The Bean Trees (21 page)

After the others went to bed I stayed up with Irene, who was expecting her husband in from Ponca City after midnight. We sat on high stools behind the desk in the bright front office, looking out through the plate glass at the highway and the long, flat plain behind it. She told me she missed Mrs. Hoge something fierce.

“Oh, I know she wasn’t
kind
,” Irene said, her thinned-down bosom heaving with a long, sad sigh. “It was always ‘Here’s my daughter-in-law Irene that can’t make up a bed with hospital corners and is proud of it.’ But really I think she meant well.”

The next morning we had to make a decision. Either we would go straight to the sanctuary church, which was a little to the east of Oklahoma City, or we could all stay together for another day. They could come with me to the bar where I’d been presented with Turtle, to help me look for whatever I thought I was going to find in the way of Turtle’s relatives. I admitted to them that I could use the moral support, but on the other hand I would understand if they didn’t want to risk being on the road any more than they had to be. Without hesitation, they said they wanted to go with me.

Retracing my original route became a little more complicated. I had left the interstate when my steer
ing column set itself free, that much I knew, and I’d stayed on a side road for several hours before joining back up with the main highway. I could remember hardly any exact details from that night, in the way of landmarks, and of course there were precious few there to begin with.

The clue that tipped me off was a sign to the Pioneer Woman Museum. I remembered that. We found a two-lane road that I was pretty sure was the right one.

As soon as we left the interstate, trading the fast out-of-state tourist cars for the companionship of station wagons and pickup trucks packed with families, we were on the Cherokee Nation. You could feel it. We began to understand that Oklahoma had been a good choice: Estevan and Esperanza could blend in here. Practically half the people we saw were Indians.

“Do Cherokees look like Mayans?” I asked Estevan.

“No,” he said.

“Would a white person know that?”

“No.”

After a little bit I asked him, “Would a Cherokee?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” He was smiling his perfect smile.

I asked Turtle if anything looked familiar. When I looked in the rear-view mirror I caught sight of her on Esperanza’s lap, playing with Esperanza’s hair and trying on Esperanza’s sunglasses. Later I saw them playing a clapping-hands game. The two of them looked perfectly content: “Madonna and Child with Pink Sunglasses.” Nobody, not even a Mayan, could say they weren’t. One time I thought—though I
couldn’t swear it—I heard her call Turtle Ismene. I was getting a cold feeling in the bottom of my stomach.

I tried to keep myself cheerful. “I always tell Turtle she’s as good as the ones that came over on the
Mayflower
,” I told Estevan. “They landed at Plymouth Rock. She just landed in a Plymouth.”

Estevan didn’t laugh. In all fairness, I might not have told him before that she was born in a car, but also he was preoccupied, going over and over the life history he had invented for himself and his Cherokee bride. He was quite imaginative. He had a whole little side plot about how his parents had disapproved of the marriage, but had softened their hearts when they saw what a lovely woman Hope was.

“Steven and Hope,” he said. “But we need a last name.”

“How about Two Two?” I said. “That’s a good solid Cherokee name. It’s been in my family for months.”

“Two Two,” he repeated solemnly.

I missed my own car. I missed Lou Ann, who always laughed at my jokes.

I was positive I wouldn’t recognize the place, if it was even still there, but as soon as I laid eyes on it I knew. A little brick building with a Budweiser sign, and across the parking lot a garage. The garage looked closed.

“That’s it,” I said. I slowed down. “What do I do?”

“Stop the car,” Estevan suggested, but I kept going. My heart was pounding like a piston. A quarter of a mile down the road I stopped.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do this,” I said.

We all sat quietly for a minute.

“What is the worst thing that can happen?” Estevan asked.

“I don’t know. That I won’t find anybody that knows Turtle. Or that I will, and they’ll want her back.” I thought for a minute. “The worst thing would be that we lose her, some way,” I said finally.

“What if you don’t go in?”

“We lose her.”

Estevan gave me a hug. “For courage,” he said. Then Esperanza gave me a hug. Then Turtle did. I turned the car around and drove back to the bar.

“First let me go in alone,” I said.

It looked like a different place. I remembered all the signs—
IN CASE OF FIRE YELL FIRE
. They were gone. Blue gingham curtains hung in the windows and there were glasses of plastic roses and bachelor buttons on all the tables. I would have walked right out again, but I recognized the TV. Good picture, but no sound. And there was the same postcard rack too, although it seemed to have changed its focus, placing more emphasis on scenic lakes and less on Oral Roberts University.

