Keepsakes & Other Stories

CHIEF LARSON

CHIEF LARSON 79 8o "WHY DID YOU DO IT, Charles Edward?" his mother kept asking him. He was seven and the reasons were clear enough in his mind, but when it came to putting them into words he didn't know where to start. His new parents were forever asking ,______.......,.__. him the reasons for things, and that was something he had never had to put up with as an orphan on the reservation. Not that he wanted to go back to that life, back to being handed around from shanty to shanty and sleeping at the foot of beds already overcrowded. No, this new life was generally better, for along with his new parents and more food, he had a warm bed of his own in a room like a toy store, a new baby sister, and a new grandfather-all this in an enormous house surrounded by a yardful of trees and playground equipment. Looking CHIEF LARSON back six months to the reservation, he missed only two things: one was the way people left him alone and never asked him for reasons, and the other was the way everybody used to call him Chief. He had had no other name. From the time of his birth, he had been known simply (and magnificently) as Chief. After being called Chief all your life, it's a letdown to become known as Charles Edward Larson. "Why did you do it, Charles Edward?" his mother asked. Well, for one thing, he had just suffered through another Sunday afternoon-that endless expanse of time when his new father, his new mother, his new grandfather , and his new baby sister took naps. After dinner the baby was put to bed so sleepy that her eyes rolled up in her head before her lids were dosed. After a cigar, Grandfather, the most deliberate napper in the family, climbed the stairs, undressed down to his long underwear , and slipped into bed without his teeth. Mother took the women's section of the Sunday paper to the couch in the sunroom and called out two or three familiar names from the engagement notices, then dozed off with her glasses on. Father, in his stockingfeet, stacked a halfdozen symphonies on the phonograph spindle and lay on the living-room sofa; he claimed that he never slept in daylight, that he was listening to music with his eyes closed, but Chief knew by the way his mouth hung open that he was asleep. Endless symphonies. As much as Chief disliked Sunday silence, he would have preferred utter silence to those symphonies. In certain slow movements the treble sound of a lone violin seemed to come 81 }ON HASSLER 82 from his own heart instead of from the phonograph-a long quavering wail of loneliness and boredom that sometimes brought him to the edge of tears. So that was one reason he did it-simply because it was Sunday. Once the house was asleep, he began tracing the Sunday comics on sheets of white paper, holding them flat against the bay window in the sunroom and drawing until his arms were tired. Then he went to the back yard and climbed into the apple tree, where he sat in a crotch and bombed imaginary cities with the sour crabs that hung about him. Next he lay behind the hedge in the front yard to spy on passersby, but nobody passed by. He looked up and down the broad street. Nothing moved. The shade of the elms lay in perfect repose on the asphalt and boulevards. Not a single leaf-shadow stirred. Chief rolled onto his back and searched the cloudless, birdless sky for movement, but there was only a pale blue stillness. Even the sun, as was its custom on Sunday afternoons, had stopped. Finally at four-thirty the phone rang and brought the household back to life: The baby cried and Mother rose from under the newspaper and went to the phone. Father lazily tied his shoes. Upstairs Grandfather's bed creaked. It was Chief's piano teacher calling to say she was not leaving town as she had originally planned, and that she would expect Charles Edward for his Monday-evening lesson after all. And she wondered, incidentally, if Charles Edward's eyes had ever been checked. He might need glasses. He was not reading music at a normal speed, and she had once known a boy like that who was discovered to be nearsighted long...