The Day of Small Things (9 page)

“John Goingsnake had heard the stories of the Yunwi Tsunsdi and he was most certain that this was one of their dancing grounds he was in the middle of and that those drums he was hearing was their drums. But he remembered how the old folks always said that the Little People was good to help lost children. ‘Well,’ thinks he, looking behind him where he could hear the soldiers getting closer, ‘I’ve got a lost child on my back and nowhere else to go.’ And thinking that, John Goingsnake crawled into the opening there at the foot of the big cliff.”

This is my very most favorite part.

“Tell what he saw, Granny,” I beg, and I jiggle her arm to get her to hurry.

“It was only long years after,” she says, “when John Goingsnake was an old, old man and wandering in his mind, that he would talk about what he saw down there. And even so, it didn’t make much sense. He talked of being brought food—nuts and berries and honey—and of a red wolf suckling her cubs and Baby Rebekah nursing alongside of them. He said there was dancing and singing and sleeping and dreaming following each on each and that sometimes it was hard to tell the one from the other. He said it was always warm and dry and just light enough to see and that there was always a humming sound down there and Little Things moving around just at the edge of sight.

“Like a dream it must have been, and that was all he ever could tell of the time he and the baby Rebekah stayed with the Little People.”

“How long were they there, Granny?” I can feel every hair on my arms standing up, and when I hug myself to keep from shivering, I can feel the goose bumps.

“Now, that’s the quarest part of all,” Granny says, her voice low and wondering, like it always is at this part of the story. “John Goingsnake always told that it was first light when he crawled into that cave with the baby on his back and the two of them curled up and went to sleep and that he woke up when he heared a rooster crow. First the rooster and then he heared a child crying and looked to see where his little Rebekah was.

“She weren’t there by him and the blanket that had wrapped her was gone. John Goingsnake couldn’t see nothing but the dirt floor and some shiny brown laurel leaves. And outside the crying went on and on.

“John Goingsnake grabbed the pack he’d laid his head on and the blanket he’d had around him and pulled them along with him as he crawled to the opening of the cave. His joints was as stiff as an old, old man’s and his head felt like it was stuffed full of moss.

“When the daylight hit his eyes, it fair dazzled him and he blinked a time or two. There, standing in the middle of the clearing, was a little girl who looked to be about seven or eight years of age. She was naked as a jaybird, but around her shoulders was a gray blanket with a blue stripe. It was just like the one he’d wrapped around the baby when they lay down in the cave except that this one was wore most to a rag, with big holes and rips in it. And around the girl’s neck was the same leather thong with the same little leather bag his own baby had worn.

“ ‘Who are you?’ John Goingsnake called out, and his voice sounded strange to him, all rusty and creaking.

“The little girl looked at him and her crying stopped.
‘Edoda,’
she said—that’s Cherokee for ‘papa’—
Edoda
, I thought you’d gone away too!’ And she ran to him and wrapped her little arms around him.

“Now John Goingsnake was as bumfuzzled as ever a man was. He stood there looking at this little girl who was calling him papa—this little girl who had the face of his dead wife—and he tried to make sense of what had happened. He picked up the little girl and held her to him while he turned in a slow circle to look all around. But there weren’t nothing to see except right in the center of the clearing’s mossy floor was a little ring of bare dirt, like the moss had been wore away by people doing a stomp dance. He didn’t see no sign of the baby he’d carried to this place nor sign of the soldiers who’d been following him.

“Just then there was a loud
cock-a-doodle-doo
and a tall speckled rooster come strutting out of the laurels. He walked right up to John Goingsnake and kindly bowed before him, wiping his beak on the moss at the man’s feet. The speckled rooster crowed once again then turned and paced slow and deliberate back to the laurels.

“The little girl squirmed out of John Goingsnake’s arms, saying
‘Edoda!
It’s the guide! They said they’d be a guide!’ and without another word, she fell to her hands and knees and began to crawl, following the rooster into the laurel hell.

