The Tomahawk

by WILLIAM BRANDON

QUINCY ADAMS was a tough school — tough in the sense of juvenile delinquency. Some of t he kids carried knives and brass knuckles, and one or two of the teachers sometimes kept discipline with a blackjack. The school windows wore heavy jail-wire screens, so they couldn’t be broken by neighborhood rocks. At other schools the playgrounds were left open for afterhours recreation, but at Quincy Adams the playground gates were padlocked as soon as school was out. Otherwise, the principal maintained, the playground wouldn’t be there in the morning.

Quincy Adams had a tough look about it, lean and harsh, threadbare and maybe a little punchy. The buildings, grimed with dirt, baked in the sun in the center of a half block of naked asphalt. The asphalt got soft enough on a hot day for the kids to pound banana peels and orange rinds into it, and these things remained for a long time, deeply cemented in the paving and filmed over with soot and chewing gum, like plaques presented by the class of this year or that. Other schools in Jordan were shaded by trees and ornamented with green lawns and banks of vermilion pyracantha, but these things would cost too much money at Quincy Adams.

By some accident of zoning, Quincy Adams drew for its student body most of the community’s Mexican and Japanese and Filipino and colored children. Sometimes they fought one another along racial lines, but not often. Once early in the war a mob of eighth-grade boys and girls stoned a new sixth-grade arrival from Czechoslovakia and put out his eye. They told the police they thought he was a Nazi. The police called often at Quincy Adams. The most frequent charges were vandalism, rape, theft, and possession of narcotics.

Mrs. Polling lived in a two-story frame house on the corner across the street from Quincy Adams. The house had been built in 1908 as a present from Mr. Polling on their tenth wedding anniversary. At that time it had been one of the town’s fine houses, Now it was ramshackle and unpainted, the yard was overgrown with monstrous bushes, so the lower windows of the house couldn’t be seen from the street, and the Quincy Adams neighborhood had grown up around it.

In good weather Mrs. Polling spent much of her time in a rocking chair pulled out to the sidewalk, where she could watch all the people and children and visit with her friends as they passed. Pulling her rocker out to the sidewalk was not an eccentricity in the Quincy Adams district, where everybody else sat in chairs on the sidewalk or leaned from windows, watching life. There was a lot of life to watch in the crowded streets. Mrs. Polling’s one peculiarity was that she never invited anyone, even her best friends, inside her house. Some neighbor women thought that might be because she was so old, and not able to keep her house fit for company any more, and so would be ashamed to have it seen. Still, in spite of its neglected condition, her place was the most imposing house around, from the outside at least. Most of the other houses near by had been converted into red and green fronted stores, with apartments above them and apartments or trailer space to rent in back. Mrs. Polling’s was the only house with a yard.

When the children came and went front school there were student crossing guards on Mrs, Polling’s corner, ragged youths wearing while belts as badges of office. The truck drivers and motorists roaring up and down the street paid no attention to the crossing guards, and the other kids gave the guards only a strict deference of size. That is, the little kids obeyed the guards and the kids big enough to whip the guards pushed them out of the way and darted across the street when they pleased.

2

QUINCE was one of those guards when Mrs. Polling first noticed him. He was a thin-faced, long-wristed boy of ten or twelve, with a shock of harsh black hair. He looked Spanish, Mrs. Polling thought, but not quite Spanish, either. She got curious about his bloodlines and called him over to her rocker and asked him his name.

Quince glared at her and said, “You think you’re smart, you old bat?”

A bigger boy, passing by, put his hand against Quince’s head and pushed him down to the sidewalk, rather casually, with the corner of his eye on Mrs. Polling. The bigger boy then sat on Quince and jammed the heel of his hand in Quince’s face until Quince had to stop yelling to get his breath.

“That’s Mrs. Polling, dummy,”the big boy said, still watching Mrs. Polling surreptitiously to see that she was approving of his gallantry. “You don’t shoot off your face at Mrs. Polling.

