House of Purple Cedar

by Tim Tingle

  When Maggie lifted the blinds, she heard the powdery sound of ripping cobwebs and a cloud of dust filled her nostrils. She coughed and rubbed her nose. She couldn’t lift the window, and when she turned to the ladder, Hiram stood on the top rung holding a crowbar.

  “Thought you might need this, Maggie,” he said, scooting the crowbar across the floor.

  “Thank you, Hiram, I do.”

  “Hurry, Maggie. The marshal has stepped back in his office.”

  “Did Amafo follow him?”

  “Not yet. He’s waiting for him on the sidewalk. I think the old man is too smart to go inside.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Maggie said.

  It took Maggie half a minute to pop open the window, set the crowbar aside, and rest the barrel of the gun on the windowsill. She squinted and eyed the line of the barrel to a spot above Amafo’s shoulder, aiming at the empty doorway to the marshal’s office.

  Amafo stood facing the door with his arms relaxed at his sides, as if waiting for a friend. When he lifted his head and turned his ear to the door, Maggie knew the marshal had spoken to him.

  “Do not go through that door,” she said aloud. Maggie felt sweat running down the tip of her nose.

  Marshal Hardwicke emerged from the shadows and thrust himself to within a few feet of the old man’s face. Amafo took half a step back and winced at the stale smell of his breath.

  “What do you want?” the marshal asked.

  “Nothing. Just saw you across the street and thought I’d speak.”

  Hardwicke lifted Amafo’s hat from his head and leaned forward, looking hard into his eyes.

  “You better leave, old man,” he said.

  Amafo felt a cold shiver roll over him. Short, quick breaths burned inside his chest and his heart pounded. He had seen eyes like these only once.

  When he was barely six years old, he saw a large cottonmouth water moccasin near his grandfather’s house.

  It was stretched out, flat and lifeless across a fallen cypress tree on the banks of a swamp. He broke a thick branch from the tree and poked the snake to be sure it was dead. It was not. The snake rippled his muscles and lifted his head from the log, slowly turning to face his tormentor. His eyes were like none the young boy had ever seen. They shone back at him, dark and empty, and gave no hint of feeling, no clue of intent.

  The young Amafo remembered, too late, his grandfather’s warning.

  “A cottonmouth will sometimes attack a man, and it can outrun a boy. Stay clear of water moccasins.”

  He knew the snake could strike him at will or slither after him through the swamp. He stood immobilized by fear till the snake moved in slow undulations, writhing from the log and plopping into the algae-covered surface of the swamp.

  The boy ran to his grandfather’s house and stayed near the old ones that day and the next, till his grandmother finally asked him, “What is the matter with you? Did you see a snake?”

  When he looked at the floor without replying, she wrapped both palms around his head and sang prayers over him for a quarter of an hour.

  “You stay close to home today,” she said. “After that, you be hoke.”

  “Did you hear me?” Hardwicke said. “You better leave before you get hurt again.”

  “Good day,” said Amafo, touching his hat and turning away.

  The marshal watched as Amafo made his slow way to the end of the sidewalk, then stooped his shoulders and entered the millinery shop three buildings away.

  Maggie kept the gun on Hardwicke till he re-entered his office. “Maggie,” Hiram called from below. “I’ll hold the ladder steady. Looks like it’s safe to come down now.”

  “Thank you, Hiram,” she said, backing slowly down the ladder. “I am proud of us, Hiram.”

  “I am afraid for that old man,” said Hiram. “This affair is far from over.”

  “That’s what Amafo said,” said Maggie.

  Later that day Pokoni met Amafo at the gate, raising her hand to shield her face from the blazing colors to the west. Amafo dismounted and led Whiteface by the reins to the barn. Pokoni accompanied them.

  “How did the day go?” she asked.

  “Hoke. I picked up your thread.”

  “I wasn’t talking about my thread.”

  “Well, I stopped by the depot and John Burleson bought me a cup of coffee.”

  “That’s never happened before,” said Pokoni.

