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Short Stories & Tall Tales
White Boy, Indian Brave Charlie Two-Tents
Tom Sheehan
I was Christopher Happs (white) when I was born and Charlie Two-Tents (Indian) now, this day, as I am about to be hanged. Life for me, as will be evident, was always hanging in the balance. Looking back on it now, from this late circumstance, that life turned on more accidents in one man’s existence than the mind can apprehend fully. Accidents are the unaccounted moments and deeds, some in tandem and some in their singular overtures, where lives, not just a life, in this case being my own, are involved.
At this minute, high on an old, rugged, man-killing scaffold, I can look out and see most of the people gathered here from this town in Nevada, right on the simmering edge of the Rockies, a place called Hell’s Target, so aptly named, and most of the people off the ranches that surround this corner of the territory. Come they have to watch me hang for a murder or murders that I did not commit. Here, as if on consignment in life, I have no reason to lie.
Let me tell you my story, beginning here on this ignoble parapet of wood from which I can see my beloved mountains most directly north of this town now called Hell’s Target, but once was the village of Manatanka, great chief of the tribe. Then, in the days of that great chieftain, it was he who found a woman to teach me to read at a tender age. He had said to that woman, in great wisdom and revelation only the great souls can touch, “We found you in the mountains desperate for food and shelter, and a place, a good place, with the living. It was an accident we found you, for we were going to travel on another path and the way had been lit for us. The Great One Above, the One of Voices, at the moment of decision, said to me, ‘Manatanka, are you sure you have chosen the right path?’ His voice was the voice of the turtle at that moment, slow and sure of the words, for the turtle never hurries his words, weighing them as sure as a scale. I said back to The Great One Above, ‘Your question has an answer folded within it, so I will let you give your sincere help here by a toss of a stone to select our path.’ I summoned the white mother of this boy to my side, told her of my plight, and asked her to toss a stone of her choice in the air to determine our path by its fall. Of much wisdom was that woman, that mother, and she knew one course might help her and her son, and the other might do nothing. She studied a whole day on my plight, also having the patience of the turtle, and then pitched a stone, after all her thoughts and viewings of the land, down the path that lead us to you sitting alone, frightened, hungry, but not quite ready for the wolves or the coyotes or the ugly pigs. I saw you first before any of the tribe. I knew you were a gift from The Great One Above, for you were reading a book amid ruins and death scattered too far to measure. You said you were a teacher. I said I want you to teach this boy to read. He is a white boy claimed by us long ago. Here at my side is his mother who does not read, but who accidentally lead us to you. But I want him to know both sides of his skin, both sides of his cloth, for he is both a white boy and has been since he first came to us Charlie Two-Tents, a Sioux of the Great Nations. We have taught him all a Sioux needs in this world; he can ride a horse to the sky and back, hunt the bear and the boar and the sheep and the deer and the great buffalo of the grass, fight any foe, track a shadow across open ground, know what berries and roots he can eat, how to treat hides and skins for best winter use, where the deepest dens are, where the snake waits to strike, how to save a leg or an arm broken by stone or wood or metal, and become a chief in his time.”
That day my lessons started. All the words I know came from that single book at the beginning until I found a few in deserted cabins, once on a wagon of the dead, under a seat, as if it was to be given as a present at arrival somewhere along the trail or in the mountains. And I knew all the words in my teacher’s mind. Her name was Miss Motherwell and we called her Voice of the Cave. She taught me for five years and Manatanka asked her one eventful day, after a great feast of buffalo meat, if she had done her job of teaching me to read and she replied, ‘He knows more than I do.’ So Manatanka gave her a horse and left her near a town well east of here and she went home to her own people, but cried leaving me, saying, ‘Adieu, adieu, dear Charlie.’ And I knew her meaning then, with the last word she taught me, and which I have not used yet.
But that was all in the beginning, at the very beginning, for I was barely into many years then, only about 10, and knew ‘how to listen’ as though it was the only rule in the world. I bit and chewed and tasted and swallowed every word she ever brought to me, first in my ear, and then on skin thin as the pages of the book. I knew it all at that tender age, and whenever Manatanka found a written thing, a book or page or poster or newspaper, he made me read it to him over and over again so that he could say it back to me from what he called the ‘eye of his mind.’ He kept saying ‘I will not be second to the white man even in his own words. For the Great One Above told me that I dare not lose the advantage of what he had given to me.’ He knew, before he died, the words of The White Father in Washington, who died just after Manatanka died and was left off the ground in a fire nearer to The Great One Above on the poles of two ash trees and two laurel trees and the skin of a bear three times his own size that he had killed by his own hand.
