House of Purple Cedar

by Tim Tingle

  Be it known that effective July 24, 1897, Terrance Lowell, formerly of Texas, and Maggie Johnston, formerly of Spiro, Indian Territory, are hereby pardoned for any and all crimes committed in Spiro on July 2 and July 3, 1897. This pardon is granted by the Honorable Indian Agent Roy Taylor. Mrs. Taylor sends her regards.

  From their balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, as the seagulls yelped in the evening sky and the gentle wash of the waves soothed their troubles, Maggie read the notice to Terrance. Upon hearing the news, he wept like a child. Terrance slept in a blanket on the balcony that night, and the next day he and Maggie were married.

  Eleven years later, on September 13, 1908, Maggie again made the Galveston Daily News. Five days after the Galveston Storm––a hurricane which killed close to ten thousand people––struck the Gulf Coast of Texas, an article appeared under the following headline:

  WOODEN LEG OR GOD'S ALTAR?

  Mr. and Mrs. Terrance Lowell lost their home and belongings to the winds and high waters of the Galveston Storm, but they managed to escape with their most precious possession, their lives. As the waters rose on the evening of September 8, Mr. And Mrs. Lowell climbed to the roof of their single story home on Grand Avenue, a block from the bay. Winds battered the east wall of the building, finally toppling the entire structure into the churning waters.

  While sliding from the roof, Mrs. Lowell, known affectionately to Islanders as Maggie, unhinged her wooden leg. Using the leg as a flotation device, the Lowells clung to the miraculous appendage, like grateful supplicants before the altar, till their rescue the following morning.

  Before their rescue, as Maggie and Terrance clung to Maggie’s leg and bobbed up and down in the crashing waves of the Gulf of Mexico, the following conversation took place:

  “Maggie.”

  “Yes, Terrance.”

  “I’m not sure we’re gonna make it.”

  “Just hold on tight, Terrance. We’ll be fine.”

  “Maggie.”

  “Yes.”

  “If my fingers slip and I sink away, what will you do?”

  “I will sink away too, Terrance. To be with you, I will sink away too.”

  Pokoni and Amafo

  Slow Like the River

  Rose • Winter of 1967

  My grandfather was slow and deep, like the nearby Arkansas River, while Pokoni, my grandmother, was sharp and quick, like a crackling winter fire. That is how I remember them.

  Amafo was so soft-spoken he could enter a room and go unnoticed for hours at a time. He preferred this, for Amafo was the greatest watcher of people I ever knew. He was also the best judge of character I ever knew and tried to teach me everything he could in that regard.

  Even as I write this, I am laughing at the irony of Amafo being such a great watcher, for my grandfather had the worst eyesight of anyone in the family. His eyeglasses were thick and the right lens was broken. Till the day he died he refused to have it repaired. But seeing, in my grandfather’s case, had very little to do with eyesight. Seeing had more to do with insight.

  My grandfather saw people, he saw them as they truly were. He quickly spotted an individual’s faults, then just as quickly forgave them. He also saw the goodness of people and was never surprised when heroes emerged from unlikely places. I once heard him say of Maggie Johnston, “She’s been a hero for years, a one-legged hero climbing ladders and working for that funny little bossy man. That convict didn’t stand a chance.”

  When Maggie shocked everyone by breaking the convict out of jail and eloping with him, Amafo proclaimed, “Like I been telling you, that convict didn’t stand a chance.”

  I still have in my possession Amafo’s broken glasses––his spiderweb glasses, I have come to call them. Together with Pokoni’s sipping mug, they are my most cherished possessions.

  Now that I am old, I have to be careful how I hold Pokoni’s mug. I cannot stand and hold it as I once did. My grip is weak and unsteady. I sometimes wrap my fingers around its blue porcelain roundness and place it on my windowsill, as if it was a place of honor.

  I have been known to settle in front of my upstairs bedroom window, once my grandmother’s window, and stare at nothing for hours. Pokoni would never do that. I can still see her dashing about the house. Only late in the evenings did she ever sit still. She would lean her skinny spine against the caneback chair in front of the fireplace and take one long, deep breath. The entire household, the very house, would slip into a blue sea of sleep.

