House of Purple Cedar

by Tim Tingle

  The marshal unbuttoned his own bloody shirt and, lifting the man from behind, pulled the stranger’s thin arms through his shirtsleeves. The belt and britches were more of a struggle, but in less than half an hour the dead man was dressed in clothes anyone in Spiro would recognize as belonging to Marshal Hardwicke. He dragged the body to the edge of the cliff overlooking the tracks and waited.

  In two hours, the freight train from Little Rock to Oklahoma City reduced its speed as it approached the rising curve in the tracks. Once several cars had rattled past, Hardwicke tossed the body onto the tracks and knelt by the cliff to watch. The body was flung and torn as parts were scattered for half a mile on either side of the crossties.

  “Those damn Indians,” he said, anticipating the reaction of townspeople on finding his body. “Well, after all that business with the preacher’s daughter, cain’t say I blame ’em all that much.”

  “Might not even be Indians done this.”

  “No, could’ve been just about anybody.”

  “Hell, maybe he just fell on the tracks.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me none if that’s what happened.”

  “Somebody gonna have to tell his wife.”

  “Yeah. She gonna be mighty torn up to hear it.”

  That is what they’ll say, he thought.

  “She’ll be mighty torn up to hear it.”

  As the news of the marshal’s demise swept through Spiro, the men in town did utter these sentiments.

  “She’ll be mighty torn up,” the bartender said.

  “Wonder what she gonna do now?” someone asked.

  The women reacted differently, casting knowing glances at each other and saying nothing.

  The Friendly Color

  For the first ten years of her marriage to Robert Hardwicke, Ona Mae was afraid of her bruises, especially those that darkened her eyes and face. She sometimes delayed looking in the mirror for a week, at least until the tenderness grew less painful to the touch.

  “Ona Mae. Ona Mae! Where are you sweetheart? Ona Mae, supper needs cooking. Come on in and help.” Ona Mae’s grandmother loved her probably more than anybody that ever lived. She would touch her hair while Ona Mae peeled and chopped the garden vegetables for the boiling pot.

  “You my little girl, my little helper girl.”

  Ona Mae discovered that if she pretended to hear her grandmother call her in from those long-ago Arkansas woods, where she played with her little blonde-haired sister Emily, she would be more likely to laugh at how silly her face looked when she took her first glance after a beating.

  “Wash your face up, hon.”

  Though the bruises would not wash off, a hot soapy face wash always felt good once the bruises turned yellow. Fresh blood bruises. Purple bruises. She hated those the most. They always brought the tears.

  After a while you could tell the color of the bruise by the feel of it. If you paid attention, you could tell. The later black and browning ones she could tolerate, knowing they would soon fade into that greenish yellow color. Green was a good color, the color of leaves on the redbud trees after that early burst of spring. But green was too dark to hide. It meant more waiting.

  Yellow, just yellow, that was the true friendly color. A dab of white powder could easily hide the yellow bruises. They were friendly bruises, the yellow ones. They meant she could go to town again. They meant she could open her own front door and welcome someone, anyone, into her home, without fear that they would peer too close and ask that awful question.

  “What happened to you?”

  She feared this question almost as much as she feared him.

  “What happened to you?”

  This question required a lie, a lie she would sometimes practice even before she fell asleep.

  After.

  His sweat.

  His breath.

  His fist.

  As she lowered herself into bed.

  Carefully.

  On the side he had not kicked.

  On the side that had not caught the edge of the kitchen table as she chose to cover her face with her hands rather than break her fall.

  “What happened to you?”

  The friendly yellow bruises meant the dialogue she feared most would not occur, not this time at least.

  “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why do you stay with him?”

  “Where would I go?”

  “Somewhere. To your folks.”

  “I am afraid to leave. He would find me.”

  When nobody answered, and nobody ever did after she told them she was too afraid to leave, she could always say, “I am not feeling well,” and they would go. Mrs. Roundtree did. They all did.

  One afternoon she parted the living room curtains and watched as Mrs. Roundtree paused on the front porch, considering knocking on the door again to insist on something. It was the consideration of what this something would be that sent her away, clutching her purse and thanking the good Lord that my husband loves me.

