friendly but don’t ever crawl on your belly before a Cheyenne no matter what he does, on account of he’ll do it worse then. I mention that because they have lately had a lot of trouble with whites and might carry a prejudice.”
“Against white men?”
“Of which you are a black-colored one,” I says. “I’m talking of what they believe, which is the truth when you live among them, like law is around here.”
I drawed that map, resting the paper against a book. Lavender couldn’t read, but he ought to be able to follow the lines of rivers.
“If you was going to wait a while, I’d teach you some of the sign talk and maybe Cheyenne as well,” I said.
“No,” he told me, “I cain’t tarry. But I thank you kindly.”
“Hold on,” I says as he starts to rise from the chair. “You never finished what you begun before about the Reverend.”
Lavender went out and looked up and down the hall, then he come back alongside my bed.
“He don’t lay with his Lady,” says he. “I expect on account of he is a preacher, but them other preachers in town has children, so it must not be against the law.”
“You mean never?” I asks. “For I’ve knowed Indians who wouldn’t do it for a time because of a dream they had or before a war.”
“Never,” says Lavender. “Lucy see that in the yolk of an egg. She got the gift of a witch. That’s the reason I’m leaving. Every time I go with another woman, Lucy see it in an egg.”
Lavender didn’t run off that night. He come in to see me again the next day and never even apologized for not carrying out his plan. Instead he talked as if he meant the
Anyways, I oughtn’t to protest his staying, for he was the only person in that town I could talk to with ease. That boy I whipped, Luke English, come around to visit while I was sick. He still hated my guts and figured he had been tricked rather than beaten outright-whites always believed that when licked by Indians-but his Pa wanted to suck up to the Pendrakes, so sent him over with a cake his Ma had made. Luke stopped somewhere on the way and tongued off all the icing; which didn’t matter none to me, though, because I was still off my feed and couldn’t have ate a cannonball like that when well.
As soon as Mrs. Pendrake, who had let him in, went downstairs, Luke started talking indecent. Him and the Reverend could have gone around with a tent show, holding debates on the topic, for they represented the long and short of it.
“Say,” Luke remarked, studying round my room with his mean eyes, “you got quite a wigwam here. Did you ever sneak a girl in?”
“Did you?” I asked him in scorn.
“I don’t have it so private. I got to bunk in with three brothers. My old man and old lady went at it so hard they have filled the house. I also got four sisters. The oldest is just eighteen. Some feller climbs in her bed every night and has his way with her. Pa don’t know what to do about it.”
I was taken in and dumb enough to ask: “Why don’t he shoot him?”
“Oh,” says Luke, cackling, “it’s her husband.”
He sits down on the foot of my bed. “What’s it like with an Indin squaw? I hear they got quite a strong smell. I hear you want one, you throw a bean across the fire and the one it lands near has to go with you even if she’s married to the chief. I never had an Indin woman. The ones I seen have been mighty ugly. I’d druther find me a fat sheep if I couldn’t get nothing else.
“Course I do all right as it is. The other day I come into the room while the darky girl was cleaning. Nobody else was upstairs at the time, though my Ma and sisters was down in the kitchen. So I was feeling like a piece, and I just throwed that black girl down and put it to her.…”
I never did like dirty tales, true or false; if they’re any good, they just make you wistful; if not, there’s nothing more boresome in the world, I reckon. As to Luke, the more he talked, the more I was convinced that his experience consisted solely of playing with himself to the point of idiocy.
Nonetheless when Mrs. Pendrake come up and asked us both if we’d like a glass of buttermilk and I says no and showed I was tired, and he says yes and she took him off to the kitchen, with him staring at her up and down soon as her head was turned, I was pretty jealous. For you take even a rotten-looking kid like that, he was of the male sex, and Mrs. P. knowed it. She couldn’t help reminding you she was a woman. I don’t mean she did one thing you could see with the naked eye, and as I have said she was downright cool to most men and acted as if they was standing in horse manure about ten feet below her location.
After enough time for him to have drunk a gallon, Luke come back upstairs, where he had forgot his cap. He was licking his thick lips, which I guess was reasonable enough on account of there was a margin of buttermilk around them. But I had my knife under the pillow, and I remember vowing that if he made one reference to Mrs. Pendrake, I would cut out his black heart.
But he just said: “Well, I’ll tell my Pa you ain’t going to die from that beating I give you. I ain’t got no hard feelings if you ain’t. When you get back on your feet I’ll innerduce you to a good whore down at Mrs. Lizzie’s.”
I had been a man before my time, and now I was being a baby after it, just laid there day after day and when I wasn’t being talked to, looked at the ceiling and saw a naked woman imprinted on it. Not Mrs. P., I hasten to say-nor the Indian females I had seen now and again without clothes though the Cheyenne is modest, and you take Nothing, had I come upon her bare it wouldn’t have been a striking experience-but rather a
Now that is a funny thing that come back to me from a time when it didn’t mean nothing. They put a blanket over it during services, and I can recall Bill sniggering and my sisters blushing, but to me it had been right dull: she was fat as to breast and hip, and had one meaty haunch crossed over the other so as to hide her loins. Her nipples was purple, that was all I could have said at the age I had been then, because they reminded me of plums.
But here she was on the ceiling of my bedroom. It went along with everything else in that house, I suppose, the image and not the reality: Mrs. Pendrake’s motherhood, the Reverend’s spiritual authority, Lavender’s freedom, and my woman who had never existed.
At last I got strong enough to take outside walks so long as I dressed warmly, for it was winter now with a fall or two of snow while I had been laid up. And then one afternoon when we had finished our dinner, the Reverend having so far as I was concerned outdone even his own record in laying waste a turkey singlehanded-for Mrs. P. took very little and I was still on soup-Mrs. Pendrake says: “Dear, it might be diverting for you to walk downtown with me. We might take a glass of soda water and buy some new clothes.”
I won’t go into the shopping, which Mrs. P. accomplished in amazingly short time for a woman though she bought a big load of stuff for both herself and me. I reckon she was about clothes like the Reverend was concerning food: gluttonous but tidy. Nevertheless, I wasn’t any too robust yet and even when well I get dizzy in shops. So she noticed that and says: “Now we’ll have our soda water.”
I had never been in the place we went, which had just been opened up while I was sick, pretty fancy with little marble tables and wire chairs and some brasswork, and there was a big marble bar and on it a vessel like a funeral urn which was silver-plated, with a cupid sitting on top and two elephants’ heads projecting from the bowl. In the base of this structure was six or seven knobs under which they’d put your glass, squirt some flavor into it, then stick it beneath an elephant’s trunk, turn his ear, and out would come the soda water.
I took an immediate dislike to the fellow who run the place, for he thought quite a lot of himself, wore a brocade waistcoat and a artificial flower in his lapel, and was mighty tall. I guess you’d say he was handsome by the light of some, clean-shaven and with black curly hair. He sure thought so, anyhow. What I didn’t like was the snooty manner in which he run a place where women and children went for refreshment.
Now this fellow would draw the soda himself, then put the glasses on a silvered tray which a small colored
