The Rising of Glory Land

by Janie DeVos

  Running alongside in case any more treats might be forthcoming, he arrived at Rose’s chickee with me, and then politely waited outside while I went in to speak to her. At the moment, she was thoroughly engrossed in making something bright and beautiful on her manual sewing machine.

  “Knock, knock,” I said softly as I rapped my knuckles on one of the chickee’s vertical poles. Though I tried not to startle her, I did, and she nearly fell off the little stool she was sitting on.

  Rose made some exclamation in her native language, then, smiling, said in English, “Miss Eliza! You about gave me a heart attack!” She set her sewing aside and waved me in. “Come in, come in! Why you here?” she asked but not unkindly so. “You supposed to come Monday. You have no thing to do?”

  “That’s ‘nothing’, not ‘no thing’,” I gently corrected her. I knew she wanted to learn, that she was as thirsty for knowledge as a man is for water in the desert, but there’d been no persuading Paroh. Pushing that thought from my mind, I asked her where the boys were.

  “They learn how to make a pithlo…How you say?…A canoe! Yes, canoe! Little Mac teach them. They find good cypress trees this morning.” Little Mac was a man in his thirties, and there was nothing little about him. He was gigantic in height and width, and just as big in kindness, though the alligators didn’t think so. He was the tribe’s best wrestler, and he was legendary for subduing one that weighed half a ton.

  “What time will they return, Rose?”

  “Late day,” she replied. “They stay long today.”

  “Ah, well then, that’s that.” I was disappointed, but there was nothing more I could do in the village. “I’ll see y’all next week,” I said, but just as I turned to leave, Rose knocked a magazine off her little sewing table and I went over to retrieve it for her. It was Vogue Magazine. I was curious now. “What are you working on?”

  “I show you,” she said, holding her hand out to take the magazine. She flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for and then handed it back to me. It was a clothing pattern, which was a regular feature in the popular magazine, and this one happened to be for a woman’s skirt and shirtwaist. Though the skirt was fairly simple, the shirtwaist was more complicated. Its waistline was tailored like a man’s shirt before becoming more generous up the torso to accommodate the bosom and then it was finished off with a high neckline. Instructions were provided, as well as specific measurements, and they needed to be followed explicitly or one would have a mess on one’s hands.

  “Are you making this for yourself, Rose?” The outfit was quite different from the way the Seminoles dressed.

  “No, no. I make it for white lady in town. You know Miz Brubaker? She very big one.” Rose smiled mischievously. “She no can find her size in store.”

  “It’s not ‘no can find…’” I started to correct her grammar. “Oh, never mind that right now. How are you able to make this, Rose? It’s a complicated piece, even for someone who is able to read the directions.” I was amazed she was even trying. “Is she paying you to do this?” I asked, squinting my eyes.

  “Yes, she pay!” Rose looked and sounded indignant. “She pay good, too!”

  “But how are you able to follow these directions since you can’t read?”

  “I follow pictures best I can,” she replied, looking rather deflated.

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous! There’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t be able to read this every bit as well as I can. You wait right here,” I ordered. I jumped down from the chickee, retrieved a few items from my saddlebag, went back inside, pulled a chair next to Rose, twisted my ponytail into a bun, opened the ABC primer, and went to work.

  “This letter is A, Rose. A as in apple and alligator. This next one is B. B as in boy and boat. This next one is C.” And so we continued through the morning and into the afternoon, until we got to the letter T. Then capital T trouble arrived.

  “Rose!” Paroh shouted, startling both the young woman and me as we sat hunched together over the primer. The chief had returned early, and we’d not seen him coming.

  Paroh spewed out a string of words in their native language, and even though I didn’t understand any of it, I knew it wasn’t good. The poor girl was ashen-faced, and tears flooded her eyes. Paroh added a last word to his sentence, pointing away from us as he did, and I knew that word must have been “Go!” And she did—fast. Rose ran off through the palmettos and as she fled, Paroh turned his controlled wrath on me.

