Pigs in Heaven (27 page)

“No, believe it or not, the strong gush of water flowing out at the bottom is what attracts them in here. The Corps of Engineers figured that out a few years back. They narrowed the channel to increase the flow, and a lot more fish came in. You know the really sad part?”

“What?”

“There are a couple of fat sea lions that like to hang around at the top, just licking their chops, waiting to meet these guys at the end of their hard day’s work.”

“That is so sad.”

“Well, it’s life, I guess. The law of the jungle.”

The fish curve and buck and thrust themselves against the current, dying to get upstream and pass themselves on. Taylor stands flanked by Turtle and Steven. For a long time the three of them are very still before the glass, framed by greenish light and a wall of solid effort.

“I know how they feel,” Steven says, his voice amused. “It’s like getting into someplace that isn’t wheelchair accessible.”

I
know how they feel, Taylor thinks, and it’s not like getting into anywhere at all. It’s working yourself for all you’re worth to get ahead, and still going backward. She holds Turtle against her side so she won’t look up and see her mother’s tears.

A
LICE HAS A DATE
. Any minute now Cash Stillwater is going to pick her up and take her for a drive over to the huckleberry fields near Leech. She can’t understand why, but there it is. Some out-and-out stranger has called her up and said, “Let’s go pick berries.”

Sugar insists he isn’t a stranger—that Alice met Cash the day they were in town. She swears they spotted him opening the door for Pearl Grass coming out of the Sanitary Market, and went over to say hello. It must be so, she argues, because Roscoe’s sister-in-law Letty claims Cash is sweet on Alice, and how could that be, if they hadn’t met? Alice has to agree, it seems unlikely.

She is standing by the front window when his truck pulls up. His long legs come out first, in jeans and cowboy boots with curled-up toes, and then the rest of him. His face is flat and broad under the eyes, the dark skin creased rather than wrinkled. He wears gold-rimmed glasses that give him a kind, twinkling appearance. She has never laid eyes on this man in her life. But that’s not to say she won’t go for a ride with him, at least this one time. If someone is sweet on you without ever having met you, she reasons, you owe him that much.

She meets him at the door, gripping her purse for courage.

“You all set to go?” he asks. He seems to be looking her over just as thoroughly as she is eyeing him.

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she states, looking down at her slacks and workshirt. “Are these tennis shoes all right? If we’re going to be in mud, I better borrow some boots from Roscoe. Sugar’s wouldn’t do me a bit of good, she wears a five. She always had the smallest feet of anybody.”

“I don’t expect we’ll run into mud today, no. I think you’ll do all right.”

Alice follows him around to the passenger side of his truck, where he opens the door and gives her a hand up onto the running board. The truck is a wondrous, buttery copper color, though it seems about as old as anything with a motor could possibly be. The windshield is divided into two flat panes with a dark, puttied seam running down the center. Alice remembers Sugar’s counseling, that Cash is a big talker, and she hurries to get some kind of conversation going. “You had this truck long?”

Cash starts it up. “All my life, near about. I keep putting new engines in her, and she keeps a-going. Wish I could do the same for myself.” He pats his chest gently with his right hand, then reaches down to shift gears, which makes a sound like slamming the spoon drawer.

“They do that, now. Put new hearts and livers and stuff in people,” Alice points out.

“I know. But that don’t seem right, trading parts with dead folks just to keep yourself around, pestering the younguns. When you’re wore out, I’d say that’s a sure sign it’s time to go.”

“I agree,” Alice says. She takes notice of some flower growing in the ditch that looks like a dandelion gone crazy, as big as a child’s head.

“Ask me in ten year, though, and I might sing a different tune,” Cash says, laughing.

“I know. It’s hard to admit to being old, isn’t it? I keep thinking, How’d this happen? Sixty-one! When I was young I looked at people
this age and thought they must feel different inside. As different from me as a dog might feel, or a horse. I thought they would just naturally feel like they were wrinkled up and bent and way far along.”

“It don’t feel that way, though, does it?”

“No,” Alice says, running a hand through her short hair. “It feels regular.”

The trees crowd up against the road, each one a different shade of green. The oaks are the darkest. Their leaves angle downward and seem to absorb more light. Cash’s truck rolls across a little bridge, and below them Alice can see a creek banked by a world of ferns, their spears all pointed straight up.

“You’re kin to Sugar some way, is it?”

“We’re cousins,” Alice replies. “We grew up together, but we lost touch after I married.”

“Well, it had to be Sugar’s side you was related on, and not Roscoe’s. If it was Roscoe’s I’d of knowed you, because my sister Letty’s the widowed wife of Roscoe’s brother. Did you and your husband have a big family?”