  “It is my fault,” Ona Mae told herself. “I am not a good wife. I cannot love him properly.”

  To her closest friends from church she sometimes said, “It is my duty. He is my husband. He will change. Besides, he is not himself. He doesn’t mean to hurt me.”

  The real reason she stayed was a secret, a deep secret that everybody knows but never said. It was a secret that darkened even the friendly yellow color. Sometimes she stood before the sink and brushed away this hateful, this mean and hateful truth, waving and swatting her hands in front of her face, brushing the air thick with it, slapping her cheeks to drive the unseen biting gnats that whispered what only she and Grandma knew. Grandma who loved her so. Grandma who said it every day.

  You are my sweet little helper, my angel, and your Grandma doesn’t care if you’re not pretty like your sister Emily. Pretty’s not everything.

  Now that she was grown, Ona Mae said it. “Pretty’s not everything.” Every day she said it. But why did these gnats keep humming and tormenting her, swimming before her like his breath, his stale breath, mean as his unfeeling eyes. Sometimes she said it out loud just to make the humming go away. She said the secret only she and Grandma knew.

  “No one else will have me.”

  That was the darkest of all the secrets.

  News for Ona Mae

  Mrs. Idabell Taylor, wife of the Indian agent, held her chin high and waited for her husband to step down from the carriage and help her descend. She was to deliver the news to Ona Mae Hardwicke of the death of her husband. When Agent Taylor offered her his hand, she nodded, clutched her dress in her fist, and took his hand in hers. He leaned back, lifting her hand as he did so, and took her elbow with his free hand. The entire ritual of her removal from the Taylor carriage was as practiced and rehearsed as a ballroom cotillion.

  “Just a small part of your training,” he had explained. “Being the wife of a federal agent has social obligations. You must rise to every occasion, even the most mundane.”

  In fact, Agent and Mrs. Taylor––a week before their wedding, when she was still Idabell McCurdy, the daughter of an Arkansas farmer and his mixed-blood Cherokee wife––had practiced the maneuver for the better part of an hour. Her mother peered through the living room window, wiping the tears from her cheeks with a towel dotted and puckered with flour from the bread she was kneading.

  It was mid-morning and Mrs. McCurdy lifted and pounded the thick slab of oat bread. When Agent Taylor’s two dark horses and shining Memphis-made carriage neared the house, she moved to the front room window to watch. Her oldest daughter Idabell dashed from the house and into the arms of the man who would rescue her from a life of hot sweat and hard work and give her a life of leisure only seen in fairy tales.

  From her mother’s perch on the windowsill, the scene was idyllic; her daughter stepping from carriage to the ground, her hand held high and gripped softly by the man who had so properly asked for it in marriage. Idabell felt
the first hint of impatience in the tightness of his grip. Unaccustomed to the new shoes he had insisted she wear for this rehearsal, she slipped clumsily from the top step.

  “Look where you are putting your feet. You must pay attention,” he said, squeezing her fingers in a painful balling of his fist.

  Now, thirty years later, as she approached the modest Hardwicke home, Idabell smiled to remember her awkward efforts at becoming his wife, his perfect complement. When she spotted Ona Mae’s face at the window, Mrs. Taylor stiffened her lips in judgment. Ona Mae’s look was quick and furtive, like a small animal in the woods, much as her own mother’s had been. It was the face of an uncultured woman.

  “Who is it?” Ona Mae asked, pulling her hair from her face as she stepped through the door. Still clutching her dress, Mrs. Taylor watched her own feet in her black boots ascend the two steps before she replied.

  “Mrs. Taylor,” she said. “Mrs. Idabell Taylor.”

  Ona Mae said nothing. She tilted her head and furrowed her eyebrows as if her mind were sorting through sounds of a foreign tongue.

  Mrs. Taylor gestured to the carriage and said, “I am the agent’s wife, Agent Taylor.”

  “The agent,” Ona Mae repeated. “You are the agent’s wife.”

  “Yes.” A long and awkward pause ensued. “May I come in?”

  “Yes. Of course. You may come in. The marshal is not at home.”

