by Billie Letts
But Mark wasn’t smiling. “Do you have some business with me, or is this a social call?”
“Came by to tell you I made an arrest in those break-ins.”
“Will wonders never cease,” Ivy said.
“You’ve got a smart mouth on you, girl. Just like your mama.”
“Why, thank you, O Boy.”
“Anyway, you’re free to leave town, Albright. Or Harjo. Whatever you’re calling yourself now. So you can take off whenever you’re ready, but if I was you, I wouldn’t waste any time.”
“Why’s that?”
“Had a call this morning. Some reporter in Tulsa asking questions about you. I didn’t give him a damn thing, but that won’t stop him. He’s not going to let a story like this go. And if one of those sons of bitches knows about you, you can bet there’s more on to it by now. Place’ll be crawling with them.”
As O Boy turned and started for the door, he said, “You have a good trip. And don’t be such a stranger.”
When the door slammed, Ivy said, “Isn’t he charming?”
Mark walked to the front window, where he watched O Boy get into his patrol car and pull away. “Well,” he said, “I guess Hap was right.”
“What’d Hap say?” Lonnie asked, calling Mark’s attention to the foursome in the corner, where the domino game had stopped, the players caught up in the goings-on around them.
Customarily, Mark would have been peeved at a near stranger butting into his personal business, but given the incongruity of this situation, he couldn’t keep from grinning.
“He said the sheriff would be real enthusiastic about me leaving town.”
“Hap was right,” Jackson Standingdeer offered, his comment considered a downright outburst from a man who cared little for the spoken word.
“You know, Mark, as much as it hurts me to say this, O Boy’s close to the truth about one thing,” Ivy said. “Story like yours will cause a big stir around here, and I don’t think you’ll like being in the middle of it. Before this is over, you may wish you’d taken that flight back to L.A.”
“You could be right, Ivy, but there’s so much more I want to know. If I leave now, chances are I’d always wonder.”
For a brief time, all movement, all conversation, in the pool hall ceased. The domino players in the corner, Ivy behind the counter, Teeve in the café doorway . . . they all waited.
Finally, Ron John O’Reily, in one of his more lucid moments, said, “I think you might ought to shoot the moon.”
Chapter Fifteen
You’ve got to remember, Mark, I was just a little kid when all that happened, so I only know what Mom’s told me.” Ivy slowed the van as she neared a one-lane bridge that crossed a dry creek bed.
“Then tell me what you know.”
“Well, she was a hell of a basketball player, I guess. I’ve seen an old newspaper clipping with her picture; the caption says, ‘Gaylene Harjo Named Player of the Year.’ Several colleges were after her when she finished high school, but she decided on Northeastern, a state college in Tahlequah, because they offered her the best scholarship. Full tuition, books, room and board. All she had to do was sign a letter of intent and pass a physical.
“So, a week before she was scheduled to leave, she went to a local doctor for her exam. I don’t know . . . an X-ray of an old knee injury, some other tests, I guess.” Ivy glanced at Mark. “Evidently, she had no idea she was pregnant. If she had, things wouldn’t have turned out the way they did.”
“What things?”
“Grandma Enid planned a surprise party. See, having a Harjo go to college was really a big deal. A first. So she arranged for Grandpa to drive Gaylene into town to pick up the results of her physical, and while they were gone, everyone would come to the house—the basketball team, her friends, teachers, coaches. And the family, of course. The whole damn clan.
“They tied balloons to the fence, set up tables in the yard, put out a ton of food. Some of the kids had Roman candles and firecrackers. It was going to be a real celebration. Mom said nearly a hundred people showed up.
“So, they were all there waiting for Grandpa to pull in with Aunt Gaylene when they’d yell ‘Surprise!’ and set off their fireworks.
“But when Grandpa drove in, Aunt Gaylene wasn’t with him. He parked his truck, walked straight into the house without a word to anyone, and that was that.”
“What do you mean, ‘that was that’? Where was she?”
“I don’t know, but Mom said the next day she was living in one of Arthur McFadden’s rental trailers. A little more than seven months later you were born. And she never did go to college.”
“But what happened on that trip to town?”
“I assume her medical exam showed that she was pregnant. Grandpa probably found out at the same time she did.”
“So he wouldn’t let her come home?”
“I don’t think she ever stepped foot inside his house again.”
“How did her mother feel about that?”
“Oh, Grandma tried to talk to him, tried everything she could to change his mind, but he was so damn hardheaded. He wouldn’t listen.
“So she did what she could to help Aunt Gaylene. Kept her in produce from the garden, bought everything she’d need for the baby. Took her to the hospital when she went into labor. Stayed with her for a week when she came home with you.”
“I don’t suppose your grandfather was too happy about that.”
“Probably not, but he couldn’t do anything about it. Grandma’s a strong woman. Independent as hell. Yeah, he obviously knew about it, but I doubt he ever mentioned it. That wasn’t his way.”
“He must’ve been fun to live with.”
“Well, I know how it sounds, but he was really a decent man. Good husband, hard worker. But to his way of thinking, there was only one way to live. The right way. Which just happened to be his way.”
