Redwood and Wildfire

by Andrea Hairston

  Aidan jerked his head back, as if something slammed too close to his eyes. He sipped a cup of water. Iris picked at the peaches, scattering pie crust for pigeons. Redwood ate three portions of everything, rather than let food go to waste.

  “I got two woebegone companions on my hand. What fun showing you anything?”

  “Look!” Iris pointed to a long, pale green scarf fluttering behind the wings of an aeroplane. “That must be Miz Quimby.” She jumped up and squealed. Dipping and wheeling, the plane wove arabesques in the red, orange, and purple clouds of sunset.

  They walked home. Redwood didn’t trust her full belly to the El or even a trolley on the ground. Aidan didn’t need to be in close quarters with strangers. He was spoiling for a fight, snarling at anybody who looked at them. Or maybe he just needed some good loving. Iris enjoyed folks bustling through the streets or sitting in front of stores and apartments, playing games and talking foreign words. She danced into Reginald Jones’s grocery ’cause she and Aidan were finally ready to eat something.

  “Mr. Jones is a Georgia man!” Iris came out with three meat pies. “Living his Chicago dream. He knew Daddy and gave me all this food for free.”

  Reginald Jones, a middle-aged, brown-skinned man, smiled in the window at them. Aidan nodded. He and Iris chomped into their meat pies. Redwood was still too full.

  A mile from home, they turned a corner and walked into a wreck. An elevated train had jumped the track and crashed into the street. The rusty nose dug a big hole in the asphalt. The tail of the wreck was still on the elevated track, leaning against the roof of another train car. A crowd of railroad men stood beside it, scratching their heads.

  “Nothing to see, folks. Just go on about you business.” Policemen shouted at gawkers and stalled automobiles.

  “Good thing we walked,” Redwood said.

  “Nobody died,” Iris said. “Just hurt real bad.”

  “You full of good news, ain’t you?” Aidan said.

  When they got home, Iris told everybody the adventures of the day. Clarissa smiled, and George too. Redwood complained of a stomachache, and Aidan looked sick enough to escape to the back parlor with her. Hoping for inspiration, she laid out a piece of white cloth on the floor. She lit four candles and set one at each corner with a bundle of dried fireweed and swamp iris. In the center she placed a bowl with tupelo berries, Culver’s root, devil’s shoestring, man root, and lemon rind. She sprinkled sugar in the bowl and set the last candle in the center. Aidan stood in the doorway, watching her lay out the crossroads spell, like he didn’t want to come in.

  “I’m sorry I spoiled your day,” he said. “I don’t know what come over me.”

  “Taking you to that museum — I just didn’t think…” Redwood set the two furry acorns from the bur oak on either side of the bowl of herbs and then pulled him into the room, onto the cloth. “Tell me something good. Read me from your book.” She thrust his journal at him.

  Aidan shook his head.

  “No? All right, let me read to you.”

  He was fixing to resist, but nodded. She turned the pages ’til a title caught her eye.

  Walking The Stars

  Stories and songs are medicine too.

  Big Thunder was of the Wind clan, one of the first clans to come out the mountains when the Master of Breath called the Indians from the navel of the Earth into life. Wind clan was whirlwind friend to Panther clan, clearing away giant roots so that his bigheaded brother could make it into sunlight. The other clans tumbled in after that, Deer, Bear, Corn, Bird, Potato, and all the rest. Big Thunder had to marry across the Fire. His first wife was Snake Clan. His second wife, Aislinn, was an O’Casey from County Cork. They married far across the Fire.

  “Your parents are dead,” Aunt Caitlin said to Aidan Wildfire. “You are Aidan Cooper now and nobody else. Those mountain people you lived with got taken by fevers and coughing sickness. You are strong stock, lucky. You take after Aislinn, and I love you as my own. Don’t go running off, hiding in the swamp like a wild savage.”

  Aidan was young, and sadness was sharp nettles clinging to him, digging deep, drawing lifeblood. He missed his parents and the clan of mountain folk who had made the world home. Aidan cried in the night. He grew sick and pale, not from coughing or fever, but grief. Finally, when Aunt Caitlin couldn’t get any food to stay in his belly, she took Aidan to Miz Garnett Phipps and pleaded with this colored conjure woman to hold her adopted son to life.