  “Not since yesterday,” said Amafo. “Then I visited Maggie, then the marshal.”

  “You saw the marshal?”

  “Yes. We bumped into each other.”

  “You bumped into each other?”

  “Yeah. But it was better this time. He didn’t have no board. I just told him good day and went on and bought your thread.”

  “Wait here for a minute,” Pokoni said. Amafo stopped and turned to her. She closed her eyes and reached to touch his face. Her fingers were curled with arthritis. Amafo felt his eyes tear up to see the purple spots on her crooked fingers.

  “You know how much I love you,” he said.

  Pokoni nodded a slow, sweet nod. “I do,” she said. She removed his hat, ruffled his hair with her hand, and sang Amazing Grace in Choctaw over him. Shilombish Holitopama.

  With the loving couple thus occupied, the forgotten spider crawled from her temporary home in Amafo’s pocket. She sought and found a new place to raise babies on a rafter overlooking Whiteface’s stall. While the family slept, the spider went to work, crissing and crossing an intricate weave, wrapping her web, like gossamer armor, around the fate of the old man Amafo.

  The Fist of Darkness

  Hardwicke and the Agent

  A week after the incident at the train station, a festive reception was held for the newly appointed Indian agent at the county courthouse. The invited guests were the business and political leaders of the county. They came dressed in their finest attire, climbed the courthouse steps and were ushered inside by the agent’s servant, where an introductory line of a dozen county officials awaited them. Last in the line was Agent Taylor, who welcomed this opportunity to meet his new friends and business associates in the community of Spiro.

  Marshal Hardwicke waited across the street at the jailhouse, eyeing the unfolding of the greeting ritual. When he felt assured the last of the guests had entered the courthouse, he put on his coat and crossed the street. He entered the building by the side door and made his way down a back hallway before stepping into the flower-decorated foyer.

  A small orchestra provided the evening’s entertainment, an orchestra consisting of Mrs. Maude Lapham on the piano and her oldest boy Nathaniel on the violin. Between the third and fourth musical numbers, Mrs. Lapham smiled and bowed and thanked her audience for the applause, while she reached behind her and viciously pinched the neck of her son, who had spat on his shoes and was casually wiping them on his britches legs.

  Much to the chagrin of Mrs. Lapham, the crowd applauded this move with more gusto than the music, for it seemed to represent their own feelings. Though dressed in their best, the residents of Spiro were cattlemen and farmers and felt no more at ease than did poor Nathaniel.

  A bar had been set up in one corner of the courthouse—two long tables covered by a white cotton cloth and manned by an out-of-town bartender hired for the occasion. The whiskey was from Kentucky; it was old and expensive. Guests practiced the art of pleasant conversation as they lined up and waited for their drinks. Spotting the makeshift bar, Marshal Hardwicke pushed his way through the crowd.

  Sidestepping the line, he approached the bartender. He took the glass offered him, slung the whiskey down his throat, and held his glass out for another. The bartender eyed him for a long moment.

  “I’ll make it easy for you,” Hardwicke said, grabbing the bottle. He found an unoccupied table in a far corner, away from the crowd. Slamming the bottle on the table, he called to a group of cowboys waiting in line.

  “Hey, drinks are on the house, boys. No waiting over here!”
He was soon the center of attention, surrounded by a group of barroom acquaintances, men who sometimes served as deputies in pursuit of Hardwicke’s brand of justice.

  Agent Taylor, still shaking hands and greeting his guests with a quiet charm, witnessed the entire incident from the corner of his eye. He noted that as Hardwicke fell under the spell of his liquor, his followers began drifting away. Hardwicke called for another bottle when the first was emptied. When no one responded, he stood up clumsily and staggered his way to the bar.

  The bartender looked to Agent Taylor, who simply nodded. Thinking he had bullied his way to the top of even this echelon, Hardwicke grew bolder.

  “Someone bring Agent Taylor a drink,” he said. Lifting a glass and spilling whiskey on the bar and himself in an effort to fill it, he stammered, “Here, bring this to the agent.”

