Little Big Man (20 page)

So I immediately got the idea we’d be traveling around to the opera houses, giving shows, lifting sixteen midgets with one hand, breaking iron chains and all, for the chaplain says: “Jack, this is the good man who has graciously consented to adopt you. You must honor him as you would your own Papa, for that’s what he has become by law.”

The fat man glanced at me over his beard, shifted his powerful shoulders, and said in a voice as deep as if it echoed from a canyon bottom: “Can you drive a wagon, boy?”

I admired him and wanted to please, so said: “Yes, indeed, right good.”

“You’re a liar, boy,” he growled. “For where’d you learn to drive a wagon if you have been reared by the Indians? We shall have to beat the lying out of you.” He leaned down, grabbed my shirtfront, and lifted me into the buggy with only his left arm. It was like being levered up with the trunk of a tree.

The chaplain squealed: “Oh, Jack, you must be respectful to the Reverend and show him that you learned at least some manners in your short time among us.”

That was it: my new Pa was not a theatrical performer but another goddam preacher, as if I hadn’t had my quota of them, and his name was the Reverend Silas Pendrake. In addition to that black beard, he had thick black eyebrows, and his skin was white as dried pipe clay. He sure looked mean. I had retained my scalping knife in the waistband of them Army pants I still wore, underneath the shirt, and I considered putting it into his spine as we drove towards the Missouri River. But I was discouraged by the look of his enormous spread, which run about four foot from shoulder to shoulder and almost as thick through. I believed my blade would snap off against it, as if you’d stab a stone wall.

That knife and Muldoon’s six-foot clothes comprised my total property. They took my pony when we got to Leavenworth and I never saw it again. I think the chaplain sold it to compensate for my keep, and his tow-haired kids got to playing with my Cheyenne bow and broke it.

At the river Pendrake drove his buggy right onto the deck of a stern-wheel boat that was sitting there. His horse by the way was a big, patient gray animal; and you might figure how strong he was to pull his gigantic owner. That horse was a might leery of me, as I could tell from the curve of his nostrils: I reckon he could smell the Indian on me though I had washed at least four or five times all over in the months since leaving the tribes.

After a while they got that boat going, and it was interesting but I didn’t like it much because I remembered Old Lodge Skins would mention that if a Human Being, anyway, went over much water he would die. Of course I had been raised on the Ohio at Evansville, but that was long ago, and the Missouri to look at won’t build your confidence. It is always undermining its banks before your eyes, and I reckon that if enough years go by it will have worked its way out to Nevada and be irrigating them deserts.

I ain’t going to tell you where we was heading, except it was a fairly prominent town in western Missouri. The reason for my delicacy will be clearly apparent in the sequel, as they say. So we’ll just go on here from where we docked after a trip of some hours, and drove off the boat, and through the town to the better section of it, where Pendrake had himself a proper church and next door to it a two-story house of some substance, with a barn in back into which he run the buggy, and said to me the first words I can recall he uttered since leaving Leavenworth: “Do you know how to unhitch a wagon, boy?”

I had learned my lesson. “No, I don’t, sir,” says I. “Not a-tall.”

“Then you must figure out how to do so,” he rumbles, though not nearly as mean as he talked at Leavenworth, and I immediately got the idea that maybe his manner there was intended to offset the mincing ways of that chaplain, so I wouldn’t think all preachers was alike. I’ll tell you right now about Pendrake: he never seemed to know how to act natural except when eating; otherwise he appeared to be trying to live up to an obligation to someone or something else. I think if he’d of cut himself, he might bleed to death before working it out laboriously that the thing to do was put on a bandage.

Well, it wasn’t hard to study out how to unhitch that horse, and aside from tossing his head some, but doing that slow and heavy, the animal didn’t give me no trouble, and I got him in the stall. After that was done, though, I was in a quandary, on account of I still didn’t have no faith that Pendrake wouldn’t take a marvelous price for a bad guess. If I stayed in the stable and he expected me up at the house, there might be hell to pay. On the other hand, if I went to the house, maybe he’d rather I stayed in the barn. I decided for movement, as usual, and headed for the house, but instead of going into the back door which he had used, walked around to the front, thinking I’d avoid him for a time that way and also get the lay of the building in case I’d have to run for it.

