Shell Shaker

by LeAnne Howe

  “I know your family well,” says Delores, looking kindly at him.

  However, Dovie still doesn’t seem completely satisfied with what she’s heard. She looks Gore up and down, then folds her arms confidently and asks, “Are you a Leo?”

  He laughs out loud. “Get out of town! How’d you know?”

  “The hair,” says Dovie. “Leos take a lot of pride in their hair. Now take McAlester and his Mafia brothers. Not a Leo among them.”

  “Miss Dovie,” interrupts Gore, as graciously as he can. “Just what do you know about McAlester and the Mafia?”

  “Plenty,” says Dovie, wiping her thin brown face with a black lace handkerchief. “Ever been to the Casino of the Sun? Check it out. Oh sure, some Choctaws sweep the floors there for ten dollars an hour. But the ones who make the big money are the dealers, and they’re all named Lucky Luciano or Vito Corleone.”

  Delores chuckles softly. “Vito Corleone was a movie character.”

  “Whatever. The Mafia and our newly-demised casino chief, McAlester, were blood brothers. Blood suckers, more like it,” quips Dovie. “He might have fooled us for a while, but he couldn’t hide his dirty business forever, not from the Choctaw people. Did you know he was giving money to the Irish Republican Army?”

  “I hadn’t heard that,” says Gore, innocently. “Can you fill me in, Miss Dovie?”

  “Stick with us, honey, we’re in the know.”

  Delores continues to laugh good-naturedly at her sister. “Every time we’d hear about McAlester’s shenanigans—that is, before we learned he was dead—Dovie would hyperventilate.”

  “Well, he’s finished now,” says Dovie, curtly. “Some of the elders want Delores to lead the singing at his funeral. They want her to do the old-timey pole planting at the graveside. I think she should. Even a Osano Chitto deserves a proper Choctaw funeral. What do you think, Susie?”

  Susan turns to Auda. Another silent message passes between them. They both know that Choctaws are deeply reverent about the dead. And forgiving. A traditional funeral would bring the community together so they could begin the healing process. Her mother speaks slowly. “Making peace with the dead is something we must do.”

  Then she asks Delores and Dovie for their help. “I’m going with Auda to the Choctaw Health Clinic. She was in shock and I want to talk to the doctor. We need to take a lot of food to Blue Creek Grounds tonight. Tema and Adair are in the kitchen cooking up a storm. Will you take charge of the fixings until I get back?”

  Delores smiles and tenderly pats her cheek. “Susie, don’t fret about the meal. That’s why we’re here, for bone-picking and chicken frying.”

  Rain hangs in the air, but refuses to fall.

  Auda stands in the middle of the backyard and surveys the sky before she leaves for the clinic. She decides to search the yard once more for her rabbit. Jean Baptiste has been missing for two days, since the morning of McAlester’s murder. At his advanced age he’s too feeble to outrun the neighborhood dogs, so she believes he must be dead.

  She adopted the small French Angora ten years ago when she was writing her dissertation on eighteenth-century Choctaws. She decided she needed a pet. Not a dog she’d have to walk, or a cat she’d have to shoo out of her bed. Remembering that her father had kept rabbits, she adopted one from a shelter and named him after the Frenchman whose history was completely intertwined with her tribe’s. She’d become totally fascinated with Jean Baptiste Le Moyne Sieur de Bienville when she was researching Choctaw history. She somehow felt as though she knew Bienville, or had firsthand knowledge of his relationship with the Choctaws. However she dismissed this as a curse of her profession. Many historians talked about developing psychic communications with those they researched. After their work was finished, though, they often realized that their “channeling” had been a result of having read too much into what little they’d found out. Nevertheless, as she pored over the French documents, certain episodes that dealt with her tribe and Bienville felt more like memories than mere historical events.

  From the beginning of Bienville’s tenure in Louisiana, he allied himself with Choctaws and, on occasion, he had Choctaw women living in his house. In 1701, the Choctaws were at war with all the nations to their north and east, and had six thousand warriors in the field. The next year, Bienville traded muskets to the Choctaws so they could fight the English and Chickasaws. He asked for their political and military support and most towns complied. In return, Bienville frequently lived with Choctaws along the Pearl River, and learned to speak their language fluently. After serving under a string of political appointees from France, he was finally named governor general of the colony in 1718. However, six years later he was recalled to Paris and fired. Amazingly, at age fifty-three, Bienville triumphantly returned to Louisiana in 1733 for a second chance. He ruled as governor for nine more years, then was dismissed after his failure in the wars against the Chickasaws. Bienville returned to France at his own expense in 1742. Strangely though, especially for a Frenchman, he never married.

