House of Purple Cedar

by Tim Tingle

  Maybe he fell asleep in front of the fire. Of course. He is keeping guard. He promised Daddy he would keep a watch out for the panther.

  I would have seen him when I climbed down the stairs. I would surely have seen him when I came from the kitchen with the chocolate.

  Amafo is outside. He has gone to the woods. He tried to earlier.

  I took one quick and lunging step to the door and almost called out to wake Daddy. Then I remembered. The day Pokoni almost died. I remembered my frantic hollering and how she had to do it all over again. If I have learned anything, I have now learned to walk through sacred moments. My eyes told me I was in the midst of one.

  I turned to the window.

  My eyes moved to the edge of the woods east of the barn. Amafo crouched on the ground, facing the thick trunk of a red oak tree. A shaft of white moonlight pierced the clouds and etched deep into the bark. The beam slowly climbed down the trunk, illuminating gnarled and aging wooden knuckles on its descent.

  My grandfather’s hat cast a saucer-shaped shadow on the tree trunk. His arms were moving slow as a dream, first wrapping around the tree, then caressing his own cheeks. His head was bowed and he moved to kneeling.

  Then the dance narrowed. Beyond Amafo and the tree, outside their circle, everything turned dark, midnight dark. This old man I knew only as Amafo now floated in a sphere of light before a living, breathing tree.

  All froze––light, wind, even the pulsing fog––all but my Amafo. He tilted his head and I saw by the soft shimmer of his skin that he was crying. He held the tilt. The light fell pure. Only his hands moved, slowly lifting to his face. His fingers unfurled as he wiped the moisture from his cheeks.

  When he turned his palms to the tree, the tree was gone.

  I saw now what my Amafo saw, maybe what he had always seen, the sacred life in all of it. I saw Amafo touching the tears from the tips of his fingers and spreading his moist longing on the face of the panther, my grandmother, koi chitto, my Pokoni. I stood in awe of what I saw and what I now knew, that Pokoni and the Walking Ones would be with us forever, till we join them in the Walk.

  Final Reckoning

  Somebody Looking to Die

  Rose • Remembrances 1968

  I am old and dying and someone should know. I have long ago lost my best friend in the world, Roberta Jean Willis. I know she wants me to speak of that night, to reveal the mysteries.

  The sight of Pokoni as the panther was startling, but in another sense it came as no surprise. I had always felt Pokoni would never leave us. I had always known she was nearby. During the long ride home, the panther’s eyes sent the fear of death through me, but part of me always knew Pokoni would be there, helping us as best she could. When I saw Amafo smoothing his tears on her face, I knew the time had come for me to help my friend.

  Since the night of her attack, Roberta Jean had taken to sitting next to me at church. I still occupied my place by the window, three rows back on the cedar bench. Now she sat beside me. We seldom spoke, but if the sermon should refer to an event that was likely to trigger a deep and fearful memory in her—Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—I would squeeze her hand and let her know I was there for her.

  But part of knowing was this. Roberta Jean would never, could never, feel safe as long as he was alive. We both had tasted fear borne of his look and we knew that to speak of it was futile.

  Standing at the window and staring at the two, the panther and my grandfather, I shook my head and turned away. I turned away from the sacred scene, from Pokoni and Amafo. I left the blue-starred mug on the windowsill and picked up my Amafo’s dress hat, the one he always wore to town. I quickly crossed the hall to my bedroom, dressed in the warmest clothes I had, and slipped out the front door.

  The dread of what I would say and how I could ever awaken Roberta Jean without Samuel knowing, these thoughts so occupied my mind that the distance and the cold were as nothing. Soon I stood before the home of Preacher Willis. The windows eyed me, asking why. The porch seemed to set her lips and bow in the knowing that my will was strong.

  I crept to her window and stood tapping my fingertips on the glass, softly so I could barely myself hear the tapping. Only a moment passed and she appeared, wide-awake as if she had been lying on her bedcovers, sensing the night’s beckoning. I waved a palm at myself, motioning for her to come outside. She pointed to the front door and placed her finger to her lips.