“John Goingsnake always said that she moved like a fox, winding and twisting through those close-knit laurels. It was all he could do to keep her in sight as he fought his way through the crookedy branches that caught in his hair and snagged his shirt, tearing it easy as if the stout homespun cloth was handkerchief muslin. He reached up
to pull a hank of his hair loose from a laurel twig and was surprised to find his hair was so long.

“That was when he saw it. Right there beside him was a soldier’s coat, hanging from a branch like someone had put it there to air. It was all dirty and faded and the brass buttons that he remembered glittering in the morning light was tarnished and dull. John Goingsnake reached out to take one, thinking that a token from his enemy would be strong medicine for him. He pulled at the button and pulled again till it snapped off.

“ ‘Maybe I’ll get them all,’ thinks John Goingsnake and reaches for the next and gives a mighty tug.

“With that, the whole front of the coat fell open and a rib cage and two skeleton arms slid out of the coat and rattled to the mossy ground like a pile of dry sticks.

“John couldn’t hardly get his breath. There he was on his hands and knees with those old dry bones falling all around him. ‘Aaah! Aaah!’ he said, and looking a little beyond, he saw some more bones scattered about and an old rusting musket. Off to one side, the empty eye sockets of a half-buried skull was watching him.

“ ‘AAAAAAH!’ John Goingsnake called out and took off on his hands and knees crawling after the rooster and the little girl.”

There is a creaking sound and I turn to see Mama coming up the porch steps.

“Are you both deaf and don’t neither one of you hear that cow bawling?” she hollers. “If Poll takes the masticks and goes dry, I’ll know who to blame.”

She reaches out and catches my ear and pulls me off the stool. “Get on with that milking right now,” she says. “You can take your whupping when that’s done.”

The barn is near dark but I manage just fine. Poll settles in with her pan of corn and for a mercy don’t dance about. And when the milk is squirting into the pail,
psst psst psst
, I tell Poll how the story come out, so’s not to leave John Goingsnake in that laurel hell.

I tell her how John Goingsnake caught up to the girl and the rooster just as they got to the edge of the laurels and looked down the mountain to a new-built cabin and stock corral. I tell how there was a man and woman and some children out digging taters and they looked up and seen the naked Injun girl and the long-haired Injun man behind her. I tell how the rooster weren’t nowhere to be seen but the man and woman was kind and took the two Injuns into their house and cared for them.

“Then, Poll,” I say as I untie her and turn her into the stall where her calf is waiting for his supper, “then John Goingsnake finally told the folks that he was a runaway from the march to the West and that if they had a mind to turn him in, they might as well go ahead and do it.”

Poll steps over the log sill into the dark stall. I can hear her calf snorting and snuffling as it sucks on her and I can hear Poll’s rough tongue working on the calf’s fur. I stand there breathing in the smells of the warm milk and the cow dookie and the sweet scent of the hay in the loft above.

“And, Poll, when those folks asked John Goingsnake how long it had been since he’d run away from that cruel Removal march and he said he didn’t rightly know—maybe a day or two—why, they looked at one another in wonder.

“ ‘My poor friend,’ said the kind man to John Goingsnake, ‘the last Removal march to come through these parts was in 1838—seven long years past. Where have you been all that time?’ ”

Thomas the Rhymer
Part First

*   *   *

(Least)

T
he yard dog has run off at last.

He never had no name and Mama always kept him chained to his box, there in the middle of a big patch of bare ground so that he would bark if anyone came up the road or if a strange dog was to come loafering. It was what he was there for, she said, and twice a day I would take him some cornbread and sour milk and he would eat it and then lay back down—in the shade if it was hot or in the sun if it was cool. That was all he did—that and drag his chain around so that couldn’t no grass ever grow around his box.

But when Granny Beck taught me to read and when I read in the Baby Ray book about Baby Ray’s little dog and how it was his friend, I thought maybe the yard dog could be
my
friend. So I saved out some scraps from my dinner, and when Mama had gone to town, I went to where he was and tried to toll him over to where I could pet him.

No matter how I tried, that old dog would get as far
away from me as his chain would reach. Or he would go in his box and not come out till I was gone, not even to eat his supper. One time when he was in there, I went to the hole at the front to see could I make friends but he just growled, low and mean-sounding, and I was afraid to put my hand out to him.