"No, just my daughter. He didn't even quite stick around long enough to drive her home from the hospital." Alice laughs. "I had to get a nurse to drive us home. She was a great big woman with a Chevrolet as big as a barn. She said, 'I can drive home all the babies you want, Miz Greer.' I never will forget that. She made me wish I'd had twelve more, while I was at it."
"I wished that too. That we'd had more. We had the two girls, but then the doctor told my wife no more. Her blood was the wrong way, somehow. She had negative blood, is what he said. She always run to being peaked."
Alice feels embarrassed and amazed that within ten minutes of meeting one another they've gotten onto Cash Stillwater's dead wife's female problems. He doesn't seem bothered, though, only sad. She can feel sadness rising off him in waves, the way you feel heat from a child with a fever.
"Sugar tells me you've just moved back from someplace."
"Wyoming," he says.
They pass an old cemetery whose stone walls are covered with rose brambles, and then a white clapboard church set back in the woods. On a tree, a washed-out sign has been attached by a nail through its center, and rotated a quarter-turn clockwise. It crookedly advises: FLESTER DREADFULWATER FOR TRIBAL COUNCIL.
"Flester Dreadfulwater!" Alice says, hoping it's not impolite to laugh at someone's name who is no doubt some relative of someone related to Cash.
Apparently it isn't. "He lost the election," Cash says, smiling.
"Why'd you move to Wyoming?"
Cash stretches a little behind the wheel, though he never takes his eyes off the road. "I got restless after my wife died. I had this idea you can get ahead by being in a place where everbody's rich. That being close to good times is like having good times."
"My second husband was like that. He thought if he'd watched some loving on TV, he'd done had it." Alice instantly covers her eyes, feeling she has surely gone too far, but Cash only laughs.
"How long were you up there?" she asks, recovering. Riding through the woods with a talkative man is making her giddy.
"About two year," he says. "I despised it. Everbody rich, treating you like you was a backdoor dog. And not even happy with what they had. I did beadwork for a Indian jewelry store, and the owner one day up and took pills and killed himself clean dead. They say he was worth a million."
"Why'd he want to die, then?"
"I think he was depressed about the Indians being all gone." Cash points his thick hand at the windshield. "He should have come down here and had a look."
They pass a ragged little shack with a ragged little birdhouse on a post beside it, and Alice thinks: Then he would have taken the pills and shot himself too. But she knows that isn't entirely fair.
"They used to be a store up here," Cash says suddenly, as if he'd long forgotten this information himself. "A general store. I wonder what happened to that. We lived right down yander in them woods. We'd come up here for lard. You had to take a bucket. And me and mommy used to take fryers, we'd catch them and tie them up and walk to the store. And eggs."
"Oh, I remember carrying eggs," Alice cries. "That was just a criminal thing to do to a child. Make them carry eggs."
"Sounds like you know."
"Oh, yes. I was raised up on a hog farm in Mississippi. It wasn't just hogs, though. We raised a big garden, and we had chickens, and cows to milk. We'd sell sweet milk and cream. People would come in their wagons to get it."
"I miss that," Cash says. "Driving the mule. We had a mule team and a wagon."
"Well, sure," says Alice, feeling they've finally climbed onto safer ground. "Even up into the forties we still used horses or mules and the wagon. You'd see cars down in Jackson, but it wasn't the ordinary thing to have. We thought they were more for fun. For getting someplace, or hauling, you'd need the wagon and a team of mules."
"Wasn't that the time to be a kid?" Cash asks. "Our kids had to work out what to do with liquor and fast cars and fast movies and ever kind of thing. For us, the worst we could do was break a egg."
"Isn't that so," Alice agrees. "You know what seems funny to me, thinking about old times? We'd get excited over the least little thing. A man playing a fiddle and dancing a little wooden jigging doll with his foot. Even teenagers would stop and admire something like that. Now teenagers won't hardly stop and be entertained by a car accident. They've seen too much already."
"That's how I felt up at Jackson Hole. That's why I wanted to come back. Everbody acted like they'd done seen the show, and was just waiting to finish up the popcorn."
"Well, I met all Sugar's grandkids, and they seem interested in catching fish for their grandma. They're a nicer bunch than I'd ever in this world expect a teenager to be."
