Burials
Page 30
“Everybody wins. I like that.”
“Good. Me, too. You take care of yourself, Doctor Faye, you and your family. Be safe and happy.”
***
Faye knew something was wrong, because Sly had asked Amande to take Michael to town for ice cream. Ice cream and his grandchildren were Sly’s favorite things, so what would possess him to send them to eat banana splits without him?
As Amande pulled out of the driveway in Sly’s truck, he beckoned for Faye and Joe to join him at the kitchen table. Patricia’s urn sat in front of him. Sly had postponed her memorial service for a few days so that Amande and Michael could be there, but he couldn’t postpone it forever. Today was the day.
When Faye dropped into the chair next to Sly, she found that there was nowhere but the urn to put her eyes. After they scattered the ashes that day at sundown, would Patricia be anywhere any more? When was a person really gone?
Sly held out his hand and there was a heart-shaped potsherd on its palm. “I need to decide what to do with this.”
“Do you want to tell us where you got it?” Faye asked.
“You know where I got it. I’m damn sure you do. Sophia gave it to me the day before I left for Houston. It was the day before she died.”
Joe’s face was so still that Faye would have sworn he wouldn’t say a word, no matter what. She was wrong.
“Why, Dad? Why did she give it to you?”
Sly flipped the potsherd over in his hand and studied the other side. “A woman has a lot of ways to let a man know she wants him. From the day I met her, Sophia tried every one of those ways to get my attention. Truth is, she had my attention. She was trying to get me to do something about it. When I didn’t take the bait, she tried harder.”
“But Mickey and Kenny—” Joe started.
“Maybe I’m an egotistical son-of-a-bitch, but I always thought she was carrying on with them because she thought it would get to me.”
Faye had seen how women looked at her husband. There had been a time when Sly had looked like Joe.
“I’ve done a lot of bad things. Truth told, I’ve been a terrible person, sometimes. One thing I never did was cheat on my wife. I thought Sophia didn’t understand why I took myself away from her. But on that last day, she told me that she did. She gave me this heart and told me she loved me.”
He flipped the potsherd again and studied its design. “Before that, I would’ve said that you can’t love somebody in just a few weeks. Maybe you can’t. But you can feel something. You can feel a lot, to tell the truth. What I didn’t understand until I met Sophia was that you can feel a lot for somebody, even when you’re in love with somebody else. I can’t tell you how it broke my heart to hear what happened to that woman.”
He held out the little pottery heart on his open palm. “I thought about burying this on the creek bank where we’re going to scatter your mother’s ashes, but that don’t feel right. I thought about burying it at that dig she loved so much, but she was murdered and buried there and now it’s just awful to me. Can either of you tell me what to do with this?”
Faye didn’t even have to think. “Donate it, so people can enjoy seeing it.”
“You mean to a museum?”
“Not just any museum. Give it to the museum at Spiro Mounds. They’ve lost so many treasures there. If you tell Roy you’re doing it, I bet he’ll dig the other potsherd out of his evidence files and donate it, too. You know, the one that fits right into the notch on top of that heart. I love the idea of reuniting them someplace where they can stay together forever. Don’t you?”
***
This was the creek, the shallow rippling endless stream of water where Joe’s mother had taught him to fish. Faye couldn’t say how many times Joe had told her about it. He was a man who loved nature and the sweetness of its quiet spaces, but none of those spaces had ever lived up to this grassy bank and these trees and that brown water.
There wasn’t a blade of grass around them or a drop of water in the creek that had been here when Joe and Patricia sat on this bank. Everything was new but the trees, some of them, but this was still the place. It had a quiet holiness and it was an altogether worthy place to remember one’s dead.
Joe had picked some herbs out of the woods. Only he knew their significance, but he threw them on the water and watched them float away, never saying a word.
Sly tried to say the words he’d been practicing, but all he could manage was, “Kids, I wish your grandmother was still here. She would have loved you so much. And your mother. She would have adored this woman standing here beside your father.”
Sly turned to the creek and upended the urn over its flowing water. His family gathered tight around him and, together, they let Patricia go.
Guide for the Incurably Curious
This is the place where I give a bit of background for readers who are interested in the facts behind Faye’s fictional adventures. Teachers and book group leaders say that this kind of information spurs discussion. Also, I find that book-lovers are incurably curious. After we finish reading a book, we almost always want to know more. Here are some things I turned up in my research that I think my readers might find interesting.
•If you check the website for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Lighthorse Tribal Police, you will find that they really do have a K-9 named Bleck: http://www.mcn-nsn.gov/services/lighthorse-police/
•The Oklahoma Historical Society’s website has an excellent overview of the historical use of schools, particularly boarding schools, to forcibly assimilate Native American children by depriving them of their cultures’ languages and customs. This is the basis for Sly’s painful memories of having his hair cut while he was away at boarding school. As I wrote those memories, I thought that I might be pushing the boundaries of truth a bit, as I thought that Sly, who would have been in high school in the 1970s, might be too young to have had those experiences. As I finished writing Burials, I found Mary Harjo’s memoir of her boarding school experiences during those years and I learned that children continued to suffer separation from their families and their cultural traditions well into the time period when Sly would have been in school. She speaks of returning home unable to understand her family when they spoke, saying that she felt sad because “Creek/Seminole should be my first language.” Her memories can be read on Southeastern Oklahoma State University’s website at http://www.se.edu/nas/files/2013/03/NAS-2011-Proceedings-Harjo.pdf.
•The story of the destruction of Spiro Mounds is true. There is a brief history of the site and a description of the archaeological park there on the Oklahoma Historical Society’s website at http://www.okhistory.org/sites/spiromounds. You’ll also find a fascinating description of the University of Oklahoma’s efforts to conserve 600-year-old lace found at Spiro here: http://samnoblemuseum.tumblr.com/post/50367318964/historical-heroes-saving-the-spiro-lace.
***
Longtime readers of the series will remember that I established in Artifacts that Joe had a father in Oklahoma whom he needed to call. In Isolation (2015), he finally reestablishes that connection and now, in 2017, Joe finally comes home. Artifacts was published in 2003, so these two Oklahoma-related books were a long time in coming. This makes sense, because family dynamics often build walls between loved ones that are hard to break down. I’m glad Joe and Sly finally managed it.
On a personal note, I had no idea when I planted the notion in Artifacts that Joe would eventually need to go to Oklahoma that I would eventually live in Oklahoma myself. I didn’t even know that I’d be living here when I wrote Isolation. Burials would have been a different book if I weren’t now an Oklahoman, and I’m very grateful for the twists of fate that brought Joe, Faye, and me to this beautiful place at the same time. The three of us are looking forward to our next adventure.
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