"Not waiting too hard," Taylor says without looking at Alice. "When I called last night he told me he'd gone to bed with the woman that collects our rent."
Alice's mouth falls open. She closes it, staring at Taylor, then suddenly blinks and says, "Hello? I'm a cousin of Sugar Hornbuckle's calling long distance, looking for her. She is? Good Lord. Yes, please."
Taylor looks up, her eyes still watery but changed, self-contained and inquiring.
"Don't give up the ship yet," Alice says. "We've found Sugar. It sounds like they're having a big old party in Heaven."
Sugar Hornbuckle hangs up the phone and goes cold at the sight of blue-lipped children, a host of them, running like a crowd of small ghosts stealing from the pantry. Letty shoos them off the peach pies and out of her kitchen, and Sugar blinks away what seemed like a bad omen.
"Who was that on the phone?" Letty asks.
Sugar backs up several stitches through her quilted thoughts. "Funniest thing. A cousin of mine I haven't seen since nineteen and forty-nine. She wants to come visit. She's got some business with the Nation but she didn't say what."
Letty's curiosity wakes up and knocks down the door. "Well, I wonder what that could be? She got some kind of a claim?"
"I doubt it. She's not from around here. We kind of grew up together down in Mississippi, as good as sisters. You ever been down South?"
"No. I heard it's hot."
Sugar laughs, wondering what could be hotter in summer than an Oklahoma woods.
"Could you give me a hand with these wild onions, hon?" Letty asks, not about to let her escape the kitchen yet with this thrilling news item. She crosses the kitchen to her freezer chest, walking like a bear; Letty is built square, with legs sticking out from the bottom of her dress that seem to be set two feet apart. She opens the freezer chest and bends over it, exposing the tops of her thick brown stockings rolled to her knees. A cloud of steam curls around her face and touches her hair with silver.
"Why'd you all go all the way down to Mississippi to get raised up?" Letty never leaves Heaven; as far as she is concerned, Mississippi might as well be India.
"It was the Depression," Sugar says. "Alice's mama had a hog farm."
"Hog farm? There's money in that, I guess."
"Oh, law, we never had three dollars at the same time. But we didn't have all that bad a time of it."
Letty grunts a little as she stoops deeply into the freezer. "Well, sure, you get by. I heard about them civil rights they had down there."
Sugar takes the frozen blocks Letty hands her, one by one, stacking them like cool firewood against her chest. She remembers helping Letty collect these wild onions in the spring, to be put away for a summer or fall hog fry. "It wasn't like they make it sound now. We were all more or less in the same boat, black and white. Or maybe we were just ignorant, but it seemed like we got along. My favorite thing in the world was going down to Jackson to see the maypoles and the State Fair. There'd be just hundreds of dark little children dressed up as angels, marching down the street, singing hymns. To this day, I swear that's the prettiest sight I ever saw."
"Mmhm." Letty is losing interest.
"Nobody had two bits, it was just like here. You didn't notice what you didn't have, because nobody was right there wagging it in your face."
"When's she coming?"
"She says just as soon as she can get here on the Greyhound bus."
Letty sighs. "Well, I'll bring over a pie, to say hello, soon as I help get Cash settled in."
Letty Hornbuckle is the nosiest person in three counties. Sugar knows why she'll bring over a pie--for the same reason she's been helping Cash: to snoop. She's probably been looking through all his things to see if he secretly got rich in Wyoming. Sugar helps Letty fill a pail and swish warm water over the freezer bags of wild onions. Letty will stir these into scrambled eggs, and Cash will declare he's never leaving home again. No, Letty can't possibly suspect her brother of having struck it rich. No Cherokee she's ever known would keep money a secret from relatives. Cash probably came back with the same nothing he bore away three years ago, and nobody will hold it against him. Especially not after all the funerals he went through. When they finish with the wild onions, Sugar slips quickly outside to find her husband and tell him about Alice.
The children she saw inside have joined a mob of others under Letty's big mulberry. She laughs at herself, her vision of ghosts. The children's hands and faces and soles are all inked blue from berries gulped and trampled.
