Citizens Creek

by Lalita Tademy

  “What it always means,” Jake told her. “We mind our business; we pay what taxes come to us and what bills we owe; we pray for good weather and crops and a healthy herd; we answer to whatever the United States government asks, no matter they think us simpletons and incapable and ripe for misuse; we answer to the Creek government, no matter they think us less than Indian; we stay away best we can from the old-style white hate sure to come unleashed in our direction each by each; we remind ourselves and everyone else that this is our land as long as we work it; we raise our children to expect more and fight if we’re not able; and we put as much as we can away in case we have to start over.”

  He looked tired, the contours of his once-unlined face deep and sagging, his shoulders stooped, his hair uncombed, still carrying the sweat-line indent circling his head from his cowboy’s hat, though the hat itself lay flat against the hook by the door until morning. And Rose felt, deep and final, each one of her ten additional years of tiredness above her husband’s age. How many times could a body start afresh, or be threatened with the possibility of needing to do so?

  “What of the ranch? Will they come for the ranch?”

  “Someone’s bound to try.” Jake was matter-of-fact. “Grafter or boodler, government or settler; the only thing we don’t know is when. But we fight for what matters. We change as time demands.”

  What had Grampa Cow Tom said in the death tepee? Carve the life you want. She’d fought for Jake, and she’d fought for the land, with success at both, but at such cost. So much else had slipped out of her reach in the process.

  “Yes,” said Rose. “We’re warriors. And we fight for what we want.”

  Chapter 69

  AT DAYBREAK, MONTHS after the sting of statehood passed, Rose pulled two baskets’ worth of ripe cucumbers from the garden, packed her pistol, left Laura in charge of the house for the day, hitched up her favorite pony, and set out for the pasture. She selected four cows from her own herd, including a milk cow and calf, and began to drive them north.

  “Cows!” she called out to get them on their way, and again, each time they threatened to stray from the course she’d set.

  She’d used this pony to move her cows before, from grazed area to fresh pasture, but never as far a distance as she intended this morning. She gathered the four graceless cows in a loose herd and kept them moving, zigging and zagging on her pony to keep them calm but in motion, their hooves clopping on the dry ground.

  For the second time this week, Rose followed parallel to the creek until she came to the homestead of a distant neighbor, a widow with two small boys. Seminole. The woman had lost her husband in a gun accident the year before, and was struggling to hold on to her land. The family came to Rose’s attention through loose ranch-hand gossip, and for the fact that she had never thought to search out such a family before, she was ashamed. But at least she was here now.

  The trip took two hours, and when she arrived, the widow was already in the field outside, hoe in hand, weeding squash. Her dark, long dress had seen better days, but she wore rows of bright beads around her neck, Seminole-style, as she had when Rose talked to her the week before. Her young boys, from the look of them ten and twelve years old, worked lines of cornstalks by the side of the small log cabin. The widow put down her hoe when she heard the clatter of hooves, and Rose stopped short of the house to let the cows graze.

  “I’ve beans if you’re hungry,” the widow said.

  “I’ve somewhere else to be,” said Rose, “but once the cows are settled, some coffee will send me on my way.” She offered one of the baskets of cucumbers. “For you and the boys.”

  The widow accepted. “Your hand came round earlier in the week and helped me patch the fencing for the cows,” she said.

  She was even younger than Rose initially thought. She’d guess twenty-eight, no more than thirty. She’d gathered up her abundant hair in a topknot, but her work in the garden had loosened several locks that hung straight and limp against her damp skin.

  “I still don’t understand why you do this for us,” the widow said. “I can’t pay.”

  “If neighbor helps neighbor,” Rose said, “fortune balances out.”

  The widow seemed puzzled, but didn’t press further, perhaps afraid Rose’s generosity would be rescinded. Rose didn’t, she couldn’t, explain that she strived to fulfill a commitment long overdue. How many years ago she’d sat in Grampa Cow Tom’s death tepee and made him promises, and then went about her life picking and choosing which to keep. Over thirty years. A lifetime ago. Her early disillusionment that her grandfather committed shameful acts in wartime had vanished alongside her young womanhood, but he’d asked her to help him atone and she’d done nothing. Rose owed him that and more. She’d made too many promises she hadn’t kept.

