I Cannot Get You Close Enough (14 page)

The meat is in the freezer now. Part of it is in the freezer behind Mr. Tree's trailer and part of it is downtown in a freezer for Grandmother and Granddaddy and Aunt Mary Lily and me. The blood was everywhere. It was on my boots and on the leaves of the forest floor. I was the killer and the bringer of food to people. I could stay here and marry Bobby and never see you. I could give up my hopes of education and go on and forget your bad blood inside of me. I could go on and be a Cherokee but your bad blood won't let me.

I think I'll go sleep in the woods alone tonight. I might spend the night where the deer fell and build a small fire or maybe not have a fire to warm me. There isn't a thing out there that can hurt me. The things that hurt me are people. I am very young to know so much about the world but I have only had old people around me all my life so what do you expect me to do?

Your daughter, Olivia

Dear Father,

I have fallen in love with a boy but not really in love. Only I think about him all the time now. I think he must look like you did when you were young. Because he is strong and can ride better than anyone in Oklahoma his age and can calf rope better than the men. He lives in a trailer with his dad because his mom is dead and there isn't a woman to take care of them and make them a home. The trailer is in a trailer park two blocks from our school and is nice like a neighborhood. It has been there since the Second World War. They call it Jones Park. I was over there the other night and helped them cook hamburgers for supper and then we sat around and talked about everything. I told them about North Carolina and that you are coming to see me soon. Aunt Anna said she would come soon. She wrote to me five times this year but I have told you that. Now I have to go. I was going to tell you my dream but I will not. This is silly. Well, you will never see it anyway.

Dear Aunt Anna,

I think I am in love with a boy. The boy I have been going with. He took me to Kayo's room on Running Deer and we went in and lay down on the bed and I almost let him do anything to me, then I remembered my mother and how she ended up. I don't think I'll ever be able to let anyone do that to me. Stick it in and maybe kill me. I don't have anyone to talk to. If I told Aunt Mary Lily this she'd kill me. I am so different from the girls here. None of them read anything but the paper or movie magazines and the rich girls are snotty to me. I liked the books you sent me. Especially the one about Mahatma Gandhi. I have read it twice and am reading it again. I also like
The Little Prince
, although I guess that's a children's book. I have seen the desert. We drove to New Mexico to see some friends of my aunt's. They live on the side of a red mountain. In the afternoons it was so beautiful, everything would turn purple. This purple light was on everything. Anything that was white was turned purple. The man we were visiting is a painter. He and his wife asked us to come back but we never have. Maybe you would like to go there with me someday.

Say hello to Dad for me and tell him I'm waiting to get to know him. I am still making all A's. Well, I won't mail this. It's too mixed up. It's stupid but I liked writing it.

Dear Dad,

This morning I went riding at dawn. It was drizzling rain by the time I had gone two miles. The hills behind me were full of mist. It is beginning to be spring here, my favorite time of year. I need to see you so much. My heart is bursting with the things I want to say to you. I am a very nice girl and everyone loves me. I have brown hair. I don't look much like an Indian. I would never embarrass you. I know I will never mail this letter so I can go on and tell you my dream.

We were in a canoe together, on a wide river like the Arkansas below Lee Creek. We were together in the canoe and I was all dressed up in my new green suit Aunt Mary Lily bought me. I had on high-heeled shoes and a beautiful white blouse with lace down the front. I looked so nice and you were taking me to meet my cousins and water was all around us. Finally, we came to a curve in the river and I slid out of the boat and got into the water and I was pulling the boat along. I still had my shoes on. Somehow they did not fall off into the water when I swam. I was sorry I had gotten all messed up but in a way I didn't care, because I looked behind me and there you were, smiling at me as if it didn't matter that I was all wet. We were going somewhere together, maybe to visit my mother's grave, but I doubt that. I think we were just riding along in the canoe, watching the trees. Birch trees were all around us, yellow and green and white, and the light came down between the branches and you were smiling at me.

When I woke up I was weeping. I was crying like a baby from that dream. Please come to see me or let me come there. Is that too much to ask?

