the cold air.

  There were some cattle scattered here and there, but they didn’t appear to be of any particular breed. They were kind of poor-looking. I figured that, in a harsh country such as central Oklahoma, they sold off most of their stock except mamma cows and bulls before the winter.

  Most of the country was poor-looking, but now and again you’d see a big two-story clapboard house painted white set well back from the road. Most of them had two or three well-kept barns or outbuildings with several corrals, and usually some fields of winter wheat or oats along with stubbled fields of harvested wheat or corn.

  Hays said, as we pulled the horses down to give them a blow, “This here country is dead.”

  “Now it is,” I said. “But I got a feeling it does fancy well at other times of the year.”

  He pointed to the telegraph poles that ran alongside the road. “How come we didn’t take the train?”

  “Because there ain’t one to Anadarko. At least that’s what the agent in Fort Worth told me. I know what you’re thinking, but there are places where the telegraph runs that the trains don’t go. Remember, we’re on a reservation. Everything ain’t going to be exactly as you expect.”

  “What the hell is a reservation anyway?”

  “I’m the wrong one to ask that
question.”

  “Hard to believe we was in Blessing just a few days ago.”

  “Let’s push these horses up some more. I’m already hungry again. I’d like to get into that town and get some lunch.”

  “From the sound of the name of the place all we likely to be able to get is pemmican.”

  I just give him a sour look. Hays wasn’t physically able to go more than half an hour without saying something smart-alecky.

  About an hour and a half later we topped a little rise and saw a pretty little town about a mile off, nestled down in a little shallow valley. We rode straight on toward it. It was about the size of Blessing, and could have been Blessing had Blessing had a bunch of teepees scattered around outside of town and if most of the horses on its streets were pintos and paints.

  Hays said, “Boy, them Injuns like them colored-up horses, don’t they?”

  “If it was what you were used to you’d like them fine yourself.”

  We were looking for the sawmill, and it wasn’t hard to find. It was by far the biggest structure in town. We were still a half mile out of town when I spotted it down to the south and a little behind the buildings on the main street. I pointed it out to Hays. “Let’s look for our man there.”

  As we rode closer I could see clouds of steam rising from the place. Obviously Charlie Stevens had converted from a mill race that would only rough-hew logs to a steam engine that would run a blade fast enough to cut fine lumber.

  And as we got closer we could hear the sound of the place. It sounded like the biggest hornet’s nest in the world, giving off a variety of high-pitched whines that made you just want to grit your teeth. I had no earthly idea how men worked inside such a racket for any stretch of time.

  We went past the main street and rode around the line of buildings at the top of the town. I could see a big pile of logs up at the back of the sawmill. And beyond them was the biggest pile of sawdust I’d ever seen. Back in Matagorda County it would have made a fair-sized hill. The sawmill itself was made out of corrugated tin and was nearly two stories high. I could see the line of the river that Howard had mentioned to me running close to the mill. I figured the mill race was long since gone, but then we got closer and I saw that it was still in operation, though now it appeared to be used to turn big fans that blew into an open side of the mill. They were disconnected now, but I figured they were used in the summer to cool the place off. The sun beating down on that corrugated tin in the summer could probably make it hot enough to heat soup without a fire.