  “I know,” Mrs. Taylor said, lowering her voice to a barely audible hush and looking to the floor.

  “What? What do you know?” said Ona Mae.

  “Please, let us go inside.” Mrs. Taylor stepped to the door and Ona Mae followed, reaching around the matronly woman to hold the door ajar for her.

  “Sit down, please,” said Ona Mae, nodding to the sofa by the window. “May I make some tea for you?” Her hands began to shake and her first impulse was to swat the gnats now buzzing about her face.

  The gnats are not real, she told herself, and I am not alone. She clutched her trembling right hand with the other and felt the muscles of her face tighten into a smile.

  “Tea, would you like tea?” she asked again in too loud a voice, she realized, for Mrs. Taylor, the agent’s wife, leaned back in surprise and looked away.

  “In a moment, Mrs. Hardwicke.”

  “Ona Mae. Please call me Ona Mae.”

  “Yes. Ona Mae. Will you sit down beside me?”

  “Yes. My name is Ona Mae. You are Mrs. Taylor, the agent’s wife, and you will have your tea in a moment.”

  “This is hard for me as well.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Please sit down.”

  “I will not sit down. I would rather stand, at least until you tell me what you came here to say. Please give me this respect in my own home. Our home. What do you know about my husband?”

  “I am sorry.” Mrs. Taylor stood and took Ona Mae’s hands in her own. “Your husband has been killed. Accidentally.”

  Ona Mae squinted her face in an expression of bewilderment and wonder. Her chest heaved and her breath shortened to a series of quick pants. Mrs. Taylor wrapped her arms around Ona Mae’s waist and eased her onto the sofa.

  “It must be someone else,” said Ona Mae. “My husband is Marshal Hardwicke.”

  “You sweet, dear woman. Marshal Hardwicke, Robert, was found dead this morning on the railroad tracks. He apparently fell from the boulders on Gilliam’s Hill.”

  “Take me to him. I want to see him,” said Ona Mae, rising to her feet and smoothing her dress. “Please, will your husband the agent take me to see him? Where is he?”

  “Mrs. Hardwicke. Ona Mae. There is no doubt it is your husband. Before you see him you should know how he was found.”

  Ona Mae stared at Mrs. Taylor as tears coursed down her cheeks and sobs shook her entire body.

  “How…was…he…found?”

  “He fell across the tracks and a train hit him. Without his clothing and belongings, it would be difficult to know who he was.”

  “You must take me to him.”

  “You poor, poor dear,” said Mrs. Taylor, embracing her as a mother consoling a daughter. Ona Mae instinctively reached for the baby blue scarf encircling Mrs. Taylor’s neck, touching the silk to her wet cheeks. The scarf came untied and Ona Mae clutched it in her hands and raised it to her face, taking in the soft powdery smell.

  She closed her eyes and laid her head on Mrs. Taylor’s shoulder.

  “Thank you for coming.”

  “I know how hard things are for you. I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

  “How hard things are?” Ona Mae heard herself saying.

  “Yes.” Mrs. Taylor unbuttoned the top button of her dress and leaned her neck far to the right. She touched the loose flesh of her neck with two fingers, gently rubbing. She moved her fingers to the cloth of her blouse and pulled the cotton away from her skin.

  A deep purple bruise extended across her collarbone.

  When Ona Mae shook her head and stared at the bruise with round, incredulous eyes, Mrs. Idabell Taylor took a deep breath and sighed.

  “You poor lonely child,” she said. “Did you think you were the only one?”

  Ona Mae accepted the helping hand of Agent Taylor as she ascended the steps of the carriage, settling herself onto the rear seat. The three rode in silence to Hermann’s Funeral Parlor. Ebert Hermann met the three and offered necessary but insincere condolences.

  “I am so sorry for your tragic loss,” he said, bowing and revealing his shiny balding head. A nervous assistant led Ona Mae and Mrs. Taylor to the back room. As soon as they were out of earshot, Ebert turned to the agent.

  “He was as sorry a man as ever walked the earth,” he said. “He got exactly what he deserved.”

  Entering the back room, which reeked of alcohol, Ona Mae felt a slight touch to her elbow. She jumped in surprise at the intimacy of the touch and turned to see the assistant, pointing to a darkened corner of the room.