6

It was Mary Lily who supplied Olivia with the report-card forms on which she was creating the straight-A student the Hands were becoming interested in. Anna Hand thought she had finally found a child who had inherited her genes for language. Daniel Hand thought he had miraculously fathered a child who was smart in school. He couldn't help being excited by the prospect of a child who did well in school. Daniel had been kicked out of three preparatory schools and had never even been able to finish the University of North Carolina. He never finished college because he was spoiled and indulged and drank too much but he thought it was because he was dumb. With the marvelous intuition of the young, Olivia had found the perfect way to make the Hand family think they needed her.

Mary Lily didn't mind giving Olivia the first handful of report-card forms. Olivia was with her at the office of the high school, where Mary Lily had a Saturday job cleaning the offices. The forms were sitting on a shelf with many others. “Can I have these?” Olivia asked. “I'll just take a few.”

“Okay,” Mary Lily said. “Just a few.”

 

By the time Olivia needed more forms Mary Lily had caught on to what she was up to. Olivia talked so much that sooner or later she told everyone around her everything she knew. “I need some more report-card forms,” she said one afternoon. She and Mary Lily were sitting at the kitchen table eating a sack of doughnuts Mary Lily had picked up on her way home from work. “Will you get me some on Saturday?”

“No. I won't do it anymore.”

“He's a rich man. If he thinks I'm worth it, he'll send me to college.”

“No. We won't do it anymore. We won't take things.”

“They're only pieces of paper. They aren't worth anything. It isn't stealing.”

“It's stealing. It's a sin.”

“Rich people steal things all the time. They stole North Carolina from the Cherokee. I only need two more. Two or three. That's all.”

“No. I won't do it.”

“Then I'll do it. I'll go in Saturday and help you clean. I'll take them. Then you won't have to tell the priest.”

“No. I won't do it.”

“Please, Aunt Mary Lily. It's so important. It's my future. All you have to do is take me with you.”

“I don't know. I don't think it's good.” Mary Lily stuffed the remainder of a doughnut in her mouth, thinking of the trouble it could make. She could lose her job, Olivia could get caught, she would have to tell the priest. She chewed the doughnut. Olivia watched her with pleading eyes. Mary Lily began to change her mind, persuaded by the sugar and the loss of North Carolina, not to mention North America. “I'll let you go with me,” she said. “But only take one. One or two. You're going to get in trouble doing this.”

“No, I'm not. I just want them to send us some money.”

So, the following Saturday Olivia went with Mary Lily to the office and took a handful of report-card forms and began to think about the computer. I could change the grades on the computer, she decided. They would never know the difference. They have so much to do they probably wouldn't even know I did it. They couldn't prove it even if they found out. I make good grades. All I'm changing is the math. By the time they find out I'll be in North Carolina being rich.

Olivia kept the blank forms in a cedar chest with the un-mailed letters. It was a chest Mary Lily had bought at a fair when Olivia was a baby. It opened on brass piano hinges and had a brass pole to hold the top open. The outside had been sanded and shellacked but the inside was unfinished and smelled like the woods in winter, when snow is on the ground and the creek is frozen to a trickle. Mary Lily kept Summer Deer's possessions in the chest. Three quilts, a brown leather vest with silver fittings and fringe (the vest had hung down to the tops of Summer Deer's boots when she wore it with no shirt and no brassiere in the heat of summer in San Francisco), a small red velvet box that contained three pieces of jewelry. A small gold watch Summer Deer had bought at a pawn shop in Tahlequah, a golden chain with glass beads, and a thick gold wedding ring with writing inside.
DH to SW, 1967
, then a peace sign. Olivia would put on the necklace and the watch and the ring and look at herself in the mirror, then take them off and put them back in the box and replace them underneath the quilts.

There were other things in the chest. A black dancing dress, a pair of ballet shoes, a cheerleader sweater with a dark red T intersected by a warbonnet, a notebook from a biology class, and a history textbook with five names on the first page.

7

It was several weeks before Mary Lily had time to go to confession and talk to the priest about the report-card forms. “She took some more of them,” Mary Lily said. “I'm sure she did.”

“She shouldn't have left Saint Alphonsus. I wish you had been able to stand firm.”

“I couldn't help it. She doesn't listen. She says she can't go to college if she didn't change. She wants to go to college. It's all she thinks about.”

“Is she still seeing that boy?”

