When the day was just right, we planted corn mostly. That was our main crop for we depended on it for eating and feeding ol’ Sam, and it was our money crop in the whiskey trade.
Granpa laid off the rows with the plow and ol’ Sam. I didn’t lay off any rows. Granpa said I was mostly a turning plow man. Me and Granma dropped the seeds in the rows and covered them up. On the sides of the mountain Granma planted the corn with a Cherokee planting stick. You just jab it in the ground and drop in the seed.
We planted lots of other things: beans, okra, ’taters, turnips and peas. We planted the peas around the fringe of the patch, near the woods. This attracted deer in the fall. Deer are crazy about peas and will come twenty miles through the mountains to a pea patch. We always got an easy deer for winter meat. We also planted watermelons.
Me and Granpa picked out a shady end of the patch and planted watermelons pretty heavy. Granma said it was a mighty big watermelon patch. But Granpa said what we couldn’t eat, we could always tote to the crossroads store and more than likely make a lot of money selling them.
The way it turned out, by the time the watermelons got ripe me and Granpa found out the watermelon market had collapsed. The best you could get for the biggest watermelon you had was a nickel, if you could sell it. Which wasn’t likely.
Me and Granpa figgered it out on the kitchen table one evening. Granpa said that a gallon of whiskey weighed about eight or nine pounds, for which we got two dollars; and he didn’t hardly see no way in the world that we could tote a twelve-pound watermelon to the crossroads store for a nickel—not unless the whiskey trade fell through, which was not likely. I told Granpa it looked to me like we would have to eat all the watermelons.
Watermelons are might near the slowest growing things ever planted. Beans get ripe—okra—peas—just about everything, and the watermelons just lay there, continually green and growing. I checked on the watermelons fairly heavy.
When you are certain that the watermelons are ripe, they’re not. Finding and testing out a ripe watermelon is might near as complicated as planting.
Several times at the supper table I told Granpa that I suspicioned I had found a ripe watermelon. I checked the patch every morning and evening, sometimes at dinnertime too, if I was passing by. Each time, we would go up to the patch and Granpa would check it out. It wouldn’t be ready. One evening at the supper table, I told Granpa that I was might near certain that I had found the watermelon we was looking for, and he said we would check it out the next morning.
I was up early, waiting. We got to the patch before sunup and I showed Granpa the watermelon. It was dark green and big. Me and Granpa squatted down by the watermelon and studied it. I had already studied it pretty heavy the evening before, but I went over it again with Granpa. After we studied it awhile, Granpa decided it looked near enough ripe to give it the thump test.
You have to know what you are doing to thump test a watermelon and make any sense out of it. If you thump it and it sounds like a—think—it is total green; if it sounds—thank—it is green but is coming on; if it goes—thunk—then you have got you a ripe watermelon. You have got two chances to one against you, as Granpa said is true in everything.
Granpa thumped the watermelon. He thumped it hard. He didn’t say anything, but I was watching his face close and he didn’t shake his head, which was a good sign. It didn’t mean the watermelon was ripe, but no head shake meant he hadn’t give up on it. He thumped it again.
I told Granpa it sounded might near like a thunk to me. He set back on his heels and studied it a little more. I did too.
The sun had come up. A butterfly lit on the watermelon and set there, flexing his wings open and closed. I asked Granpa if it wasn’t a good sign, since it seems to me I had heard that a butterfly lighting on a watermelon near about made it certain the watermelon was ripe. Granpa said he had never heard of that sign, but it could be true.
He said as near as he could tell, it was a borderline case. He said the sound was somewheres between a thank and a thunk. I said it sounded like that to me too, but it ’peared to lean pretty heavy toward the thunk. Granpa said there was another way we could check it out. He went and got a broom sedge straw.
