House of Purple Cedar

by Tim Tingle

  I opened my mouth but only squeals came out. I saw her slip and hit the porch hard with her cheekbone. Jamey fell from her arms and rolled beneath the wagon.

  Now all motion ceased. Momma lay face down, her arms hanging limp at her sides. All of her weight rested on her already swelling face. Her eyes were closed and her body stretched half across the step and half across a brown puddle of ice and mud in the front yard.

  There was an eerie beauty to the scene. For a brief moment I gave myself over to it. The wind came in strong gusts, swirling the sleet in icy threads. My bruised mother lay unconscious before me. Icicles were forming in her silverblack hair. My brother curled up in fear behind me.

  Whether borne of fear or simple loss of breath at what I was beholding, whether I was lifted from my body and gently returned by a force more powerful than any I have ever known, I cannot say. I do know this had everything to do with my being a child no longer.

  I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the stinging rain and I felt comforted. No more dark grief, no more deathwalk wandering, no more waiting for life to return. Life had descended upon us with a vengeance. This night was real. This daggered rain was real. I felt alive and within myself for the first time since Pokoni died.

  I heard Reverend Willis boom out across the pulpit, “When I was a child!” Then in that way he had of whispering and talking straight to only me and making me shiver and cry, in that whispery voice he had that floated through the Sunday air and nestled in my ears, he said, “I saw through a glass darkly. But when I became a man…I saw him face to face.”

  When I opened my eyes I saw the panther crouching twenty feet in front of me.

  Koi Chitto on the Prowl

  The panther was enormous. Her coat was shiny black, not dark––but more as if her velvet fur were wrapped around a cold white fire. Her fur seemed to move, every inch of it to move, though she sat still and stared at me.

  I had seen larger animals—horses, mules, and cattle—though nothing quite this large stepping from the dark, wet trees; nothing suddenly appearing from the night air as this cat had appeared; nothing with this knowing sense of its own power; nothing––I realized with a shudder that hurled the breath from my lungs and left me panting––nothing that ate flesh.

  I had never beheld a thing quite so big that had the teeth and claws to eat a human like myself, and I so frail to stand before it.

  I heard myself whimper. Her face twitched and I was drawn to her eyes, to the green glaring of her eyes. I felt strength in their dark shining. A power surged through me and I began to move.

  The panther’s paws twitched and pulsed, as if she readied herself to leap.

  I lifted Momma and carried her through the door. When I returned to the yard, the panther had dragged Jamey from beneath the wagon.

  “No!” I screamed. The panther turned to face me and I flung myself upon her, pounding her with my fists. I felt her rippling muscles. She threw me to the ground with her paw and her full weight crushed my chest. She took my hair into her teeth and bit into my scalp. Her breath was hot upon my face.

  Suddenly the door slammed shut and I knew Jamey was safe inside. I shook and cried with relief. I let my arms fall limp and I gave myself to this quick and cutting death.

  Then the panther was gone.

  The sleet still fell, but lighter now. I watched it floating, shimmering and beautiful in the lamplight streaming from the open door. I felt Momma’s strong hands grip me beneath the armpits as she helped me to my feet.

  “Careful. The step is slick,” she said.

  I felt her bony strength as she wrapped her right arm around my waist and led me to the front room. Her left arm held my father’s shotgun.

  “How can you be unhurt?” Momma asked. She had seen the panther draw her paw across my face. I brought my hand to my brow and touched the soft skin of my cheek, expecting cuts and scratches. I could still feel the cat’s rough paw pad and knew that only shock was warding off the pain. But now I felt neither pain nor blood nor anything but soft, cold flesh––my own.

  “Sit with your brother,” Momma said. “You can keep each other warm.” Jamey crouched beneath a blanket on Pokoni’s chair.

  I crawled into the chair and sank into its softness. The back and arms were padded, and soon I was a child once more, clinging to my brother.