  Auda knew that Bienville must have been adopted by one of the Choctaw warrior societies, because he had Choctaw women living in his houses. Someone had claimed him as theirs. But who? Finally she discovered that he’d been tattooed on the arm, a sign that he’d been made a member of one of the eastern district towns. But she was never able to discover what the symbol was. She liked to imagine that it was a chukfi, rabbit, one of the trickster animals in Choctaw wisdom tales. Chukfi is a cunning adversary, the ultimate survivor, and in the rabbit world, the female rules.

  Auda gingerly searches her mother’s iris beds, trying not to destroy them. Then something catches her eye—the entrance to the dilapidated root cellar at the back of the house. Jean Baptiste might have gone in there. She opens the heavy wooden door and walks down the sod steps, hoping she’ll find him happily living underground.

  She feels the cool ground around her, as if from a distance. She watches the world whirling away, moving through her, whispering the past. She’s a young girl holding her mother’s hand in front of their cabin made of cut canes. There is a river nearby. A man is speaking in Choctaw, but his accent is funny, almost childlike. It’s Jean Baptiste Sieur de Bienville and her mother is asking why he must leave. “Because,” he says, his stare as cool as a snake’s, “I openly despise the Chickasaws, the Natchez, and Chitimaches—all your enemies—so now I must defend myself to my chief. But someday, Shakbatina, I will return to you and your daughters. Not the pull of Paris, nor the tether of kings, can keep me from you.” Even then she detects something incomplete. Bienville is not telling the whole truth. She wonders if her mother also sees through him, as she does.

  Fine dust makes Auda sneeze. It breaks the shock. The woman she’d found in the diaries of the French priest in 1738, and again in 1747, was her ancestor. Until now, she’d only considered the woman’s name—the same as her ancestor’s—a coincidence, but at this moment, she believes the impossible. That she is the young girl in her vision, standing beside her mother, Shakbatina.

  Auda’s eyes adjust to the half-light in the cellar. She runs her fingers over the sod. Clusters of spiders’ eggs occupy the pockmarks in the dirt walls. Round bloodless bodies, centuries old. From now on, her world will always be marked by the seconds just before the gunshot. She’s living on borrowed time. She wipes her face with the tail of her denim dress. Her rabbit is dead, and only now does she realize that her mother’s heroism is for her.

  Midafternoon, Auda, her mother, Hoppy, and Isaac leave for the Choctaw Health Clinic. Isaac is driving. Immediately behind them is an ill-sorted procession of neighborhood vehicles. A white 1967 Chevy Impala. Behind the Impala, a motley 1981 Buick LeSabre with a missing headlight and caved-in passenger door. The last car in line is in mint condition, a yellow 1979 Volkswagon Beetle. Each of the drivers are Choctaw friends of Hoppy. However, it isn’t long before three police cars and a Bryan County sheriff’s vehicle begin forcing the supporters’ cars off the road. Fi
nally, Isaac’s is the lone car driving along Elm Street, until Durant’s Big Peanutmobile streaks by them, heading in the opposite direction as fast as a 1976 Delta 88 with peanut wings can possibly go. One of the two remaining patrol cars whirls around and chases the Peanutmobile.

  “Nick Carney to the rescue!” shouts Hoppy.

  Auda turns around to watch what happens. “I hope they don’t shoot him.”

  “Isaac, those boys are going to get hurt!” says Susan Billy. “Why did you let them come along?”

  Her uncle doesn’t answer, and it’s clear to Auda that something terrible is about to happen. When Isaac stops in front of the clinic, her fears come true. Two policemen jump out of the patrol car, and drag Isaac out of the car. They arrest him for reckless driving. Hoppy bounds out of the passenger’s side, and one of the cops pulls his revolver.

  “Get back or I’ll shoot!”

  Hoppy puts both hands on his head.

  Isaac yells as he’s being shoved into the patrol car, “Stay with the women, stay with the women!”

