A Dangerous Age (8 page)

“You didn’t go riding there in a car with a boy,” my grandmother said, and my grandfather was about to get into it too when Bobby drove up in the yard and got out of the truck, came up on the porch, shook my grandfather’s hand, and started talking to him about fishing.

So we got away okay, but I forgot to take my cheerleading costume, so when I got back, there was hell to pay. Except by then Bobby and I had been down the Big Black from Pinewood to Five Feathers and on down to Reserve and spent two nights in the woods in sleeping bags, and I could see how good he was at everything in the world, from making a fire without looking like he was doing a thing but breathing, to holding me against him like there wasn’t even air between our hearts, and it was done. Not that we hadn’t already loved each other for weeks before going off to be alone with the earth and make our bond.

Except all that was twenty years ago, and now he was making a living building houses around Tulsa and I was the first woman editor of the
Tulsa World
and our lives had moved further apart—but not really, not in the place where the life of the heart and soul is lived.

“I
WANT TO DO
it right this time,” he said. “I want your grandfather to do a blessing for us in Tahlequah, and have the dances and the fertility rites and wear the deerskin robes. I have a headdress that was my uncle’s. He gave it to me right before he died.”

“Granddaddy’s too old to do a blessing ceremony. We’ll go to him and ask him who to get to do it.”

“And we’ll have children. I want a child, maybe more than one.” He was so proud, sitting beside me at the kitchen table with his shoulders back and his head lifted. He was a grown man in his prime and it was time for me to be a woman, and I had already made up my mind that that was what I wanted to be. I wanted it because I wanted him, and without children, without sons and daughters, there was no real love, no real partner or dance, only new ways to be lonely and alone.

“Then let’s hurry up and get that going,” I said. “Because I’m already almost too old to have babies, and I don’t want my children having old people for their parents.”

“Is that so?” he said. He was finishing off his eggs and bacon and moving in without doing anything but changing his eyes, and I got up from the table and started trying not to give in to it, but hell, I love to fuck the man.

“I’
M SORRY
I’
M LATE
,” I told the reporters who had been waiting in my office for fifteen minutes when I got there at ten thirty. “The goddamn traffic on Harvard Avenue was so bad I started to get out and walk.”

“You want us to go back to the courthouse and do another piece on the Hardin trial?”

“Yes. You didn’t need to wait on me. Go on over and see if the jury’s coming in, and interview anyone you can grab. This afternoon I need someone to cover the soccer games at two junior high schools. Take a photographer. Jim and Beth are on the rag about circulation again. Jim read something about the growth in population in the county and he thinks we need to make the local news more prominent, and I think he’s right. So what? Are you mad at me for being late? I just moved in with my ex-husband, all right? I’m sorry. I’m human.”

“After all,” Charles Ott said, and he came around to my desk and gave me a kiss and handed me his expense report for staying in the hotel with the jury for three days. “It’s okay, Olivia. We’re cutting you slack. Just don’t let it settle into a habit.”

“It might,” I answered. “What the hell. I’m in love and we’re going to have a blessing ceremony as soon as we can get it going. You’re both invited. It takes two days. You ever been to one?”

“No,” they both answered. “But I guess we’re going to now.”

“You’re going to cover it. One of you is. I’m going to make it page one and the cover of the living section on Sunday. Jim wants local news, I’m giving him local news.”

O
NLY IT WASN’T
going to be that easy because nothing ever is, and if it were, we wouldn’t want to do it anymore
because the real enemy of human beings is boredom. Or so I told myself when I started throwing up on Saturday morning, just when I’d arranged to take the weekend off so Bobby and I could go down to Tahlequah and see Granddaddy and get things going for the blessing ceremony.

“I think that’s what happens when you get pregnant,” Bobby said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, patting my back. I didn’t feel all that bad, just groggy and sleepy and more or less wanting to be left alone.

“Go get one of those pregnancy test kits from the drugstore,” I said. “Buy two kinds and come back as quick as you can. And some Seven-Up. Get me some Seven-Up or a Coke.”