If you lay a broom sedge straw crosswise on a watermelon and it just lays there, the watermelon is green. But if the broom sedge straw turns from crosswise to lengthwise, then you have got a ripe watermelon. Granpa laid the broom sedge straw on the watermelon. The straw laid there a minute, then it turned a ways and stopped. We set watching it. It wouldn’t turn anymore. I told Granpa I believed the straw was too long, which made the ripe inside the watermelon have too much work turning it. Granpa taken the straw off and shortened it. We tried it again. This time it turned more and might near made it lengthwise.
Granpa was ready to give up on it, but I wasn’t. I got down so I could watch the straw pretty close, and I told Granpa it ’peared to be moving, slow but steady, toward being lengthwise. Granpa said that could be because I was breathing on it, which didn’t count, but he decided not to give up on it. He said if we let it lay until the sun was straight overhead, about dinnertime, then we could pick it from the vine.
I kept a close check on the sun. Seemed like it rolled around and just set on the mountain rim, determined to make a long morning of it. Granpa said the sun acted that way sometimes, like when we was plowing and figuring to go washing in the creek, late of evening.
Granpa said if we got busy doing something, and made out that we didn’t give a lick-damn about how slow the sun moved, that he would give up and git on with his business. Which we did.
We busied ourselves cutting okra. Okra grows fast and you have to keep it cut. The more okra you cut off a stalk, the more you will have grow back.
I moved along the row ahead of Granpa and cut all the okra that growed low on the stalk. Granpa followed me and cut the high okra. Granpa said he suspicioned that me and him was the only ones who had ever figured how to cut okra without bending over or pulling down the stalks. All morning we cut okra.
We reached the end of a row and there was Granma. She grinned. “Dinnertime,” she said. Me and Granpa broke into a run for the watermelon patch. I got there first, and so got to pull the watermelon from the vine. But I couldn’t lift it. Granpa carried it to the spring branch and let me roll it in—splosh; it was so heavy it sunk down beneath the cold water.
It was late sun before we got it out. Granpa laid down on the bank and reached deep into the water and brought it up. He carried it, me and Granma following, to the shade of a great elm. There we sat around it in a circle, watching the cold water bead on the dark green skin. It was a ceremony.
Granpa pulled out his long knife and held it up. He looked at Granma and then at me, and laughed at my open mouth and big eyes watching; then he cut—the watermelon splitting ahead of the knife, which means it is good. It was. When it was opened out, the juice made water balls on the red meat.
Granpa cut the slices. Granma and him laughed as the juice run down my mouth and over my shirt. It was my first watermelon.
Summer eased along. It was my season. My birthday being in the summer made it my season; that is the custom of the Cherokee. And so my birthday lasted, not a day but a summertime.
It is the custom, during your season, to be told of your birthplace; of your father’s doings; of your mother’s love.
Granma said I was lucky, and more than likely one in a hundred million. She said I was born from nature—of Mon-o-lah—and so had all the brothers and sisters of which she had sung my first night in the mountains.
Granma said very few was picked to have the total love of the trees, the birds, the waters—the rain and the wind. She said as long as I lived I could always come home to them, where other children would find their parents gone and would feel lonesome; but I wouldn’t ever be.
We sat on the back porch, in the dusk of summer evenings. The dark crept down the hollows while Granma talked soft. Sometimes she would pause and not go on
for a long time, and then she would smooth her face with her hands and talk some more.
I told Granma I was right proud of the whole thing; and right off, I could tell that I wasn’t afraid of dark in the hollows anymore.
Granpa said I had the uppers on him, being born special and all. He said he wished he had been picked out for such. Granpa said he had always been hampered with a suspicion of being frightened of the dark, and now would total depend on me to lead him about in dark situations. Which I told him I would.
Now I was six. Maybe it was my birthday that reminded Granma time was passing. She lit the lamp nearly every evening and read, and pushed me on my dictionary studying. I was down into the B’s, and one of the pages was torn out. Granma said that page was not important, and the next time me and Granpa went to the settlement, he paid for and bought the dictionary from the library. It cost seventy-five cents.
