Each night when the café closed, Arnie played taps on the sousaphone, then did the pots and pans. Once they were cleaned, he used them to play the drums. He set a pot upside down on the floor and banged it with his foot and mimicked playing the sousaphone with his hands. Just might work, he thought.
Arnie and Pam got to know everyone who came in. There was the shade-tree mechanic who ordered the used parts for Arnie’s van, and the two local boys who helped him get the gears in place. And the nurse from the county hospital who assisted Pam with prenatal care and carefully monitored her pregnancy. Pam delivered food to the tables three times a day with a thermometer in her mouth. Her tips were always larger then.
There were the father and son who brought more firewood out to the farmhouse and loaned Pam and Arnie coal-oil lamps so they had lights at night. They lived on a farm that touched the river, they said.
And there was the high-school girl who sewed clothes and cut Arnie’s hair. She had red-apple cheeks and curly blond hair. She adjusted Pam’s skirt waists. She created pleats in Pam’s tops by stitching in extra pieces of cloth and knotting a sewn thread at the top of each fold.
By January, Pam was too big to play the accordion. Her feet were tired. She and Arnie talked it over. It was time to go. When a break in the winter weather came, they loaded their things in the van for one last day at the café.
Arnie talked to the owner of the café before they left.
“She wants to have the baby on down south,” he said. “It’s warmer down there, you understand? And we’ll be closer to kin.”
“You have enough money to find a place?”
“Yes, sir, thanks to you.”
“No, don’t be saying that. You two made me more money by working here than you made for yourself. I have a little cash bonus for you. I’ve been saving up. For the baby, you see?”
The cook took off his paper hat to say goodbye to Pam. He handed her an envelope. Pam put it in her purse.
“Thank you,” she said.
She hugged the cat goodbye and sang it the Oscar Mayer song. He seemed to like it. One ear twitched the whole time.
They drove away to buy a full tank of gas for the road.
“Arnie,” she said from the passenger seat, “you smell like chicken soup.”
They stopped for gas in Nonesuch. Inside the filling station, Pam stocked up on a few things for the trip. She bought four bags of corn chips, six Hostess Sno Ball cupcakes, and a jar of pickles.
“Are you the couple been staying at the old farmhouse up the hill?” the clerk asked.
“Yes, we are,” Pam said. “It will be empty now, if you know anyone who needs a place to rent.”
“Oh, it’s never empty long,” the clerk told her. “Don’t know why, but someone’s always living in that house. Not locals much, though. Just folks the cat dragged in.”
“The tomcat that smells like chicken soup?”
The clerk stared at her a moment.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “It’s just an expression. You know, what the cat dragged in?”
Pam nodded. She reached into her purse to get money and pulled out the envelope from the café.
Arnie came over from the men’s room to help her carry their purchases.
“Have you ever eaten at the Yellow Cat Diner?” he asked the clerk. “You know, if it wasn’t for that diner, we wouldn’t have lived through December. My wife and I both worked there.”
The clerk cocked his head.
“The food is the best there is,” Arnie added. “You should tell people to go there.”
Pam pulled another envelope from her purse. And then another one.
“Did you say the Yellow Cat Diner?” the clerk asked. “You worked there this winter?”
“That would be the one and only,” Arnie said cheerfully. “It’s right up the road a ways. Tell people to go there, now. It’s real home cooking and all. Ask for the chicken soup. You’ll like it a lot, I promise you.”
Still more envelopes were in her purse. Pam eventually found her own money. She got it out and crammed all the envelopes back in. There must have been one for every week they’d worked at the café.
“Oh, I’d tell people about it, if it was still there,” the clerk said. “The Yellow Cat Diner burned down when I was a little boy. Nothing is there now. Nothing has been there since the fire.”
“Naw,” Arnie said. “We were there just a bit ago. The place is hopping.”
“Not the Yellow Cat Diner. You’ve been somewhere else.”
Once their purchases were in the van, Arnie ran back to the store. He stepped inside and stood with his hand on the door.
“I’m going to draw you a map,” he said. He pointed at the clerk and smiled. “I’m going to draw you a map and bring it right back.”
The clerk laughed. “Why don’t you take one of these disposable cameras and get me a picture while you’re at it?”
“Okay. How much are they?”
“On the house,” the clerk said.
He tossed one to Arnie from the counter display. Arnie caught it in one hand and was out the door.
Riding back to the farmhouse road, Pam counted the envelopes and then took the money out of each one.
“Arnie?”
“Save me that envelope, darling,” he said. “I think there’s a pen in the glove box.”
“Arnie!”
“Yes, dear?”
“I’ve got more than six thousand dollars here. My purse was full of those envelopes, and I swear he gave me only one.”
The cat walked the counter at the Yellow Cat Diner. A large pot of chicken soup bubbled on the stove. Sliced carrots rose to the surface, then dove back in. The broth thickened.
The cook came around to the counter with a ladle in his hand. The same pieces of pie were inside the display as had been there the day Pam walked in wearing a sleeping bag over her blue crocheted sweater, her red-and-white-striped socks soaked with the first snow of the season. He leaned his elbows on the counter, his face next to the cat. They both looked out the window as the van drove slowly past. They could see Pam in the passenger seat. But she couldn’t see them. She couldn’t see anything there at all.