I went up on the porch and through the front door, and into a hall where a hatrack stood fashioned of deer antlers, then stepped into a parlor which I expect wouldn’t look like much today but it was then a wondrous sight to me with the brass coal-oil lamps and tidies on the furniture to keep off hair-grease, for though Pendrake wasn’t exactly wealthy, he sure wasn’t seedy like my folks had been and wasn’t Army like that chaplain.

Then that great voice said behind me: “You’re in the parlor?” He wasn’t exactly outraged by it, just dumfounded.

“I didn’t break nothing,” says I.

I hadn’t turned till then. When I did, expecting to see his hulk directly behind me, he was actually farther away than I thought. With that voice of his, he could be a hundred yards distant and still sound on your neck.

But now, between him and me, was a woman with dark-blonde hair drawn across either side of her face and into a bun at the back. She had blue eyes and pale skin, though not the dead white of his, and wore a blue dress. I reckoned she was about twenty years of age while Pendrake was fifty, so believed her his daughter.

She was smiling at me and had teeth smaller than average over a full underlip. She kept looking at me but talked to Pendrake.

“I don’t think he’s ever seen a parlor before,” she said velvety soft. “Would you like to sit down, Jack? Right here,” pointing out a kind of bench covered in green plush. “That’s called a loveseat.”

Pendrake sort of growled deep in his windpipe, not in rage but rather a sort of stupor.

I said: “No thank you, ma’am.”

And then she asked if I wanted a glass of milk and a piece of cake.

There wasn’t nothing I wanted less than milk, for which if I’d
ever had a taste I had long lost it, but thought I’d better play along with this girl if I was going to have a friend in that house, so followed on to the kitchen and by so doing got out of Pendrake’s way for a while at least, for he went to a room off the parlor where he wrote his sermons and sometimes spoke them aloud; you could hear him rumbling through the woodwork and the glassware would tinkle all through the place.

In the kitchen I met another individual who was friendly right off. She didn’t have no other choice, being colored. Though freed, she wasn’t acting cocky about it, I can tell you, for it was within the law in Missouri of that day to keep slaves. I guess once you’ve been one, you always figure you can be made into one again. She got on my nerves slightly, however, with her everlasting good humor, which I suspect was partly fake, and I’d have had more in common with her great-grandpa who carried a spear in Africa. This cook’s name was Lucy and she was married to a fellow who worked around the place outside, cutting grass and all, another freedman by the name of Lavender. They lived in a little cottage out beyond the stable, and I could sometimes hear them arguing out there in the middle of the night.

That white woman which I took for Pendrake’s daughter was actually his wife. She was older by five or six years than I had first thought, just as he was some younger. Still, there was quite a range between them and I already wondered that first afternoon what she saw in him. And I might as well say now I never found out, either. I reckon it was one of them marriages arranged by the parents, for her Pa had been a judge and such a fellow wouldn’t want a saloonkeeper for a son-in-law.

Mrs. P. now sat across the table while I drunk the milk, and impressed me by the interest she took in my early life, or seemed to. Here was the first soul who ever asked about my adventures, which surprised me in a refined white woman in the Missouri settlements, whereas that colored Lucy, though laughing incessantly and saying “Lordy,” couldn’t have cared less and I knew figured me for a mighty liar.

I saw I had a good thing in my stories, so didn’t exhaust them all at once. I also tried to mind the eating manners showed me by that chaplain’s wife, where the first time I set down to table I picked the meat off the plate with my hands. I knowed better now and cut that cake Mrs. Pendrake give me bit by bit and daintily inserted it into my mouth on the point of a knife.

When I was done, she said: “You don’t know how glad we are to have you with us, Jack. There aren’t any other young people in this house. Your coming has let the sun in.” I thought it was a pretty thing to say.

