Shell Shaker

by LeAnne Howe

  Later that night, Koi Chitto jumps naked into the river. He feels nothing, it is the temperature of his skin. An alligator slips into the water beside him. A test. The river is not deep, he can walk or swim. The alligator nonchalantly passes him by.

  Koi Chitto crawls onto the bank, allowing the wind to dry him. It is a cool night and his purpose is sacrifice. He denies himself warmth, food, clothing, and shelter. The first night’s ritual is for denial.

  Throughout the next day Koi Chitto smokes the dreaming tobacco that will open his mind. He prepares black drink, a concoction that is used as an emetic. He vomits to purify himself. He smokes more of the tobacco and finally, when night comes, he collapses on the floor of his sweat tent. He stares into the small fire in the middle of the tent. Intoxicated at last, Koi Chitto climbs into a river of memories of his life with Shakbatina. Their first night together he is entirely wedded to her body. After caressing him she rubs him down with bear grease. Time races by. A newly delivered baby cries softly at Shakbatina’s breast. One daughter is followed by two more. A little girl comes toward him galloping along the green-belted banks of the river and shouting, “Father, hold me.”

  In the fire he sees Shakbatina’s death coming into focus. He watches the vision unfold again. He cradles her head on his lap. Blood oozes from her eyes and nose as she struggles for air. At that moment he loves her so much that he spits a drop of saliva into her mouth thinking it will save her. Foolish, he knows.

  “You see me,” he screams, “I know you do. Wait for me!”

  Koi Chitto puts a hand over his eyes, hoping to stop the vision. The Red Fox man hits her two times, just to make sure. Anoleta sucks in her breath and runs toward her mother shrieking, “Alleh, alleh, alleh.” He rocks them both in his arms. The dead woman and her daughter. He knows Anoleta is innocent of killing anyone so he whispers for her to wait until after the bone-picking ceremony. “Then we will take our revenge for your mother’s death.”

  Koi Chitto rolls away from the fire and sits up. Everyone at Yanàbi Town understood his wife’s double message. Make peace now, but make war when the time is right.

  He takes another drag from his pipe. He’s supposed to remember that his ritual is for renewal. Not sadness. He sings a love song and prepares his claw-like nails, grown purposefully long since Shakbatina’s death. He smokes and refills his pipe. He repeats the cycle until he feels completely spent. Finally, the thing he seeks comes to him. He enters the na tohbi, something white. As always, when it first arrives he is terrified, yet seduced by it. And through his terror he knows he is participating in a life mystery. On the evening of the second day Koi Chitto slips into unconsciousness. Through his ritual he will become his people’s sacrament. The purpose of the second night is indulgence in the sublime.

  On the third night, Koi Chitto emerges from the sweat, much thinner. He has not eaten in three days. He speaks to no one. He smears bear grease on himself. He feels invigorated knowing that he has succeeded in his purification ceremony. While no two ceremonies are alike, no two purifications are alike, only the knower knows when the experience is complete. Koi Chitto has seen his future in the seductive hallucinations of the tobacco and black drink. He will one day be reunited with Shakbatina. Their children’s children will survive, but not without many hardships. The purpose of his ceremony tonight will be rebirth.

  Koi Chitto heads to Shakbatina’s burial scaffold dressed only in a string cloth. There are hundreds of people gathered for the ceremonies. Many others have died. Shakbatina is not the only one whose bones will be picked clean on this night when the Sun sleeps longer than any night of the year. He climbs the burial scaffold. He listens to the drums; his clansmen have been beating them all day. Their purpose is to wake the dead. Under the influence of black drink he can hear the internal drumming of the plants and trees. He can hear the collective prayers of the people and, if he concentrates, he hears the thoughts of a single person. The combined noise is maddening, yet all-consuming. His people learned to hear the internal drumming of the plant world eons ago. No one knows when this special communication began, only that it exists and the ancestors used it as a tool of survival. The humming and vibrations of the trees and tall corn plants are a soothing comfort to the people. When the musical sounds of the plants changed to frantic drumming during the dry season, the people helped the plants by imitating plant rhythms on their drums. This helped bring rains. In return the plants gave themselves willingly to the people as a gift.

