Roving bands of teenagers move through the woods from here to there: long-haired girls in jeans and Keds, and long-haired boys in jeans and complicated athletic shoes. Some of the boys are tough-looking, with black bandanas pushed high on their shiny foreheads and knotted in the back. They hail each other through the woods in English, but when they address the older people, their greetings are Cherokee. Even toddlers, when they run up to slap dark skirts with grubby hands, open their small mouths and let out strange little bitten-off Cherokee songs. Alice is fascinated. She thinks of the holy-roller churches in Mississippi, where people spoke in tongues, though of course in that case it was more or less every man for himself, whereas here they understand one another. She had no idea there was so much actual foreign language thriving right here under the red, white, and blue. The idea thrills her. She has always wished she had the nerve to travel to foreign lands. Whenever she suggested this to Harland, he reminded her that anything at all you could see in person you could see better on TV, because they let the cameras get right up close. She knew he was right, but always felt misunderstood, even so.
Suddenly there is a sense of quiet, although everyone is still talking. The men are moving toward their trucks. Cash leans over to Alice as he gets up. "Ledger's just got here," he explains.
"Who?"
"Ledger Fourkiller. Our medicine chief. He's over by that standpipe."
Alice spots him: a small man in jeans and a hat and plaid flannel shirt, hardly one to stand out in the crowd. She doesn't know what she expected, surely not war paint, but still. "Where you going?" she asks Cash.
"Nowhere. Just to get my eagle feather."
The other men are doing the same: each producing a large brown feather from a glove compartment to tuck into a hatband. Alice would like to see Boma Mellowbug, but she doesn't. Instead, a woman with a walk like a she-bear is waddling over to Alice with two cups of coffee. She says something like "Siyo" to Cash. Cash introduces his sister Letty to Alice.
"Pleased to meet you," Alice says, though she actually feels just about every other known emotion besides "pleased." But she takes the coffee gratefully. The night has grown clear and chilly against her bare arms.
"You all looked cold. I thought you needed some hot coffee." She gives Cash some sort of look, but Alice has no idea what it means. Another woman, even shorter and broader than Letty, comes up behind them and reaches up high to clap Cash on the shoulder.
"This here's Alice," Letty tells the woman. "She's staying over at Hornbuckles'."
"My daddy's sister married a Hornbuckle," the woman tells Alice. "Did you know that?" she asks Letty.
"Well, now, sure I did. Leona Hornbuckle."
"No, not Leona. She was a Pigeon, before she married. I'm talking about Cordelia."
"Well, sure, Cordelia was your aunt. I knew that."
"She was a Grass. Cordelia Grass."
"Honey, I know it. I've got Grasses related to me through my oldest daughter."
"No, them's Adair Grasses. This is the Tahlequah Grasses."
Alice listens as the argument winds its way through Grasses, Goingsnakes, Fourkillers, and Tailbobs. At that point Cash touches his sister's arm and points to the fire circle. Both women give a little start and begin to move toward the fire. Cash leans down and touches Alice's hand. "I'm going to go smoke this pipe. I'll see you later on."
The benches have filled up entirely and the chief now stands by the fire. He's a man of slight build, maybe sixty, distinguished by the fact that a long, pale leather pouch hangs down from his belt. To Alice it looks like a bull's scrotum.
Sugar appears in the lawn chair next to Alice, out of breath. She leans over and grabs Alice's arm like a grammar-school girlfriend.
"I didn't want to interfere with anything."
Alice has had about enough of the entire Cherokee Nation organizing her love life. "What's that he's got on his belt?" she asks, nodding toward the chief. "Balls?"
"Naw, just tobacco and stuff. Plants. It's his medicine. They'll all smoke it directly. It isn't nothing bad."
"Well, I didn't think that," Alice says. She wouldn't expect drugs; it has already struck her that there is no alcohol here. She can smell woodsmoke and coffee and the delicious animal scent of grease on a cooking fire, but none of that other familiar picnic odor. It's odd, in a way. A hundred pickup trucks on a Saturday night, and not one beer.
