Pigs in Heaven (29 page)

Alice feels transported, though. His words blend together into an unbroken song, as smooth as water over stones. It
is
a little like those holy-roller churches she loved, where, when someone fell into a swoon, you
felt
their meaning; in the roof of your mouth and your fingertips you felt it, without needing to separate out the particular words.

A blue-tick hound walks across the clearing in front of the chief and lies down with a group of dogs near the fire. They all hold their heads up, watching him. Now and again a latecomer truck pulls up through the woods, joining the circle, and respectfully dims its lights. The focused attention in the clearing feels to Alice like something she could touch, a crystal vase, small at the ground and spreading as it goes up into the branches of the oaks.

All at once the chief raises his voice high, and something like a groan of assent rises up through the crowd and the glass is shattered.
There is only quiet. Then babies start up with fretful cackles, and old men stand up to shake the hands of old women they didn’t see earlier, and the dogs all rise and walk off toward the kitchens.

“Now we get to dance,” Sugar says, excitedly. A dozen teenaged girls come out, checking each other seriously and adjusting side to side as they line up in a close circle around the fire. They’re all wearing knee-length gingham skirts and the rattling leggings made of terrapin shells filled with stones. Alice is taken aback by how much bigger these are than the training shackles Sugar showed her; they bulge out like beehives from the girls’ legs, below their dresses. They all begin to move with quick little double sliding steps, giving rise to a resounding hiss. Several old men fall into line behind them, nodding and singing a quick, perfect imitation of a whippoorwill. Alice feels chills dance on her backbone. The old men begin a song then, and the young women step, step, step, counterclockwise around the fire. As other people come into the circle, they take up hands behind the singers and shackle-bearers, making a long snake that coils languidly around the fire. All at once, when the chief holds up his hand, everyone’s feet stop still in the dust and the dancers whoop. It’s the sound of elation.

“Oh, that looks fun,” Alice cries to Sugar. “Can’t you do it?”

“Oh, I will, directly. You should too. You don’t have to wait to be asked, just go on up any time you feel like it.”

Another dance begins right away. The song sounds a little different, but the dance is still the same gentle stomping in a circle. Only the girls with the turtle-shell legs do the fancy step, concentrating hard, with no wasted motion in their upper bodies; everyone else just shuffles, old and young, pumping their arms a little, like slowed-down joggers. There are several rings of people around the fire now, and the crowd is growing. Alice is fascinated by the girls who remain in the inner circle by the fire, in the honored place, working so hard. This forest feels a hundred miles away from the magazine models with their twiggy long legs. These girls in their bulbous shackles have achieved a strange grace, Alice thinks—a kind of bowlegged femininity.

The dancing goes on and on. An old man produces a drum, and the music then is made up of a small skin drum and deep, mostly male voices and the hiss of the turtle shells above it all like a thrilling high wind. When Alice asked Cash, earlier, about the dance and the music, he said it would be music that sounds like the woods, and Alice decides this is right. No artificial flavorings. It’s the first time she has witnessed an Indian spectacle, she realizes, that had nothing to do with tourism. This is simply people having a good time in each other’s company, because they want to.

“What are the songs about?” she asks Sugar. To Alice they sound like “oh-oh-way-yah,” and sometimes the chief sings out in a sort of yodel. His voice breaks and rises very beautifully, and the crowd answers the same words back.

“I couldn’t really tell you,” Sugar answers, at last. “It’s harder to understand than regular talking. Maybe it don’t mean anything.”

“Well, it would have to mean
something
, wouldn’t it?”

Sugar seems untroubled by the idea that it might not. “Let’s go,” she says suddenly, grabbing Alice by the hand. “Just go in after the shackles,” she instructs. “Don’t get in front of the girls.” Alice wouldn’t dare.

She follows Sugar in, trembling with nerves, and then there she is, stomp dancing like anybody. At first she is aware of nothing beyond her own body, her self, and she watches other people, imitating the way they hold their arms. But she’s also aware that she’s doing a strange and unbelievable thing. It makes her feel entirely alive, in the roof of her mouth and her fingertips. She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might
see
things better on television, but you’ll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.