  The room fell silent and all heads turned to Hardwicke. Wives took husbands by the arm and even the marshal’s friends shuffled away in groups of twos and threes, till Hardwicke was left alone.

  He gripped the bottle by the neck and made his way to the side door from which he had entered. Before leaving, he cast a long look at the agent, who returned his gaze.

  Dead by the Hand

  The night Ona Mae Hardwicke decided to leave her husband, she spent the early evening hours on the back porch, recovering from a sweltering day of planting her vegetable garden. She settled on the steps and spread her legs apart, lifting her skirt and letting the west wind cool her thighs.

  Dark clouds covered the setting sun, broken by jagged flashes of lightning. Ona Mae saw her life now as clearly as if she were reading the Book of Days in God’s own hand. She saw it in the sky, beginning with the purple bruises stretched across the horizon. She knew this color, the pain of bleeding tenderness, the long weeks of healing. Her twenty-year longing for change was like this lightning—bright and promising and devoid of hope.

  Without thinking, she moved her hand to the forehead curl she had twisted since she was twelve, twisted it sometimes to the point of tears. Ona Mae cried now, twisted her hair and cried like a child.

  She remembered, sometime in the third year of their marriage, finding a redtail fox in a trap behind the chicken coop. Its leg was snapped and the fox lay in a dying stupor, barely able to lift its head and growl at her as she knelt beside it. She moved closer and closer till her eyes were only a few inches away from the broken bone, fascinated by the slow ebbing away of life.

  “She is like me,” Ona Mae whispered. “She is slowly dying.”

  Ona Mae eyed the tiny splinters and the tears in the flesh where the fox had tried to gnaw her own leg to free herself. As she leaned closer, the fox seemed to give itself over to her. The growl shifted to a deep panting, a lift and fall not only of the creature’s chest but of her entire body.

  She cupped the fox’s head in her palm and in a slow and subtle floating in and out began to emulate the breath, to breathe in the rhythm of the fox.

  An opaque glaze settled over the fox’s eyes and she appeared to be staring at a distant predator, a predator larger and swifter than herself, a predator who had caught her scent and was now moving through the underbrush, brushing aside the sumac bushes and rattling the dried crimson leaves like the soft rattle now hissing from her throat, a razor-clawed, blood-hungry predator named Death.

  Ona Mae trembled with the fox. She felt the pain coursing through her broken leg and gently touched her tongue to the dark blood dotted under the fox’s skin. At that moment, as she suckled on the wounded fox like a child on its mother, the fox died.

  With the sight that such a spirit moment gives, Ona Mae saw her own life as the fox—fearful, trapped, and crippled by her own dull teeth.

  I will bear no children, she knew with all certainty. This man is bitter and barren and will give me none. She wept quietly as she buried the fox in the soft dirt beneath her bedroom window, where the knowledge of its being would comfort her for the better part of two decades.

  She had resolved to leave that night. That was twenty years ago. She was still waiting for the right moment.

  Now when she remembered the fox and her early years of breathless fear, she saw herself as a distant cousin in a photograph, a child she seldom thought about and, when she did, she wondered what had become of her.

  One thought continued to haunt her like a cruel joke.

  Though the fox would surely have died, What if she were still living when I buried her? What if my troubles are caused by my own cold nature and not the bitter spirit of my husband?

  She shuddered to consider this and replayed every cruelty he had dealt her as a way of proving to herself he was the mean one, the crazed one. In reliving these scenes she became what she most despised, one whose very existence was sketched out and defined by the punishment she withstood. Without his mean fist and bullying arms, Ona Mae was nothing. Without her life of avoiding him, cringing before him, and maybe unconsciously taunting him to drunken meaness, she had no life.

  These moments were her worst, when she doubted herself.

  When she heard him slam the front door, she jumped to her feet. The marshal circled the house, never intending to come inside. His door slamming was what passed for a greeting. He strode to the backyard arbor, pushed aside the drying vines covering the doorway, and stepped into his refuge.