Letty's yard is a small mowed clearing held in on every side by protective hickory woods. Sugar's husband, Roscoe, in the company of all the other old men, is standing watch over Letty's big iron washpot, which is settled like a hen on a white nest of coals. The fire adds more cruel heat to this hot day, quivering in the air around the men's boot leather and rising up into the arms of trees. Inside the enormous pot, a thousand thumbsized pieces of what was yesterday a live fat hog swirl upward in the cracking oil. Sugar thinks: One more citizen of Heaven, making his contribution. Roscoe and his friends are studying the heat of the fire and the level of oil in the pot with the attitude men take on occasions like this, feeling the weight of their supervisory powers. Sugar smiles. A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.
She stands alone under Letty's bent peach trees, wanting to be outside the crowd for a minute before it draws her back in. What will her cousin Alice make of this place? She can't imagine. Sugar looks fondly at the dark braids trailing down men's backs, the women's shoes lifted high in the uneven grass. Children are everywhere in sight. The ones too small to climb trees run low through the crowd, their smooth, dark heads passing under every hand. Sugar feels rocked in the bosom of family. All these people are related somehow to Roscoe and herself and her children. Probably she could pick out any two people in Cherokee County and track the human path that links their families. In fact, that's the favorite pastime of every old Cherokee, at gatherings of every kind. Even though she wasn't born here, Sugar has been a Hornbuckle long enough to do it as well as anyone: trace down Hornbuckles and Blackfeathers, Stones and Soaps and Swakes. She can remember, when she first moved here with her new husband, she felt she'd walked into an endless family reunion.
Her daughters, Quatie and Johnetta, are standing shoulder to shoulder in Letty's outdoor summer kitchen, Johnetta stirring the bean pot and Quatie working just as hard on some long tale she needs to tell. Quatie's husband's mother, Boma Mellowbug, is crossing the yard in a bright blue satin dress and a man's wool cap. She walks sideways like a crawdad, with her eyes on the sky. In Heaven it's a good thing to be related to Boma, because she sees things no one else does.
Earlier she saw Boma standing among the men, talking earnestly with Cash. Now she crosses to the grape arbor to talk to three boys and a girl that belonged to Bonnie Fourkiller, a dear friend of Sugar's now deceased. The girl has an odd haircut but still yet looks like Bonnie. Sugar can't remember any of these children's names except, strangely, the first baby boy who died--that was Soldier--and the youngest, Gabriel, who was taken off to Texas somehow, and killed, Sugar thinks, though she can't recall how. Today she can easily imagine those lost boys turning up here too, grown tall; she sees how their shoulders would fit into place between their brothers' and sister's.
The crowd is also missing Cash and Letty's mother, who died a few years back. She should be here ordering the children out of the pies and the old men away from idleness. In her last years she always organized gospel singing at the hog fries. For her whole life prior to that she went to the Locust Grove stomp dances, and wouldn't be persuaded to miss them for anything in this world, until her knees got bad; then she converted to Baptist. She said the kneeling and praying was trouble but still grieved her less than stomping. That was her way. So then they had to sing "Amazing Grace" and "Washed in the Blood" at every big occasion, with the Cherokee words, which were less
appalling at least than the English. The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete. It astonishes Sugar that she's becoming one of these old women herself. She still feels pretty and young.
She jumps slightly, for Boma Mellowbug is standing beside her, reading her mind.
"Are you happy?" Boma asks, looking sideways at Sugar from under her wool cap and veil of white hair.
"I am, Boma. I haven't been sometimes, but now I am."
"Well, then, don't be tormented by the kolon. He's not always a bad thing."
Sugar looks up. "That bird?"
"That one flies over when somebody is going to die. You hear him call? He sounds like he's chewing bones."
A naked toddler wearing only red shoes moves from one group of adults to the next; none of them looks down, but each one honors the child's round head with a downstretched hand, as if it were a ripe melon that had rolled itself up from the field. Sugar stares at Boma, whose eyes are clear, light brown, and undisturbed. "I don't want anyone here to die," she tells her at last.