Once in a while, Alice remembers Cash and feels a thrill in her stomach. She looks around for him, but can only see the people in front of her and those beside her in the snake’s other coils. The song turns out to be a short one, and Alice is disappointed to see that when it ends everyone leaves the clearing and settles back down on
the benches of their respective clans. Even after such a short time, her calves feel pinched. It’s like an all-night workout on the Stairmaster she has seen advertised on Harland’s shopping channel. A Stairmaster with a spiritual element.

While the dancers take a break, a young man stretches a hose from a spigot in one of the kitchen shelters, looping it through the trees, and attaches onto its end the kind of spray nozzle people use for gardening. He carefully hoses down the dirt floor of the dance area, beginning with the eastern part where the chief stood and paced, and working his way slowly around the clearing. He never sprays any water into the fire.

The fire seems to Alice like a quiet consciousness presiding. It’s not like an old dog, after all, because it commands more prolonged attention. It’s more like an old grandmother who never gets out of her chair.

Sugar is busy gnawing on a chicken wing and introducing Alice to everyone in sight. Alice is too tired to remember names, but she notices Sugar is very proud about pointing out Alice’s connection to the Bird Clan.

“I know we had the same grandmother,” Alice tells her finally, when all the Tailbobs and Earbobs have drifted away. “But you’re forgetting I’m not Indian.”

“You’re as Indian as I am. Daddy was white, and Mama too except for what come down through the Stamper side.”

“Bloodwise, I guess,” Alice says, “but you married Roscoe and you’ve lived here near about your whole life. Don’t you have to sign up somewhere to be Cherokee?”

“To vote you do.” Sugar holds the chicken wing at arm’s length, turning it this way and that as if it were some piece of sculpture she were working on. “You have to enroll. Which is easy. You’ve just got to show you come from people that’s on the Census Rolls, from back in the 1800s. Which you do.”

“Well, even if that’s true, it don’t seem right. I don’t feel like an Indian.”

Sugar places the chicken bones in a bag inside her purse, and
touches a napkin to her mouth. “Well, that’s up to you. But it’s not like some country club or something. It’s just family. It’s kindly like joining the church. If you get around to deciding you’re Cherokee, Alice, then that’s what you are.”

Alice can’t believe it’s 2:00
A.M.
and people are still driving in. The crowd has grown to several hundred. The turtle-shell girls are assembling around the fire again, and when the dance starts, Sugar and Alice are among the first up. Alice feels endurance creeping up on her gradually. This time the singing lasts longer, and she forgets about her arms and legs. It’s surprisingly easy to do. The music and movement are comforting and repetitious and hypnotic, and her body slips into its place in the endless motion. For the first time she can remember, Alice feels completely included.

The instant a dance stops, she becomes aware of her body again, her muscles and her sleepiness. She understands how, if she kept dancing, she could keep dancing. A keen, relaxed energy comes from forgetting your body. She sees how this will go on all night.

Midway through the next song, she realizes Cash has moved into the line behind her. She smiles as she moves her body through the siss-siss of the turtles. He is back there for a while, and then by the time another song begins, someone else is. She sees Annawake out to the side of her, once. She thinks she sees Boma Mellowbug too, without her feather. For a while she tries to keep tabs on where Cash is, but then she forgets to think about it, because she can’t quite locate
herself
in this group either. She only knows she is inside of it.

At the end of each song the voices stop and then there is only the watershell hiss, vibrating inside a crystal jar of quiet. It’s a sound that loses its individual parts, the way clapping becomes a roar in the hands of a crowd. It is as many pebbles as there are on a beach. Alice’s life and aloneness and the things that have brought her here all drop away, as she feels herself overtaken by uncountable things. She feels a deep, tired love for the red embers curled in the center of this world. The beloved old fire that has lived through everything since the beginning, that someone carried over the Trail of Tears, and someone carried here tonight, and someone will carry home and
bring back again to the church of ever was and ever shall be, if we only take care of it.

At home, with morning light seeping under the yellow-white shades in Sugar’s spare room, Alice lies in bed hugging her own beating heart, afraid of falling asleep. She takes stock of where she is, without believing any of it. Her black suitcase yawns against the closet door, exposing a tangle of innards, and Sugar’s ironing board stands near the bed under a pile of wrinkled laundry, burdened like a forward-leaning pack mule.