The big tomcat flipped his tail each time the van went by.
“Well, I need another waitress now,” the man in the paper hat said to the cat. “Go see what you can do.”
GATLINBURG, TENNESSEE
Slivers of Bone
Wampus Cat lives wild in the Southern woods yet today. She is not a house cat.
Wampus Cat is a bad cat. The size and weight of a full-bodied woman, she walks upright on cat feet. She rambles through the rhododendron hells of darkened mountain coves, paces silently under the canopy of tall pines and hardwoods.
Her scream, like that of a mountain panther, is heard from time to time echoing eerily in the middle of the night along the spine of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Residents of mountainous Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee will tell you Wampus Cat originated among the eighteenth-century Cherokee.
Half beast, half woman, she is old and she is young. She has human eyes and a human brain, with the feral heart and the appetite of a wild cat. Wampus Cat adapts. She forever changes and is forever hungry. She eats men.
She wears a tail. Where Wampus Cat hunts in the mountainous woods, she leaves behind only a scattering of white slivers of bone on the forest floor. Sometimes, the bones are those of a human. She carries with her the lingering scent of sudden death.
Wampus Cat rapidly devours all she catches, hair, skin, and flesh. She consumes eyes, nose, and ears. She feeds on organs and fingertips. She gobbles feet, ankles, shins. She gulps down hands, wrists, elbows. She sucks in the skin, the meat, the tendons, the bones. Wampus Cat snaps ribs in two in her teeth and swallows both ends. In eating her stunned catch, Wampus Cat coats her own face, her chest, her fists of claw and fur with blood. Little pieces of bone fall from her carnivorous mouth as she feeds.
Along the Blue
Ridge Mountains, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest and the Nantahala National Forest, she eats quickly and slips back into the shadows of rocks and tall trees. She moves to a mountain stream and washes the blood from her fur, her claws, her breasts.
Cherokee lore tells of two animals known as Long Tail. One is the possum. The other is the half-woman, half-cat mountain creature known today as Wampus Cat. The Cherokee expression for Wampus Cat may be spoken only by witches, and it will not be repeated here. The phrase is too dangerous to say out loud by those untrained in the furthermost reaches of native spiritual medicine.
Modern Cherokee people rarely admit to having witches in their culture, and certainly not in their own communities. Cherokee witches are men. They have existed since the beginning, skilled in a magic so dark that it is forbidden among Cherokee to ever say that anyone is a witch. A curse will fall on the person who says it. The Cherokee do not like to believe they have ever met or been in the company of such a man.
The Cherokee witch will never tell another person that he is one. Were he discovered, he would be put to death. He wears no outward sign of his secret familiarity with the darkest of conjuring arts, arts that can transform man into beast and beast into man. A Cherokee witch will never tell on himself, even to his own family. Most Cherokee today do not admit that they have even heard of the existence of a witch among them. But they know better.
In the 1700s, the Cherokee more openly tolerated the practice of dark arts by a few elders of the council governments. Conjures, especially war rituals, were never revealed to women. To do so would weaken the strength of Cherokee magic. Such magic was crucial in times of war. English soldiers burned Cherokee towns to the ground in the 1700s. It was the failure of the sacred magic that allowed this to happen.
When the forced colonization of the Southern territories reached into the mountains, it was a crisis for all Native Americans living there. To keep the Cherokee from joining the colonists in the Revolutionary War, the British destroyed their towns at will. Despite agreements to stay out of the conflict, the Cherokee Nation came under relentless and unprovoked attacks by soldiers of the English crown.
This was a period when the sacred rituals had to be protected at all costs. It was a very risky time for a Cherokee woman to wonder about conjuring.
One young Cherokee bride, however, was overly curious about all things concerning her new husband. In her case, curiosity didn’t kill the cat, although she may have wished it had.
British soldiers, cutting wide swaths of destruction and subjugation among the Native Americans, were making their way through the fertile mountain valleys along the Tuckasegee River in the Cherokee Nation. They burned towns and crops well into what is now mountainous Jackson County, North Carolina, approaching the future location of the town of Cherokee itself.
Important councils were held in secret among the men of all Cherokee communities. Emissaries traveled from council to council with the most recent reports of destruction, sparing no detail in telling of the relentless atrocities suffered at the hands of English soldiers. American history contains few accounts of the ruin wreaked upon the Cherokee Nation by the British. But the stories live on among the Cherokee. Town sites that were burned, some repeatedly, by the British are well known to Cherokee cultural keepers such as Davy Arch.
Davy Arch tells his native stories and presents lectures on Cherokee history and culture on a regular basis for the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching in Cullowhee. Skilled in stone carving, basket making, flint knapping, and Cherokee traditional cooking, Davy is best known as a master mask carver.