  Miz Garnett sent George and Redwood to help their daddy in the fields. She had Aidan gather hairy roots for a healing brew. They watched it boil in a black iron pot. A dead smell filled the house. When darkness fell, Miz Garnett stood by Aidan on the porch. The moon didn’t bother to come out. The air was a heavy blanket of heat. Aidan felt a chill in his heart all the same.

  “Shooting stars.” Miz Garnett pointed at streaks of light. “That’s a sign for sure.”

  “What the stars got to say to us?” Aidan asked.

  Miz Garnett sang a star song in Gullah Creole, and Aidan could only feel the meaning, a traveling song, a song for loved ones far away. “I knew your daddy since I was younger than you.” She put a warm cup of the nasty brew in Aidan’s hands. “His people and my people been ’round these parts for a long time. I got family over on the Sea Islands still.”

  “My daddy knew folks from everywhere,” Aidan said, proud of who he come from for a moment. “Aunt Caitlin said I shouldn’t talk about him.”

  “I’m a hoodoo, hearing underneath things, can’t hide the truth from me,” she murmured. “We can talk about your daddy and your mama too, if you like, just us. I won’t tell nobody.”

  Aidan put the cup to his lips and drank the medicine down quick. It was sweet and frothy and felt good going down. His tongue tingled and his belly didn’t feel so tight. Miz Garnett sat down in the rocking chair and opened her arms. Aidan crawled in her lap, like he was a little child, and they rocked together, slowly. He liked her hickory smoke, sweet magnolia scent. She wore an orchid in her hair- seemed it was growing there and not ever fixing to die.

  “Your daddy told me a story once about the Milky Way.” She pointed to the stars.

  “The Master of Breath blew into the sky and made the white pathway,” Aidan whispered.

  “He told you too? Ain’t that something!”

  “Yes. The white starway leads to a City of Light where good people go, when they’re dead.”

  “Gullah song tell a similar story. Your mama and daddy are there, smiling on you, hoping you have a long life, a good life, before you walk the stars to them.”

  “Aunt Caitlin don’t believe in the Milky Way. Uncle Charlie neither.”

  “It’s up there in the sky for us all to see, a prayer every night. A good story fill you up when you hungry, when you lonely. A good song take the hurting out your spirit. No harm believing in that.” She gave him a wind-up music box. “Play this and think of the stars smiling on you.”

  “Stars smiling on you…” Aidan’s words, Mama’s words tasted like warm rain after a long winter drought. “She used to rock me in her chair too.” Redwood placed the red leather journal in his hands. “Why you write these stories as if Aidan Wildfire was somebody you heard tell of?”

  Aidan shrugged. “How my mama used to do.”

  Redwood picked up Garnett’s music box from her nightstand and twisted the screw. The drum wouldn’t turn any more, so she hummed the Suwannee River tune. Aidan squatted in the center of the crossroad cloth, looking right through Redwood to her mama and beyond, to Big Thunder and Miz O’Casey walking stars.

  “She still talk to you when the sun go down?” Redwood sat next to him.

  “Just a whisper now and then,” Aidan replied. “I can’t make out what she’s saying.”

  “If she talking Sea Island Gullah, who can blame you.”

  He leaned against her. “Is this a good life we’re living?”

  “What you want me to tell you?”

  “Tell m
e ’bout this picture we’re goin’ make.”

  Redwood’s pulse spiked. “I’ve been thinking on it every day.” The candles hissed and sputtered in a draft from the window. The flames died away, but came back again.

  “Me too,” Aidan said.

  “Really?” Redwood rested her head on his shoulder. “A Sea Island romance. I’ll play that Teacher everybody always wanted me to be. Course, the Teacher longs for adventure, longs to see the world. The Pirate almost drowns, but Sea Island folk save him, and he loves poetry, like the Teacher.”

  “I bet he writes his favorite lines in a journal.”

  Twenty-one

  Chicago, 1912

  “Two years? Has it been two years since we met?”

  Aidan stood with the Persian Prince and Walter Jumping Bear in the back of a dingy, crammed meeting hall listening to Indians, full- and mixed-blood, from all over: Lakota Sioux, Seneca, Oneida, Arapahoe, Kickapoo, Ojibwa, Winnebago, Apache, and other tribes he could not name. The balcony creaked above his head as late arrivals stomped up stairs. Nobody else could squeeze in the back. Hundreds were gathered to discuss an evening of entertainment in support of The Society of American Indians. Walter wore a fashionable gray suit with a few feathers in his cap, but Aidan spied several imposing figures in traditional dress.

