Shell Shaker

by LeAnne Howe

  “How so, Aunt Delores?” asks Adair, mashing the potatoes in a bowl so they can take it to Blue Creek Grounds for tonight’s feast.

  “Because everything that is important to Choctaws, or all Indians for that matter, is not written down. We have to live the life to know the ways, and so much goes unspoken,” says Delores, turning her attention to the bowl. “Maybe I should add more grease?”

  “You’re overworking the dough,” says Dovie, authoritatively, “you should let me do that before you kill the yeast.”

  “Wishia cha... you flour the chicken parts,” quips Delores, “I’ll make the bread.”

  Dovie puts her hands on her hips. “Delores is a Gemini, they can’t concentrate long enough to become really good cooks.”

  Tema and Adair both giggle. They’ve always laughed when she and Dovie argue. As Dovie continues bossing her, Delores has an overwhelming feeling of sadness. She will miss Dovie terribly. She doesn’t understand why she feels they’ll soon be parted. Perhaps it’s the anticipation of what will happen between her and Isaac. Perhaps it’s the coming funeral she must conduct, regardless her nerves are raw as open sores. Her eyes tear up as she remembers the first time she came to the Billy house fifty-two years ago. It was the beginning of her new life—helping to conduct traditional funerals for Choctaws.

  The year was 1939 and Delores was young, only twenty-nine, although by the standards of the day, a spinster. Her mother had just died and the funeral was her first experience with laying out the dead, with singing the soothing words that would coax an unyielding body into its transformation to dust. A year later her brother Orvil was killed, and she washed and dressed his body, as she had with her mother. A few terrible years later she would do the same for her youngest sister, Lola. For over a half-century, she’s prepared Choctaws for their journey to the spirit world. Unlike the years she spent riding bareback in Wild West shows, or acting in the talkies, Delores believes her role as a modern foni miko, bone picker, is the only useful thing she’s ever done. But McAlester’s funeral is different. Her niece, the cause of his death.

  She and Dovie once met Redford McAlester and his mother, Minnie. It was sometime in the late 60s at a summer tent revival outside of Rush Springs, Oklahoma. A friend had invited them to hear a young Choctaw named Red McAlester witness on the miracles of the Lord. The young man had finished his sermon by saying he would be entering the Baptist seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Many years later, when McAlester was running for chief, neither she nor Dovie brought up his brush with the Baptists. It didn’t seem proper. Lots of people change horses in midstream. She had. But who would have guessed that McAlester started out wanting to be a preacher? She wonders if Auda knows the whole story. Delores sighs deeply and silently prays for guidance. She’s never buried a chief, or anyone, accused of rape and other despicable crimes against the Choctaw people.

  She picks up the bowl of dough and examines the mess she’s making. Water might help. She adds a tablespoon or two and continues kneading. Suddenly there is a gust of wind, a hint that someone has entered the room. A clock strikes four. A voice calls from afar. Footsteps, barely audible, touch the floor. There is a spirit. A loving compassion circles the room. She leans toward the apparition and opens her sticky palms as if receiving a gift. She stays that way for a moment, honoring the one who has given her the essential knowledge of how to properly bury the dead.

  November, 22, 1939—her own dear mother had died the day before. She drove the hundred miles from the Love Ranch to Durant in order to find the Billy matriarch, the one who could sing the ancient songs for a proper Choctaw funeral. Her sister Dovie had stayed behind at their ranch to greet the people coming to pay their last respects. The drive took all day. Back then, the dirt roads were narrow and went through forests and dozens of tiny communities of three or four families. In 1939, Southeastern Oklahoma was a patchwork of Indian towns. When nightfall came she pulled up in front of the Billy house. For a moment she stood motionless in the yard. As she gathered her courage, so did the wind until it was swirling all around, demanding that she pay attention. She turned her face to the dark sky, meager black clouds were flying above. A storm was coming.

  She walked onto the front porch, but before she could knock, Susan Billy opened the door. She was fresh out of boarding school. Eighteen. Her long black hair streamed down her back. Susan smiled and ushered Delores into the library where a sweet thin voice was calling in Choctaw, “Hurry up, woman, you’re the one I’ve been waiting for. I am the great-great-granddaughter of Chunkashbili, Heart Wounder, and she was the granddaughter of Shakbatina whose name doesn’t mean ‘Wildcat’ like people say. Her name means Survivor!”