  What happened next convinced me I was dreaming. I heard a scream like nothing I’d ever heard before. I rose from the chair and went to join Momma. She stood by the front window staring at the sound. The panther pawed the ground once, then lifted her face to the dark sleet and screamed again. Past the short distance and through the thin pane of glass came the cry, piercing my eardrums and settling in a knot of fear at the pit of my stomach. The high-pitched cry was a mother’s squeal, a birthing cry.

  When the panther’s scream stopped, I resumed my breathing and looked about the room. I expected broken glass, at least a shattered window. I looked for fresh blood and hurling winds, for death and destruction. I thought the sleet might turn to stones and splinter through the roof in a hail of falling rafters, followed by the panther in our living room, clawing her way through the order of our simple lives. I waited for a clap of thunder to announce the world’s end.

  Nothing happened.

  The panther gazed through the window as she paced back and forth in full view of Momma and me. She began circling our house, flicking her tail as she walked. Momma ran frantically from room to room, tracing the path of the cat. The wind picked up again and blew so hard the sleet fell in long needles sideways to the ground.

  “Tell me when you see her,” Momma said, passing from her bedroom through the front room on the way to the kitchen. A few minutes later the panther halted once more in the front yard.

  “Momma?” I tried saying, but the words stuck in my throat. In a brief moment, Momma stood beside me. She lifted the shotgun and the panther let fly another piercing cry.

  For the next hour this pattern was repeated. The panther circled the house, pausing long enough to stop and cry. Momma moved from room to room and I moved from the window, watching, to the chair to settle Jamey. Once when he woke up and stretched, I whispered to him, “If you be very still, we can make peach fritters tomorrow. Shhhh! Don’t let Momma know you’re awake.”

  I think it was after midnight when Daddy and Amafo appeared on the porch. As soon as she spotted them, Momma ran to open the door. Their boots were covered in thick red mud and their hat brims drooped with ice. Momma spoke to them on the porch. I knew by the way they glanced to the woods she was telling them about the panther. Daddy squeezed Momma to his chest.

  Amafo, I noticed, moved to the shadows and looked hard into the woods. He covered his eyes with one hand and squinted at the silver threads of sleet. As I watched, Amafo laid his gun on the icy ground, held his hands chest high as if he were showing somebody he was unarmed, and took several steps in the direction of the woods. Then he hesitated and turned back to the porch.

  “He is tashimbo, crazy with grief,” I whispered.

  Momma and Daddy entered the house, followed by Amafo.

  “Too cold to catch anything but frostbite,” Amafo said when he saw me. He took off his hat and slapped it against his leg, knocking the ice to the porch before he came inside. Spotting logs by the fireplace, Amafo soon had a small fire going.

  He rubbed his hands together, facing his palms to the fire. He then approached me in a slow and shuffling walk, as if he didn’t want Momma and Daddy to know he had business with me. Leaning his shotgun against the chairback, he crouched beside me and waited, resting on the balls of his feet.

  Momma and Daddy had retreated to the kitchen to talk. Every few minutes Momma looked through the kitchen door and glanced from the window and back at me, letting me know she was counting on me to alert them if the panther returned.

  I could feel how hungry Amafo was to know about the panther. He sat next to me for the better part of half an hour, gazing into the fire and rocking
so gentle-like. I had to pick a spot on the wall behind him and stare at it to make sure he was really moving. When he spoke I jumped like he’d grabbed me, but his voice was soft and laced with longing.

  “You saw the panther?”

  “Yes. She pinned me to the ground.” Amafo nodded. His eyes had a glazed and faraway look. I knew he was imagining the scene, imagining the koi chitto on top of me.

  A short while later, Amafo moved from his crouched position to sit on his behind and pull his knees to his chest.

  “Did she hurt you?”

  “She pulled my hair. She bit me on top of my head.” Supporting himself on the arm of the chair, Amafo straightened his skinny legs and slowly stood. He rubbed his knees and took two steps to stand behind me. He ran his fingers across my head, feeling the small teeth marks and scabs forming on my scalp. I could feel the rough skin of his old fingers. He smelled like a cedarwood campfire. I closed my eyes and saw Daddy and Amafo crouching near a fire when the sleet came.

