A Dangerous Age (9 page)

“I want to tell Olivia about your dreams.”

“No.”

“So she will be ready.”

“She knows. If we know, she knows also.”

“She is too busy. She might mistake it for something else. At Flaming Rainbow they said seeing is nothing unless you see clearly. How can she see clearly at the newspaper office with all that news of evil things coming in from all over the world at every moment?”

“We could drive over there tomorrow and take her some fresh eggs and cream.”

“Yes.”

Then I will not be able to ride with Kayo, Little Sun was thinking. All my life I have had to give up riding to drive in the automobile and dodge the other machines on the highway.

“Then we will go. Will you be satisfied now?”

“I will.” She turned her face and looked up at his and he saw in her eyes the lovely young girl she had been when he first met her. It was their secret and no one could take it from them, and
they did not need to speak of it because it was written in their hearts forever.

T
HAT AFTERNOON
, B
OBBY
T
REE
got the letter saying his reserve unit had been called up for active duty. The letter had been mailed a week before from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and had been forwarded from his old address.

Bobby had served four years in the marines when he was in his twenties, after he and Olivia had split up. He had spent most of that time in a unit in North Carolina and had met some of Olivia’s cousins and visited in Charlotte with Olivia’s father, Daniel Hand. When his four years were over, he had signed up for the reserve unit to get the $356 a month he was paid for going one weekend each month to a base in Nebraska to keep his skills up-to-date. He was a marine mechanic, training that proved invaluable in the construction company he started when he got out.

He had begun with building driveways and doing landscaping and drainage projects. This required heavy equipment and he was able to buy secondhand tractors and repair them and keep them going.

In the two years before he and Olivia found each other again, he had moved on to restoring houses in the old, historic parts of Tulsa. He could do wiring and plumbing and even oversee roofing. He had a sixth sense for any kind of machinery or tools, and men liked to work for him because the tools they needed were always good and in working order.

By the time he and Olivia were married, he had a business
that employed seven people full-time. He had made one of his cousins into his partner, a gesture of goodwill that was going to pay off in the coming months when he would be gone.

Bobby was in the hallway reading the letter when Olivia came in from the newspaper. It was six thirty and dark outside. The cold weather Little Sun had been wanting had come in the night and enveloped eastern Oklahoma, gripping it like a gray fist. Cold and damp and deep, Olivia thought as she turned the key. And three months of it to go. Well, maybe two and a half, although you can’t trust March not to be worse than February.

She stepped into the hall and saw Bobby with the letter and knew not only that it was bad but also what it said. She hadn’t been reading newspapers all week for nothing. If they were calling more reserve units, they would call the ones from the Midwest. The South and Midwest always fought the wars, farm boys and high school athletes, poor boys and sons whose folks worked for a living, the sons and daughters of the beautiful small towns of America. That’s who went to war and that’s who shed the blood.

Bobby handed her the letter. “Don’t worry,” he said. “If I have to go, all I’m going to do is keep the goddamn trucks running. Over there the fucking things will be full of sand. I can’t believe … well, to hell with it. I’m an American. I took the money and now I have to do the work.”

The letter said he had to report for duty on January 30. The blessing ceremony would go on as planned on Friday and Saturday, January 14 and 15.

L
ITTLE
S
UN
AND
C
ROW
and Mary Lily and their neighbor, Kayo, were planning the ceremony without consulting Olivia and Bobby. “They are very busy,” Little Sun kept saying. “We will do this so they do not have to worry.”

Olivia was taking an antinausea pill every morning and was working like a demon at the newspaper, trying to show how unaffected she was by the changes in her life. Bobby was finishing a project and getting things ready for several more. He would take a computer with him and would weigh in on the construction work, at least as long as he stayed in the United States. He did not expect to be in the United States for long. He had a skill that was needed in Iraq, and he knew where he was headed as soon as he read the letter.

I
S THIS THE PRICE
of love? Olivia asked herself a hundred times a day. Why should my happiness and joy be taken from me for a war I cannot justify, although perhaps I do understand why it must be fought. All of that is nothing but words until your flesh and blood is in the game. Now I’m in the game and I cannot think clearly or believe anything I hear or anything I read. It’s down to Bobby getting on an airplane and flying into a war zone, where he might be killed at any moment, no matter how much he tries to tell me he will be in safe places getting sand out of the steering apparatus of machines. Let machines fight the wars. That’s all I know for sure that I believe. I should be one of those nuts who write the Pentagon all the time and tell them how to run the war.

“Dear Secretary of Defense: Please hurry up and finish designing the machines that will fight our wars and keep our beautiful young men or women from getting in the way of bombs or bullets.

“Dear Secretary of Defense: Please let my husband out of this obligation. We didn’t know there would be a war when he signed up to be in the reserves. Yours sincerely, His wife. Postscript: I’m pregnant. Doesn’t that count for anything? What are we fighting for, by the way? If it’s oil, why not say it’s oil and quit all the rhetoric?”

C
HRISTMAS PASSED AND
Olivia and Bobby gave each other presents and pretended to be cheerful. They spent Christmas Eve with her family in Tahlequah, and Bobby went hunting with her uncles and cousins on Christmas Day. Then they drove back to Tulsa so Olivia could get to the newspaper office to check the layout of the after-Christmas sales advertisements.

Olivia was being very careful in her editorials about the war. “I have to write one saying my husband is going over,” she said. “But I decided to wait until you get orders. Just saying you were called up with your unit isn’t powerful enough.”

