she isn’t dead. Truly. She went away for doctoring by the ocean.” South Boy’s mother had gone to Los Angeles for an operation eight months before. “She was cured, but the doctor said she must stay there until the hot weather breaks. You will see her back here by the second full moon from now, or thereabouts.”
Whereupon the old man laughed in great relief and wiped his eyes with his dirty sleeve. He pointed to South Boy’s mud-smeared hair. “Then that means nothing,” he said.
“Nothing,” said South Boy, thinking sullenly, First, the cook, then this old man . . . He added, “My hair has grown lately.”
“Yes,” said Hook-a-row. “Yes, truly. Maybe it grows all-the-way-long and it will be twisted into fifty strands and you will become a Real Person indeed.”
He went away chuckling to himself, and South Boy went on down to the river, not knowing that more seeds of thought had been planted in the back of his mind.
There was a big black-willow that made shade over the water all day long at the spot where he came to the river’s bank. And the river in those days was the old wild river, before any dams had tamed it. It was deep and strong, and its usual color was that of coffee with a spoonful of cream in it; but today it showed a strong tinge of red as it did when there had been big rains far away in the Navajo country causing the Little Colorado to dump a stinking red flood into the big river above the Grand Canyon.
So the river on this day not only was red, but was a foot higher than it had been the day before, and there was an added restlessness to its surge. South Boy heard it talking to him in disquieting tones. He stripped off his clothes, caked with ditch mud that had already dried, dropped them on the bank, and slid into the water.
By and by he crawled up the bank and into the first fork of the big willow, where such breeze as did come off the river cooled his wet skin. Against the sooty gray of the willow bark he made a motionless pattern of golden brown—the color of a new saddle freshly oiled. His back was against the downstream side of the fork, his right knee was braced against the upstream limb, and his left leg hung down the trunk.
For a moment he was almost happy, watching the river, wide and strong, its rolling sand boils and its ever-changing pattern of crosscurrents and back currents. There was a great sand bar out in the middle, dried bone-white in the two months since the recession of the annual great flood. Over it the heat waves danced frantically, distorting the line of green that was the grove of willows and cottonwoods on the Nevada bank. But in the heat and unaccustomed idleness, the seeds of thought that had been planted in the back of his mind grew disturbingly.
First, he frowned as he puzzled over the cook’s talk about his hair. Then he squirmed over Hook-a-row’s mention of his mother. So the Mojaves had decided she was dead. That was why no one had asked about her lately.
Well, she’d be back by October, and he’d be very glad.
Truly, hadn’t he always been waiting by the Needles road each Tuesday and Saturday when the stage went by on its way to Fort Mojave to collect her long letter? Didn’t he read it to his father whenever he was home and see to it his father wrote an answer in time to make the down stage on Wednesdays and Mondays? Didn’t he always write her a full, honest page, himself, for every letter, and two pages when his father was not at home?
Still, when she came back he would be confronted with Cultural Advancement and Christian Instruction again. And he would hear the cry that grew in persistence every year. “When are we sending this boy away to school?”
For South Boy’s mother was not only a white woman, she was a lady. She said herself she belonged to Another World. Certainly she was no part of either of the two worlds around her—these, according to her own description, were the Rough World of the White Man and the Heathen World of the Indian. She had been forced by a fraud of nature to give South Boy to the breast of an Indian woman, but almost from the day he learned to drink cow’s milk out of a glass she had sought to armor him with Cultural Advancement and Christian Instruction against the Rough and the Heathen Worlds.
Every weekday South Boy received two hours of Cultural Advancement, which began with reading and writing when he was small and afterwards developed into two pages of Tarr and McMurry’s “Advanced Geography,” one chapter of Wells’s “History of the United States,” and two pages of “Gems of Great Literature,” the first two to be memorized at least in part, and the latter to be read “with feeling and proper pronunciation.” All this was no great chore for South Boy, who had all three volumes almost by heart within a year and had learned to think of more interesting things, like shooting ducks or wild pigs, while he was reciting.
At the end of the two hours he was turned over to his father, who spent fifteen or twenty minutes teaching him arithmetic and, lately, double entry bookkeeping—both of which he enjoyed. By that time his mother, always in delicate health, had retired to read in her own room; so South Boy sallied out into the Rough or the Heathen World, as suited his fancy, and learned all those things he had been armored against: from the Foreman; from various callous cowhands (most of them fugitives from something or other); from the Mormonhater; from the Yavapai roustabout; and from several score Mojaves, his most cherished companions.
Christian Instruction came on the long weary Sabbath. He read ten selected chapters out of the Bible—selected by his mother so he wouldn’t run into any embarrassingly frank language—and one sermon, long, tough, and dry, by some Scotchman. On the Sundays they stayed at home he could escape after dinner, when his mother took a nap. On alternate Sundays he was stuck for all day. He had to hitch up his mother’s surrey, drive around to the house for his mother and the cook, drive down to a point across the river from Needles, yell his lungs out to fetch the cable ferry, lead the skittish horses on and off the old flatboat—and carefully keep from cussing when they tried to jump into the river—drive the cook to the Catholic church, go with his mother to the Presbyterian mission, sit through a sermon, and then reverse all that tedium homeward.
All in his good clothes, too. The only bright spot on these days was when the rig would encounter a rattlesnake. As his mother loathed snakes and there was a biblical admonition against them, it was permissible for him to use the shotgun that he was allowed to carry in the rig for defense purposes only.
Usually he fired suddenly, scaring the wits out of his passengers and the horses. After he had checked the runaways and after the screams in the back seat had been reduced to gasps he would explain he had to shoot the snake without warning because it was coming to attack the horses.
Of course the cook never believed him, but his mother still thought a snake, no matter how far away it was, had murder on its mind. For all these years in the wilderness—her own term—she had lived in her own island of Culture and Civilization, hermetically sealed against the facts of the world without—Rough, Heathen or Herpetological.
Still, South Boy loved his mother. She was a dear, good woman. He missed her very much and he would be glad to give all his Sundays and two hours of every other day to have her back. It was the thought of being sent away to be shut up among white strangers in a school that made his skin prickle and the sweat beads form on his hands. As the day of her return approached, he had fought off thinking about it and had succeeded because he kept busy. Now that crazy weather enforced idleness he could fight it off no longer.
As though the thought of white strangers could conjure them up, the sound of voices talking English came floating down the river and after it came a good big boat with an awning rigged on willow poles and three white men under it, cursing the heat and dipping up hatfuls of water to pour over their perspiring heads. The boat drifted into the near channel.
“Hullo,” said the man in the bow. There was a surveying transit leaning against the gunwale