  Koi Chitto examines his wife’s decayed body. She remains steadfast at her post, just as her relatives had placed her, like a warrior watching over the people. He rakes the leaves that have blown over her, leans down and touches the fragments of her hair. Shakbatina’s small jawbone and teeth lie surrendering to the sun, like gleaming pearls. Her skin has been turned inside out by some sharp-beaked, flesh-eating birds. What is left has dried to the bone and resembles snake skin.

  Koi Chitto believes, as all Choctaws believe, that the spirit is related to the body as perfume is to the rose. Shakbatina’s smell is erotic. Over time her exposed bones have taken on that stark, delicate beauty the Choctaws regard as Chunkash Ishi Achukma. The good bliss.

  Three months before, Nitakechi had prepared her body in the Inholahta way. For Inholahta, the preparation ceremony is as ritualized as the bone-picking ceremony. Her body was rolled in every direction. The flesh directly above both her thighs had been sliced away in half-moon shapes in order for the blood and body fluids to run out of the buttocks, because the blood of a dead animal gravitates to the lowest point of the body if an exit is provided. They also pierced her stomach and bladder in order for the bloating gasses to escape in the wind. This was to announce to the animal world that a woman of the people was coming.

  Shakbatina’s head had been turned east so that she would greet the rising sun each morning while she too waited for the day of her rebirth. Her umbilical cord and medicine bag had been tied around her neck as part of the ceremonial incubation. The umbilical cord of a peacemaker is their first toy; with them before birth, it accompanies them into death.

  Koi Chitto looks over his wife’s things. A corn hamper made of swampcane lies beside her. Inside is a small basket with an opening shaped like a mouth. He picks up the basket and opens it. Hiding in a dense nest of fluff and turkey feathers are Shakbatina’s ear spools, the turtle shells she tied around her ankles and wore to the dances, and her black and white porcupine sash. He remembers how she looked with it strapped around her, proudly singing her death song. After tonight, his daughters will retrieve these things from the scaffold.

  The drums grow louder. They seem in rhythm with Koi Chitto’s heartbeat, and he drops the basket. At last, the roar of forest, the constant drumming, and he begins to chant to the crowd gathered below her scaffold.

  “I am the Bone Picker, dancer of death, transformer of life, the one who brings sex, the one who brings rebirth. You must have death to have life. The people live by killing, by stripping the flesh from the animal corpse. The people live by dying. That which dies is reborn.”

  A shrill moan comes from the belly of Koi Chitto. He dances faster, and rolls his eyes back in his head. He is again at the center of na tohbi. The drums vibrate his body and the scaffold shakes as if it will break apart, then it stops. He sees his wife dancing toward him, and he shouts. “Shakbatina is coming. She is here!”

  She looks like she did so many years ago. Her skin is vibrant brown and she is half-naked. Her calf-length hair glistens in the moonlight. She comes very close, puts her hands on his penis. He puts his hands around her hands and together they stroke him, until he ejaculates on her body and screams, “Flesh of my flesh, I will be with you always. Flesh of my flesh, I will return with you always. Until the nothingness becomes everything. Until everything becomes nothing. I am the Bone Picker, dancer of death, transformer of life, the one who brings sex, the one who brings rebirth.”

  Shakbatina’s spirit dances around the platform and
Koi Chitto can hear her talking to him. “Dance with me, my husband, this is the dance of life and rebirth. This is my body. Pull away my remaining flesh. I charge you to get inside me. Release me now, so I may watch over our people. Dance the dance that releases me.”

  She smiles and entreats him to touch her corpse and tear the remaining flesh from her bones. “Hatak holitopa, beloved man, release me and dance the dance of life and death. Che pisa lauchi. I will see you.”

  Hearing her promise that she will return, Koi Chitto gathers his courage and tears Shakbatina’s skull and spinal column from the rest of her bones. He holds them in both his hands high above his head and salutes the four directions. He believes when he finishes this spirit dance, and Shakbatina’s bones are painted and placed in the box, he will not see her again for a long time. Until then he lets her fading scent engulf him. He closes his eyes. They are together, dancing the dance, both knowing that this is the ecstasy of life and rebirth.