  This was her signal to Amafo that her day was done and she was ready for her hot chocolate. It was his way of loving her, when they were older, his making chocolate and serving it to her, always in her special mug. Once Amafo forgot and left the kitchen while the milk was boiling, scalding the chocolate.

  “Look what you’ve done now,” my mother said, clucking her tongue. “Here, let me make her another cup.”

  “I like it that way, a little burnt,” said Pokoni, stretching her neck backwards from the living room. And that’s how she got it, for the next ten years, a little burnt, all to save Amafo from even a moment of embarrassment. Till the day she died, my Pokoni always enjoyed her hot chocolate a little burnt.

  Yes, Amafo was slow and deep like a river, while Pokoni was sharp and quick like a crackling winter fire. Reflecting on my grandparents, I realize now what should have been obvious to us all. A river flows on forever, while a winter fire is gone before you know it.

  The Day My Pokoni Almost Died

  Rose • September 1897

  The day my Pokoni almost died began as a very unspecial day. No threatening weather, no visitors coming, no visits to make. I was gathering sticks and kindling and helping Momma stoke the laundry fire by the back porch. Pokoni was in the garden filling a basket with ripe tomatoes.

  She lugged that basket around everywhere. It was like Pokoni’s skin, old and sagging. She had woven it from river cane long before I was born, she once told me. It was the color of exposed wood, soaked of color by the sun to a soft brown, but splotches of red and purple told the story of its use. Thousands of pounds of grapes, strawberries, and tomatoes had found their way to scores of hungry stomachs, carried by this basket, gathered by Pokoni.

  If Pokoni loved this basket because she had made it and lived with it so long, I thought, then God must love Pokoni like she was his own child, loving her even more now that her skin was sagging from her skinny arms. God and everybody else found it real easy to love my grandmother. “Filled with the spirit,” folks would say, shaking their heads and watching her go about her work at twice the speed of anybody else.

  That morning especially, Pokoni dove into the thick green tomato foliage, her hands held together and her fingers pointed in front of her, like a man diving from a high rock into a river. After every dive, she emerged with a fat red tomato. Her strong fingers clutched it like a trophy and carefully nestled it into the basket.

  Seeing her disappear into the leafy rise and fall of the garden, I imagined she was holding her breath, puffy-cheeked, while her eyes darted from tomato to tomato, mentally discarding the yellow and green ones, till, completely out of breath, she would settle on a pearl of a tomato and rise victorious from the salty sea. She knew I watched her and she sometimes smiled and held her prize high for me to admire, but only for an instant.

  My grandmother burned with the hot breath of the spirit, the life fire.

  Other grandmothers bent and knelt and gathered tomatoes in their aprons. Other grandmothers stood up slowly, mopping their faces and slapping horseflies from their necks and shoulders. Other grandmothers rubbed the small of their backs and made painful faces, brushing away mosquitoes or blowing hair out of their eyes. My grandmother, my Pokoni, leapt into the tomato vines and whirled and whistled when she found her treasure, a single ripe tomato.

  I used to think that other grandmothers were made of brittle breakable bones and scratchable bleedable skin, while my grandmother was made of rubber––stretchable, bounceable rubber. I know no
w she was made of the same time-worn human hurtable stuff. She just refused to give in to it, to the pain, the aging, the dying.

  On the morning my Pokoni almost died, she was at her best. Spreading her legs apart for balance, she rocked forward and, seemingly in the same motion, reappeared, sometimes with a tomato in each hand.

  She had almost filled the half-bushel basket when I saw her stand straight up, sudden-like. She shook her head from side to side, slinging spit, then slumped forward. She grabbed ahold of the thick base of an old vine, hung on for a moment, then landed hard on her rear end. Her head fell to one side and her eyes seemed unaware, like the eyes of a trap-caught fox giving in to death.

  “Momma!” I called, but she was on the other side of the house hanging laundry. I knew she couldn’t hear me. I ran to Pokoni, but before I reached her, she stood up and straightened her clothes, removing a broken tomato stem from her apron pocket.

  “Can you bring me some water?” she said.