  “There’s grazing land enough here for now, but we’ll check back from time to time to see what else you need.”

  “We thank you and yours.” The widow glanced over at her sons. “It’s been struggle for us.”

  Once the cows were driven to their pasture, and she’d had her fill of the bitter brew of the widow’s coffee, Rose mounted her pony and rode until she found a small clearing in the woods.

  She dismounted, and tied the pony to a tree so he wouldn’t bolt. The pistol weighed heavy in her hands, but she was steady. She shot four times. Once north, once west, once south, and once east.

  “Rest in peace, Grampa,” she said aloud. “We make our own traditions.”

  Rose remounted. The next leg of the trip was not likely to be so easy.

  She began to worry about what she would say, how the encounter might play out, whether she would be able to face her little sister after all this time. Over the years, her initial fury toward Elizabeth had turned to something hard and cool, a stony bitterness, and then bloomed again into jealousy as they battled over Eugene’s head and heart, two mothers where there should only be one.

  Rose slowed the horse’s trot as she came near the tall-grass plain leading to the homesite where she’d spent a goodly part of her early years before striking out on her own. Now this was Elizabeth’s home. The closer Rose came, the more her memories flooded, good recollections and ill, from this place and before. She’d have to hold those memories close to get through today, dealing with the living. Her Gramma Amy, in her nineties, body and mind both failing but still hanging on. Ma’am, now faithful caretaker of Cow Tom’s ranch. Elizabeth, spinster. She thought of the departed. Aunt Maggie and the cousins, Lulu and Emmaline. Granny Sarah, lost and then found. Twin, of the blue light, who protected her as a child until, as an adult, she left him behind. Her Grampa Cow Tom, gone, but ever with her, her bedrock.

  Though still morning, the day had warmed, and she saw movement at the front of the ranch house, on the wrapped porch, a solitary figure. Elizabeth, in a rocking chair, embroidery in her hand. She had changed much, and yet in some ways had barely changed at all. Older, yes, her face and body filled out, her dark hair streaked with silvery wisps, more matronly, but with the same promised charm of a smile waiting at her lips. Rose remembered clearly that day so long ago when a much younger Elizabeth churned butter on her front porch, and her husband, Jake, coming home from months on the road, laid eyes on her at their ranch. She should have known then what would follow. She should have sent her packing then.

  Rose closed her eyes to wipe away the stale image, to reset her mind to an attitude that would serve better for her purposes today. She had to force the past gone. For Eugene.

  Some children needed more than others. Her girls would marry, early and well. She had raised them thus, and they took the lessons to heart. Her son Jacob was already making a name for himself as an oil broker, taking full advantage of the booming industry literally bubbling up from beneath their feet. Kindred was lost to them, there was no bringing him back from his choice of slipped-life as Indian, and though it cut her to the core, she knew his
mind. He had closed himself to them. But Eugene was teetering at a crossroads, and Rose refused to let him fall.

  Elizabeth looked up from her needlework, and stared at Rose as she slowed the pony and approached. Rose saw her whenever visiting Gramma Amy and Ma’am, but hadn’t really talked directly to Elizabeth since the day she banished her from her ranch. Elizabeth wasn’t as easy to read as she’d been as a girl or a young woman, and Rose had fallen out of the practice of trying. There was a moment of confusion on Elizabeth’s face, come and gone in a twinkling, before her features settled to blankness.

  “Ma’am’s out back with Gramma Amy,” Elizabeth said coolly.

  Rose fought against her mind’s picture, honed and burnished from years of imaginings, of Elizabeth and Jake together. She replaced the image best she could by setting young Elizabeth side by side with the woman before her now.

  “I’ll see them later,” Rose said. “I come for you.”

