The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (50 page)

The thousand women present let out a single scream, and still one heard the thud as the falling man struck the roof. Even those who managed to get their hands over their ears before he hit still heard inside their heads the heavy sickening thud, and felt it in every cell of their bodies.

He ought to have been instantly killed, but as a matter of fact, he survived—helplessly crippled, to be sure, but still miraculously alive. Despite some eleven operations over the years, all paid for by the community he so despised, he remained permanently bedridden and immobilized, requiring even to be fed, a duty which his wife conscientiously fulfilled, although her patient was not noted for a cheerful disposition.

The event has remained vivid in local memory, and often, hearing the clock strike the hour, New Jerusalemites pause at their play or at their busy chores to recollect for a moment those desperate hours it tolled that earlier day.

In October 1945, under “Ten Years Ago This Week,” and again in October 1955, under “Twenty Years Ago This Week,” the
Lariat and Northern Bee
reprinted its original account of that day when, as Grippo the Human Fly, Stan attempted to scale the courthouse tower, preserving unrevised in the interest of historical accuracy its concluding observation that he was not expected to live. Stan died in the little cottage provided for him near the jailhouse and we buried him just last week—it was his obituary I have lately had to write—after thirty-three years as a ward of the town. Anyone who supposes he was grateful for our charity not only didn't know Stan, he doesn't know human nature.

Some readers may, like ourself, be intrigued to know how many times the town clock chimed over that period. 10,571,358.

The Last of the Caddoes

I

B
Y THE
shores of the Red River, in Texas, lived a boy named Jimmy Hawkins, who learned one day to his surprise that he was, on his father's side, part Indian. Until then Jimmy had always thought he was just another white boy.

A curious reluctance had kept Jimmy's mother from ever telling him about his Indian blood. She had felt it from the time he first began to question her about himself, about the family. She shied away from it warily, almost as though in fear. This was very silly of her, of course. Just childishness. Some old bogeyman left over from her early childhood, nothing more. She had never seen a live Indian in her life. The savages, even in Texas, had long since been pacified, not to say exterminated. Being afraid of Indians in these days and times, when the only ones left were celluloid Indians, Saturday-matinee horse-opera Indians!
Ugh. How. Me big chief Squat-in-the-Mud. Heap big medicine
. Ridiculous! It was quite plain that what she really felt was not fear at all, it was in fact a touch of jealousy, possessiveness. For it was not she but his father from whom the child got his Indian blood, and obviously she was jealous of that part of him, small as it was, that was alien to her. Not that this was not equally silly of her, of course. Not that the Indian in himself was not equally alien to her husband. Certainly he would never try to use this bond to draw the boy closer to himself, away from his mother. There was really no reason for it. And that was it, precisely. That explained entirely why Mrs. Hawkins, and, following her lead, Mr. Hawkins, had let their Jimmy reach the age of twelve without ever mentioning this trifle about himself: there was no reason to.

Yet all the while Jimmy's mother felt she really perhaps ought to just mention it. There were times, indeed, when it was as though she were being urged from all sides to tell him, reproached for her silence, even almost commanded to speak out without further delay. “But what on earth difference does it make?” she would argue. “Nowadays what difference does it make? None whatever.” Though in fact it might have made a great difference to Jimmy. The boy was simply crazy about Indians: read about nothing else, dressed himself up as one, made himself beadwork belts, sewed his own moccasins; his mother might have guessed that to be able to claim he was part Indian would have pleased him as nothing else could. “But it's only the tiniest little fraction,” she would rejoin. “Hardly enough to count.” Or, again: “It isn't as if I had deliberately not told him. Heavens! Why on earth would I do that? What's it to me, one way or the other? The subject has simply never come up, that's all. If it ever should, why then, of course …” Just who it was she was arguing with at these times she never knew.

