by LeAnne Howe
Auda and Red stare ahead at the road. Their sorrow rises and falls, congealing into an artificial cloud that engulfs them. They drive in blackness. The inside of the car has the coolness of a cave. There is no sun. Not here, but there are little paths jutting off in all directions.
13 | The Nanih Waiya
MISSISSIPPI
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1991
In the waning Sun of autumn, fantastic shadows fall from the branches of sycamore trees and watch as seven vehicles from Oklahoma, of varying sizes and models, pull up and park in front of the Nanih Waiya. “Finally,” says the one to the others.
The black earth of the mound is soft and open from recent rains, like the pores of skin. Above, although hidden by the sun’s rays, Fichik Issi shakes his head, making the air taste sweet from the dust of his antlers, and he shouts joyously to his friends around the universe. “Ah hah, look at what’s left, a chin, a foot, and so much more!”
Isaac Billy gets out of his truck, limping from sitting so long. His khaki pants rustle with each step he takes around the mound. Like an old-time warrior acknowledging the perimeter, as if the Nanih Waiya still had a perimeter, Isaac offers a silent prayer of thanks for their journey. When he feels it’s safe for the others to get out of their cars he calls out in a loud voice, “Falamut.” As the word leaves his mouth, the ghosts of red children begin playing toli, and the wind laughs, and streamers of ancient songs rise from the ground and dance.
Delores slides off her loafers before getting out of the truck. Rather than take the wooden steps to the flat summit of the Nanih Waiya, she slowly walks up the east side of the mound using her cane. She feels the wet grass between her toes and is elated. In a few hours it will be twilight; the skies will be clear, and the air still warm, as she sings the funeral songs that will put McAlester’s spirit at peace.
Once on top of the mound, Delores searches the nearby forest for signs of animal life. She lifts her nose toward the Pearl River and inhales, shedding all her anxiety and fears. This is truly a sacred place. Bringing the chief’s body to Mississippi for burial was the right decision, although risky. When Nick Carney demanded that “his Uncle Red” be loaded into a U-Haul trailer, the Durant funeral home didn’t resist or ask a single question. But she and Isaac were still worried. They constantly looked in the rearview mirror for McAlester’s supporters or the D’Amato brothers, or both. So far, they’ve seen no one.
From her vantage point, Delores can see the load of mud they hauled that began as flour, water, and a little lard. The spectacle of it percolating in Isaac’s truck bed and the stains on her hands nearly make her swoon. The other six cars in their Okie caravan are stuffed with McAlester’s clothes, ties, shoes, golf clubs, magazines, a computer, and an office copier. Of course, the most outrageous sight is the Big Peanut-mobile. Hoppy, Kelly, and Nick used the 1976 Delta 88 to pull the trailer with McAlester’s coffin and a large black nylon bag found at McAlester’s house. Hoppy said an old man discovered the bag hidden inside a huge barrel of Purina Dog Chow. “Poor guy, he didn’t know what to do so he brought it to us.”
They all believed the bag was stuffed with the money McAlester stole from the Mob. But, like the old man said, “As long as no one don’t open it, or touch it, it’s likely they won’t become Osano.”
He spoke the truth. It was an old lesson, never touch what evil has touched. They took a vote and agreed to bury the money with McAlester. Delores laughs aloud. In a hundred years or so, when archaeologists stumble upon McAlester’s skeletal remains, they’ll find gifts from Xerox and Microsoft, along with millions of dollars buried next to him. His gravesite will confirm the long-held theory that Indians so deeply revere their leaders that they bury them with precious gifts.
She sits down on the ground and smoothes the wrinkles in her dress. For a moment she toys with a thread hanging from the hem. She considers leaving it, but then yanks it out. No, there will be no more loose ends, nothing left undone. Looking skyward she squints as two blue herons fly toward her. They pass overhead and land on the banks of the creek. She tries to imagine what they see as they fly: the Pearl River nearby, small perch they wish to feast on, the Nanih Waiya as it once was. Everyone knows it was rimmed with an earthen rampart. Eighteen wooden lookout posts were built at various intervals so the young men could watch for approaching visitors coming to trade their goods. She tries to remember a story about this, but can’t focus. She’d rather enjoy the Sun and think about her nine-hour trip to Mississippi sitting beside Isaac.