  7 | Penance

  DURANT, OKLAHOMA

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1991

  Now Auda remembers. It happened in the twinkling of her mother’s eye. The moment Susan Billy stepped inside her jail cell, the world that had separated them vanished. With one look her mother forgave her everything. For using her family to get Redford McAlester elected Chief of the Choctaw Nation. For the gambling business that had, with the stroke of a pen, mortgaged a thousand years of Choctaw sovereignty—in one night. As her mother speaks to the crowd in front of the house, their unspoken affection hangs in the air. Auda feels it around her, warm as a goose down comforter.

  “My beloved family is here with me,” says Susan Billy. “Adair from New Orleans, Tema from Dallas, her son Hopaii, who will be attending art school in France later this fall, and, of course, my brother, Isaac Billy. I want you to know that we’ve all made great mistakes in the past, siding with the wrong people and such. I know I have. But the Billys are going to survive this, and I promise you it will come out that my girl Auda is innocent of all charges!”

  Auda winces.

  There is a flurry of looks. Adair and Tema, and Gore Battiste, each want the other to say that Auda has confessed to murdering Chief McAlester. But no one dares.

  Outside, Auda and her mother stand side by side. Susan Billy in a royal blue suit she usually reserves for tribal receptions, Auda in a white frumpy bathrobe. They pray with the Choctaw Baptist minister, the Choctaw Presbyterian minister, the Choctaw Methodist minister, and the many Choctaw elders. They shake hands with their neighbors and their neighbors’ children, and all their supporters who’ve never believed that Susan Billy had anything to do with the murder. Now they’ve heard her say Auda didn’t do it either.

  Her mother makes another short speech. “Anyone who believes that there’s no power on earth who’ll return Choctaw’s land to Choctaws except the casino Mafia, I have news for you. We’re going to take back our tribe, our lands, and kick out the gangsters. Just wait and see.”

  There is a clamor of applause. Shouts of “Amen” and “that’s right, Mrs. Billy” reverberate around the yard. Auda looks at her mother. For a woman whose aging body is shaped like a peanut, her mother stands extremely erect and self-assured. She’s rallying the Choctaw tribal elders and the young people, a dangerous combination. Auda slips her hand inside her mother’s. Susan Billy’s gaze is now fixed on her. Her eyes say it all; at last they are of one mind. Forgiveness.

  When the people begin to disperse, Auda excuses herself and heads inside to change into a dress. Gore follows her, but seems apprehensive as they enter the house.

  “I need to see your evidence,” he says.

  “I haven’t forgotten. Come upstairs with me.”

  He peruses her bookshelves while she looks under her bed, then in her closet. She rummages through the manila file folders on her desk, but the phone logs and bank statements she’d stolen from Tonica’s office are gone. A wave of anger washes over Auda. Someone has been going through her things. What else is missing, she wonders?

  “Not here,” he says, nonchalantly.

  “Someone must have taken them,” she says, trying to control the fire in her voice. Auda waits for a reaction from her lawyer, but he merely shrugs, and turns his attention to a picture on the wall. Why the hell is he looking at her photograph? It’s from 1960, an enlargement of her and her sisters swimming with their aunts, Delores and Dovie, in the “Love Lake.” Their horse pond. Beads of water glisten on the sisters’ faces and hair. Their cheeks are pressed together. Tema’s and Adair’s braids hang like black arrows down their small chests, but hers are long and scraggly. She is nine years old and her front teeth are missing. Thirty-one years later, some things are exactly the same, she thinks, running her tongue over her broken teeth.

  Suddenly he exclaims, “That’s Delores and Dovie Love; they’re famous! There’s lots of articles on them at the Oklahoma Historical Society.”

  “Yes, they’re my aunts. Not blood relations, but Indian-way aunts.”

  Gore smiles. “I have some of those, too.”

  “Every summer when we were kids, we spent a couple of weeks with them. Before I got ...sidetracked,” she says, her voice softening, “my next book was going to be a biography of the Love Sisters.”

  “They’re twins, right?”

  “No, a duet, eleven months apart in age. Delores is the eldest, but Dovie is the boss.”