The chief raises his head suddenly and sends a high, clean blessing to the tree branches. His voice is so clear it seems to be coming from somewhere above his ears. When he paces to the east of the fire he seems to grow taller, just from taking long strides. He takes some tobacco from his pouch and offers it to the fire, speaking to the fire itself, the way you might coax a beloved old dog to take a rib bone out of your hand. The fire accepts his offering, and the chief paces some more, talking all the while. He fills a slender white pipe that's as long as Alice's arm. The old people move toward the fire, then nearly everyone else shuffles into single file behind them, making a line that circles the whole clearing.
Sugar leans to get up. "I got to go smoke the pipe now," she whispers. "Afterward, you come sit with me on the Bird Clan benches. You can't sit with Cash, he's not Bird, he's Wolf Clan." She winks at Alice. "Just as well. You can't marry inside your clan."
Sugar hurries to join the line, leaving Alice feeling bewildered and slightly annoyed. She surely had no idea she belonged to a clan. Also she's apparently the only person for miles around, besides Cash, who isn't making wedding plans.
The chief hands the pipe to the first old man, who closes his lips on the stem, closes his eyes, and breathes in. Then he rotates the pipe one complete turn, parallel with the ground. It's an odd-looking gesture that takes both hands. He hands the pipe to the woman behind him in line, the one who was debating Grasses with Letty. The old man walks five or six careful steps toward the east and takes a place at the edge of the clearing. When the woman has gone through the same motions, she joins him. One by one each person takes the pipe; even children do.
Alice spots Annawake in line behind a barrel-chested boy and a slew of kids, and there is Cash, looking like a tall, congenial weed among a cluster of chrysanthemum-shaped women. He seems round-shouldered and easy with himself each time he takes another little step forward. It's a slow process. Alice keeps her eye on two little twin girls dressed in identical frilled square-dancing skirts, moving patiently forward in the line. When their turn comes, the mother touches the pipe to her own mouth first, then holds it to her children's lips, helping each one to rotate it afterward. When the last person in line has smoked the pipe and everyone moves to sit down, Sugar motions Alice over to what she says are the Bird Clan benches. "Third ones from the east, counterclockwise," she points out with her finger. "So you can find them again."
"Well, it's a good enough seat, but I don't see what makes me belong here."
Sugar stares. "Alice Faye, you're just as much Bird as I am. Grandmother Stamper was full-blooded. You get your clan from your mother's line."
Alice never met her mother's mother, a woman of questionable reputation who died dramatically and young somehow in a boat. As the story is told, she didn't even own the clothes she drowned in; Alice hadn't especially thought this woman might leave her belonging to a clan. She doesn't argue, though, because the chief has begun to pray, or talk, again. With his arms crossed he paces back and forth on the bare dirt circle, sometimes looking up at the sky but mostly addressing the fire. His words seem very calm, more like conversation, Alice thinks, than preaching. Sugar says he is preaching, though. "He's saying how to be good, more or less. Everyday wrongs, and big wrongs. Don't be jealous, all that business," she confides. "Same stuff he always says."
Alice feels transported, though. His words blend together into an unbroken song, as smooth as water over stones. It is a little like those holy-roller churches she loved, where, when someone fell into a swoon, you felt their meaning; in the roof of your mouth and your fingertips you felt
it, without needing to separate out the particular words.
A blue-tick hound walks across the clearing in front of the chief and lies down with a group of dogs near the fire. They all hold their heads up, watching him. Now and again a latecomer truck pulls up through the woods, joining the circle, and respectfully dims its lights. The focused attention in the clearing feels to Alice like something she could touch, a crystal vase, small at the ground and spreading as it goes up into the branches of the oaks.