Boma blinks. "It's a big tribe. Somebody's always dying."
Sugar looks at the people gathered in this single green place and understands the price of love.
"All right then," she says. "Just so it's not one of the children."
"No," Boma says. "We're going to keep these children on."
20
The War of the Birds and Bees
IN ALICE'S OPINION, HEAVEN HAS gone to pigs and whistles. She has no idea what promise the town held in days gone by, but on the morning someone named it Heaven there could not have been, for example, a mess of mean dogs holed up under the Post Office porch.
"Watch that one pup with the stump tail," Sugar says, dancing a little on the stairs and swinging her purse at the dogs. "His name's Choppers."
Alice can't pick Choppers out of the lineup of his yellow brothers and sisters; they are all leaping up as if they'd been caught by the mouth on fishing lines. The two larger dogs merely stare, considering whether the food value in this pair of old women is worth the bother. "Why wouldn't somebody rout them out?" Alice asks, framing the question as tactfully as possible as she skirts sideways up the steps with her hands on her pants legs, watching her blind side.
"Oh, honey, they live here," Sugar explains. She pushes open the screen door and introduces Alice to her daughter Quatie, post-mistress of Heaven, before Alice has quite finished looking out for rear-guard attacks.
The Post Office sells cigarettes and notions and smells a good deal like tuna fish. Quatie has a Camel going and a sandwich in one hand, which she wipes before holding it out to Alice. "Pleased to meet you," she says, once she has licked her front teeth. Quatie has her father's broad, brown face but her mother's eyes, sloped faintly down at the outside corners, giving a touch of sadness to her smile.
"Our cousin from way back when," Sugar tells Quatie, raising her hands to show it's been more years than she can count.
Quatie rolls her eyes at Alice in a friendly way. "Mama talks about Mississippi like it was kingdom come."
"Well, sure I do," cries Sugar. "Me and Alice were the belles of the ball. This morning we decided we'd come on downtown and paint the town red."
Quatie winks. "Reckon that took about a quart."
"Pardon?" Alice asks, still nervous.
"Of paint."
"Oh. Well, I'm used to small towns. Small is nothing new to me." But Alice is being polite. She thinks, as they leave the P.O. and head up the road toward Sugar's house, that this place has problems beyond being small. It looks like everybody here has been out of work for the last forty years, and in fact Sugar says that's about right. In the past, she claims, the eastern end of the state was a reservation, and fairly prosperous. But the federal government cut up the land into small packets and gave one to each family; since the people here had no thoughts of land as something to be given or taken permanently, they were persuaded by clever investors to trade their allotment papers for a mule or a stove or, in one case Sugar knows of, a crate of peaches and a copy of The Leatherstocking Tales. Since then, most of eastern Oklahoma has been more or less looking for a job. Sugar came here freshly married to Roscoe in 1950; it seems to Alice that they've lived mainly off Sugar's local fame as the "Welcome to Heaven" poster girl, though it wouldn't have paid any bills.
Roscoe dropped Sugar and Alice downtown on his way to repairing a pump for some relatives in Locust Grove; Alice happily agreed that they could walk back. She wanted to get her bearings. Now she has got more bearings than she cares for. They pass houses that Alice only hopes have seen better times; front yards where chickens run free and cars with no wheels enjoy the rich, rust pelt of eternal life. They stop to rest a minute at the spot where Main crosses what Sugar calls "the uphill road" (which, Alice thinks, must surely run downhill for someone), in the shade of big oak trees whose limbs dangle vines like Tarzan's jungle.
"How'd that husband work out?" asks Sugar, politely avoiding the more obvious question of why she is here. Alice wants to mention Turtle, but can't. She's not yet at home with Sugar. They haven't seen each other for a lifetime. The cousin she's just met is a thin, humpbacked woman in canvas shoes and a blue cotton dress that hangs empty in the bosom. Alice recalls mention of sons in and out of trouble, and in their last correspondence, ten years ago, an account of surgery for breast cancer, but Sugar still has a pretty smile and eyes you look at twice. She wears her snow-white hair the way she did as a girl, in an Andrews Sisters roll across the back, and she has an almost flirty way of talking that makes Alice think of the Andrews Sisters shaking their fingers, making round "o's" with their mouths: "No, no, no, don't you sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me-ee!"
