The Removed

by Brandon Hobson

  Dedication

  In memory of my uncles, Bob and Leon Briggs, who spirit-

  walked across water to visit me during the writing of this book.

  Epigraph

  Our moans were night crawlers under the weight of removal.

  —Diane Glancy, Pushing the Bear

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Ray-Ray Echota

  Present Day

  Maria Echota

  Edgar Echota

  Sonja Echota

  Tsala

  Maria

  Edgar

  Sonja

  Tsala

  Edgar

  Maria

  Sonja

  Tsala

  Edgar

  Maria

  Sonja

  Tsala

  Edgar

  Maria

  Sonja

  Tsala

  Edgar

  Maria

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Brandon Hobson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Ray-Ray Echota

  SEPTEMBER 5

  Quah, Oklahoma

  THE DAY BEFORE HE DIED, in the remote town of Quah, Oklahoma, Ray-Ray Echota rode his motorcycle down the empty stretch of highway, blowing past rain puddles and trees, a strong wind pressing against his body. He was fifteen years old. Workers along the side of the road wore orange vests and white hard hats. They didn’t pay any attention to him as he flew past them, hunched forward working the throttle. He rode for the pureness of the thrill and for the isolation of riding alone in an area where few police officers ever patrolled. Clouds hung low and pale before him as he rode home past fields and old buildings, heading east into the hills, landscape and sky blending into the horizon.

  That night he did impersonations at home to entertain his parents. While Ernest and Maria watched their police drama on TV, Ray-Ray staggered into the living room wearing dark sunglasses and waving a cane around, pretending he was blind. He stood in front of them, blocking their view of the TV, and spoke in his best French accent: “Care to help an old blind man, monsieur? I am in need of assistance.”

  “Funny,” Maria said. “Isn’t he funny, Ernest?”

  “I’m trying to watch my show,” Ernest said.

  “But monsieur,” Ray-Ray said.

  Ernest leaned forward and watched Ray-Ray as he removed his sunglasses and went through his usual impersonations: Pee-wee Herman, Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone, even Ernest’s friend Otto, who told old Cherokee stories drunk:

  “Listen, Chooch,” Ray-Ray said in Otto’s low drunken voice. He pretended to smoke an imaginary cigarette. “You know the story of Tsala, who was killed for refusing to leave the land? Let’s go get another whiskey.”

  “Not bad,” Ernest said. “We’ll probably see him tomorrow at the Cherokee National Holiday.”

  The following day, September 6, marked the anniversary of the 1839 signing of the Constitution of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. Ernest spoke with an unfamiliar excitement in his voice about the date’s importance. “This is a very important day for all of us, since it marks the Trail, so we should honor it.” September 6 usually fell close to Labor Day weekend and brought people from all over the country to Oklahoma. The Echotas planned to spend the entire weekend watching stickball games, attending powwows, pageants, and art shows.

  Outside, a storm was heading west instead of east. A soft rain pattered against the window, the beginning of a thunderstorm. The night was cool. The house smelled of fried catfish from dinner, which they had eaten on TV trays there in the living room.

  “Did you finish your homework?” Maria asked Ray-Ray.

  “The paper is done. A-plus with smiley face. I bid you all good night. Ave atque vale.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Latin for hail and farewell. Ave atque vale.”

  “Sure, sure,” Maria said. “Now go play with your little brother.”

  Edgar, the youngest sibling, was sitting on a blanket playing quietly with Legos in the corner of the room, as he often did. Ray-Ray limped over to him, dragging his leg like a wounded soldier, and collapsed. He began helping Edgar stack Legos together.

  When Ray-Ray was younger he had fallen out of the tree in their backyard, breaking his leg in three places. He’d spent a few days in the hospital, where he told the nurse he had learned to levitate like the false prophet Simon Magus.

  “I flew up in the air forty, fifty feet and then fell,” he said. “That explains the broken leg.”

  The nurse looked at Ernest and Maria, confused.