“My goodness, I only asked his name,” Mrs. Polling said.

“He’s just a no good little bastard, the big boy said in disgust. He gave Quince’s head a final bang on the sidewalk and stood up. He waited with a foot ready to kick if Quince should show some fight, but Quince lay still with his hands over his face.

The big boy said, “His name’s Quince.” He pronounced it as Spanish, Keensy. “Some egg-headed teacher didn’t know how to read it and called him Kwinse one day, so now the kids call him Kwinsy, like in Quincy Adams, and it makes him sore. He ain’t nothing but a crumb.”

The big boy hitched up his pants and trotted across the street to the school. Mrs. Polling could see lhat Quince was crying behind his hands.

After a moment Quince got to his knees, still erving, and snatched up a rock from the edge of Mrs. Polling’s yard and threw it after the big boy, halfway across the street, and hit him in the leg. The big boy howled and ran back, chasing him, and Quince ran away. Mrs. Polling didn’t see him again until the next morning.

She said, “Hello, Quince,” pronouncing it Keensy. Quince wouldn’t look at her, and set his jaw stubbornly, but after he had gone on a few steps he said, “Hi,” but without looking back.

Thereafter Mrs. Polling spoke to him regularly, as she did to the rest of her friends.

When she had known him for a week or so, she saw that Quince sold marijuana cigarettes to the other kids before and after school as he worked at his job of crossing patrolman.

She said to him one day, “Quince, do you know what those muggles do to the kids?”

Quince was startled. He said. “What muggles?”

Mrs. Polling said, “They bewitch people. Anyone who sells muggles is a witch. A brujo. Did you know that?”

“I never seen any muggles,”Quince said. He was frightened.

Mrs. Polling took a salt shaker from under her shawl. She had brought it out to her rocker for this purpose. Anyone knows that salt thrown in the form of the cross at a witch will make the witch die, and then a bat will fly out of the dead witch’s mouth.

Mrs. Polling said solemnly, “Quince, I’m going to call upon the sweet names of Mary and Joseph and make a cross with salt. You’d belter be sure you’re not lying about not having any muggles.”

Quince watched the salt sbaker with terrified eyes. He took two brown paper cigarettes from his pocket and threw them on the grass. He wanted to run, Mrs, Polling could see, but he was too scared to run. He said in a whisper, still watching the salt shaker, “I ain’t any witch, Mrs. Polling. Honest.”

“You are if you sell muggles,” Mrs. Polling said relentlessly.

“They’re only fake muggles,” Quince said, He licked his lips and swallowed. “That’s the real truth. They only cost a nickel. How could they be muggled up for a nickel?”

“Do you sell them for Double Jig?" Double Jig was an immensely fat boy who had gone from Quincy Adams to reform school and had come back again.

Quince nodded. He said, “I get two cents and he gets three cents. They can’t really be muggled up, can they, for three cents?”

“The salt would tell us, I guess,” Mrs. Polling said. She weighed the salt shaker in her hand. Quince watched it in agony. He tried to be courageous, but he began to tremble.

“What did you do with the money you made?” Mrs. Polling asked suddenly.

“I bought candy,”Quince said, shivering, and looking very grave.

Mrs. Polling pursed her lips and thought that over. She said, “Would you like to see a tomahawk?”

Quince looked at her blankly and didn’t know what to say.

“You stop on your way home from school this evening, and I’ll show it to you,” Mrs. Polling said.

Quince said in awe, “Do you know I m an Indian?”

“Indeed I do,” Mrs. Polling said. “I asked about you. Do you want to see the tomahawk?

Quince breathed, “Gee, yeah.”

“I’ll have it here when school’s out.”

Quince hesitated, although it was clear Mrs. Polling had dismissed him. He gathered his courage. He said, “Are you going to do the salt?”

I was waiting for yet to be brave enough to be ready,” Mrs. Polling said.