It came out unexpectedly one day when they were having one of their rows. Lately it had gotten so all they ever did, it seemed, was fuss and quarrel. Jimmy was passing through a difficult phase. Going on thirteen now, and feeling new powers stirring within him, he was forever testing his strength, trying his mother, seeing just how far he could go, how much he could get away with. This one was their third fight in two days. Jimmy had done something he knew not to do, had been scolded and punished, and had turned sullen and defiant. His punishment would end, he was told, when he confessed he had been bad and said he was sorry; the set of his jaw proclaimed that he had vowed he would sooner die. He could be very stubborn. He was getting to be more than a match for his mother, as he well knew: too big for her to switch anymore—the very threat had begun to sound absurd—almost too big for his father to correct; and he soon reduced her to that frazzled state where, as she would say, she didn't know what to do. He grew bolder and more impudent until at last he said something so sassy she slapped his face. This made dart from Jimmy's black eyes two poisoned arrows of hatred. “Oh!” cried his mother, pierced by his look, “I don't know what gets into you at times like this!” Then before she knew it: “It must be the Indian in you coming out.”

Jimmy instantly forgot his burning cheek. The Indian in him! Did she mean it? Real Indian? Which tribe? What part Indian was he? How long had this been known? Why had she never told him before?

But his mother had already told him more than she ever meant to. “You get it,” she said dryly, “from your father, not me.” To her surprise, and her chagrin, she found herself trembling, positively seething with anger. She felt somehow as though she had been tricked into letting it out. What was most exasperating was to find herself so vexed over a mere trifle. But what she felt was not altogether anger, and she knew it. One of her heartstrings had just been tied tight in a hard little knot of fear.

Jimmy's antics, meanwhile, did nothing to soothe her temper. His disobedience, his mother's displeasure, the sentence of punishment he was still under all forgotten, he was circling round and around her doing an Indian war dance. Brandishing an invisible tomahawk, he stamped his feet, ducked his head, then flung it back, all the while patting his mouth as he whooped, “Wah wah wah wah wah wah—” Until, shaking with rage, she hissed at him, “Little savage! Treat your mother with no more consideration than a wild savage! Well, that's just what you are! So act like one, that's right! Be proud of yourself for it!” Then she broke down in tears and ran sobbing from the room.

Thus, not until he was twelve, almost thirteen, and then only by accident (or so it seemed at the time), did Jimmy Hawkins learn that he was part Indian. And that that was the part his mother blamed for all she disliked in him.

II

How big a part? Which tribe? These questions, and others, Jimmy did not again put to his mother, eager as he was for an answer to them—not after her angry outburst. His hurt pride would not let him.

She had said he got it from his father, so Jimmy went to him. But he checked himself long before he got there. Not much pondering upon the matter was needed to make Jimmy even less willing to question his father than he was to question his mother. More Indian by half than he, his father had connived at, or at the very least had acquiesced in, keeping from his son the knowledge of his Indian ancestry. There was a name for men like his father, and a punishment decreed for them. His father was a renegade, and so without further ado Jimmy drummed him out of their tribe—whichever that might prove to be.

To be an Indian, even if only in part, was to Jimmy so glorious a fate it was impossible for him to imagine anyone feeling differently. But any lingering doubts he may have had about how differently his mother felt were soon dispelled. For although she had meant never to mention it—unless, that is to say, it just came up by itself, of course—once it was out and there was no taking it back, she found herself saying again and again, whenever he goaded her to it, which was often enough as the warfare between them went on, “That's the Indian in you coming out, that's what that bit of deviltry is. Little savage!” Though each time she said it it seemed to draw tighter that hard little knot in her heart.

And it was no sooner said than something awful began to happen. Something truly sinister. Something quite uncanny and even unbelievable, and yet precisely the sort of thing that might have been expected. Indeed, it now seemed to have been a premonition of this very thing that had kept her from ever speaking out before. Overnight Jimmy began to look like an Indian. He really did. What made this sudden transformation the more uncanny was that, strictly speaking, he looked no more like an Indian than he ever had, or ever would for that matter, with his corn-silk hair and pale, almost white eyebrows and lashes, his fair, not to say pallid, skin. His only feature that might have been Indian was his glittering black eyes—brown, actually, but a brown so dark, especially being set in that pale face, as to be really black. Yet all the same he really did begin to look like an Indian—more so every day—more so each time he was reproached with being one. More sullen and sly: more Indian.