In the distance, a line of cars approaches the mound. Delores watches as Isaac and the other Oklahoma Choctaws gather below to greet the convoy. She hoists herself up with her cane and walks back down the side of the mound to join him. They are a couple now: she should be there. She smiles. The things she is rediscovering about him in such a short time.
The cars rattle on. Isaac and Delores greet the people. She asks if he knows everyone and he shakes his head no. Eventually, a man wearing khaki clothes similar to Isaac’s approaches them. His gimme cap says “Chahta” across the front, and he greets Isaac in Choctaw. His name is Earl Billy, a distant cousin, and she hears them say they haven’t had a long visit in some twenty years. They talk among themselves. Isaac then motions for Hoppy and his friends to come so he can introduce them to the elder Choctaws who’ve just arrived. When he comes back to her, Earl is still with him.
“Meet the wife,” he says proudly to Earl. “We married yesterday after a fifty-year courtship.”
Earl looks at Delores oddly, then Isaac.
“We wanted to be sure, that’s all,” says Delores solemnly.
Earl nods his head. “Yes, I’ve heard that the Oklahoma Choctaws have developed some strange customs,” he says, winking.
The three of them laugh while Delores and Earl shake hands. They begin the familiar Indian ritual of “who is related to whom?” After a while, Earl brings up Redford McAlester and the arrangements they’ve made.
“We’re going into a swampy area,” he says. “We had to use a backhoe to dig such a large hole. We’re going to put your chief and his things in the ground, cover it up with the mud you’re hauling, then let Mother Nature takes it from there. We’ll hold the ceremony back here. Maybe McAlester will stay put that way.”
She nods in approval.
“They say you have to have a sign,” he says, looking toward the Pearl River. “It can be a snake, a bear, maybe the little people, but something will put you in touch with the spirits. They say that you can tell when a boy is young if he’s going to be a spiritual leader. He usually goes into the woods all alone. He may go out and stay all night. Sometimes he will walk in his sleep, and that’s when it happens. That’s when he receives the gift.”
Earl looks down at his hands, rubs his eyes and shakes his head sadly, as if he is reliving the moment when McAlester was shot. “I have it on good authority,” he says, “that that is what happened to Redford McAlester. He received the sign and was supposed to be a healer. But for whatever reason—we don’t know what happened—he rejected it.”
He takes a breath. “So on this day the Chahta people who’ve been split apart by circumstances beyond us—we’ve come back together to put this man’s spirit at peace.” He turns to Delores. “Would you like to meet some of the women now?”
She doesn’t have to answer; Earl reads her thoughts and walks her where the women are standing. She looks back at Isaac. At last he’s relaxed. They’ve come to finish what they started long ago, nothing will stop them. He knows it, too.
Delores begins shaking hands with the women from Zwolle, Louisiana; Homa, Louisiana; Lexington, Texas; and Mobile, Alabama. After a while, they decide to walk together around the sacred mound.
“We were told as kids,” Delores says, “that before the Choctaws left Mississippi, they came here and grabbed a little bit of the Nanih Waiya to take with them on the long walk.”
“Then again,” says Edith LaHarve of Pearl River, Mississippi, her voi
ce filled with irony, “there are those of us who never left.”
“Yummak osh alhpesa,” says Delores, hanging her head in shame. She can’t believe she’s said such a callous thing, as if the only true Choctaws went to Oklahoma. She came here to help reunite people, and now she’s spoken out of turn. Many Choctaws stayed and fought for their rights, and in 1918, the Mississippi Band of Choctaws was officially recognized by the federal government.
Edith LaHarve walks over to her. “We’ve been separated for so long, it’s hard for us to remember that we once thought of ourselves as one body with different parts, but with one heart. However we always believed this day would come.” She holds out her brown-stained hands to Delores. “We’ve been to the truck bed,” she says tearfully.
