I Cannot Get You Close Enough (12 page)

“We don't need them,”‘ the midwives said. “It takes its time. It's coming now.”

“I want some dope,” Summer Deer screamed. “Get some dope for me.” A terrible pain went through her body and then another and another. Olivia moved down into the birth canal, down the small tortured pathway to the light. There were sirens in the distance now. “They're coming,” Mary Lily said. “They're on their way.”

Olivia's head emerged, then her shoulders, then her arms. Summer Deer stopped screaming. She was leaving now. She was leaving it for good and she regretted that. She regretted bright blue skies and rain and jazz and sun and lysergic acid and cigarettes and beer and sandals and flowers and food. She regretted rivers and trees and stars and full moons rising behind white translucent clouds on warm nights in the Ozarks. She hated leaving fucking. She had loved to fuck. She hated leaving Olivia crying in her sister's arms. It had been a good pregnancy. Up until the end it had seemed like a good thing to do.

The family gathered around the bed. Little Sun and Crow Wagoner, grandparents of the newborn child, May Frost, the married sister, Roper, the oldest son, Creek, the youngest, Mary Lily, the old maid. It was late September. The trees were gold and rust and silver and red. Maples, walnuts, sweetgum, birch and sycamore, sumac and cedar. Round bales of hay were in the fields. Small yellow flowers covered the pastures. Huge crows made their deliberate journeys from the tall white birch trees to the taller pines.

The Wagoners gathered around the bed.

“Her name will be Olivia,” Mary Lily said. “Summer wrote it on a piece of paper.”

“We should tell the father,” Crow said. “The father should know.”

“We tell no one,” Little Sun said. “The child is ours. Mary Lily will care for her.” He took the child from his wife's arms and handed her to his youngest daughter. “Here, Mary Lily. She is yours. She is entrusted to you.”

2

The house where Olivia was born stood on five acres of land beside a creek that ran down to join the Illinois River. The land belonged to the Cherokee nation but the house was the Wagoners' and no one could make them leave as long as they wished to stay. Two miles down a gravel road was a highway. Three miles farther was the town of Tahlequah. As Olivia grew she was allowed to travel farther and farther from the house. First she could go to the edge of their property. Then she could go to the Hawkkiller place, then all the way to the highway. She would rein in her pony beside the last fencepost and watch the cars come down the winding highway going into town. She could not understand what kept them on the road. She thought it must be the Holy Spirit, but the priest said no, the Holy Spirit was too busy for cars. Cars were guided by Saint Christopher.

When she was six years old she began to walk the two miles to the highway. There a dilapidated school bus picked her up and took her to the Roman Catholic school.

“I don't want to go,” she told Mary Lily. “It's boring there. You can't take off your shoes.”

“You have to go,” Mary Lily said. “It's the law.”

“Don't tell them you have me. Say I'm gone. The bus smells bad. It smells like poison gas. We have to sit, sit, sit. I won't go anymore. I won't go there.”

“Never have I seen a child talk so much,” Little Sun put in. He was sitting on a straight chair watching them. “Talk, talk, talk, like a magpie. Talk all day.”

“Like a jaybird,” Crow agreed.

“Like a dove,” Mary Lily added. “Always calling.”

“Why do I have to go?” Olivia said. “I won't go after this. No more after today.”

“We'll find the goats this afternoon,” Mary Lily bribed. “They've been eating up the yard.” She swooped the child up in her arms and tried to kiss her. “Getting so big,” she said. “Too big for me to carry.”

“I won't go,” Olivia said. She laid her hands against Mary Lily's cheeks, a move guaranteed to get her anything she wanted. “I will stay with you and help you beat the goats.”

Wild goats lived in the woods behind the Wagoners' house. They came in at night and ate the gardens and the low branches of the trees. There were also blue curved-horn sheep in a corral and three hens and a rooster. There were five fox terriers, several cats, a bee box with no bees, nine bronze turkeys in a pen, a pet deer, and four apple trees. Olivia's bedroom window looked out upon the apple trees. As long as she lived the sight of blossoming apple trees could make Olivia lonesome for the hard brown soil of Cherokee County and the timeless days when she was smelling and hearing and watching everything and was earnest and terribly momentous and sweet and hot and brave.

