by Rilla Askew
When she sent Fowler to Yonubby to fetch Mrs. Henry, she’d made him promise to not tell anyone, meaning, as both he and she knew, to not tell his father. Jessie didn’t question to herself why she did not want Fayette to know—there was so much she had to keep from her husband—but she told her son to bring the woman directly to the store, to keep hushed about it, and then he might take the buckboard on to Cedar if he wanted, and, as with so many secrets between them, the boy did just as she asked. He drove up in a cloud of khaki dust and buckboard clatter, drew the reins up sharply, and waited impatiently for the Indian woman to climb down. He was off with the team and buggy before the woman had hardly cleared the spokes, and Jessie called after him, “Mind what I said now!” She stood on the porch, her arms wrapped around herself, one eye on her youngest child toddling about the porch floor, as Thula Henry, wrapped in a red blanket and holding to her chest a leather satchel, slowly climbed the store steps. Jessie bent and grasped the toddler by the back of the collar as the little one wobbled toward the porch ledge. She said, “Come in, Miz Henry, let me just get my wrap.”
The woman waited inside the door, seeming to look at everything and nothing, as Jessie carried her toddler to the back and placed her kicking and yelping in her eldest daughter’s arms. “Watch the front,” Jessie said. “I’ll be back in a little bit.” It was not necessary to tell Mildred—to tell any of her daughters at any time—to not speak of things to their father. Jessie took off her apron, folded it and laid it on the counter, reached for a thick knitted gray sweater lying on a shelf, and put it on. She made her way rapidly between the crowded rows of boxes and barrels, kegs, harrows, singletrees, stacks of buckets and tins, to where the woman stood in her wool dress and blanket, peering upward, expressionless, seeming oblivious—or, in any case, without opinion—regarding all that took place in front of her, and at the same time acutely alert. Jessie started out the door without speaking and was halfway across the porch before she remembered what she was supposed to be doing. Quickly she turned and entered the store again, where the woman still stood, apparently not having moved an eyelash, just inside the door.
“Millie!” Jessie called. “Bring me the mop and that big bucket. And one of them corn brooms hanging up over there.” Surely they’ve got soap and water in that house, she thought, and then, on second thought: “Bring me a box of them soap flakes too!” she said, and then did not wait for her daughter to put down the little one and do as she’d directed but went on into the store and gathered the items herself. She handed the mop and box of soap to the woman and started out again with the broom in one hand and the bucket stuffed with clean rags in the other, and this time the woman followed behind her.
Jessie led the way across the sloping yard toward the log house. They left the store’s little wedge of swept yard and moved east directly across the land. For some reason Jessie did not want to go along the road, and the Indian woman followed without protest, the two of them picking through the burst pods of milkweed and clutching cockleburs, their skirts filling with legions of beggar’s-lice, their sticks of mop and broom pointing skyward, as they made their way slowly across the orange and umber November field.
Again Jessie experienced the peculiar sensation of entering her own past when she mounted the stone step. It was not pleasant: she had worked too hard to leave that bone-hard existence; she did not like to reenter it, and even as her shoe touched the wood of the porch, she hesitated. But there was that sense of duty in her—or this is how she thought of it—a nagging sense of Christian duty which she could not escape. And something else. Something about the girl Martha and her hard eyes and her hard little chest: the girl was coming into her time, Jessie knew it, she had raised too many daughters, and the child had no one but a father to guide her, which he would not nor could not, and in any case most of the time he was not even there. It was up to Jessie to do something, and this was more important, deeper and more urgent than the children’s dirt and wildness, but she knew no other way to start than to begin by cleaning up the house—as if cleaning could wipe away the soiled years and lack of raising, she thought—but really, she knew no other way. She half hoped the children would be gone, half hoped they would be there, and knew not why she wanted either, but there was no answer when she rapped her reddened knuckles on the split-log door, and the relief swept her like a wind.