  “Don’t worry Imoshe, we’ll get you out!” shouts Hoppy.

  The cop holding the gun orders Auda and her mother out of the backseat, then he jumps in their car and speeds away. She and her mother close ranks around Hoppy and face the angry crowd at the clinic. What Auda wants to know is how everyone knew she was coming to get her front teeth capped? High school kids dressed in pseudo-military fatigues, Durant store owners, stray dogs, and preachers all gawk, trusting that something ugly will happen. A dozen or so white men, supporters of Tonica, hold up red and white placards painted with the words MIKO TUBBY. All the Choctaws in the street will read them as CHIEF KILLER. Suddenly a white man with a handgun rushes toward them. Hoppy charges the man and they tumble onto the pavement; the revolver slides a few feet away. Two Choctaw guards run out of the building, grab the loose gun, and pull the man off Hoppy. Her nephew’s forehead is badly cut, and blood streams down his face.

  The double doors of the emergency entrance fly open and her cousin Buster Jones, a physician’s assistant, hustles the three of them inside. The guards take the attacker to a Choctaw paddy wagon nearby.

  Instantly the mob shouts the war cry.

  “Miko Tubby!”

  “Miko Tubby!”

  “Miko Tubby!”

  “Miko Tubby!”

  Auda spins around abruptly. Looks defiantly at the sea of faces through the glass doors. “Has the whole town gone mad?” she yells.

  “Come away from there!” shouts Buster. “Tonica’s men have the people all torn up.” Her cousin glares incredulously at her, as if she should know why people are behaving like this. “Aunt Susan, are you all right?” he asks, shifting his gaze from Auda to her mother.

  “I’m fine, Buster, but Hoppy needs stitches.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Grandmother,” he says, wiping the blood with his shirt sleeve.

  Buster looks out the glass doors. “The police are scattering the crowd. C’mon Hoppy, I’ll sew you up myself.”

  “Make this quick, I’ve gotta get my uncle out of jail!”

  “Auda,” asks Buster, “can you go by yourself to the dentist’s office while Aunt Susan calls a lawyer?”

  “I’m not going now, there’s no way—,”

  “Don’t you see what’s happening?” he snaps. “This whole thing was a set-up. The local police wouldn’t have arrested Uncle Isaac without some reason, like maybe an anonymous phone call saying ‘crazy old Isaac Billy is going to bomb the Choctaw clinic.’ Something like that. Think of what’s transpired, Auda. The prairie fire, McAlester’s murder, the county jail burning down—it’s not much of a stretch to believe the Billys are capable of bombing a tribal health clinic. You’ve gotta go about your normal business here and prove them wrong. Let the men finish the war that Tonica has started!”

  “Buster’s right, Auda,” says her mother. “I’ll call Gore and Adair to come and get us. You go on with your appointment. Let’s show the police, the tribe, and the whole town that they’ve made a mistake.”

  Auda agrees, and hugs her mother and her nephew. “Don’t worry, Mother. We’re going to be okay. We’re Billys, after all,” she says, winking at Hoppy. She walks toward the dental wing of the clinic. Before she’s three steps away, she hears Buster tell Hoppy, his voice filled with love, “Aunt Susan practically raised me and my sister after our mother died. When I only had one pair of hand-me-down jeans, she brought me my first new pair of Levis. I’ll do anything for her.”

  She realizes now that no matter how many dirt roads she and McAlester paved, no matter how many gas stations and subdivisions they built for the elderly with the casino money, it could never compete with the simple act of giving away a pair of jeans. Why had it taken her so long to see it?

  A middle-aged woman greets Auda at the dentist’s reception counter. A curtain of brittle hair falls over one eye as she scrutinizes Auda. Auda reminds herself that after what she’s done, she has to get used to being stared at.

  “I think the dentist is expecting me,” she says, noting that there are no other patients in the waiting room. “I’m Auda Billy.”

  The woman doesn’t answer her directly, but chatters away with her chin propped on the tall counter, as if her head is separate from the rest of her body. A mouth with no trunk. She talks about the rain that is predicted. Her new car. Her vacation in Bermuda; she leaves tomorrow. “I’ve been working for this all my life,” she says.

  “My appointment is for 3:30, has it been canceled?”

