Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 23

Meacham tried to see his quarry in the dismal light, but it was hard to without looking directly at him. He had the impression of smooth, well-balanced features, a broad mouth pulled into a thin, clenched line, a jaw set in displeasure, a man his own age, maybe some younger. The eyes did not look at him but into some middle distance, a veil of resentment over them. He could read the checked anger in the set of the head, the shoulders. Meacham felt his own heart banging against his ribs, a dryness in his mouth that made it impossible to swallow. Had he paused to think, he would not be here, but impulse had swept all before it when the Modoc men had thrust their ponies forward to block the way. Suddenly, after weeks of waiting, after sitting half-frozen for days in a shambling line of suppliants, he was taken by such a lust to see this man that nothing -- least of all good sense -- could stop him. Pushed by all his promises and intentions, he had forced his way past everyone and had lurched and sprawled into this elusive presence, at the dark heart of this dark house.

For one of the few times in Meacham’s life, words failed him. There was nothing he could do but wait. He held his hand out again to the chief and tried to keep it steady, afraid to think what was in the dark behind him, what was coming from the future toward him. Finally, when it was clear that Jack would not reach his own hand out to him, Meacham fished the pouch of tobacco from the parfleche, opened it. He took his pipe from his pocket, wiped it clean with his kerchief, and filled it. Pulling a burning twig from the fire, he sucked the flame into the pipe and let the smoke rise in a puff into the dark air. Through it he could see the hardened eyes of Jack’s men, watching. He wiped the pipe again carefully then handed it toward Jack, nodding, then he looked encouragingly toward the young Indian who stood next to him. Meacham noticed for the first time the deforming scar that angled over the flesh of the fellow’s right cheek from his eye nearly to the corner of his mouth. He looked, too, toward the man, evidently a bit older than the chief, with thicker, less refined, features, who sat on the fire’s other side. Was it from him the guttural sounds came? Perhaps. Meacham was not even sure he heard them. Soon they stopped, but still there was no movement. Was this John Schonchin, the next in command, he wondered. And by him, with the buffalo-mane head of hair, this would be Euchoaks -- the shaman, the kiuks -- Curley-Headed Doctor. Well named! It was as if Meacham were not there, his pipe extended, the others caught in some tableau at a wax museum. These were the players he had heard about, all right. He drew the pipe back again, tamping at the tobacco in its bowl and thinking how to breach the impenetrable void Jack kept between them. Even the women had grown quiet.

“Will we speak?” he asked at last. The scarfaced man passed on the question, but there was no answer. Well, then, it was to be silence. Meacham knocked the tobacco out of his pipe and into the fire. For some moments they stood there, frozen, until Jack relented. He gestured to a blanket folded near the fire and himself sank to the mat floor. Meacham sat where Jack had pointed, between this chief and the one who had spoken for him, across from the other men whose eyes never seemed to engage his. Still, he knew each thing about him was scrutinized. He set the now-cold pipe on the mat, picked up the tobacco pouch again and proffered it, whole, to Jack. It was as if his hand were empty, and when there was no reaction from anyone sitting there, he dropped it to his side.

At last, the small fire flickered down to embers, the scarred young man on Jack’s right, half in English, half in trade-jargon, asked sternly:

“What you want? What for you come? Keintpoos not send for you! Keintpoos got no truck with you! He don’t want to talk! He in his illahee -- his country! What for you come here! You not Keintpoos’ tyee! He don’t know you! You stranger!”

Relieved at last to use the words he had been rehearsing for days, Meacham began: “The Big Father in Washington, the new one, he cares for his children, the Modocs. He told me. He sent me all the way here to tell Jack I’m the new chief for all Oregon. He said, ‘Go see my boys, all the Indians. Care for them.’ He said to say that he has presents for Jack and all you Modocs. I bring his tobacco for you.”

“How come you bring all them people?”

“You know them. They’re here to say I speak true.”

He waited while Jack received the message, saw how his eyes narrowed, as if he were trying now to see inside Meacham, know his words for himself. Meacham wasn’t sure how to interpret the flicker of recognition when he spoke, couldn’t be sure he had even seen it. But then Jack nodded at the scar-faced man’s translation.

“No soldiers,” Meacham said.

Good. Jack nodded briefly at that.

“Knapp. The new agent….”

At the translator’s frown, Meacham figured he had better get it over with, and he rushed on:

“… who knows how to make things go right. And the Modoc women of the Klamaths, to show you we come in peace. George Nurse and Gus Horn from up at Linkville. And no brass buttons,” he repeated.

