A Thousand Voices

by Lisa Wingate

  When we’d finished “Yankee Doodle,” someone called out, “Play ‘You Are My Sunshine,’” so we did. We stumbled through that and a dozen other campfire songs. The notes were less than perfect, and the old guitar sounded bad, but the lack of quality was eclipsed by the enthusiasm of the crowd. As we played, people from neighboring campsites wandered over, and Nana Jo invited them in. Among the visitors were four members of a family gospel band, who were to perform tomorrow at the Labor Day festival. They joined in with a Texas fiddle, a harmonica, a mandolin, and another guitar, and we filled the night with music.

  We’d played every song we could think of, and most of the campground was gathered at the Reids’ fireside when the park ranger came by and apologetically told us we’d have to quiet down, because the people in the motor home were complaining about the noise. “If it was just up to us, it’d be fine,” he said. “But we have to try to keep everybody happy.” He slanted a glance toward the RV, where, in the dim glow of a nightlight, faces hovered near the window.

  Nana Jo checked her watch. “Why, it’s not even ten thirty yet. I don’t see…” Beside her, Uncle Rube, the largest member of the Reid clan, stood up, crossing his thick arms over his ample stomach and towering above the park ranger.

  Jace preempted whatever Uncle Rube was about to say. “We’ll tone it down.” He shook the park ranger’s hand pleasantly. “Sorry you had to come over here. It’s probably time the kids headed for bed, anyway.”

  Lana rose from her chair, the one I’d vacated beside Jace and Nana Jo, and started toward Jace’s kids, clapping her hands rapidly. “Come on, you two. Not that it hasn’t been fun having visitors in camp.” She spat out fun and visitors like they were dirty words, flashing a plastic smile toward our impromptu band. The message was clear. We’d worn out our welcome. “But it’s way past bedtime. Come on in the camper and wash up.”

  Autumn and Willie groaned, and one of their cousins scowled resentfully at Lana, then tugged his mother’s T-shirt. “Mom, do we have to go to bed, too?”

  The park ranger chuckled. “Hate to be the bearer of bad news.” Tipping his hat, he turned to leave. “Y’all have a good night.”

  I handed Dillon his guitar as the campfire gathering began to break up.

  The members of the bluegrass band packed their instruments and said good night. “It was a pleasure.” The fiddle player pointed at me as he turned away. “You’re good, young lady. You put this old fiddler to shame. You performing at the festival tomorrow?”

  “No, I’m just here visiting.” In spite of the bum’s rush from Lana, I wished the evening didn’t have to end. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d experienced such complete joy while playing music. Tonight it was effortless, as natural as breathing.

  “Everybody come again in the morning! We’ll have breakfast!” Nana Jo called out.

  Lana glanced over her shoulder, widening her eyes. “Nana Jo,” she protested, pausing in her quest to hustle Willie and Autumn off to her camper, “we’ve got enough people to cook for already.”

  Nana Jo stabbed her walking cane into the ground, and pulled herself to her feet. “You can never have too many mouths to feed.” With a definitive nod, she hobbled off toward the camp kitchen to check supplies. “Dillon, John, you two boys come get this trash and take it up to the Dumpster, y’hear?”

  Dillon sulked off to do his grandmother’s bidding.

  In the camp kitchen, Nana Jo started giving orders, directing the storage of the food and deciding what could be saved for the next night’s supper.

  “Lord,” Shasta muttered to the woman beside her, who, judging from the resemblance, might have been her mother. “Next thing, she’ll invite the whole campground to supper.” Standing up, Shasta unwrapped herself from her blanket, and I realized she was pregnant. I caught myself staring, thinking that she couldn’t be much older than me.

  The woman next to her nodded ruefully. “By the time she spends a few hours at the festival tomorrow, she’ll have found fifty-seven lost relatives and invited everyone who stops by the booth to look at her quilts. Nana Jo loves a party.”

  Rubbing the pads of her fingers across her cheeks, Shasta cupped her face in her hands. “We’d better have someone make a run to Wal-Mart.”

