House of Purple Cedar

by Tim Tingle

  We were only a mile or so from the McCurtain place when the first hint of trouble came, nestled in a clump of bull nettle too far out in the road to ignore.

  “Rose, take the shovel and dig it up. Whiteface don’t seem to want to go ’round it,” Momma said. I climbed over the side and Jamey handed me the shovel. As I neared the bull nettle, Whiteface reared up and flailed her legs out in front. Momma did her best to settle her down, saying, “Hoke, girl, it’s hoke now.”

  I once again approached the bull nettle. The yellow and white blooms stood tall on the spikes of the poisonous flower. I stepped slow, careful to avoid the prickly stalks. Something moved at the dark green base of the plant. It seemed almost part of the ground, like the brown dirt was moving. I was so curious. I knelt down close before I heard the rattler’s dry hissing.

  “Momma,” I said, “it’s a rattlesnake. I think it’s a big one.”

  “Jesus Lord,” Momma said. “Don’t move sudden. Just back up easy, hon.” I saw the flower stalks sway and the head of the rattlesnake appeared, leaping at me. I flung the shovelhead at the snake and ran towards the wagon. Whiteface saved my life. She pounded the snake with her hooves till he was dead. Momma came down from the wagon and picked up the shovel.

  “Get in the wagon with your brother,” she told me. She picked up the dead snake and threw him into the woods. I saw him turn over and over before settling in a pile of dried red leaves at the base of a maple tree.

  With the distance and knowledge of half a century plus, I now think the events of our stay at the McCurtain place were contrived by the dead to prepare us for even stronger trials to come. The rattlesnake was our warning.

  As we pulled up to the McCurtain place, Missus McCurtain stepped to the porch to greet us. Aaron came from around the back of the house, but you could hardly call what he did a greeting. He slouched across the yard and his skinny body squinted, him watching everybody else but never letting himself be seen. Pokoni once said, “That Aaron boy slithers ’round like a snake––in higher grass every time I see him. Hard to git a hold on that one.”

  Pokoni was right. Aaron started up not ten minutes after we arrived, tensing his lips at his momma and tossing his hand over his shoulder like he wanted to whisper something at her. Next time I looked up, Aaron was gone.

  I didn’t care. He could slither all he wanted to with his sweaty black hair and his skinny arm muscles that weren’t any bigger than a rope. I knew he would hang around and not do a lick of work, so I’d just as soon he be gone. His mother must have known it too. That’s why she let him go.

  “Did you say halito to Aaron?” my mother said. When I didn’t answer, I could feel Momma and Missus McCurtain looking at each other behind my back. That was hoke too. Momma was just making sure we were polite.

  “I forgot, Momma,” I said.

  “That’s alright, hon,” she said. “Maybe later.”

  That first afternoon we spent mostly picking the last yellow squash of the season. Missus McCurtain had a bunch planted on the sunny side of the house. She covered ’em with a blanket when a frost threatened, so she had squash later than anybody.

  The coming north breeze felt cool on my neck. The chiggers must have felt it too. They went jumping for skin, my skin, but I knew better than to itch. I knew come evening time Momma would have a cure and it would be hoke by morning.

  After squash picking, I carried a bushel of white onions up from the root cellar on the south side of the house. Momma said Missus McCurtain could make squash pickles with onions and bread-and-butter spices better than anybody. For the next hour the three of us sliced and washed onions and squash.

  Just after suppertime, Missus McCurtain put the vinegar and spice mixture to boiling, cloves and brown sugar mostly. The fuming vinegar burned inside my nose. My head swelled and I felt like I had to throw up. Missus McCurtain saw me growing wobble-kneed.

  “Go sit for a while, Rose,” she said, looking to the back porch. “Go get some fresh air. You feel better if you do.” I saw her eyes tearing up as she said it and I knew why. Missus McCurtain was thinking about her babies.

  The babies, two girls and a boy, had each died a few hours after they were born. They were buried in a corner of cedar woods a short walk from the back porch. All three babies were buried in the same gravehouse. The roof stood no taller than a small dog, surrounded by piles of dried yellowing flowers nobody was allowed to move.