She made a cross of salt on the sidewalk. No owl appeared over Quince’s head, and he didn’t die, and no bat came out of his mouth.

Mrs. Polling met his eyes and smiled. Quince broke into a broad grin and raced away to the school.

Double Jig was laying for Quince when school let out in the afternoon, and beat him up and cut his arm with a flip knife, so Quince didn’t stop by that day to see Mrs. Polling’s tomahawk.

3

MRS. POLLING had learned that Quince lived with a family of neighbors who had taken him in when his mother died. His father had gone away someplace before then, and nobody knew where he was. Quince’s mother had been part Indian and his mother’s father had been all Indian, they said, American Indian, from someplace in New Mexico or Wyoming. When Quince didn’t appear for a day or two, Mrs. Polling made inquiries of a halfgrown girl named Gloria, who waited on table in Ollie’s Tavern down the street. Gloria lived next door to Quince.

Gloria said, “He won’t go back to school,” and shrugged, “He’s not any good, that Quince. Yesterday he hid under the house all day, with the centipedes and spiders, and Mrs. Espinosa even tried to throw hot water at him under there and she couldn’t get him out until after dark, lie was afraid the police were coming to take him. They will, too, if he stays out of school. Personally, I think it will be a blessing for Mrs. Espinosa when they do. She keeps him like one of her own just because she’s a religious kind of person, but I think you can be too religious, don’t you? That Quince will disgrace them sooner or later because he is no good. Even the other kids don’t like him. Do you want to hear a secret?" Gloria, touching up her eyebrows with a moistened linger tip, glanced aside from her compact mirror to give Mrs. Polling a dancing smile. “Ollie and I are going to get married, He’s going to name the tavern The Gloria’s Tavern — you know, Gloria’s, but it will sound like Glorious. Isn’t that cute? lie’s going to paint it all over with blue stars. But don’t tell because it’s a secret.”

Mrs. Polling congratulated her and promised not to tell. She asked Gloria to tell Quince to come see her on Saturday.

On Saturday, just at dusk, Quince appeared at Mrs. Polling’s rocking chair on the sidewalk. His arm was still wrapped in a dirty bandage.

Mrs. Polling had the tomahawk under her shawl on her lap. She brought it out and held it in both hands for Quince to see it. It had a small, neat, vicious iron head. The haft was of some mysterious wood, very light.

Quince looked at the tomahawk with bright eyes. Mrs. Polling offered it to him and he took it, holding it flat on his two palms as Mrs. Polling had held it. He said, “Is it a real one?”

“You bet your boots it is,” Mrs. Polling said. It belonged to a Shoshone chief, a great man in his time. He gave it to my grandfather for a present.”

“Was your grandfather an Indian, too?” Quince asked.

No, he was a trader. He had a lot of friends in the Cheyenne and Ute and Shoshone and Arapahoe nations and I don’t know who all. What nation was your grandfather, Quince?”

“I don’t know,” Quince said. “I don’t know what I am.”

“Once a miner stole it from my grandfather,” Mrs. Polling said. “My grandfather took a gun and went after him and made him give it back. He followed that man for a hundred miles before he caught up with him. He said he’d chase him till hell Loze over and then he’d chase him some more on the ice, if he had to.”

Quince held the tomahawk in one hand and ran the other hand along the black blade. He said, “Did he kill him ? ”

“Land, no. My grandfather didn’t, have to kill a greenhorn like that fellow. But I suspect he scared him half to death when he caught him.”

Quince sat down on the ground beside Mrs. Polling’s rocker. He gripped the tomahawk in both hands and slowly chopped with it to right and to left.

He said, “Gee, it feels funny. It’s so light. Did this ever kill anybody?”

Mrs. Polling chuckled. “I should say so. The Chief who had it must have killed dozens of Blackfeet with it. He was famous for lighting Blaekfeet. He was always rich in Blaokfoot horses, my grandfather said. And of course anyone who fought Blaekfeet fought the very best, and didn’t they know it.”