  Amafo touched a tender spot and I winced.

  “I’m sorry, hon.” He took his hand away. “It's a miracle you are still alive.”

  “I was so afraid, Amafo. She had Jamey. I screamed at her and she let him go. That’s when she knocked me to the ground.” He opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment my parents strode to the front window. Daddy cupped his hands to his eyes to shield the fireplace light and stared at the darkness beyond the porch.

  When he turned and looked about the room I could see the birthing of a plan.

  “We going to build a bigger fire, heh,” he said, looking at Amafo. “We’ll see if we can draw her out. Rose, how about you keep the fire going? I’ll get more logs from out back.”

  “Be careful,” said Momma.

  “Better take Jamey upstairs,” he told her.

  “What about the upstairs window?”

  “We can hear her on the roof. She’d have to jump clear from the oak tree––that or climb up the side of the house. Either way we’d have time to get upstairs before she made it through the window.”

  As soon as Momma disappeared up the stairs with Jamey, Daddy nodded to Amafo. They picked up their shotguns and walked quickly to the kitchen. Amafo stood in the open doorway, gun in hand, while Daddy carried several loads of wood from the far end of the porch. He made a stack just inside the kitchen and I began carrying wood to the front room.

  Soon we had the fire built and blazing, casting light and shadows on the walls in popping flashes of orange and blue and black. Daddy nailed a heavy quilt over the door to the kitchen to keep the rear of the house dark.

  “If she does come through the kitchen window, this quilt should slow her down enough. We’ll have our guns trained on her before she can get to us,” he said.

  We settled into a nervous and alert waiting. At least now, with two more adults and their guns, we could move about the room. Momma made coffee and even poured me a cup.

  “It’s better with a little sugar,” she said. “I put a spoonful in for you.”

  “Yakoke,” I said.

  We did not have long to wait.

  I thought I saw her first, but in looking back, I know Amafo saw her long before I did. Maybe he had seen her days before. Maybe he spotted her easing through the elm trees at the rear of the house as he sipped his evening cocoa. Maybe he saw her that very evening, watched her through the front room window as we sat and talked of how she pinned me to the ground. Maybe he eyed her from the back porch while Daddy gathered the firewood.

  Of one thing I can now be certain. If he did see her, he hoped we would not. And something else I know as well––the panther saw my Amafo. I am certain of that.

  The green flame of her eyes stepped from the woods, long before her body came into sight. I was hypnotized by her beauty. My mouth fell open and I drank my own breath in a dizzy swoon. I felt again the panther on top of me, her rippling muscles, her strength so much greater than mine.

  A log fell in the fireplace in a crunching noise of brittle wood, startling me back to the present. My eyes flew to the shower of embers, and when they returned to the front yard, the panther’s sleek black body had joined her eyes. There she stood, crouched ten feet from our front porch.

  “I see her!” Momma called. Daddy now stood ready to open the front door. He turned to Amafo and said, “If I miss her, you got to be ready. She’s big enough to come through this here window. Cain’t let her do it.” He nodded to Amafo and stepped onto the porch.

  With his rifle shouldered, Daddy took aim at the panther. She kept her eyes on him and twitched her tail. I expected her to sink into a slow crouch as she readied to leap. Instead she rose up and looked to the window where I stood with Momma and Amafo. She looked back at Daddy, pushed off with her front paws, and turned and twirled to the woods, disappearing before Daddy fired even a single shot.

  Momma moved quickly to the doorway.

  “She’s getting away,” she said.

  “Her work here is done,” Daddy said.

  “She’ll be back.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You should have killed her.”

  “No. I won’t be the one to kill her,” Daddy said, moving into the house and setting his rifle against the wall.

  “She stalked us all the way from the McCurtains. She attacked us. You don’t know.” Daddy turned away, but Momma was mad and scared both. She grabbed his shoulders and twisted him round to face her. “She is still in those woods waiting for us.”

