A Parchment of Leaves (3 page)

I
STOOD WITHIN
the shadows of the porch when Saul took Daddy out in the yard to ask for my hand. I had told Saul that it was customary to ask the mother of a Cherokee girl first, but he felt it would be a betrayal of Daddy if he did not tell him before anyone else. They were friends, after all.

Daddy leaned against the gate, his face made darker and older by the dying light. I knowed Daddy would say it was all right, but that he'd tell Saul to ask for Mama's permission. I seen Daddy nod his head and put his finger to the touch-me-not bush that hung on the fence. All of the flowers were gone from it now, for summer was beginning to die. For some reason, I felt sick to my stomach.

Mama's voice was hot beside my ear. “It's been decided, then.”

“Not unless you say so.”

“What do you expect me to do? Mash out what you want so bad?” She stood there in the doorway, folding a sheet with such force that I thought the creases might never come out. She worked it into a neat square, then snapped it out onto the still air and folded it again.

“I'll tell him to go ahead with it, but you know it ain't what I want. It's not right. Your daddy's great-great-granny was killed by white men. My people bout starved to death hiding in them mountains when they moved everbody out. I can't forgive that.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Eighty years, almost.”

“Might as well been yesterday.”

“Daddy says we're Americans now,” I said, searching for something to say.

Mama's eyes were small and black and her skin seemed to be stretched tightly on her skull. I turned away, as I couldn't look at her.
“Tetsalagia,”
Mama said.
I am Cherokee.
I knew this much of our old language, as Mama said it to Daddy when they got into fights about how their children ought to be raised up. “That's his way,” she said. “Not mine.”

“Don't do me thisaway, Mama. Your own sister married a white man.”

“And I ain't heard tell of her since. She's forgot everything about herself.”

“I never knowed much to begin with,” I said, more hateful than I intended. “You all act like the past is a secret.”

“Well, that's your Daddy's fault. Not mine.”

In the yard, Saul and Daddy stood with their hands in their pockets. I realized that their friendship was gone. They'd never go hunting together or go on with their notion of butchering a hog together this winter. Now they would only be father and son-in-law, one dodging the other. Saul would take me away from this creek, and Daddy would hold it against him, whether he intended to or not. They looked like they were searching for something else to talk about.

“You know you'll have to leave this place,” she said, like she could read my thoughts. She whispered, as if they might hear us. “Leave Redbud Camp. All the people you've knowed your whole life.”

“I know it, Mama. I'm eighteen year old, though. Most girls my age has babies,” I said, but this didn't make a bit of difference to her. She put her hand on my arm, and I turned to face her.

“I don't want you to leave me,” she said. I knowed this had been hard for her to put into words; she was not the kind of woman who said what her heart needed to announce. I listened for tears in her voice but could hear none. She was too stubborn to cry for me, but her words just about killed me. “I'm afraid I'll never see you again.”

“That's foolishness,” I said. “You know I'd never let that happen.”

There was movement down on the yard, and I watched as Daddy headed up the road. I could see that he was hurt over my leaving. He was walking up on the mountain to think awhile. Most of my uncles got drunk when they were tore up, but Daddy always just went up on Redbud and listened to the wind whistle in the rocks.

Saul strode across the yard, as deliberate and broad shouldered as a man plowing a field. I eased past Mama. I didn't want to be out there when he asked her for my hand. I didn't want to remember the way her face would look when she agreed to it.

I lit a lamp and made the wick long so that I could see good by it. I carried the lamp through each little room, trying to memorize the house I had knowed all my life. I made a list of two or three things I wanted to take: one of the quilts Mama and her sisters had made, the cedar box my granddaddy had carved, the walnut bushel basket I had always gathered my beans in. I was homesick already and hadn't even left. I sucked in the smell of the place, memorized the squeaks in the floor. I run my hands over Mama's enamel dishpan, wrapped my fingers about the barrel of the shotgun Daddy kept by the door.