  “We had a deal, Miss Eliza. We had a deal which you didn’t keep!” His dark eyes flashed and his mouth was hard. Paroh stepped up into the chickee and came to within a few feet from me. Then he studied my face as if trying to figure out my thinking, or perhaps wondering how he could have misjudged me so.

  “I was only…” I began but was immediately cut off.

  “I know what you were only trying to do! Did we not agree that you would just teach the boys, Miss Eliza? Did we not? I hesitated to let you do even that, but I gave in. And, as is always the case every time our people do, your people take advantage of us! Why is that? Please tell me! Why are the white people so set on breaking every bit of trust and every treaty they’ve had with the red people? Explain it to me!” He was absolutely furious, and I was stunned into silence…until. “You’re evil people! Every one of you! You—”

  “Now you just wait one minute, Mr. Monday. I highly resent you clumping all of us together. We’re not all evil, and we don’t all break the trust that—”

  “Then what would you say you just did?” he interrupted. “I set limitations with you, ones that we both agreed to.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No, ‘buts’, Miss Eliza! There are no ‘buts’!” Paroh said loudly.

  “Mr. Monday, please hear me out. Rose is trying to earn some money by making clothes for a woman in town, and, in order to make those clothes, she must be able to read the directions on the patterns she’s using. She has to know arithmetic in order to follow proper measurements.”

  “Rose won’t be making clothes for the white lady. Rose will not be going to town anymore. She stays here now!” he adamantly declared.

  “Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!” I said. It was the wrong thing to say.

  Paroh’s eyes narrowed at the insult, and then he lifted his left hand and pointed off to the east, toward Miami. “Go. Go now!”

  I was frozen to the spot and my mind raced as I tried to figure out a way to calm him, to appease him. Then I remembered my earnings from the wreck! “Listen, Mr. Monday, I would actually be willing to pay you if—”

  The look on his face stopped me mid-sentence. If I’d thought that telling him he was ridiculous was the wrong thing to say, this was even worse. Paroh’s narrowed eyes flashed like glowing coals of fire. In a dangerously low, flat voice, he said, “Never come back to this place again. You are no longer welcome here.”

  Grabbing my books from the sewing table, I rushed past him and out of the chickee. Before mounting Sundae, I turned around and faced him, unable to stop myself from adding one last thing.

  “You know, Mr. Monday, following time-honored traditions is fine when it helps your people. But when it comes from stubbornness and resentment toward a world you can’t stop from changing, then you’re only hurting the ones you claim to love. You’re oppressing your own people, Mr. Monday, and you’re causing them to suffer. They deserve far better than that.”

  Paroh said nothing more to me. Instead, he just stood there and watched me. I jammed my books into my saddlebag, got up on my horse and rode out of the camp. Tears blurred my vision so that I could hardly see, but I caught a glimpse of Rose turning her back on me as she disappeared within a hammock of gumbo limbo trees.

  Chapter 16

  Growing Pains

  It was a good thing Sundae knew our route because she found her own way home. I c
ried the entire time, but not entirely out of frustration with the tribe’s chief. Some of my tears were because of the way I’d handled everything. As soon as the words had come out of my mouth about paying him, I’d realized how offensive they sounded, but there was no taking them back. And now there was no going back.

  We made our way along the Miami River slowly because I needed time to collect myself. Finally, we came upon the Stricklands’ old home, not far from mine. It was a white two-story home, with a large porch that ran across the front and down both sides, just as ours did. And just like every home on the river, it faced the water to take advantage of the cooling breezes. Though Striker still lived there when he was on shore leave, the house had taken on a forlorn, faded look. In truth, there was nothing wrong with the structure. It was as solid and strong-looking as when Mr. and Mrs. Strickland had lived there. The paint still looked fresh, the steps didn’t sag and the railing wasn’t broken, but the home’s spirit was. It was as though the house had withered and died when the family it had sheltered and protected had been stolen away by the sea. Where once there had been lamps brightly glowing in the windows of every room, now the windows remained dark, save for one or two if Striker was home. And, in some ways, the weak illumination of one light struggling to break the darkness was even more heartbreaking than no light at all.