"Harland is his name," Alice confesses. "The fellow I married. It didn't amount to much. I finally just couldn't stand the quiet."
"Oh, honey, don't I know. I think Roscoe used up his whole vocabulary when he asked me to marry him. All that's left now is 'Where's it at?' and 'When's dinner?' "
Alice breathes a little deeper. Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women's friendships, it seems, the thing that makes them bubble and rise.
They pick up their feet and walk on past a Shell station and a building covered with pockmarked yellow siding that advertises HEAVEN MACHINE TOOLS NEW & USED. Then they are beyond the pale of what Alice would call town. It's small all right, but even so she feels Quatie underestimated the amount of paint called for.
"Where did the name Heaven come from?" she asks Sugar.
"Well, that's for the blue hole. A great big water hole down in the crick where the kids love to go jump in and fish and all. Catch crawdads, that kind of stuff. The grown-ups like to go too, really. It's the best place around. They used to just call it 'The best place,' in Cherokee, and when they went to turn that into English somebody thought people was talking about Heaven. But they wasn't, they just meant the best place around here."
"Isn't that the way," Alice says. She feels relieved to know that "Heaven" as a value judgment is only relative.
"How about your girl?" Sugar asks. "Where's she now?"
It stuns Alice to realize she has no earthly idea. And can't go into it with Sugar, which makes her sadder still. "She's living out in Tucson, Arizona. Taylor's my pride."
"Oh, sure, they are. When they don't give you no trouble, they're a blessing."
The road becomes a lane, passing under a tunnel of locust trees. A creek runs beside them in the thick woods; Alice can hear its satisfied rush. Birds sing loudly in the trees, and there seem to be dozens of terrapins in the road. The trucks that come along swerve to miss them, and they pull in their heads and sit like rocks, their small hearts surely pounding from another near miss. But somehow they must make it across, otherwise the roads would be lined with box turtle tragedies.
"Well, look, there's poke," Sugar says, suddenly animated. She pulls a wadded plastic bag from he
r purse and shakes it open as she steps sideways down the bank. There in the ditch she squats and picks handfuls of new green leaves. A truck passes, and Sugar waves. Alice doesn't know what to do with herself, and half turns her back, as if her cousin were going to the bathroom down there. She knows you can eat poke, has known it all her life. But she has also known for many years what people would say about her if they saw her collecting her salad greens from the roadside.
Sugar climbs carefully back up the bank, triumphant, her bulging sack the size of a lumpy basketball. "There used to be a world of poke right up behind our place, where they cleared the woods out under the power lines," she tells Alice as she falls into step beside her, catching her breath. "But a few year ago they started coming along and spraying something poison under those lines that kilt all the poke. Now, why do you think they'd do that?" she asks.
Alice doesn't say, "To kill the weeds, what do you think?" She says, "It's hot, isn't it?"
Sugar wipes her brow. "I was just thinking how hot it used to get, back in those summers when we were kids. The grown-ups would live on the porch, and not hardly move."
"It was hot," Alice says. "It was Mississippi."
"My mommy wouldn't want the baby on her lap because it was too hot. We'd take the babies on our laps because we were big britches, playing mommies. I guess we didn't feel the heat so much, any more than we knew the half of what it was to be mommy."
Ahead of them, a huge black snake parts the weeds and starts to slide into the road, thinks better of it, loops back over itself like a shoelace, and slips away into the bush.
Alice speaks abruptly from her thoughts: "Do you know anybody named Fourkiller?"
"Oh, honey, you can't hardly walk around here without stepping on a Fourkiller. There's Ledger Fourkiller, he's a chief, just the nicest man you'd ever meet. He does the ceremonies over at Locust Grove and lives on a shantyboat. He's lived down there on the lake since the second war, Roscoe says. He's got a landing built all out of old tires. It's a wonderful thing to see."