"Cherokee, kids know the family, that's sure," Cash says. "They know the mother's birthday, the wedding anniversary, all that. We always have a big hog fry."
"You must enjoy your daughters."
"Well, we had a bad time of it in my family. My older daughter, Alma, is dead."
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Alice says, realizing she might have guessed this, from his stooped shoulders. She stops trying to talk for a while, since there is nothing to say about a lost child that can change one star in a father's lonely sky.
They pass clusters of little tin-roofed houses and trailer houses set near each other in clearings in the woods. Propane-gas tanks sit in the yards, and sometimes a wringer washer or a cookstove on the porch, or a weight-lifting bench in the driveway. There is really no predicting what you'll see here. One house seems to be hosting a family reunion: old folks sit around in lawn chairs, and six or seven kids are lined up straddling the silver propane tank as if it were a patient old pony.
"There's sassafras," Cash says, pointing at broad, mitten-shaped leaves sprouting among dark cedars in a hedgerow. "They use that in the medicine tea at the stomp dances."
"What's it do for you?"
"Oh, perks you up, mainly." Cash seems to be looking far down the road when he speaks. "My daddy, he knew all the wild roots to make ever kind of medicine. He tried to tell me what it's for, but I've done forgot about all of it. Back when I was a kid, I never did know people having operations for kidney and gallbladder and stuff, like they do now. Did you?"
"No," Alice says. "People didn't have so many operations. Mainly they got over it, or they died, one."
"When I had a bellyache he'd just get a flour sack, put ashes in that and put that on my side, and the pain would go away. People would always be coming to him, my dad. He died on New Year's day, nineteen and forty, and I didn't even know it for sixteen days. I was in boarding school."
"They didn't tell you?"
Cash doesn't answer for a while. Alice spies a black-and-white Appaloosa horse standing in the woods near the road, alone and apparently untethered; it raises its head as they pass by.
"I can't explain boarding school. The teachers were white, they didn't talk Cherokee, and seems like you got used to never knowing what was going on. You forgot about your family. We slept in a big dormitory, and after a few year, it was kindly like you got the feeling that's how kids got made. Just turned out in them lined-up beds like biscuits in a pan."
"That sounds awful. It sounds like a prison for children."
"It was, more or less. Half a day school, the other half-day work: sewing room, dining room, kitchen, laundry. Boys did the laundry. We didn't mix with girls. Except Sunday, when we had Sunday school, but sometime I couldn't go, I had to stay in the kitchen."
Alice tries to picture a herd of subdued little boys doing laundry and stirring pots. She can't. "Did you learn to cook, at least?"
"Not much. You know what got me through, though, after my daddy died? They had a big window on the west side of the dining room, and Miss Hay, she was the boss of the kitchen, she had a orange tree about two foot tall in a pot. She growed that from a seed. I watched it. There was two oranges on that tree when I left. They wasn't yellow yet, just green."
"Did you run away? I think I would have."
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"I tried, a few times. But finally my mama said they needed me home, so they let me come on home. I just went up to seventh grade, that was all. I didn't learn too much English, even though they tried."
"Well, you sure speak it now," Alice says, surprised. Cash Stillwater talks more than any grown man she's met. She can't imagine how it would be if he spoke English any better.
"Oh, well, sure, you pick it up. We didn't talk Cherokee anymore at home after my girls started to get big."
"Why not?"
"I don't know. I talked to them when they were babies, and they knew it real good. But after a while it just all went blank. When they get up around four feet high and start mixing with the other kids, you know, in two weeks they can forget it. I feel like I done my girls wrong, some way. Like there was something they was waiting for me to tell them that I never could think of."
Alice feels his sadness again, and wishes she could lay a hand on top of his weathered brown paw on the gearshift. They've come out of the woods now into rolling, tall meadows of uncut timothy. At the head of a dirt road stands a hand-lettered sign: FIREWOOD. XMAS TREES. BLUEBERRYS HUCKLEBERRYS U PICK. As they turn in on the dirt track, a handful of quail run into the road and break into buzzing flight.