“What will you write?” Bobby asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not privy to what the government knows. I keep thinking the entire Senate voted to go to war. What do they know that we don’t know? What were they told?”

“We know they are politicians.”

“No, it’s more than that. What do you think they know?”

“That we have to make a stand. That’s what war is always about, Olivia. Making a stand, drawing a line.”

“Where does it stop?”

“It won’t. It will always be that way. You choose to be a warrior or you choose to be a slave.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes. I do.”

“I know you do. What if you die?”

“I won’t die. I’ll be fixing tractors and tanks.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Try to believe it.”

B
ECAUSE THEY WERE
busy at the newspaper, Olivia was not leaving Tulsa for the blessing ceremony until Friday afternoon. The entertainment editor, who had been assigned to write the story about the ceremony, had volunteered to drive her so that Bobby could go in the morning and help set things up for the sweat tent. Bobby had become very quiet as the days leading up to the blessing drew near, very tender and careful when he made love to her, more like the very young man she had loved than the grown man she had remarried. They hadn’t been talking much these past few weeks. Bobby wasn’t talking to anyone, and Olivia was doing her lashing out on the typewriter, although she wasn’t publishing what she was writing. She was just getting it down on paper. Underneath and beyond all that, she was strangely happy and content, sure Bobby wasn’t going to die, sure in some deep, strange way she didn’t
understand or care to examine. I’m the denial queen, she told herself. Well, it works. It’s worked so far.

I
N
N
EW
O
RLEANS
, Olivia’s half sister, Jessie, had just heard from their cousin Louise what was going on with Olivia and Bobby and was at her computer frantically e-mailing their father, Daniel, who was on a hunting trip in Africa. “What is the veld?” Jessie had asked Louise on the telephone that morning. “He said they were going to the veld.”

“It’s a Dutch word for wilderness, but he’ll get the e-mails if you keep sending them. If you don’t hear back, call me and I’ll pull some strings up here. He’d go crazy if he knew this was going on and he wasn’t here to help.”

“Why didn’t Olivia call me?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that they’re having a blessing ceremony, some special thing the Cherokees do occasionally for people who get married.”

“Well, I’ll find Dad. She’s pregnant; that’s the main thing. I love Bobby Tree. The only time I ever knew her to be really happy was when she was with him.”

“She’s pretty happy being editor of the Tulsa newspaper. I can tell you that.”

“You can’t come home at night to a newspaper office.”

“Well, actually you can.”

“Good-bye, Louise. I’ll call you back tonight.”

Jessie walked through her beautiful house to the room she called her office and sat down at the computer and heaved a
sigh and began to try to figure out how to get hold of her father.

Outside the windows of the elegant spare room, with its oak floors and Oriental rugs and handmade shutters painted pale blue to match the walls, a nest of mockingbirds were making a racket in a grove of cherry trees. It was cold weather for birds to be so loud, but these mockingbirds were acting as if it was spring.

Jessie got up from the computer and went to the window, where she stood watching the birds fly madly from the feeders on the ground to the bare branches of the trees. I love families, she thought. I’ll write a poem about those birds and give it to Olivia for a wedding present. And I’ll give her some of Grandmother’s silver. Grandmother should have left part of it to her anyway. I miss Olivia. What good does it do to have a sister if I never, never see her? Well, at least I’ll let her know I’m standing by. What would I do if King went to Iraq? I would die of fear. Maybe not. Maybe I could be strong. Olivia will be strong. She’s the strongest woman I have ever known.

Jessie went back to the computer and sent several more e-mails to her father, and then some to both of his business partners, asking them to help find him pronto. Then she wrote an e-mail to her cousin Tallulah in Nashville. “Dear Tallulah, Olivia’s husband, Bobby Tree, has been called up to go to war. Also, Olivia is pregnant. Try to come to the blessing ceremony they are having. You can stay in the motel with me. We need to close around her now. Say you’ll come. Love, Jessie.”

An hour later she turned on her computer and there was an answer from Tallulah. “I’ll try to be there. I knew about the baby but not about Bobby being called up. Damn and double damn. My team finally won two matches in a row. They are driving me crazy. There isn’t a single girl who really wants to win. I’ll finish this year, but then I’m quitting. I’ll join the air force or go to law or medical school. I won’t coach these losers. I need Olivia to prop me up, not the other way around. Love, and thanks for the update, Tallulah.”

L
ITTLE
S
UN AND
C
ROW
had invited three hundred people to the blessing, not counting Olivia’s and Bobby’s friends in Tulsa and some friends of Bobby’s in the reserve outfit. The yard and pasture had been sprayed for chiggers, although the cold weather had probably killed them already. Extra beds had been put into the house, and twenty rooms had been rented in a motel on the highway. Two cafés in Tahlequah were making food and bringing tables. A medicine man from Tunica, Mississippi, was coming two days ahead to set up the sweat tent and oversee the fire sites. He had ordered cedar chips for the fires from Indiana in case he didn’t like the cedar trees in Oklahoma. His name was Deer Cloud, and Little Sun had known him for thirty years, since he was a very young man and had come one winter to teach at the Cherokee school in town.

There would be the sweat tent for the groom and his close friends and his father. The next morning the blessing would begin at dawn and last all day as the visitors each came to the
bride and groom and offered their blessings and prayers and handmade amulets against evil. A group of Mary Lily’s friends were at work on a quilt for Olivia. Crow was making the deerskin dress that Olivia would wear. It was being bleached in the old way, and three women were beading the sleeves and collar with beads that had been on the dress Crow had worn in her blessing with Little Sun.