An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [50]
All about our native land
Where the shops and houses stand.
Richland Lane was untrafficked, hushed, planted in great shade trees, and peopled by wonderfully collected children. They were sober, sane, quiet kids, whose older brothers and sisters were away at boarding school or college. Every warm night we played organized games—games that were the sweetest part of those sweet years, that long suspended interval between terror and anger.
On the quiet dead-end side street, among the still brick houses under their old ash trees and oaks, we paced out the ritual evenings. I saw us as if from above, even then, even as I stood in place living out my childhood and knowing it, aware of myself as if from above and behind, skinny and exultant on the street. We are silent, waiting or running, spread out on the pale street like chessmen, stilled as priests, relaxed and knowing. Someone hits the ball, someone silent far up the street catches it on the bounce; we move aside, clearing a path. Carefully the batter lays down the bat perpendicular to the street. Carefully the hushed player up the street rolls the ball down to the bat. The rolled ball hits the bat and flies up unpredictably; the batter misses his catch; he and the fielder switch positions. Indian Ball.
And there were no roads at all.
And the trees were very tall.
Capture the Flag was, essentially, the French and Indian War. The dead-end street (Europe) saw open combat at its fixed border. Brute strength could win. We disdained the street, although of course we had to guard its border. We fought the real war in the backyards (America)—a limitless wilderness of trees, garbage cans, thickets, back porches, and gardens, where no one knew where the two sides’ territories ended, and where strategy required bold and original planning, private initiative, sneaky scouting, and courage.
If someone cheated at any game, or incurred the group’s wrath in any way, the rest of us gave him, or her, Indian burns: we wrung a bare arm with both hands close together till the skin chafed. Worse—reserved for practically capital crimes—was the dreaded but admired typewriter torture, which we understood to be, in modern guise, an old Indian persuader. One of us straddled the offender, bared his or her breastbone, and lightly tapped fingertips there—very lightly, just where the skin covers the bone most closely. This light tapping does not hurt at all for the first five minutes or so.
We were nice kids who rarely resorted to torture. We played Red Rover, a variation on Prisoners’ Base called Beckons Wanted, and Crack the Whip. Everything else, and parts of these games, too, smacked of Indians. By day, Pin Ford and I played at being Indians straight out. Her parents were also young, and she was my age, an only child; they lived two doors up. Pin’s real name was Barbara. She was tan and blond, sturdy, smooth of skin; she was agreeable and quick to laugh. Her courage and her flair for the visual arts hadn’t yet formed. She was content now to stalk the neighborhood and knock over the odd streetcar.
As Indians, Pin and I explored the wooded grounds of the Presbyterian seminary at our backyards. We made bows and arrows: we peeled and straightened deadfall sticks for arrows, and cut, stealthily, green boughs to bend for bows. With string we rigged our mothers’ Chesterfield cigarette cartons over our shoulders as quivers. We shot our bows. We threw knives at targets, and played knife-throwing games. We walked as the Indians had walked, stirring no leaves, snapping no twigs. We built an Indian village, Navajo style, under the seminary’s low copper beech: we baked clay bricks on slate roofing tiles set on adobe walls around a twiggy fire.
We named the trees. We searched the sky for omens, and inspected the ground for sign.
We came home and found our mothers together in our side yard by the rose garden, tanning on chaises longues. They were both thin and blond. They held silvered cardboard reflectors up to their flung-back chins. Over their closed eyelids they had placed blue eye-shaped