Original Sins

by Lisa Alther

  But The Five knew it was a burial mound. The main highway through town had been part of the major north/ south Indian war-path. Honest Injun’s was a shack on this highway that sold country hams and jugs of molasses and chenille bedspreads and silver reflecting balls that people put on pedestals in their front yards. Also for the front yard, flamingoes on one foot, miniature Bambis, smiling plaster darkies in livery. Towering over all these objects of wonder (which their unimaginative parents would never let them buy) was a statue of a huge red Indian in a loincloth, with dark braids. Standing at his feet and looking up, The Five decided he was almost as tall as the Castle Tree. Between his massive moccasined feet was a pond, at the bottom of which were several green iron frogs with bowl backs—ashtrays, they looked like. Customers dropped pennies into the water and won a prize if one landed in a frog. Most people missed, as evidenced by a thick layer of pennies in the bottom. The Five were sure at least twenty-five dollars in pennies would accumulate before Injun Al got around to cleaning them out. But Jed and Raymond’s father had once gotten a penny in a frog, before Jed and Raymond were born. His prize still sat on their window sill. It was a small grey teepee of plastic birch bark, laced with plastic cord and stamped with the words “See Rock City.” On its bottom was stamped “Made in Japan.”

  Injun Al French, squatting in his fringed buckskins and feathered war bonnet, with The Five and his daughter Betty squatting in a circle around him, often told them about the days when his ancestors had hunted the surrounding hills and valleys and had stalked on the packed earth underneath the very highway outside his shop—to make war or to find game, in search of a warmer or cooler climate. He explained why Cherokee country was so mountainous: After the Flood, the Great Buzzard flew low over the earth while it was still soft. Where its wings dipped down, valleys formed. Where its wings swept up, mountains appeared. He told about the first people on earth, a brother and a sister. He slapped her with a dead fish, and she had a baby seven days later. (That day at lunch Raymond sneaked up and slapped Emily with his tuna sandwich, but nothing happened. They decided it was because Raymond wasn’t her brother.)

  It was also Injun Al who taught them the old Cherokee trick of notching their middle fingernails at the base with penknives the day school got out. When the notch had grown out to the tip, it would be time to return to school. They had only to consult their fingernails to know how much vacation was left.

  “I didn’t know Indians had to go to school,” one remarked.

  “Oh yeah. Uh, well, I reckon they didn’t,” Injun Al replied. “They’d use it—you know—to tell when the Moon of Roasting Ears was starting, and all like that. When the heap big frost was due.”

  He often assured them the area was filled with burial mounds, that their hill was most likely one. Then he would urge them to try their luck some more at the frog pond.

  The fact was that each time they dug in their mound, they found an arrowhead or a pottery shard. Once Jed even found a jagged piece of flint they were sure was a tomahawk head. The message was clear: They were not alone. Clues had been planted. The afternoon would end with whosever turn it was, branches tied on his or her arms, doing a dying eagle dance—swooping and dipping, limping and faltering, while the others sat in a circle and drummed on Quaker Oats boxes.

  Then there was the cave. Its mouth was about a yard high. You squatted and crept down a narrow chute for a dozen yards, emerging in a black cavern. It had served as a powder magazine for Confederate troops. The Five kept down there a huge stack of comic books, wrapped in a chain from a swing and locked with a padlock. Shining flashlights over the walls, they found initials and dates scratched in the limestone—one read July 6, 1864. July sixth was Raymond’s birthday. There had to be a connection. And on the floor Donny found a button with CSA embossed on it. When they cleaned it with brass polish and Q-tips, it turned out to be gold—pure gold, Raymond announced as he bit it.

  Riding in a car across the Cherokee River bridge, they always held their breath—to ensure that the bridge wouldn’t collapse underneath them. And in the underpass with railroad cars overhead, they always pressed their palms against the car roof to keep the underpass standing. The only thing they hadn’t yet been able to master was flying. One autumn they went every day after school to the hill behind Emily and Sally’s house. Arms outspread, they’d run down the hill, throwing themselves into the air when they picked up maximum speed and flapping their arms frantically. They had been sure it was merely a question of time until they would soar off into the sky. They tried tying leafy branches to their arms. Then cardboard wings.