  “Are you hoke?”

  “Fit as a fiddle. Could use a drink is all.”

  When I returned with her water, she had already filled the basket with tomatoes.

  “This should do for today,” she said. “Let’s get some greens and start ’em a slow boil. I’ll get the water going. You go find us some mustard greens that ain’t gone to seed yet.” She strode through the back door and into the kitchen, stepping strong as a pony headed home.

  In the quarter hour it took me to gather a mess of mustard greens, my grandmother died. She died for real this time. Not in the garden sitting on her backside, but in the kitchen, staring up at the ceiling.

  I think she tried it first in the garden and might very well have gone that way. But when she heard my frantic cry and nervous running feet, she thought, “Oh, this won’t do. We’ll just try it again later with a little less carrying on.”

  I got it right this time. I was slow and thoughtful, easing into the moment. I sat down on the floor beside her and picked up her hands. I held them on either side of my cheeks and tried to stop the tears from flowing down my face. I brushed her hair from her forehead. I closed her eyes. No one else was in the house and I was glad of that.

  I left her for a moment. I walked to the east-facing side and picked a beautiful gardenia blossom, white and full of perfume. At first I placed her hands together at the waist, one hand on top of the other with the gardenia sticking up between her fingers. I right away decided this looked too much like a pose in a funeral parlor, so I stuck the flower behind her ear.

  I stood over Pokoni for a long time, trying to be more grown-up than I was. I tried to understand how sometimes you loved so much you cried at how beautiful and brief it all was. Not just people, but everything––the basket, the flower, the knotty pine floor she laid on. I know I didn’t understand any of it then, but for the first time I knew there was this understanding that some people came to. Pokoni would know how to make me see it rightly.

  But she never would, not anymore. Pokoni now lay on the wide planks of that knotty pine floor in the last dress she would ever pick out for herself. It was a pale blue working dress, nothing special. Her apron was a faded yellow, only slightly darker than the color of the gardenia petals. But her dress, the blueness of her dress, was more in harmony with the gardenia, I thought. The fragrance of the flower seemed a soft summery blue, the blue of a clear sky, the sweet lingering blue of a robin’s egg.

  I knelt down, just this once more, this secret final time before everything exploded in motion. I felt the silky smoothness of her hair. I closed my eyes and drank deep gulps of gardenia. I kissed my grandmother on the lips, rose, and went to tell Momma.

  She was hanging clothes, stooping and stretching. I walked to her like in a floating dreamwalk, watching myself move too slowly, too deliberately. My feet stirred up tiny clouds of dust. I was taking Pokoni’s deathwalk for her. She couldn’t do it.

  She is alive until I tell somebody, I thought.

  Momma stopped to stare at me, clutching the clothesline above her head. The closer I came, the slower I walked, the more her face grew worry lines and her mouth went tight.

  “Say it,” she said. “Please just say it.”

  But I could not say it, not until I touched her on the arm, her pink and brown forearm. She held her breath for a few moments, then started with a series of short, shallow breaths, breaths that became panting, panting that became singing, desperate hanging-on singing.

  And He walks with me

  And He talks with me

  And He tells me I am his own.

  And the joy we share

  As we tarry there

  None other has ever known.

  We clung to each other and rocked as the heat of the morning and the warm smell of our mother-daughter sweat wrapped us in a quilt of comfort.

  “Pokoni is dead,” I said. She nodded and squeezed her closed eyes tighter shut. She pulled me against her hip and held me there, as if she expected me to cry. When she didn’t hear any whimpers or sobs, she took my head in her hands, tilted my face to hers, and looked at me—into my eyes.

  I was not numb to my Pokoni’s death. Her death, I realized, would be a living presence for many years, maybe for the rest of my life. It would kiss my eyelids like a breeze, then vanish at my waking, leaving only the shivering window curtains—a ghost or a spirit or a thing born of sleep.

  I am lying, of course, or forgetting. The years have eased my feelings. I hurt that day, a deep hurt, like a heavy stone was pushing on my chest. Pokoni’s spirit was soft, but her death was quick and mean and I hated it.

