by Rilla Askew
It was not humming now, not a high keening at the edge of hearing, but a real song. I could hear the voice of it, I could hear words, and they were not words of English or Choctaw but I knew them as we know dreamwords, and the song rose and fell, it was in the air, the smoke, the light coming from the east: piercing, beautiful, like water trickling, like light shining, the sound of spirit walking in the world. The song pulled from my very breast, the hard core heart of me, to my nipples and fingers and the soles of my feet. As I listened the song became smell; it didn’t die or transform but became smell also, embraced smell, and it was smoke then, it was light then, and taste, and the smell of some place on the earth I had been and forgotten, which I cannot describe to you any more than I can name you the sound, but it was a little like watercress plucked from a stream and crushed at once in the teeth and fingers, the green smell of plant but not of earth, of water but not the mud and dank that goes with it; a smell of longing, like craving, to prick at the nose like crushed cedar and become in the back of the mouth and throat a taste like green apples and honey, and the song was mine, the smell was my before and after, what was given to me, what I was supposed to do: it was my life, singing in the air and earth and sky around me. The pain came then, sudden, an eruption in my limbs like they would be torn asunder, and I heard a voice saying, See this, you must follow. Be still. There was Light then, and Presence, and around me in the valley the cedars bled.
I turned my face away. Kneeling—I was kneeling then, I don’t know when it happened—kneeling, I lowered my face in my hands to block it. I put my thumbs in my ears to not hear it, but the song was inside me and outside me and still it sang. I stood up with the sun rising over the rim of the world, rising white light, red with spring coming, the bleeding cedars before me turning red with the light of the sun rising, and I shook my fist at heaven, because it was God in the red light of heaven, which I knew then, and I roared and shook my fist over my head because He had killed her, or at least He had not saved her, and everything, every last bit of it, followed from that. I turned away from the east and walked back to the log house.
From that day on, the mystery did not come on me.
From that day on, I went in shame and defiance and anger, the hollowness a cold permanence to ebb and swell as it would, and I just went on, taught the children and schemed and prepared. I didn’t tell Thula. I wouldn’t tell her, though she knew, or she knew something, because it was right after that she left. She knew always, from the beginning, because she tried so many times to smoke me. She tried to make me sweat. She talked to me, in English and Choctaw. She said I would die. But I did not—you can see that I did not—but something was not right, because every preparation I made to go back home was stripped from me, but I wouldn’t see what it meant. I believed that I knew what I was doing. I’d seen her black eyes on me many times—watching me in judgment, I told myself then. I grew to hate her so bad. I blamed her for it, as I blamed Fayette for what befell us in the living world, what befell me. I wouldn’t see that it was just those old threads pulling from all directions for eternity, just our lives spun by God’s mind telling Himself a story with the pitiful substance of our pitiful selves. I wouldn’t see my part in it, and I hated her because she told me. She tried to make me understand. She would come to me in dreams, bending over me as she had bent over us in the red darkness, her flat brown face with eyes like black seeds in it, coming down, telling me in dreams of torment that I couldn’t keep from remembering, so that it got to where I stayed out and gone from the house at night, wouldn’t sleep on the pallet with Jonaphrene because of Thula breathing the same air in the shell of the log house. I said to myself she was a devil, and I know she wasn’t. Even then I knew it, because He gave her to me for a guide—not a spirit guide, because I wouldn’t hear the Spirit, but a flesh-and-blood woman talking bad English, saying, “The Creator handed you that job to do, you going to die you ain’t done it.”
I followed them on the white horse miles and miles going slow on the wagon road to Latham because her eyes told me, because her mouth said, Come go with us, but her eyes said, You are going to die if you do not. And I did die to something, because I fell unconscious for seven days, they said a death mask came on me, Jessie said I was dead, she wanted to bury me, but Thula told them I was not dead but in the other world receiving my instructions, and I remembered what it was then, for a little time I remembered. I cannot tell you now because it was stripped from me that red dawn when I shook my fist at God. From that moment I did not enter another, willing or unwilling, until the afternoon my uncle faced me over the back of the blue roan in the darkness of the barn shed.
Why?
