The Night Watchman(55)

His thoughts switched from the baby to Pixie. Damn. Of course she had to be a good shot.

Wood Mountain remembered the fluffy pemmican and told Zhaanat that they had eaten it on the train, and it was good. While he complimented her mother, Patrice took the baby behind a blanket, into another room. He didn’t stay much longer.

*

Barnes had driven Wade home and spent a good hour talking to his father about the meeting down in Fargo. Thomas had taken off work to go, and he still had endless potatoes to get in. He’d put his intensity into pitchforking hill after hill. Wade and the girls would clean potatoes, bury them in the sand cellar. He left them to it, and asked Barnes in for tea.

“I don’t understand why it’s so bad,” said Barnes. “It sounds like you get to be regular Americans.”

They were sitting where Barnes always sat when he drove his boxers home and was asked, inevitably, in for a visit—the table central to eating, cooking, canning, drying, and processing foods, also playing pinochle and cribbage, bathing babies in dishpans, and visiting. The tea was nice and hot in the heavy old white mugs. Thomas was such a thoughtful, quiet fellow that Barnes sometimes saved questions for him because he knew that Thomas would ponder out the answers.

“Lots of people here thought the same as you,” said Thomas. “But then we realized we have been holding out . . . how many years since Columbus landed?”

Barnes did his favorite thing. Mental subtraction.

“Four hundred and sixty-one,” he said immediately.

“Well, closing in on five centuries,” said Thomas. “Holding out through every kind of business your folks could throw our way. Holding out why? Because we can’t just turn into regular Americans. We can look like it, sometimes. Act like it, sometimes. But inside we are not. We’re Indians.”

“But see here,” said Barnes. “I’m German, Norwegian, Irish, English. But overall, I’m American. What’s so different?”

Thomas gave him a calm and assessing look.

“All of those are countries out of Europe. My brother was there. World War Two.”

“Yes, but all are different countries. I still don’t understand it.”

“We’re from here,” said Thomas. He thought awhile, drank some tea. “Think about this. If we Indians had picked up and gone over there and killed most of you and took over your land, what about that? Say you had a big farm in England. We camp there and kick you off. What do you say?”

Barnes was struck by this scenario. He raised his eyebrows so fast his hair flopped up.

“I say we were here first!”

“Okay,” said Thomas. “Then say we don’t care. Since you made it through that mess we say you can keep a little scrap of your land. You can live there, we say, but you have to take our language and act just like us. And say we are the old-time Indians. You have to turn into an old-time Indian and talk Chippewa.”

Barnes grinned, thinking of Zhaanat.

“I couldn’t do that,” he said.

“That’s natural,” said Thomas. “Good thing you don’t have to. I can’t turn all the way into a white man, either. That’s how it is. I can talk English, dig potatoes, take money into my hand, buy a car, but even if my skin was white it wouldn’t make me white. And I don’t want to give up our scrap of home. I love my home.”

“I see,” said Barnes. He thought about it. “But I heard you get to be citizens. Don’t you want to be a U.S. citizen?”

“What?” said Thomas. “We are citizens.”

“Vote? You already can vote?”

“Sure, back in 1924 we got the vote. After the black man, after the women. But we got the vote.”

“Oh. Who did you vote for last year?”

“Not Eisenhower. Everything came out Republican anyhow. Both houses. That’s why they passed this bill here. It’s dishonorable to Indians.”

Barnes blurted out, “Is it that you don’t want to start paying taxes?”

“No,” said Thomas, patient, “we pay taxes just like you. If we make enough a year, we pay taxes. Only difference, not on our land. You’re not gonna charge us taxes to live on the ishkonigan land that is left over after your people stole the rest of it, are you?”

That didn’t sound right to Barnes.

“This thing will break our land up, see,” Thomas continued. “We keep it in common now. That’s the way it works. We can sell to one another but it stays in the tribe that way. So this bill would break up our land and let the BIA sell it off. They’d probably take a nickel on the dollar for it. Then we’d get relocated. Shipped off to the Cities. That’s where we’d end up. Living in those little rooming houses, what do you call them?”

“Apartment buildings.”

“Those. Visiting around in little rooms. Streets with lights. I’ve been there. Rose and yours truly wouldn’t like it. We would feel very gloomy about it.”

“I can well understand,” said Barnes. And as he sat in the little house, with a gentle fire in the wood range throwing out just the right amount of warmth, with the mug of cooling tea on the richly scarred and polished wooden table, and a couple of doves calling tenderly in the pine tree outside the window, he began to feel gloomy too.

“If I married an Indian woman,” said Barnes, “would that make me an Indian? Could I join the tribe?”