Manatanka said I was second in line for his high place, after Lion’s Flight, but Lion’s Flight was ever weary of my reading skills, and did not trust me. He said, ‘White face does not disappear, but keeps coming.’ Of course, he was right, for the white people, my first people, came on in relentless fashion, against my taken people, the gallant Sioux of the Great Nations, who will contest to the last warrior the taking of their mountains, their lands, by the people from overland.
All that departs, of course, from this current predicament of mine, where I can observe all the citizens of Hell’s Target. And but minutes ago the under-swelling started from the crowd, where one man, with a loud and disturbing voice, in a crazy derby of some kind that few people wear out this way, kept screaming, “Hurry it up, will you, and get that damned Indian stretched by the neck. We ain’t got all day here. Poker’s waiting. My throat is dry. Don’t cha know today’s Satiday.” With fancy footwork he danced a dance calling on decent energy, and some bodily control not all cowboys have. I guessed him a card player at his living.
Joining up with him were many disgruntled voices, another man saying, just as loud but with his arms waving and his hat waving like he was saluting me in my place, “Injuns ain’t got the right to be treated this square. Not like us. Should have been hung on a tree out there at the McKenney place after we asked him where Nellie Mabel was. I bet you all agree with me, don’t cha?”
Nelly Mabel was 13 years old, pretty but slow for her age, who often appeared at the edge of her parents’ ranch where she fished in a small stream, never catching any fish that I ever saw, for I had seen her a number of times and even talked with her. In dresses so pretty you could see her for miles, ones that her mother made especially for her, she’d come along the path to the stream, always with a silly song coming from her mouth that she repeated a hundred times, but that silly song kept a smile on her face all the time. She was convinced that fish took on the squiggles of the worms she fed them. I had talked with her, but briefly, on the day she disappeared, which was the same day her parents were killed and the house robbed. One of the ranch hands had seen me talking with Nelly Mabel when he came back from town and found the parents dead. When he went to look for her, and me I suppose, we were not to be found. I was back up in the hills by that time and had no idea where Nelly Mabel was. I did later on, after I heard about the discoveries, find some current tracks near the stream, those of a few horses, and assumed that the killers realized Nelly Mabel had seen them and was a witness to murder.
If they took her, kidnapped her or visited harm upon her poor soul, she now without parents, I could give no accounting, for before I could trail the horses that left their tracks, I was arrested by the sheriff and his posse and brought here. The trial was over in an hour, and I am now condemned to hang.
All this time I have thought about the poor girl, slow enough, about to be tossed to the wolves of this mad town, her parents unable to protect her, no brothers or kin on the horizon to stand for her. No more will she be allowed to fish and sing her silly song, or enjoy the golden air, or the flowers beside the stream that so often matched her dresses. It was very evident that her mother paid attention to the flowers on the prairie and along the fishing stream.
More noise comes from the crowd, more yelling and impatience, and wanting to get on with the day in Hell’s Target, and from afar I see the disruption on the fringes of the crowd as a man in a black eye-mask makes his way here to this scaffold, down the main street he comes between the bank and the barbershop on one side and the general store and the freighter directly across. People part at the edges, and the insertion moves like an arrow through the crowd, the way a chieftain might make his way, both with obligation and dominance. Noise ceases for a moment, and commotion ensues; probably questions as to his identity, for that identity must be sworn to secrecy, so that wearing such a mask does the job. He is, I fear, the hangman come to do his bidding. On a golden palomino he comes, a robust animal the sun lights up, and he wears a black crowned hat, black vest over a black shirt and denim trousers the land yet has a grip on. Easily he rides the proud horse, a gallant looking animal, and I am a good judge of gallant animals, having bred and run my own prairie horses, from wild stages right through birth of their young, growing colts with knobby legs, but full of promise. The Anasazi from old told us first of the magnificent animals that the Conqueror brought to this land from a far place, and in the matter of the fate of a man, one such horse carries my executioner to my feet to stretch my neck, as they have vouched in Hell’s Target.
As I look about not one Sioux from the tribe is here, for would they not also be brought up here to share my fate? Of course, the way this small town runs on the food of frenzy and fear and unknown facts says it is so. I have no friends here, now that Nelly Mabel is away someplace, that quiet child though full of song, but only the one song. And this man, this hangman, who comes to do a job, will never know what kind of a man that I really am. That I killed my first puma at such an early age, and captured my white stallion in a canyon full of the sounds of terror. And he will not even know that I am able to read anything that he can read, and perhaps more. If I tell him of that ability, he will most likely laugh at a last ruse on my part to find mercy, as would the sheriff. But I have never cried. Not once in my life have I cried. I do not know my own tears, though I have seen others’ tears, how they make their way slowly from the harbor of their eyes, the dam of their expression.
Never, I say again, has this white boy turned Sioux managed a tear from his eyes; not in battle, not in death, not at wounds of the body or of the soul.