Why would He make me enter that man who was my enemy? Why, when He should make the mystery come on me again, would it be only to know the rank self-loathing and fear and hatred in my uncle, who only hated and loved my father as Esau hated and loved his brother for stealing his father’s blessing, as Cain hated and loved Abel in the weary old sin of envy for his blood offering more pleasing in God’s sight, as all men have hated their brethren and loved them for eons in the spinning out of God’s tale? Envy is not my secret sin set forth in the light of God’s face. Pride is. And contempt, which is only a guise of the same thing. And anger. I have owned them. I confess them. Why make me bear witness to Fayette’s sins?
I stood in the roadbed aiming an old single-shot twenty-two at the back of my uncle, whom I loathed as fiercely in that moment as in the twinkling instant on the creekbank with my arms lifted, hoisting his guns into the water, as on the nights I listened to him outside the log house, standing in the yard or down on the road, hollering at Papa, cussing Papa, and sometimes walking around and around the house firing his pistols and the gun Papa made, which we knew what it was because it made such a loud sound. And Papa on the far side of the room in his blanket, just lying there, listening, never answering him back or doing anything but to lie awake looking up at the dark dome of log ceiling and listen to his brother curse him and make threats and fire his guns in the night air.
I wanted to kill him, and have believed all these years I should have killed him because if I’d killed him when I could have, any moment when I could have, alone, before he reached Cedar, before he came face-to-face with Papa, then they would not have all had to pay. I watched my uncle ride away from me. After a long time, the mottled hide on the roan’s rump growing ash-colored in the distance, I let the hammer back down.
The town toward which the man rode was no different from hun-The town toward which the man rode was no different from hundreds of other white towns springing up in that time, spontaneous life spawned from invisible spores scattered along the newly laid rails cross-hatching the whole of Indian Territory—except in this manner: the spawning ground which was to become Cedar, I.T., had been, from the time of the Choctaw people’s coming, a gathering place for consensus and punishment, for the meting out of Choctaw justice at the site of the old courthouse and whipping tree, in the rule of law brought with the Choctaw people from their homeland. The place had held from the beginning a certain life, marked by the echoes of Choctaw words spoken, the force of which lay on its soul and in its dust and could not be erased.
It stood at a crossroads, where the new east-west road beside the train tracks crossed a north-to-south section of the old stage route, and for this reason Cedar, I.T., held within its encasement the shape of the Cross as well as the reaching out of arms to the Four Directions. The streets were laid out square, as white men plat their towns: a radiating grid of smaller squares emanating from the central chiasma, the grid fading into smaller crossroads of smaller, poorer houses outward, until the edges of the town blurred back into the little plain whence it had arisen. The gleaming blueblack rails of the train tracks appeared to slice into and bisect the town, separating itself from itself, but in fact the whole of the town had emerged from the ocher earth on either side of that steel intrusion, as matching fungi will spring up on either side of the gash in ligh
tning-struck wood. The log and brick and native stone buildings had sprung up in a line perpendicular to that gash, sprung oxblood-red and umber and burnt sienna from that yellowbrown dirt, a transformation of rolling flaxen earth into triangulated redbrick bank and square train depot, created from uniform rectangles of baked red clay dug from the red earth in the very core-heart of the land of the red people and drawn east by mule train to be laid and stacked in patterned squares along the main street, as dark redbrick buildings were being raised, distinctive, throughout the Indian Nations. No different. Hardly different, except in the minds of those who lived there, because it was home.
South of the rail tracks were the wagon yard and the hotel, the post office and mercantile and a new white steepled churchhouse, which had raised up on either side of the old livery stable and stage stop; north of the tracks, a half mile above the old commissary, the remains of the Choctaw courthouse still stood. Yet even that portion of Cedar was changing, for O. L. Upton had caused to be built on the northwest corner of the intersection a triangular-shaped two-story redbrick bank. It was toward this building Thula Henry walked, crossing the east-west road slowly, her skirts lifted in one hand above the swirl of khaki dust. She stepped deeply to mount the high plank sidewalk that ran in front of the bank, and then she stopped a moment at the corner, looking north.
