I awoke to find Lishie had curled herself around me, indistinguishable from her homespun patchwork.
That’s the impossible memory I’ve crafted. No amount of time visiting Bud’s house changed that.
I wonder if the bones of my father are exposed and clean now. I picture a perfect white skeleton, fully intact, framed within the pine coffin—like the one I saw in anatomy class. So perfectly preserved, the bones could teach. I know it sounds odd to speak of my father like that, but you have to understand, I never knew him in the flesh. I never felt the breath of his lungs. His memory is as much a skeleton as his body.
Yet Lishie was always present. It was as if she radiated—sometimes even radiated right through me. I remember walking in her door after I returned from junior college. I hadn’t said a word, and I surely hadn’t made up my mind if I was ever going back. She looked up from where she sat in her rocking chair, sighed a heavy sigh, and let her hands fall from her quilting to rest in her lap. “Oh, Cowney,” she whispered. That is all she said, but I knew she knew everything. She understood far more than even I did about how I was feeling or how I would come to feel. I knew then and there that I wasn’t going back because she knew it first. She wasn’t judging me or even pitying me. She just stirred within me until it was all sorted out.
Except for the valley land that began pimpling with improvised storefronts, Cherokee was not the Cherokee of today. Cherokee was mudchinked log cabins burrowed into mountain hollers, surprising expanses of neat garden rows jutting across rare unwooded land at the end of roughly carved dirt roads—half washed away in the spring and summer and impassable with snow in the winter. But no matter where human life chose to carve its mark on the land, it did not stray far from water—creek, river, stream, or fall—follow one and you would find Cherokee. You would find the smoke from woodstoves. You would find red clay ground into a fine, ginger dust coating the surface of life. And you could not find it directly from any highway. To trust a road is still a road when it looks like a creek is not and has never been for the tourist’s heart. Yet it is only that trust that will get you from a road sign to a home. Or, in my case, from Lishie’s, where I lived, to Bud’s, where I worked.
Bud’s cabin was short of breath, strangled by the dust of his daily existence and by the humid draft of his lungs. He was the only man I knew whose sweat seemed to flow simultaneously from the pores of his body and the foulness of his words. I grabbed the besom from beside the front door and walked out to sweep the porch.
“I guess you’re glad you’re a gimp, for once in your life.” My uncle Bud sure had a way with words. “Weren’t for that skee-jawed foot of yours, you’d be knee-deep in Nazis.” He tossed a tattered, two-day-old newspaper onto a pile, a collection of three months’ worth of international posturing and local weather reports, each paper a near carbon copy of the one that lay beneath it.
I shrugged. He wasn’t asking a question. He never really asked questions.
“You can thank your momma for that. She was in too big of a hurry to get you out.”
He reminded me of this often.
I grunted so the words forming on my tongue couldn’t slip through my lips. These were not debates. Not even arguments. Bud was Bud and my only purpose, in his mind, was to be an echo in his presence. If I had cared more about him, I might’ve tried to offer my opinion once in a while. But I found it no real victory to earn him as an ally, so I echoed. He was a cavern whose hollow center managed to trap errant winds. I drank his vibrations. Still, he was mostly right. Since birth, the bones of my left foot have conspired against my body’s natural compass and collectively pointed outward, tempting me to lead my life in circles.
“Better a penguin than a pigeon,” my mother was said to have remarked when the midwife laid me in her arms. They both knew then that the foot would never fully correct itself. The midwife had seen too many births and she recounted all similar situations to everyone in attendance. My mother prayed for a “remarkable son.” She confessed it to the midwife as if she had signed a legal contract with God. These were stories Lishie told me, not Bud.
Perhaps my foot could have been corrected, but the week following my birth was spent trying to save my mother’s life rather than tending to the nonessentials of me. Deep down, I still felt that urgency to protect my mother as Bud placed his irresponsible blame, but I just echoed.
“I reckon ’bout all your cousins are over yonder now. You best believe that means you’ve got twice the work to do ’round here. Uncle Sam may let you off the hook, but you’re going to need more than a twisted flipper to just lay up here all summer. We got a lot of work to tend to ’fore harvest.”
“Or before I leave for school.”
“Yeah, I’m not holding my breath for that one.”
Bud always spoke like I had shied from work, that I had refused to cut and hang tobacco or hoe the tater garden or milk old Bess. My disabled foot translated to disabled resolve in his book. The only work he recognized as work was within his gaze. I would spend hours, overtime even, at the inn, but he couldn’t attest to my efforts. So it was as if I was on some sort of holiday while he waited at home listing the chores in preparation for my return. He certainly didn’t think doing my schoolwork was praiseworthy. This led me to stop altogether when I was with him. Lishie didn’t seem to mind me reading or doing arithmetic at the table. I think she might’ve even liked it. She said my mother used to write poetry—though I’ve never seen any trace of it.
“I’ll tell you one thing. Back in my day, you’d have to have more than just one gimp limb to keep you from shippin’ off to fight for your country.” Bud punctuated his statement with the ping of the spittoon. He rubbed his knees, acknowledging his gout flare-ups he blamed on old war injuries. Again, no proof of that.
I rolled my eyes but kept my head down so he wouldn’t launch into the long version of his tired lecture.
“Hell. If it wasn’t for guys like me and your dad, this wouldn’t even be your country.” And again, Bud was only half right. All Indians were finally recognized as US citizens following World War I partially because of the service of so many volunteers like Bud and my father; but I was fairly certain it would have happened without Bud’s contribution. The only letter sent home that ever arrived from my father mentioning Bud’s service insinuated that Bud spent more time trying not to get kicked out of the infirmary than he did working a post. Lishie used to show me the letter when I got sad. Still, Bud and his brother had volunteered, even when they were told that they would not be conscripted. Lishie always said it was because they liked to fight and it didn’t matter who or for whom. I think it also had something to do with not having a job. The war was over for all intents and purposes when they arrived in Europe.
Outside Bud’s cabin, the black-capped chickadee whistled a lonesome song, the notes piercing and unrequited. The indigo bunting darted between tree limbs like the woodland sprite I had once seen in a book Lishie brought home from the Goat Man peddler.
Lishie had asked a cousin in Charleston to write her when the Goat Man made his way through their city so that she might time his arrival in Cherokee. Even though exhibiting amazingly accurate travel estimations, Lishie made futile journeys to town three times before he arrived and she was able to trade a month’s worth of savings from her humble mending services for the volume. The copy was well worn and two pages were completely missing, but what remained seemed magical and questionable in the context of Lishie’s conservative religious practices. This was a woman who damn near burned Ulysses when she found it (and read nearly a quarter of it overnight) among the books I overconfidently resolved to complete before the age of twenty after my teacher, Miss Marjorie, assured me I was bright enough to do so. Joyce being “the Devil’s whisperer,” according to Lishie, I barely glimpsed the final pages before the book was confiscated. Perhaps the bunting-esque spirits of a fairy tale were somehow godlier than man’s quest for godliness.