Those warriors of the Pillager hid among the trees when the soldiers marched in to take their leaders prisoner.
Nobody intended it to start, they say. A boy stacked their rifles. One went off!
Asin made an explosive sound and raised an imaginary Winchester. He shot and shot, pulling back at each recoil.
One soldier down, another two. A wound to their head man and then another. He is killed. We don’t attack them — just kill the ones who stick their heads up. We could have killed them all! Asin’s face worked. We could have killed them all. But because we showed our power, they brought us food and blankets. They made us more promises. We were not punished because they knew we were in the right. On that day, the only day we shot the whiteman, we won. We should do it again.
Warriors
The boys did every chore after that as warriors. If they were sent out to net fish, they worked as army scouts. The fish were the enemy. They netted and killed as many of the warrior fish as they could. The boys carried on their victory celebration far out on the lake, then came to shore and gutted all their enemies and put them up on drying racks.
They snared rabbits, hunted muskrats, gophers, any animal, with ferocity of purpose. They pestered Asin and Bagakaapi about warrior ways, learned that a war party was signaled to assemble by a deadly symbolic red glove. They carefully sewed one of tanned deerhide, dyed it with mashed cranberries, stuffed it with sage and stolen pipe tobacco. They kept it hidden in their blankets. Each brother kept the red glove until he wanted to declare a war party, then it was sent to the others in turn and the time was set for them to convene. Sometimes they attacked fallen timber, reduced their enemy to stove lengths and kindling. Surprised, their mothers praised them. They gloated proudly. Peace, the only one of the children who had ever actually waged war on a whiteman, thought her brothers were ridiculous.
Peace Roy
She had authority, though she was shy. Her eyes quickened with understanding, and she moved with deliberation. She was meticulous. Her smile flashed ironically, her eyebrows lifted in amusement, but she rarely spoke. She was guarded because, like her father, she was emotional. She was precious because she was the only daughter. Her hands liked to stack, smooth, fold, and slice. Her brain counted everything her hands touched. Again, like her father. Her grandmother and namesake had given Peace a few of her freckles. A shade darker than her skin, they dusted her nose and cheekbones. They were truly visible only when she was angry or upset. When she laughed, as she often did at the absurd things her brothers did, her laugh was soft and breathy. Her brothers felt like they were being tickled with a brushy wand of grass.
Peace was the first Indian to work in a bank. She cleaned the floors.
Later, much later, she became a teller and then a manager. Indian people came to the bank just to look at her and see for themselves that one of them knew how to handle the whiteman’s white metal, zhooniyaa. It was this stuff, this material of no possible use, that their parents and grandparents had been forced to admit into their lives. Americans seemed glad to perish over pitiless coin and paper, which now controlled their destinies but seemed, still, in its essence a symptom of madness.
Peace began cleaning floors at the bank when she was twelve. She got out the mop and bucket after everyone but her father had left the building. When she was done, Augustus taught her how the bank worked. When they went home, she was supposed to pass this knowledge on to her brothers. But although money and all that it represented in the world — territory, goods, religion — was the basis of war, they had no feel for it. They could write and calculate, those boys, but it was war stories that they fed upon.
Despairing of their attention, Augustus read The Iliad out loud every night after they were finished with mathematics. That the translation was ornate and repetitive was so much the better — the boys sank into the drama and made their father read it many times. It became the only book that mattered. They chased one another around the house brandishing long sticks for spears; as either Hector or Achilles, they destroyed and mutilated each other over and over. Shawano, the youngest, got the hardest treatment. They pretended to burn him on a funeral pyre or even chopped him up with their hands to feed him, raw, to the dogs. He had to lie still and not laugh while he was gorged upon by vultures. Although Augustus had been careful to teach them the realities of carnage — even to the point of telling them about their own family tragedy — the boys gloried in Asin’s narratives, and in the glamour of the Trojan War, and they lamented that these conflicts were long finished. So it was with tremendous excitement that they learned, through reading their father’s newspaper, that a fresh, new war was being waged in France, against Germany. Real bloodshed, real valor, real killing, real heroes. Moreover, they were thrilled to find out they could join this war. There was also a recruitment notice in the newspaper.
One day, without telling anybody but Asin, whose clouded eyes lit with supreme joy, the brothers went to the town hall, where the recruiter sat waiting in a corner, at a wooden desk. They signed up to become soldiers and were delighted to learn they would be given uniforms with round hats and pants with legs that puffed at the hips. They would also have tailored jackets, but only after they’d passed certain tests. Once they were trained, they would also be given new guns. After that they would be transported to the war.
“How soon can we get there?” asked Charlie.
ZOSIE AND MARY could not bear for their sons to leave. Both mothers threatened to cut their hair and slash their arms, but in the end they seethingly wept and packed lunches for their boys to eat on the train. They said good-bye in the road and told Augustus that their hearts were too full to go along. Actually their hearts were full of rage. Once their sons were out of sight, they took the path to old Asin’s house, where they drew their razor-keen fish knives and assured him that if any harm came to their sons they would carve him up and dry him on a rack.
They had said nothing to Augustus the night before, however, for it was obvious that he was stricken when he threw the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad into the outdoor cooking fire. He intended to stamp the ashes of the book into the earth, but to his surprise Zosie plucked the book out before the cover was more than scorched.
“I listen too,” she said. “We’re just like those people, never knowing what the gods or the government is going to do to us next.”
AUGUSTUS AND PEACE walked into the train station with the young men. The freckles appeared on Peace’s face, dark points of distress. It appeared to Augustus that he had spent his life in error. He had protected his sons from the train station by educating them as best he could — still they chose the same inscrutably violent path as Scranton Roy. The boys already had their tickets, so Augustus and Peace sat down with them on a long bench. Silently, they waited. The floor of the train station was polished terrazzo based on a singular slate-green crushed marble. The walls were paneled with ancient oak worked into scenes of progress. There were wagons, valiant pioneers, oxen, plows, trains of course. As the Americans advanced counterclockwise around the great waiting room, Indians melted away before them, looking sadly back over their shoulders or turning their backs entirely as if to walk straight into the wood, which was carved into a simulacra of its origin as an unrepeatable forest. It is unnerving, thought Peace, to see my ancestors swallowed into the exact same wood that was stolen from us. She tried to divert her thoughts from her brothers living and breathing beside her not in fear but silent exaltation. She had to try and think of something other than the monstrous crack she sensed was developing in her father’s heart.