Even As We Breathe

by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

  The indigo bunting reminded me that the merging of the forest’s stillness and its interruption marked by fierce velocity was what made the woods the wilderness. Hovering just outside Hawthorne’s darkness, though less romantic than Sherwood Forest, it was a wood not yet known in literature or picture shows. Now, I know what you must be thinking. That all sounds starry-eyed, maybe even romantic. But that’s why you need the stories of this place. No outsiders seemed to know what I knew, what we knew about these woods. Few outsiders knew the contradictions of poison oak and healing salves growing side by side, or the way in which grapevines have nothing to do with eating and so much to do with flying. And that … well, that was fine by me then. But you will need to know.

  I was also one of the few who recognized old man Tsa Tsi’s capuchin monkey, Edgar, simply by the way the tree branches bent overhead. Tsa Tsi, or George (his English name), was one of those fixture characters many of us have known in our childhood. He was a man who never seemed to age nor would ever die. As a child, I was perpetually nervous in his presence, fearful he could see deep to the root of my motivations and ambitions and judge them ceaselessly without saying a word. One sideways glance from the old man and I was transformed. I never actually saw him move from one place to the other, now that I think about it. I can’t recall when or how I met him or when I decided we should go on conversing like lifelong friends. Of course, there were lots of folks like that back then. Formal introductions weren’t needed. Just like I never introduced myself to the stream below my house or my great-aunts that I saw maybe once or twice in my lifetime. Some things, some people just seem to always have existed within our own sphere of being, indefinable by common terms of friendship or familial relationship. Just people, peopling our world. And of course, I still laugh to think that such an apathetic man cared for a ridiculous monkey named Edgar. But as a child, it all made perfect sense.

  Edgar’s leap caused the limbs of the trees to dip much lower than a squirrel’s jump, though he was also far less clumsy than the local woodland flyers. He made very little noise. Tsa Tsi insisted it was because he was deaf. I wasn’t so sure about that because I couldn’t figure how a monkey could survive the panthers if he couldn’t hear them sneaking up on him. I’ve never heard that monkeys have a strong sense of smell. I’m pretty certain Edgar was quiet because Edgar had to be quiet. To survive. I know a little something about that.

  Often, standing on the porch, even though I could not see his tiny black, brown, and white body, I could see his path zigzagging back to Tsa Tsi’s place over the hill. Pines bending. Oak leaves dancing. Maples swaying as if a strong gust of wind had managed to coil its way within the confines of the forest. His movement was in such congruence with the treetops I couldn’t help but feel he was naturally meant to be there.

  I guess it’s safe to say that the old man was the only one around who kept a monkey as a pet and the only monkey owner in the whole wide world who thought it perfectly natural to let said pet roam at will. Edgar caused more than one hunter to go into near cardiac arrest a time or two. But more folks in the area by then knew to be on the watch for him and would relay sightings to Tsa Tsi so he wouldn’t worry. Not that he was prone to worrying.

  A few years back, while I was up at his place helping to split wood, the old man, sitting on a stump rolling cigarette after cigarette, told me how he came to acquire Edgar. It seems that the carnival was making its way through Cherokee one summer. Early ’30s, late ’20s … something like that. The carnival wasn’t stopping here for a show because no one in Cherokee had any money anyway, but sometimes it would set up camp for performers to rest before moving on to another town for a week of shows. Edgar was a trained tightrope walker, wore a top hat and tiny red vest. Unfortunately, he also had a problematic tendency to lift ladies’ skirts and nip at children who tried to pet him. The carnival manager kept him in a minuscule metal cage for those reasons. “Weren’t fit for a possum.” Tsa Tsi shook his head, thinking back.