  But apparently there was some message in their not being allowed to fly. They lay on their backs in the dead grass with their hands under their heads and watched with envy the vast swarms of birds on their way south. “Look! The sky has chicken pox!” one would exclaim. They watched and they wondered—where were the birds going, how did they know how to get there, what if you got separated from your mother and father and from the trees you were used to? Their envy would fade into relief. They’d roll down the hill, leap up, and race toward warm fires, hot suppers, and mothers whose embraces and kisses they could impatiently shrug off.

  When The Five had been small, Donny’s mother Kathryn had babysat them through the sweltering summer afternoons. They went on hikes, darting across the fields like a school of minnows, with grasshoppers whirring up all around and with the tall grass tickling their bare legs. Against Kathryn’s protests, they overturned each stone they came to and squashed every nest of black widow spiders. In the woods, they found forked sticks and crept through the leaves searching for lurking copperheads. The most they ever found were occasional blacksnake skins, bumpy and thinner than onion skins. They would study these, and the crisp brown shells of locusts gathered from tree trunks, and try to understand how creatures could shed their familiar coverings and still exist. They grew new skins, new shells, maybe even nicer than the old ones—but what happened in the meantime? There they were, helpless larvae, cold, naked, and unprotected. It would be better, they concluded, to stick with the skin you already had. They would race to a nearby hedgerow and pick hundreds of honeysuckle blossoms, pinching off the ends and pulling out the stamens until droplets of sweet nectar popped up, which they would lift away with their tongues, gorging themselves like insatiable bees. They would end up in the pond behind Emily and Sally’s house, drifting around and crashing into each other in tractor-tire inner tubes. Then they would sprawl on the red clay shore and mold from clay a replica of Newland—the mills and factories, the river and Cherokee Shoals, the train tracks, Pine Woods, the mill village, the hill, and the Castle Tree—and the mountains all around.

  Kathryn had beautiful hands—dark brown on the backs, light pinky-purple on the palms. The white children studied them with wonder. With her long fingers she molded delicate figures—people, animals, bowls. The Five would watch her handsome dark face with its high cheekbones as she bent in concentration. With their clumsy fingers they would try to copy her deft twists and pinches at the balls of clay, gentle smoothing motions with the fingertips, careful indentations with the nails. They made doll-sized dishes for their hut and left them to bake in the sun.

  Once Kathryn had each of them build a model of the house he or she wanted to live in later on. Donny built a castle with turrets and crenellated walls and placed it on the hill overlooking town. Kathryn looked at it critically and said gently, “Donny, honey, you can’t build up on that hill.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sure he can,” said Raymond, frowning as he built a heliport on the roof of his mansion.

  Kathryn smiled sourly and shrugged.

  Sometimes they would hear the whistle of a train whooping around the bend on the far side of town. They’d race away, trampling their models, heading for the low stone wall that overlooked the valley. Usually the engine would arrive just as they did. The Five would count the cars and insist on Kathryn’s yelling over the clacking wheels and the ro
aring engine the exotic names painted on the sides—Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe; Delaware and Hudson; Duluth, Winnipeg, and Pacific; Spokane, Portland, and Seattle; Canadian Pacific; Soo Line; Illinois Central; Frisco Line …. Heading north, open cars carrying mounds of coal from Appalachia, iron ore from Alabama; cattle cars; flatcars loaded with huge hardwood trunks, or cotton bales; refrigerator cars filled with produce, meat (corpses, Raymond insisted). Heading south, car after car of new automobiles. You could walk along these very tracks in one direction and end up at the Atlantic Ocean. Follow them in the other direction and you’d reach the Pacific. From sea to shining sea they stretched. Probably all trains eventually ended up in New York City, they decided. As the caboose passed, The Five would wave tentatively: “Wait? Take us with you?”

  The men sitting on the back platform with their feet propped on the rail would smile and wave back: “Maybe someday. Just be patient.”

