Honorable Mention in Prose

Undimmed By Human Tears, America, America
Zachary Gates '05

Tucked in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, there are towns that have never had a visit from the Governor, let alone the President of the United States. Republican legislators arrive about once a year in Pennsylvania towns with worldly names, places like Canton, Troy, Rome, and Athens, and the townspeople consider themselves lucky. Republican legislators talk to the Republican populism, to tell them how they are doing everything they can for the farmers and factory workers, how they're concerned about the loss of youth in the Commonwealth. Republican legislators leave the towns, pocket the votes, and know they don't have to do a damn thing to keep those votes. When the Casey boy said that the Northern Tier of Pennsylvania was full of "rocks, rattlesnakes, and Republicans," he wasn't too far from the truth, at least with the last one on the list. The towns in the Endless Mountains remain waiting patiently for the promise of America to come to them, or to rise up from within them, but for now there is no rising spirit. That spirit died somewhere along the line, too long ago for most folks to remember there ever having been brighter days. Those who remember the heyday don't talk about it much.

In just such a town, past a field of corn nowhere close to being knee-high, to the right of the wife beater's clapboard house, to the left of the Methodist church with the chipping white paint, down in the valley of the shadow of meth, on the other side of the crick, in his parent's farmhouse, under the covers in his bedroom, Wallace's dry-eyed drowsiness gave way to waking thought. The thirteen-year-old boy uttered a gagging cough, scratched himself, and rolled out of his bed to an overcast day. He could smell the hint of coming rain; give it three hours. Celebrating freedom was the order of the day. Happy Fourth of July!

Wallace had something to see. Pulling on a week's-worn pair of cut-off jean shorts, Wallace managed to clothe himself enough to be presentable in public, or more likely, blend in for a couple minutes. A sweat-stained white T-shirt and a red bandana that didn't come close to hiding his greasy shoulder-length mullet was enough of an attempt at patriotism to not arouse suspicions from the crowd. He would be with the crowd that day. He would float around the crowd, on the periphery, people-watch. He did not want to be a part of the crowd.

And a crowd it was. As his Grampa said, like flies on a turd. Crackers came out of the woodwork of the outlying community around East Smethfield to show that they weren't a bunch of goddamn Commies or fruits who didn't appreciate what it meant to be a "real" American. Fourth of July, or "Nabisco Day" as Wallace liked to refer to it, was less a chance to be seen as it was a chance to see who wasn't around. Wallace chuckled at how, from a way's off, the sound of the people resembled the clucking of hens in a barnyard. For Wallace, it didn't make one difference what everyone's patriotic prerogative or motivation was. Pony-tailed girls his age and a few years older would be out in T-shirts and Daisy Dukes, the volunteer firemen would be throwing candy he could snatch up quicker than the five year olds, and as it was every year, this might be his last chance to see the Dead Indian alive and to talk to him.

The Dead Indian was as much a fixture of the Fourth of July parade as the tanker trucks and tottery VFW members marching out of step, half-drunk, half-drunker. Every year, about two-thirds of the way through the procession, a red Ford Mustang convertible with white fenders would slowly make its way up a slight knoll into the town square, bringing with it a momentary hush of the crowd. Seated in the back seat of the Mustang, dressed in what everyone said was his warrior outfit, sat the Dead Indian. He couldn't have been more than a day under 90, for the wrinkled olive skin sagged underneath his eyes as if it had long ago given up trying to hold tight against the surrounding gravity. A headdress of colored, matted hawk, crow and turkey feathers sat atop his bowing head, gray hairs peeking out on the sides. Despite the usually 100 degree temperature, the Dead Indian always wore a buckskin shirt. Beads of sweat would drip from underneath the headdress and down his forehead, get caught in a wrinkle, and disappear into the leathery folds beneath his eyes. Wallace knew that was where they mixed with the Dead Indian's tears. Wallace didn't know the Dead Indian, but somehow he knew the Dead Indian still cried.

This year's rendition of the routine was no exception. The crowd stilled for a moment, under a hush of uncertainty, as the Indian and his Mustang slowly arrived at the town square. The Dead Indian took in the moment, addressing the public with only flashing sidelong glances. Wallace had heard it said that the Dead Indian was the last Indian living in the county; that he was only half-Indian on his father's side; that his father was Susquehannock. The Dead Indian wasn't talking, and though Wallace one time waited at the end of the parade to talk to the Dead Indian, the red Mustang and the Dead Indian never showed up at the fairgrounds. It was as if somewhere along the way, the Dead Indian just disappeared, only to return mysteriously the next year.

As the Dead Indian surveyed the crowd in his own fashion, an eight-year-old boy, ten Tootsie Rolls to his credit by that point, put a dirty calloused hand to his tiny mouth, and with a "whoop whoop whoop" called the Dead Indian's attention. The Dead Indian's black eyes peeked through a slit of skin, glancing dejectedly in the direction of the child without seeking reciprocal contact. The child didn't notice, too preoccupied with chanting his war whoop into a frenzy and dancing around with his other hand stuck behind his head like feathers. Other kids joined in, some with "hi-yie-yie-yie, hi-yie-yie-yie." The Dead Indian looked away, staring forward again with a pause, and then with the greatest of efforts, with a deep painful breath, he raised his tomahawk, a rusty old hatchet, into the air with a clawed arthritic hand. Liquid pooled up in his facial folds, but the sweat and the tears were hidden by his stoic forward gaze. Mothers hugged their children with a rush of patriotism and loving familial safety, fathers waved their handheld American flags with vigor, and the crowd, Wallace's town, cheered. The Dead Indian passed away for another year, right on schedule.

Wallace skirted the crowd, following the Dead Indian with his eyes until the Mustang turned the corner and disappeared. At that moment, in his Pennsylvania, in his United States, Wallace felt himself a part of a world where everyone was starving for something: food, leadership, hope, a God or god to dry the tears and make it all better. He did not know how patriotism was supposed to feel; he didn't care to examine what freedom meant to him the way his history teacher had encouraged his class to do last spring. Wallace felt dirty, dirtier than the day his dad told him if he ever "married a nigger" he would be disowned from the family, dirtier than when he realized the bigotry behind the ribaldry of the song "Old Zip Coon" that his Grampa sang while bouncing grandkids on his lap, dirtier than the day he found out his other grandfather once ran with the Klan up in New Hampshire, dirtier than when his friends asked him whether he wanted to play "Smear the Queer." Wallace would marry whoever he damned well please, when that day came; he could put his ancestors' racism behind him and chalk it up to ignorance or even stupid desperation; he could turn his back on his friends and risk being called a "fuckin' faggot." He could take all of that and chart his own course in the family. But this . . . this was not how he wanted to remember his rural American boyhood. It was not just his family's misunderstanding of freedom, justice, or equality that he had just witnessed for the umpteenth year. Wallace had seen the Dead Indian before, but this time, he felt like it would be his last memory of the Dead Indian, a memory of an outcast "half-breed" (God, Wallace hated even knowing that word) crying while children mocked him and their parents secretly called him a boozed-up Injun. Did the Dead Indian ever cry out under his breath like Christ on the cross; did it even matter? Christ, did Christ have anything to do with all of it? Wallace wondered how many deaths a man can take in one lifetime.

Wallace returned to his house, throwing into a lilac bush the candy in his pockets before he walked through the front door of his Pennsylvania home. Happy Fourth of July.