  Five minutes later we stood by the road before the Willis place, in the shadows of a sycamore tree and far enough away from the house to speak.

  “I think he is alive,” I said. “The marshal.”

  “Where is he? What has he done?” she asked.

  “I think he is after us. He tried to kill us tonight. He stalked us through the woods. We cannot live like this, waiting till he kills again. Lillie Chukma…”

  “I know,” she said, stopping me. “His home? Do you think he’s at home?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  We walked in silence, neither of us knowing what we would do at Marshal Hardwicke’s home. We followed the railroad tracks for what seemed like hours. Dark ice still clung to the trees, thick and groping. When we reached the curve on the tracks south of the Hardwicke place, we angled down the steep hill to keep from stumbling, finally landing in the old stone-covered graveyard.

  I said a quiet prayer and picked up a gravestone big as the foot of a boot.

  “Here,” said Roberta Jean, reaching out her upturned palms. “This is for me to do.” She took the stone from me and carried it beneath her arm as we approached the dark and lifeless house. We crossed the back pasture till we heard the whining and yelping of dogs, the marshal’s hunting dogs. We began to run, not fearful running, but purposeful running, in the direction of the house.

  We were crouching and catching our breath beside a run-down arbor when the dogs came at us. I grabbed a branch as long as I was tall and waved it at the dogs, slapping their faces. These were trained hunting dogs and knew how to circle their prey and attack from many sides at once. I knew we only had a moment till they flung themselves on us and we were on the ground fighting for our lives.

  “Hey! ’Mon boys! Hey!” called Hardwicke, in a twangy, high-pitched voice, followed by a quick burst of whistles. The dogs stopped their lunging and backed away, only a few feet, growling deep-throated threats and still facing us. I threw Amafo’s hat to the ground and the dogs leapt for it, tearing it with their teeth.

  Marshal Hardwicke appeared on the back porch wearing britches and a coat pulled over his undershirt. In the dim light of the moon I could see scars running down the side of his face. Claw markings. The blood shone dark red and glistened on his cheek.

  “Yakoke, Pokoni,” I whispered.

  We hid as best we could while the marshal leaned against a roof support and pulled on his boots, never taking his eyes off the arbor, squinting and calling softly, “What you got there, boys? Something coming round our house looking for trouble?”

  He approached the dogs and wrestled Amafo’s hat from them, grabbing the crown and ripping it from their frothing mouths. “Look like maybe somebody ready to die,” he said, fingering the hat and eying the dark field behind us.

  “You out there, old man?” he called out. “You think you gonna come for me? That it, old man? This is worth coming home for,” he said, turning to the house. The dogs came at us again, circling and barking. “Hey doggies!” called Hardwicke. “Let him be for now.”

  Hardwicke walked to the house in a rush and climbed the three steps. He stomped on the back porch and took a hopping skip, then swung his leg sideways and kicked the door with such force we could hear the pine board crack and splinter, all the time hollering, “Git me my gun! Now! We got a prowler here.”

  Ona Mae Hardwicke came to his calling, but not in her usual manner. During the year of his leaving, a year of basking in the sun of life without questions, Ona Mae had changed. Hardwicke had not. Unable to feed his ha
tred with the blood of either the old man—Amafo—or the old man’s family, Hardwicke had instead turned, that very night, to his most familiar victim, his wife.

  As she stood in the doorway holding his shotgun, Ona Mae wore the bruises of the beating, her first in over a year.

  When Robert Hardwicke reached for his gun, Ona Mae raised the barrel and shot him in the chest. The shotgun blast lifted him from his feet and he staggered for a moment, waving his arms to steady himself. When he regained his balance, he lowered his head to look at the blood pouring from his chest. He knew he was dying.

  A final gust of anger swept across his face and his cheeks turned red. He glared at Ona Mae. I thought for certain she would drop the gun and flee into the house. She did not flee. Ona Mae stood her ground. Hardwicke lifted his doubled-up fist to strike one last unforgettable blow across his wife’s face. For twenty years Ona Mae had longed for the strength to stand up to him. And now she did. When his fist fell like a heavy stone, her arm was there to block it.

