When we soaked up all the water we could, I tucked the wrench back in the toolbox. “Thanks for the company.” I shook his hand.
“Anytime. This routine gets pretty boring and I’m just trying to stay out of trouble.”
“Don’t guess you guys have to worry too much about that since everyone else here is trying not to get in trouble with you.”
“Yeah, but some of these guys, some of the guards, they make their own trouble when bored.”
This must be what Lee and Sol were talking about, I thought. “You mean with the girls?” I asked, walking with Peter into the hall.
“That’s one way,” he acknowledged. “Say, who was that girl you were with that one night?”
My stomach sank. Why was he asking? Was he just making conversation or had he decided to make his own trouble?
“Essie?” I asked as if it were really a question.
“Yeah, Essie. Who is she?”
“What do you mean? She works here.”
“Well, I figured as much. I’ve seen her around plenty. I mean, who is she to you?”
“She rode over from Cherokee with me. I mean, we know each other, kind of.”
“So, friends?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Sort of.”
“But let me guess. You’d like her to be more?”
“Peter—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Cowney. Didn’t mean to pry. It is just, well. I know that look. The way I saw you two that night.”
I walked over to the window and pressed my palms into the sill. “Girls like that are not meant for me.”
“She have a boyfriend?”
Peter was the first person that whole summer who I felt like I could tell about Essie. I had just really met the man and yet I wanted nothing more than to spill everything I knew, thought, dreamt of. But he was still a soldier and Essie was still a servant. And Andrea was still a “guest.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not interested for me, just so you know. I’m married.” He pulled a wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a photo. “And this here’s my baby girl.”
A tiny, bundled baby, eyes wide, stared back at me.
“Beautiful,” I offered.
“Yes, sir. I’m a lucky man.”
“I bet you miss them.”
“Yes. Every. Single. Second. Just try to pass the time as best I can.”
“Any advice on how to do that?”
“Not much. Maybe take up a hobby. Get out as much as you can. You fish or anything?”
“Yes, but don’t know where to go ‘round here.”
“I wouldn’t mind showing you sometime. Me and some of the guys go out on weekends sometimes to the French Broad.”
“Say, you wouldn’t have access to a canoe, would you?”
He shot me a crooked smile. “As a matter of fact, that’s one of my favorite ways to pass the time. The inn had practically a whole fleet in storage. I figure it’s better to use them than let them sit there and rot.”
I smiled, too, thinking how even the smallest of revenges, doing something Essie had wanted to do so badly without her, felt empowering. I thought for a moment that I would show him room 447. We were so close to it, no one else was in the hall, and if someone did come, I was with a guard.
But I did not get to make that decision. The stairwell door down the hall flew open, crashing against the wall, and a fumbling private came around the corner. “Sir.” He nodded to Peter. He then turned to me. “Are you Cowney See—See—”
“Yes, I’m Cowney Sequoyah.”
“Lee asked me to fetch you. A call came for you.” He handed me a note.
I felt nauseous as I read. “I have to go,” I told Peter.
“Everything okay?” Peter asked.
“No, no, I don’t think it is.”
“Anything I can do?”
“No. Thank you.” I turned to leave, but looked back at Peter and dug the key from my pocket. “You’ll have to return this yourself, though. And thanks for your help.”
“No problem,” he called after me.
I read the note one more time, just to make sure that I was truly reading what I thought I was. “Come home … Lishie … not long …”
I rushed from the property with such speed that nothing seemed to move in real time. The note drove me, drove me so quickly that I remember nothing about packing, speaking with Lee, or being in the car the two hours home to Cherokee, to Lishie. I prayed. I remember that. Prayed I would make it back to her before she was gone. I conjured every drowsy word I could possibly recall from church meetings with Lishie, from summer revivals and deep-water baptisms. English, Cherokee—it mattered not. Somewhere along the way, I dug deep into my pocket and pulled forth the mother bear’s scream.