“And having a pregnant unmarried daughter wasn’t the right way, was it.”
“No,” Ivy said as she turned off the blacktop onto a recently graded dirt road.
“He must have had a lot of regrets when she was killed.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Did he ever talk to you about it?”
“No. He didn’t talk to anyone about it. Grandpa stopped speaking the day Aunt Gaylene was buried.”
“We’re here,” Ivy said as she eased the van across a rusted cattle guard and onto a graveled drive leading to a freshly painted clapboard house.
The home was the first dwelling Mark had seen for the last half hour or so, unless someone was living in the abandoned school bus or the burnt-out church they’d passed several miles back.
Even before Ivy parked, two hounds raced from a barn at the back of the property, barking while they circled the van.
“Why don’t you give me some time alone with her. This is going to be a shock no matter how we do it, but maybe it’ll be a little easier for her if you wait out here while I tell her.”
“Okay.”
“And here’s another thing. She’s going to call you Nicky Jack. Not Mark. And you’re not going to correct her. She’s an old lady and you’re her grandson. Understood?”
“Understood.”
As Ivy was climbing the steps, the door opened and a thin, dark woman with white hair and an open smile stepped onto the porch.
“Hi, Grandma.”
“Well, hello, sweet thing.” Enid embraced Ivy, then patted her belly. “How’s our little one today?”
“Feels like he’s playing kickball.”
“Who’s that with you?” Enid asked, shading her eyes against the sunlight. “That your mama out there?”
“No.”
“Well, whoever it is, tell them to get out and come in.”
“I will, but let’s go inside first. I have something to tell you.”
A look of alarm crossed the old woman’s face. “Is it bad news, Ivy?�
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“No, no,” Ivy said as she drew her grandmother inside. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
When Ivy closed the door, Mark got out of the van to draw a breath of fresh air. A muscle just beneath his right shoulder blade had tightened up as it usually did when he was feeling tense.
He stretched, grimaced at the pain that radiated up to his shoulder, then began to walk. The hounds followed but kept a safe distance behind this stranger.
The doors of a one-car garage were standing open, so he took a look inside, where a workbench, clean and smooth, was topped by a Peg-Board containing straight rows of tools. On a shelf overhead, cans of oil, gasoline, anti-freeze, kerosene and paint were lined up neatly, their labels facing front. The walls were hung with coils of garden hose, rope, fan belts, extension cords and baling wire. Everything neat, everything orderly. All put in place by a man who lived the “right” way. His way.
At the back of the house, enclosed in a chicken-wire fence, Mark found a garden—straight, weedless rows of squash, corn and melons.
Behind the garden was a shed housing a tractor, lawn mower, sacks of livestock feed and bales of hay.
As he completed circling the house, he passed a tire swing, the spot beneath it bare where children’s feet had rid the space of grass.
When he took a seat on the front porch steps, the dogs approached him timidly.
“So you want to be friends now, huh?”
At the sound of his voice, both dogs wagged their tails, then cozied up so he could rub behind their ears.
When the front door opened behind him, he stood and turned to see Enid coming toward him, her face wet with tears.
“I never gave up hope, Nicky Jack,” she said as she wrapped him in her arms. Then, holding him close, she whispered, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you for bringing my grandbaby home.”
• • •
While Enid turned the chicken, sizzling on the stove, Mark watched every move she made. He’d been stealing glances at her since he’d walked into the house, but now, as she busied herself with cooking, he felt free to stare.
He was fascinated by their similarities—the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, the contours of their lips. For the first time in his life, he was in the company of someone whose face resembled his own.
As she took a spoon from a counter drawer, she saw him watching her and smiled, causing him to flush with embarrassment.
After she slid a pan of biscuits into the oven, she rejoined him and Ivy at the kitchen table, covered with photographs, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings and school yearbooks. Mark was turning pages of an album, looking at pictures of Gaylene as a toddler, her face smeared with chocolate; then, at seven, she and two older boys wading in a creek; Gaylene, a teenager, climbing the town’s water tower; and at her graduation, in cap and gown, giving a thumbs-up to the camera.
“Look at these.” Ivy held out a handful of blue ribbons she’d picked out of a shoebox of memorabilia.
“Oh, she won all kinds of awards for her artwork,” Enid said. “Won blue ribbons at the state fair in Tulsa three times.”
“What happened to her paintings?” Mark asked. “Did she sell them?”
“No.” Enid smiled. “Said they weren’t good enough to make people pay for them. She just gave them away.”
“Do you know who has them?”
“Well, let’s see. My brother in Arizona; her old basketball coach. Rowena Whitekiller—she was Gaylene’s best friend. They started kindergarten together and graduated together.” Enid swallowed hard, trying to hold back tears.
“I think her art teacher at the high school, Irene Dobbins, had several, but she moved to Florida after she retired and I’ve lost track of her.
“Now and then, Gaylene would donate her paintings for fund-raisers. An auction or raffle, something like that. She gave one to the tribal office so they could sell chances on it to pay for some equipment at the dialysis center. She gave a couple to our church to raise money for new pews. And the United Way sold one at auction for over six hundred dollars, I think.”
“She didn’t keep any of them?”