  The old woman looked as fragile as the wings of a butterfly. She had rounded shoulders. Faded eyes. Only a few snags of teeth. A black scarf was tied around her thinning white hair. She wore a yellow skirt that stopped just above her tiny ankles. The blouse was also sun yellow, with long puffy sleeves. Both were trimmed in blue rickrack that formed four zigzag rows around the edges of the skirt and sleeves. The old woman was sitting in the rocking chair holding in her hand a tiny gray stone with holes in it, like a skull. Delores would later learn from Isaac that the stone held the essence of two powerful Ancestors. It was as necessary to the old woman’s comfort as a roaring fire.

  “Tell me what to sing when your mother dies,” Delores blurted out.

  The old woman lit up with happiness. No one had asked her this in years. She rocked gently back and forth in her chair, indicating that she would tell Delores what she knew.

  “I keep hearing the words you spoke and the songs you sang at Conehatta Annie’s funeral,” said Delores.

  She continued rocking. “You were no bigger than a flea when she passed away. That was so long ago, why do you remember my words?”

  Delores hesitated. She was afraid her formal Choctaw was a little rusty, so she spoke to the woman as if she were a relative. “My mother, Elizabeth Love, treated you with extreme respect. She told me that you were very wise in these matters. Now I must bury my mother, and I would like to sing the honor songs that will send her on the journey.”

  The old woman shook her head, kept shaking it all the while Delores spoke, as if marking time. “We said good-bye to Pearl River in Mississippi. The agent was able to do very little to alleviate the suffering of those who were going to walk the hundreds of miles from Bogue Chitto, Conehatta, Pearl River, Red Water, Standing Pine, and Bogue Homa to our new home in Indian Territory. That was before our people made the whites change the name to Oklahoma, home of red people. Some laid down on the roads to die. They were resigned. As we passed them by they gave away their shoes. We were surrounded day and night by our enemies. It was very unsanitary as to our personage. No way to make a toilet. We all had fevers. Millions of flies ate from our flesh. They left many scars on my body.”

  The old woman’s eyes stared vaguely ahead. She raised her left arm. “See for yourself. I have been a good host.”

  Delores struggled to understand the old woman’s Choctaw. She used different words than those Delores used. The accent was strange. Perhaps she had reverted to the dialect of her childhood. Susan Billy quickly rolled up the sleeve of her grandmother’s blouse, treating her with such tenderness that Delores was ashamed she’d wanted to see the scars. The woman was called Nowatima, “She who walks and gives,” and, by her own reckoning, she was one hundred and fourteen years old. Delores examined the diligent arm. The upper muscle looked as if it belonged to a tireless farm hand, sinewy, but wrinkled. Lower down on the forearm there were cross-hatched scars where larvae had once wriggled through the skin. Delores believed the scars must have been screwworms that had burrowed into the woman’s flesh. Like Indians, the insect was supposed to have been eradicated by the 1930s.

  “Heavy-booted soldiers feasted on bread and meat,” said Nowatima. “When they ran out of government rations the soldiers ate their own horses. On occasion, I myself principally ate dirt. There were exceptions
when we came on a friendly town. People gave what they could. But not many did. We carried everything our families owned in baskets, and I learned all the songs because we sang day and night for our dead. Babies’ stomachs, right before the end, swelled like bread dough. My mother, Pisatuntema, my brothers and sisters, aging warriors, beloved friends, were all left behind on the trail. I’m the only one from my family who made it. Conehatta Annie was another one who made it. She was my friend. That’s why you remember the words I spoke for her. They were sacred. You will never forget them.”

  A heavy silence fell inside the library of the Billy house. But outside the wind roared and the oak trees shed their leaves like tears as Nowatima told the story of her walk on the Trail of Tears.

  Finally Susan Billy spoke. “Pokni needs sleep now.” Before Delores could excuse herself, she was stopped by the old woman’s reply.

  “First, I will teach our guest what she came to learn. Alla tek, you sleep for me.” Susan smiled, but never left her grandmother’s side.

