Citizens Creek (26 page)

“I have to give it back,” he said. “And four bullets.” He fished these out of his jacket and gave her those as well.

Amy pocketed the bullets and pistol, and spread her arms wide, circling one hand over her head, as if swinging an imaginary lasso, encompassing their encampment.

“Protect us,” Amy said, her voice firm. “Keep us in the circle of family.”

She gathered a handful of loose dirt and threw bits over her left shoulder, weaving around each family member in a snakelike dance as she softly chanted a wordless tune. Rose gave herself over to her grandmother’s incantations, and followed along behind her, looping as she looped, shuffling as she shuffled. By the time Gramma Amy gave up her chanting, Grampa Cow Tom was already snoring where he lay on the ground, and Rose had worked up a fierce sweat. Rose covered her grandfather with a blanket.

That evening, before dark fell, they put Granny Sarah in the ground. Grampa Cow Tom, more himself after his sleep, dug the hole himself, and after she was safely buried, and the dirt covered the body, he fired the pistol four times. First to the north, then west, then south, and finally east.

Granny Sarah was on her way home.

The next day, with her family still listless in the aftermath of Granny Sarah’s service, Rose snuck away to find Chibona. She wasn’t sure how to go about the task, but hungered for reconnection with the Cherokee boy. If only she could forge a bond outside the family. A friend of her own, now she had lost Twin. It needn’t matter that they didn’t speak the same language, only that he might be kind to her. That he let her talk to him.

There were thousands of Indians here, countless tribes represented, but Rose knew Chibona’s family was allowed inside the fort’s gates, and would be among the Cherokees there. That was at least a place to start. She slogged through the endless sea of communities of misery outside the gates, refusing to allow the suffering she witnessed to slow her resolve. She hadn’t ventured very far on
her own since coming to Fort Gibson, except under the protection of her grandfather or to fetch water, and she was surprised to see so many pockets of play—a small rectangular mudded field of children younger than her getting up a game of stickball with dead branches and a lopsided ball of moss, girls her age braiding one another’s hair, mothers tickling their lean babies until they squirmed and twisted their faces into smiles. Life went on.

Though soldiers in faded blue milled about shouldering rifles, Rose slipped through without incident. She’d been inside, with Grampa Cow Tom, but it was different on her own, as if the ominous weight of the place was leavened by the scope of her small task instead of the burden of the large duties her grandfather undertook.

Rose knew Chibona wouldn’t be inside the fort’s buildings, reserved for military and officials, and instead walked the muddy, close-packed trails where so many Cherokee families set up haphazard housing. She looked for over an hour, peering over strung blankets acting as walls, and small tepees in zigzag formation, and crude huts to keep off rain. Just like outside the gate, Cherokees mostly sat idle, passing time. Her mood flagged.

She heard yelling behind the company commander’s office, shouts of cheer and not distress, and, drawn to the sound, anything that might boost her frame of mind, walked until she saw a game of stickball, with dozens of young men running the small, cleared area. The only difference between the game outside the gate and this one inside was that here they had a real deerskin ball. They had jury-rigged a goal, and ran up and down the short field in teams, chests bare, feathers flying. Rose couldn’t tell who was on which team, but the sheer purposefulness and the athleticism displayed were a joy to watch. As if they were young and carefree and not a part of the horror of Fort Gibson.

Rose almost forgot her mission, engrossed. And then she saw him. Chibona, one of the players on the makeshift field. He moved
with the intensity of a warrior, whooping as he blocked a shot, emitting an intimidating screech as he stole the lopsided ball from another player and sped away toward the center goal.

She’d found him.

She waited for his time at the game to be finished. There were so many young Cherokee boys waiting on their turn to play, and they rotated in and out in shifts. Chibona came off the field with several others, bathed in sweat, his arm around the shoulders of another boy his age. There were several of them, laughing and joking, and Rose was in high spirits at her boldness, an act as bold as her grandfather might do, that she’d risked seeking him out, so happy for the opportunity to share in something lighthearted. She put herself in Chibona’s path.

“Chibona,” she said, and smiled her prettiest smile.

It took a moment for Chibona to place her. Rose read the confusion on his face, and saw it give way to uncertainty.

“Chibona,” one of his friends mimicked, and the others took up the refrain, each interpretation more high-pitched and girlish than the last. The boy who’d come off the field with Chibona said some words Rose couldn’t understand in Tsalagi, and made a gesture toward her face and then her body and laughed. Rose looked to Chibona for rescue.

Chibona hesitated, but then he laughed too, his words to his friends coming fast and matching their tone. Laughing.

At first, Rose was pinned to where she stood, frozen, until she had the presence of mind to run, their laughter at her back, calling out words she was thankful she couldn’t understand. She ducked behind one of the buildings and pressed herself into the shadows, afraid to cross paths with any of them again. She wasn’t sure what just happened, whether they laughed because she was a girl, or because she was Creek, or because she was dark, or because she was homely.

She stayed crouched there for some time, until she admitted
to herself she needed to find her way home in the daylight, before darkness fell. Rose gathered herself and darted through the inner-fort trails, head down, retracing her steps until she came to the front gate. And there, waiting, was Chibona. He was alone now, none of his friends in sight, staring at her.

“Rose,” he said. He shook his head and mumbled more cryptic words. He looked regretful, but what was that to her? He had laughed, when all she wanted was a friend. “Rose,” he repeated.