It had certainly made a change in him: Jimmy could see it for himself. And no wonder. For although it may have come out accidentally, the revelation that he was an Indian found him already prepared to be one. He knew all there was to know about Indians. All his reading, ever since he learned to read, had been about the Indians, and in the accounts of the wars between them and the white settlers he had always taken their side. Now at last he knew why. They had been calling to him, blood calling to blood.

The things about himself that Jimmy had not understood before were explained now. His outbursts of temper, his touchy pride, his moods of contrariness, his impulses of cruelty, the stubborn streak that so irritated his mother: his Indian blood not only accounted for all these, it absolved him from blame for them. If he behaved sometimes like a little savage it was because he was a little savage. It was not his fault. He was what he was. He felt a burden of guilt lifted from him. He was through forevermore with apologizing for himself. It was not his fault that he was part Indian. He could not change that. He could not have done anything about it even if he had wanted to.

Being an Indian was not going to be all fun then. It never had been: this Jimmy knew from his reading; to be one in his day and time was harder than ever, it seemed. Situated where he was, cut off from his people, not even knowing yet who his people were, he was alone, surrounded by the enemy. He would need to be very crafty, very cunning, very wary. He would need to tread softly. He would have to sleep always with one eye open. He would need to grow up very fast. At his age an Indian boy was already training to be a brave.

He no longer joined in childish games. It did not befit his new dignity. To be an Indian was a serious responsibility. He seldom smiled, never laughed anymore. He comported himself with the gravity of a sachem, spoke with the sententiousness of one of Fenimore Cooper's sagamores. He exulted inwardly to see that his new disdainful silence was more exasperating to his parents and his schoolteachers than open defiance had ever been. When stung by one of his mother's slurs upon his Indian blood, he betrayed none of his resentment; he stored these up with Indian patience, all to be repaid with interest one day.

Meanwhile the more he brooded upon it the more he resented never being told that he was what he was. And who knew how much longer he might have been kept in ignorance? Had she not lost her temper that day and let it slip, his mother might never have told him. The prospect of this appalled Jimmy. When thought of that way it was not just the pleasure and the pride of being part Indian that he would have been deprived of: that would have been never really to know
what
he was.

It had come out despite them. Blood, they said, would out, and Indian blood, more powerful than any, would out though it were only a drop. There was an unseen power at work here. The spirits of his long-denied red forefathers had spoken to him at last (ironically enough, through his mother's own mouth) and claimed him as one of their own. Only who, exactly, were they? What was he? Indian, but what kind? Heir to what renown?

There was just one person who might be able to tell Jimmy the answers to his questions.

III

That his Grandfather Hawkins was half Indian, or more, was plain for all to see, yet Jimmy saw it for the first time when next the family went for a visit out to the farm. He who had been looking all his life for an Indian to adore!

But how were you to recognize the Indian in a man who dressed always in baggy, patched old denim overalls and a tattered denim jumper out at the elbows? Who, as Jimmy had seen, let his old wife cut his hair using an oatmeal bowl as a form instead of wearing it down to his shoulders in braids? Who when he came into town came not riding bareback on a horse but in a creaky old farmwagon drawn by a team of plodding gray mules? Sixty-five years of plowing, hoeing, picking cotton had taken all the noble savage out of the man.

“Grandfather,” Jimmy said, “I've just been told that I am part Indian, and that I get it from you.”

“Who told you?”

“My mother.”

“Did, did she? Well, sonnyboy, our side of the family is ever bit as good as yore mother's, and you can tell her I said so. She's got a lot to brag about, now ain't she? Them Tylers. What did e'er a one of them ever amount to? Old Dub Tyler, jake-legged from all the bootleg corn liquor he's drank, in debt to everbody in town: he's something to be proud of, I reckon? That's yore other grand-daddy. So any time yore mother's in the mood to trade compliments about—”