All at once the chief raises his voice high, and something like a groan of assent rises up through the crowd and the glass is shattered. There is only quiet. Then babies start up with fretful cackles, and old men stand up to shake the hands of old women they didn't see earlier, and the dogs all rise and walk off toward the kitchens.
"Now we get to dance," Sugar says, excitedly. A dozen teenaged girls come out, checking each other seriously and adjusting side to side as they line up in a close circle around the fire. They're all wearing knee-length gingham skirts and the rattling leggings made of terrapin shells filled with stones. Alice is taken aback by how much bigger these are than the training shackles Sugar showed her; they bulge out like beehives from the girls' legs, below their dresses. They all begin to move with quick little double sliding steps, giving rise to a resounding hiss. Several old men fall into line behind them, nodding and singing a quick, perfect imitation of a whippoorwill. Alice feels chills dance on her backbone. The old men begin a song then, and the young women step, step, step, counterclockwise around the fire. As other people come into the circle, they take up hands behind the singers and shackle-bearers, making a long snake that coils languidly around the fire. All at once, when the chief holds up his hand, everyone's feet stop still in the dust and the dancers whoop. It's the sound of elation.
"Oh, that looks fun," Alice cries to Sugar. "Can't you do it?"
"Oh, I will, directly. You should too. You don't have to wait to be asked, just go on up any time you feel like it."
Another dance begins right away. The song sounds a little different, but the dance is still the same gentle stomping in a circle. Only the girls with the turtle-shell legs do the fancy step, concentrating hard, with no wasted motion in their upper bodies; everyone else just shuffles, old and young, pumping their arms a little, like slowed-down joggers. There are several rings of people around the fire now, and the crowd is growing. Alice is fascinated by the girls who remain in the inner circle by the fire, in the honored place, working so hard. This forest feels a hundred miles away from the magazine models with their twiggy long legs. These girls in their bulbous shackles have achieved a strange grace, Alice thinks--a kind of bowlegged femininity.
The dancing goes on and on. An old man produces a drum, and the music then is made up of a small skin drum and deep, mostly male voices and the hiss of the turtle shells above it all like a thrilling high wind. When Alice asked Cash, earlier, about the dance and the music, he said it would be music that sounds like the woods, and Alice decides this is right. No artificial flavorings. It's the first time she has witnessed an Indian spectacle, she realizes, that had nothing to do with tourism. This is simply people having a good time in each other's company, because they want to.
"What are the songs about?" she asks Sugar. To Alice they sound like "oh-oh-way-yah," and sometimes the chief sings out in a sort of yodel. His voice breaks and rises very beautifully, and the crowd answers the same words back.
"I couldn't really tell you," Sugar answers, at last. "It's harder to understand than regular talking. Maybe it don't mean anything."
"Well, it would have to mean something, wouldn't it?"
Sugar seems untroubled by the idea that it might not. "Let's go," she says suddenly, grabbing Alice by the hand. "Just go in after the shackles," she instructs. "Don't get in front of the girls." Alice wouldn't dare.
She follows Sugar in, trembling with nerves, and then there she is, stomp dancing like anybody. At first she is aware of nothing beyond her own body, her self, and she watches other people, imitating the way they hold their arms. But she's also aware that she's doing a strange and unbelievable thing. It makes her feel entirely alive, in the roof of her mouth and her fingertips. She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.
Once in a while, Alice remembers Cash and feels a thrill in her stomach. She looks around for him, but can only see the people in front of her and those beside her in the snake's other coils. The song turns out to be a short one, and Alice is disappointed to see that when it ends everyone leaves the clearing and settles back down on the benches of their respective clans. Even after such a short time, her calves feel pinched. It's like an all-night workout on the Stairmaster she has seen advertised on Harland's shopping channel. A Stairmaster with a spiritual element.
While the dancers take a break, a young man stretches a hose from a spigot in one of the kitchen shelters, looping it through the trees, and attaches onto its end the kind of spray nozzle people use for gardening. He carefully hoses down the dirt floor of the dance area, beginning with the eastern part where the chief stood and paced, and working his way slowly around the clearing. He never sprays any water into the fire.