  Robert Hardwicke sat on an oak chest that doubled as a bench and place to store his whiskey. A small stone fireplace occupied the center of the arbor. Constructed of river cane and green willow boughs, the structure was more a long-range campsite than part of a homestead. The vines and shrubs shading the arbor were wild and unkempt.

  In truth, the marshal never fully gave himself to civilization, never committed to the rudiments of domesticity, neither to his home, his buggy, the kitchen table, or his marriage.

  Perhaps no scene more accurately depicted their marriage than the picture drawn at this very moment. Ona Mae stood over her kitchen sink, scrubbing her hands, while her empty eyes stared at the upturned collar and scruffy neckline of her husband, sitting between his two hunting dogs. His back was turned to her. He sat hunched over, clutching his quart jar of whiskey with both hands and wishing he were beholden to no one.

  Lifting her gaze at the sound of the night train, Ona Mae watched the strange and beautiful fireflies hovering over the grave markers near the tracks.

  Samuel the Night Walker

  Samuel Willis sat leaning against the barn in a cane back chair, cleaning catfish and throwing the fish heads into his mother’s garden. Three feral cats leapt from the shadows, hissing and clawing and fighting over the stinking remains of the day’s catch. Samuel knew he was both fertilizing and feeding, but his manner was listless. He sensed a cool front blowing in, felt it in his skin.

  An hour before sundown he heard the wind’s first whistle bow the tops of the pine trees. Within a quarter hour, the whine was steady and loud. Samuel stepped indoors only long enough to pick up his coat and hat. He pulled the brimmed hat low over his ears. Circling the barn, he shooed the cats away, selected four fish heads, and slipped them into his coat pocket. Leaning into the wind, he eased into a quick and youthful pace.

  He turned north toward the Nahullo farms, into the rising gray wall of the coming storm. He knew where the creek bed offered the shelter of overhanging rocks, in case the weather turned bad in a hurry. He walked with no focused intent, but to say he had no purpose would be wrong.

  Samuel went seeking the eye of the storm, the real source of the trouble brewing between the Nahullos and the Choctaws. His steps, he knew, were guided, and he felt the time was nigh.

  Samuel had rounded the bend in the railroad tracks five miles north of town when he heard the low moan. He knew this moan. It was a higher, deeper wind that moved the elms and oaks and splintered the brittle sycamores. He paused and turned to face the wind, to read the moisture in the gale. No rain for several hours, no need to hurry, he thought.

  Retracing his steps in the direction of t
own, Samuel felt the tracks shake with the weight of an oncoming freight train. He slid on his backside down the embankment and had barely regained his footing when a small doe leapt from the undergrowth, almost knocking him off his feet. She darted up the slope as the train’s headlights scorched the night. Frantic and fearing for her life, she wheeled and came at Samuel again. He flung himself into a clump of sumac bushes.

  As he disentangled himself from the broken branches, Samuel saw the light of a farmhouse a half-mile in the distance. He turned away from the lights and spotted, some fifty feet in front of him, a sight he had heard his father speak about. Instantly he knew the reason his steps had followed this path. Many times before, on other walks, he had seen the slate stones lying almost flush with the ground, a dozen more or less.

  He knew them to be grave markers of some forgotten family who had sold their land or had it stolen from them before they moved away or died. The graves were too near the tracks to be disturbed. The land they slept upon had little use.

  But the graves were disturbed, the sleeping ones no longer sleeping. Like large fireflies, the spirits hovered over their graves, moving slowly, visiting, returning, a dozen spirits walking. Samuel was overcome with a reverence for the moment. He leaned against a tree trunk, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them, the fireflies were tiny balls of golden flames, a whisper away from becoming the people they once were. For long minutes he barely moved, taking in the nimble beauty of the sight: flickering lights surrounded by a pulsating silhouette, almost taking the shape of the living, then turning into light, pure light.

  They know I am here, he thought. He moved among the stones and found that he could read the names. He stopped before Estella Roe and lingered there, searching the dark cavern of his memory. Estella Roe. Estella Roe.