Another Brutal Indian Attack
by David James Duncan
The Indians lived in railroad boxcars in the woods behind my boyhood home. I never saw them come and go, couldn't say how they traveled; they didn't seem to own cars. Some people told me they were reservation indians, though no one seemed able to name the reservation. Others said they were wild then laughed as if they'd made some sort of joke. All I knew for certain was that, come June, the same three or four families, give or take a man or baby, would show up in those boxcars the way spring chinook used to show up in local rivers and stay on, like the Salmon, till fall. All I knew was that for a third of a year, year in and year out, eighteen or twenty Indians were my nearest neighbors to the west.A cranky old white guy, Jake Hartwig, let them live in the boxcars for free, but not as charity. Hartwig was a commercial raspberry grower and needed the Indians to harvest his berries. He needed me, too. It makes me feel like a history book footnote--an Indian feeling, maybe--but in the western Oregon of the early sixties, white kids and Indian families worked side by side in the fields of white or Japanese berry farmers. We made four to six cents a pound, depending on the type of berry. A good day for me, eight hours of picking, I'd make three dollars. But my low income was partially explained by my high output: my scats in those days were as seedy as a bear's. I had a hard time sticking fresh berries in a box when my mouth was just as available.
The boxcars were parked on a sidetrack no longer connected to a railway: just a few lengths of double-dead-ending rails rusting in the cottonwoods there. Old Man Hartwig inherited the cars from the railroad when a sidetrack was cut off by subdivisions and the cars were left stranded. They'd been standard freight cars in their day--Burlington Northerns, Southern Pacifics. They now had a couple of windows cut in each side, no bathrooms, no electricity, a potbellied stove for unnecessary heat and necessary cooking, and whatever comforts the occupants themselves could add to the tune of four to six cents a pound. Maybe folding chairs and a card table. Curtains in the front windows. Bunk beds to consolidate kids. Wildflowers in a wine bottle. Dogs, usually with puppies, congregated under the cars; cats with kittens, too, though each fall--when the Indians disappeared as suddenly and silently as they'd arrived--the kittens remained.
Old Man Hartwig did his best to keep the cars and their contents hidden from local eyes. But if there is any topic that pioneerstock white folks feel compelled to gossip about, it's Indians. The talk bandied about the neighborhood detailed how "they" threw their garbage in the frog ponds behind the boxcars, how the pall from "their" outhouses drifted into "our" neighborhoods in hot weather, how "their" men drank themselves crazy, mean and blind. The middle-of-the-road position in our Judeo-Suburban stronghold was "Like 'em or not, Indians can't be trusted." The hardline stance was "Get 'em outta here before somebody gets sick or robbed or killed." But I was one of those renegade white kids trying to defy friends and live down pioneer forebears by including Indians among the neighbors Christ commanded us to love.
It was not yet a popular position. Kids like me caught flack from the ruling pragmatists for romanticizing Indians. But what choice did a Bible-raised kid have? "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is an outrageously romantic notion, "Love thine enemies" even more romantic. And my feelings were not just Bible-inspired: I'd been smitten from the time I was little by the sight of Wyampum men fishing the platforms at Celilo, by Tlingit and Kwakiutl carvings in local museums, by the occasional Indian athlete who'd light up the neighborhood gym or ball field, by the Paiute points I'd find along rivers--and by TV Cochises, Tontos and Mingos, too. So though I loathed berry picking, and wasn't any too fond of Old Man Hartwig either, there were three things I did like about working in his fields. One was the four to six cents a pound. Another was the raspberries. And the other was the presence of all those Indians.
ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS I NOTICED, WORKING WITH THEM in the fields, was that only the women and girls picked. The men seemed to prefer--just as gossip predicted--to stay drunk enough to be unable to tell red people from white, which was of course too drunk to tell red raspberries from green. I tried hard to rationalize this. I didn't yet know exactly what drink did to a person, but boxcars, garbage ponds, malicious gossip and outhouses all struck me as good reasons for a person to be something other than fully alert. Indian men shouldn't have been there at all, I'd tell myself. They should have been out hunting or fishing. But there was nothing to hunt in our suburbs, it wasn't salmon season, and the salmon runs were fading fast. So they drank&emdash;with a dedication that maybe suggested they'd have been equally dedicated fishermen/hunters, if only the world was different.