“No, just my daughter. He didn’t even quite stick around long enough to drive her home from the hospital.” Alice laughs. “I had to get a nurse to drive us home. She was a great big woman with a Chevrolet as big as a barn. She said, ‘I can drive home all the babies you want, Miz Greer.’ I never will forget that. She made me wish I’d had twelve more, while I was at it.”

“I wished that too. That we’d had more. We had the two girls, but then the doctor told my wife no more. Her blood was the wrong way, somehow. She had negative blood, is what he said. She always run to being peaked.”

Alice feels embarrassed and amazed that within ten minutes of meeting one another they’ve gotten onto Cash Stillwater’s dead wife’s female problems. He doesn’t seem bothered, though, only sad. She can feel sadness rising off him in waves, the way you feel heat from a child with a fever.

“Sugar tells me you’ve just moved back from someplace.”

“Wyoming,” he says.

They pass an old cemetery whose stone walls are covered with rose brambles, and then a white clapboard church set back in the woods. On a tree, a washed-out sign has been attached by a nail through its center, and rotated a quarter-turn clockwise. It crookedly advises:
FLESTER DREADFULWATER FOR TRIBAL COUNCIL
.

“Flester Dreadfulwater!” Alice says, hoping it’s not impolite to laugh at someone’s name who is no doubt some relative of someone related to Cash.

Apparently it isn’t. “He lost the election,” Cash says, smiling.

“Why’d you move to Wyoming?”

Cash stretches a little behind the wheel, though he never takes his eyes off the road. “I got restless after my wife died. I had this idea you can get ahead by being in a place where everbody’s rich. That being close to good times is like
having
good times.”

“My second husband was like that. He thought if he’d watched some loving on TV, he’d done had it.” Alice instantly covers her eyes, feeling she has surely gone too far, but Cash only laughs.

“How long were you up there?” she asks, recovering. Riding through the woods with a talkative man is making her giddy.

“About two year,” he says. “I despised it. Everbody rich, treating you like you was a backdoor dog. And not even happy with what they had. I did beadwork for a Indian jewelry store, and the owner one day up and took pills and killed himself clean dead. They say he was worth a million.”

“Why’d he want to die, then?”

“I think he was depressed about the Indians being all gone.” Cash points his thick hand at the windshield. “He should have come down here and had a look.”

They pass a ragged little shack with a ragged little birdhouse on a post beside it, and Alice thinks: Then he would have taken the pills and shot himself too. But she knows that isn’t entirely fair.

“They used to be a store up here,” Cash says suddenly, as if he’d long forgotten this information himself. “A general store. I wonder what happened to that. We lived right down yander in them woods. We’d come up here for lard. You had to take a bucket. And me and
mommy used to take fryers, we’d catch them and tie them up and walk to the store. And eggs.”

“Oh, I remember carrying eggs,” Alice cries. “That was just a criminal thing to do to a child. Make them carry eggs.”

“Sounds like you know.”

“Oh, yes. I was raised up on a hog farm in Mississippi. It wasn’t just hogs, though. We raised a big garden, and we had chickens, and cows to milk. We’d sell sweet milk and cream. People would come in their wagons to get it.”

“I miss that,” Cash says. “Driving the mule. We had a mule team and a wagon.”

“Well, sure,” says Alice, feeling they’ve finally climbed onto safer ground. “Even up into the forties we still used horses or mules and the wagon. You’d see cars down in Jackson, but it wasn’t the ordinary thing to have. We thought they were more for fun. For getting someplace, or hauling, you’d need the wagon and a team of mules.”

“Wasn’t that the time to be a kid?” Cash asks. “Our kids had to work out what to do with liquor and fast cars and fast movies and ever kind of thing. For us, the worst we could do was break a egg.”

“Isn’t that so,” Alice agrees. “You know what seems funny to me, thinking about old times? We’d get excited over the least little thing. A man playing a fiddle and dancing a little wooden jigging doll with his foot. Even teenagers would stop and admire something like that. Now teenagers won’t hardly stop and be entertained by a car accident. They’ve seen too much already.”

“That’s how I felt up at Jackson Hole. That’s why I wanted to come back. Everbody acted like they’d done seen the show, and was just waiting to finish up the popcorn.”

“Well, I met all Sugar’s grandkids, and they seem interested in catching fish for their grandma. They’re a nicer bunch than I’d ever in this world expect a teenager to be.”

“Cherokee, kids know the family, that’s sure,” Cash says. “They know the mother’s birthday, the wedding anniversary, all that. We always have a big hog fry.”