 

When she was six she learned to read. The nun who taught first grade at Saint Alphonsus was good at reading out loud. She made Olivia hungry for books. “I want books to read,” Olivia told Mary Lily. The next weekend there was a bookshelf in her room and Mary Lily set to work going to yard sales to fill it up with books. A Girl Scout Handbook appeared, a copy of
The White Cliffs of Dover, The Best Loved Poems of the American People
, a set of five Nancy Drew murder mysteries,
The Cat in the Hat, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Do You Know What I'm Going to Do Next Saturday?
, a book of Cherokee history, three Bibles — the New Catholic Bible, the King James Version of the Bible, and an illustrated children's Bible. Also, a complete set of
Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia
.

One of the main reasons Olivia hated going to school was that it kept her from staying home to look at her books. Especially if it rained. On rainy days she loved to stay in bed with her books all around her and read them to herself and tell herself stories. In Volume B of the encyclopedia there was a story of a family of bears getting ready for their hibernation. She read it over and over again. Sometimes she would take the story into her grandfather's room and snuggle up beside him and beg him to tell her stories of real bears when the Cherokee hunted them. “The head of the bear was a great treasure in the old days,” he would begin. “The father of my father owned three such heads. He earned the first head when he was only sixteen. He went out all alone in spring to trap his bear.”

“How can I make her go to school if you fill her head with stories?” Mary Lily complained. “No wonder she pretends to be sick all the time.”

“I'm sick now,” Olivia would say and clutch her stomach and begin to groan. “I threw up all night long.” Then her grandfather would laugh out loud and Mary Lily would go to work and leave them there.

3

When she was nine years old Olivia asked Mary Lily for a photograph of her father. She already had a photograph of her mother, a five by seven school yearbook picture taken when her mother was seventeen. “Now I must see a picture of my father,” she said. “You must get me one.”

“There isn't one,” Mary Lily said. “There is no such thing.”

“Then write to England.”

“What makes you think he is in England?”

“I think so. I'm pretty sure that's where he must be. We had it in school. It's where those white cliffs are in that poem.”

“He might not be in England.”

“I think that's where he is. He will be coming to get me before too long. I need to know what he looks like.”

That night Mary Lily discussed the conversation with her father. “Tell her what we know,” he said. “Yes. Tell her.”

“No,” Mary Lily answered.

“If she wishes to know what he looks like, tell her what we know.”

“We don't know. We never saw him. Well, there is a photograph in the box of Summer Deer's things. Some photographs.”

“Then give them to her.” Little Sun put his hand on his daughter's arm. “She wants it. She has a right to it. Let her see it.”

“In a while,” Mary Lily said. “After a while.” When she left the room Little Sun worried about her. She was too fat for men so she had given all her love to the little girl. It was too much love for one child. The child is not like us, Little Sun told himself. She will leave us someday and then where will my daughter be. He folded his hands. There was no use to borrow trouble. Trouble would always come. In the meantime he would keep his own counsel and wait and see.

Mary Lily walked around for two days looking like she might cry. She even stayed in bed one day running a fever. The third day was Saturday. She took Olivia into her grandfather's room and opened the safe and took out the shoebox with Summer Deer's things. There were letters and a marriage certificate and an envelope with photographs. Seven snapshots made one day in Chinatown. Olivia looked at the photographs a long time. She kept returning to one of Daniel and Summer Deer together. Daniel had his arm around Summer Deer. Behind them was the great arch of the entrance to Chinatown. In the photograph Daniel was wearing cutoff blue jeans and a blue shirt. His long skinny legs stuck out beneath the jeans. A big grin was on his face. He had his arm around Summer Deer's shoulders. She was wearing white shorts and a stretched white T-shirt. She was wearing her mysterious look.