  Tsa Tsi told me that one day while the carnies were in camp, he went down to see if they might be interested in buying some wild greens or deer jerky. “They paid a fair price for fresh goods.” He told me that the place looked pretty deserted, so he eased his way into one of the larger circus-style tents for a look-see. When he saw Edgar the first time, the monkey was clenching the bars of his cage and shaking the entire structure so hard that the bottom kept lifting from the ground. As Edgar saw Tsa Tsi enter the tent and approach his cage, Edgar just stopped, and as Tsa Tsi says (though who’s to know what’s really true), “he began to grin like a fool” at Tsa Tsi and calmed right down.

  It all seems like a crazy story to me (and probably you) now, but the old man did tell me something that I took to heart. We were sitting outside the trading post on a split-log bench. I sipped an RC Cola, desperate to cool off from the walk down the mountain and he, as he always did, seemed to have been sitting there his whole life. I took a long drink as Tsa Tsi picked up the story at its midpoint.

  “And right then I knew what I had to do. See, Pap used to tell me about sneaking down to the stockade and taking food to his older brother and his family right before they moved ’em west during the Removal. He used to tell me that the government had made an animal of his brother and that he knew he could never get caught or he’d become one too. So he hid out in the mountains and later stayed with a family who’d been traded a small piece of land ’cause freedom was worth more than life.”

  And that’s why old man Tsa Tsi never left the Qualla Boundary either and how he came to end up with a capuchin monkey named Edgar, who I’m guessing he just up and stole—because Tsa Tsi wasn’t much for negotiations with white folk.

  I asked him once why he’d named him Edgar. He told me that he’d named him after Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t know what I think about that. Wouldn’t have suspected Tsa Tsi to have even read Poe; but then again, Tsa Tsi didn’t seem to fit into molds so easily.

  Now, as for Edgar, he was even more adventurous than Tsa Tsi and loved to explore and that’s why he nearly sent quite a few people to an early grave. Edgar had been seen as far away as Tennessee and Georgia. He always made his way back to Tsa Tsi, though. He might be gone a whole month, but he’d come ambling into Tsa Tsi’s cabin, hungry as hell, no worse for the wear. So I think Tsa Tsi saw no point in keeping him tied or locked up, and the rest of us got to enjoy having our very own capuchin monkey hanging out in our woods. We didn’t even have to go to a zoo for a taste of the exotic.

  Ever since I could remember, I wanted to escape Cherokee, and that feeling of suffocation just kept growing with my body. But just as I was about to finally get out, at least for a summer, I felt as if I was rushing carelessly out of the woods, saw briars pricking my bare forearms and legs, leaving trickles of blood to mix with the sweat of haste. I started thinking of all the things I would miss, like ripe berries left on the bush. Lishie’s hand over her mouth when she got tickled. The way a cool mist rises from the Oconaluftee as if sighing at the rising sun. The chattering of the indigo buntings. And a place where a monkey could scamper across oak and maple limbs like a tightrope performer. If I thought too much about the sweetness of my place in the world, I might never be able to leave it.

  Chapter Two

  Bud had one more job to scrounge up before I left for the summer to work at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, and though he would never admit it, he needed me. Bud and a few of his cronies had managed to covertly fell several trees following a major storm but were unable to convince the remaining railroad bosses to haul the load to the lumberyard. The river, with its infinite ability to expand and contract due to cloudbursts or man’s manipulation, offered the only solution. They would burden the beasts that had been retired to farming life and drag the load to the Tuckasegee River. They’d dam it, anticipating the expected summer rains, and wait for the push.

  The Smokies had long been a logging economy, ending only with the inception of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
I had mixed feelings on such and probably harbor more distaste for the industry in my later days; but back then, logging was just another way to survive. Bud made what semblance of a living he could out of those woods.

  As the logging companies dried up, he siphoned every last opportunity they leaked on their way out of town, as if it were maple sap. The timber companies used to build great splash dams to push their haul down the rivers into the timber yards. Railroads couldn’t do all the work. The rivers and animals, as they always have, bore the burden of man’s desire to do things faster and cheaper.