  “I’ve been to California and the Olympics in Sweden and back,” the Prince said.

  Aidan missed most of what he said next concerning Jim Thorpe, an Indian who won gold medals and got crowned king of the athletes. A Seminole man in a turban and a great coat belted with a bright blue sash walked under his nose, talking the language of his childhood. A short, soft-spoken fellow with close-cropped hair, he looked nothing like Big Thunder. Still, Aidan’s chest heaved and his throat ached, for his Daddy and Mama lost to yellow fever, for a family he never knew marched off to Oklahoma, for his people hiding in the Georgia hills and Florida swamps, chasing freedom.

  “Chicago is full of Indian people,” the Prince said, as squabbles and skirmishes broke out in the unruly crowd. “Now different tribes making a big tribe together.”

  “Yes.” Aidan wasn’t sure if one big tribe was a good thing or even possible.

  “Strength in a big gathering of folks,” Walter Jumping Bear said. He and several other Lakota from the motion picture factory insisted the Society was Indians organizing and leading themselves. Aidan didn’t feel part of any clan and hadn’t wanted to come, but Walter was offering to act in Redwood’s pirate picture with one breath while persuading him to come to the meeting with another. Walter was his true friend at the studio. How could Aidan refuse? The Prince went where he pleased, of course, and looked as Indian as Aidan did.

  “I don’t live in a tipi,” a gal shouted. She wore a purple swamp orchid in her hair, like Garnett. Her cheeks were high and her eyes fierce. “Neither did my Maskókî ancestors.” She smoothed a white collar on a somber blue dress as Aidan, Walter, and other men eyed her. Women were sparse in this crowd.

  “We are all tired of Wild West show Indian raids.” Aidan surprised hisself by speaking up. “But who pays to see Creek farmers or a Lakota romance in Chicago?”

  Walter leaned into Aidan and grunted. “If we walk away from their money, where is our victory? White men will play Injun without us.”

  The Creek gal smiled at their words and moved closer.

  A large fellow in a finely tailored suit with a doctor’s bag stood up. “Italians, Poles, Hungarians, they leave their old world behind and become Americans. They pay a price — they must give up their tongue, their ancient ways. So can we.”

  “We did not cross the great water and steal this land,” Walter said. “We are home, why should we bury our spirits and act as if nothing is sacred, like white men do?”

  “I am an Apache. You are a coward Sioux in a toy Indian show. I can lick you!” The large doctor waved an umbrella in Walter’s face. Walter knocked it on the ground. Aidan gripped his friend’s arm before he did anything else. “They’ll keep us prisoners on the reservations ’til we are civilized,” the doctor said.

  “We need a vision to follow, or else we fight over nothing.” The Creek gal touched Walter’s shoulder. He heaved a breath and studied her.

  A man in the balcony took the doctor’s side. “The white man has beaten us all.”

  “Well, I am not yet conquered,” Walter declared.

  Everyone was shouting now. Aidan’s head throbbed.

  “Don’t look so glum.” The Prince grinned at the spirited exchange and clapped Aidan’s back. “I’ve seen two years of your vast country and found so many people who let themselves think…anything. This is a wonder.”

  A secretary at the podium called for order.

  “I’m feeling poorly,” Aidan whispered to Walter and his daddy, whose name meant something close to brave wind, but he hated this English translation, so no one spoke it.

  “You are abandoning this boat?” Walter said.

  “No, I just can’t take…” Aidan gestured.

  Walter’s daddy spoke — he knew English, but rarely used it, so Walter translated. “Smoking a pipe with so many different Indian people makes his balls ache too.”

  Aidan laughed. “I’ll do whatever show you want to support Mr. Charles Eastman and his Indian Society.”

  Walter nodded, disappointed all the same. “This evening we are not at our best. Come another time.”

  Aidan waved good-bye and turned to leave. The Prince bowed to Walter, his daddy, and the Creek gal too.

  “My father asks, what is your tribe?” Walter said before they could escape.

  The Prince responded in Farsi and the old man seemed satisfied with his answer.