In the distance, beyond the last house that marked the limits of the town, she saw the man riding stiffly, elongated in the saddle, the fine horse stepping slowly, stirring dust. Through some trick of alignment and that very moiling dust, Thula didn’t at first see the girl coming behind him, and so for a moment she merely looked at the white man with unaffected eyes, tracking his approach as she might watch a silent crow flapping across a cleared space in the sky: a curiosity because of its solitariness and silence, but not so strange as to be a sign, necessarily. Fayette hardly swayed with the saddle motion, and there was something nearly formal in the erect dignity of his posture, the arc of his wrist as he held the reins above the horn. The woman stood a moment, watching him with recognition but without particular interest, and then she continued on toward her destination, which journey carried her in the man’s direction, for she was only coming from the mercantile south of the train tracks to join her son George at the general feed supply store known as Lolly’s.
She moved unhurriedly in her soft shoes along the plank sidewalk which united the three buildings on that side of the street: the brick bank building on the corner, the old native stone commissary to the north of it, and finally the roughsawed front of Lolly’s Guns, Farm & Feed. Beneath her arm, Thula carried a brown paper-wrapped bundle containing a few yards of calico encasing a spool of thread, a length of ribbon, a tin of sardines, and a second, smaller, brown-wrapped square, the paper folded in fourths around a neat stack of white-flour crackers. These few small purchases had, up until that moment, satisfied her belief in a reason for her presence in Cedar, I.T., on this particular bright early-spring afternoon. In the next instant, however, her own leisurely motion and that of the roan shifted the brief alignment of horse, man, and girl, and through the obscuring dust Thula saw Matt coming along the road behind Fayette in her man’s hat and breeches, shoeless, wrapped twice around her narrow hips with a thick leather gunbelt. Immediately Thula understood why she’d said yes when her son George drove into her yard that morning to see if she wanted to come go with him to Cedar to pick up the new turning plow he had ordered, because she understood that the deep trouble she’d been feeling in her mind for many days and nights now was connected to the girl.
The woman hurried forward and stepped into the narrow crevice between the old commissary and the feed supply, her soft leather shoes whispering across the splintered surface and down onto the damp earth between the rock and wood walls. She peeked around the corner of Lolly’s, and now Fayette was within the compass of the town, passing in front of the remains of the old courthouse. As he rode nearer, Thula saw that what had at first seemed an erect dignity was, in fact, something more like a stupor, or a trance. His blue eyes held directly in front of himself, focused somewhere in the middle distance; the reins were doubled between middle and forefinger in his left hand, and his right hand rode loosely, palm-down on his denimed thigh. Thula could see the crosshatched grip of a pistol protruding from his pantwaist, the cartridge belts draped over the saddlehorn, the big volleygun strapped down. Several horses tethered along the street stirred restively as the man and horse passed, though her son’s mule, standing with head bowed before the shabby wagon parallel to the front of Lolly’s, did not stir. It was then that Thula realized the emptiness of the street, except for the stirring, snuffling horses, the head-bowed and forbearant mule. Nowhere was there a wife waiting impatiently in a wagon, sitting on the spring seat with her snarled knitting while her husband completed his business at the gun and feed supply. Nowhere was there a child playing, a loafer loafing, a drummer selling. No Indians were sitting on the plank sidewalk across the way watching the town’s comings and goings, and there were no comings and goings here on the north side of the crossroad and train track, nor, turning her head, did she see people moving about the street to the south. Within Thula the familiar dread she’d fought against in the nighttime began to rise, here in the damp alley, in cold daylight. For seven nights Thula had awakened at the deepest hour, soaked and sweated in that dark dread. Each of those nights she had lain in her bed as the low white pricks of stars on the black horizon faded from her window and the air in the room blued, the shapes in the room darkening, and then graying, becoming distinct. When the eastern sky blanched in preparation to receive its color, Thula would still be lying on her shuck mattress, watching, unable to name or know what it was that made her feel afraid. She had risen on each of those troubled dawns and got the stove started, gone through the day irritable and restless, quick and harsh with her grandchildren, which had never been her way, and filled with a vague, directionless sense that something very bad was going to happen, a cataclysm, a terrible event. In bed again at night, she would pray, the cornhusks whispering beneath her restless and shifting body, pray staring into the black room as it turned blue into gray into light. Chitokaka ma! sai yimmishke; nan-isht ik a sai yimmo ya is svm apelvchaske. But she remained dry and full of dread. Thula thought that it would be her own family that would suffer the cataclysm—her grandson Moss maybe, who seemed doomed for it, or one of her sons—and so she was for that reason glad to see the armed man and the girl walking behind him, and in another way, she was even more afraid.