  The memory of her death now blends with moments of her life, like a slow-simmering stew of leftovers—potatoes, tomatoes, celery, chunks of roast beef, carrots, the broth thick as gravy—to be sipped and tasted one spoonful at a time. Today Pokoni’s memory sends a warm and satisfying glow, just like that stew, down the inside of my chest and right to the pit of my stomach.

  As days and months passed, I would forget about her death for an hour, then a few hours, finally almost an entire day. Then it would just be there, right in front of me, needing my full attention. I was only eleven years old, but somehow I knew it would be this way.

  I was not numb to my Pokoni’s death. I stood facing it. Momma smiled, a slight smile, but a smile.

  “We have much to do,” she said. She gripped my hand and together my mother and I walked to the kitchen to tend to Pokoni, my grandmother.

  Amafo Alone

  Rose

  When Amafo was struck by the marshal, he retreated into himself, protected and encircled by his Choctaw friends of many years. Pokoni guarded Amafo from even those closest to him, for only Pokoni knew of the deep wound he had suffered.

  Amafo had experienced a taste of his own death. New intrusions appeared, like strange unwelcome fish, in the clear river of his thinking. His mortality was now real to him, and so was the weakness of his aging body. He was forced to admit that he could no longer protect either himself or his family. His body was old and weak.

  Pokoni allowed my grandfather to know this, to adapt himself to this new knowledge. Even his closest of friends would tell him well-meaning lies.

  “You could have taken him when you were younger,” they would say. “You would have made him eat that board!”

  In the evenings Pokoni would sit alone with him for hours, bringing him coffee. I once sat with them on the back porch. My grandmother stroked his hand and said in a whisper that blended with the night music, the cicadas and the windy tree noises. “There are ways. There are always ways.”

  Another time I heard her tell him, “Goodwill always has a place.” Pokoni sang to Amafo in his troubled time. For hours she sang to him, sweet Choctaw hymns they both knew.

  And so it was that, nurtured by Pokoni, Amafo grew in the strength of his own goodwill. The marshal had his muscle and his board. Amafo had his smile and his forgiving nature. And his Pokoni.

  Pokoni and Amafo together had defeated the marshal, a
nd now Amafo was alone.

  At the funeral service, Amafo sat on the front pew with Daddy on one side and Momma, me, and Jamey on the other.

  Pokoni looked powdery and very dead in a pink dress she would never have chosen. Amafo wore a navy blue suit with a dark brown tie, a suit that draped him like a flag and flapped and swayed with every step he took, a suit that fit him no tighter than the dark folds of skin hanging slack from the bones of his sagging face. I have never seen a body so devoid of happiness as that which carried Amafo’s spirit to the burial service of the only woman he ever loved.

  That evening, long after everyone retired, I heard Amafo moving in his room. “I will bring him chocolate,” I thought. “I won’t have to say a word. He’ll know I am showing my love in a wordless way, like Pokoni would.”

  Half an hour later I climbed the stairs with the chocolate. Amafo stood by the window when I entered the room. The room was fully lit, but he moved as if in total darkness, feeling his way with slow-moving hands and fingertips that softly patted the walls and furniture.

  I stood watching him, holding the wooden tray and his blue enamel cup, filled with steaming cocoa. Amafo knelt before his bedside table as if before an altar. He knew I was there. He lifted the back of his hand to me, both to acknowledge my presence and to ask me not to speak. This was a holy moment, a quiet and sacred time to my Amafo. As the scene unfolded, I realized I was witnessing not so much a worshipping as a new way, for my Amafo, of expressing his love.

  Amafo began weeping. I saw him cry before I heard him. He rocked back and forth, bowing his head deeper with each motion and rocking the sobs from his chest and belly, sighing and crying.

  I could not move. Why would I ever move again? Why would anyone ever move or need to move when we could rock instead, curled up and crying? But crying was only a door. It was the rocking, only the rocking that mattered.

  Talking, working, eating, breathing, none of this was necessary. Only rocking. Pokoni would take care of everything else. All we had to do was rock. And when we tired of rocking, all we had to do was hold on tight and she would do the rocking for us­­––even the rocking. She did all of this, everything, even the rocking.