  The Five would race back through the familiar fields and woods to the pond, in whose red clay banks they knew every muskrat hole. Almost every bluegill who leapt from the water, and twisted and flashed silver in the sun they had caught at one time—and had thrown back after introducing themselves. They would pile into the boat and row around the pond rescuing drowning insects. They called this mission the Bug Patrol.

  The Five agreed that Kathryn was as close to being special as any adult could be. As each was shooed out of his or her house by the arrival of a new baby or a new job, Kathryn was there to bandage cuts, wipe noses, and tie shoes. Once when Emily and Sally’s mother was in the hospital getting them a new brother, Kathryn took The Five to the lawn below her third-floor window. Mrs. Prince appeared at the window in a filmy white robe with her black hair flowing, looking like a fairy princess. While The Five gazed in amazed silence, she threw down chocolate-covered cherries wrapped in gold and silver foil. For days they hoarded the candies, looking at them and remembering this vision. But it was Kathryn who took the children home that day and fixed lunch and read a story with a different one cuddled in her lap every few pages.

  Then one day Kathryn was no longer there. Their parents said she had gone to New York City to learn to be a nurse; she had said to tell them goodbye and that she would see them sometime one of these days. Emily reported to the others having been awakened the previous night by voices in the driveway below her window.

  “But I’m scared, Mr. Prince,” Kathryn had said.

  “Don’t be scared, Kathryn,” Emily’s father had replied. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “What do you reckon she was scared of?” Emily demanded. The Five searched their brains and couldn’t come up with an answer. They themselves were scared of nothing—not Commies, not Yankees, not Indians, not nothing. They had a pact that if they were ever captured and tortured by the enemy, they would never reveal each other’s names, not even to the death. They had drills to prove their courage. On summer nights under the streetlight in front of Jed and Raymond’s house, large fluttery shadows swooped through the circle of light on the pavement. Raymond said they were the shadows of vampire bats. The Five took turns standing directly under the streetlight as at least twelve vampire bats passed overhead.

  Another drill involved the old boarded-up Hardin house down the street. It was crumbling red-brick with vines all over it. The story went that old Mr. Hardin beat his wife. One night as he was beating her nearly to death, their son Carl came in and shot him dead. Mrs. Hardin died of her injuries; Carl was still in the pen. The house was supposed to be haunted by both Mr. and Mrs. Hardin, who continued to carry on even in death. Jed and Raymond insisted they regularly heard screams coming from the broken upstairs windows late at night.

  “Why did she let him?” Emily would demand. “Any man who tried that on me would be sorry!” The others nodded in agreement.

  The Hardin drill required each to crawl through the wrought-iron fence after sunset, sneak across the overgrown lawn, and dash seven times across the gravel driveway. In bare feet. Then they would reassemble in Emily and Sally’s yard to catch lightning bugs and put them on their fingers and pretend they were diamond rings.

  Once Raymond led them down by the river in search of a trestle for a defunct railway spur. He had studied in school how the Yankees set fire to it to cut off supplies to Lee in Virginia. An eight-year-old girl from a nearby house dumped a bucket of water on the fire. The Yankees, retreating in their torn blue, their faces black with gunpowder and sagging with exhaustion, saw this and set another fire, which the little girl dowsed. The Yankees squatted down and lied patiently to her in their harsh accents, thinking of their own little daughters, about how the trestle had to be destroyed so that no more Yankees could come south and bother her people. She smiled shyly. As they left, she dumped water on the new fire. They rode back shooting rifles in the air. She ran and hid. And once the Yankees were certain the blaze was going and were riding away, she emerged to drown it.

  The Five knew they would have done the same. And if the Yankees wanted to fight about it, they’d have a real fight on their hands. In Emily and Sally’s dining room was a mahogany table from their mother’s family farm. The table top was scarred from when Yankees butchered the farm’s steers on it. Their great-grandmother had watched in silence, as her table was hacked up and as blood dripped onto her carpets and splattered the walls. Well, Emily and Sally were certain they would not have just stood there. And all the children cheered at the part of the story when the Yankee officer slashed open the feather bed in search of silver, inhaled a feather, and suffocated to death.