  His knees buckled and a soft humff came from his mouth. Hardwicke tried to raise his arms and grab her. Ona Mae never flinched. She stood staring at her husband till his last ounce of hatred oozed away and he lost his balance completely, falling backwards down the stairs. By the time he hit the ground, hard enough to bounce his head, his body was limp and lifeless.

  The dogs ran to Hardwicke and began licking his chest. They lifted their faces and we could see their bloody tongues smacking as they swallowed. Ona Mae held the shotgun firm. No one could ever know for how many years she held her guard up, unable to fully bathe in the cleansing waters of his death. She stared at us as if we would try to take the gun away.

  Roberta Jean held the heavy stone high as her chest, then reached her arms out in offering, as if to show our common intent. Ona Mae nodded, and gave us in return a slow and beautiful dance to see. Her feet and legs unmoving, she twisted her shoulders and torso and slowly knelt to lean the shotgun up against the door, her head and neck held tall, her eyes upon her husband lest he rise and once again return. Still moving in the thick fog of her deliberateness, her silent dancing liturgy, she took three steps and sat on the edge of the porch, smoothing her dress and gathering it tight around her knees.

  We looked into each other’s eyes and moved to join her, Roberta to her right and I to her left. The moment soon was broken as Samuel stepped from the shadows of the arbor. We joined Ona Mae in rising.

  “You shouldn’t touch him,” he said, without so much as a glance at the marshal. Noting our surprise, he continued, “You know I couldn’t let you come by yourselves.” He approached the porch and laid Reverend Willis’ pistol on the top step.

  “Rose and ’Berta, you got to leave. Now. No telling who heard the shot. Come morning we’ll have a good story to cover it. Prowlers. Ona Mae shooting over the heads of prowlers.”

  He slapped Amafo’s hat against the side of his hip, saying, “Your grandpa’s just gonna have to lose his hat and you can’t tell nobody, not even him, where it got off to. No way of explaining the marshal’s dog’s chewing on his hat. I’ll see it gets burned tonight.”

  When no one moved, he said, “Maybe be best if you girls went through the house, soes you won’t leave no more tracks.

  Samuel spoke to us as a big brother might, hardly as one two years junior to Roberta Jean, but his surprising arrival and the firm readiness of his logic gave no berth for hesitation. He gestured and we moved through the kitchen door, pausing only to watch his quiet doings with Ona Mae.

  “Ma’am,” he said to her, speaking more softly than he had to us. He bowed his head and climbed the back steps, then reached behind himself to help our people’s newest member, our Choctaw family’s newest adopted one, ascend the steps of her home. In vanquishing our common enemy she soon, we knew, would take her place among the most revered of elders, be she yet so young.

  “I think it better if you stay inside,” said Samuel, holding the door open for Ona Mae. “You never saw your husband, in case anybody asks. But if we do our job tonight, nobody will. We best carry this secret to our graves, all of us. All we know is the marshal died going on a year now.”

  Ona Mae nodded.

  “It’s a long way home,” he said, turning to Roberta Jean and me. “Stay in the dark and don’t be seen.” He then slipped out the back door in the full expectation that his orders would be followed.

  “He is right. You girls must leave now. Come see me in a day or two,” Ona Mae said, trying to mask the pleading in her voice. As we left the kitchen, I heard another man talking. I turned just in time to see Colonel Tobias Mingo emerging from the darkness.

  He lifted Hardwicke’s shoulders from the ground, Samuel took his legs, and the two of them carried him past his sleepy, full-bellied dogs.

  Best I could make out from later talkings––talkings I was not intended to hear––Tobias and Samuel dragged and carried the marshal all the way past Fort Coffee and to the river, a several miles distance. True to his word, Samuel burned Amafo’s hat, digging out a hole between two thick roots of an old elm tree. Tobias tore off the marshal’s shirt and stuffed his chest and belly with dark river mud to quell the blood flow, then they rolled him over so he lay face down, his body some six feet from the river. His back was a scrawling map of claw markings, swollen lines of glistening purple and red.