  From where I stood on the trail, looking at the back of the house, I could see the separate oversized shed that stood to the side and rear of the home. It had been used for the construction of the Stricklands’ glade skiffs and small sail boats, but it, too, had been dark and locked up since their deaths. Today, however, both front and back doors of the building were open wide to allow a nice cross breeze to blow through. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I could just make out Striker standing at a workbench with his head and shoulders bent over something he was working on.

  I nudged Sundae over to the river’s edge and dismounted. While she drank, I splashed water over my tear-stained face, dried it with the back of my shirt sleeve and then released the bun of my hair and retied it into a ponytail. I didn’t want my outside to reflect the way I felt on the inside. When Sundae was finished drinking, I took her reins and walked her over to Striker’s shed.

  “Knock, knock,” I called softly, which painfully reminded me of saying the same thing as I stood at Rose’s chickee. Striker turned toward me, peering out over the top of a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and his expression went from surprise to a dimpled smile. “You don’t need to knock,” he said.

  “When did you get glasses?” I smiled.

  “When I couldn’t think of any more excuses not to,” he quipped. “C’mon in. Just give me a minute here. I’m about done.” He turned back to his workbench and some small piece of metal he was working on.

  “Don’t hurry,” I said as I looked around at the shelves, and the large variety of boat parts and pieces filling them. “This place has a lot more stored in it than last time I was here.” What I didn’t say was, “when your parents were alive.”

  “When I came home after working for Merrill-Stevens up in Jacksonville, I brought a lot of this with me,” he said, glancing up toward one of the shelves. “It was pieces I’d bought over time to play around with—to test some new things.”

  There was a comfortable silence for a couple of minutes as he concentrated on his work, and I browsed around the large shed. Finally, he broke the silence. “So what’s wrong?”

  The question caught me off guard, so much so that I wasn’t ready with some clever answer, or one that would downplay what had actually happened. Instead, I blurted out the truth: “I opened my big mouth at the Seminole village and the chief, Paroh Monday, told me I was never to come back. Ever!”

  The tool in Striker’s hand stilled and he threw his blond head back and laughed, which really irritated me. “Ah, Eliza,” he finally said, turning around to face me. “Only you and the white generals from the Seminole wars could get those kind and patient people so blasted angry they’d ban you for the reminder of your days. Lord, woman, what did you go and do?”

  His amusement at my expense did not make me want to cry my heart out to him. On the contrary. “Never mind,” I said. I turned and walked out of the building and over to Sundae, who was busy nibbling the grass. Grabbing her reins, I got one foot in the stirrup, and started to pull myself up, but suddenly a firm grip on my forearm stopped me.

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said, trying to smother a laugh. “Just calm down. Why are you gettin’ so mad at me? I didn’t ban you from my shed. C’mon, let’s go inside and have somethin’ to drink and you can tell me all about it. I promise not to laugh…well, I promise to try not to.” He smiled. “This is one story worth putting a carburetor on hold for.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I followed him up the back steps of his house and into the spacious kitchen. It was exactly as I remembered it.

  Sitting down at the farmer’s table, I looked around, both enjoying the familiarity of the room and feeling saddened by it as well. Light blue beadboard lined the bottom half of the walls, while the top half was still painted in the same pretty shade of cream. Curtains, adorned with tiny birds of all kinds and colors, and painstakingly made by Mae Strickland, still framed the window on the backdoor we’d just come through, as well as the large window above the deep enamel sink. Because the kitchen was at the back of the house, there was only a partial view of the river, but the enormous avocado tree that grew right outside the window helped keep the kitchen a little cooler during the day.