  Three empty tables lay white and ready to receive the dead. Walking between the tables, Ona Mae approached an open wooden box. The marshal lay face down and pieces of his legs and arms surrounded his torso in random stacks.

  Ona Mae gasped and covered her mouth. She felt a tremor in the pit of her stomach. She slowly lifted her hands to the front of her face. They hovered there for a moment, then flicked the air in random thrusts, grabbing at unseen gnats.

  Mrs. Taylor stepped before Ona Mae and gripped her wrists.

  “No more of that,” she said. “He is gone and you are alive. Consider how lucky you are. Life is offering you another chance.” Ona Mae met her gaze with a confused look, and Idabell continued. “You have more friends than you know. You will see.”

  Early that evening a steady flow of people streamed into Ona Mae’s living room. Just after sundown, as she made her way to the kitchen to put more water on to boil, she heard a faint knocking at the back door. In the dim light through the kitchen window, she saw three people huddled together on the porch, each holding a pot or basket.

  She pushed open the door to find Samuel, the preacher’s son, flanked by Rose and her mother. Samuel nodded in a respectful manner, and instantly she knew he had told no one of their evening together. She stood holding the door in the yellow dark of night, and, for the first time in years, Ona Mae Hardwicke moved into forever time. Her mouth filled with the sharp taste of ebbing life, the memory of a red fox buried beneath her bedroom window.

  When Ona Mae returned to the present, she saw a swath of kitchen light slice across the heads of three Choctaws bowing before her.

  “Come in. Please come in,” she said, stepping outside and holding the door for them.

  Samuel entered first, fighting the temptation to cast his eyes about the room and compare the fully lit kitchen with the dark memory of his initial visit. He glanced sideways, only once, and saw the corner where she cowered and cried while he tended to her wounds. He remembered how thin and weightless her bones felt when h
e lifted her legs.

  The others shuffled in and placed their foodstuffs on the already-covered table, shifting in embarrassment to be standing in a Nahullo household. Ona Mae lingered for a moment on the porch, taking in the cool night air. A small noise caught her attention, followed by a brief and shy movement. Someone was standing in the shadows, leaning against the wall. She heard a trembling voice.

  “I brought you something too.”

  Roberta Jean stepped into view, holding a bundle of white daisies in her outstretched hand. “I grow these daisies in my room,” she said. “They sit by my windowsill.”

  “I know you, don’t I?” Ona Mae asked. Roberta Jean nodded. Ona Mae took her in her arms and held her tight. Roberta stiffened and the daisies fell to the porch. Ona Mae held the embrace till the young girl wrapped her arms around her and, like leaves in a breeze, the two began to sway, a soft and imperceptible movement at first. Swaying led to sobbing, sweet sobs of shared pain and joy. A quarter hour passed before Ona Mae spoke.

  “Will you come to visit me?”

  “Yes,” said Roberta Jean.

  “Good.” She stooped to pick up the flowers, but Roberta Jean touched her shoulder, saying, “Leave them be. I’ll bring you a living daisy, roots and dirt, all in a Choctaw pot.”

  “I will hold you to that promise,” she said. “Now, come into my home.” Ona Mae opened the door and ushered the daughter of a Choctaw preacher into the light of her kitchen.

  Amafo Comes to Life

  Rose ~ Early November 1897

  We were all convinced the marshal was gone, out of our lives forever, save for the ashes he left behind. Over the next several days I spent every afternoon with Roberta Jean. Some mornings I’d just show up at her door for breakfast, always offering to help cook. She was quieter than her usual self at first, but after her family and mine both spent a Saturday picnic day at the church and the graveyard, she once more was the Roberta Jean I knew and loved.

  Reverend Willis changed too, in little ways. Years later Samuel told me about hiding the knife so his father wouldn’t kill the marshal. Looking back, I am dead certain the reverend knew it was Samuel who hid it. Partly out of shame for what he almost did, and partly out of gratitude, Reverend Willis little by little gave Samuel more respect. He let Samuel drive the family wagon to church, and he even let Samuel say the prayer at our picnic.