  It was morning before Nowatima stopped singing the funeral songs. Sometimes she hesitated, rocked in her chair as if she were listening to something only she could hear. Then she’d begin again, softly chanting to herself, Wi hi yo ha-na-we, wi hi yo ha-na-we, which would grow into another song for the dead. Before the old woman was led off to bed by Susan, she grasped Delores’ hands. “You will sing good now that I have taught you. You are the one we’ve been waiting for,” she said sweetly.

  Delores remembers how frantic she and Dovie were when they received the telegram that said their mother was dying. At the time they were living in Santa Monica, California, and car travel in 1939 was not what it is today. Gasoline could be scarce in the small towns. The steering wheel of their Ford was big and tiresome and their front tires often went flat due to thin inner tubes. So it seemed only fitting that a blistering wind whipped the Ford the last hundred miles to Poteau, as if to remind her that she’d been a disobedient daughter. That she’d stayed away too long.

  It was true. She had run away. First from boarding school. Then from her family—all except Dovie. She’d run to European colognes and beaver coats, to cafes where cinematic men with thin mustaches repeatedly said, “Delightful,” and “Darling.” In Hollywood, she’d grown into the double-faced woman in the black and white films. Spoke slivers of dialogue in gushes of euphoria, or tenderness. The other her.

  In Oklahoma, she was Elizabeth Love’s oldest girl. The one responsible for laying out her mother’s body.

  Delores didn’t want the formaldehyde embalming solution for her mother so she bathed her in a mixture of baking soda and lavender water. The dried husk of her mother’s body became smooth again. Looked almost born. She dressed her mother in a blue silk suit and placed her hands around a small bouquet of roses. Dovie put Indian head nickels on Elizabeth Love’s eyes, and tucked sprigs of sage and pinches of sweet snuff in her suit pockets. The room smelled of childhood memories and Indian tobacco.

  When she was done, Delores threw out the basin of bath water and watched it soak into the yard. Everything changed for Delores in that instant. The water which held the essence of Elizabeth Love was returned to the Earth as it should be. Minutes later, Delores pulled her Hollywood studio contract out of her briefcase and set fire to it. No more Westerns. No more cowboys and Indians. She wasn’t going back to California. She was going to stay in Oklahoma and hold a traditional funeral for her mother. When she asked some of the neighbors what songs to sing, what words to say for a proper Choctaw funeral, she was told to go to Durant because the Billy matriarch would know. That’s when she remembered Conehatta Annie’s funeral—and that moment would mark the beginning of Delores’ service work to the Choctaws.

  Her two sisters and her brother Orvil put up six poles around their mother’s grave. Then they hung vine hoops on top of each pole, and colored streamers of cloth to signify that a burial had just taken place. Delores fasted all day before she began the funeral cry, just as Nowatima had instructed. She made the cry, then sang four songs that Nowatima had taught her. Many elderly cousins said it was the most heartfelt ceremony they had ever attended. Afterwards, Choctaws from other towns began asking her to sing at their relatives’ funerals. Delores realized she didn’t know enough, so she returned weekly to the Billy house to sit with Nowatima. She continued learning the old songs and, without realizing it, she started a revival of Choctaw music and traditions. Many other women began coming to Nowatima to learn traditional songs and rituals. The number of Choctaw singers grew. When Nowatima died in 1941, there were twenty-two singers who sang traditional songs at her funeral.

  That same year, she and Dovie hired Isaac to work on their 360-acre ranch outside of Poteau. He was sixteen at the time, too young to go to war. He began working full-time and built them a one-room funeral parlor on the ranch.

  Trouble began at Love’s Funeral Parlor when Dovie decided to build an additional room. She wanted to open an herbal tea shop and teach tai chi, something she’d learned from a Chinese boyfriend during the filming of Lost Horizon. Grinding herbs and reading tea leaves were both habits Dovie had picked up from him, and she thought she could make a little extra money this way. However, a local Baptist preacher, always on the lookout for contraband, spread the rumor that Dovie Love was Isht aholla, a witch, and that her teas were love potions of the devil. He even got one Indian playboy to confess to being bewitched by Dovie after drinking one of her elixirs. Most folks knew this was just a feeble alibi. The man’s wife had caught him, again, with another woman. But there were those who became cautious of the Love sisters after that.