  To the left of the back door was a large Boynton cast iron cook stove. Once, when my family had come over for dinner and my mother was admiring it, Jerry Strickland laughingly told us that when Mae insisted on bringing it down during their move from Leesburg, they’d had to leave a whole other room of furniture behind. He said that the poor horses pulling their wagon had known hell on Earth when they’d been tasked with hauling that enormously heavy stove all those miles.

  I sighed as my mind moved on from that memory to others. How quickly things had changed, I thought, and how quickly a house of lightness and laugher had become one of darkness and pain.

  “Warm tea or hot coffee?” Striker asked.

  “Huh?” I replied, still shaking off the past.

  “You want hot coffee—though it’ll have to be black ’cuz I’m out of both milk and cream. Or warm tea since I don’t have any ice.”

  “Oh, the tea’ll be fine,” I assured him.

  He poured each of us a glass from an ironstone pitcher he kept in the iceless ice box, then pulled a chair back from the table, turned it around and straddled it. “Okay, so tell me,” he said. “What happened with Paroh Monday?”

  I started at the beginning and Striker rested his arms on top of the oval back of the chair. Then, as I got deeper into the story, he rested his chin on his arms, making me wonder if he was totally bored, or totally engrossed.

  “Am I dragging this story out too long?” I asked, cringing slightly.

  “Oh, no, Eliza. Remember, I’ve been out at sea with not much more to amuse me than Jim Altman’s stupid jokes, or Owen’s tales about where-all he’s been. Although, I have to admit, some of those are pretty interesting.”

  At the mention of Owen’s name, something immediately shifted in the room and between us. Silence hung heavy in the air for several seconds as we looked at each other. It was as though we each wanted to say to the other, “So…what do you think of him?” Suddenly, I felt I needed to be going.

  “Anyway, that’s about all that happened, which is quite enough, don’t you think?” I forced a laugh, hoping to switch us back to that easiness we’d shared up until that moment.

  “I think,” Striker said as he rose up off the chair and then turned it around so that it was back in place at the table again, “you still haven’t learned what the word ‘patience’ means.” There was no laugher or lightness in his statement. He was
being very serious with me.

  “Eliza, many things in this world that are really worth waiting for take time. But you get your heart set on something, and there’s no stopping you. You decide what’s going to be, how and when. And that, pretty lady, is the fastest way of pushing something away—or someone. You’ve got to hear what people are saying to you. No, let me rephrase that: You need to listen to what people are saying to you. You need to listen to what it is they want and need. Instead, all you hear are your own wants and wishes. And because of that, in the end, you’ll be hard put to get exactly what it is you’re after—if you even know what it is.”

  I’d been glued to my chair as he’d lectured me, but I finally stood up and moved away from the table. “I never realized you saw me as such a shallow person, Striker,” I said in a calm, controlled voice, though inside I felt anything but calm. I knew my hands were shaking in anger so I shoved them down into the pockets of my gauchos. He started to object to my statement but I held my hand up to stop him. “I’m glad we’ve cleared the air. I have to go now.”

  “Eliza, I’m sorry…If I—”

  “It’s fine,” I said as I brushed past him. He reached out and grabbed my arm, but I flung it off. “Really, I have to go,” I said one last time, before throwing open the kitchen door and running down the back steps. I mounted Sundae, then pulled her reins around to turn her in the right direction while Striker stood at the door watching me go. When I hit my horse’s rump with the ends of the reins, she took off for home. And as she did, I realized that I hadn’t outgrown Striker; he had outgrown me.

  Chapter 17

  To Taste, Touch, and Smell

  “I will not jump from this height!” I laughed. Owen was forty feet below but I instinctively took a couple of steps back from the edge of the platform, as if afraid that some phantom hands might shove me off.

  “Then come on down to the lower platform and jump from there,” he shouted, as he treaded water beneath Fowey Rocks lighthouse.