A teenaged girl in jeans and an apron came through a door from the kitchen. She had a round Indian face behind large, blue-rimmed glasses.

“Get you some coffee?” she asked cheerfully.

“Okay,” I said, and sat down at the counter.

“Now, what else can I do for you?”

“I’m not sure. I’m looking for somebody.”

“Oh, who? Were you meeting them here for lunch?”

“No, it’s not like that. It’s kind of complicated. I
was in here last December and met some people I have to find again. I think they might live around here. It’s very important.”

She leaned on her elbows on the counter. “What was their names?”

“I don’t know. There was a woman, and two men in cowboy hats. I think one of them might have been her husband, or her boyfriend. I know, this isn’t getting anywhere. Ed knew their names.”

“Ed?”

“Isn’t that who runs this place?”

“No. My parents own it. We bought it in March, I think. Or April.”

“Well, would your parents know Ed? Would he be around here?”

She shrugged. “The place was just up for sale. I think whoever owned it before musta died. It was gross in here.”

“You mean he died
in here
?”

She laughed. “No, I just mean all the dirt and stuff. I had to scrub the grease off the back of the stove. It was
black
. I was thinking about running away and going back home. We’re not from here, we’re from over on tribal land. But I like some kids here now.”

“Do any of the same people come in here that always did? Like men, drinking after work and that kind of thing.”

She shrugged.

“Right. How would you know.”

I stared at my cup of coffee as though I might find the future in it, like the chickenbone lady back home. “I don’t know what to do,” I finally said.

She nodded out the window. “Maybe you should bring your friends in for lunch.”

I did. We sat at one of the spick-and-span tables with plastic flowers and had grilled-cheese sandwiches. Turtle bounced in her seat and fed tiny pieces of grilled cheese to Shirley Poppy. Estevan and Esperanza were quiet. Of course. You couldn’t speak Spanish in this part of the country—it would be noticed.

After lunch I went up to the register to pay. No other member of the family had materialized from the kitchen, so I asked the girl if there was anyone else around that might help me. “Do you know the guy that runs the garage next door? Bob Two Two?”

She shook her head. “He never came over here, because we serve beer. He was some religion, I forget what.”

“Are you telling me he’s dead now too? Give me a break.”

“Nah, he just closed. I think Pop said he was getting a place closer to Okie City.”

“It wasn’t even a year ago that I was here.”

She shrugged. “Nobody ever comes out here anyway. I never could see who would go to that garage in the first place.”

I put the change in my pocket. “Well, thanks anyway,” I told her. “Thanks for trying to help. I hope your family does all right by this place. You’ve fixed it up real nice.”

She made a small gesture with her shoulders. “Thanks.”

“What did you mean when you said you came from
tribal land? Isn’t this the Cherokee Nation?”

“This!
No, this is nothing. This is kind of the edge of it I guess, they do have that sign up the road that says maintained by the Cherokee tribe. But the main part’s over east, toward the mountains.”

“Oklahoma has mountains?”

She looked at me as though I might be retarded. “Of course. The Ozark Mountains. Come here, look.” She went over to the postcard rack and picked out some of the scenery cards. “See how pretty? That’s Lake o’ the Cherokees; we used to go there every summer. My brothers like to fish, but I hate the worms. And this is another place on the same lake, and this is Oologah Lake.”

“That looks beautiful,” I said. “That’s the Cherokee Nation?”

“Part of it,” she said. “It’s real big. The Cherokee Nation isn’t any one place exactly. It’s people. We have our own government and all.”

“I had no idea,” I said. I bought the postcards. I would send one to Mama, although she was married now of course and didn’t have any use for our old ace in the hole, the head rights. But even so I owed an apology to great grandpa, dead though he was.

As we were leaving I asked her about the TV. “That’s the one thing that’s still the same. What’s with it anyway? Doesn’t anybody ever turn the sound up?”

“The stupid thing is broke. You get the sound on one station and the picture on the other. See?” She flipped to the next channel, which showed blue static but played the sound perfectly. It was a commercial for diet Coke. “My gramma likes to leave it on 9,
she’s just about blind anyway, but the rest of us like it on 8.”

“Do you ever get the Oral Roberts shows?”

She shrugged. “I guess. I like Magnum P.I.”

