Pigs in Heaven (28 page)

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.

O
N 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.”

Roving bands of teenagers move through the woods from here to there: long-haired girls in jeans and Keds, and long-haired boys in jeans and complicated athletic shoes. Some of the boys are tough-looking, with black bandanas pushed high on their shiny foreheads and knotted in the back. They hail each other through the woods in English, but when they address the older people, their greetings are Cherokee. Even toddlers, when they run up to slap dark skirts with grubby hands, open their small mouths and let out strange little bitten-off Cherokee songs. Alice is fascinated. She thinks of the holy-roller churches in Mississippi, where people spoke in tongues, though of course in that case it was more or less every man for himself, whereas here they understand one another. She had no idea there was so much actual foreign language thriving right here under the red, white, and blue. The idea thrills her. She
has always wished she had the nerve to travel to foreign lands. Whenever she suggested this to Harland, he reminded her that anything at all you could see in person you could see better on TV, because they let the cameras get right up close. She knew he was right, but always felt misunderstood, even so.

Suddenly there is a sense of quiet, although everyone is still talking. The men are moving toward their trucks. Cash leans over to Alice as he gets up. “Ledger’s just got here,” he explains.

“Who?”

“Ledger Fourkiller. Our medicine chief. He’s over by that standpipe.”

Alice spots him: a small man in jeans and a hat and plaid flannel shirt, hardly one to stand out in the crowd. She doesn’t know what she expected, surely not war paint, but still. “Where you going?” she asks Cash.

“Nowhere. Just to get my eagle feather.”

The other men are doing the same: each producing a large brown feather from a glove compartment to tuck into a hatband. Alice would like to see Boma Mellowbug, but she doesn’t. Instead, a woman with a walk like a she-bear is waddling over to Alice with two cups of coffee. She says something like “Siyo” to Cash. Cash introduces his sister Letty to Alice.

“Pleased to meet you,” Alice says, though she actually feels just about every other known emotion besides “pleased.” But she takes the coffee gratefully. The night has grown clear and chilly against her bare arms.

“You all looked cold. I thought you needed some hot coffee.” She gives Cash some sort of look, but Alice has no idea what it means. Another woman, even shorter and broader than Letty, comes up behind them and reaches up high to clap Cash on the shoulder.

“This here’s Alice,” Letty tells the woman. “She’s staying over at Hornbuckles’.”

“My daddy’s sister married a Hornbuckle,” the woman tells Alice. “Did you know that?” she asks Letty.

“Well, now, sure I did. Leona Hornbuckle.”

“No, not Leona. She was a Pigeon, before she married. I’m talking about Cordelia.”

“Well, sure, Cordelia was your aunt. I knew that.”

“She was a Grass. Cordelia Grass.”

“Honey, I know it. I’ve got Grasses related to me through my oldest daughter.”

“No, them’s Adair Grasses. This is the Tahlequah Grasses.”

Alice listens as the argument winds its way through Grasses, Goingsnakes, Fourkillers, and Tailbobs. At that point Cash touches his sister’s arm and points to the fire circle. Both women give a little start and begin to move toward the fire. Cash leans down and touches Alice’s hand. “I’m going to go smoke this pipe. I’ll see you later on.”

The benches have filled up entirely and the chief now stands by the fire. He’s a man of slight build, maybe sixty, distinguished by the fact that a long, pale leather pouch hangs down from his belt. To Alice it looks like a bull’s scrotum.

Sugar appears in the lawn chair next to Alice, out of breath. She leans over and grabs Alice’s arm like a grammar-school girlfriend.

“I didn’t want to interfere with anything.”

Alice has had about enough of the entire Cherokee Nation organizing her love life. “What’s that he’s got on his belt?” she asks, nodding toward the chief. “Balls?”

“Naw, just tobacco and stuff. Plants. It’s his medicine. They’ll all smoke it directly. It isn’t nothing bad.”

“Well, I didn’t think
that
,” Alice says. She wouldn’t expect drugs; it has already struck her that there is no alcohol here. She can smell woodsmoke and coffee and the delicious animal scent of grease on a cooking fire, but none of that other familiar picnic odor. It’s odd, in a way. A hundred pickup trucks on a Saturday night, and not one beer.

The chief raises his head suddenly and sends a high, clean blessing to the tree branches. His voice is so clear it seems to be coming from somewhere above his ears. When he paces to the east of the fire he seems to grow taller, just from taking long strides. He takes some tobacco from his pouch and offers it to the fire, speaking to the
fire itself, the way you might coax a beloved old dog to take a rib bone out of your hand. The fire accepts his offering, and the chief paces some more, talking all the while. He fills a slender white pipe that’s as long as Alice’s arm. The old people move toward the fire, then nearly everyone else shuffles into single file behind them, making a line that circles the whole clearing.

Sugar leans to get up. “I got to go smoke the pipe now,” she whispers. “Afterward, you come sit with me on the Bird Clan benches. You can’t sit with Cash, he’s not Bird, he’s Wolf Clan.” She winks at Alice. “Just as well. You can’t marry inside your clan.”

Sugar hurries to join the line, leaving Alice feeling bewildered and slightly annoyed. She surely had no idea she belonged to a clan. Also she’s apparently the only person for miles around, besides Cash, who isn’t making wedding plans.

The chief hands the pipe to the first old man, who closes his lips on the stem, closes his eyes, and breathes in. Then he rotates the pipe one complete turn, parallel with the ground. It’s an odd-looking gesture that takes both hands. He hands the pipe to the woman behind him in line, the one who was debating Grasses with Letty. The old man walks five or six careful steps toward the east and takes a place at the edge of the clearing. When the woman has gone through the same motions, she joins him. One by one each person takes the pipe; even children do.

Alice spots Annawake in line behind a barrel-chested boy and a slew of kids, and there is Cash, looking like a tall, congenial weed among a cluster of chrysanthemum-shaped women. He seems round-shouldered and easy with himself each time he takes another little step forward. It’s a slow process. Alice keeps her eye on two little twin girls dressed in identical frilled square-dancing skirts, moving patiently forward in the line. When their turn comes, the mother touches the pipe to her own mouth first, then holds it to her children’s lips, helping each one to rotate it afterward. When the last person in line has smoked the pipe and everyone moves to sit down, Sugar motions Alice over to what she says are the Bird Clan benches. “Third
ones from the east, counterclockwise,” she points out with her finger. “So you can find them again.”

“Well, it’s a good enough seat, but I don’t see what makes me belong here.”

Sugar stares. “Alice Faye, you’re just as much Bird as I am. Grandmother Stamper was full-blooded. You get your clan from your mother’s line.”

Alice never met her mother’s mother, a woman of questionable reputation who died dramatically and young somehow in a boat. As the story is told, she didn’t even own the clothes she drowned in; Alice hadn’t especially thought this woman might leave her belonging to a clan. She doesn’t argue, though, because the chief has begun to pray, or talk, again. With his arms crossed he paces back and forth on the bare dirt circle, sometimes looking up at the sky but mostly addressing the fire. His words seem very calm, more like conversation, Alice thinks, than preaching. Sugar says he is preaching, though. “He’s saying how to be good, more or less. Everyday wrongs, and big wrongs. Don’t be jealous, all that business,” she confides. “Same stuff he always says.”