Alice feels excited, as if she has set sail for an unknown shore. She couldn't say why. The smallish bobbly heads of golden flowers are blowing in the wind, and the edges of the field are embroidered with tall white blossoms she remembers from childhood: Queen Anne's lace. They are as pretty as their name, but if you ever tried to take too close a look, they would sting your eye to tears.
It is nearly dusk when they get back to Sugar's with two full pails of huckleberries in the back of the truck. Alice ate some while they were picking, even though that's stealing, since you only pay for what you carry out. Cash teased her, warning that her blue tongue would give her away. She feels like a girl.
In Sugar's driveway, a banty rooster threatens to run under the wheels of the truck. Alice gasps a little.
"He'll run out of the way," Cash says. "If he don't, we'll make dumplings."
He turns off the key but the engine keeps chugging for a little while. Just like Cash, who can't seem to stop talking. "A week before Christmas, them roosters start crowing all night," he tells her. He reaches in his pocket and slips something into Alice's hand. It is dry and flat and sharp as a tooth. She examines it.
"An arrowhead? Where'd you get that?"
"Found it. While you was eating up all the berries."
"You take it home, then," she says, although she loves the feel of its ripply bite against her thumb, and doesn't want to give it up.
"No, you have it. I got about a hundred at home."
"You found that many?"
"No. Some I found, but most of them I made."
Alice turns the slim blade over in her hand. "How'd you learn to make arrowheads?"
"Well, it's a long story. I found my first one when I was five. A little white one about like that. It was broken, though, not much count. I got off my horse and picked it up, and then I picked up another piece of that same white flint, and later on I started knocking pieces off of it. I just kindly taught myself how. For a while I worked down there at Tahlequah making arrowheads for a tourist shop."
"I can't get over that. That's something."
"Oh, it isn't. We used to make ever kind of thing, when I was a kid. We'd make blowguns out of river cane. Heat it over a fire, straighten it out. You blow a little arrow through there, it's good for killing a bird or a squirrel." Cash laughs. "Not that good, though. Now I use a rifle."
Alice wonders what it would be like to have a man go out and kill food for you. She opens the door and steps down from the truck before she can let herself think about it too long. Cash gets out too, and lifts one of the heavy pails out of the truck bed.
"There's a stomp dance coming up, Saturday week," he tells her.
"I know. Sugar's been talking about it."
"You planning on going?"
"I could."
"You want to plan on driving over there with me? I'd be happy to take you."
"All right," she says. "I'll see you."
Alice feels his eyes on her as she retreats to Sugar's front door. When she hears the truck kick up again, she turns and waves. His glasses twinkle as he pulls away with his arm trailing out the window.
Alice doesn't recall the sensation of romantic love; it has been so long she might not know it if it reared up and bit her. All she knows is that this man, Cash Stillwater, chose her. He saw her somewhere and picked her out. That single thought fills Alice with a combination of warmth and hope and indigestion that might very well be love.
26
Old Flame
ON THE NIGHT OF THE stomp dance, Cash comes to fetch Alice at a quarter to twelve. It had seemed to Alice a late hour to begin a date, but Sugar has assured her that the dances start late and run all night. "Cinderella wouldn't of had a chance with this crowd," Sugar tells her. "She'd of gone back all raggedy before anybody important even showed up."
Alice snaps on her pearl earrings and hopes for better luck. In Cash's truck, she teases about the hour as they drive through the woods. "I'm not so sure I know you well enough to stay out all night," she says.
"We'll have about two hundred chaperones," he says, a grin widening his broad face. "If I know my sister Letty, they'll all be keeping a pretty good eye on us."
Alice feels strangely excited by the idea that people are talking about herself and Cash.
"Can I ask you a question?" she asks.
"Shoot."
"I hope you don't mind my asking, but I'm sorry, I can't remember the first time we met."
He glances at her, and the dashboard lights glint on the curved lower rims of his glasses. "First time I seen you was on Sugar Hornbuckle's front stoop, the day we went berry picking."
"Well, how in the world?" Alice doesn't quite know how to go on.
"Did I think to call you up?" Cash asks.
"Yes."