Next thing she did was take me shopping for some new clothes. She got her bonnet and parasol, and her and me walked into the commercial part of town, for it was not far and the day was fine weather in early October as I recall. We come across a number of people that Mrs. Pendrake knowed and they gawked at me and sometimes talked with her as to my identity. The women generally made a clucking noise and sort of simpered, though I drew a belligerent look from certain of them who were old maids, schoolteachers, librarians, and such, for I hadn’t got a proper haircut in five years and probably had a nasty expression in spite of my efforts to look decent.

As to the men we encountered, I don’t believe a one of them could have told you later whether I was tall or short, for they kept their eyes fixed on Mrs. P. She had quite an effect on them. I don’t believe I done her justice in the description, which I have tried to tell from my point of view that first day. As I had spent my formative years among the Indians, my basic taste in women was for black hair and dark eyes. She was also supposed to be my adopted Ma, so I was restrained somewhat from looking at her purely as a woman. But it’s only fair to say that with white men I reckon Mrs. Pendrake was thought to be indeed a beauty, and most of them we met that afternoon acted like they’d have got down on their knees and hung out their tongues if she’d of asked them to.

CHAPTER
9
Sin

OF COURSE I HAD
to go to school there in that town, and it may surprise you to hear I didn’t mind it much. Sitting on a hard seat for long hours was the worst part, and I wasn’t thrilled none by the sour old spinster who taught us, and it was also embarrassing to be put with the tiny children, for I never had much learning up to that point. I could read a little before I went with the Indians, and I could count, and I understood that George Washington had been President though I couldn’t have said when.

Let me just say I labored diligently at my studies, and Mrs. Pendrake tutored me at home, and by spring I had advanced in reading to where I could do the work of twelve-or thirteen-year-olds and in composition right well though spelling was never my strong point, but in arithmetic I stayed virtually a baby. But that was ever so many year ago and I didn’t go to school long, so if the man who is listening to this story of mine copies it down the way I am saying it, you will read the memoirs of a uncultivated person, that’s for sure.

The Pendrakes must have talked some to each other in my presence, but I swear I can’t remember any such occasion. As I see them back over the years, we’re sitting to supper in the dining room, the Reverend at the head of the table, Mrs. at the foot, me along the side, Lucy putting down bowl after bowl of steaming food. After grace, Pendrake’s voice not loud but so penetrating that I reckon it could soften tough meat, he’d dig into his chuck. He was a prodigious eater, outdoing even a Cheyenne in that respect, for while an Indian will stuff himself most wonderful there is much of the time that he has to go hungry; it evens out over the course of a month,
say, to somewhat less than the average intake of a white man who never misses his three square.

But Pendrake laid into it day in and day out, and I’m going to tell you what he’d eat on any one of them, for you won’t have an idea of that man without knowledge of his appetite.

For breakfast Lucy would fry him six eggs, a great mass of potatoes, and a steak about the size of his two giant hands put together. By the time that was chawed up and had been washed down to his belly with a couple quarts of coffee, she’d deliver the griddle cakes, ten or twelve surmounted by a hunk of butter big as an apple and dripping with molasses. For lunch he’d eat two entire chickens with stuffing, potatoes, couple vegetables, five pieces of bread, and half a pie swimming in cream. In the afternoon he’d make calls on sick parishioners, and they wouldn’t never be so under the weather that they couldn’t see to it he got an enormous hunk of cake or a dozen cookies along with coffee or tea.

Then came supper. He’d drink a bowl of soup into which he broke so much bread it was more solid than liquid. Next would be a platter of fish, then a huge roast of beef which he would singlehanded reduce to the bone after me and Mrs. Pendrake had maybe a slice each; a mountain of potatoes, a swamp of greens, and boiled turnips and black-eye peas and steamed carrots, four cups of coffee and about five pounds of pudding, and if there was any pie left over from lunch, he’d drive that home as well.

Yet for all that gluttony he was the neatest eater I ever seen. He wouldn’t put a finger on any type of food but bread; for the rest he used knife and fork as nicely as a woman does her needlework. And when he was through the plate shone as though fresh washed, and such bones as was left rose in a little polished stack in an extra bowl he had Lucy lay by for that purpose. It was a real show to watch him take a meal, and I got some pleasure from filling in the time that way, left over after I satisfied my own appetite.