books that the slavery issue was hot in Missouri of this date, and there was private wars over it and shootings in the dead of night, a reign of terror and so on. Well that ain’t no lie, but you could be living right in the middle of it like me and never know it was going on. Remember that next time you read something. I knowed many a man who went all the way across the prairies during the Indian wars and never saw one hostile savage. That’s the way reality operates. I wasn’t ever interested in politics, so I never saw any. In them days there was always somebody getting shot or knifed, and you wouldn’t think nothing of it. And then I have an idea that Pendrake was so respectable that he might not have had to take a loudmouthed stand either way.
The Reverend broke off at that point and pulled the oilcloth from the basket. Lucy had packed us more food than all of Old Lodge Skins’s band ate during one whole winter. There was two or three cold fried chickens, a great hunk of ham, about a dozen hardboiled eggs, two loaves of bread, and a chocolate cake, just to mention the larger items.
We hadn’t done nothing so far but sit under the wagon, and I wasn’t too hungry. I was also feeling a little queasy from being damp in wool; among the Cheyenne you wear leather, which takes the rain almost like your own skin. Or maybe I might have been embarrassed at Pendrake’s jawing about matters that should be private. I guess I already knowed it at ten, before I went with the Indians, but I had forgot how the conjunction of men and women is looked upon as dirty by the whites, so they got to involve it with law. Lucy and Lavender shared the same room, but it was against the laws of God and man until Pendrake said a few words over them, after which it was O.K.
Well, it was an entertainment to see the Reverend consume that lunch. I ate a wing, an egg, and a piece each of bread and cake and felt myself uncomfortable full at that. All the rest went soon enough into Pendrake’s great belly. What was left of the contents of the basket was a pile of cleaned bones and eggshells within fifteen minutes.
Then he brushed his beard with his fingers, though I never in my acquaintance with him saw him drop a crumb into that underbrush-he was neat about food, I believed, because he wasn’t going to let a morsel escape his mouth-and picked his teeth and cleared his passages with a huge draught from a jug of water that Lucy had included.
“It has been a great satisfaction to me to have this talk with you, boy,” he says then. “And I hope and trust you will derive some value from it. We have not before had the opportunity to know each other, for while I am your father upon earth, I am much occupied with serving my own Father in heaven. But He is also yours, and in serving him I am serving you, if I do it properly. That effort leaves me little time for the delightful sport we are enjoying today, though to enjoy oneself moderately is surely no sin.”
I haven’t mentioned how I had to sit Sundays in church and listen to Pendrake’s gab. The only consolation was that Mrs. P. had to go as well, wearing her fine clothes, and it was a proud thing to sit alongside the most beautiful woman in town, with the men, including the ancient elders, stealing looks at her and their women all peevish. But them sermons! Pendrake’s trouble was he didn’t have no fire. Unlike my old man, he didn’t get no release from his religion, but rather was further bottled up by it. That might have kept him from getting killed by savages, but maybe it is worse never to open your spirit up to the wind.
Anyway, he always said a good deal about “sin,” and what I got to wondering now we was sitting there, was what in his opinion constituted such. You may remember with my Pa it was cussing, chewing, spitting, and not washing your face. It seemed likely Pendrake had another view. Anyway, we obviously wasn’t going to catch any fish, and lunch was over, and despite the Reverend’s remarks on the satisfaction afforded by our little talk, he was still uneasy-looking. I reckon a man who puts out words all the time gets to wondering whether they are ever being received.
So to oblige him, with the same motive I had called Mrs. P. “Mother,” I asked about sin. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and he had wiped off my face. I am like an Indian in that if I am treated nice I’ll try to make a return.
He had a wider-sweeping definition of sin than my Pa’s, and a longer list of specifics than my old man had give, probably because Pa was an amateur at preaching and couldn’t read. For Pendrake’s roster wasn’t properly his own but rather, as he admitted, that of the Biblical Paul.
“The works of the flesh,” answers the Reverend. “And ‘the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like.’ ”
It was a funny thing, the most important years of my rearing so far had been handled by my second father, who was Old Lodge Skins. Now you take away “envyings” from that list-for he didn’t covet much, owing to his belief he had everything of importance already-and you had a perfect description of that Indian’s character. Yet he was as big a success among the Cheyenne as a man could be.
As to myself, I had performed only a few of them crimes; on the other hand, I was still young.
For the rest of the day, though, I stayed fairly pure and even extended the period for several weeks on. That’s what white life did to me. First time I got soaked in civilization, I come down with pneumonia.
CHAPTER 10 Through the Shutter
I WAS REAL SICK, such as I had not been since earliest childhood. I don’t mind being wounded, but I hate to be sick. I mean, I don’t like to get a wound, but if you have to pay a penalty I’d rather it were that than any type of illness which will put you to bed. I don’t care to lay around unless some part of my flesh is missing and I can watch it knitting up.
You see there what I said about penalty. Despite my cynical ways as I approached the age of sixteen, the Reverend had got to me with his bluenose talk, and I had had dreams the night after the fishing expedition, in which I was doing my damnedest, though I knowed it was wrong, to make the golden chalice of woman into a slop bucket like he said.
You might say he give me the idea, just as he give me pneumonia by that outing in the rain, for that’s what I had in the morning though at first it seemed like just a cold and I got up as usual. But I felt so poorly at breakfast and got dizzy when Pendrake lit into his great mess of eggs though he was neat as always, so Mrs. P. puts her cool hand against my forehead, which was flushed at the same time that I was chilled to the bone.
Shortly I was back in bed, and an old doc with white whiskers come eventually but he didn’t have the medicine of Left-Handed Wolf, I can tell you. I was sick for about three weeks, and understood later that it was believed I should die during the first few days and the Reverend come and prayed over me.
Lavender told me that. He dropped in frequent when I started to improve. I remember the first time I saw him standing alongside the bed as I woke up from the napping with which I put in most of that time, I had the delusion I was back among the Cheyenne. He was very black of countenance, but the Indians sometimes painted themselves that color: anyhow, he wasn’t white.
So I made a remark in Cheyenne.
“Pardon?” says he, widening his eyes, and then I seen who he was and felt embarrassed.
“Now then,” he says, “you just rest easy. Don’t you worry none about old Lavender. He just come to see how you was.”
He generally referred to himself in that style, as if he was talking about a third person. I guess he had some theory that you wouldn’t suffer him to say “I” or “me.”
I says: “I thought you was an Indian.”
Sometimes one remark will make you a friend, and it generally ain’t planned to do so, for I have found that you can seldom intentionally make up a successful compliment. I don’t mean I was enemies with Lavender before saying that; it was rather that we took each other for granted as kid and servant. I reckon he had come to visit me out of curiosity.
He says: “I snuck up here while everbody but Lucy’s not to home, and Lucy don’t know I did or she’d be riled.”
I had a room all my own on the second floor, with a big soft bed that took me a while to get onto sleeping in without taking down seasick.
“Ain’t you never been here before?”