Quince held the tomahawk up beside his face. He said, “Does it look like me?”

Mrs. Polling got out her spectacles and put them on and peered down at him. The street light splintered on her glasses and gleamed on her false teeth when she smiled, and shone through her fine white hair to make a veil around her head. She said, “Not too much. Although you both certainly are skinny.”

Quince laughed. He laid the tomahawk across his knees and bent his head over it. Suddenly he grabbed it up and whipped it in a circle around his head and then put it back across his knees again.

Mrs. Polling said, “There used to be a little bunch of feathers tied to it by a strip of leather. I can remember them when I was a little girl. But they gave out, I guess.”

“If I had this, I’ll bet I could fix old Double Jig,” Quince said.

“Well, you’re not going to have it, young man. Don’t you start thinking of that. I wouldn’t part with it for anything on earth. But you can stop by and see it whenever you want, on your way from school.”

Quince raised the tomahawk above his head with both hands and then looked up at it in the dark. He said in a low voice, “Double Jig won’t let me go to school no more.”

“Pshaw, as fat as he is I shouldn’t think you’d be scared of him. You can outrun him, certainly.”

“His gang catches me and holds me for him. He’s got a lot of friends and I ain’t got any friends. It’s because everybody else is something else and I’m the only Indian in school.”

“Why, that’s not so. Nine tenths of these Mexican people are part Indian, way back. Didn’t you know that.”

“They ain’t Indian like I am,”Quince said in a matter-of-fact voice. “Why else would they all act to me like they do?”

Mrs. Polling got to her feet. She said, “You just make believe Double Jig and his bunch are all Blackfeet. If you show enough fight, I’ll warrant they’ll stop picking on you.” She reached down and took the tomahawk away from him and began dragging her rocking chair up the brick walk to her house.

Quince jumped up and said, “Do you want me to help you?”

“I’ll manage. This is most all the exercise I get each day. Good night, Quince.”

She disappeared among the bushes in her front yard. He could still hear the rocker scraping and bumping along oxer the bricks. He called out, “I sure wish I could see it again sometime.”

The rocker stopped. Mrs. Polling’s voice said, “The next day you go to school, you stop. Good night.”

Quince waited until he heard the rocker making its way painfully up the steps of her porch, and then walked away home.

On the following Monday, Quince went to school, and after school he stopped again to see the tomahawk. He had a bloody nose but his knuckles were skinned too, Mrs. Polling was pleased to see. He was shivering spasmodically , but while he looked at the tomahawk, now and then wiping blood from his mouth, the shivering stopped. Mrs. Polling didn’t say anything about his returning to school, or about Double Jig. When it was suppertime, Quince finally gave the tomahawk back to her and left.

He didn’t stop the next day, but the day after that he came by with a gauze compress taped over one ear. Mrs. Polling could not restrain her curiosity, and asked him if Double Jig had been at him again.

Quince said, “No, the principal punched me around. He gave me a licking because I hit Double Jig in the belly with a ball bat and they had to take him to the hospital.” Quince kept his eyes lowered to the tomahawk, but Mrs. Polling could tell that he was quite proud and happy.

From then on Double Jig left him alone, and Quince seemed much more sure of himself. He came every few days after school to see the tomahawk. He never talked much, but bis face was very expressive, as it should be, Mrs. Polling thought, because it was so thin you could almost sec through it. Sometimes he would show up with the same sick look in his eyes she remembered from the first time she had seen him, and she would know something had gone wrong at school or at home, but the tomahawk would make medicine and the fear and loneliness would be spirited away.

4

THE next year, when Quince graduated from the eighth grade and thus from Quincy Adams, Mrs. Polling invited him into her house and gave him a cookie. Quince understood that this was a great honor, being shown inside Mrs. Polling’s house, because no one had ever been asked inside by Mrs. Polling, so he had heard.