She entered the room that had been her home for the first terrible year and a half after they’d arrived in the Territory—the rough log room wherein she had scrimped and saved and struggled to put enough food on the table for her children, where she’d worked day and night, trying endlessly, futilely, to keep them and the crude, sap-glittered, mud-chinked, bark-littered house clean—and went straight to work sweeping almost as soon as she came in. She started at the cold, cinder-strewn hearth, moving the corn broom roughly over the sandstone, the scarred puncheon in front of it, because she did not want to look at the room—dark, as it had always been, and hollow now, empty, the unfinished ceiling arching away. The Choctaw woman came in behind her and stood in the center of the room, watching. Jessie could feel her there, not moving, not working, just watching, and at last she stopped, exasperated, and said, “Well, what are you looking at? What are you waiting for?”
The woman said, “Me think you hire me him for to clean ’im up.”
Jessie nearly exploded in disgust. “Oh, for Pete’s sake. Yes. Me hire you to clean him up. Talk English. Here!” And she thrust the broom at her.
It wasn’t just that the woman’s English was abominable—or seemed to be anyway, although Jessie had always had, even in that first year, the sense that Thula Henry could speak the King’s English as well as any white person if she wanted to—and it wasn’t just that she didn’t care to be paying an Indian five yards of good cotton to stand around and stare at her in disapproval. It was . . . it was the taut strings twisting her spine into knots; the shudders running rivers beneath her skin; her teeth—the twelve that remained to her—gum-gritted and aching. It was . . . she didn’t know what it was, but when the Indian woman laid her satchel aside, dropped the mop to the floor with a clatter that echoed in the bare, high-ceilinged room, and took the broom from her and began sweeping in just such a way as to nearly literally sweep her out the door, Jess Lodi was grateful.
She stood on the log porch a moment, a little confused, but relieved, as if a dreadful burden had been removed, and recognizing suddenly that she had done all she could do, she stepped down off the porch and picked her way back across the land, home.
The white woman was right about Thula Henry’s ability to speak English. She could speak it precisely as well as she chose to—had learned not only to speak it but to read it and write it at the Wheelock Academy down by Broken Bow—but she preferred her father’s brand of English, and she used that when she had to speak the distasteful language at all. Thula Henry was Choctaw, yes, for her mother was Choctaw, and she spoke Choctaw predominantly, lived with her mother’s people near the Indian Church at Yonubby—but it was her father’s English she spoke when she had to; it was from her father’s people that she had received certain gifts of knowledge.
Her father had been a Creek man, a Muscogee man, who’d come down into the Choctaw Nation soon after the Removals and settled there, taking a Choctaw woman, Thula’s mother, to wife. He had fathered Thula, whom he called Tooske, in the winter of 1837 and lived with them nine years, taking up Choctaw ways, farming—but each summer he’d returned north to his native grounds at Kialigee town for Green Corn ceremony. And each year, going, he stayed longer, coming back to Choctaw Nation later and later each autumn, until the year Thula was nine, when he did not return at all. For two years her mother waited, and in that time she did not hold the Big Indian Cry, would not take up mourning or receive another man. Then, the summer Thula was to become eleven, her mother put her on a fine horse, gave her a pistol and a leather satchel of food—this selfsame satchel she’d laid aside on a flour keg to take up Jessie’s broom—and
sent her to Creek Nation to bring back her father. She had not brought him back, for he was dead, shot on the sandy banks of Skunk Creek by a Cherokee man he was drinking with, and Thula did not grieve him, for she understood it was because he was supposed to be, in his language, hilishaya, or medicine man, that he had to die like that. Long before that time, he had taught her. It was from him she had learned the everyday forms of healing—not spirit healing, not the songs and powerful medicine, but how to use the slippery-elm bark for cleansing, the uses of blackroot and chiggerweed, how to smoke the sick person or make a sweat. But her father had told her early on, from the time she was little, that he was a bad man who did not do as he was supposed to do. He had never worked bad medicine, did not use the gift that way, but he’d let the white man’s fire demon take him when he was a young man, and it had thiefed his soul; he had no defense against it, though he would become sober a good long time before Green Corn, had to be clean to take ceremony, to purify himself, to receive the black drink and dance—but always afterwards, the thirst would come on him bad again, and he would go down in the Deep Fork River bottoms alone, or with another one also caught by that demon, and so he betrayed the gift. It was because she understood this that Thula did not grieve her father, but she stayed four months with her father’s people, and it was during those four months that she had listened to the drum, the singing, the saka-saka of the turtle shells strapped to the shell-shakers’ legs as they danced in a circle around the sacred fire; only one summer did she drink osofki, dance the ribbon dance at Green Corn, take medicine—but she’d held the truth of it inside her spirit all her life.
