Silence grew until Elizabeth began to fidget. “Can we see the donkey again?” she asked.
Rose pinched her arm. “Hush,” she said.
Elizabeth glared at Rose and then her mother in appeal, but Ma’am gave her a warning look and Elizabeth pouted in silence.
Her grandfather continued on, producing a silvery round coin, a piece worth half of a dollar, depicting a seated woman in a flowing gown. Again, the family was allowed to look, but not touch.
But Grampa Cow Tom saved the best for last. He fanned the stack of pennies out, one at a time, until each lay flat and nested in its own copper puddle. He called everyone in the room forward by name and handed them one of the pennies, seven in all. Rose didn’t know exactly what she was supposed to do with the coin. She studied the reddish-brown profile of a young woman in a headdress, a band of spiky feathers that looked almost but not quite like a proper war bonnet.
“Miss Milly?” Gramma Amy asked. She brought the coin near her face, inspecting the image more closely, and ran her finger along the small rise and fall of the coin, back and forth, as if expecting it to rub away. “A Creek chief’s wife on the white man’s money?”
Rose also caught the resemblance to Chief Yargee’s youngest wife, at least what she looked like in profile when still very young.
“No, that’s not Miss Milly. They call her Lady Liberty. Liberty, like freedom,” Grampa Cow Tom said, voice aquiver. “Each keeps a coin of your own, so you remember who you are.”
Rose had never touched money before, and gripped her coin in a tight fist. Gramma Amy dropped her penny into the pocket of her apron. Elizabeth flipped her penny in the air to try to catch before it hit the ground. She missed, and scrambled under the table to retrieve the spinning coin, and when she reemerged with a scuffed knee and endearing grin, she held the penny overhead in triumph.
“Your penny isn’t for spending,” her grandfather said to them all. “Your penny is for reminding. We are Negro, and we are Creek, not one or the other but both, and we share with the tribe. When the tribe gets, we get. It is our right. We payed our dues to the nation, suffering alongside in every Removal, every war, every betrayal.”
Suddenly, her grandfather faded. He’d dealt in words all his life, spoken or unspoken, he’d formed and clarified meanings and agreements and understandings, but at this moment appeared incapable. His sudden silence drove home the import of his gift to Rose, in a way words could not, what it must mean for a man like him to give each member of his family the symbol of his life’s work. She vowed to cherish her penny always, a piece of him, and keep it near.
Her grandmother pulled gently at Grampa Cow Tom’s arm, sensing his changed mood. She urged him into a chair and he sat.
The room stayed silent. Not even Elizabeth made a sound.
“This is celebration,” he finally said. “We’re on the Creek rolls again, part of the tribe. We have received our due.”
“Our due,” Gramma Amy agreed.
“After taking out the pennies, that leaves us seventeen dollars and fifty cents from the back payment,” he said. “We’ll use this money to improve on our land.”
Rose took Elizabeth’s hand. Today’s windfall proved what she’d always known. Her grandfather could conquer anything.
Chapter 47
ROSE DREADED ENTERING the tepee alone. Grampa Cow Tom demanded they construct a last way station for him distant from the main house once certain he was going to die. What was the use of all of Gramma Amy’s herbs if she couldn’t cure her own husband? What started with the fall off a horse riding to a Council meeting and a broken leg had become this, first the march of gangrene up the leg and now a grim procession in and out of the tepee as her grandfather said his last good-byes to every member of the family, each by each.
He’d saved her for last. Rose breathed deep until her heart’s pounding slowed. She raised the flap and entered. The interior was dark, and smelled of salves and rotting flesh and something damp and musky she couldn’t name. She adjusted her face into acceptance and drew closer. He looked smaller than normal on a pallet on the floor, no longer fierce, the curlicue scar on his cheek sunken in sagged flesh, his missing earflap hidden by the pillow at his head, the putrefying left leg wrapped in bandages to the thigh, his favorite buffalo pelt underneath his body.