“Just one. It was her favorite, but I don’t know why. She said it was a self-portrait, but it didn’t look anything like her. Matter of fact, it didn’t even look like a human at all.”
“May I see it?”
“I wish you could, but I don’t know where it is. Gaylene took it with her when she moved into that trailer. And I don’t know what happened to it. I saw it on her wall the last time I visited her, just two or three days before she was . . . a few days before she died.”
“So you don’t have any of her work.”
“Not her paintings, no. But I have her sketchbooks, drawings she did in high school. Would you like to see those?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Come on, then,” Enid said. “Ivy, honey, keep an eye on that chicken, will you?”
“Sure, Grandma.”
Mark followed Enid through the dining room, then down a hall past a bedroom and a bath to a closed door, which she opened almost reverently. And when she led him inside, she stepped softly as if she were entering a shrine. He knew, without being told, that nothing here had changed in the past quarter century.
“I used to come to this room every morning, long after she was gone. Pretend I was waking her for school. Sometimes I’d bring flowers from the garden, put them in a vase on her night table. She always liked—”
When her voice broke, Enid bent to snatch a dead leaf from the floor. Then, forcing control, she said, “Her sketchbooks are on a shelf in that closet. And her diary’s in the top drawer of the desk. You can read it if you want to.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Why, honey, why would I mind? She was your mother, Nicky Jack.” Enid touched his cheek with the back of her hand, then left the room, closing the door behind her.
Suddenly feeling weak in the knees, Mark sat on the bed where Gaylene Harjo had slept, surveying the room that had been hers for over seventeen years, and tried to see her there. A girl learning to put on lipstick, trying out her first pair of high heels, daydreaming about a future she would never have, this girl who became his mother.
On the top shelf of a bookcase in the corner, he found several high school textbooks and three library books thirty years overdue: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, A Vision of Paris and The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. On the bottom shelf he discovered a stack of art books, three poetry collections, a French phrase book and several paperbacks, including And Still the Waters Run, Black Elk Speaks and Custer Died for Your Sins.
Standing in front of her dresser, he picked up a bottle of cologne, evaporated now but still holding the scent of honeysuckle. He opened her jewelry box, which contained a charm bracelet, two pairs of earrings and a peace pendant attached to a leather strap.
In her closet, he found clothes dating back to the sixties: tie-dyed shirts, bell-bottom jeans, peasant blouses, granny skirts. And a dress of soft cotton—pale yellow with small orange flowers, a dress he pressed to his face, inhaling the faint sweet aroma of honeysuckle.
On the shelf above the clothes, he found her sketchbooks. He carried them to a chair by the window, where he leafed through her drawings: several pages of hands—hands of children, praying hands, fisted hands, gnarled hands; women dancing; children laughing; a man and a woman embracing; horses; ears of corn; an old man fishing; nude men; nude women. Pages and pages of sketches that might have become finished paintings had there been time.
At her desk, he removed the diary Enid had told him he would find there. On its cover, printed in block letters, the words WARNING! THIS IS PRIVATE. IF YOU OPEN IT, YOU WILL BE CURSED.
Mark didn’t know if it was the threat of a curse that made him feel uneasy or what he might learn about the girl who wrote it, but when he opened the diary, he felt a chill in the room.
Her first entry was dated January 1, 1966.
Dear Diary,
Mom said I could stay all night with Row tonight, so Daddy took me to town after supper. Mr. and Mrs. Whitekiller went to bed at ten o’clock, but we stayed up till after midnight. We watched the New Year’s celebration on TV, then Row stole two cigarettes out of her mother’s purse and we went outside and smoked them behind the garage. When we came back in, we called Danny Pittman’s house, but his mother answered, so we hung up.
Row made twelve resolutions for the new year, but I’ll bet she doesn’t keep any of them. I just made three. I’m not going to smoke anymore; I am going to shoot one hundred free-throws every day; and I am going to study French because one day I will move to France.
Spider Woman
• • •
After Ivy served herself a second helping of green beans, she offered the bowl to Mark.
“No, thanks,” he said.
“I guess this isn’t the kind of food you’re used to,” Enid said, gesturing toward Mark’s plate, where a cold biscuit and chicken leg remained untouched and the gravy on his potatoes had jelled.
He had barely gotten started on Gaylene’s diary when Enid had called him to dinner, and now, with his mind still on those pages, he had no interest in food.
“This Rowena Whitekiller you mentioned earlier . . .”
“Her last name’s Findley. Married a local boy a long time back.”
“Where does she live?”
“Somewhere in Illinois, but I heard she was in DeClare a couple of weeks ago. Came back to be with her daddy, I imagine. Milton’s got lung cancer, not got long to live.”
“Do you think she’s still in town?”
“Well, she might be. I haven’t heard of Milton’s passing.”
“Why are you interested in her?” Ivy asked.
“I didn’t get very far into the diary, but Rowena’s there, on almost every page I read.”
“Oh, she and Gaylene were close,” Enid said. “Closer than most sisters, I think. And when Rowena got her driver’s license, she was out here almost every night. They went everyplace together. Even double-dated until Rowena took up with one of the Warner boys.”