But this man, this hangman, this stolid executioner, does not come pompous. He does not wear his vestments the way some of the lawmen do that hold sway in the region. Slowly he moves, patient, making no circus of his deed. He must value life, this hangman, in the most obvious conflict of deed and duty.
And as I look early down upon him, I am caused to lift my eyes and there lies my mountains rising against the great sky, green and white and fiery red and orange in a sunset, with the red slashes in steep stone faces, and the lines of ridges showing where the trails and paths are secret to the Sioux and the black mouths of the caves where some of the gods take to rest, where I chased my puma and met my maiden and high above, past the tree lines I see the snow lines where the sheep have tried in vain to hide from my arrows.
At this time, as the hangman rises slowly and somberly up the steps to reach me, I am visited by memories borne upon the mountains so sweet and so swift they rush through me like the wind in a long cave, and the sound of music comes along as that wind and quick breath cuts off corners like erosion itself is taking place at my ear.
His eyes are sad eyes as he looks at me. They peer out from the slits in his black mask, so blue I think of a tarn up high on the mountain where I swam as a boy with Red Eagle and Chosen Hand who have gone on long before me in the wars. A bit of hair sits on his face and on his chin, some of it gray and some brown as yet, and the sadness also sits at the corners of his mouth where those lips say sadness is about us this day, as if he makes somber announcements at his tasks.
No hatred fills me about him or his task, but only the hurrying sense of innocence that rushes through me trying to be found, but I cannot cry it out or shed tears to gain an edge for my innocence. His shirt is neat. He wears no badge or sign of status, nothing to say what he is, what he has come to do. But only the sadness in his eyes.
“Son,” he says to me, lightly, almost a whisper, “I don’t have any hate for you or any Indian that does me no harm, though I have been subject to great pain in my past. I have forgiven all things done unto me and onto mine. I don’t know if you did the deed or deeds they have said came of your hands, for I am not a judge. I only come to finish the works of a trial. It is the way we do our things. The Sioux way is different, I have heard. Many of us admire your stand, how you fight for your land.” He shook his head, looked at me again, and said, “It is the way we do things. That’s all.”
Then in an almost silent gesture, a bare whisper, he slipped a prairie flower inside my shirt and said, “I have brought you a part of the great grass, to carry with you, to know the odor of the plains.
His face was close to mine, his eyes intense but sad, trying to say all the things his heart carried.
I too whispered, in my turn. “I bear you no hate, sir. None at all. No hate. No sympathy. The way of the Sioux is different, we both know that. All is written in the Great Book, which I have read, at the suggestion of Manatanka.”
He dropped his eyes from my eyes, and stepped behind me to slip the rope over my head. “Do you want a cover for your eyes?” he said, in a voice so courteous, so solicitous, so profound, it made me shake in my moccasins, thinking it too was the voice of The Great One in another body.
“No,” I said. “One up here is sufficient.” The very moment I uttered those words, I was sorry I had said them. I truly felt no hatred to this man.
Behind me, he attempted to fix my collar, the collar of my blue shirt, an old army shirt from the wars, a minie ball hole now soft in it, the sleeves holding stitching remnants of a soldier’s rank, the blue severely faded, like the blue of a high noon sky over miles of a great plain of grass.
Suddenly, in a thunder of the fates that portend cataclysms and surprises, of lives at immediate change, the God of the Great Voice was at it again. I heard this hangman, this hidden man, this man behind a mask, speak to him of the Great Voice. “My god,” he said. “What is this? What is this? Oh, God, what is this?”
It made me think the hangman was going to fall down dead, not me the selected one, up here on this pedestal they call the gallows.
He clasped me from behind, squeezing me with some inordinate pressure bearing on all my bones, on the cavity of my chest. My breath, near all of it, rushed elsewhere.
Then this hangman stepped around me and yelled down to the sheriff, his voice coming again from the great sky above, “Bill, Bill, this is Christopher. This is my son stolen from us many years ago. He has the mark on his neck, the same mark you first noticed. Come up here and look at it, Bill, this is my son, Christopher Happs. Christopher Happs.” He hugged me again.
The sheriff rushed up the steps and grabbed the neck of my shirt, even as a buzz started sweeping the crowd. Then his arms encircled me. I heard his sobs too, deep and convulsive, like the sobs of the hangman. From far off I heard Miss Motherwell say, in a favored poem, “The angel comes never at once but all ways.”
Silence sat in Hell’s Target like it had never sat before.
And way out on the edge of that silence, coming from some path of private wandering, I saw a girl moving slowly, deliberately, in a dress as pretty as a bouquet of prairie flowers, her hand in the hand of an elderly woman leading her from some lost place no one else knows.
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