I fell asleep and drifted into a wonderful strange sort of dream about being on the pier at Lake Wedington. Bobby was in the water saving a bunch of babies that had fallen in. He would get one and hand it to me and I’d put it in the basket, and then he’d get another one and hand that one to me. The babies weren’t in danger in the water. They were floating, just waiting for him to swim over and pluck them out and hand them to me. It all happened in slow motion, and the sun was shining and it was warm and we just kept on working, getting out the babies, until he came and sat back on the bed and woke me.

“I wish we could do the test now, if you don’t mind. Do you feel like getting up?”

“Read the directions.”

“I already did. You have to urinate—I mean, pee.”

“I know what
urinate
means.” I turned over and started laughing.

Then I sat up on the edge of the bed and tried to get the blood to go back to my brain. I went into the bathroom and urinated into the container and stuck in the swab and walked back into the bedroom, and we watched it turn dark blue.

I felt nauseated for another hour, but Bobby fed me soda crackers and Seven-Up, and by eleven thirty I was dressed and we were in the Nissan driving to Tahlequah to make my grandparents ecstatically happy. I already knew how they would act. Aunt Mary Lily and Grandmother would be worried and happy. Granddaddy would be mystical and happy. He was a mystical man who had been chief of the Cherokee Nation for many years when he was younger. He was Little Sun of Wagoners, son of Morning Sun and Flowering Morning. My grandmother’s lineage was even more interesting, but she didn’t like to talk about it as she was part Arapaho.

“I’ve seen pregnant brides at blessing ceremonies,” Bobby said. “I think you’ll look good, Olivia.”

“I hope we get it going before I’m as big as a house. The office will buzz for weeks with this. Well, at least Jim can’t fire me now, no matter how much I goof off. I could sue him for millions if he fired me because I got pregnant.”

“He won’t fire you anyway. The paper’s twice as good since you took over.” He reached over and touched my hand, and I hated the Nissan Maxima and wished we had the pickup so I
could cuddle up beside him and feel him driving and see his dick getting hard and his breathing slow when he started wanting me. That’s our history, and now our history is going to be something new.

Granddaddy was waiting in the yard down by the gate, pretending to be inspecting the fence, but he’d probably been out there for an hour. We picked him up and he rode in the back-seat to the house. “What took you so long?” he asked. “Your grandmother’s been watching the clock since breakfast.”

“I was throwing up. I’m pregnant, Granddaddy. Bobby and I are going to have a baby.”

“Now you’re railroading,” he said. “It’s been a long time since we had a baby around here.”

Then Mary Lily and Grandmother came out to meet us and we told them our news and they started going crazy.

We went into the house, and the day went by like an hour while everyone gave us advice. In between we talked about the blessing ceremony and how many people we could ask to come and manage to feed, and how we’d have to find places to sleep for the ones from far away. Even when we were leaving, Grandmother and Aunt Mary Lily were still hovering over me, throwing in bits of childbearing advice. Mary Lily was worse than Grandmother, and she had never had a child. She had, however, had a long friendship with the main midwife in our tribe. She had helped at hundreds of births as she reminded me about a hundred times.

“Mary Lily’s been doing exercise classes at the meeting center,” Grandmother said. “She is very full of life lately.”

“We are proud of her,” Granddaddy added. “She is going three times a week. See how slim she is becoming.”

“Kayo’s nephew has been coming around,” Grandmother said.

“It’s tai chi,” Mary Lily said. “It’s for the heart and soul. We have this Vietnamese girl who comes here and shows us how. In China they do it every day. Even very old people go outside on the green spaces and do these exercises. It isn’t anything to do with Kayo Manley’s nephew, Philip Whitehorse. Don’t tell her that, Momma.”

“Okay,” Grandmother said. “It isn’t, then.”

I hugged Grandmother and then I hugged Mary Lily and asked her if there was anything I should be doing that she hadn’t already told me about.

“You need to go see Miss Roisan and get some herbs to take away the sickness,” Mary Lily said for the tenth time. “She makes sachets you keep by the pillow and they take away the morning sickness.”

“She needs to eat soda crackers and let the baby settle into the womb,” my grandmother added. “She doesn’t need any sachets. I had plenty of babies without sachets. It only lasts a few weeks.”