"Letty told me." He looks at Alice again, bringing the truck to a complete, unnecessary stop at a quiet intersection on a thoroughly deserted road. Alice has her window rolled all the way down and can hear birds in the forest, fussing themselves into whatever activity it is birds perform at night. "She let me know you was interested," Cash says finally.
Alice is stupefied. "Well, I would have been, if I'd known you from the man in the moon, but I didn't. Sugar told me, she said Letty said..." She can't finish.
Cash begins to laugh. He tips his straw cowboy hat far back on his head, smacks the top of the steering wheel with both his palms, and laughs some more. Alice merely stares.
"You have to know my sister Letty." He runs his index finger under his lower eyelids, behind his glasses. "Oh, law," he says. "If she had free run of this world, she'd like to get that Pope fellow fixed up with some nice widow woman."
Alice blushes deeply in the dark.
Cash reaches across and brushes Alice's cheek with the back of his hand before driving on. "And every once in a while," he says, "the old gal chases a pair of folks up the right stump."
A sign at the gate of the Ceremonial Grounds says: VISITORS WELCOME, NO DRINKING, NO ROWDINESS. Alice and Cash have fallen quiet. Several trucks are ahead of them and a station wagon behind, all rolling through the gate into a forest of small oaks. They pass a dozen or more open shelters with cedar-shake roofs and cookstoves inside, where women are gathered in thick, busy clumps. Above the roofs, the chimney pipes puff like smoking boys hiding out in the woods, giving away their location.
The dirt road ends at the edge of a clearing, and in its center Alice can see the round, raised altar made of swept ash, knee-high and eight feet across. The fire is already burning there, glowing inside a teepee of stout logs. At the edges of the fire a large log lies pointing in each of the four directions, giving it a serious, well-oriented look, like a compass. Cash has warned Alice that this fire is special.
It's as old as the Cherokee people; someone carries off the embers in a bucket at the end of each ceremony and keeps them alive until the next monthly dance. Someone carried this fire over the Trail of Tears, he says, when they were driven out here from the east. Alice has only the faintest understanding of what that means, except that it's a long time to keep an old flame burning.
The altar is surrounded by a ring of bare earth some twenty yards across, and at its perimeter a circle of middle-aged oak trees stand graceful and straight-trunked, their upper limbs just touching. People are beginning to gather and settle on hewn log benches under the oaks, facing the fire. Cash gets out a pair of folding chairs and they settle down in front of the radiator grill. Alice can hear little overheated sighs and pops from the engine, and the buzz of a bee that has gotten tangled up there with the metal in an unlucky way.
"You reckon that's one of Boma's bees?" she asks Cash.
"Could be. We drove right by her place."
It was true. Alice saw her standing in her yard, wearing a fedora with a giant white ostrich feather cascading backward into a curl behind her left shoulder. It gave Boma a dashing look, like one of the three musketeers out checking the pressure on the propane tank. Alice feels a little guilty about the bee stuck here writhing on the radiator. "Sugar says Boma loves those bees," she says.
"Oh, she does. Bees are only going to stay living in your eaves if you have kind feelings toward them." He takes off his hat and gently swats the bee, putting it out of its noisy misery.
An old man ambles over to chat with Cash. He has a wonderfully round face and like every other man here wears a straw cowboy hat that has darkened and conformed itself to its master around the crown. Cash introduces him as Flat Bush, leaving Alice to wonder whether this is a first or last name, or both. The two men speak in Cherokee for a while. Alice is surprised that she can follow the general gist because of words like "Ace Hardware" and "distributor cap" that regularly spring up shiny and hardedged from the strange soft music of the conversation.
People have begun to arrive now in a serious way, parking their trucks in a ring facing the fire, reminding Alice of a crew of friendly horses all tied nose in. She sneaks looks at the old women nested nearby in sag-seated lawn chairs. They all have on sprigged cotton dresses, dark stockings, dark shoes, and black or red sweaters. Their long white hair is pent up in the back with beaded clasps, and their arms are folded over their bosoms. Alice hopes she hasn't done anything wrong by wearing pants, or having short hair. But that's silly; no one has been anything but kind to her so far, or for that matter, looked at her twice. She listens in on the old women's conversation and it's the same over there, except that the hard, shiny words are "permapress" and "gallbladder" and "Crisco."