Prologue
About the place—when I take you there or when you find it on your own, just know that what the old folks say is true. This land is ours because of what is buried in the ground, not what words appear on a paper. But also know this: what is buried in the ground isn’t always what you think. It’s just the beginning. It’s the beginning of the story—the beginning of all of us who call ourselves Homo sapiens. Fitting, I guess, that what I found buried, just as I was trying to figure out how to become a man and still be human, was the very thing that threatened to take it all away. Just when I began to see what taking control of my own life might look like, I realized I was not who I thought. And neither was this place.
That summer in 1942 when I met her, really met her—before I found myself in a white man’s cage and entangled in the barbed wire that destroyed my father—I left the cage of my home in Cherokee, North Carolina. I left these mountains that both hold and suffocate, and went to work at the pinnacle of luxury and privilege—Asheville’s Grove Park Inn and Resort. I guess I had convinced myself that I could become fortunate by proximity—escape Uncle Bud’s tirades and my grandmother Lishie’s empty kitchen cabinets just by driving a couple of hours up the road. It sounded good to tell folks I was raising money for college; but the truth was, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just didn’t want to do it there anymore. And if I stayed any longer, I would become rooted so deeply I might as well have been buried.
My plan didn’t quite work the way I thought it would. When I got to the resort, I mostly stayed outside, cut the trees, mowed the grass, and helped to dig the holes that would sink signs and posts for barbed-wire fences. Music occasionally seeped from the ballroom but was muted by thick, lead-paned windows before one note ever reached the perimeter of the property.
That’s where I first found the bone. I was on my hands and knees, pitching rocks and digging holes. It was just as the inn, like its music, was becoming dulled by wartime restrictions and hushed by lead bullets. The prisoners—who were actually diplomats and foreign nationals treated more like guests—weren’t really known to me yet. That little girl, God bless her soul, had barely even stepped foot on the property, and I was still as free as I would ever be.
I squatted there by the fence along the boundary of the Grove Park property and grasped the bone by its middle, pointing both ends upward, studying its curvature. A bent bauble for my idle adolescent hands to fidget with in the absence of a ball stick or a soldier’s rifle. I can’t recall playing with many toys as a child. That’s probably why the bone spoke poetry to me as a young man.
It was smooth and porous, its slight c-curve angled in motion, calling to be grasped, used—a weapon, at least in some primitive function of strength—like a subhuman scythe, though innately human. Maybe even the very core of humanity. And now, as I recall the moment out loud, it was an embarrassing indulgence of make-believe for a nineteen-year-old. It’s all right to laugh. I don’t blame you.
Such an extraordinary object to be inside flesh, it was wholly earthen. Not sterile or cellular. It was natural in a way we pray our body is not.
Momentary. Seasonal. Destined for expiration.
The bone had lost its story. Petrified into a mere alkaline deposit, transient and nameless.
I was immediately spellbound by this calcified opportunity to embrace a remnant of a life’s existence in one hand. Dry it. Dust it. Preserve it, and listen. Buried by a story, and I was the only one on this earth privileged to hear it. “Cowney.” It seemed to coo my name like the beautiful girls of my daydreams, the ones who never took interest in boys like me. Just as I was yet to know of a certain beautiful girl’s power, I was yet to understand the power that bone would wield over my life. I was yet to know how much more I would risk for her, for it.
I am bits and pieces of the people I meet, my teacher once told me, though, more accurately, I am of people and places and creatures. And so, because of that summer, and that war and that small, hollow relic, I am bits and pieces of a grand estate, and a half-tamed primate, and a dozen accents, and a missing girl, and a fearful girl, and all the trees and mountains and asphalt in between.
And you—well, I reckon you will be, too, soon enough.
Knowing that she is now gone from this earth, all I am left to do is wonder what remains of her here … for me … for anyone who knew or didn’t know her. What happens to the memories? How long do they survive? I can still see her, dancing. Head thrown back, laughing. If there’s one thing old age has taught me, it’s that there are many kinds of love. She taught me that sometimes we feel many different kinds with one person. And now it seems possible that love is the only thing that will outlive us all, but only if we continue to tell its story.
1
Bones
That’s the thing about ceremony; it must have three things: it must be for the right reason, at the right time, and it must be in the right place.
—Tom Belt, Cherokee Nation
Chapter One
I don’t remember the day my father died. I don’t remember Lishie standing at the clothesline when the soldier came to tell her the news. I don’t remember the way she nodded her graying head, turned, went back to pinning shirts and skirts, unable to cry for a long while. I don’t remember how relieved Lishie was that his body, under the circumstances, would be returned when so many others were not. I don’t remember my father’s face cradled in the pine casket by one of Lishie’s special quilts. I don’t remember any of that. Barely four months old at the time, I couldn’t have. I’ve reconstructed images from stories and pictures and stitched them into one of Lishie’s quilts.
I do not remember the paleness of the pine box as it was precariously lowered into the deep earthen hole. I do not remember Preacherman sprinkling dry specks of red clay on top, an act that later seemed terribly disrespectful to my six-year-old self when Lishie explained it to me at an aunt’s funeral—an act that made me wonder if my father deserved such treatment.
I don’t remember Preacherman announcing, “Dust to dust,” but he must have.
Sometimes I think that I remember smells, but only when I smell them at new funerals.
Grease.
Lilies.
Tobacco.
Vanilla.
Fresh dirt.
Pine sap.
I remember one taste, though it must have just been repeated so many times after that day that I’ve convinced myself of it—the bitterest salt I have ever tasted—Lishie’s tear when she scooped me up and held me so tightly that my open lips smashed into her cheek.
“You were his,” I think I remember her saying. “You are mine,” I am certain I remember her saying. Even though all of this is surely impossible.
I don’t remember my uncle Bud, or rather his shadow, jutting from the doorway. But there has always been a shadow between him and me, between him and my father; so it must have been there that day.
I don’t remember the many different scales of cries from many different throats.
Gunshots surely rang—must have been twenty-one, three from seven men. I seem to remember more.
Lishie wailed.
Bud shouted, garbled and wet.
Too young to even crawl, I could swear I remember running past folded arms and hiding beneath one of Lishie’s special quilts until a new sun rose and all I could smell was coffee.