Them Indians

Short Fiction

edited by Megan Haab.

There was this cotton farm we worked at, and we saw Indians there— real Indians. Not city Indians buying white bread or roadside Indians selling turquoise trinkets. Real Indians riding horses, free. They weren’t all feathers and face paint, they wore normal clothes — jeans and such. But you knew they were Indians from the braids and other tells. It used to be you saw ‘em more, when I was young, and then you saw ‘em less. And now, you don’t see ‘em. And there are reasons why, sure; every one of ‘em too sad to think about. So I don’t. I think of Indians as alive and free, on the backs of horses, gliding through the grass, under a bright blue sky, like the way I saw ‘em near that cotton farm with my sister Sharon.

Cotton was good work for kids. We could handle a hoe at thinning season, and had small hands for picking. We worked a lot of farms back then. Farm work was all there was. The stock market crumbled and the world became desperate. People traveled around chasin…