Her house looked far grander and better kept inside than out. Quince was surprised at this. He had heard people speculate that her house was probably a mess inside, the way old folks living alone usually let things go. There were several other rocking chairs like the one she dragged out to the sidewalk, squat-legged chairs with high backs, decorated with chintz-covered cushions. There was a beautiful piano, and a mirror in a frame of golden curlicues, and a glistening sideboard set with rubbed and polished silver, and a lacy fern hanging in a pot at the sunlit bay window. Quince had never seen so much furniture in a house. It looked like a furniture store, he thought, the way things were crowded around and kept shiny. Every table top bore porcelain figures, bronze vases, glass paperweights, odd cups and saucers. Above the fireplace there was a painting of a bearded man, his hand thrust heroically into his coat, and there was a row of old photographs on the manteltree, some of them pictures of Mrs. Polling’s house in earlier days, with a carriage in front and people on the porch.

Quince sat down on a stiff, gleaming little chair. He was conscious of his ragged sweater and his dirty hands. Mrs. Polling brought him the cookie on a plate, and a glass of milk. The tomahawk was stuck behind an oval picture on the wall, and after she put down the milk and cookie she crossed the room and got the tomahawk and brought it over to him. She was puffing from all the walking back and forth. She stood before him, breathing hard but smiling, a bent old woman in a print house dress, holding out the tomahawk in both hands as she had held it the first time he had seen it. Quince was lifted upon a sudden wave of well-being that seemed a culmination of all the good feelings he had had each time he had seen the tomahawk. In the midst of this he was excited by a thought, springing for no reason at all from his sense of pleasure and excitement, that maybe Mrs. Polling was going to give him the tomahawk fora graduation present, but he knew that couldn’t be.

He gulped down the last of the milk and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and took the tomahawk. He couldn’t keep from grinning, because he fell so fine.

Mrs. Polling sat down in a rocker. They were silent for a long time, while Quince held the tomahawk.

Mrs. Polling said at last, “I hope you’ll not stop coming to see it, Quince, just because you won’t be going by to school.”

Quince said, “Heck, no.”

Mrs. Polling sighed. She said, “My, I haven’t, had company for ever so long.”

Quince grinned.

“All the friends I used to know moved away from around here years ago,” Mrs. Polling said. “I never see them any more. But this house means so much to me, I don’t believe I ever could give it up. Everything here reminds me of when my husband was living and my children were growing up. Both my boys died of the typhoid when they weren’t much more than youngsters.”

Quince, holding the tomahawk and studying the strange, ancient gouge that ran up from the bit, wondered what Mrs. Polling would say if he would ask her for it. But something told him Ids contentment would be shattered if he said anything like that.

“I suppose it means you’ve stopped growing when you let a place get such a hold on you,” Mrs. Polling said. “But land, surely I’m old enough to stop growing.”

Quince said nothing. They were quiet again, while the afternoon sank away and the room was filled with shadow.

Quince said, “I guess I’ll go.” He put the tomail a wk down on a table. He said, “I’ve got a job for summer. It’s helping Mr. Mangahas with his gardening business, over on the other side of town.”He hesitated, and then blurted, “I won’t get back over here very much.”

Now maybe she would offer to give him the tomahawk.

“That will be a real good job, I should think, ‘ Mrs. Polling said. “When you do come back, you stop by.”

Quince concealed his disappointment. It wasn’t exactly disappointment, anyway. He had known all the time she didn’t mean to give him the tomahawk.

He said, “Okay.” Mrs. Polling opened the front door for him and he went out.

On the porch, Mrs. Polling said, “I’m awfully happy about you, Quince,”

He didn’t know what she meant, and she seemed to realize she had embarrassed him. She said, “Good-by,” and closed the door without giving him a chance to answer.

5

THE summer job was hard work, and it was in a strange part of town. In the beginning Quince was unhappy, and after a few days he came back to Quincy Adams one night after dark, hoping to see the tomahawk, but Mrs. Polling had gone in from the sidewalk for the night and there was no light on in her house, so he had the trip for nothing.