  “Kind of like Adair and Tema,” he remarks casually, “although Adair is definitely the bossy one.”

  “How do you know so much about us?” she says, going through her dresser drawers to see if anything else missing.

  He keeps his eyes on the photograph while he talks. “Adair told me. We’ve met before, but you don’t remember, do you?”

  Auda sits down on the edge of her bed. “No, I’m sorry. Where was that?”

  “The Oklahoma Historical Society lecture, right after your book The Eighteenth-Century Choctaws came out. I worked there while I was in law school. Adair and I had dinner...after your lecture.”

  She studies his face. “Of course,” she says, turning red. “I’m still so embarrassed about that. Never give whiskey to an Indian.”

  “You weren’t much trouble. I enjoyed watching some of the Society’s benefactors squirm.”

  “So have you and Adair stayed in touch? She’s never mentioned you—, I mean, do you ever see each other?”

  “No,” he says, turning away to look at other mementos on her walls. “We exchanged business cards, had a couple of drinks after we helped you to bed, that’s all.” Auda can tell he’s withholding something. She could have kicked herself for getting drunk that night. When she woke up, she had a terrible hangover. By the time she got dressed, her sister was already downstairs in the hotel’s restaurant looking through the newspaper ads. Adair had said she’d decided to buy a house in Oklahoma City, a “getaway place,” but she never did. Auda had never thought twice about Adair’s impulse. Until now.

  As he brushes the dust off her photograph, she notes that he isn’t wearing a wedding band. They make eye contact and Auda raises her eyebrows. Now it’s his turn to squirm, she thinks.

  “No, really,” he says, putting his hand in his jeans’ pocket. “I never heard from her until she called and asked me to represent you. I just remember being impressed that Adair flew all the way from New Orleans to hear your lecture. You two must be very close.”

  Gore’s last remark disarms her. What a kind thing to say after all he’s heard today. His casual manner, and the tone in his voice, eases her anger at discovering her evidence has been stolen.

  “Yes, we are close,” she says, a little ashamed that she’s always felt closer to Tema. “What else do you know about our family?”

  “Um, lemme see. Well, I know a lot about your aunts,” he says. “In 1924, Delores and Dovie Love ran away from boarding school. They got jobs at the Miller Brothers’ 101 Ranch that sprawled over 110,000 acres of Ponca Indian land. At the turn of the century, Colon
el George Washington Miller had turned the 101 into the most diversified ranching operation in the world. It had housing for employees, schools, stores, a meat packing plant, a tannery, experimental breeding barns where they crossbred buffaloes with Brahmans. Much later, after its heyday, Al Capone tried to convert the 101 into a colony for immigrant Italian families.”

  “That sounds memorized.”

  “I was the archivist at the Historical Society. They wanted me to collect materials for a book about Oklahoma Indians, Al Capone, and the 101 Ranch.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “Law school. After that, I started my own practice. Now, criminal cases like yours take all my time.”

  “Indians and Italians,” she says bitterly, “seems like you can’t escape your destiny.”

  He looks at her black velvet painting of Elvis and frowns. “Hey, were you going to mention Delores’ affair with Ronald Colman in your book? I’ve heard it began in 1937 while they were filming Lost Horizon.”

  “I was going to devote an entire chapter to it.”

  He turns and grins at her. “Delores has denied it in print.”

  “Yes, but she’s Choctaw. We always deny having affairs with foreigners.”

  “I see,” he says, still grinning. Then he leans against the wall. “But think of all the things that Delores and Dovie have done. They toured the country in The 101 Real Wild West and Great Far East Combined. They even met Al Capp, who was a struggling artist at that time. His sketches of Dovie...”

  “...became the inspiration for the Indian femme fatale in his comic strip Li’l Abner,” says Auda, finishing his sentence. “I know, I know,... you’ve really got a crush on them.”

  They both laugh. Auda puts a hand over her mouth to hide her front teeth.

  “Have you ever met them?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “Today’s your lucky day,” she says. “They’ll be here soon, but I hope you’re not disappointed; they’re sort of eccentric—not your traditional little ol’ Indian ladies.”