This kind of thinking was a stretch, though, and I knew it. The truth was that, face-to-face and close up, the men from the boxcars scared me. They scared me not because they looked dangerous but because they looked ruined, and it's hard, face-to-face, to romanticize ruin. They seemed beyond caring what happened to them, or to anyone--hardly aware of what happened, maybe. My own Grandpa Duncan--a striking man in photos, fine singer, father of two, legendary fisherman and hunter--got the same way, over in Montana, then vanished from our lives. And he scared me, too. That grown men red or white, living fathers and grandfathers, could grow sad enough to drink enough to get that ruined; that kids like me meant so little, could assuage their sorrow so little, that they still chose ruin. It scares me still.
The boys from the boxcars didn't scare me. They worried me, though. There were five of them, all under six, and they were usually--again in accord with white gossip--dirty. What gossip failed to mention was that they had nowhere to play but a dirt berryfield, and there was no plumbing in their boxcars. It wasn't the dirt that concerned me. It was when I'd greet the boys, call them by name, try to joke and get silly with them. Because nothing would happen. They weren't unfriendly, just unresponsive. And they were this way with everyone, even their own mothers, even each other. It gradually gave me the feeling that something was way less than right--that their food must be off, their water tainted, that they'd caught something inexplicable from their ruined dads. In time I stopped trying to buddy up and we'd just stare at each other, like rabbits or fish. It was the way they seemed to want it. And giving up on words like that did make me feel more like one of them.
The girls, for some reason, were different. The girls were so difterent they gave me hope for the boys. There were six of them, ranging from my age (around ten) to teenaged, and they were nothing like their fathers and utterly like their mothers. That was the hope. They were dignified, physically capable, alert, animated with each other, cautiously friendly to me. They also shared some wonderfully raunchy stories now and then--if they didn't know a white kid was eavesdropping a few rows away.
Another thing about them: they were the fastest fricking raspberry pickers on earth. I noticed this in a big way--because I was the fricking slowest. Even the youngest boxcar girls made five times what I made in a day. We'd start picking at 6 A.M., we all stacked our filled crates in the same storage shed, each stack had our name on it, and by noon or so--when I'd be lugging my second crate to the DAVID stack and some Indian girl would be heaving her tenth or twelfth up onto the MARCIE or CARMINE or RITA stack--nobody could even glance at me without bursting out laughing. Which always made me laugh right back. And sometimes it would catch, like fire. Sometimes there'd be laughter all over the berryfield as I trudged back to my infernal row. And when I'd hear the whole field go off in the boredom and heat and dust, I can't say how good it sounded. It made me smile till my cheeks ached; made me eat berries till I was sick; made me fill my crates slow as ever, just to get to hear that laughter rise up again.
THE EAST WEEK I PICKED AT HARTWIG S AN INDIAN GIRL named Mary Margaret--the girl I liked best--suggested that I could speed things up by hiding dirt clods under the berries in my crate. Rocks were too heavy, she said. They'd create suspicion and might foul up the machinery at the jam factory. But dirt clods weighed in well and would dissolve on the conveyors when the berries got washed. I just laughed when she said this--and so did Mary Margaret. I figured she was joking. But amid the interminable boredom of the next day's picking I decided that, joke or not, it was a workable idea. So I put it to use.
I made decent money for three straight days after that.
Then I got caught.
Mary Margaret happened to be passing by just when Jake Hartwig fired me. He was enraged as he did it, wanted to make an example of me--and succeeded. I was simultaneously ashamed of myself, afraid he was going to hit me (which he didn't) and afraid he'd tell my parents (which he did). Yet what I remember so clearly is not an irate old man dismantling me; it's Mary Margaret's face. She stood a couple of rows away, watching, her expression neutral as an owl's: no amusement, no visible fear, no sadness or sympathy either. Yet she remained there until the old man was finished, her eyes riveted to mine. I never saw her again after that long, strange moment, so I've wondered, I've been half-haunted, by what that stare signified. Had the dirt clod trick been honestly shared to dishonestly help me, and was she sorry that it backfired? Had we become friends? Or did she have a few clods tucked in her own crates and fear the white boy would tell where the idea came from--fear, even, that her whole family could be kicked out of their boxcar home simply because she'd joked with or pitied or trusted an outsider like me?
I don't know. And it was Indians, "like 'em or not," who I'd been told not to trust. But one thing I'm sure of, regarding those dirt clods: I'm the one who hid them in my berries; I'm the one who cheated Old Man Hartwig; I'm the one who put an end to the best, the most biblical, the most neighborly thing that happened between those Indians and me--which was the whole pack of us laughing because the white boy picked so slow.