He beckoned her forward with his two-fingered hand, and patted the cover thrown over him, expecting her to sit. She’d not thought of it before now, but he favored his bad hand, as if challenging that old injury to try to get the better of him. Gramma Amy nodded to her, as if giving a blessing, egging her forward. Her grandmother tended him in between visitors, refusing to leave his side. Grampa Cow Tom and Gramma Amy were models for Rose, their devotion to each other palpable whether together or apart.
“Amy, just leave me to talk with Rose alone, eh?” said Cow Tom.
Gramma Amy seemed surprised, but she excused herself and left, lowering the tepee flap behind her. Rose kept her arms to her sides, tight. She was alone with the man she admired most in this world, yet she was ashamed to admit, she would rather be anywhere but here.
Rose didn’t want her grandfather to die. If she could give up her own life for his, she would. He was fearless, important, respected. And what was she? Destined to be a spinster, someone to whom things happened, not someone who claimed their own path, like him.
“Grampa, I am so sorry,” she began.
He waved off her words.
“I ever tell you how you come to your name?”
It was as if something kneaded at her heart like so much dough to shape. She squeezed back tears.
“No, Grampa Cow Tom.”
“Now there’s so little time, I see what I should have done.” He kept her gaze in his. “Rose.”
Her name held promise when her grandfather said it.
“Was me named you Rose,” he said. “A rose of beauty.”
She flinched at the pain of his words, the cruel falsity, and the sting made her speech harsh.
“Elizabeth has beauty. I am plain. A scrawny chicken.” Elizabeth was already shapely, with her dimpled cheek, smooth ebony skin, and flashing eyes.
A change came across her grandfather’s face, a sudden grimace that held for a brief moment before disappearing. In the dim light of the tepee, Rose couldn’t tell whether he was in pain, or angry, or disappointed. But his voice, when he spoke, only sounded sad.
“From early, I had to aim higher than my name, an offhand thing tossed out to make it easier for somebody to call me. The name fit, far as it went, but I was more than a tender of cows. I was a tender of words, and of people, and master of myself. I built a path to freedom with my words. And now I see you ignoring the name I took such care to give to you. Listening to the wrong voices. Listen to me now so you can learn to listen to yourself.” He struggled to pull himself more upright on the pallet, and Rose helped him settle in a new position.
“My Rose has plentiful beauty,” he went on. “My Rose survived what so many others couldn’t. My Rose is special, and brave enough to make her own way.”
“I’m not brave,” said Rose.
Grampa Cow Tom laughed. He bore the physical ravages of sickness, but his voice was light. This death business had released something in him, set him loose and free.
“Brave is only doing a thing needs doing, no matter how hard, no matter if you’re not ready or you’re afraid.”
“I want to be brave,” Rose admitted.
“My mama told me I’d be special from a small boy. It looked impossible then. But I chased after my mother’s opinion my whole life long. That search served me well. She made me braver than I was.”
“I’m not destined for any such thing,” said Rose. Her grandfather talked of glory. She just wanted her world small. She wanted snug and safe.
“And yet you sit here and not Twin.”
Grampa Cow Tom adjusted himself again on the pallet, pulling forward to sit upright, and his movement let loose a stink so sharp and unexpected from beneath the bandages that Rose’s eyes watered. She coughed to cover her face, hoping he hadn’t seen her wince.
“I tell you things I see, even if you do not. I won’t be here to remind you later. ’Twas me, Rose. ’Twas me that carved the life I wanted, whittling at the thing till the shape came clear. Like you must do for your life now. Find your own way. Go out in the world to know what waits there, if only for one year,” he said. “To Muskogee or Haskell or Okmulgee. Or beyond. Come back to this ranch after, if need be, or build another, and protect the land as best you can. Make a family of your own. Make sons. Give my Amy the great-grandsons she deserves and break the curse. You are braver than you know.”