Somehow I had been thinking that once we got back in the car and on the road again, everything would make sense and I would know what to do. I didn’t. This time I didn’t even know which way to head the car. If only Lou Ann were here, I thought. Lou Ann with her passion for playing Mrs. Neighborhood Detective. I knew she would say I was giving up too easily. But what was I supposed to do? Stake out the bar for a week or two and see if the woman ever showed up again? Would I recognize her if she did? Would she be willing to go to Oklahoma City with me to sign papers?

There had never been the remotest possibility of finding any relative of Turtle’s. I had driven across the country on a snipe hunt. A snipe hunt is a joke on somebody, most likely some city cousin. You send him out in the woods with a paper bag and see how long it takes for him to figure out what a fool he is.

But it also occurred to me to wonder why I had come this far. Generally speaking, I am not a fool. I must have wanted something, and wanted it badly, to believe that hard in snipes.

“I can’t give up,” I said as I turned the car around. I smacked my palms on the steering wheel again and again. “I just can’t. I want to go to Lake o’ the Cherokees. Don’t even ask me why.”

They didn’t ask.

“So do you want to come with me, or should we take you to your church now? Really, I can go either way.”

They wanted to come with me. I can see, looking back on it, that we were getting attached.

“We’ll have a picnic by the lake, and stay in a cabin, and maybe find a boat somewhere and go out on the water. We’ll have a vacation,” I told them. “When’s the last time you two had a vacation?”

Estevan thought for a while. “Never.”

“Me too,” I said.

E
speranza and Estevan were transformed in an unexplainable way over the next two hours. They showed a new side, like the Holy Cards we used to win for attendance in summer Bible school: mainly there was a picture of Jesus on the cross, a blurred, shimmering picture with flecks of pink and blue scattered through it, but tip it just so and you could see a dove flying up out of His chest. That was the Holy Ghost.

We must have been getting closer to the heart of the Cherokee Nation, whatever or wherever it was, because as we drove east we saw fewer and fewer white people. Everybody and his mother-in-law was an Indian. All the children were Indian children, and the dogs looked like Indian dogs. At one point a police car came up behind us and we all got quiet and kept an eye out, as we had grown accustomed to
doing, but when he passed us we just had to laugh. The cop was an Indian.

It must have been a very long time since Esperanza and Estevan had been in a place where they looked just like everybody else, including cops. The relief showed in their bodies. I believe they actually grew taller. And Turtle fit right in too; this was her original home. I was the odd woman out.

Although, of course, I supposedly had enough Cherokee in me that it counted. I knew I would never really claim my head rights, and probably couldn’t even if I wanted to—they surely had a statute of limitations or some such thing. But it was a relief to know the Cherokee Nation wasn’t a complete bust. I read a story once, I might have this confused but I think the way it went was that this lady had a diamond necklace put away in a safe-deposit box all her life, thinking that if she ever got desperate she could sell it, only to find out on her deathbed that it was rhinestones. That was more or less the way I felt on that first terrible trip through Oklahoma.

It was nice to find out, after all, that Mama’s and my ace in the hole for all those years really did have a few diamonds in it: Lake Oologah, Lake o’ the Cherokees.

“The Cherokee Nation has its own Congress and its own President,” I reported to Esperanza and Estevan. “Did you know that?” I wasn’t sure if I actually knew this or was just elaborating on what the girl in the restaurant had told me.

The scenery grew more interesting by the mile. At first it was still basically flat but it kind of rolled along,
like a great green, rumpled bedsheet. Then there were definite hills. We passed through little towns with Indian names that reminded me in some ways of Kentucky. Here and there we saw trees.

Once, all of a sudden, Turtle shouted, “Mama!” She was pointing out the window.

My heart lost its beat for a second. To my knowledge she had never referred to anyone as Mama. We looked, but couldn’t see anybody at all along the road. There was only a gas station and a cemetery.

Turtle and Esperanza were becoming inseparable. Turtle sat on her lap, played with her, and whined at the rest stops when Esperanza wanted to go to the bathroom by herself. I suppose I should have been grateful for the babysitting. I couldn’t quite imagine how I would have kept Turtle entertained by myself, while I was driving. We’d managed a long trip before, of course, but that was in Turtle’s catatonic period. At that stage of her life, I don’t think she would have minded much if you’d put her in a box and shipped her to Arizona. Now everything was different.

Lake o’ the Cherokees was a place where you could imagine God might live. There were enough trees.