  “Why must we entertain them?” the Creek gal spoke in Aidan’s ear. “Tell me this.”

  “Guess we should try entertaining ourselves too,” Aidan said.

  “I have seen you both in moving pictures.” Her eyes lit up. “Is that your plan?”

  “Yes, Ma’am, it is.” Aidan glanced at Walter.

  “I look forward to your next picture show then,” she said.

  “Me too.” Aidan hunched his back and walked on.

  She took his place beside Walter. “My name is Rose. I am Hutalgalgi, of the Wind Clan.” And then her voice was lost to the babble of the crowd.

  “Mr. Jumping Bear has won her heart,” the Prince said.

  “Hmm.” Aidan barged through a knot of latecomers, out the door. Their faces looked open and eager. Aidan tried not to glower as he took off down the street. The Prince chased after him, barely keeping up. Aidan wanted to run ’til his own heart busted. He wanted to get lost in the noise from the streetcars and belching automobiles and grind his spirit against the cobblestones. Actually, he wanted a drink. He wanted a whole jug. The firewater thirst was getting stronger everyday.

  “Not so fast,” the Prince yelled behind him.

  Aidan slowed. “All day, I make fun of myself. Where is the dignity in that?”

  The Prince caught up. He was wheezing and sweating, despite the winter chill in the air. He considered Aidan as he caught his breath. “You should have sons by now.”

  Aidan halted. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “You need heirs, then what matter these difficult moments in flickering images?”

  “Here’s your motorcar.” Aidan waved ’cross the street at Mr. McGregor. “I think I’m goin’ walk the rest of the way.” He dug in his shoulder bag for Subie’s tin.

  “It’s several miles. Dinner will be prompt tonight. Akhtar cooks for you all.” The Prince stepped in front of Aidan before he could rush off. “I don’t mean to offend you.”

  “You don’t have sons, sir.” Aidan clutched the tin.

  The Prince wiped his damp forehead. “I’ve offended you. Please, accept my apology.” He stood close to Aidan, saying nothing as sweat dried on both their cheeks. Finally he spoke softly, little more than a hiss. “I’ve tried many women. Not one could give me a son or even a daughter. Fa
rah, Akhtar, Abbaseh, and I are happy even so.”

  Aidan was stunned at these intimate remarks.

  “And you, Mr. Wildfire?” The Prince’s moist breath made Aidan blink. “What of you and Miss Phipps?” He shook Aidan’s shoulder. “Do you think of another woman? Hmm? Is it the cat that gets your tongue?”

  “With me and Redwood, ain’t no real worry ’bout children, sir. It’s, well…” Redwood could barely stand Aidan laying a hand on her. But she wanted him all the same, as much as he wanted her. This was enough to make a man holler and cuss and drink and smash in the heads of anyone fool enough to ask stupid questions ’bout goddamned cats. Aidan took a deep breath. “The way of the world is against us.”

  “You can’t believe this lie. The way of the world is always for you.” He gripped Aidan’s arm. “The way of men, now that can be troublesome.”

  Aidan sagged. “No, it’s me. I let yesterday eat up too much of today.”

  Glass exploded from a building down the street. Aidan and the Prince fell to the pavement as smoke billowed into the sky. Horses and motorcars almost collided. A dog whimpered. A bloody colored man jumped, fell, or was pushed out of a second story window. It was Reginald Jones, screaming in the air. He hit the ground with a sickening smack, and Aidan closed his eyes. Reginald had come up from Atlanta and was making a good Chicago life. Clarissa had everybody buying from his grocery. The smell of burnt food filled Aidan’s mouth. He spit out the taste and forced his eyes back open. People close by the fire hollered. The shower of glass had wounded a good many who limped, crawled, and staggered through debris.

  Aidan and the Prince struggled to their feet. Aidan coughed out smoke. The Prince was wheezing, like he’d never catch his breath. A beat-up motorcar raced away from the catastrophe, darting through stalled traffic faster than even McGregor would drive. Pale skin and bright teeth flashed in fading sunlight. Rowdy white thugs in the front and back seats grinned at their handiwork. They almost ran down a few colored folk who were shaky on their feet. Aidan caught the driver’s eye. He’d seen the man before, a big, red-nosed fellow, who’d been having a set to with George.