“At chi hullo li,” says Delores, holding out her hands to Edith. “I care for you.”
“At chi hullo li,” replies Edith.
Then all the women begin chanting:
At chi hullo li
At chi hullo li
At chi hullo li
At chi hullo li
Delores slows down her breathing as she’s done a hundred times before in preparation for singing the songs for the dead. But her gaze shifts and she sees the afternoon sunlight dancing around them, as if birthing new life. She exhales, pushing all herself out of her body and, in this moment, she feels a miraculous beginning as she and the other Chahta women of the Southeast join hands and sing.
14 | Road of Darkness
TALIHINA,
ROCKY ROAD
The room is a bed of wind.
In one instant Auda’s lungs are filled with the delicious rush of sunrise; swelling like a sail she floats high above it all. Her feet, eyes, and her faces are everywhere, leaving a warm imprint in the air. She is amazed at how effortlessly she glides through the cocoon of white sheets that protect her trapped body.
But in the next second she is hollow—herself pushed out through a fissure—and she goes down, down, down into the blackness through a sound. He is still with her. She hears breathing. His and hers. Their rhythms are in sync. Dressed in his best suit, his Harvard tie neatly knotted around his neck, he drives along an endless road. Something has brought them together. Now she remembers. Blood. He wraps himself in her light and shadow. She doesn’t mind.
Finally he says in a low voice, “I had a dream. We are ancient and still living together. Our children and families are all around us.”
Auda looks at him. “It’s an old preoccupation that penetrates our emptiness.”
Once again she is thrust up into the open air and the light. Suddenly her cousin, Buster, is next to the bed listening to her heart with a stethoscope. Her mother sits beside her stranded body. Her head is bowed. Auda can’t see her mother’s face clearly, but hears her prayers:
Presley War Maker, we need your help. Please come.
Auda looks up through the windshield. It’s misting rain. She hears a group of women speaking softly in Choctaw, calling on her father’s spirit to save her. Auda pictures her father in her mind, but instead sees a sky of umbrellas black as birds. They open and close their wire wings. Auda stretches out her arms to fly and emerges in a garden of green corn where a paunchy deer grazes. He nods his antlers in her direction, as if to say, isn’t this fun?
She is living in a town fat with food. In the cool underneath of the cane trees, women from the Intek Aliha cut the palmetto leaves for the new cabin that is being built. Hers. Beyond, alligators nap in the swamp. She is so happy running along the river bank to meet her father, yet when she blinks she’s falling into the churning waters. A feathered serpent stands up out of the water next to her, preventing her father from pulling her out of the water, then it flaps toward the sun. She sees a drop of her blood hit the ground, then swell into a river. Now she remembers what happened.
Her first failure to kill Red Shoes was in Yanàbi Town, the night after her mother’s bone-picking ceremony. When Red Shoes returned to her cabin he was mad as a snake. He did not stop to eat the poisoned meat she had prepared for him, nor did he even pause to look at her. He brought two men with him who waited outside and talked with Haya, her younger sister. She can still see Red Shoes’ bodyguards. They shouldn’t be there. Three more of his warriors grow out of the path to Yanàbi Town and stand beside her. Frightened, she reaches her hands out to push away the past, but nothing happens.
He is again driving the car too damn fast.
“I can’t believe you are here. What was I saying?” he asks.
“You were telling me how our history could have been different.”
“The Choctaws,” he says, his words as warm as breath, “had been major trading partners in the Southeast for centuries. But you knew that.”
She nods. His shadow fades and a warrior’s muscular body comes into focus. It’s the Red Shoes she remembers, the greatest war leader, the enemy of her enemies, the astute, the ruthless, the savage.
“I made my first bold trade for weapons and other goods with the Inkilish in 1729. That success convinced me I could unite the Chickasaws and the Choctaws against the foreigners.”