  “My son has an active imagination,” Ernest kept saying, which was true. Ray-Ray always carried with him a notebook in which he scribbled song lyrics and sketched strange creatures, beasts with fire shooting from their eyes and tongues hanging from their mouths, chubby old men with pig snouts instead of noses, and Uktena and Tlanuwa, the mythic hawks who carried away babies. Ernest and Maria encouraged his artistry, his drawings and impersonations, and also loved how he enjoyed searching outside near the lake for animal bones, bird bones, and feathers to make necklaces. How he wore certain shirts he said were for healing. How he was fascinated by the sky and would go lie down and watch the stars at night. How he mowed lawns and cleaned roof gutters for two summers until he earned enough money to buy his own 250cc Nighthawk, the motorcycle he would ride to the mall in Tulsa on September 6, the day he was shot by a police officer.

  Sonja, who was sixteen and the eldest sibling, was eccentric in her own way too, retreating to her room every day after school and staying there all night, rarely coming out. Sensitive to the strange intimacy of family conversations, she preferred solitude. On this night, she was in her bedroom writing long letters to boys at school and listening to Joy Division. She would later wonder why she hadn’t been in the living room spending time with Ray-Ray. If only I’d been a better sister, she often thought.

  The night of September 5, his last night alive, Ray-Ray lay next to his younger brother Edgar on the floor with the Legos. “We should build a castle,” he said. “It could be beautiful, brother.”

  “I’m building a monster,” Edgar told him excitedly. He held up his Lego creature and roared.

  “Little brother,” Ray-Ray said, “there are enough monsters in this world.”

  Present Day

  Maria Echota

  SEPTEMBER 1

  Near Quah, Oklahoma

  AT SUNSET THE LOCUSTS FLEW, a whole swarm of them, disappearing into the darkening sky. They buzzed each night, moving through wind and trees, devouring crops and destroying gardens. The sky was pink and blue on the horizon. Another unusually rainy season had caused weeds to sprout up everywhere, so we were seeing more locusts, more insects.

  “When was the last time it snowed?” Ernest asked.

  My husband was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. He was seventy-four but looked young for his age. He still kept his gray hair long in a ponytail, still had his same laugh and sense of humor, though he was getting more and more confused. We had known about the Alzheimer’s for almost a year, and of course these things never get easier with time. He grew frustrated easily. He would forget little things like why he’d walked into a room. Whenever he did this, he would look down at the floor and struggle to understand. I would find him rummaging through the garage, and when I asked him what he was looking for, he couldn’t tell me. He was growing considerably worse.

  “I’m turning into tawodi,” he said. “Tawodi means hawk in Cherokee.”

  We were sitting on our back deck, where Ernest liked to look for geese flying over the lake. I watched him lean forward, sq
uinting.

  “I’ll eat locusts and honey like John the Baptist,” he said.

  “Ernest,” I said quietly.

  “I see a sailboat out there. I see smoke or fog, maybe a spirit.”

  “There is no spirit out there,” I told him.

  He reclined back in his chair, still looking.

  “Ernest,” I said, “tomorrow Wyatt is coming. Did you remember?”

  He was thinking.

  “The foster boy,” I said. “I have Ray-Ray’s old room ready for him.”

  “You already mentioned it before.”

  “He’ll be here tomorrow,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Wyatt, sure,” Ernest said. “Stop asking me if I remember.”

  “I wanted to make sure.”

  “I got it.”

  The call had come a few days earlier from Indian Family Services. It was Bernice, a former coworker of mine. I had retired from social work a year earlier. Bernice said they needed an emergency foster placement for a twelve-year-old Cherokee boy. Would Ernest and I be able to take him in temporarily?

  “You’re our only available Cherokee family,” Bernice said. “His dad’s in jail, mom left the state. Right now he’s at an aunt’s, but she’s in bad health. We’re trying to contact grandparents.”