Rose could barely absorb his words. How could he know of her dream of sons? Already she played each statement back in her mind, as she knew she would for years to come, committing all of them to memory, testing each as she pondered whether she believed these things her grandfather told her about herself, if she could live away from the ranch, if she really could fashion a family of her own.
“I’m not you,” Rose said, her voice small.
“Not much time remains,” he said. “This body tires. But you will sit with me each day. You will listen until my voice gives out. My mother never gave me her stories, and now they are lost forevermore. I was an orphan. I blundered. I sometimes hid my fear inside like slow poison. I did things of such deep shame, I never told anyone, not even Amy. But I made my life. I chose family and tribe and fixed to that choice. I did my best to atone. And that needs to continue with you. You can make my shame right. Stand tall, Rose, and know you will be knocked down. When knocked down, there is only the matter of how to get up again. In these last days, I aim to give you the gift of my stories. All of them. Some you know. Some no one knows. Hold them. Keep them safe.”
Grampa Cow Tom was her bedrock, the perfect man, above reproach, her moral compass. Rose couldn’t imagine his wrongdoing, or what part she could play in righting some unshared shame. She’d sought his stories all her life, begged for them, but was uneasy at the thought of secrets big enough to change her opinion of him.
“Yes, Grampa.”
“I’ll tell you all, the good and the bad. Judge me, but you mustn’t tell anyone else. I can’t go with the shame weighing down my spirit. Promise me.”
She didn’t want that burden, whatever he wanted to tell her, not if it began like this. She’d rather he be what he’d always been for her. Strong. Brave. All-knowing. A hero.
“You’re a great man, Grampa. Everybody knows that.”
“Amy must never know. Ever. Promise.”
She wasn’t sure what exactly she promised. Hide his stories? All of them? Some? But still, she knew she’d do anything he asked.
“I promise.”
He lay back on his buffalo hide, exhausted.
“We begin tonight. Come alone, after supper.”
Rose prepared to leave him, his eyes already heavy, but he stopped her before she stood, his hand on her arm.
“One thing more. I choose you, Rose, to shoot the gun south for me,” he said.
Rose couldn’t believe her grandfather asked her to do this, with such honor involved. She was a twenty-two-year-old woman, not a man of the family, not an elder. And yet he invited her, as one of four he would so ask, to shoot the bullet at his funeral that would guide his way home. A lump in her throat threatened. Whoever could love her again like this once her grandfather was gone?
“A woman can’t—” she began.
“We make our own tradition,” Grampa Cow Tom interrupted. “Remember?”
“Ma’am won’t—”
“Will you do it?”
She’d made too many promises already, promises she didn’t quite understand, but keeping secrets was different from standing up to everyone and demanding to break with tradition, without him there to guide her. Rose couldn’t make a false promise, not now, not to him, and yet she knew to claim this honor would require more courage than she possessed. The family would surely object, insulted she would put herself forward in such a way, at her grandfather’s request or no.
She was wedged, somewhere between duty and personal failing and dread. Her grandfather had hold of her arm, waiting for her answer. She closed her eyes, tight. She couldn’t speak.
Please. Please. I can’t do this alone. Help me. Please.
For the first time in years, she called on Twin, as if he was no longer a place of peace in a single-stoned grave to sweep and pay tribute to, but of this world and not the next. Hers was a silent, desperate plea.
The tepee grew warmer, all things suspended. He came to her side with a swiftness that surprised her. She couldn’t see Twin, of course not, she never had, but she opened her eyes and the contours of the tepee’s dark interior seemed to fall away, as if she observed them from a great distance instead of close on. The kerosene lantern gave off inconsequential light, yet the blue brightness almost blinded. He was here, by her side, and Twin was fearless. Twin was wild. Twin was very, very angry. He frightened her, threatened to overwhelm her, but at least she was not alone.
“I will shoot the gun south, Grampa,” she said. “I promise.”