  “If she is,” Daddy said, “you should be grateful. The panther followed you tonight, but she was not stalking you. She didn’t want to hurt these children. She never would, nor you neither. She was protecting you. If she is still in the woods, she’s doing it yet. But I don’t think she’s staying round here. She got other business this night to tend to. I think we safer here than we been in a long time.”

  “You talking crazy,” said Momma.

  “You probly right. But we in here safe and warm. Whatever took after you is still out there in the cold.”

  Amafo spoke up. “How ’bout I stay up, keep guard in case she come back. You all get some sleep. Been a long night for everybody.”

  “You sure?” Daddy said.

  “I be fine,” said Amafo. “I wake you up if I get sleepy.”

  Momma stared for a long minute at Daddy. With her eyes still on him, she motioned for me to climb the stairs to bed. From the top stair, I saw her slump on her way to the bedroom. The evening had taken its toll on us all.

  When Momma closed her door, I crept back to the landing at the top of the stairs. Amafo and Daddy stood gazing at the fire.

  “What did you see?” said Amafo.

  “Koi chitto,” said Daddy.

  “What you know ’bout koi chitto?”

  “I think you know, old man,” Daddy said. “Maybe it’ll all make better sense come morning.”

  Amafo and Pokoni

  I climbed beneath the pile of quilts on my bed and rightaway fell into a deep sleep, but the sleep was a short one. Maybe I heard a screaming again, maybe I was dreaming the scream, I don’t know. My eyes popped open and I was wide awake.

  By the yellow slice of light through the window I could tell only an hour had passed. A thin gathering of clouds passed over the moon and the room went to blue. My mind went racing backwards, through the sleet, the bloody gutting of the sow, the ghostly children. I snuggled in joy and cringed in fear as the pictures flew before my thinking eyes.

  Amafo and his skinny grieving for Pokoni, my blessed Pokoni. I could not stop my tears thinking of Pokoni. I never want to think of her without crying, even knowing she would laugh out loud at this silly way to be. I can see her, hear her, saying it.

  I felt like I was learning how to fly for the first time, like I was no longer a person—no longer just a person—with two legs to bind me to the earth. I was shrinking into nothing and learning that maybe nothing was the only road to everything—the trees, the river waters, the
others, all the others, the slipping into it all.

  My flying stopped sudden with the killings. I could not breathe. I saw the killings for the first time through my grandfather’s eyes. The death of Lillie Chukma and the burning of New Hope, the killing of the sow, he knew who did these things.

  Amafo knew.

  At long last I saw through my Amafo’s eyes and I knew as well. I knew who burned the school, who killed the sow, who chased us through the woods, who hung the snake. I saw Amafo now, over and over, touching his fingers to his cheek, long after the cuts had healed and the scars had blended with the lapping wrinkles of his skin. He was reminding himself never to forget the man who cut him down so. He could and would do it again. With every touching he was reminding himself.

  I had to talk to Amafo. I flung the covers back and swung my bare feet to the cold wooden floor. My feet seemed guided and instead of walking across the landing to Amafo’s room, I descended the stairs to the kitchen. I put milk on to boil, stoking the cedar embers in the woodstove. The cedar smell curled around my hair and filled the room. I broke a chunk of chocolate and dropped it in the bottom of the cup and stirred till the milk bubbled and boiled and stuck to the bottom. Gripping the pan with a towel, I poured the milk over the chocolate.

  Chocolate steam rose to meet the cedar smoke. I placed the dark blue cup on the pine tray and stepped tiny, careful steps from the kitchen to the stairway, then climbed the steps two-footed, like a child, or like a grown-up unhinged to childhood by the day. I wrapped my left arm around the tray bottom and reached for the doorknob with my other hand.

  “Amafo,” I whispered, craning my neck and tossing the whisper across the darkened room. “Amafo. I brought you something. Chocolate.”

  The room was empty. I did not need to gaze across it to know this. In reply to my whisperings, the room spoke empty. I was at first confused. I moved to the window and set the tray on the table.