From her mother she had one kind of mind and thought and being, for her mother’s people had received the Christian faith early, had embraced it from the first teachings brought by white missionaries to Mississippi and carried it with them into the new Nation. There was something in Christianity that spoke to the understanding in her mother’s people, and now they were Baptists, for it was the Baptists who’d sought out hardest and tended fiercest their souls to keep them from hellfire damnation, and Thula was Baptist, and she brought her children and grandchildren to the all-day camp meetings at Yonubby, and they were each baptized and took the Lord’s Supper when it was offered, and it was through her mother’s faith that Thula understood the Holy Trinity, how the Creator and the Son and the Spirit were one—but it was from her father, or, more truly, from her father’s people, that she understood the Sacred Four. Thula Henry knew that the number Three left the sacred hoop broken; it was not whole in the ways formed by the Creator: the Four Directions, the four seasons, the completeness echoed in the four brush arbors built for Green Corn ceremony on the sacred stomp grounds. Thula Henry’s Creek soul recognized the Fourth Part, the portion left out by white men and Christians in their search for the spirit—and yet this knowledge did not divide her. There was no conflict between stomp dance and baptism in her spirit, but only, as she understood it, the marriage of two spirits within her, and it was right in her eyes. She worked as she waited for the return of the girl and her brothers and sister, sweeping the leaves and ashes from the corners into an open circle in the center of the room, but she knew, if the white woman did not, that her purpose concerning the girl with yellow eyes was not to clean the log house.
They came at evening. Thula had built fire in the fireplace and put meat on to roast. She cooked the tanfula, the hominy she’d carried with her in her satchel, in the Dutch oven on the the iron hook above the open fire and put shuck bread in the hot ashes to bake. There was time for fasting and time to feed the body, and the time for fasting was not now. Almost she could feel the girl hesitate on the roadbed when she looked up at the chimney and saw the gray smoke. Almost she could feel her move forward slowly, and then her step quicken, believing it was some other one who had built fire in the house. And so they came. Thula heard the small feet running across the porch. The latch lifted, the heavy door was shoved inward, and the children, bounding in quickly, came to a tumbling halt, stumbling one into the other behind Matt, who stopped still in the middle of the floor.
For a very long time the girl and the woman looked at each other. There was recognition in their gaze—acknowledgment from the time of the clay cup healing, from the day of the death of the mules on the mountain, yes, but it was not that. Caught in the circle of leaves and ashes on the floor of the room warm with the smell of meat and bread roasting, the girl remembered what she had pushed away for nearly a quarter of her lifetime: the brown face coming down in the red darkness, round and flat as a skillet—round, and flat, and brown—the hands lifting away the tiny body with arms and legs like sticks, dangling. It was this Indian woman who’d been with them in the fever, who had stayed with them and nursed them when Papa was gone and the others shunned them; this woman who had given them medicine, smoked them and sung over them, so that they had lived—they had all but one lived. And so it was this woman who had witnessed her secret sin.