Granpa didn’t begrudge the money. He said he had always wanted that kind of dictionary. Since he couldn’t read a word that was in it, I suspicioned that he had other using for it, but I never saw him touch it.
Pine Billy came by. He taken to coming more often after the watermelons ripened. Pine Billy liked watermelons. He wasn’t uppity at all about the money he had got from the Red Eagle snuff company, nor the reward for the big-city criminals. He never mentioned it, so we never asked him about it.
Pine Billy said he figgered the world was coming to a end. He said all the signs pointed that way. He said there was rumors of wars, and famine had set on the land; banks was mostly closed and what wasn’t closed was being robbed all the time. Pine Billy said there wasn’t any money to be had hardly at all. He said that folks was still jumping out of winders in the big cities whenever the notion took them. Out in Oklahoma, he said, the wind was blowing away the ground.
We knew about that. Granma wrote to our kin in the Nations (we always called Oklahoma “the Nations” for that is what it was supposed to be, until it was taken from the Indians and made a state). They told us about it, in letters; how white men had turned grazing ground up with a plow, ground that was not supposed to be plowed. The wind was blowing it away.
Pine Billy said he determined to git saved since the end was near. He said fornicatin’ had always been his biggest block toward gittin’ saved. He said he fornicated at dances where he played, but he laid most of the faulting on the girls. He said they would not leave him alone. He said he had tried going to bush arbor meetings to git saved, but there was always girls around them too that kept after him to fornicate. He said he had found an old preacher who was too old to fornicate, he figgered, because he was holding a bush arbor meeting and was preaching, no-holds-barred, agin’ fornicatin’.
Pine Billy said that this old preacher made you feel like, at the time, that you would totally give up fornicatin’. Pine Billy said that was what it took to save you—feeling that way at the time. He said he was going back and git saved—the world coming to an end, and all. Oncet you was saved, the primitive Baptists believed, you was always saved. If you backslid a little into some fornicatin’, you was still saved, and more than likely had nothing to worry about.
Pine Billy said he leaned more toward the primitive Baptist as his religion. Which sounded reasonable to me.
Pine Billy played his fiddle in the dusk evenings of that summer. Could be it was because the world was coming to a end, but his music was sad.
It made you feel like this was the last summer; that you had already left it and wanted it back, and here you was all the time. You wisht he hadn’t started playing, for you ached—and then you hoped he wouldn’t stop. It was lonesome.
We went to church every Sunday. We walked the same trail that me and Granpa used to deliver our wares, for the church was a mile past the crossroads store.
We had to leave at daybreak, for it was a long walk. Granpa put on his black suit and the meal-sack shirt that Granma had bleached white. I had one too and wore clean overalls. Me and Granpa buttoned the top buttons on our shirts which made us proper for church.
Granpa wore his black shoes that he tallowed to shine. The shoes clumped when he walked. He was used to moccasins. I figured it was a painful walk for Granpa, but he never said anything, just clumped along.
Me and Granma had it easier. We wore moccasins. I was proud of how Granma looked. Every Sunday she wore a dress that was orange and gold and blue and red. It struck her at the ankles and mushroomed out around her. She looked like a spring flower floating down the trail.
If it hadn’t been for the dress and Granma enjoying the outing so much, I suspicioned that Granpa would never have gone to church. Not counting the shoes, he never taken much to churching.
Granpa said the preacher and the deacons pretty much had a choke-hold on religion. He said they done the determining on who was going to hell and who wasn’t, and if a feller didn’t watch it, pretty soon he was worshipping the preacher and the deacons. So he said to hell with it. But he didn’t complain.
I liked the walk to church. We didn’t have to carry our load of wares, and as we walked the cutoff trail, day broke ahead of us. The sun hit the dew on the valley down below and made tree patterns where we walked.
The church set back off the road in a scope of trees. It was little and wasn’t painted, but it was neat. Every Sunday, when we walked into the church clearing, Granma stopped to talk to some women; but me and Granpa headed straight for Willow John.