  One Christmas The Five received further confirmation that they were special. With Raymond’s battered .22 rifle, they trudged through the fields behind Emily and Sally’s house. The mustard-colored stubble, stiff with frost, snapped under their boots. Up the high hill they had tried to fly off when they were dumb little kids. In the distance were blue mountains, fronted by row upon row of frosty mustard-colored fields. And immediately below was the woods, the bare limbs of oak and poplar and walnut etching intricate dark designs like wrought-ironwork on the overcast sky.

  Enveloped in their own steamy breath, they inspected the oak trees for dark clumps of mistletoe. Each took one bullet. The idea was to shoot through the branch and bring an entire basketball-sized clump floating like a parachute to the forest floor. If you shot through the clump instead, tiny sprigs would shower down. Often even Mr. Tatro failed to bring down more than sprigs. But that year, and for the next three, one of The Five shot down an entire clump. They would race through the tangled dead timothy into the forest and search until they found the clump on its shattered branch. The one who had shot it would inspect it as the others watched in silence. The mistletoe lived on dusty green through the winter when everything else in the forest appeared dead. Like them, the mistletoe was special, chosen to keep watch. Yet the waxy white berries were poisonous. You didn’t mess with mistletoe, and you didn’t mess with The Five either.

  They would carry their totem home—where someone’s mother would hang it in a doorway by a silly red ribbon and kiss other adults under it—while The Five watched with disdain.

  The Five felt these signs should be acknowledged, so one blustery March morning they pooled their allowances and bought a yellow paper kite and four dozen balls of string. On the kite they wrote, “Messages received. Call Newland 761, collect, day or night.” Then they climbed the hill and sent up the kite, which tugged and tossed in the gusts. They let out more and more string until the kite was less than a speck in the distance, with fluffy clouds scudding and colliding all around it. Then they cut the string, certain the kite would be found in New York City. They hung around by the phone, but it never rang for them.

  Doubt didn’t really set in until the fall Raymond entered junior high school. In the first place, Emily didn’t go to Washington, D.C., for the National Spelling Bee. In fact, she hadn’t even made it out the door of Jefferson Davis Elementary School. She misspelled “abscess” and had to sit
down in the second round in tears. If she couldn’t even get herself to Washington, D.C., the others whispered, how could she get to New York City for “The $64,000 Question”? Was it possible that, even with her oversized brain, she might not make it to the top plateau?

  The Five were lolling in the Castle Tree one Saturday afternoon. “Boy, I just wish some Commies would try to take over this town,” Jed said, his brown eyes gleaming. “It’d be the last place they’d invade, I’m telling you.” The Five settled back on their branches and pictured themselves disposing of dozens of attackers—Commies, Yankees, Indians, bandits, pirates, atheists. Judo throws, bayonet thrusts, left hooks to the jaw….

  “Yeah,” Donny agreed, rolling languidly off the Tire and falling through the air, looking to even the initiated as though he would certainly crash through branches thirty feet to his death. Just in time he grabbed the knotted rope that hung from the Throne and, with a thrust of his skinny black legs, swung up and landed on the Couch. It was his favorite commando stunt. The others watched from the corners of their eyes, pretending to be unimpressed. Jed was too puny for that stunt, Raymond was too clumsy. Sally had recently become concerned with keeping her knees together at all times, and Emily was scared of breaking her neck.

  Emily, who was carving “abscess” into the footrest of the Couch, said, “I’m sure we’re adopted.”

  “How do you know?” her younger sister asked.

  “Well, I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? They couldn’t be our real parents, could they? We don’t even look like them. They’re dark.” She gestured to Sally’s light brown braids and her own auburn boy cut. “Probably our real parents live in New York City in a penthouse.”

  “Shit,” said Raymond, learning to swear now that he was a seventh-grader. “Your parents screwed like everybody else’s, and that’s where you came from.”