“You must enjoy your daughters.”

“Well, we had a bad time of it in my family. My older daughter, Alma, is dead.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Alice says, realizing she might have guessed this, from his stooped shoulders. She stops trying to talk for a while, since there is nothing to say about a lost child that can change one star in a father’s lonely sky.

They pass clusters of little tin-roofed houses and trailer houses set near each other in clearings in the woods. Propane-gas tanks sit in the yards, and sometimes a wringer washer or a cookstove on the porch, or a weight-lifting bench in the driveway. There is really no predicting what you’ll see here. One house seems to be hosting a family reunion: old folks sit around in lawn chairs, and six or seven kids are lined up straddling the silver propane tank as if it were a patient old pony.

“There’s sassafras,” Cash says, pointing at broad, mitten-shaped leaves sprouting among dark cedars in a hedgerow. “They use that in the medicine tea at the stomp dances.”

“What’s it do for you?”

“Oh, perks you up, mainly.” Cash seems to be looking far down the road when he speaks. “My daddy, he knew all the wild roots to make ever kind of medicine. He tried to tell me what it’s for, but I’ve done forgot about all of it. Back when I was a kid, I never did know people having operations for kidney and gallbladder and stuff, like they do now. Did you?”

“No,” Alice says. “People didn’t have so many operations. Mainly they got over it, or they died, one.”

“When I had a bellyache he’d just get a flour sack, put ashes in that and put that on my side, and the pain would go away. People would always be coming to him, my dad. He died on New Year’s day, nineteen and forty, and I didn’t even know it for sixteen days. I was in boarding school.”

“They didn’t tell you?”

Cash doesn’t answer for a while. Alice spies a black-and-white Appaloosa horse standing in the woods near the road, alone and apparently untethered; it raises its head as they pass by.

“I can’t explain boarding school. The teachers were white, they didn’t talk Cherokee, and seems like you got used to never knowing what was going on. You forgot about your family. We slept in a big dormitory, and after a few year, it was kindly like you got the feeling that’s how kids got made. Just turned out in them lined-up beds like biscuits in a pan.”

“That sounds awful. It sounds like a prison for children.”

“It was, more or less. Half a day school, the other half-day work: sewing room, dining room, kitchen, laundry. Boys did the laundry. We didn’t mix with girls. Except Sunday, when we had Sunday school, but sometime I couldn’t go, I had to stay in the kitchen.”

Alice tries to picture a herd of subdued little boys doing laundry and stirring pots. She can’t. “Did you learn to cook, at least?”

“Not much. You know what got me through, though, after my daddy died? They had a big window on the west side of the dining room, and Miss Hay, she was the boss of the kitchen, she had a orange tree about two foot tall in a pot. She growed that from a seed. I watched it. There was two oranges on that tree when I left. They wasn’t yellow yet, just green.”

“Did you run away? I think I would have.”

“I tried, a few times. But finally my mama said they needed me home, so they let me come on home. I just went up to seventh grade, that was all. I didn’t learn too much English, even though they tried.”

“Well, you sure speak it now,” Alice says, surprised. Cash Stillwater talks more than any grown man she’s met. She can’t imagine how it would be if he spoke English any better.

“Oh, well, sure, you pick it up. We didn’t talk Cherokee anymore at home after my girls started to get big.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I talked to them when they were babies, and they knew it real good. But after a while it just all went blank. When they get up around four feet high and start mixing with the other kids, you know, in two weeks they can forget it. I feel like I done my girls wrong, some way. Like there was something they was waiting for me to tell them that I never could think of.”

Alice feels his sadness again, and wishes she could lay a hand on top of his weathered brown paw on the gearshift. They’ve come out of the woods now into rolling, tall meadows of uncut timothy. At the head of a dirt road stands a hand-lettered sign:
FIREWOOD. XMAS TREES. BLUEBERRYS HUCKLEBERRYS U PICK
. As they turn in on the dirt track, a handful of quail run into the road and break into buzzing flight.

Alice feels excited, as if she has set sail for an unknown shore. She couldn’t say why. The smallish bobbly heads of golden flowers are blowing in the wind, and the edges of the field are embroidered with tall white blossoms she remembers from childhood: Queen Anne’s lace. They are as pretty as their name, but if you ever tried to take too close a look, they would sting your eye to tears.

It is nearly dusk when they get back to Sugar’s with two full pails of huckleberries in the back of the truck. Alice ate some while they were picking, even though that’s stealing, since you only pay for what you carry out. Cash teased her, warning that her blue tongue would give her away. She feels like a girl.