The fire seems to Alice like a quiet consciousness presiding. It's not like an old dog, after all, because it commands more prolonged attention. It's more like an old grandmother who never gets out of her chair.
Sugar is busy gnawing on a chicken wing and introducing Alice to everyone in sight. Alice is too tired to remember names, but she notices Sugar is very proud about pointing out Alice's connection to the Bird Clan.
"I know we had the same grandmother," Alice tells her finally, when all the Tailbobs and Earbobs have drifted away. "But you're forgetting I'm not Indian."
"You're as Indian as I am. Daddy was white, and Mama too except for what come down through the Stamper side."
"Bloodwise, I guess," Alice says, "but you married Roscoe and you've lived here near about your whole life. Don't you have to sign up somewhere to be Cherokee?"
"To vote you do." Sugar holds the chicken wing at arm's length, turning it this way and that as if it were some piece of sculpture she were working on. "You have to enroll. Which is easy. You've just got to show you come from people that's on the Census Rolls, from back in the 1800s. Which you do."
"Well, even if that's true, it don't seem right. I don't feel like an Indian."
Sugar places the chicken bones in a bag inside her purse, and touches a napkin to her mouth. "Well, that's up to you. But it's not like some country club or something. It's just family. It's kindly like joining the church. If you get around to deciding you're Cherokee, Alice, then that's what you are."
Alice can't believe it's 2:00 A.M. and people are still driving in. The crowd has grown to several hundred. The turtle-shell girls are assembling around the fire again, and when the dance starts, Sugar and Alice are among the first up. Alice feels endurance creeping up on her gradually. This time the singing lasts longer, and she forgets about her arms and legs. It's surprisingly easy to do. The music and movement are comforting and repetitious and hypnotic, and her body slips into its place in the endless motion. For the first time she can remember, Alice feels completely included.
The instant a dance stops, she becomes aware of her body again, her muscles and her sleepiness. She understands how, if she kept dancing, she could keep dancing. A keen, relaxed energy comes from forgetting your body. She sees how this will go on all night.
Midway through the next song, she realizes Cash has moved into the line behind her. She smiles as she moves her body through the siss-siss of the turtles. He is back there for a while, and then by the time another song begins, someone else is. She sees Annawake out to the side of her, once. She thinks she sees Boma Mellowbug too, without her feather. For a while she tries t
o keep tabs on where Cash is, but then she forgets to think about it, because she can't quite locate herself in this group either. She only knows she is inside of it.
At the end of each song the voices stop and then there is only the watershell hiss, vibrating inside a crystal jar of quiet. It's a sound that loses its individual parts, the way clapping becomes a roar in the hands of a crowd. It is as many pebbles as there are on a beach. Alice's life and aloneness and the things that have brought her here all drop away, as she feels herself overtaken by uncountable things. She feels a deep, tired love for the red embers curled in the center of this world. The beloved old fire that has lived through everything since the beginning, that someone carried over the Trail of Tears, and someone carried here tonight, and someone will carry home and bring back again to the church of ever was and ever shall be, if we only take care of it.
At home, with morning light seeping under the yellow-white shades in Sugar's spare room, Alice lies in bed hugging her own beating heart, afraid of falling asleep. She takes stock of where she is, without believing any of it. Her black suitcase yawns against the closet door, exposing a tangle of innards, and Sugar's ironing board stands near the bed under a pile of wrinkled laundry, burdened like a forward-leaning pack mule.
If she sleeps, the magic could be gone when she wakes up again in this room. She might be merely here, in a cousin's ironing room, with no memory of what has happened tonight. It seems like a fairy tale, and the stories say spells get broken and magic doesn't endure. That people don't really love one another and dance in the woods for no other reason than to promise goodness, and lose track of themselves, and keep an old fire burning.
Pigs in Heaven Page 27