Every nerve and fiber and instinct in the girl’s being told her to run. Turn and run out the door, run out into the prairies and hills and creek bottoms, never return to the log house till the taint of the woman was gone and her smell gone, and the sight of her eyes gone, if it took forever, if Matt never came back to the log house forever. And the girl could not move. She felt herself caught in the circle as tight as a mite in an orb spider’s web; she could only look at the woman whose eyes nearly met her eyes—for Mattie had grown tall in the first decade of her life, but from the time of the earth falling she had not grown, and so she and the woman were the same height nearly, hardly more than four and a half feet tall, the girl only perhaps a half-inch taller, and the two stared in recognition at one another, brown webbed eyes and ocher eyes, each in some way bearing kinship to the other. For the woman recognized the girl too. She had known it in an outside way a long time, had thought it maybe even from the time of the fever, but now she knew. The girl was charged with the gifts of the spirit. Thula had never seen this in a white child. She had never seen it in anyone but her father and her firstborn grandson, and they both were dead.
The other children, held only a shocked moment by the silent web between the two females, quickly swarmed the room, led by the urgently hungry Jim Dee, who smelled and saw and heard the hog’s leg sizzling and dripping on the spit inside the fireplace and, giving a little shout, rushed over there. The boy Thomas came behind him, big and pale and handsome, his smooth countenance bland as an angel’s, and he was nearly as tall as his wiry, sandy-haired brother, heavy, dense in his bones, though he was not fat but just big, solid, like his father, and, like his father, he moved always in a slow, rolling gait. And then it was Jonaphrene, torn by her desire to join with her sister—in their profound link that whispered in each other’s souls without language, she knew Mattie was caught and could not move—but at last the compelling urge of the body won out in the younger girl, and she went to the spit, where the boys were tearing at the meat with a knife and their bare fingers, burning their own flesh, and said, “Wait. Wait! Let me get a fork and plate.”
Jonaphrene started across the room toward the pine shelf where the improbable stacks of delicate white china stood amid clusters of tin utensils, candle stubs, the father’s shaving mug and razor strop. Thula broke her gaze away from Mattie, came around her to the kitchen area, and took the fork and the chipped plates from the younger girl’s hands. With only a word or two in Choctaw she made the children settle down and stand in line before the fireplace, and she served them, great heaping plates of pork and tanfula, or “tom fuller,” as white folks called hominy, big crisp hunks of shuck bread. The boys went each to his place, Jim Dee to tip back against the wall on the rope-mended ladderback, Thomas to his place behind the door, to eat wolflike, not speaking, and Jonaphrene took her plate to the cold cookstove and ate tiny delicate bites of the pale hominy, her back to the room. Thula filled a plate then for Matt and took it to her, where she stood, still unmoving, in the circle of ashes. With gestur
e and sound and expression, the woman made it known to the girl that she should eat; she made it known to the other children to take a second helping, to carry their empty plates to the bucket, and she calmed them, made friends with the two boys almost entirely without language, as very young children make friends with one another without need of words. She calmed all of them but Matt, who continued staring at her with wide eyes, knowing eyes, frightened, but Thula Henry went on working patiently in the room, in silence, continued even when the children’s father came in after dark and began asking questions. She gestured and shrugged and filled a plate for him, and pretended to not understand, until at last the man talked himself into his own answers, said he would speak to his brother tomorrow, and did not ask again, not even when she pulled her red blanket from beneath the satchel and wrapped it around herself to sit on the floor beside the hearth when the children climbed the steep stairs to settle down on their pallets. On the morrow, and on the morrow following, Thula Henry cooked and cleaned and cared for the children; never did she cross the clotted field to the store to receive her length of cloth from Jessie. Her reason to remain was not connected to the white woman, nor to any human demand or payment. Each day Thula worked in silence, in patience, for she had a large purpose, and she knew God’s time was long.
The word went out in the cold moon of January. The Wilderness Preacher was coming to hold services down below Latham’s Store on the banks of the Braz-eel, as the little river was called. Among the Indians it was known as far away as Nashoba and Skullyville, and it was noised about a great deal among the white settlers as well, for the Preacher’s fame was broad in the land then, and the hunger for spiritual food and for entertaining diversion in I.T. was great.