  When I told Ernest, I was surprised he agreed. We had never fostered before. “He can mow the grass,” Ernest said. “He can play checkers. Catch fish.”

  We could see the lake behind our house, and a small amber pond down past where the road ended was also visible. Most people liked to go fishing at the lake, but Ernest preferred the pond, which he said was always a decent place to fish, full of catfish and largemouth bass. There were fewer people there, and bullfrogs and yellow-striped ribbon snakes lived in the water. He had been talking about fishing a lot more.

  Ernest shivered in his sweater, even though it was still warm. “Time to go inside,” he said, getting up from his chair.

  “I’ll be right in,” I told him.

  He slid open the screen door and stepped inside. I leaned forward and looked out over the yard. Red and yellow leaves were scattered everywhere on the sloping ground. Evenings were quiet and still. Some mornings I sat on that deck and watched a red-tailed hawk return to its same nesting tree while red-winged blackbirds gathered at the birdhouse. Every now and then several cedar waxwings would land on a branch, apple-blossom petals in their beaks, and sit there watching me.

  In the distance, tonight, a fog settled over the lake, and I could sense the presence of something gathering there.

  WE LIVED ON A WINDING DIRT ROAD by Lake Tenkiller in a hardwood forest of persimmon, oak, and hickory trees near the Cookson Hills. Many years ago, the Cherokees came to this area during the Trail of Tears to build a nation. They developed a tribal government, constructed buildings and schools, and invented a syllabary. Ernest and I both grew up in Quah. When we were newly married, he built a back deck onto our house, overlooking the slope of trees down to the edge of the water.

  It was in this place that we raised our three children. Here, in our house made of rock and brick, with its slanted roof and chimney full of spirits. Here, where we slept under the blue light of the moon in the dark sky, waking sometimes to see a deer at the edge of the yard. I remember seeing a family of deer gather down the hill near the water. And how sad our daughter Sonja was when they never returned, and how Ray-Ray promised they would return one day. Sonja was only a teenager. After Ray-Ray died, she sat watching for a deer all winter, but we never saw them again. “It’s deer season,” she said. “Maybe they died, too. Maybe someone shot them and dragged their bodies away in their truck.” I pictured their bodies hanging somewhere, and all that blood dripping. We sat on the back deck, and I prayed for deer to return and for Sonja to heal. We soon saw other deer along the road, but Sonja was still unhappy. “It’s not the same family,” she said. “I can tell. This deer is different. The deer that came to our house are dead.”

  Fifteen years earlier, on September 6, our son Ray-Ray rode his motorcycle to a mall where he evidently got into an altercation with two other guys. Someone fired a gun, and Ray-Ray was shot in the chest by a police officer. The police officer heard a gunshot and instinctively fired at the Indian kid. Afterward, when the police officer gave his statement to the press, he swore he thought Ray-Ray had been the one who shot the gun, but it had been a white kid. The officer was temporarily placed on administrative leave. After months of investigation, the police department declared that the officer’s behavior was justified in the shooting, so it never went to trial.

  Everything changed in me after that.

  How do you lose a child to gun violence and expect to return to a normal way of life? This was the question I struggled with the most. My son was a victim. The officer who shot him—now retired—lived in our town, and there were many sleepless nights when I wanted to drive to his house and kill him myself. I wanted to hit him as hard as I could, so that he could feel pain. Yes, yes, I have always known grief is difficult and that forgiveness takes many years. I still haven’t learned to completely forgive. I could only put it in the will of the Great Spirit. Ernest handled it better than me; he was able to get himself together and go back to work at the railroad after a month or so. A doctor prescribed Xanax for me, and then for a long time all I did was sleep. Every day I sat in a chair by the window.