When I walked back into the front room, I knowed Saul would be standing there in the door. I didn't run to him. I set the lamp down on a low table so that my face would be lost to the grayness. I didn't want him to see the hesitation on my face. He was so happy he was breathing hard. “It's decided,” he said.

Still I stood in the center of the room, although I knowed he wanted me to come be folded up in his big arms.

“I know we'll have to live with your people,” I said, “so I want to marry amongst mine.”

“All right,” he said, and then he come to me and picked me up. I cried into the nape of his neck, not knowing if it was from grief or happiness, for both gave me wild stirrings in my gut.

I
t was a ritual between us that every morning my mother would comb out my hair. Sometimes—when I was very lucky—she would tell me about the people who had lived long before us. On the morning I was to be married, I realized it might be the last time she would run the narrow teeth of that comb down the length of my hair, the last time she would speak to me in the same manner.

She roused me from sleep very early that morning. The world was still dark when I got up, and it was such a quiet morning that it made you want to whisper so that you didn't break the stillness. It was black as the ace of spades and it seemed everyone, everything, was asleep except us two. There was not even a cricket or katydid stirring. The moon looked like melted iron. She led me out onto the porch, where two cups of coffee set on the table. The coffee was bitter—the way she liked it—but I choked it down gratefully. I was afraid I might forget the taste of her coffee once I moved to God's Creek. I swirled it round in my mouth so that it soaked into my teeth.
I thought I might be able to pull back this taste someday and remember the way she looked so early in the morning. Mama looked exactly the same when she got up as she had when she laid down. Her eyes were not swelled by sleep, her hair barely out of place, never the crease of pillow on her cheek.

“We'll set out here so we don't wake up your daddy,” she whispered, and then I knowed that she was going to tell me one of the old tales. Daddy frowned on living in the past.

Even the creek seemed to be trying to silence itself. I imagined that it had slowed to a trickle through the night and only when daylight spread itself out would it rush out of the mountain again, tearing through the leaves of ferns on the bank.

“I should have let you sleep,” she said. “This will be a tiresome day for you.”

“I'm glad you got me up,” I said, and I was. The air smelled so warm and juicy that the threat of autumn seemed an impossible thing.

“I'm being selfish,” she said, and blowed a line of breath across the top of her coffee. She supped from it with caution. “I want a little time with you to myself before all your aunts and girl cousins land on us like a pack of crows. They'll want to be in on getting you ready for the wedding.”

Mama got up and pulled the comb out of her apron pocket. If I hadn't knowed better, I might have thought she slept with that apron tied about her waist. I could not remember ever seeing her without it.

“I thought I might comb your hair out good,” she said, like it was not a strange thing to do this early in the morning.

She hustled around behind my chair and ran her small, thick hand down my plait. “You're blessed with such a head of hair,” she said. Then I felt her take the yarn from the plait's end and start to unbraid it very slowly.

I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. Mama was careful to
stop and work her way through the tangles. She knowed how to fool with hair. She could fashion a three-foot-long plait or wind up a bun in a matter of minutes.

“When your great-grandmother died, her man made them cut off a foot of her hair and wrap it up in the funeral net for him,” she said. I sat up a little more straight, alert at hearing this story once again. It was never old to me; it was like a song that you never tire of hearing. “A foot never made much difference, since her hair struck the back of her knees, anyway.

“He loved her like air, they said. He loved Lucinda the way most women love their men. You know that he saved her life, don't you? They was meant to be together, if anybody ever was.”

I was silent. There was no need to say anything. She didn't need me to prod the story along. I kept my eyes closed and pictured my people. There were no photographs, but I had always carried a picture of them in my mind.

“Lucinda was just a little child when they was ordered out of their homeland. Her people wasn't about to go, though. For all they knowed, they was being marched off to a death camp. No sir, they run off. They scratched out refuge in them mountains. Roaming, never staying no place long. They hid. Sometimes below them they'd see the soldiers, see lines of people being marched out. From high cliffs they seen boatloads being took up the river. They could pick out the faces of people they knowed.”