Chapter Sixteen
When I arrived home, I washed my hands in the sink. I breathed in the scent of the lye, anything to delay entering her bedroom. I had been in such a rush to get home, but now I was nearly paralyzed. I rubbed my hands until they warmed to a bright red, threatening to bruise. When I could no longer stand to hear her distant cough, I reached for a dishrag, knotting my hands dry. That is when I first saw it. Blood. Tiny drops of deep crimson blood in perfectly wrought circles by the sink. I imagined how she had coughed into the basin, washed the murky spittle down the drain, cleaned up her own mess as best she could.
Hallowed be thy name … Dust to dust… The hand of the Lord was upon me … Amazing grace … that they may live … ga-lv-lo-i… a-gi-ni-shi… a-gi-li-shi.
I called her Lishie because my mother had and since my mother had, my father had. And when my father had, Lishie referred to herself as such. In truth, I didn’t have a lishie, not in the Cherokee sense. Not a maternal grandmother. Not one that I knew. My Lishie was my father’s mother and should have been called a-gi-ni-shi, if we’re speaking in the strictest sense. But there was nothing strict about our family tree. I guess I always just thought that my mother needed Lishie more as a mother than she did her own. It was Lishie who brought clean linens to sop the blood from my birth. There was no room in that story for any other mother.
Bud came through the door carrying a load of firewood. “’Bout time you got here.” He shoved the logs into the stove.
“How is she?”
“I wouldn’t have sent for you if she were well,” Bud grumbled.
“I know. I just—what should I be prepared for?”
“You haven’t been in yet?”
“No. Just washed up.”
Bud pushed the last log inside and wiped his hands on his jeans. His eyes welled and he turned away. “Can’t prepare yourself for things like this. Just go see her. She’s been asking to see you.”
Lishie’s modest cabin seemed to stretch as I made my way to her room. There were others with her. I heard muffled voices. Preacherman’s for sure. Myrtle’s maybe. I felt my body shrink. I could also tell others had been there before me. The scent was there.
Grease
Lilies
Tobacco
Vanilla
Fresh dirt
Pine sap
“Lishie,” I whispered, easing open her door.
“Come in, son.” Preacherman stood and opened the door wider. “She’s resting now.”
Lishie’s face was pale and someone had combed her wiry gray hair out long and straight. It outlined the rise and fall of her shoulders. I hadn’t seen Lishie’s hair unfastened in years. She wore it beneath a bandana like the other ladies when she went to town and either braided it tight or coiled it into a bun when at home. She always had it braided so quickly after washing it that I forgot what it looked like loose. A quilt was pulled to her chin and her black King James sat on the table beside her, illuminated by the oil lamp’s flame.
“What happened?” I turned to Myrtle, knowing I’d get the uncensored truth from her. She and Lishie had known each other for as long as I could remember and carried on like sisters more than some sisters I k
new.
“Not completely sure. Bud found her, thank goodness.”
“Why’s she here then? Shouldn’t she be in the hospital?” I fumbled to understand.
“She refused to. Plus the fire’s so close to the hospital, can’t hardly breathe in there. And … well …” Myrtle shook her head.
“Doctor said there’s nothing else they can do for her, Cowney,” Bud continued. “She needs rest and they sent home some medicine with us, but—”
“She’ll be okay?” I looked at Bud with more hope than I had ever afforded him. “How long has she been asleep?”
“There’s no way to know how she’ll be. She’s been asleep since we got her home,” Bud answered. He approached me as if he were going to touch my shoulder, but let his arm drop before we touched.
And then a silence fell on the house like I hadn’t sensed in many, many years. And I realized that I did remember (if that is the word) far more than I ever thought I had about my father, about his funeral, about each anniversary of his funeral, about Bud, about …
Grease
Lilies
Tobacco
Vanilla
Fresh dirt
Pine sap
I remembered that there was also yelling. There was Myrtle tending to Lishie and Preacherman warming everyone’s coffee. There was Bud and there was a jar of homemade liquor. And then there was Bud and there was yelling. There was Bud and Lishie and there was more yelling. And there was a tiny version of me and darkness beneath a heavy quilt. I was an infant one moment. I was three the next moment and five the next. It was as if the pictures had been stored in my blood only to slowly develop over the years until my brain found the words for them.