From the day Thula had silently gathered her herbs and tobacco within her leather satchel and returned to her own house to live, she had thrown herself more deeply into the Baptist church at Yonubby; she had prayed at revivals and for revival and carried her Choctaw-language Bible with her at all times. She’d quit making medicine, for she feared it was not pleasing to the Lord. She feared that it might be true what Christian preachers preached: that the old ways were the ways of Satan; that the people had to turn their face against the old ways because it was only through belief in the name of Chisvs that their souls might be saved. For five years Thula Henry had lived doing as she believed she ought to do, but without peace. Always she carried the discomfited sense that she had forgotten something or neglected something. She would see the girl sometimes, with her family at a camp meeting or walking along the road with the old beagle, and often the girl would appear, but for her small size, nearly normal, and other times strange, but Thula would turn her eyes away. Now, standing in the well of alley between the rock building and the rough-timbered wall of the feed supply, watching Fayette Lodi pass before her and continue south on the dirt street, Thula did not turn her eyes away. She did not have the desire to, nor could she, perceiving, as she did, without turning her gaze, the force of the girl coming along the street trailing the man, tethered to him nearly, as the younger children had trailed the wagon home from camp meeting on Thula’s son’s white plowhorse in the cold new-moon darkness five years befor
e.
The girl still bore that look of hollowness, like a cornhusk doll without features, but for the yellowbrown eyes staring ahead at her uncle. She was lean, hard-muscled, bony, and her chest was as flat as the day Thula had first seen her when she was ten. Thula realized with a start and then a slow deepening of the dread within her that the girl had never received her womanhood. Watching from her creviced place, the woman teetered between believing it was a sign of the girl’s emptiness that she’d never got her womanways and, in the next instant, thinking it signified how powerful was the girl’s medicine: a mark from the Creator that the girl had been charged to do powerful things. It was as if Matt exemplified and bore in her body the duality that had grown up in Thula, so that the woman could only watch in secret trembling as the girl—armed, barefoot, hardly taller than a fourteen-year-old, her face blank beneath the soft brim of the tan hat —passed in the street and continued on south midst the pawing, whickering horses.
When Matt neared the crossroad beyond the bank that ran east and west beside the train tracks, Thula Henry stepped up onto the plank sidewalk, crossed it swiftly and, holding the parcel to her chest and bending her knees deeply, and grunting once, for the distance was nearly two feet, she stepped down into the dirt street, where none but her son’s long-suffering mule witnessed her movement.
There were none but that mule’s eye, warm, brown, slanted, comprehending, and God’s eye, perhaps, to see the short Indian woman moving along the street in a long dress of faded cotton, her hair crow-black still, and braided, looped in a black circlet crowning her head, a pale knitted shawl about her shoulders, the paper-wrapped parcel pressed to her chest, and on her small feet the soft leather shoes that were not moccasins but something more like house slippers hand-stitched of cowhide, raising a thin skein of dust behind the thin boyish figure walking steadily, neither swiftly nor slowly, behind the armed man mounted on the nervous, evenly gaited blue roan. None but God’s and the mule’s and the Indian woman’s eyes to see when the figure lifted its trousered knees and stepped barefoot over the railroad tracks that appeared to slice through the heart of the town. But it could have been God’s eye alone that saw the chert-eyed sister, her hair a dark mane flying, the bruise dimmed beneath a flour coating upon her cheekbone, as she snapped the reins above the rump of the little bay mare belonging to the Waddy postmaster Clay Mewborn, harnessed to the neat, shining buggy belonging to that same Mewborn, the yellow-painted spokes on the four wheels seeming to swirl backwards as the vehicle rolled swiftly toward Cedar on the old Butterfield road.