  Elizabeth threw down her embroidery. “Something’s happened to Eugene?”

  “No, nothing.” Rose pushed herself forward, closer. “It’s time to talk about him, is all.”

  Elizabeth regained her composure, taking her time, picking up her stitch before responding. “Was a time I’da welcomed a word from you. Any word. All I got was silence.”

  “Those days are past. You been good to Eugene. He never gave you up.”

  “No thanks to you. You tried to poison him against me, but you couldn’t,” Elizabeth accused. “He’s my son. From my body.”

  “I was there,” said Rose. “Remember? Midwife to my sister with my husband’s child.”

  The heat filled her, coming back as if she were still in that birthing room, helping Elizabeth with the final push. Rose willed herself to balance.

  “Easier to think all the blame mine, eh?” said Elizabeth.

  They had already taken a wrong turn. Of the many lessons learned from Grampa Cow Tom, she’d only just come to appreciate this last one. After her grandfather killed the black Seminole, he willed himself to change, to shed his old skin in favor of new, and become a different kind of man. A man of peace, and sobriety, and dedication to others, the grandfather she’d loved without reservation. If he could transform, so could she.

  “There’s too much time passed to capture right and wrong now,” Rose said. “You are my sister, that doesn’t change. It is Eugene at risk now, our battle spilled over to him, and him squeezed between Mama Rose and Mama Elizabeth. He threatens to go away, and leave us both.”

  “Not everyone is made for Indian country, for this life,” said Elizabeth. “Not everyone is Rose Simmons. Perfect.”

  “Perfect?”

  “Perfect wife. Perfect mother. Perfect rancher.” Elizabeth could barely take a breath.

  Rose fastened on a memory of Elizabeth in the kitchen at her ranch long ago, before Ma’am came to visit. Eugene wasn’t yet born, and Elizabeth cajoled Rose out of her anxious mood, as only she was able. She remembered the dinner, with children laughing in the background.

  “My children obey me but never brighten when I’m around the way they did with you. One of my sons is already fled and soon maybe another. We have to battle every day to keep our ranch from being snatched from under us.” Rose could have stopped herself, but didn’t, pushing the words out she’d never said aloud. “My husband takes up with other women and I look the other way.”

  Elizabeth sat back in her rocker, studying her sister. “Yet you stay,” she said softly.

  “Jake holds the key to the life I was meant for.” Rose struggled to catch up to her own thoughts. “I want that life. I want him.”

  “Why are you here, Rose?”

  “I’m come to say you were right, Elizabeth. I grew hard and cold without you, and only now try to find my way back.” Rose fumbled with her handkerchief. Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper. “Did you love him? Did he love you? Is that why you never married?”

  Elizabeth put her embroidery in her lap, and a long moment passed before she spoke. “I am sorry for the part I played. Everything suddenly went wrong, and couldn’t be called back.”

  Rose expected tears, but there were none. The young Elizabeth would have shed tears. Instead Elizabeth squared her shoulders and looked into Rose’s eyes as she talked, a gaze so deep Rose had to force herself not to look away.

  “I was young. Jake and me, we were both so young. There was only the one time, and we both knew at once what a mistake we’d made, but that’s of no consequence now. The years on your ranch were the happiest I’d ever been. I was a part of something growing and alive. I looked up to you. You were everything I wanted to be. It was wrong, but I craved a taste of everything you had. Husband, children, building a ranch, making a home. I wasn’t in love with Jake. Nor him with me. I wasn’t trying to take your place. I just wanted to be a part. And after, I only wanted peace, and found that here. After all these years, I still can’t explain, though it cost me everything.”

  “I didn’t think I would survive it,” Rose said.

  “Yet you found a way to live with Jake, but not me, though we were both at fault.”

  “I’d built a life with Jake, and learned to live with who he was. I couldn’t keep you both in my head, and chose Jake. But I didn’t grasp the import of losing you. Losing who I was with you.”