If she sleeps, the magic could be gone when she wakes up again in this room. She might be merely here, in a cousin’s ironing room, with no memory of what has happened tonight. It seems like a fairy tale, and the stories say spells get broken and magic doesn’t endure. That people don’t really love one another and dance in the woods for no other reason than to promise goodness, and lose track of themselves, and keep an old fire burning.

A
YOUNG WOMAN WEARING A
lot of beads and a complicated hairdo leads Alice and Sugar through the basement hallway of the Cherokee Heritage Center. She unlocks the door to a small room with a huge oak table in the center.

“You need help finding anybody?” she asks. Alice has noticed that the girl is trying not to chew the gum in her mouth while they are looking. Is that what old women look like to the young? Their fifth-grade teacher?

“No thanks, hon, I’ve done all this before,” Sugar replies.

Their guide leaves them, chewing her gum earnestly to make up for lost time as she heads back upstairs to the gift shop. The big table is covered with old brown ring binders, sprawled out hodgepodge across one another like farmhands taking a break. One wall of the room is covered with an old-looking map of the Cherokee Nation districts, and some sort of film-viewing machine crouches against the other wall. Lined up across the back of the room are antique wooden cabinets of the type that might sit in a country doctor’s office. Alice
feels exactly that kind of nervousness—as if she’s about to get a shot, for her own good.

Sugar sits down in one of the plastic chairs. “This here is the index for the Dawes Rolls,” she says, picking up a ring binder thick enough for a toddler to sit on at the dinner table. “1902 to 1905,” she reads. She straightens her glasses, licks her thumb, and begins to page through it.

“Are you sure we ought to be doing this?”

Sugar looks up at Alice over her glasses. “I swear, Alice, I don’t know what’s become of you. You used to make me sneak out to the beer joints on a double dog dare, and now you’re scared of your shadow doing just a ordinary everyday thing.”

“I don’t want to break any rules.”

“For heaven’s sake, sit down here and look. This isn’t nothing in the world but a long list of names. People that was living here and got allotments between certain years.”

Alice sits down and scoots her chair toward Sugar, who is holding her chin high so she can see the small print through the bottom window of her bifocals. She looks like a proud little bird with a forties hairdo.

“I’m just going to show you your grandma’s name. She’s not going to reach out of the grave and tickle your feet.”

“She might, if she knew I was trying to cheat the Cherokees.”

“Alice Faye, you’re not cheating.”

Alice gets up and moves restlessly around the room, leaving Sugar to her search through the roll book. “What’s this?” she asks, holding up a yellowed, antique-looking newspaper covered with strange curlicues.

Sugar looks up over her glasses. “The
Cherokee Advocate
. That’s old, they don’t run it anymore. That’s what the writing looks like for the Cherokee. It’s pretty, isn’t it? I never did learn to read it. Roscoe does.”

Alice studies the headlines, trying to connect their cursive roundness with the soft guttural voices she heard at the stomp dance. “They had their own paper?”

“Land, yes,” Sugar says, without looking up again from her book. “It was the first newspaper in Oklahoma. The Cherokees got things
all organized out here while everybody else was cowboys eating with their jackknifes, Roscoe tells me. Them big old brick buildings we passed by in Tahlequah this morning? That was the Cherokee capitol. Oh, look, here she is, right here.” She motions Alice over, holding down Grandmother Stamper under her fingertip. “Write down this enrollment number: 25844.”

Alice digs in her purse for a pencil, licks the end of it, and dutifully records this number in her address book under the “Z’s,” since it seems unlikely she’ll ever get close to anyone whose last name starts with a Z. For that matter, the whole address book is pretty much blank, except for three pages of crossed-out numbers for Taylor.

“Now all you’ve got to do is prove you’re descended from her. Having the birth certificate is the best, but she didn’t have one. What we did, when Roscoe helped me do this, was we writ to the records office down in Mississippi and we got the record of where she was drownded at. And then we just took that on down to the tribal recorder’s office and explained how she was my grandma, and that was that. I think I showed them some family pictures and stuff. They’re pretty understanding.”

Alice stares at the book of names. She can’t put a finger on who, exactly, she feels she’s cheating. All the people on the list, to begin with, and the fact they are dead doesn’t help. She wishes Sugar hadn’t mentioned the business of coming out of graves and tickling feet. “It doesn’t feel right to me,” she says. “I always knew we were some little part Indian, but I never really thought it was blood enough to sign up.”