  Then there was the murder. An accident really. It happened one night when an old lady from Yanush was sitting up with the dead. She was notorious for falling asleep on the job. Everyone knew this. Around midnight, three Choctaw boys slipped in and removed the body of the dead man. One of them climbed into the wooden casket. When he raised up and shouted “Hello!” the old lady woke up, screamed, and caved in his skull with her cane.

  Delores had to conduct two funerals that week. The whole town of Poteau turned out to view the two Choctaws lying side by side. The teenager, killed by his own joke, and the old man, dead of natural causes. The Yanush woman was promptly exonerated in an investigation by the county sheriff. He said there was nothing to be done about the deceased teen and labeled the cause of death “An Act of God.”

  Afterwards, Delores decided to go underground with her funeral ceremonies, and Dovie would only sell her herbal teas to friends. Their services were reserved for those they could trust. They began hanging strips of red cloth along the barbed-wire fences of the southeastern roads to signal that one of their all-night sing-alongs or a private funeral was happening until the public forgot about love potions and the songs for the dead.

  4:30 arrives. The kitchen of the Billy house is hot and liquid. Steam rising from the frying chickens covers the walls with droplets of a greasy elixir only Southerners appreciate. Delores comes out of her reverie and puts a cup towel over the bowl of dough. She washes her sticky hands and sits down. Her feet and legs ache.

  Dovie makes a show of putting away the last of the chicken wings on a platter to cool before she takes a piece for herself.

  Tema puts her arms around Dovie and hugs her. “How are you doing Auntie? Getting tired?”

  “I can’t complain,” says Dovie whimsically. “Did I tell you I located Atlantis?”

  Tema doesn’t look surprised, which slightly annoys Delores.

  “Oh yes. It’s not where everyone thinks,” says Dovie.

  “Where is it?”

  “Off the coast of Texas.”

  ‘Imagine that,” says Tema. “I would have thought nearer to the Caribbean.”

  “C’mon you two,” interrupts Delores. “Enough.”

  “But Aunt Delores, sometimes foreign ideas are closer to Choctaw ways than you think,” says Tema. “When I performed in The Conference of the Birds, I realized how much the Sufis are li
ke Choctaws. I’ll give you an example. Sufis believe that there is only one God, and all things emanate from that energy. Mankind’s distinctions between good and evil have no meaning in Sufism because the two are connected to the unity that is God. The poetry we spoke in the play was about destroying the self, and the importance of experiencing overwhelming love for the collective. I had the role of the hoopoe,” she says, stepping away from Dovie to deliver her lines.

  Besotted fool, suppose you get this gold for which you drool—what could you do but guard it night and day while life itself—unnoticed—slips away? The love of gold and jewels is blasphemy; our faith is wrecked by such idolatry. To love gold is to be an infidel, an idol-worshipper who merits hell. On Judgment Day the miser’s secret greed stares from his face for everyone to read.

  “Oh, my girl,” says Delores, standing up to hug her. “Isn’t she talented?” she says to Dovie.

  Her sister is quietly wiping her eyes with her black lace handkerchief, and nodding her head yes. Delores reaches out to Dovie and embraces them both.

  Tema excuses herself to grab a Kleenex. “The play reinforced my Choctaw beliefs,” she says, sniffling. “Women are the essence of Mother Earth. We create life and, during Green Corn, we shake shells to reconnect with all living things. The Sufi poetry reminded me that survival of the collective is what is important. The Sufis must be Choctaws at heart, don’t you think? Everything is everything, nana moma.”

  Dovie smiles. “Yummak osh alhpesa. Yummak osh alhpesa. That is it. That is it, my girl.”

  “Speaking of the collective,” says Delores, “what happened to Adair?”

  Tema grins mischievously. “You must have been lost in thought when she and Gore ducked out, otherwise you would have noticed the code talking going on.”

  They all giggle.

  “Actually, what I meant to say,” continues Tema, “is that Adair went to show Battiste to his room, and we haven’t seen her since.”