Later, he came over on a Sunday and found her in her chair on the sidewalk, and she went in and got the tomahawk and brought it out for him to look at. He came back once more in the summer, and then it was autumn and he was going to high school downtown and working for Mr. Mangahas in the evenings and on Saturdays and Sundays, and he was too busy to think about the tomahawk for a long while. He came over again in the spring, when school was out. Mrs. Polling kept him sitting by her on the sidewalk for an hour, looking at the tomahawk and listening to her tell all over again the story of how her grandfather had chased the miner who had stolen it. Then Mrs. Polling kept him even longer while she made him tell her all about how he had gotten along in his first, year in high school. His grades had been all right, not too good, but he had passed in everything. High school math was sure hard. They were having algebra.

After that he only came to see Mrs. Polling at the end of each school year, in the early summer, and forgot about her and the tomahawk the rest of the time. Mrs. Polling thought about him frequently and was sorry he could not come over, but she knew he was kept terribly busy. She found out all she could about how he was getting along. Gloria, who was going with a policeman now, kept her informed about Quince, because her boy friend, the policeman, knew everything about every body in all parts of town, not just in the Quincy Adams district. Gloria had not married Ollie at the tavern after all.

Gloria said Quince was getting along real good. Gloria thought it was amazing, the way Quince was working hard and behaving himself. She said no one would ever have thought that Quince would grow up right. Gloria said that Quince was even thinking about stinlying landscaping at college after he got through high school, so Mr. Mangahas had told her boy friend. Mr. Mangahas said maybe Quince had a talent for landscaping.

Mrs. Polling was extremely proud of these reports. In her own mind she exaggerated the importance of the tomahawk in shaping Quince’s character until, in her own private thoughts, she saw her tomahawk as the only thing in the world Quince lived and worked for. It was an instance of true magic, she sincerely believed, but wondrous as it was she never spoke of it to anyone. Her happiness about it was inarticulate.

When the time came for Quince’s graduation from high school, Mrs. Polling decided to make him a gift of the tomahawk. It would be hard to give it up, it was one of the most precious of her keepsakes, but that would make the gift all the more momentous. She pictured over and over, while she waited for Quince’s visit after the end of school, his joy and astonishment. She was certain he had never dreamed that she might ever give it to him, all his, to keep. But she did feel he had earned it, turning out as well as he had.

It might be better, if Quince was really going on to college, to wait and give him the tomahawk after he was through college. It would mean still more as a college graduation gift. But Mrs. Polling was afraid to wait another four years. She wanted to be on hand herself to see his face when, all unexpected, the tomahawk became his.

She waited eagerly for Quince to come and see her, expecting him each day after the end of the school term, but he didn’t appear. Weeks passed, and it was midsummer. She asked Gloria about him, and Gloria said he was working extra hard and still studying too. He had gotten some kind of scholarship that would help him go to college. He had a girl, too, Gloria said.

Mrs. Polling told Gloria to ask Quince to come and visit her, if she saw him. Gloria reported later she had seen Quince downtown and he had said he was coming to see Mrs. Polling right away, the first chance he got. Gloria said his girl was with him, and she was real cute.

But Quince didn’t come to see her, in spite of his promise. The summer passed. Gloria said Quince had left for college, and her boy friend had heard from Mr. Alangahas that he was going to try to get through in less than four years. He was very serious about his girl, and they wanted to get married, but they would wait until he was through with college and had a job. He was one levelheaded, steady boy, Mr. Alangahas said.

Eventually Mrs. Polling had to accept the fact that Quince had altogether forgotten the tomahawk. She supposed that meant it had done its work well and he didn’t need it any more, but she couldn’t help feeling neglected and disappointed, almost as if Quince had betrayed her. She thought a time or two of getting his address and sending the tomahawk to him as a gift, but she decided that the selfishness of age had as many rights as the thoughtlessness of youth, and if he wanted the tomahawk he would have to come and visit her to get it. But he never did.