“It don’t have to be more than a drop. We’re all so watered down here, anyway. Did you see them blond kids at the stomp dance, the Threadgills? They’re signed up. Roy Booth over here at the gas station, he’s enrolled, and he’s not more than about one two-hundredth. And his kids are. But his wife, she’s a quarter, but she’s real Methodist, so she don’t want to sign up. It’s no big thing. Being Cherokee is more or less a mind-set.”

“Well, maybe I have the wrong mind-set. What if I’m just doing it to get something I want?”

“Honey, the most you’re ever going to get out of the Nation is a new roof, money-wise, and you might have to wait so long you’ll go ahead and fix it yourself. There’s the hospitals and stuff, but nobody’s going to grudge you that. They’ll collect from your insurance if you have it, no matter who you are.”

Alice feels her secret swelling against her diaphragm from underneath, the way pregnancy felt toward the end. She is even starting to get the same acid indigestion. “Sugar, you’re a good friend to me,” she says. “I appreciate that you never have asked why I came here.”

“Oh, I figured a bad marriage, whatever. Then when you asked after Fourkillers I thought you must be looking for Ledger, for some kind of cure.” Sugar holds Alice steady in her gaze, and puts a hand on her forearm. “Everybody’s got their troubles, and their reasons for getting a clean start. People’s always curious for the details, but seem like that’s just because we’re hoping somebody else’s life is a worst mess than ours.”

Alice feels a pure ache to break down right there on the roll books and tell all. But she’s so afraid. Sugar might withdraw that hand on her forearm and all the childhood hugs that stand behind it. A month ago, Alice wouldn’t have thought any person alive would argue that Turtle belonged to anyone but Taylor. Now she sees there are plenty who would.

“My reasons for coming are different from anybody’s you ever heard of,” she tells Sugar. “I want to tell you, but I can’t right yet. But what I’m thinking is that it could help my cause to sign up here and be Cherokee.”

Sugar cocks her head, looking at Alice. “Well, then, you ought to do it. I don’t reckon you have to say you’re sorry for coming along and picking a apple off a tree.”

Alice knows she has to pick the apple. But in her heart, or deeper, in her pinched stomach, she knows it will hurt the tree.

The afternoon is humid and buggy. Alice waves her hand around as she walks, to chase off the gnats that seem to spring right out of
the air itself. She wishes she’d worn her shorts. Though when she pictures an old lady in baggy shorts walking down a dirt road to the river, waving her hands wildly, she comes up with something close to Boma Mellowbug. It’s just as well she wore her double knits. She wants to make a good impression.

Alice asked Annawake if they could meet someplace besides the café in town; she’s not crazy about having every Tailbob in sight overhear what she wants to discuss. Annawake suggested her Uncle Ledger’s houseboat. Now Alice is fairly confident she’s lost. Just when she arrives at the brink of serious worry, she sees the flat glare of the lake through the trees, and then the corrugated tin roof of what looks like a floating trailer home with a wooden veranda running all the way around. Thick ropes bind it to the shore, and thinner lines run from boat to treetops like the beginnings of spider webs, from which all kinds of things are hung: men’s jeans with their legs spread as though they mean to stand their ground up there; and buckets, too, and long-handled spoons. She spies Annawake sitting on the edge of the porch with her legs sunk into the water.

“Yoo hoo,” Alice calls, not wanting to startle Annawake, who looks at that moment like a child lost in the land of pretend. Annawake looks up and waves broadly, and Alice is struck by how pretty she is, in shorts and a velvety red T-shirt. Last time, in the café, Annawake showed sharp edges, a cross between a scared rabbit and the hound that hunts him, and her hair seemed deliberately shaggy. Between then and now she has had it trimmed into a glossy earlobe-length bob, and her maple-colored skin is beautiful.

Alice walks across the wobbly-planked bridge from bank to boat, hanging on to the coarse rope handrail to keep herself from falling in the water. The side of the boat is lined all around with old tires, like bumpers.

“You call this a lake?” Alice asks. “I could just about throw a rock to the other bank.”

“Well, I guess at this point you could call it a glorified river,” Annawake admits. “Did you have trouble finding us?”

“No.” She looks around to locate the “us,” but sees only Annawake and a lot of dragonflies. Annawake had said Ledger had to go bless a new truck in Locust Grove.