  I was seated on a stump at the lumberyard removing my shoes at the edge of an ever-rising pool, watching the rounded, slick logs race down the river toward me. Waiting. My job was to be a river hog. “Gas money,” Bud reminded me. “ ’Bout time you can get off the teat.”

  “Yeah, just try and relax.” Thomas, a man I barely knew, nudged me. “Ain’t no big deal.”

  Little did I know I’d hear those words again in only a matter of weeks. Just try and relax. It took me a while to understand why suspicion would feel so much like drowning. I know now it was those words that connected the sensations for me. It was those words that would outlast the men who spoke them. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The log runners (those skilled, balanced men who spun endlessly on the glassy logs, prodding them into alignment) had left with the last whistle. I knew with my foot useless as it was, and well, to be honest, my body useless as a whole, I could never maneuver the way they had. I could swim, though. I could swim for hours. Surely I could push the few dozen poles into their stalls from the pool’s rim and, if need be, wade among them. I needed the money. Not just to put away, but to make sure I had the necessities when I got to Asheville. Places like that’ll make you pay for your uniform before you even clock in. That’s how you became more of an indentured servant than free-will staff, and I couldn’t let that happen.

  Bud gave no direction on how to accomplish the objective. He told me where to wait, where the logs should rest, and to keep my mouth shut about the splash pool to anyone else.

  The logs rushed down the river in a collective heap, fast and bulging from the waters like dark storm clouds mounting. I immediately felt my pulse quicken, and I turned, momentarily considering leaving this impending mess to Bud alone. How could I corral such a force of nature? It was obvious I would never be able to swim between the poles as I had imagined. I would need to, at the very least, mount them on all fours to float among them.

  I’ve tried many times to recall what happened next, but much of it will forever be blackened from my memory. Here is what I know.

  I was wet—head to toe, submerged in the frigid spring waters. I felt slick bark on my fingertips and managed to pull my torso atop one undulating log until I became nauseated from the pressure against my gut. I found some sort of strength, some sort of urgency, that pulled me into a straddle position, and then I made the mistake of trying to stand. This lasted no discernible time because the balance of my memory is veiled by water and darkness and desperation. I’ve had a similar sensation when I drive beneath a bridge in a rainstorm. There is a brief void of silence, and then everything rushes in again. In this case, the void was when my head dipped below the water, suffocating my senses.

  Logs were coming faster, and the pool was rimmed three, sometimes five, deep. To reach the bank I would have had to scramble over multiple rows of the hewed trees. I ducked beneath the surface as each new wave came, fearful that the next time I tried to emerge there would be no space for my body or that the space would be swallowed, crushing me. I couldn’t see a thing beneath the surface. The water reddened with clay and frayed bark. I was blind. Calling for help was a waste of time. The skeleton crew of men were stationed elsewhere. My survival was my own.

  I forcefully pushed my legs downward, propelling my torso above the surface as far as I could, like a trout gasping in silted waters. I inhaled deep and sank just as quickly as I had risen.

  And then I swam.

  I swam as hard and as straight forward as I could manage, knowing that coming up for air was no longer an option. Logs loomed overhead, blanketing the surface and blocking the sunlight. I swam until my lungs no longer held and I expelled a burst of bubbles, what I felt was surely my last contribution to this earth. I waited for my body to rise and rest beneath the barrier of wood, having nothing left in me to breach it.

  And just as my body began to rise, my fingertips sank into soft mud. I had reached an edge. I could stand.

  I clawed my way up the receding bank until my face rested on grass, and air once again filled my lungs. I tried to blink my eyes open, but they were stung by the splinter remnants and fresh light. I am unsure how long I lay there, but it was Bud’s voice I heard first, followed shortly by other men’s. They were laughing; he was not. “Get up!” he roared, rolling me over with his boot and pointing the way to his truck. I never saw a dollar from that day and we didn’t speak again until I returned to his cabin one last time before leaving for Asheville. This was all I needed to assure me that if I stayed, if I became Bud’s dispensable errand boy, I would die young—if not physically, most assuredly spiritually. My father had not died for his country merely to have his son die for someone else’s pocket change.

