The indigo bunting reminded me that the merging of the forest’s stillness and its interruption marked by fierce velocity was what made the woods the wilderness. Hovering just outside Hawthorne’s darkness, though less romantic than Sherwood Forest, it was a wood not yet known in literature or picture shows. Now, I know what you must be thinking. That all sounds starry-eyed, maybe even romantic. But that’s why you need the stories of this place. No outsiders seemed to know what I knew, what we knew about these woods. Few outsiders knew the contradictions of poison oak and healing salves growing side by side, or the way in which grapevines have nothing to do with eating and so much to do with flying. And that … well, that was fine by me then. But you will need to know.
I was also one of the few who recognized old man Tsa Tsi’s capuchin monkey, Edgar, simply by the way the tree branches bent overhead. Tsa Tsi, or George (his English name), was one of those fixture characters many of us have known in our childhood. He was a man who never seemed to age nor would ever die. As a child, I was perpetually nervous in his presence, fearful he could see deep to the root of my motivations and ambitions and judge them ceaselessly without saying a word. One sideways glance from the old man and I was transformed. I never actually saw him move from one place to the other, now that I think about it. I can’t recall when or how I met him or when I decided we should go on conversing like lifelong friends. Of course, there were lots of folks like that back then. Formal introductions weren’t needed. Just like I never introduced myself to the stream below my house or my great-aunts that I saw maybe once or twice in my lifetime. Some things, some people just seem to always have existed within our own sphere of being, indefinable by common terms of friendship or familial relationship. Just people, peopling our world. And of course, I still laugh to think that such an apathetic man cared for a ridiculous monkey named Edgar. But as a child, it all made perfect sense.
Edgar’s leap caused the limbs of the trees to dip much lower than a squirrel’s jump, though he was also far less clumsy than the local woodland flyers. He made very little noise. Tsa Tsi insisted it was because he was deaf. I wasn’t so sure about that because I couldn’t figure how a monkey could survive the panthers if he couldn’t hear them sneaking up on him. I’ve never heard that monkeys have a strong sense of smell. I’m pretty certain Edgar was quiet because Edgar had to be quiet. To survive. I know a little something about that.
Often, standing on the porch, even though I could not see his tiny black, brown, and white body, I could see his path zigzagging back to Tsa Tsi’s place over the hill. Pines bending. Oak leaves dancing. Maples swaying as if a strong gust of wind had managed to coil its way within the confines of the forest. His movement was in such congruence with the treetops I couldn’t help but feel he was naturally meant to be there.
I guess it’s safe to say that the old man was the only one around who kept a monkey as a pet and the only monkey owner in the whole wide world who thought it perfectly natural to let said pet roam at will. Edgar caused more than one hunter to go into near cardiac arrest a time or two. But more folks in the area by then knew to be on the watch for him and would relay sightings to Tsa Tsi so he wouldn’t worry. Not that he was prone to worrying.
A few years back, while I was up at his place helping to split wood, the old man, sitting on a stump rolling cigarette after cigarette, told me how he came to acquire Edgar. It seems that the carnival was making its way through Cherokee one summer. Early ’30s, late ’20s … something like that. The carnival wasn’t stopping here for a show because no one in Cherokee had any money anyway, but sometimes it would set up camp for performers to rest before moving on to another town for a week of shows. Edgar was a trained tightrope walker, wore a top hat and tiny red vest. Unfortunately, he also had a problematic tendency to lift ladies’ skirts and nip at children who tried to pet him. The carnival manager kept him in a minuscule metal cage for those reasons. “Weren’t fit for a possum.” Tsa Tsi shook his head, thinking back.
Tsa Tsi told me that one day while the carnies were in camp, he went down to see if they might be interested in buying some wild greens or deer jerky. “They paid a fair price for fresh goods.” He told me that the place looked pretty deserted, so he eased his way into one of the larger circus-style tents for a look-see. When he saw Edgar the first time, the monkey was clenching the bars of his cage and shaking the entire structure so hard that the bottom kept lifting from the ground. As Edgar saw Tsa Tsi enter the tent and approach his cage, Edgar just stopped, and as Tsa Tsi says (though who’s to know what’s really true), “he began to grin like a fool” at Tsa Tsi and calmed right down.
It all seems like a crazy story to me (and probably you) now, but the old man did tell me something that I took to heart. We were sitting outside the trading post on a split-log bench. I sipped an RC Cola, desperate to cool off from the walk down the mountain and he, as he always did, seemed to have been sitting there his whole life. I took a long drink as Tsa Tsi picked up the story at its midpoint.
“And right then I knew what I had to do. See, Pap used to tell me about sneaking down to the stockade and taking food to his older brother and his family right before they moved ’em west during the Removal. He used to tell me that the government had made an animal of his brother and that he knew he could never get caught or he’d become one too. So he hid out in the mountains and later stayed with a family who’d been traded a small piece of land ’cause freedom was worth more than life.”
And that’s why old man Tsa Tsi never left the Qualla Boundary either and how he came to end up with a capuchin monkey named Edgar, who I’m guessing he just up and stole—because Tsa Tsi wasn’t much for negotiations with white folk.
I asked him once why he’d named him Edgar. He told me that he’d named him after Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t know what I think about that. Wouldn’t have suspected Tsa Tsi to have even read Poe; but then again, Tsa Tsi didn’t seem to fit into molds so easily.
Now, as for Edgar, he was even more adventurous than Tsa Tsi and loved to explore and that’s why he nearly sent quite a few people to an early grave. Edgar had been seen as far away as Tennessee and Georgia. He always made his way back to Tsa Tsi, though. He might be gone a whole month, but he’d come ambling into Tsa Tsi’s cabin, hungry as hell, no worse for the wear. So I think Tsa Tsi saw no point in keeping him tied or locked up, and the rest of us got to enjoy having our very own capuchin monkey hanging out in our woods. We didn’t even have to go to a zoo for a taste of the exotic.
Ever since I could remember, I wanted to escape Cherokee, and that feeling of suffocation just kept growing with my body. But just as I was about to finally get out, at least for a summer, I felt as if I was rushing carelessly out of the woods, saw briars pricking my bare forearms and legs, leaving trickles of blood to mix with the sweat of haste. I started thinking of all the things I would miss, like ripe berries left on the bush. Lishie’s hand over her mouth when she got tickled. The way a cool mist rises from the Oconaluftee as if sighing at the rising sun. The chattering of the indigo buntings. And a place where a monkey could scamper across oak and maple limbs like a tightrope performer. If I thought too much about the sweetness of my place in the world, I might never be able to leave it.