  Her children still lived in Missus McCurtain, in her sad eyes, her sloping shoulders, the way she would pat your hand and talk in her soft cracking voice when she told you to do something, like you might cry if she was too harsh. It was Missus McCurtain who might cry, anybody who knew her knew that.

  Pokoni once told me, “It don’t matter if her eyes cry or not. Her spirit cries most of the time. Death falls heavier on people like Missus McCurtain. She is your momma’s best friend, you know.”

  “How come?”

  “Your momma is the only person who can make the children laugh. She makes Missus McCurtain forget about them, so they can go off playing. Children will laugh if you leave them alone. Shilombish children are the same way.”

  Pokoni and I were picking green beans in our garden when she told me this. At the mention of shilombish children-spirit children in Nahullo talk-she lowered her voice and looked all around to make sure we were alone.

  “Your Amafo can see the McCurtain children,” she almost whispered. “I can sometimes hear them laughing, but I never seen ’em.” Pokoni looked around again before she continued. “He says they look like glowing yellow children.”

  “Are they babies, like when they died?” I asked, feeling a little guilty about pretending not to know.

  “No, they grow every year, just like you. ’Spec maybe they keep growing till they reach the age they ’sposed to die.”

  I tried to look surprised.

  “If you take after Amafo,” Pokoni said, “you’ll be seeing the McCurtain children, all kinds of Walking People. That’s what I call ’em, ’cause their spirits are still walking.”

  Pokoni crouched down among the bean bushes and took my hands in hers. “Rose, if you be real quiet and learn to see people, you can know the ones weighed down by death. Find out what makes them happy, what they like to do or talk about. Making Walking People laugh is a very good thing to do too, sweetheart. When the spirits laugh, everybody is happy.”

  Soon we went back to picking beans, at least our fingers went to picking, but our minds went other places. Thinking back, I’m sure Pokoni knew that I would someday see the McCurtain children.

  The McCurtain Children

  Rose • Four years earlier

  He will gather, he will gather,

  The gems for his kingdom.

  Oh the pure ones, oh the bright ones,

  His loved and His own.

  Like the stars of the morning,

  His bright crown adorning,

  They will shine in their beauty,

  Bright gems for his crown.

  Mister McCurtain had half a dozen good plow mules for selling and we were spending a day and a night with them. Jamey was just barely walking so most of my morning was taken up seeing to him.

  Let him run some on his own, now, hon, I ’member Momma saying. If he don’t fall, he’ll never learn to walk.

  Momma was out back tending to a basket of mending. Daddy was in the barn talking to Mister McCurtain, patting mule rumps and pulling back teeth gums. When Jamey finally fell asleep between two pillows in the front room and I saw Missus McCurtain leave out the back door, I slipped out the front door to follow her. Something about the way she pulled a dark shawl up tight around her shoulders, even though it was a warm September day, told me where she was going.

  I had heard talk about the little gravehouse on the McCurtain place. Missus McCurtain kept three dead babies in that tiny wooden house and would not let anybody else down there. The Willis boys, all excepting Samuel, had smart-talked about digging the babies up and bu
rying them in the flowerbeds at church, but I knew they were lying.

  The gravehouse sat quiet as a boulder in a small clump of stunted cedar trees, just east of the barn. Missus McCurtain kept the underbrush clear, trying her best to keep rattlesnakes from nesting with her babies, was how Pokoni put it. I hid behind the barn till Missus McCurtain entered the grove. The sun was streaking bright yellow through the cedars and I could see real clear. She knelt down facing the gravehouse with her back to me.

  Except for the size, the gravehouse was like all others, a shingled roof over a hole in the ground. One end had a tiny opening, a door for the spirits to come and go by. Missus McCurtain knelt in front of this spirit door.

  She had stuffed the pockets of her gingham dress with dozens of little cookies, her special butter cookies coated with sparkling sugar. Her pockets were large and puffy and I imagined she had sewn them so for this purpose. Using her fingers like a rake, she stooped and cleared a space on the leafy floor in front of the gravehouse opening. She then pulled three lace-edged handkerchiefs from her pockets, two pink and one blue, and topped each with a pile of cookies, much as you would divide cookies for children at a birthday party.