I still would have to say it’s stretching the issue to call the Ozarks mountains, but they served. I felt secure again, with my hopes for something better tucked just out of sight behind the next hill.

We found a cottage right off the bat. It was perfect: there were two bedrooms, a fireplace with a long-tailed bird (stuffed) on the mantel, and a bathroom
with an old claw-foot tub (one leg poked down through the floor, but the remaining three looked steadfast). It was one of a meandering row of mossy, green-roofed cottages lined up along a stream bank in a place called Saw Paw Grove.

They didn’t want to take it for the night, but I insisted. We had the money from Mattie, and besides, it wasn’t that expensive. No more than we would have spent the night before if I hadn’t had connections at the Broken Arrow. It took some doing, but I convinced Estevan and Esperanza that we weren’t doing anything wrong. We deserved to have a good time, just for this one day.

I told them to think of it as a gift. “As an ambassador of my country I’m presenting you with an expenses paid one-day vacation for four at Lake o’ the Cherokees. If you don’t accept, it will be an international incident.”

They accepted. We sat on the cottage’s little back porch, watching out for Turtle and the holes where the floorboards were rotted out, and stared at the white stream as it went shooting by. No water in Arizona was ever in that much of a hurry. The moss and the ferns looked so good I just drank up all that green. Even the rotten floor planks looked wonderful. In Arizona things didn’t rot, not even apples. They just mummified. I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.

Growing all along the creek there were starry red-and-yellow flowers that bobbed on the ends of long, slender stems. Turtle informed us they were “combines,” and we accepted her authority. Estevan
climbed down the slick bank to pick them. I thought to myself, Where in the universe will I find another man who would risk his neck for a flower? He fell partway into the creek, soaking one leg up to the knee—mainly, I think, for our benefit. Even Esperanza laughed.

Something was going on inside of Esperanza. Something was thawing. Once I saw a TV program about how spring comes to Alaska. They made a big deal about the rivers starting to run again, showing huge chunks of ice rumbling and shivering and bashing against each other and breaking up. This is how it was with Esperanza. Behind her eyes, or deeper, in the arteries around her heart, something was starting to move. When she held Turtle on her lap she seemed honestly happy. Her eyes were clear and she spoke to Estevan and me directly, looking at our eyes.

Estevan survived his efforts and handed a flower to each of us. He kissed Esperanza and said something in Spanish that included “mi amor,” and fixed the flower in her buttonhole so that it sprang out from her chest like one of those snake-in-the-can tricks. I could imagine them as a young couple, shy with each other, doing joky things like that. I braided the stem of my flower into my hair. Turtle waved hers up and down like a drum major’s baton, shouting, “Combine, combine, combine!” None of us, apparently, was able to think of any appropriate way of following this command.

I was supposed to be calling them Steven and Hope now so they could begin getting used to it. I couldn’t. I had changed my own name like a dirty
shirt, but I couldn’t help them change theirs.

“I love your names,” I said. “They’re about the only thing you came here with that you’ve still got left. I think you should only be Steven and Hope when you need to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes, but keep your own names with your friends.”

Neither of them said anything, but they didn’t urge me again to call them by false names.

Later we found a place that rented boats by the half hour and Estevan and I took one out onto the lake. Esperanza didn’t want to go. She didn’t know how to swim, and I wasn’t sure about Turtle, so the two of them stayed on the shore feeding ducks.

Estevan and I took turns rowing and waving at the shore until Turtle was a tiny bouncing dot. By then we were in the very middle of the lake, and we let ourselves drift. The sun bounced off the water, making bright spangles and upside-down shadows on our faces. I rolled my jeans up to my knees and dangled my bare feet over the side. There was a fishy-smelling assortment of things in the bottom of the boat, including a red-and-white line floater and a collection of pop-top rings from beer cans.

Estevan took off his shirt and lay back against the front of the boat, his hands clasped behind his head, exposing his smooth Mayan chest to the sun. And to me. How could he possibly have done this, if he had any idea how I felt? I knew that Estevan had walked a long, hard road beyond innocence, but still he sometimes did the most simple, innocent, heartbreaking things. As much as I have wanted anything,
ever, I wanted to know how that chest would feel against my face. I looked toward the shore so he wouldn’t see the water in my eyes.

I pulled the wilted flower out of my braid and twisted the stem in my fingers. “I’m going to miss you a lot,” I said. “All of you. Both, I mean.”

Estevan didn’t say he was going to miss all of me. We knew this was a conversation we couldn’t afford to get into. In more ways than one, since we were renting by the half-hour.