Meacham tried again to read Keintpoos as he received the words. All had now been disclosed to him. He would guess from the list that Meacham was there with more than tobacco and a greeting. He would figure out that this new man came bearing the same old intentions as the others before him. He came to return him to the reservation.

The angry burst from the man next to Jack and the others said that now he had proved it. It was just as they thought, just as they feared, just what they expected from this Superintendent Meacham.

As Jack gestured to a woman to build up the fire, Meacham raced to speak, trying to be heard above the others, forestalling with words what they were obviously urging.

“Tell him I came here, into this house, alone -- to show I think Captain Jack can be my friend. No man needs to be afraid of a friend.” He wondered whether the fragile words coming out of his mouth could hold these Bloody Point heroes, wondered whether Jack could hear the dread that clutched his insides as the men called out their opinions. “Tell him -- as friend -- I trust him.”

As if to make his point, Meacham forced himself to lean back on his elbow, his feet crossed before him near the fire, and waited.

Keintpoos listened to the shouts of the men around him, the remarks called out by the group of women until, as if driving insistent bees away from his head, he silenced them and turned to face Meacham full on.

He looked to Meacham to be a little under six feet. A stocky man, not long in his prime. In spite of the patched-together clothing, there was an athletic grace about him -- in his movements, the compact pose he assumed. He folded his arms and, looking into the fire, he began. The young man with the scarred cheek translated:

“You are lucky I am who I am. You are lucky I have heart that says to make my own enemies. You are lucky some good Boston tyees are friends to me. So I must think you might be like them. Not like all the rest. If all that were not true, I would kill you, like these men here tell me. Except that it would soil my house. You are lucky for that, too.”

He barked out an order in Modoc to the guard at the roof-hole then turned his words again toward Meacham. His voice was heavy with resentment.

“Keintpoos tell you there nothing he got to say you want to hear,” the translator said. “You don’t know us; you come to tell us anyway. Some good Bostons -- two or three -- in Yreka, that is all Jack finds in all those who came here. All others lie. They take his people’s money in the stores in Yreka, and then he sees what they sell them. Bad stuff. Stuff broke. Stuff we don’t need. And they buy our stuff, the skins we trap, the wood we cut, and don’t pay us.

“He says he’s got other things, too, to tell you, in case you don’t know them. Worse. They take us to a reservation, have our enemies to laugh. And there they let the Klamaths do things to us, same like the Bostons in Yreka. The Bostons, they teach the Klamaths that. The Bostons teach ways we should not be. They take what is not theirs and give nothing in return but a little dirt -- and lies.”

Meacham heard the sharp-edged words without argument. He was sure the miners and shopkeepers at Yreka had shown the Modocs a new way of life. He had seen the result of that kind of teaching up and down the territory. He wished the Indians hadn’t seen such things. And as for the reservation, Jack had the truth of it, too, from all he could tell. Still, none of that changed things.

“Tell him he speaks truth, and I know it,” Meacham said. “Tell him I do not come to say you Modocs are wrong, but to make you an offer instead. I will give to you if you will give me something,” he said to the scar-faced man. “Ask him if he will hear me. And will he say the others, Mr. Knapp and Doctor McKay and Ivan Applegate, can come in to this council? They are like me. They come because they are friends. Bringing peace.”

When the words were translated for him, Keintpoos reached inside his shirt and pulled up a pouch that hung around his neck. He opened it and took out some worn papers. He unfolded one and held it so the light could fall on it, then passed them all over.

“He wants you read these.”

Meacham leaned so that he could make out the writing.

“Read them so all can hear it. He likes what them papers tell.”

“‘Yreka. August 2, 1869,’” Meacham read aloud.

To Superintendent Indian Affairs for Modoc Indians or Whom It May Concern: The bearer, Captain Jack of Modocs, I have known well for many years. He is well disposed towards our citizens, and has been since he has come into power. Is trusty and faithful. He prefers not to sell his land and be forced upon a Reservation as he has seen too much of the workings of those institutions in the past.

It is signed ‘Elijah Steele.’”

Meacham nodded and looked at him. Then he read the others, that all said the same kind of thing. He nodded again then refolded the papers carefully and handed them back.

“Yes,” he said. “‘Trusty and faithful’: I have heard this is true. These men see you right. That is how I see Keintpoos, too.”

The Indian eyed Meacham a moment, measuring him. When he spoke next, it was as if the big wind had gone out of him, replaced by a fatigue too strong to measure.

“He says tomorrow we will see what it is this one has to tell us. Whether what you bring can be new. He says tell you he brings his cousin Toby and her man Frank Riddle here to speak between us. He tells these Modoc women here, ‘Give these people some fish. They are hungry.’ He says, ‘Set them up a place so they sleep.’”