  A large mound of dried flowers, over six feet tall, leaned against a squat cedar bush by the gravehouse. While Missus McCurtain spread out the cookies, I slipped from my hiding place and tucked myself behind the bush. Flower smells filled the clearing. I knew that a pile of brush this high would be a good breeding ground for snakes.

  Why would Missus McCurtain keep the grounds cleared out so snakes wouldn’t come ’round, them provide ’em a home of dead flowers?

  Just as the thought entered my mind I heard a rustling and shifting of leaves. Something was crawling toward me from its home of stalks and stems. In an instant it leapt, landing on my lap. I muffled a scream.

  A tiger-striped cat arched her back and flipped her tail in my face. So you are the guardian of snakes, I thought. Clever Missus McCurtain, to have a cat mother her children when she cannot.

  Then Missus McCurtain began to sing. I closed my eyes and gave way to the magic.

  When He cometh, when He cometh

  To make up his home,

  All the good ones, all the bright ones

  As she sang, Missus McCurtain rose and circled the cedar bush, approaching me in a steady-step walk that told me she had known I was there all along. She moved behind me as I knelt and I heard her airy laughter. She lifted the long strands of hair from my neck and spread them evenly over my shoulders. Her tiny fingertips rested easily on my back and neck.

  Still she sang, her voice floating over the clearing sweet and high, from the now living gravehouse, to the cedars, to the ebbing afternoon sky.

  Like the stars of the morning,

  His bright crown adorning,

  They will shine in the heavens,

  Bright gems for his crown.

  So large was the feeling, the sun through the cedars, the hum of the flower’s fragrance, I didn’t notice when the song was over, but some sweet unmeasured minute later I opened my eyes and beheld the true magic. Missus McCurtain knelt by the gravehouse as before.

  She had never moved.

  The tiny fingers still rested on my shoulders, three pairs of children’s fingers, I now realized. The children laughed at my surprise. I felt the breath of their laughter on my neck. I was terrified, but they moved to relieve my fears. They emerged from the empty air in front of me, three children melted together.

  Light surrounded their faces and sifted through their hair, red auburn like their mother’s. Their eyes were large, as if they felt my wonder, and they laughed and laughed in the joy of my new knowing.

  And what a new knowing it was. I saw for the first time what I had only felt to be true––the beyond and beyond of it. I saw it in the smiling faces of the children, two girls barely younger than myself and their glowing little brother.

  With musical laughter, the children turned to their mother. When Missus McCurtain lifted her face, I knew she could hear her children but could not see them. I watched the girls surround their mother, like a sweet see-through cloud, moving in and out and through her. I saw her cheeks flush and her eyes grow wide in wonder as the girls caressed her, even embraced each other through her. The boy, meanwhile, tried to pick up sugar cookies, giggling and staring as his shimmering fingers flew through the cookies without moving them.

  I heard Missus McCurtain whisper her children’s names.

  Esther, Evadelle, and Adam. Come to your mother, Sarah.

  If ever anyone wondered how she could cling forever to her babies, Cold and dead all these years and she still cain’t let ’em go, as I had heard all my childhood, I now waxed warm and confident in the abode of my new knowing. Like Missus McCurtain, I wanted to stay in the clearing forever. I missed the children and longed for their joy when they turned from me.

  I soon realized I had been blessed by this seeing, but the children needed time alone with their mother. I rose, lifted my palm in an unseen wave, and crossed the open pasture to the back porch to be with my own mother.

  Momma saw me coming. She patted the wooden porch beside her chair for me to sit and join her. She held up a green and yellow quilted coat for my approval.

  “Come try this on, hon.”

  “It’s Pokoni’s quilt,” I said.

  “Not anymore,” she replied, and smiled and helped me slip first one arm and then the other into the loose-fitting coat sleeves. Four brown buttons fastened the coat at the front.

  “These have been in your button basket as long as I can remember,” I said, fingering the buttons and examining the maroon thread tying them to the coat.

  “Since long before you were born, sweetheart. Just waiting for you.”