“But as a result,” she says, her mind sliding across old news, “you played an important role in the mass killings of the Western Choctaws and the Eastern Choctaws for nearly two decades. Your death managed to turn our homelands into one of the most terrifying places on earth.”
“It was my dream to have all the advantages the foreigners brought into our nations without surrendering to their rules. It was the same with the casino business.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t see. It’s just the trappings of time that have changed. Whether it was Bienville and the Filanchi, or the D’Amato brothers and the Italians, it’s just the trappings of time that have changed for Choctaws.”
“But Bienville was like a member of our family. We had to support him,” she argues.
He smiles. “You’re forgetting, the Choctaws adopted me, too. The only difference between you and me is that I’ve killed for you.”
She is silent for a long while, then gasps. “You murdered your wife from the Red Fox village!”
“She intended to destroy you. She had cut your hair and was going to give it to a isht ahollo to make witch medicine,” he says nonchalantly. “And she would have found a way to use it on you, if you survived the alligators. I once told you I had protected you with my life—now you know what I meant.”
Auda sits in silence, remembering a struggle that began so long ago. Here they are shedding skins, becoming a reflection of what they once were. She sees it all happening again. She catches up with Red Shoes on the road to Couechitto with his Inkilish friend. She bides her time. Another mistake. They dance around the fire until Haya pushes him in. When he crawls out of the flames, she circles his kneeling body. Rubs her fingers over his face, his thighs, his head. She bends to see what he sees. He slaps at her with what is left of him. She stands him up and embraces his charred flesh. They are a two-headed animal staggering in the darkness. A sense of oblivion is in the air, in the fire. He whispers to try and save her, “Look, behind you.” Too late. A volley careens through the air and shatters her jaw. Her teeth scatter across the ground. Blood rushes from her nose and mouth. She falls. Another shot hits Haya in the chest. She watches her sister die. She thinks, in an instant nothing will remain of me, but it does. The last thing she sees is Elsley standing above her before he pulls out an ax and splits her in two.
“I wanted revenge for your death, too,” Red says sadly. He shifts nervously in the front seat of the car; his fingers clutch the wheel, steering them along the crooked road.
Red reaches over to hold her hand. “Do you remember when I asked you to round up all the prominent Choctaws for the opening of the Casino of the Sun? You asked, in that smart-alecky voice of yours, ‘But the place is crawling with Mafia, won’t the elders be in danger?’ I laughed and said, ‘Of course not, they only kill each other.’”
He turns to her
and smiles, his eyes as black as the road ahead. “What I should have said is that it’s also true for Choctaws.” Auda knows that he’s relating what no one else will ever see—their last time together. She had walked in and begged him to make love. He pushed his pants down before he saw the gun. In the split second that followed, he had merely shrugged and said, “dying will be like dozing.”
Red begins to change. She watches as he transforms himself back into the sophisticated big-time Indian politician she remembers. He is magnanimous as he continues talking about his criminal dealings. “You know Citisavings Bank came up with a whole new strategy for me. Kind of makes you wonder about the J. P. Morgans of the world, doesn’t it.”
His body puffs up to match his demeanor. “I can hear the bells of the slot machines from here, the jingle-jangle of the coins in the pockets of hungry tourists. There is still a parade of eager white people who only want to spend their money at the Casino of the Sun. What a reversal of fortune, huh?”
“How do you do it?” she asks.
“What?”
“Make me love you one moment, and love your dying the next.”
He seems genuinely crushed by her words. “There are 90,000 Oklahoma Choctaws who will benefit from my hard work,” he says softly. “The tribe could use my extra nine million...that is, if the Feds don’t find it first.”
Auda smiles, recovering some of her old power. “You’re desperate. You don’t know how desperate, but I will know it for you.”
She turns away and suggests they shut their eyes as he drives.
He laughs. “Why not?”
She suddenly remembers what Bienville had once told her: That Red Shoes would never be far from her enemies.
“It’s strange how attractive I still find you—considering everything,” he says.
She opens her eyes and looks at him.
“I think I like it here,” he says, earnestly.