Chapter 48
ROSE’S GAZE WANDERED upward toward the white dome atop Cane Creek Baptist Church in Canadian Colored Town, framed by the brilliant blue of the cloudless Oklahoma sky. Her grandfather built the church himself, with his own hands. She needed a moment of relief from the freshly crowded hole at her feet. Off to the right lay Twin’s river stone. For years, she’d kept it free of invading weeds in summer and spent leaves in fall, but the stone without a body beneath became harder to honor. But after these last days listening to her grandfather’s failing voice, raspy but steady, she had greater understanding.
Rose reclaimed herself and bowed her head, eyes closed, a proper mourner, but still she couldn’t force herself to peer downward into the gaping hollow. They’d surrounded him in pine, in a six-by-four box of her uncle John’s making, and now they all stood around the clotted earth, lost in their own memories. She’d tried without success yesterday to busy herself, with cooking and sewing and plucking chickens, closing her ears against the pounding of nails as they prepared his final resting place. The very thought of her grandfather enclosed and stationary in one place caused her physical pain, even though she knew the body that lay before them was only the shell of the man she’d known and depended on her entire life, nothing more now than a collection of soon-to-be-gone muscle and skin and hair ripe to slough.
“Gramma?” Rose questioned.
There was no answer. Rose felt her grandmother’s heavy weight against her arm.
Rose held tight, providing a counterbalance for the gray-haired woman’s stooped stance, helping her remain upright. She avoided the wide plains of her grandmother’s face. She’d glanced once when first leaving the church and filing toward the cemetery, seeking out the familiarity of Gramma Amy’s dark eyes, always so reassuring, so stoic, no matter the circumstance. But today, there was no trace of the daily comfort from her grandmother that Rose expected. Gramma Amy seemed lost and confused, as if unsure where she was or how she came to be standing at the lip of a yawning graveside hole with her husband shut away from her, separated after all these years by a handful of thin pine planks and the impossible gulf called death.
At Rose’s elbow, Elizabeth cried softly, cloth in hand to blot at her eyes. Her little sister was still not fully grown, but even so, it was easy to decipher the telling promise of a woman’s guile just below the surface, awaiting bloom. Rose resisted the urge to comfort Elizabeth, staking out these moments as her own communion with her grandfather. Let Ma’am see to Elizabeth this time.
When the moment came, she broke away from the other mourners and took
her place before the open hole with the other three, all men, awaiting her turn. It had been almost easy, asserting her right to fire the gun. She’d envisioned herself as a bullet, encased in a hard shell, ready for discharge, unwavering, and calmly declared what she planned to do. And her family yielded to Grampa Cow Tom’s last wish in the face of such resolve, even Ma’am, with little protest.
Her uncles shot first, and second, and then she gripped the pistol as firmly as she’d been taught and took aim toward the south. When she pulled back on the trigger, her shot rang true. After Uncle Harry fired the final bullet, she returned to her place beside her grandmother.
“Gramma Amy,” she whispered again.
Her grandmother looked to her then, her face blank, no longer elder to ward, but with the fullness of giving way and letting go.
“Time for the farewell handshake.”
Gramma Amy didn’t budge.
“Time to throw the dirt,” Rose urged, and led her to the foot of the grave. At the reminder, her grandmother shuffled forward a few steps, obedient to the sound of Rose’s voice, and stooped to grab a handful of soil to throw into the open grave.
“He’s gone,” her grandmother said, to no one in particular.
“Yes, Gramma. Gone.” She wasn’t sure what else to say, what else could be said, and she helped Amy stand again as others filed past to throw their own fistfuls of dirt into the hole.
“It came too soon,” Gramma Amy said.
True enough. But Rose believed her grandfather’s soul already freed. He himself taught her that concept, the certainty in his voice reassuring to the girl she had been at twelve, in those terrible Fort Gibson days. Surrounded by sickness and starvation and suffering, he had described death not as a physical place but as transition, a natural next step that came for everyone.