When he understood what had been offered, Meacham held out the tobacco again. No one took it, not Jack, not the others. But when he stretched forth his hand, the Modoc at last grasped it. Provisionally, Meacham could feel, but grasped it nonetheless.

In the morning, he waited in Jack’s house for the Riddles, long past the time they should have been there. Jack, unreadable, also waited. And so did his people. They crowded together into the big room dug into the earth, faces vaguely lit by the smoldering fire and the little light that came in the apex of the conical roof that was both smokehole and entrance. No look of Jack’s said he was impatient. He sat with his men as if someone but he was the cause of this, as if he would not rush into this business they were met to transact that day. Meacham knew these people who were coming at Jack’s bidding. They were among those few whose facility with languages was a saleable item here when the races had to meet. They had worked for him up at Yainax and Klamath. Frank Riddle, Meacham reasoned, was a man by nature given to weakness, but he was a useful translator in negotiations with the Indians. Toby -- Mrs. Riddle, he corrected himself -- Jack’s cousin. She brought something special: She was trusted by the Indians. Meacham recalled the first day he had met her, along the trail on Yainax Butte. They had gone to meet with some others. Ramrod straight, square-shouldered, she was. She had never, by the slightest gesture, indicated fatigue or regret as she worked with him that day to make his explanations. She straddled her horse like a man, her long braids neatly nipped up with ribbons, the woven Modoc basket hat set straight on her head. She did not resemble his Orpha, but she put him in mind of her. His thinner, less stalwart wife might look frailer, but he knew her to be as solid as this Toby woman. Their spirits were the same. They endured. At least he thought so, though he would have had trouble explaining to Orpha just what he saw that paired them. On the one hand, there was his Christian wife, the mother of his children, pure to the heart of her, never one to set tongues wagging or to cause him a moment’s shame. On the other, here was this Toby, full Modoc, with unabashed, snapping eyes that looked straight at the world, purchased by the man who rode next to her.

Her husband, the ‘squaw-man.’ Wasn’t he one of Meacham’s first proofs that the reservations could be redeemed, even become forces for the good? This Frank Riddle was like a lot of other white men who had wandered west, beyond the circle of white women, and taken the easy road. Made rough by the frontier, if they had ever been anything different, they bought or bartered for the comfort they had not managed to attract in Chicago or New York. It had been twelve year old Toby, where Riddle was concerned. These two had been living together six years when Meacham met them, had borne a son, a ‘shame-child,’ some would have it, since Toby was just the man’s property. The bright-eyed, pesky Toby. Traded off for two horses, sold by her Modoc father.

When Meacham declared there were no longer to be unmarried white men and Indian women living together on any reservation under his jurisdiction, he had tried to present it in something other than an Old Testament, Bible-thumping fashion, even though he thought that way was right. He had tried, too, to come down from the administrative heights of the Superintendency to explain it, even though he could simply decree it and be finished. He had put it, instead, in terms of the times. He said buying women, for a little while or a lifetime, was nothing but slavery. It mattered nothing when they called it ‘bride price.’ It could not be tolerated since the Constitution had been amended to disallow owning another person, could not be borne in a country so dedicated to freedom that citizens had just fought a war about it. Frank Riddle had not been persuaded by those arguments, nor had his comrades who were similarly of the Confederate persuasion. But the rule was holding, and the marriages were abounding, to Meacham’s great satisfaction. Here was progress he could count!

Ever since his proclamation, Toby had kept an eye out for Meacham. He had made things right by her, by her boy Jeff. When Meacham showed up at the Klamath Agency and she met him, she thanked him, said she would do it in her heart every time Frank started up in English to call her his ‘woman’ and instead ended up calling her his ‘wife.’

She was powerful with her people, and Meacham admired her. Still, he couldn’t let Jack use her lateness for an excuse to dawdle and thereby defuse things. Meacham needed to seize the moment.

“I came here yesterday to talk to these people,” he said, rising to his feet before those assembled to listen in Jack’s house. “I put it off till today for fear of misunderstanding. Captain Jack promised to furnish an interpreter. I can not and will not wait on his movements. I am here now, ready to talk to these people and tell them what I come for. My heart is good and my mission is peace. I learn by the papers in my office that Captain Jack and his people made a treaty about five years ago.”

As he had last night, the scar-faced fellow struggled with the translation. It was going to be slow going.

“When I read that paper I found that the head men of this nation sold all their lands to the United States and agreed to obey the laws of the Government.”