“It is very warm there, isn't it?” Olivia asked.

“It is California,” Mary Lily explained.

“Is that where he is?”

“No. He's in North Carolina.”

“Oh.”

“Well, that's enough of that for now. Let's go out in the yard and feed the deer. I saw him peeking over the fence this morning. He's hoping you'll come and see him. He is far away from his people. If we don't pet him he might die.”

“I want to keep this picture,” Olivia said, holding up the one of Daniel and Summer Deer together.

“All right. Keep it then.” Mary Lily gathered up the rest of the things and put them away in the shoebox and put the lid on it. Then she tied the string back around it and put it back in the unlocked safe and shut the door. Nothing was ever locked in the Wagoners' house. There was nothing they owned they thought was valuable enough to need to be secured.

The safe was always there, in her grandfather's room, and it was always open, but it was several years before Olivia decided to look at the photographs again. It was the fall she was eleven. One Saturday morning she was alone in the house. The other members of the family were in the woods gathering pecans for Thanksgiving cakes. Olivia had gone out with them early, then come back to the house. She was pulling off her sweater as she passed her grandfather's room. One arm was still in the sleeve as she came to the door. The house was very still. The smell of blackberry jelly they had made the day before was everywhere. Olivia stood in the doorway of her grandfather's room and looked at the emptiness of the bed and the chair and the space beside the window. She pulled the other arm out of her sweater and went into the room. She went over to the closet and opened the door and sat down beside the safe. She opened the safe door and took out the shoebox with her mother's things. She carried it very carefully over to the space beside the bed, below the window, where sunlight was shining on a braided rug. She put the box very carefully down upon the rug and untied the string and removed the top. She looked at the photographs for a while, setting them up around her. Then she took the papers out, one by one, and began to read.

The first paper was an elaborate marriage license with flowers all around the edges in gold and pink and blue and red. The other papers were letters.

Dear Summer,

I am sending this to Jimmy because I called him at Elsie's and he said maybe he knew someone that knew where you were. We are married in case you forgot. Please just let me know you're okay. My mom says to tell you she liked you a lot.

Love, Daniel

Dear Summer,

My dad called the Indian reservation in Oklahoma where you said you were from but they never heard of you. If Jimmy gets this to you please call me up right away. It's important.

Love, Daniel

Dear Summer,

I have gotten this girl in trouble and we have to get married pretty quick. She is the daughter of my dad's business partner. I guess you can see I have to talk to you as soon as possible. I know damn well you are getting these letters. This is mean as shit not to call me. My dad's lawyer says he can go on and get me an annulment, have the marriage declared illegal, since we were stoned. I guess I'll do that.

Love, Daniel

When she had finished all the letters Olivia folded them carefully back into their envelopes and put them in the box and put the top back on and put the box away. She kept one picture, a picture of Daniel standing beside a grove of eucalyptus trees on the Berkeley campus. Daniel, she said to herself. His name is Daniel. Daniel of North Carolina.

The sisters at the Catholic school sent out a letter to the parents saying the children should be taken to visit a public library and given a library card, so Mary Lily drove Olivia into town and introduced her to the library. It was an old Carnegie library that rose like a temple between frame buildings on either side. Olivia thought she was entering heaven to go through such wide painted doors and come into a room with so many books on shelves so high. “Can I come every Saturday?” she asked the librarian. “Is it all right to come here all the time?”

“There is a bookmobile that goes to your neighborhood,” the librarian said, looking at the address on the card. “It goes to the Hitchcock store on Highway Sixty-two every Saturday at ten. Haven't you seen it there?”

“I don't know what it is,” Olivia said. She looked at Mary Lily, but Mary Lily just shook her head.

“It's a bus filled with books that comes around. If you take your card you can check out books without coming into town. You can tell them which books to bring and they will have them the next Saturday. If they're in.”

“Can we go?” Olivia asked, turning to take Mary Lily's hands. “Can we go to the bus?”

“Of course you can,” Mary Lily said. “We'll go next Saturday.”