Early in life, Davy Arch and his family lived with his grandfather, who taught the young boy the Cherokee stories, the practice of herbal medicine, and the harvesting of wild plants for food. They lived on Stilwell Branch in the Painttown community on the Qualla Boundary. His education in Cherokee culture continued after graduation from high school in 1975, when he went to work at the Oconaluftee Indian Village and Living History Museum. There, Davy learned his true calling and was taught by elder Sim Jessan how to carve masks of native wood. From other elders, he learned the meaning of a variety of masks. Davy continues to study older masks tied to stories almost entirely forgotten by the generations.
Besides the traditional masks used in Cherokee dance for centuries, Davy carves story masks entirely of his own pattern. These original works of art, designed to hold a particular Cherokee story or myth, are elegant and alluring aids in his retelling of the Cherokee stories. A mask carved by Davy Arch holds magic. So do the original masks of the Cherokee.
Davy carves masks of buckeye wood, cherry, pine, and walnut. His masks have been displayed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His stories have been published in the award-winning book Living Stories of the Cherokee. As a participant for six years in the North Carolina Arts Council’s Visiting Artist Program, he has presented programs on Cherokee culture in schools throughout North Carolina. Additionally, he has presented at the North Carolina Museum of History, at the North Carolina Museum of Art, at the annual Symposium on the American Indian in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and on National Public Radio. A member of the board of directors of the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, he has also demonstrated his craft at numerous arts festivals, including the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville. His earliest recognition was a Grand Prize for carving at the Cherokee Indian Fair in 1979, four years after graduating high school.
On a walk in the area of Judaculla Rock, deep in a green cove along a creek feeding the Tuckasegee River, just beyond a turnoff of rural Caney Fork Road, Davy Arch points out features of the Cherokee town that once occupied the area and was burned at least twice by the British in the 1700s. The town site is a few miles from East Laport, North Carolina.
It was here Wampus Cat was born.
On a chilly October day, Davy uses his pocketknife to split river cane growing along the water’s edge to demonstrate how Cherokee baskets begin. He speaks of the season as a time of harvesting chestnuts, an important food source. The American chestnut is now entirely gone. Davy Arch is accustomed to seeing things that aren’t there any longer.
He finds an outcropping of soapstone and runs his hands over a curved indentation where a piece was two centuries before hewn away. Davy describes the size and shape of the soapstone bowl that isn’t there, carefully surveying the age-old tool marks where the bowl was first cut into shape and then removed whole. And then he sees where another was cut away.
“This area of soapstone,” he says, looking up a rising ridge of outcroppings above the creek,“is one of the best I have seen for a Cherokee town. A soapstone bowl large enough to hold a man was found turned upside down in the rocks of the creek not so long ago.”
The huge bowl had been moved by flood, and the priceless native artifact hid from discovery in plain view for decade after decade by being upside down among other sizable stones in the bed of a rapidly flowing mountain creek. Davy notes that the size of the bowl is clear evidence of communal food preparation in Cherokee towns.
Judaculla Rock is a state historical site. Every year, hundreds of people visit the large rock carved with ancient native shapes and figures. The original meaning of the carvings in the rock has been lost to time. Some believe they are a map of a road through ancient tribal lands. Some believe the deeply incised figures represent the hunt, important battles, daily Native American life. Others believe Judaculla Rock is where the spirit of the hunt returned to physical form as a slant-eyed giant and left carved instructions for entry into the Cherokee spirit world.
Few visitors to Judaculla Rock ever see the town that isn’t there, unless someone like Davy Arch is along to point it out to them. Perhaps overgrown with trees or river cane, perhaps at the edge of the valley pasture along the road to Judaculla Rock, the burned foundation of a Cherokee house from the 1700s rests undiscovered, hidden by soil and time. It is the house where a bride lived with her hunter husband before
the town was burned to the ground by the British and the people fled.
“I must know,” she told her husband. “I must know what you do and say when the women aren’t allowed.”
Her husband wouldn’t tell her. This made her jealous. A husband should tell his wife everything.
“I must know!” she said. “It isn’t fair!”
He left for the secret council held that night at a campfire somewhere in the woodland above the town. The autumnal council was a serious one. The location was near a sacred tree. The men would discuss the possibility of relocating the people from the town as the British soldiers advanced. The elders would ask the spirit world to come close within the circle of their earth world. It was a solemn time, and helpers in the Cherokee spirit world were needed for guidance. The men would dance to bring the spirit world closer. They would sing the sacred songs.
“I must know,” she said. “And I will.”
She had already made her plans. At dusk, she retrieved the panther skin from where she had hidden it and followed her husband. The panther hide was her father’s. The bride had borrowed it from his house earlier in the day, when no one was there. She would wear it once she entered the dark woods. If any man attending the council caught a glimpse of her, he would think he saw an animal in the darkness, and the council would continue.
The Cherokee woman would keep her distance, coming just close enough to hear what was said when the men gathered. They gossiped about the women, she guessed. They said horrible things about the women and shared secrets among themselves that only a husband should be allowed to know. They laughed at the women. Why else would no women be allowed at councils?
If her husband spoke of her to the other men, she would kick him out of her house. If he dared say to others that he was not happy with her for any reason, their marriage would be over. She would see to it. But for now, she simply had to know.
What if her husband said another woman was prettier?
Ghost Cats of the South Page 2