  The older woman hugged her around the shoulders, then headed off to the camp kitchen to help. Shasta stood gazing into the fire, her eyes reflecting the dancing flames. Her lips were full and wide, her face slightly heart-shaped with high cheekbones. She had beautiful skin, a rich cinnamon color that was smooth and slightly iridescent in the amber light. I’d always hated that skin color on me, but on Shasta, it seemed glorious. She was beautiful, her features exotic and earthy. It was hard to imagine anyone at school ever making fun of her because of the way she looked.

  A toddler bolted from one of the nearby tents and wrapped himself around her legs, whining about going to bed. She picked him up and braced him on the side of her swollen stomach. He laid his head on her shoulder as she smoothed a hand over his hair.

  “Where’s Daddy, Benjamin?” she asked, and he pointed toward one of the tents. “Did he fall asleep?”

  Benjamin nodded.

  “And you came back out here?”

  “Uh-huh. I not tire-red, Mommy.”

  Groaning, Shasta laid her head wearily atop his. “Oh, Benji, I am.”

  “I not.” Benji yawned.

  Closing her eyes, Shasta rocked back and forth with him, as if she might fall asleep on her feet.

  I stood watching her, contemplating the way her long hair fell around Benjamin like a blanket, the way her beaded earrings swayed against her cheek as her son snuggled contentedly under her chin. Together they looked like an artist’s rendering, a Native American Madonna and child—young, innocent, weary, yet at peace. I tried to imagine myself in her place. Shasta couldn’t have been much over twenty, yet she was married, with a toddler in her arms and a baby coming. The rest of her life was planned, decided in some sense that mine was not. How would that feel?

  I was envious in a way I couldn’t explain.

  If Shasta could construct a future for herself, if Barry could, if everyone else I knew could move on into adulthood, why couldn’t I? What was wrong with me? Was I so damaged that I would never be normal? Uncle Bobby had told me over and over that I was making a fool of myself, hanging around Grandma Rose’s family, pretending I could be like them—everyone could see that I was a screwup, just like my mama, and I always would be.

  The memory opened up an old wound, so I pushed it back into the closet and shut the door. Nearby, an elderly man and Uncle Rube were engrossed in a small fold-up tackle box, making plans to go fishing in the morning. Dillon had sneaked away from trash duty to join their conversation as they laughed and joked about past Reid family fishing expeditions.

  “We’re headed up to the bathroom.” Shasta touched my arm as she passed by, carrying her son. “Want to walk with us? Nana Jo doesn’t let any of us go up there alone. We’ve camped here every year for, like, forever, and she’s still paranoid about us going to the restroom building by ourselves.”

  I nodded. Come to think of it, walking up to the bathrooms by myself, and without a flashlight, wasn’t the best idea. “Sure. Let me grab my duffel bag, and I’ll catch up.” I hurried to my campsite and took a few unneeded items out of my bag to lighten the load, then tossed the strap over my shoulder and jogged up the road after Shasta and the others. Ahead of us, one of Shasta’s aunts was giving the kids the usual admonishment about going into public restrooms alone. The speech reminded me of Karen’s. She always followed her parental warnings with a few carefully edited snippets from news stories about young women in perilous situations, then finished by smoothing a hand over my hair and saying she didn’t want to scare me, she just wanted me to be careful.

  I know, Mom, I’d say, but in reality I was aware that she was only doing what mothers were supposed to do. The knowledge was always bittersweet because my real mother and my grann
y hadn’t protected me like that. The older I became, the more I knew how close I’d come to disaster. If my granny hadn’t died when she did, if Karen and James hadn’t fought for foster custody of me, I probably would have been given to Uncle Bobby, who was messed up like my mama had always been, only worse. He’d started hanging around me before Granny died—taking me places in his truck and telling me to sit in the middle next to him, accidentally walking in the bathroom door when I was getting dressed, watching me when he thought I wasn’t looking, asking me to rub the knots out of his shoulders when he sat on the sofa. He’d smooth his hands up and down my arms, brush against my chest.