Rose wouldn’t look at him. She focused instead on a jagged rock by the gate’s post, just the size to fit her hand. She could almost feel the spread of her fingers curl around the uneven edges of the rock, the heft as she lifted the stone over her head, and the driving force as she brought it down on Chibona’s fine head, again and again until the blood ran. The light was overbright, a blinding blue. The air was overhot.

“Do it,” Twin shouted. “Do it now. Now.”

Twin’s voice reverberated in her head, seemed to travel straight down her spine and back up again, shaking loose every other thought. She didn’t move, not one inch in any direction, holding herself back. She tried to drown out Twin’s voice, tried not to give way to the swelling rage, but the pounding at her ears kept directing her toward the promised justice that bloodied rock could bring. She took a step forward, toward Chibona, toward the rock, toward retribution, and Twin’s voice grew louder still, excited.

But another voice competed, quieter, measured. A calm whisper instead of a roar, and suddenly, concentrating on that small spot of quiet, Rose’s mind cleared enough to ask herself a question. What would Grampa Cow Tom do? The pierce of Twin’s voice still rang in her head, but fell out of tempo with the wild beating of her heart. The blue surrounding her dimmed a shade.

Rose forced her gaze away from the jagged rock, pressed her hands into fists and kept them tight and in control by her sides, and ran as fast as she could through the fort’s gate, never stopping once until she got home.

Twin was back.

All the times she called on him since leaving the ranch, and he didn’t come, and now he came and went of his own accord every day. Always pushing her to do terrible things. Hang around by the distribution center in the fort with the other ragtag children and steal part of another family’s food ration. Hold Elizabeth’s nose and mouth shut as she slept, until her sister woke up gasping for air. Throw her cousin Lulu’s beloved bead doll, the only thing she had left from the ranch, in the sewer pit and watch it sink into the muck. Disappear from the encampment for hours without explanation to anyone. But mostly, Twin pushed her to go back into the fort and seek revenge on Chibona. Twin was obsessed with Chibona, and his remedies all involved blood. Slice off a finger. Bash in his head. Break his leg in two places so he couldn’t play stickball. Twin came up with a new punishment every day, an evil spirit on her shoulder, whispering and yelling and demanding. Rose stopped sleeping more than a few hours at a stretch.

Rose stayed away from inside the fort, even when her grandfather asked her to come along with him, as he often did now Granny Sarah was dead. She was afraid of what Twin might make her do. But after she dislocated Cousin Emmaline’s shoulder in a fight over a handful of
puska
, Rose began to shut Twin out, one bad deed at a time, hollowing herself out, refusing him. When she felt him beside her, she ignored him, and attached herself to tasks from Ma’am or Gramma Amy or Grampa Cow Tom or Aunt Maggie, the more mindless, the better. She kept on guard with Elizabeth and the cousins, Lulu and Emmaline, and at that first seductive twitch to dole out harm, went off by herself. She gave up all thought of Chibona
as a friend. She gave up thoughts of any friend. The remedy was simple. She’d give it all up. She’d starve Twin of her need until he went away once more, for good, and she would never call on him again. He was dangerous.

Rose hated Fort Gibson. She didn’t want to know anyone else’s story, full of hardship and suffering. She didn’t know how her grandfather did it, listening to one bad-luck tale after the next. She didn’t want to meet anyone new, or remember anyone’s name she didn’t have to. What was the point? They might be dead tomorrow, gone forever. She went about her tasks, but walled herself in, obedient. Something shut down inside her, and she felt it as a dimming flame. She wondered if that flame could ever burn bright again, especially without Twin as its spark.

Chapter 36

DURING THE MONTH
of July, rains of extraordinary severity rolled through Fort Gibson, unattended by lightning or thunder. A scorching sun followed each fall of rain, and disease spread quickly in the Negro section outside the garrison. Many months had passed since Granny Sarah died, and despite the lingering sadness, at least her great-grandmother’s passing felt to Rose more like a natural transition after a long life lived, not this foul thing that swept the camp without mercy, carrying the young and strong off after a day or two of suffering. They’d had a proper funeral for Granny Sarah, and observed the Creek power of fours—four days before being put to ground, four gunshots—but that was all before the cholera epidemic. The burials now were so frequent everyone in the settlement lived almost atop shallow graves hastily dug, not even three feet from the soil’s surface, subject to uncovering by the next bad rain.

Twin was gone again, it felt this time forever. His voice grew weaker and weaker in her ear until one day she realized he wasn’t there at all, prodding her toward this or that. Rose had so little investment in her surroundings, maybe Twin simply lost interest. Some part of Rose missed him, and she sometimes nursed her emptiness around the loss, but mostly she feared his return, and the havoc he could bring. Cousin Emmaline had forgiven her, and she put her misguided episode with the Cherokee boy behind her, a naive and desperate confrontation she regretted. She dug in with her own family.

Since the cholera, Gramma Amy kept Rose busy cleaning. Her grandmother was consumed with hauling out waste and garbage.
The water in their kettle was always at a boil, to wash blankets and rags and tunics in shifts because there were no extras. The family lived in a hut now, in a settlement of almost all women and children about a quarter of a mile from the garrison, scant shelter against the elements but at least out of direct rain and sun and wind. Eleven of them made the area allotted to them work, grandparents, aunt, mother, sister, and cousins in a space not quite ten feet by twelve feet.