  Chapter Three

  “Cowney! Be sure ’n’ kindle the fire ’fore you head out tonight. Blackberry winter’s settin’ in,” Bud rumbled, shaking me from daydream. Blackberry winter was an impossibility that time of the year. Bud loved to refer to the little winters—sarvis, dogwood, blackberry, locust, and so on—as much as possible, I think because he believed it made him sound wise.

  Bud stoked a fire every night, seven nights a week, 365 nights a year. It did not matter whether it was blackberry winter or the Fourth of July. Bud was cold-blooded in that regard, probably in a few other regards as well. He’d mumble something about tradition when questioned by his buddies—saying a fire always had to burn in a real man’s home.

  I swept the accumulated pile of wood shavings from under Bud’s rocking chair off the far side of the porch, selected a few twigs from the yard that had yet to be scavenged by Bud for his nightly inferno, and took the top three or four additions of old newspapers from the pile just inside the cabin. The twigs fit neatly into the fireplace like vertebrae, and I began to crumple the paper into tight balls of tinder. But something in the second layer gave me pause.

  A bold headline warned of rumored brutalities occurring in Poland. I scanned the article enough to imagine a child caught up in the conflict, a child in a cage, or a child watching his parents being hauled away. My imagination folded into the stories I had been told about when my people had been removed from this land. I could see my own ancestors in pens or hiding in caves, while their neighbors and fellow clan members were marched out, prodded along by soldiers’ rifles. I pictured a child alone, scared, and probably no longer alive when the paper was printed. This was war’s game piece—a skeleton covered in the indistinguishable color of newspaper gray as if his skin was made of the broadsheet itself. Even back then, I remember feeling that if I stirred, or turned the page, the image, the picture would come to know the merging of stillness and velocity that I had known standing on the porch looking out into the forest. But this merging was much deadlier. The paper preserved the truth’s existence, and, as I held it in my hands, I believed crumpling the page or tossing it aside would erase it forever.

  “I didn’t ask you to read the funny pages, boy. Get on with it,” Bud thundered.

  I folded the paper, setting it aside until I could tuck it into my back pocket on the way out the door.

  The fire was stoked to a moderate roar in no time. “You be sure and take the rest of those pintos with you to your Lishie tonight. I get awful tired of hearing her complain I don’t feed you enough while you’re here,” my uncle gargled.

  “Yes, sir. You remember that I’m leaving in the morning for Asheville, right?”

  “Ehh, shit. That
tomorrow? Just make sure you get everything done here you need to before you take off again.” Bud stood from his ladder-back rocking chair and walked over to the table. “I been reading about this place you say you’re working at.”

  “Reading about it? Where?”

  “Hell, son. I ain’t illiterate. The goddamn newspaper that every other folk in the country reads.”

  I wanted to know more, but knew it was best to try to ignore him when he appeared to be keen on a topic.

  “The Grove Park Inn. That’s the place, sure nuff?”

  “Yes, sir.” I hurriedly spooned the remaining beans from the castiron pot into a small blue bowl to take with me.

  “Paper says they’ve got Krauts holed up there already. Gonna move in Japs soon, too. Best watch your step or they’re liable to lock you up with ’em. You probably look more like a foreigner than a soldier.”

  “I’ll be careful, but I think they keep everyone pretty well separated. I’ll be doing outside work anyway. Doubt they let them outside much.”

  “Ain’t no resort with sightseers now. Says they’re diplomats and foreign nationals. Shit, that means they’re high-class prisoners. ‘Fore the summer’s over, you’ll be serving them tea and rubbing their Nazi-lovin’ feet.”

  “I think they pay other people for that,” I offered, grabbing the folded newspaper I had set aside, tucking it in my pants, and hurrying out the front door. “Night!” I called back.