  He was nice to me sometimes, buying me things he said a pretty little lady ought to have. He told me that for a kid who was born butt-ugly, I was sure coming up to be fine. Now that I was grown up and knew what that interest meant, I realized those covert touches weren’t accidental. He was just trying things out, seeing how I’d react, finding out whether I’d tell Granny. Now I knew that those touches, that attention, was headed someplace sinister and dark, but back then I took it for love. I fell into the trap bit by bit, and if James and Karen hadn’t taken me out of that house when they did, things would have gone on until the doors slammed shut for good. Uncle Bobby said he loved me, and, for all I knew, that was the way love was supposed to be. I would have done almost anything to get someone to love me.

  I’d never told anyone the truth about Uncle Bobby. Even now, I was ashamed that, at twelve years old, I didn’t have more sense. I should have known that someone who’s never been nice to you doesn’t turn nice overnight without a reason.

  “Did you have enough to eat at supper?” Shasta interrupted my thoughts as she fell into step with me, leading Benjamin by the hand.

  “I did. Thanks.” I blushed, thinking of myself starting the evening with airplane peanuts and cold McDonald’s fries. I must have looked like an idiot, sitting over there on the picnic table with no tent and no supplies. No wonder the Reids felt sorry for me. “I wasn’t planning on camping, so I didn’t have any food along. Every hotel in town is full, and I just ended up here.”

  Shasta’s mouth formed a silent O.

  “You poor thing.” Gwendolyn, the woman I’d surmised was Shasta’s mother, gave me an empathetic look.

  I waved away her sympathy. “No. It’s okay, really. I’m glad I ended up here. Tonight was fun.”

  Shasta laughed under her breath. “Girl, you’re starved for entertainment.”

  Gwendolyn swatted her arm. “Behave yourself, Shasta Marie.” Leaning closer to me, she shielded her mouth with one hand. “Excuse her. She’s snippy lately. Too many pregnancies in too short a time.”

  “Mother!” Shasta gasped, glaring in a pointed way that told me I’d stepped into an ongoing argument. “Geez.”

  “Leave the girl alone, Gwendolyn,” one of the women ahead of us reprimanded. “You had two kids by the time you were twenty-one.”

  “And it didn’t do me any good,” Shasta’s mother shot back. “Old, fat, and a grandmother at forty.”

  “Forty-one,” a heavyset woman corrected. “I know. I was there when you were born.”

  “Hush up, Raylene.”

  Someone behind us snickered, then another woman followed suit, and giggles rippled through the group. Gwendolyn cleared her throat, trying to maintain a straight face, then finally let out a snort of laughter, clamped her hand over her nose, and continued to half snort, half laugh uncontrollably behind her fingers.

  “Tha’s how da piggies go,” Shasta’s little boy reported, pulling away from Shasta and reaching for his grandmother’s hand. “Oink, g-oink, g-oink.”

  The group descended into gales of merriment, tossing around insults about the snort-laugh and its genetic origins in the Reid family. Shaking her head, Shasta inched to the back as Benjamin and his grandmother carried on.

  “You must think we’re nuts,” she said as we fell behind the others.

  “Not a bit. It sounds just like my family.” I was thinking of the raucous gal-pal conversations that often went on when Karen, Aunt Kate, Jenilee, and Aunt Jeane got together. The men sometimes surrendered the house and didn’t come back for hours. James said the estrogen level was too high. “Your Nana Jo reminds me of my grandma Rose.”

  Shasta gave me a kindred look. “I’m glad you’re used to it. I thought maybe Nana Jo embarrassed you, dragging you in and force-feeding you like that. She had bone cancer about a year ago and since then, she pretty much can say whatever’s on her mind and do whatever she wants. She can get away with anything, and she knows it. If we fuss at her, she goes to bed for a week and acts like she’s having a relapse until we feel guilty.”

  “That sounds like my grandma Rose, too.”

  Shasta chuckled. “Your grandma Rose didn’t happen to be Choctaw, did she, because I think stubbornness is in the genes.”

  “No,” I said, angling a glance around Shasta as we reached the restroom building. The doorway was filled with laughing, jostling Reids of all sizes. “My father was,” I added, uncertain what else to say. It was always hard to know when to tell people I was adopted. “Choctaw, I mean.”

  “How much?” Shasta leaned against the restroom wall, waiting for the crowd in the doorway to thin out.