It was one mess of a memory that pulled me from the present so quickly that I did not wait for Lishie to wake or for Preacherman to offer coffee. The memory coursed through my veins, chilling and constricting the vessels. I passed by Bud and the fumes of his breath. I walked down the ever-expanding hall to my room and dove beneath a heavy quilt.
I could not stop the images from coming. I folded my pillow over my eyes, but could not shade them from the scene.
“He was your brother!” Lishie was pleading with Bud. “Please, for his sake. For the boy’s sake.”
“Is that who you are protecting? Or are you just protecting yourself?” Bud turned up a mason jar to his lips and then flung it against the cabin wall. It shattered into large, sweepable pieces, and also into tiny pieces that bit the pads of feet, shredding skin and drawing blood.
“Bud! I’m trying to keep this family together.” I could hear Lishie’s voice as clear as if she were still in the room with me. But it was a younger, softer voice.
“Is that what you were doing when you cashed that check from the army?”
“It’s for the boy—”
“The boy? The boy? Call him who he is!” Bud stormed.
“Cowney,” Lishie whispered. I remember that for sure. The sadness of my name.
“Yeah, Cowney. Your boy, right?”
“If I have to raise him to be.” Lishie stood her ground.
“Like you raised me or like you raised my brother? Careful now,” Bud warned. “The result is very different depending on which you choose.”
“I raised you the same.” Lishie was crying now.
“But we weren’t the same.”
“No, that’s right, son. You’re right. He wasn’t as strong as you. I had to be gentler with him. We all did. But I still raised you both to be family men.”
Bud reached for a set of keys on the kitchen table and left the cabin.
Lishie cried and cried.
And her cries morphed from memories into my own beneath the quilt. Whether or not these words were spoken in this order, in this fashion, in this temper, it doesn’t matter. Their truth persisted, even through years of silence. Even through the thick smoke outside.
I waited until I heard Preacherman announce he would return after Bible study and Myrtle say that she was going to fetch dinner from home and bring it back in an hour or so. I waited until I no longer heard Bud moving about, until I figured he had found a place inside or on the porch to pass out for the evening. I crawled out of my bed, still in my work clothes, and drug myself back into Lishie’s room. She was still sleeping, so I crawled beneath her quilt and wrapped myself around her body. She breathed deeply, signaling a welcomed recognition, but did not speak or open her eyes. I smelled her lye soap hair and tried to block out all other smells.
Until exhaustion overcame me, I thought of the last few visits with Lishie. I remembered how she had started taking afternoon naps and added two new medicine bottles to her cabinet. I remembered that she had paid a local boy to bring her a basketful of dandelions, more than typical to treat an occasional bout of heartburn.
Dammit, Lishie. She knew and she had spared me. It had not been the first time she had shielded me from the pain of heartache. She had been doing it all my life. As my skin warmed hers beneath the blanket, I wanted to take the pain from her, absorb it into my own body. I was already deformed, crippled, imperfect. What was one more affliction to me?
That night I spoke to Lishie, though only through my dreams. It felt so real; sometimes I still wonder if it wasn’t. Maybe I spoke in my sleep and she responded in hers. I told her about Essie and Andrea. I confessed how I felt for Essie in ways I had never felt for anyone before. I told her how afraid I was for Essie to know, to respond. That night, in my dreams or otherwise, Lishie asked me if I remembered how to make her pound cake. Did I remember the proportions and how to mix the wet ingredients and dry ingredients separately until just the right time? Did I remember how finicky sugar was in general? Like when we made Christmas peanut brittle? If you heat it, it burns so easily—hardening into a sticky, bitter brittle. You must always watch sugar closely, even if you’re not heating it on the stove. Keep it stirred up, adding your flavor to it slowly. It seemed like a delusional fever dream, piecing repetitive memories together into a moment. Why would Lishie rise from her deathbed to share recipes with me?
