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.
Mrs. Pendrake only picked at her own victual, which was no wonder because she didn’t do no work for which she’d have to eat much. Now I was used to Indian women who stayed busy from dawn until they rolled into their buffalo hides, and before that, my own Ma who even with the help of my sisters complained the day wasn’t long enough in which she could finish her duties. But Mrs. P. had Lucy to cook and there was another colored girl who come in frequent to clean though didn’t live in, and that Lavender, he did all the gardening and run errands and whatnot outdoors. So here was this perfectly healthy white woman, in the prime of life, with nothing to do except for the hour or so she spent in helping me with my lessons when I come home from school.
Now having been reared by savages, I had manners that may not have been polished but they was considerate. I certainly didn’t step up to Mrs. Pendrake and say: “It strikes me you are useless around here.” But that’s what I thought, and it wasn’t no criticism for I liked her and helped her when I could. She had this idea of being my Ma, so to oblige I’d pretend now and again to need mothering.
In the first months of school I took a bit of jeering from the other boys my age for studying with the ten-year-olds. I let it go awhile, and you know how that works: they give it to me stronger when they believed I had no defense, and throwed in some stuff about “dirty Indian.”
Finally the whole bunch was waiting one afternoon at the corner of an alley on the route home from school. As I come along, they begun to taunt me for being an Indian, which had a unjust side you might not get until you realize they thought I had been captured and kept prisoner for five year. You might say I deserved their needling more than they knew, but I don’t think they should be forgive on the basis of accident.
I kept on walking without comment until one of them stepped out before me. He was about five foot ten at sixteen years of age, and had a few pimples.
“There ain’t a day,” he says, “when I can’t lick a dirty Indin.”
I was willing to believe that when it come to fisticuffs, which the Cheyenne didn’t practice. Indian boys wrestle some, but as I have indicated to a sufficiency, they don’t have much reason to fight among their friends when the enemy is generally just beyond the next buffalo wallow. And when they tangle with the enemy, it is not to show him up or make him eat dust, but rather to kill him altogether and rip off the top of his head.
Thus I just looked at this boy in contempt and pushed by him, and he hit me with his loutish fist underneath my right ear. I must have staggered off to the bias for eight or ten feet, being his hand was large and on the end of a weighty arm, and dropped my books along the way. Them other lads hooted, cawed, and whistled. I hadn’t had any action now since the saber charge and wasn’t used to it in town like that, a person tending to go by the custom of where ever he’s stuck, so I clumb onto my knees slow, thinking, and that fellow run over and swung his boot in the direction of my hindquarters.
That puts a man off balance: he should have knowed it if he was going around kicking people, but he learned it then. I just rolled under the lifted foot and pulled the other leg loose. He fell like a bag of sugar. I stuck my hoof into his neck and got the scalping knife from under my shirt.…
No, I didn’t even scratch him with it. For that matter, I could have let him suffocate had I not lifted my foot off his neck eventually, for it choked his wind and he was turning purple. But I wasn’t no Indian, and figured I had proved it by putting my knife away, gathering up my books, and going on.
When I got home the angle of my jaw there below the ear was swoll as if I was squirreling a cheekful of nuts. Mrs. Pendrake saw it right off, and says: “Ah, Jack, I must get you to the dentist.”
I says no, it wasn’t no wisdom tooth. We was in the parlor then, where we always did the tutoring although it was far from the best place in the house for that purpose because you could hear the Reverend muttering in his study nearby, but I guess she supposed I liked it.
Then what could it ever be, she asks. She was wearing a rich blue that day, which become her a great deal, especially when her eyes in sadness took on the exact shade of the dress. Late in the year the buffalo grass turns tawny and when you are climbing an elevation with the sun slanting on it, that’s about the shade of her hair. We was sitting as usual side by side on that plush loveseat, with me as far away as I could get, on account of next to that fine lady I always worried that I still stunk though while I was with the Pendrakes I took a bath every Saturday whether I needed it or not.
“A fight,” says I. “A boy hit me there.”
She formed an O with her mouth, which stayed half open so you could see just an ivory trace beyond her pink lip, and she put her cool hand on the back of mine. She was trying to be a mother, see, but didn’t really know how. For fighting, a Ma will swat at you if you ain’t hurt, or doctor you if you are. But Mrs. P. figured the thing was to be sad, for she had an ideal conception of everything.
Here’s what I mean when I said I helped her: I let my eyes fall to the swell of her bosom, and I lifted her hand to my jaw.
“How it thumps,” she says. “Poor Jack.” And you know how them things go, I couldn’t tell if it was mostly her or me, but soon I had my face against her breasts and my thumps was alternating with those from her heart.
I expect you are thinking what a nasty little fellow I was. Well, believe what you like, but remember Mrs. Pendrake was only about ten years older than me. It was hard to think of her as a Ma, but at the same time I never before that moment figured her as a girl if you know what I mean. When it came to idealism, I had quite a bit of my own. I have told you the Cheyenne was prigs, and that fighting takes the same kind of energy as sex. It’s peace that is the horny time. Most of them fat merchants in that town was real sex fiends compared to an Indian brave. And them other white boys my age was already slipping into brothels or laying the maids.
With the inactivity I was undergoing and all, and especially that studying-I don’t know much about scholars but I should judge them a carnal lot, because in my experience with the life of the mind, though I was interested in it, after a bit a tension would build up owing to the invisible nature of that which was studied. You can’t see it nor put your hands on it, yet it claims your absolute attention. It’d make me nervous in time. Then I would think of girls as a relief.
There you have the background to this incident, before which I never had an indecent thought towards Mrs. Pendrake. And you can get off the hook now, for nothing else happened here. She was a fine lady: if I hadn’t knowed that otherwise, I could feel it in the hardness of her bosom, which if anything hurt my sore jaw. She was all laced up in whalebone. If Buffalo Wallow Woman pulled you against herself, it had been like sinking into a pillow.