  My sister Irene came and stayed with us to help out, especially with Sonja and Edgar. In the midst of my depression, Irene dragged me to a Methodist church service one Sunday, where I heard the Doxology for the first time. After that I kept hearing the phrase in my head: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” over and over. When I got home, I wrote it down in my notebook. My therapist encouraged me to journal as much as possible. I once wrote, I no longer am afraid of dying. If I die in my sleep, I am fine with that. Another time I wrote, I feel so guilty for wanting to die when I have Sonja and Edgar who so desperately need me. I feel like a terrible person. But the Doxology kept returning to me. Thinking about it was so comforting, I found my journaling didn’t return to such a dark place.

  Ernest kept his mind busy by focusing on Sonja and Edgar, being a good father. He took them out to movies, to parks, anything he could do to get them out of the house while I stayed in my chair, depressed. Only in the past few years have we finally started acknowledging the anniversary of Ray-Ray’s death. Now, every September 6 we build a small bonfire, and each of us shares a memory. Ernest and I decided it would be a good way to get the family together, because we were never all together anymore.

  * * *

  Around six in the evening, I heated up a leftover casserole for supper. Ernest and I ate on trays in front of the TV, watching a show on unsolved crimes. Ernest kept pointing the remote and adjusting the volume up and down.

  “Maybe the foster kid can fix the TV,” he said.

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with the TV.”

  “I think it’s the volume.”

  “The volume is fine.”

  “What do we do? Sit here and take it?”

  I saw the frustration in his face, looking at the remote. He was obsessed with the colored buttons and their functions, the menus on the screen. The remote made him nervous. I thought of the years in the past when we had sat in the same chairs in front of the TV, eating supper contentedly. How different he looked now, giving such a confused gaze, a confirmation that things were declining quickly. While he continued to stare intently at the remote, I heard Sonja come in through the front door. She lived just down the road in a small house and had been coming over more often now that Ernest was getting worse.

  He looked up at her when she stepped into the room, and for a moment I wondered whether he even recognized her. She walked over to him and put her hand along his back, rubbing in a light circular motion.

  “How are you, Papa?”

  “I don’t know. Goddamn remote.”

  Her face grew solemn, as if she realized the
severity of his illness. We were all speechless for a moment while I stared at her. Sonja, at thirty-one, strongly resembled my sister Irene when she was younger, though they were nothing alike. My sister had always been demure, reserved, conservative. Sonja stayed out late nights. I worried about her and the younger men she dated, some of whom attended the college in Quah. I wanted her to settle down; Ernest and I both did, but the more we brought it up, the more she withdrew from us.

  “There’s a guy I want to meet,” she finally said.

  “A new guy?” I said. “What does he do?”

  “He’s a musician,” she said. “I’m going to see him play tonight at a bar near campus. Tonight I’m going to talk to him. I’m finally going to meet him. I’ve thought about it for weeks.”

  “A musician? What’s his real job?”

  “I haven’t even met him yet.”

  “Well, how old is he?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty-three?”

  I didn’t say anything. I got up, and Sonja followed me, helping me take the dishes into the kitchen. I turned on the water in the sink and rinsed the plates, then handed them to Sonja to put in the dishwasher.

  “Did you talk to Edgar about Ray-Ray’s anniversary next week?” she asked.

  “I was busy helping Irene at the powwow all weekend, but yesterday I tried calling him, and he hasn’t called me back.”

  “Me either,” she said. “I’m concerned.”

  “I am, too,” I said. “It’s been too long. It’s been weeks.”

  “He might be embarrassed,” she said.

  We’d had an intervention with Edgar six months earlier. He had been living with his girlfriend, Desiree, in New Mexico and got hooked on meth. He’d stolen money from Desiree and from us. Before the intervention, he had visited and said he needed money to pay for an alternator replacement on his car, plus repairs for an oil leak. Ernest loaned him over $400 in cash. He’d already dropped forty pounds in weight, so we were on edge. Sonja thought he was doing cocaine, too. Edgar was only twenty-one, my youngest baby. The thought of his drug use had nauseated me. I could hardly eat. A month later Desiree had called and said she had to bail him out of jail for breaking into a car.