Thinking about it now—shit. If that ain’t love advice, I don’t know what is. It didn’t make a lick of sense the first half dozen times she said it, especially the time I dreamt about her saying it; but it sure as hell does now. I only wish I recognized it in time to ask her what to do when there was no sugar in the cupboard to spare, when it was rationed in times of war.
Chapter Seventeen
In the morning, I was in my own bed, wrapped around myself and within a sweat-dampened quilt. I was helped there at some point in the night, but was too tired to resist or notice who led me. Likely, it was Myrtle and Preacherman, as they were both in the kitchen when I stumbled in looking for a strong cup of coffee. My eyes cleared only to see the blur of Myrtle’s. She did not even wait to hear “Good morning.”
“I’m sorry, son.”
I fell into a kitchen chair.
“Early this morning … In her sleep. Peaceful.”
“It likely was a blood clot or aneurysm.” A new voice spoke, rising from the living room. Dr. Pritchett had been called. And now he was being served coffee as if he had just come by for a neighborly chat. “She passed quickly. She was getting older, son. She’d fought this off quite a while already.” He spoke calmly, practiced.
“Fought what off?”
“Death,” Bud intervened. “Death. We’re all fighting it off.” He was angry and already loose-tongued. Bits of cornbread speckled his white T-shirt as he crammed the remaining piece into his mouth between words. As early in the morning as it was, he had already begun sweating. I was not as mad about his insensitivity as I was that he felt he had a right to be angry.
“Her heart had been giving her trouble for some time, Cowney. That along with other complications that come with age. Sugar and blood pressure. It just all finally caught up to her,” the doctor continued.
I looked around at all the people in the room. When had they arrived? When had Lishie left? How
could so much have changed while I slept? I attempted to speak. “But I didn’t—”
Myrtle tried to comfort me. “Your lishie wasn’t the kind of person that is going to burden her grandson with that sort of worry.”
I pushed the kitchen table away, shaking the breakfast bowls and plates, and ran to Lishie’s room. She was exactly where I’d left her. The covers were straight and neat around her body. Her face was even paler than before, graying to the hue of her hair. Someone had folded her hands onto her lap like she was sitting in her Sunday pew awaiting Preacherman’s call to worship.
I whispered her name, desperately hoping that she would share the secret with me, open her eyes and smile as if she had just played a trick on everyone else. “Oh, Lishie. No. No. No. Please, Lishie.” I draped my arms across hers and buried my face against her shoulder. “I can’t—” No more words came, only tears, followed by a throbbing head.
Myrtle came in with a cup of coffee and helped me into a bedside chair. She was wise enough not to speak for some time. She watched as I spoke without words to my Lishie, punctuating each regret, each promise, with salty marks.
I felt so guilty that I hadn’t stayed. If I had known … I would have written down everything she told me. What more could she have said to me? She knew more about my father, I had no doubt. I couldn’t fathom why she wouldn’t tell me. Maybe she thought I couldn’t handle it or that it didn’t matter anymore. I wondered who would tell me the stories now. How long are you supposed to boil the bean bread before it turns to mush? She had always been the only one.
When my breathing calmed, Myrtle offered, “Why don’t you get some air, child? Maybe sit on the porch and I will bring you some breakfast? Smoke ain’t as thick this morning.”
“I’m not hungry. But, yeah, maybe I will get some air.” A new resolve came over me. There were plans to make, and I quickly remembered that I was the only one to make them. The inn’s work seemed ridiculous compared to the work that needed tending here. Bud would likely absorb into himself; Myrtle and Preacherman would help, but it wasn’t their place to see to this. I took a deep breath, kissed Lishie’s forehead, and walked out to the porch.
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