She whispered, leaning close to my ear as she worked through a rat's nest of tangles.

“They hid for years. They'd run up on people who told them that the army had moved, that the government was tired of looking. Lucinda was getting to be a big girl, about eight year old, I believe. Her people had lived a little while on a big, wild mountain, had built them a good cabin and made friends with some white people they trusted. They didn't dare to go back home, but they felt safe there on the mountain. They got to where they'd let Lucinda roam some.”

“And she was out picking blackberries, wasn't she?” I said.

“Out picking blackberries. High summer, the sun a white ball straight over her head. The woods full of birdcall, so loud that she couldn't hear anything but. A creek close by, falling hard on big rocks. Her basket was full.”

I could see Lucinda. Against the black that was the inside of my eyelids, I seen it all: her little dress, her fingers scratched by briers, the beads of sweat standing on her forehead.

“She didn't know how close she was to the road, paid no attention to the cloud of dust rising over the trees. She moved on down the mountainside, followed the thicket, so heavy with berries that she had to bend low where the vines was near touching the ground.”

The comb slid through more freely now that she had rid my hair of knots. She went faster, and even though she did not raise her voice, she talked quicker, her words matching the hooves of the horses that I knowed were coming up that road toward Lucinda.

“Her back was to the road, the river on the other side of it. And on she went. She should have knowed by the white dust that was on the berries. Should have knowed how close she was to being out in the road. By the time she heard the horses coming down toward her, she could see them. Men in uniforms, blue they was. The metal on their rifles caught sun, and she dropped the basket of berries. She knowed right then to move, to run, but she couldn't. She looked at the first horseman's face and she could tell that he hadn't seen her, but he would.”

Mama stopped combing. She put both her hands atop my head, like she was feeling the shape of my skull, testing it the way she did melons when their bottoms had lost their yellow and they were ready for picking.

“Then an arm come through the trees, and she seen it try to find something to take hold of. All he could catch was her braid, and he pulled her up like a man taking hold of a snake's tail. She flew up and the tree limbs tore across her face. She landed on top of him and they
both fell into the tangles of brush. She laid there on him, her back to his chest. His big hand come around to cap over her mouth.

“The soldiers went on, none the wiser.”

“And that was him, wasn't it?” I said.

“Your great-granddaddy, hiding out in that same mountain with his people. Eight year later, he married her.”

It was here that Mama always stopped speaking. She could never go on beyond this point without prodding.

“Can you remember them?” I asked.

“Lord, no,” she said, and laid the comb on the table. She set down and took her coffee back in hand, although I knowed it had to be ice-cold by this time. “They was long dead before I come along. But right after they married, they left that mountain and come here, to Redbud. And that's how we ended up here.”

I had a quick revelation and couldn't understand why I had not thought of it before. I realized that she must have had the hair all along, and this morning she would give it to me. It was to be my wedding present.

“Do you have the hair?”

Mama smiled. It was not often that she let her teeth show. She fished down into her apron pocket, a square of cloth that had held so many things in my own lifetime, and brought out a net with the ball of hair inside. It looked like silk curled up there, like a great round wad of night sky. She held it on her flat palm, balancing it like it was something that she wanted to know the weight of.

“He figured, see, that since this was the part at the very end of her hair, it was the same hunk he had grabbed hold of all them years before. He wanted that piece of her to keep.”

Mama put the net into my hands. It was heavy and cool, like black water made solid in my hand. I brought it up to my nose and breathed in its scent. It smelled of the cedar chest Mama had kept it in all these years, but I imagined that maybe this was the scent Lucinda had had about her, too. Maybe she had smelled just as
musky and sweet. I pictured the two of them, my great-grandparents, as they rode over the mountains up into Kentucky, where they settled. I imagined that all of the cedars they passed through on that journey planted this smell on their skin so thickly that they had never been able to wash it away.