  Like the McCurtain children, I thought. They lie in that gravehouse, waiting for their mother. Every time I buttoned that coat, till I finally outgrew it sometime before my fifteenth birthday, I counted the buttons by naming the children, just as Missus McCurtain had done in calling them to her.

  Esther, Evadelle, and Adam. Come to your mother, Sarah.

  I counted as I buttoned from the bottom to the top.

  Esther. I button the first button, the bottom button.

  Evadelle. I button the second.

  And Adam. I feel the growing snugness and I fasten the next to last button.

  I always pause and say the next line just as Missus McCurtain did.

  Come to your mother, Sarah. I slip the final button through its slot.

  Sometimes, if everything felt too ordinary, I would close my eyes and imagine I was Missus McCurtain, slowly tasting the ripple of her children’s names across her tongue. Sometimes I said the names again, like in a God-bless bedtime prayer when all the names are said aloud. Maybe I was calling the McCurtain children. Maybe I was calling my own yet unborn children.

  Esther.

  Evadelle.

  And Adam.

  Come to your mother, Rose.

  Rendering the Sow

  Just like at home, we got up long before sunrise at the McCurtains. Soon the chores were sorted out, with Momma and Missus McCurtain doing the sorting. Most everybody went outside to work, but I ended up at the stove, stirring a boiling kettle of scoopanong grape juice, on its way to becoming jelly.

  Jamey was supposed to be helping me, but I knew that wouldn’t last. He soon grew tired of scooping sugar, wiping up spills, and spooning grape skins floating to the top of the boiling juice.

  “Goin’ to hep Momma,” he hollered, running out the back door. Before I could say anything, the door slammed shut and Jamey was gone. Through the kitchen window I saw him scoot around the barn.

  I went to stirring slow, thinking on the events of the past year, spooning up memories like the bubbles rising from the purple juice. I thought about Amafo and his broken pride, and what a good man he was to take the path he took. I thought about Pokoni.

  I drooped over sad to think about Pokoni. I thought about Roberta Je
an and how lonely she must be, surrounded by all those boys. I thought about the marshal too, and his mean ways.

  Pokoni would read my thoughts, if she were here, and she’d have something to say to make it all seem bigger and still in the hands of the Lord.

  “You just let that man go on ahead,” Pokoni would tell me. “He’s got to meet His Maker, same as we all do. I just wouldn’t want to be him at that meeting.” I smiled and squeezed my eyes tight shut.

  Jamey’s scream brought me back to life.

  He had spotted piglets in the cedars behind the barn and made a beeline to them. He didn’t see the momma sow, not at first. She raised from the brush, snorted, and went after Jamey, her sharp tusks lowered and ready to strike. The pow of a shotgun blast ripped the air. I froze and felt the breath whoosh out of me.

  “Nooo,” Momma called.

  We all of us ran to the scene. Jamey sat on the ground, his whole body shaking and shivering. A bloody sow lay a few feet from her squirming piglets. She had rolled on her back and died from the gunshot wound to her head. Momma hugged Jamey tight.

  “You hoke, son?” she said, doing her best to hide back the tears, but they came through her trembling voice. “You doing hoke?”

  Jamey nodded and started sputtering and talking faster than anybody could make sense of.

  “A panther, a huge, big panther, with sharp claws, her teeth were big…she jumped at the hog and the man shot her…she blew up and the hog died.”

  We tried to piece together what had happened from what we could see. There was no sign of any panther. Jamey crouched by a scrubby cedar bush near the piglets. The dead momma sow lay a few feet away. But what gave us pause to worry was the left-behind sign of the gunman.

  Fresh boot prints tracked to and from the woods.

  Jamey’s cries were brief and of small concern once it was determined he was uninjured. The major concern––what with the absence of grown men––was the question: Who had come onto the McCurtain spread and killed one of the sows?

  Why the man was on the McCurtain property to begin with, and why he fled after shooting the sow, we could not know. Later, while we packed for the trip home, I did slip away, unknown to the others. I studied the sight of the killing on the slim chance that Jamey had seen a panther. He had. The tracks were unmistakable, and by the size of the paw prints the panther was huge, just as Jamey had said.