  “And now you do?” A hard edge crept into Elizabeth’s tone.

  “I’m not sure I can change for Eugene without you.” Rose forced herself to keep talking. “His place is here, in Oklahoma. I don’t want him leaving because we can’t forgive one another. Because I can’t forgive you.” She swallowed, and said the words she’d come to say. “I forgive you, Elizabeth.”

  Her sister was close to fury now. “Oh, and now all is well? You forgive me?” She laughed again, a mean little snort. “The great Rose Simmons forgives me? Well, after almost twenty years, I suppose I should fall to my knees in joy at my good fortune.”

  “Please,” said Rose. “Please. I’m begging. Whatever I have to do. For Eugene. And for me.”

  Elizabeth stopped short, and Rose watched her face relax a bit, watched as some of the tightness melted. Rose had never begged her sister for anything.

  Elizabeth put her needlework off to one side. “It’s not like I want him gone away either,” she finally said. “But you left here for years to live in Okmulgee, and came back. Why can’t you see him do the same?”

  “Grampa Cow Tom asked me to go. On his deathbed. I promised him that. I promised too many things.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “How does Eugene know that? How would any of us know? You don’t let him see you. Eugene used to beg me for Grampa Cow Tom stories all the time, any scrap, any clue, but there’s only so many I heard or remembered. Grampa Cow Tom gave his stories to you, entrusted them to you day after day in his death tepee, and still you hide them, as much as you hide yourself. Eugene wants to see you, so he asks after Grampa. But you never budge, never give an inch. Hold a bird too tight and you end up squeezing out the life.”

  “I just want what’s best for Eugene,” said Rose.

  “If that’s true, then let him go, and work toward what he might come back to.”

  The words burrowed into Rose’s brain. Could it be true? Was she squeezing the life from her son? Rose hadn’t spent much time on her grandfather’s ranch in years, only short obligatory visits to Gramma Amy and Ma’am or transporting Eugene back and fro. She looked toward the creek, remembered sitting on the bank so long ago with her grandfather, how full she used to get on one of his adventure stories, the fact he shared that kind of time with her almost more important than the story itself.

  Shed one skin. Take on another.

  “Bring Ma’am and Gramma Amy,” Rose pleaded. “Come stay at the ranch for a couple of days, no more tug-of-war, let Eugene see us side by side, a family. Maybe we can hold on to him.
Together.”

  Elizabeth was no longer the little girl she could trick into carrying a skillet by telling her she wasn’t grown enough for the task. Too many years had passed, and Rose felt her sister’s careful judgment.

  “I’ll think on it,” Elizabeth finally said. “That’s all I promise.

  Chapter 70

  THE RIDE TO the train station in Muskogee was long and taxing, not because of the distance, which was indeed far, or the poorness of the dirt road itself, full of ruts and bumps, or the jarring of the wagon, but because of the letting go. Rose would have liked to hold the reins, to give her something to put her attention toward, but Eugene drove, and guided the horse north, his going-away satchel in the wagon bed in back. She thought her heart on the way to breaking, but she’d thought thus before, and yet here she still was.

  She sat straighter, trying to compose herself, when what she wanted to do was plead one last time, to beg Eugene not to go. Elizabeth sat on the buckboard next to her, and she was sure her sister faced the same inner struggle. But no matter how far the two of them had traveled down the path of reconciliation the last few months, this moment was too strained to imagine any small talking now. And so they rode in silence.

  They’d come early. The first train west wouldn’t leave for three hours yet, and both Rose and Elizabeth contributed to a basket of big bean dumplings and Creek corn pudding and cha-cha, all Eugene’s favorites, for a last meal together, the three of them, and for him to carry off the leftover with him when he boarded.

  They found a shade tree outside the station, spread a blanket, and sat on the ground eating, forming their own small circle. Rose could barely taste the food, although she knew she ought to be hungry. She promised Elizabeth she wouldn’t bully Eugene to stay, and though the pledge was hard to honor, she knew it to be the right thing.