“Do you mind sitting out here? The mosquitoes will be here pretty soon, but the water feels great.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Alice sits beside Annawake and catches her breath, then takes off her tennis shoes and rolls her pants legs to her knees. When she plunges her feet into the cold, it feels like a new lease on life.

“That haircut looks real good,” she tells Annawake, feeling motherly in spite of herself.

Annawake runs a hand through it. “Thanks,” she says. “I kind of went crazy and cut it all off when I went to law school. I think I was in mourning, or something. Seems like it’s growing back now.”

“That was a good idea to meet out here. It’s nice.”

“Well, it’s private. We used to come out here when we were kids, for the summer, and we felt like we’d gone to California. We thought it was a hundred miles to Uncle Ledger’s. If anyone would have told me you could walk out here from town in half an hour I wouldn’t have believed it. Because nobody ever does.”

“Didn’t even take that long. Twenty minutes.”

“You’re a fast walker.”

“I always was. If you’re going someplace, I figure you’d just as well go on and get there.”

She and Annawake look each other in the eye for a second, then retreat.

“So, you’ve got something to tell me.”

“To ask, really,” Alice says.

“All right.”

Alice takes a breath. “Would it make any difference about who gets to keep Turtle if I was, if her mother and I were enrolled?”

Annawake looks at Alice with her mouth slightly open. After a while she closes it, then asks, “You have Cherokee blood?”

“We do. I found my grandma yesterday in that roll book.”

“The Dawes Rolls,” Annawake says. She blinks, looking at the
water. “This is a surprise. I thought I knew what you were coming here to tell me today, and this is not it.”

“Well, would it make any difference? Would that make us Indian?”

“Let me think a minute.” She runs her hand through the hair at her temple, pulling it back from her face. Finally she looks at Alice with a more lawyerly look. “First of all, yes, if you enrolled then you would be Cherokee. We’re not into racial purity, as you’ve probably noticed. It’s a funny thing about us eastern tribes, we’ve been mixed blood from way back, even a lot of our holy people and our historical leaders. Like John Ross. He was half-blood. It’s no stigma at all.”

“That just seems funny to me, that you can join up late. Wouldn’t it seem like showing up at the party after they’ve done raised the barn?”

“I guess it could be seen as opportunistic, in your case.” Annawake gives Alice the strangest grin, with the corners of her mouth turned down. “But generally there’s no reason why enrollment should be restricted to full-bloods, or half-, or wherever you’d want to make a cutoff. Anybody who lives our way of life should have the chance to belong to the tribe. I
sure
don’t think outsiders should tell us who can be enrolled.”

“Don’t it kind of dilute things, to let everybody in?”

Annawake laughs. “Believe me, people are not lined up on the Muskogee highway waiting to join the tribe.”

“So I’d be as Cherokee as any soul here, if I signed up.”

“Legally you would be. And I’ll be honest with you, it couldn’t hurt your case.”

“Well, then, I’m going to enroll.”

“But that’s kind of missing the point, where your granddaughter is concerned. You’d be Cherokee legally, but not culturally.”

“Is that the big deal?”

Annawake presses her fingertips together and stares at them. “When we place Cherokee kids with non-Indian foster parents, we have a list we give them, things they can do to help teach the child about her culture. Take her to the Cherokee Heritage Center, get
Cherokee language tapes, take her to Cherokee National Holiday events, things like that. But that’s just making the best of a bad situation. It’s like saying, ‘If you’re going to adopt this baby elephant, you must promise to take it to the zoo once in a while.’ Really, a baby elephant should be raised by elephants.”

“She isn’t an elephant. She’s a little girl.”

“But if she’s raised in a totally white culture, there’s going to come a time when she’ll feel like one. And she’ll get about as many dates as one. She’ll come home from high school and throw herself on the bed and say, ‘Why do I have this long, long nose?’ ”

Alice wants to argue that there are worse things, but she can’t immediately think of any. She still doesn’t want to buy it, though. “If I’m Cherokee, and Taylor is, a little bit, and we never knew it but lived to tell the tale, then why can’t she?”

Annawake lays her dark wrist over Alice’s. “Skin color. Isn’t life simple? You have the option of whiteness, but Turtle doesn’t. I only had to look at her for about ten seconds on TV to know she was Cherokee.”