He always stood back in the trees, away from the people and the church. He was older than Granpa but he was as tall; full Cherokee with white plaited hair hanging below his shoulders, and a flat-brimmed hat pulled low to his eyes … like the eyes were private. When he looked at you, you knew why.
The eyes were black, open wounds; not angry wounds, but dead wounds that lay bare, without life. You couldn’t tell if the eyes were dim, or if Willow John was looking past you into a dimness far away. Once, in later years, an Apache showed me a picture of an old man. It was Go-khla-yeh, Geronimo. He had the eyes of Willow John.
Willow John was over eighty. Granpa said that long ago, Willow John had gone to the Nations. He had walked the mountains, and would not ride in a car or train. He was gone three years and came back; but he would not talk of it. He would only say there was no Nation.
And so we always walked to him, standing back in the trees. Granpa and Willow John put their arms around each other and held each other for a long time; two tall, old men with big hats—and they didn’t say anything. Then Granma would come, and Willow John would stoop and they would hold each other for a long time.
Willow John lived past the church, far back in the mountains; and so, the church being about halfway between us, it was the place they could meet.
Maybe children know. I told Willow John that there was going to be lots of Cherokees before too long. I told him I was going to be a Cherokee; that Granma said I was natural-born to the mountains and had the feeling of the trees. Willow John touched my shoulder and his eyes showed a far back twinkle. Granma said it was the first time he had looked like that in many years.
We would not go into the church until everybody else was in. We always sat on the back row; Willow John, then Granma, me, and Granpa set next to the aisle. Granma held Willow John’s hand during church, and Granpa put his arm across the bench back and laid his hand on Granma’s shoulder. I taken to holding Granma’s other hand and putting a hand on Granpa’s leg. This way I was not left out, though my feet always went to sleep as they stuck straight out over the seat rim.
Once, after we taken our seats, I found a long knife laying where I set. It was as long as Granpa’s and had a deer skin sheath that was fringed. Granma said Willow John gave it to me. That is the way Indians give gifts. They do not present it unless they mean it and are doing it for a reason. They leave it for you to find. You would not get the gift if you didn’t deserve it, and so it is foolish to thank somebody for something you deserve, or make a show of it. Which is reasonable.
I give Willow
John a nickel and a bullfrog. The Sunday I brought it, Willow John had hung his coat on a tree while he waited for us, and so I slipped the bullfrog and the nickel into his pocket. It was a big bullfrog I had caught in the spring branch and had fed bugs until he was practical a giant.
Willow John put on his coat and went into church. The preacher called for everybody to bow their heads. It was quiet so that you could hear people breathing. The preacher said, “Lord …” and then the bullfrog said, “LARRRRRRRRUPP!” deep and loud. Everybody jumped and one man run out of the church. A feller hollered, “God almighty!” and a woman screamed, “Praise the Lord!”
Willow John jumped too. He reached his hand in his pocket, but he didn’t take out the frog. He looked over at me and the twinkle come again to his eyes; this time not so far back. Then he smiled! The smile broke across his face, wider and wider—and he laughed! A deep, booming laugh that made everybody look at him. He didn’t pay any attention to them at all. I was scared, but I laughed too. Tears commenced to water in his eyes and roll down the creases and wrinkles of his face. Willow John cried.
Everybody got quiet. The preacher stood with his mouth open and watched. Willow John paid no attention to anybody. He didn’t make a sound, but his chest heaved and his shoulders shook, and he cried a long time. People looked away, but Willow John and Granpa and Granma looked straight ahead.
The preacher had a hard time getting started again. He didn’t mention the frog. He had tried once before to preach a sermon regarding Willow John, but Willow John never paid him any attention. He always looked straight before him, like the preacher wasn’t there. The sermon had been on paying proper respect to the Lord’s house. Willow John would not bow his head for prayers and he wouldn’t take off his hat.
The Education of Little Tree Page 14