After a while he said, “Throw a penny and make a wish.”

“That’s wasteful,” I said, kicking my toes in the water. “My mother always said a person that throws away money deserves to be poor. I’d rather be one of the undeserving poor.”

“Undeservedly,” he corrected me, smiling.

“One of the undeservedly poor.” Even my English was going to fall apart without him.

“Then we can wish on these.” He picked up one of the pop-top rings. “These are appropriate for American wishes.”

I made two American wishes on pop tops in Lake o’ the Cherokees. Only one of them had the remotest possibility of coming true.

At dusk we found picnic tables in a little pine forest near the water’s edge. Both Mattie and Irene had packed us fruit and sandwiches for the road, most of which were still in the Igloo cooler in the trunk. We threw an old canvas poncho over the table and spread out the pickle jars and bananas and apples and goose-
liver sandwiches and everything else. Other picnickers here and there were working on modest little balanced meals of things that all went together, keeping the four food groups in mind, but we weren’t proud. Our party was in the mood for a banquet.

The sun was setting behind us but it lit up the clouds in the east, making one of those wraparound sunsets. Reflections of pink clouds floated across the surface of the lake. It looked like a corny painting. If I didn’t let my mind run too far ahead, I felt completely happy.

Turtle still had a good deal of energy, and was less interested in eating than in bouncing and jumping and running in circles around the trees. Every so often she found a pine cone, which she would bring back and give to me or to Esperanza. I tried very hard not to keep count of whose pile of pine cones was bigger. Turtle looked like a whirling dervish in overalls and a green-striped T-shirt. We hadn’t realized how cooped up she must have felt in the car, because she was so good. It’s funny how people don’t give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they’re being quiet.

It’s also interesting how it’s hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you’re paying attention. After a while, whatever you’re mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.

Estevan asked us which we liked better, sunrise or sunset. We were all speaking in English now, because Esperanza had to get into practice. I couldn’t object to this—it was a matter of survival.

“Sun set, because sun rise comes too early,”
Esperanza said, and giggled. She was very self-conscious in English, and seemed to have a whole different personality.

I told them that I liked sunrise better. “Sunset always makes me feel a little sad.”

“Why?”

I peeled a banana and considered this. “I think because of the way I was raised. There was always so damn much work to do. At sunrise it always seems like you’ve got a good crack at getting everything done, but at sunset you know that you didn’t.”

Esperanza directed our attention to Turtle, who was hard at work burying Shirley Poppy in the soft dirt at the base of a pine tree. I had to laugh.

I went over and squatted beside her at the foot of the tree. “I’ve got to explain something to you, sweet pea. Some things grow into bushes or trees when you plant them, but other things don’t. Beans do, doll babies don’t.”

“Yes,” Turtle said, patting the mound of dirt. “Mama.”

It was the second time that day she had brought up a person named Mama. I registered this with something like an electric shock. It started in my hands and feet and moved in toward the gut.

I kneeled down and pulled Turtle into my lap. “Did you see your mama get buried like that?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

It was one of the many times in Turtle’s and my life together that I was to have no notion of what to do. I remembered Mattie saying how it was pointless to think you could protect a child from the world. If that
had once been my intention, it should have been clear that with Turtle I’d never had a chance.

I held her in my arms and we rocked for a long time at the foot of the pine tree.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s awful, awful sad when people die. You don’t ever get to see them again. You understand that she’s gone now, don’t you?”

Turtle said, “Try?” She poked my cheek with her finger.

“Yeah, I’m crying.” I leaned forward on my knees and pulled a handkerchief out of my back pocket.

“I know she must have loved you very much,” I said, “but she had to go away and leave you with other people. The way things turned out is that she left you with me.”

Out on the lake people in boats were quietly casting their lines into the shadows. I remembered fishing on my own as a kid, and even younger going out with Mama, probably not being much help. I had a very clear memory of throwing a handful of rocks in the water and watching the fish dart away. And screaming my heart out. I wanted them, and knew of no reason why I shouldn’t have them. When I was Turtle’s age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me.

I still hadn’t. Maybe I hadn’t started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.

After a while I told Turtle, “You already know there’s no such thing as promises. But I’ll try as hard as I can to stay with you.”

“Yes,” Turtle said. She wiggled off my lap and returned to her dirt pile. She patted a handful of pine
needles onto the mound. “Grow beans,” she said.