  “Of course not,” says the dental hygienist. “We’ve been expecting you all afternoon, Miss Billy, but the dentist is at the pharmacy. Something about a medication problem. He’ll be right back.”

  Auda thinks there’s something foul about the woman. Perhaps it’s the lingering effects of the crowd scene. Suddenly, she recalls last summer’s Green Corn Dance. People were aghast to see Carl Tonica with the bottle blonde in a lime-green evening gown at a Green Corn Dance. He sent his wife and daughter to Ireland for the summer, and brought Vergie Reagan instead of his family. He must have forgotten to mention that it was not an evening gown affair.

  As Auda enters the examining room, the bright fingers of the sun cut through the plastic blinds. The hygienist jerks the curtains across the window to block the light.

  “Sit in the chair,” she commands.

  Auda has sensed that something is wrong, but hasn’t wanted to show it. Finally, in the small room, she realizes what it is. The woman has a pewey smell. Like someone who hasn’t washed up from sex. Carl Tonica, she moans.

  “Isn’t this a marvelous room?” coos the woman. “I love the off-white walls. Carl said it is the most modern dental facility in Indian Country. Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” says Auda, coldly. “I’m the one who approved the building plans for the clinic, even down to the color of the walls.”

  The woman puts on a white mask and asks Auda to open wide. “Yes, I’ve heard we have you to thank for all this.” She picks up an explorer, a dental tool that looks like a miniature sickle, and pushes Auda’s lips away from her broken teeth. “We need to take some X-rays and impressions.” She laughs, it’s more of a snigger. “Probably we can fit temporary caps on your front teeth this afternoon so you won’t look so much like Bela Lugosi,” she says. Then she digs hard into Auda’s gum and cuts a deep gash with the needle-sharp point of the explorer.

  Auda grabs at the thing embedded in her mouth. It feels so icy hot that tears run down her cheeks. Where is the dentist? Buster? As she tries to pull it out, the masked woman quickly jabs her in the arm with a needle. Auda attempts to stand up, but a hammering pain batters her chest. She loses her balance and dollops onto the floor like dough. The woman lifts her up into the chair and stares intently into her eyes. Removes the bloody tool from Auda’s hand. Waits patiently. Finally glides away like an apparition.

  Auda’s chest grows tighter. She’s breathing underwat
er. The pain crushes her and she feels sad and abandoned. She sees the river, the shimmering water. She wants to lie down. Her father is standing beside the river bank. He yells, “Anoleta, go back.” Presently a gar breaks the surface and flashes green and red, then flies into the air.

  A spasm shakes her body. Something red comes out of her mouth. Auda throws her head back; she’s running beside the river faster than she’s ever run before. Smoke coils lazily above her cabin. The green cane door wiggles as she pushes it open and she’s aware of the filling of her lungs. She slips off her red shoes, curls on the floor beside the chief’s chair. She kisses him... Hah!... there is blood on her lips. Red was right, dying is like dozing.

  8 | A Road of Stars

  YANÀBI TOWN

  WINTER SOLSTICE, 1738

  Anoleta is marooned in her sleep. Trapped in a white room with white cane mats on the windows, she can see herself sleeping, sitting up, wearing her mother’s white deerskin dress. But whose cabin is this? Where is the hole in the roof for the smoke to escape? Maybe she has accidentally slipped into na tobhi, the something white. But na tobhi is where aging warriors go for their visions. It is not a place for women.

  All at once the spirit of a woman enters the room. She has a white mask over her nose and mouth. The woman approaches Anoleta cautiously, then forces her mouth open.

  Anoleta screams and a grasshopper-like arm pulls out her teeth. Blood gushes from her mouth. She feels the pain. She wants to ask the woman if she is Filanchi okla or Inkilish okla, but is catapulted across the night sky onto fichik tohbi hina, the white star road. When she looks down at the ground she sees her body strapped on a wooden frame, glowing like fire.

  “I’m being tortured,” she screams. Her words echo all the way to Fichik Issi, the Deer Star, who agrees with her.

  “Look at what is left of you. A chin, a foot, a jawbone, and ten thousand feet of intestines hanging in the trees,” he says, turning his antlers so he can watch her body wither on the frame. “You can stop what is coming,” he says, clearing off on a vapor.