“He's a good boy. She doesn't love him. She doesn't love anyone but herself. She's like her mother was. Like our father, cold.”

“You are doing a good job, Mary Lily. You're doing what you can.”

“I'll make her put them back. I'll do it tomorrow.”

“Good. You're a good woman.”

“Do I have a penance?”

“Oh, yes, five Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers. Bless you, my child. Good child.” He slid the window shut and listened to her shuffling around pulling herself together. Shook his head.
The things they thought of as sin. They should have been in Chicago. Father, forgive us. Dear people, such dear people, I do not deserve to be here with these dear people. I don't deserve this easy job
.

Mary Lily went home full of resolve. She called Olivia into the kitchen and told her she had to give back the grade-report forms. “Tomorrow I will put them back where they belong. Then it's over.”

“I'm not doing anything wrong,” Olivia said. “I'm just making sure I can go to college.”

“You could go to college. There's a college here. Anybody can go to Northeastern. You get loans. You can go.”

“I want to go to another school, somewhere I've never been.”

“What did you do with them?”

“I put them away. There were hundreds in the box. They'll never miss a few.”

“It's stealing.”

“No, it's what I have to do.” Olivia stood in front of Mary Lily and looked her in the eye. “I want to go up there and see them. I want to know who I am.”

“They don't want to know you. If they wanted to they would have come to see you. Just because they write to you doesn't mean they want you up there.”

“They will come. Wait and see.” Olivia left the kitchen and walked out across the backyard and into the barn. She took a bridle from a peg and climbed the fence to the corral where two old mares were standing flank to flank against the fence. “Come on,” she said. “You, Chaney, it won't hurt you to get some exercise.” She slipped the bridle on the mare's head and carefully adjusted the bit in its teeth. Then she led the horse into the yard and pulled herself up onto its back. “Okay, I know your teeth hurt. I won't use it if you don't make me. Come on, let's go to Baron Ford. You know the way.” She led the horse, half by the bridle and half by its mane, out of the yard and down the gravel road in the opposite direction of the highway. The gravel turned to dirt, then led back across a meadow to Baron Ford Ranch where Olivia had worked as a groom one summer. As soon as the mare sensed the direction, she shivered with excitement and began to run. Olivia moved her heels down under the mare's body and lay down against her neck and forgot lost fathers and Mary Lily's sad disapproving face. “Let's go,” she whispered to Chaney. “You are a yearling. Take me to the king.”

Of course, she wasn't going to a king, although Baron Ford Ranch was as close to a palace as anything in northeast Oklahoma, two thousand acres of pastureland and woods, with a forty-room mansion and an absentee landlord and air-conditioned stables for the horses. It employed two fulltime grooms and five stable boys and the weekend services of a landscape architect and a forest ranger. One of the stable boys was a young man named Bobby Tree, whose ancestors were Assiniboin hunters and Italian immigrants. In another world he might have been a baseball player or a rugby star but he had grown up in a trailer park in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, so he had learned to calf rope and barrel race instead. Bobby was so good with horses that the grown men at Baron Ford deferred to him. The chief groom, Kayo, was his uncle. He let Bobby have the run of the place just for the pleasure of watching him grow up. If there was such a thing as a prince in a world this poor, Bobby Tree was a prince. He had things just about the way he wanted them. Except for being in love with Olivia Hand. No one had things the way they wanted them with her. She walked around Tahlequah High School as if she owned the place. Bobby had seen her first when she was a freshman and he was a senior and he had been in love with her ever since. He had been in an upstairs window of the school and seen her get out of her aunt's car and come walking up the sidewalk to the front door, walking as if she was twenty years old, as if nobody was even around, as if she didn't care if anyone liked her or not. She always looked to Bobby as if she was thinking about something else. Even when he managed to get introduced to her, even when he took her to a rodeo and won three events with her watching, even when he managed finally after seven months to get her onto a bed and make her come, after all of that she still acted as if she didn't care if he called her up or not. All she ever talked about was whether or not she would get pregnant and how he had to pay for the abortion. With every girl in Tahlequah in love with him he had had to go and fall for this snooty little kid, Olivia. “All she talks about is her rich relatives in North Carolina,” he said to Kayo. “I get sick of hearing it.”