“I have to get back to Tulsa, is what I have to do,” I said. “Aunt Lily, you get me some of those sachets and mail them to me. Will you do that for me?”

“Yes, I will get them tonight.” She moved near to me and I thought, as I often did, of how fortunate I had been to have these people love me.

Bobby and Granddaddy walked to the car together. They had decided to use our pasture for the blessing ceremony so people in Tahlequah wouldn’t have to travel far to come to it.

“We haven’t had a frost,” Bobby said. “Will the chiggers be gone?”

“It will be all right,” Granddaddy answered. “We’ll spray the pasture, and people can stay in the hotels on the highway instead of sleeping on the ground. It’s no use to sleep on the ground in this new time.”

“I want to sleep on the ground,” I said. “Or else we might just as well have the ceremony in the basketball gym.”

“Some can sleep on the ground and some in tents and some in the motels on the highway,” Granddaddy decreed. “We will do this soon even though it’s winter.”

“There isn’t a hurry,” I said. “We’ve already been married, Granddaddy. It’s not like this baby is illegitimate. Everyone knows we were married before.”

“Then get married again tomorrow,” he said. “Do this right away.”

“We will,” Bobby said. “We’ll do it this week.”

O
N
M
ONDAY WE
went to the courthouse and got a license, and on Wednesday afternoon we got married in my house with half my reporters and editors there, all laughing and
being cynical, and Bobby’s father and his new wife and some of our old friends from Tahlequah. We were married by a circuit judge and then we all went to dinner in a Mexican restaurant and then dancing at a cowboy bar and then Bobby and I went home, and the next day he moved all his things into my garage and storage shed and it was done. I was Mrs. Bobby Tree again and our baby was growing in my womb, and in six weeks we were going to be blessed by my grandfather, Chief Little Sun of the Cherokee Nation, in a ceremony of such meaning and power that nothing would ever part us again.

We had decided to put off the blessing until after the Christmas holidays. Bobby’s fledgling construction company was in the middle of a building restoration, it was money time at the paper because of Christmas advertisements, and Granddaddy wanted time to call in his chits with some dancers and medicine men from around the state.

T
HERE ARE STRANGE
energies and currents in the stream of human events, and many things no one understands and only seers and artists notice or record. Little Sun had watched such currents all his life, had been drawn to notice them and keep them in his awareness so he would be prepared to help when help was needed. It had made him a great chieftain of his people and a great father and grandfather to his children. It also made him a hard man to live with for his wife, Crow, whose intuition and wisdom were at least equal to her husband’s, or maybe even keener.

Little Sun had just told her he was going into town to talk to a Chickasaw medicine woman who had moved there a few years before from Mississippi.

“I want Spotted Horse Woman to stay in the big tent with me for the first night.”

“No. You are asking her other things. Tell me what you have dreamed.”

“No, I don’t wish to talk about it here.”

“Then I will go with you today to talk with her.”

“Walk outside with me to feed the mare. Put on the coat Mary Lily gave you.”

Crow walked to him and past him out the door. She had put a knitted medicine shawl over her shoulders and had pulled her long hair back into a braid. She went down the stairs and stood in the yard waiting for him.

“I have dreamed for six nights that we are being pursued by wolves,” Little Sun began. “Olivia is small and you are carrying her, and Mary Lily is in a tree, waiting for us to get to her.”

“Where are the other children?”

“They are not in the dreams. I want to call to our sons, but I must keep moving. It is hard to move across the difficult terrain; there are deep gullies and the ground is hard packed, as though there had been a drought for many months.”

“I believe your dreams,” she said. “I have had feelings also, many days in the mornings. I want to call Olivia and talk to her and see if she is too busy. She is always too busy. It is not good to be busy when the new baby is finding itself in the
womb. What should we do? Does Spotted Horse Woman say what to do?”

“She says we should send our thoughts to surround her.” He paused to see if Crow was looking at him yet, but her gaze was still toward the ground. “Spotted Horse Woman is making prayer wheels. Nothing will keep this from coming. We must wait and see. Worrying about it does not change its course. We must keep moving and be strong for when we are needed.”