  “How much what?” Sliding my duffel bag off my shoulder, I let it drop to the cement.

  “Percentage, I mean. How much? Most people in the tribe know what percentage Choctaw they are.” She wrapped her arms around her distended stomach and let her head fall back.

  “Really?” The question had never occurred to me. In my mind, I was always Choctaw enough that I looked it, which, for Granny and Uncle Bobby, was too much.

  Shasta’s lips quirked on one side. “Sure. Don’t you have a CDIB card?”

  “A what?”

  “CDIB card.” Her brows rose, then knotted in the center. “Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. Your card. You have to have one to get your tribal membership, and you need that to, like, get anything.”

  “Get anything?” We’d entered a completely foreign world, filled with terminology I knew nothing about.

  Shasta lifted her hands like it was elementary. “Well, yeah, you know, like meat, cheese, groceries and stuff like that, Indian doctor, Indian dentist. I had Benjamin at the Indian hospital, and it didn’t cost us anything—that kind of stuff, you know? You have to have your CDIB to get it, and—” Snapping her lips shut abruptly, she drew back. “You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “None,” I admitted. “I’m not from here. I was born in Tuskahoma, but I’ve never lived here.”

  Finger-combing her hair into a ponytail, she absently braided it on one side. The strands glowed blue-black in the dim light as they slid over her fingers. “Well, do you know your dad’s CDIB number? If you do, you could take in your birth certificate and get your CDIB, I think.”

  The restroom line shifted so that we could have gone inside, but Shasta didn’t move, and neither did I. I suspected she was as curious about me as I was about CDIB cards and membership numbers. “I don’t know if he had one. How would I find out?”

  “Oh, gosh, my brother’s the one you need to talk to about that. Jace teaches at one of the Choctaw schools, and he always has his history students researching their family roots and stuff. He could probably tell you a lot about it. With kids and everything, I don’t have time for all that junk.” She glanced into the restroom, checking for her son, as if it had suddenly occurred to her to wonder where he was. After combing out the braid, she anchored her hands under her stomach again. “How come you don’t just ask your family? If you want to know about the Indian stuff, I mean.”

  I shifted away uncomfortably. We’d reached the point in the discussion at which I had to either bow out or reveal my strange and murky family history. A handful of Reids came out the restroom door, and I considered excusing myself from the conversation. It was so much easier than taking a chance on other people’s reactions
.

  Gwendolyn exited the restroom carrying Benjamin, who was sagging on her shoulder. “I think we’ve got a tired little guy here.”

  “Awww.” Shasta ruffled his hair and kissed his forehead. “Will you take him down with you? We’ll be back to camp in a minute.”

  Gwendolyn frowned. “Don’t be too long.”

  “I won’t.” Shasta pushed off the restroom wall. “I’m going to wash my face and wait for Dell, so she doesn’t have to walk back by herself. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “All right.” Gwendolyn sighed, then headed down the hill after the other women.

  When Gwendolyn was a safe distance away, Shasta resumed her position on the wall, propping one foot against the brick and glaring after her mother. “I swear. She drives me nuts sometimes. She’s so worried that just because I didn’t go right to college after high school and get a degree and then get married and then have kids, I’m going to be, like, some teenage mother and make her raise my kids. I don’t want her to raise my kids. I want to raise my own kids.”

  “That must be hard.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  Shasta returned to the subject at hand. “So why don’t you just ask your family about roll numbers? I mean, it’d be a lot easier. Getting one from scratch can take months, sometimes longer, and there’s all kinds of documentation you have to find and stuff. You have to trace your family history all the way back to somebody on the original Dawes Commission Rolls, and that can be tough to do. Even when you know your family’s Choctaw, sometimes it’s hard to prove it.” She watched me curiously.

  Taking a deep breath, I stepped over the invisible line into the truth. “I’m adopted.” I watched for her reaction. “I never knew my father. All I’ve ever really known is what was on my CPS paperwork—his name was Thomas Clay and he was at least part Choctaw. My mother told me once that I was born in Tuskahoma.”

  “Oh.” Her interest perked at the high drama. “So you’re here, like, looking for information about your birth family and stuff?”