  “Anybody wanting to know how he died not gonna have any trouble finding out,” said Tobias. “Just have to roll him back over. That mud not gonna fool anybody don’t want to be fooled.”

  “I cain’t think of a soul gonna care,” said Samuel, “Choctaw or Nahullo either one.”

  “That’s what we got to count on,” replied Tobias.

  “Besides all that, he’s already been buried, according to the law.”

  “Uh-huh, and grieved over besides.”

  “Some stranger to these parts saw the river, approached it, and missed seeing the panther watering nearby,” said Samuel.

  “Plain to see, claw marks of a panther,” said Tobias.

  “That’s how I’d rule, if I was the law.”

  “You the only law I see.”

  “Wonder who’s gonna find the body?” Samuel asked.

  “Something tells me the Bobb brothers gonna stumble ’cross it.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me. If the two of ’em happen to see it, they’d be strong enough to drag it to their wagon and get it to town.”

  Both men removed their hats and said a few private words in respect for the dead. By the time they pivoted away from Marshal Hardwicke and moved in a swift walk in the direction of their respective homes, all thoughts had turned to their own most beloved, Tobias to his wife Hannah and Samuel to his Rose.

  Circle of Buried Secrets

  Following the death of Marshal Hardwicke, later referred to in legal documents as “the animal mauling of an unknown intruder,” the Bobb brothers discovered the body on an early morning hunting trip. They wrapped the body in an old blanket and removed it to the mortuary.

  Agent Taylor supervised a private and lengthy inspection of the body, attended only by himself and undertaker Ebert Hermann. The true cause of death was quickly ascertained, as was the identity of both the deceased and the shooter in light of the obvious bruises to the face of Mrs. Hardwicke.

  “Ebert?” Taylor asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do I need to tell you how the autopsy report will read?”

  “No, Agent Taylor, you do not. I wish I had pulled the trigger myself.”

  “The body of this unknown intruder will be wrapped and buried within the hour, with no announcement of what has occurred save for a small notice in the obituary column,” said Taylor.

  “Of course, and no further mention will be made, not by myself.”

  “You are a good man, Ebert Hermann.”

  “Thank you, Agent Taylor.” The two men shook hands, and minutes later, as Taylor snapped the reins and turned his wagon homeward, Hermann rolled the body, mi
nus a coffin, onto his funeral wagon and took the back road to the pauper’s grave. He was followed by a sleek black cat who sat in the shadows of a red oak tree till the final shoveful of dirt fell down upon the marshal.

  As the body of Robert Hardwicke settled into the dark clay, Idabell Taylor prepared and served her husband a much-appreciated noon meal of fried pork and corn-on-the-cob. “Wonderful,” Taylor said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing the full expanse of his ample mid-section. “Nothing like a Cherokee meal for a hungry white man,” he laughed.

  “I am glad you enjoyed it,” Idabell said. Something about the manner in which his wife sat staring at him disturbed Mr. Taylor. Her usual habit, after thirty-five years of marriage, was to clear the table of dishes and bring him a glass of Scotch whiskey, along with the full bottle for him to partake of freely, depending on the afternoon’s activities.

  “What is it, dear?” he asked.

  “You know of the upcoming sale of used and discarded clothing?”

  “Yes,” Taylor replied, wiping butter from his mouth and picking corn from between his teeth. “To benefit the displaced girls, I believe.”

  “Yes. To benefit the displaced girls. We will be selling mostly women’s clothing.”

  “Well, I think it is a worthy cause.”

  “Yes, a worthy cause.”

  Mrs. Taylor paused till her husband eyed her curiously. “What?” he asked.

  “There is another purpose. I have spoken to only a few women about it.

  “Another purpose?”

  “Yes. A personal purpose. I have donated all of my scarves.”

  “I don’t understand. Why are you telling me this?”

  Mrs. Taylor reached beneath the table and patted her husband on the knee before continuing. “For too many years my scarves and sleeves have served a need. They have hidden the bruises, dear. The bruises. The marshal is dead and gone. So are the bruises. My bruises. I will, from this day forward, wear my bruises, not my scarf. Do you understand now?”