Pigs in Heaven (33 page)

“That was a sly, sneak-handed business you did. You figured I’d take a shine to Cash and wouldn’t want to take his baby away from him.”

Annawake feels this woman’s anger sharpened like a hunting knife. “Did you ever think it might work out the other way? That he might like
you
that much?”

“I don’t think that’s what you were aiming for.”

“Can we sit down and talk it over?”

Alice hovers for a moment the way a female dragonfly will,
before committing her future, laying her eggs on the water. Finally she plunges. Sits and takes off her shoes.

Annawake paddles her legs slowly back and forth. “To tell you the truth, Alice, I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking. I don’t think I
was
thinking, for once. I just followed my gut. I thought my Indian-white relations project needed a human touch.”

“And me and Cash went like lambs to the slaughter.”

“I didn’t think it would take you so long to find out what you two have in common. I figured you’d tell him right away.”

“Well, maybe us old folks don’t just jump into things the way you kids do.”

“Sounds to me like just the opposite. You were so busy jumping into things you forgot to state your business.”

Unbelievably, Annawake hears Alice swallow a giggle.

“I guess I overstepped,” she tells Alice. “I’m sorry.”

In the very long silence, an owl calls from upriver. Annawake can picture its wide-open eyes, hunting. Stealing scraps of sight from the darkness.

“You probably didn’t mean no harm.”

“Believe me, I had a lot of help from Letty.”

“That Letty,” Alice agrees, with grudging humor. “She’d stick her nose in a grave if she thought there was still hope of warm gossip.”

The adrenaline that rushed Annawake’s limbs when she first saw anger in the dark is receding now, leaving her body with a longing to stretch. She arches her back. “Every town probably needs a Letty,” she says. “Somebody to lubricate things, and then count backwards from nine every time a couple of newlyweds have a baby.”

“Margie Spragg. That’s who it was in Pittman. She was the phone operator for the longest time. It about killed her when they put in the dial tone.”

“It’s a public service, what those women do. Sometimes people have communication problems with their own hearts.”

“Well,” Alice says. “Nothing’s settled, still.”

“I know.”

“Taylor’s on her way. She called me from a truck stop in Denver.”

“Is she?” Annawake feels curiously apprehensive. For months she hasn’t been able to recall Taylor’s appearance, having met her so briefly, but now, suddenly, she does. The fine-featured, trusting face, the long dark hair, the way she held perfectly still while listening. She remembers Taylor standing at the window curled forward with animal fear, and she imagines her in a telephone booth in Denver, curled forward with the receiver under a sheet of dark hair.

“I figured you’d be jumping for joy,” Alice says.

“Oh, I’m not much of a jumper. I oftentimes have communication problems with my heart.”

“Letty ever try to help you out on that?”

Annawake holds her hand in the air. “Don’t even ask. Letty Hornbuckle has tried to fix me up with everything in this county that stands on two legs to pee. Unfortunately, that’s not my problem.”

“Oh.”

Alice is now swirling her own legs through the water, creating crosscurrents that jostle the stars together in the water until Annawake can fairly hear them ringing.

“Look. There’s the Little Dipper out there in the middle of the river, upside-down. See her?”

“I can’t see good at night.”

“You can see it in the sky, though. Straight up from that one dead oak that looks white, over there on the bank.”

“I think I do see it,” Alice says, in a voice thinned out from looking up.

“Don’t look it straight head-on. Look a little off to one side, and it will be brighter. Uncle Ledger showed me that.”

“Sure enough,” Alice says in a minute. And then, “I’ll swan. I can see all seven of the Seven Sisters, when I do that.”

“You people! That must be why whites took over the world. You can see all seven of the Seven Sisters.”

“What, you can’t?”

“We call them the Six Pigs in Heaven.”

“The what? The
pigs?
”

“It’s a story. About six bad boys that got turned into pigs.”

“Well, that must have made them think twice. What did they do to get turned into pigs?”

“Oh, you know. They didn’t listen to their mothers, didn’t do chores. Just played ball all the time. So their mothers cooked up something really nasty for them to eat, to try to teach them a lesson. Have you seen those little leather balls we use for playing stickball?”

“Cash showed me a real old one. It was all beat up, with hair coming out of it.”

“Exactly. Animal hair. The mothers cooked up a stew made out of that, and fed it to the boys when they came home for lunch. The boys were disgusted. They said, ‘This is pig food!’ And the mothers said, ‘Well, if that’s true then you must be pigs.’ The boys got up from the table and went down to the stomp grounds and ran in circles around the ball court, just yelling. The mothers ran after them, ready to forgive their rowdy boys and forget the whole thing, but right in front of their eyes the boys started turning into pigs.”

“Law,” Alice says earnestly, “they must of felt awful.”

“They did. They tried to grab their sons by the tails, and they begged the spirits to bring them back, but it was too late. The pigs ran so fast they were just a blur, and they started rising up into the sky. The spirits put them up there to stay. To remind parents always to love their kids no matter what, I guess, and cut them a little slack.”

Alice looks up for a long time. “I swear there’s seven,” she says.

The owl hoots again, nearer this time.

“Maybe so,” Annawake says. “The Six Pigs in Heaven, and the one mother who wouldn’t let go.”

I
N THE ROAD AHEAD
, a dead armadillo lies with its four feet and tail all pointed at the heavens. The stiff, expectant curl of its body reminds Taylor of a teddy bear, abandoned there on its back. She reaches into the glove compartment and puts on her sunglasses so Turtle won’t see her eyes.

Alice is backseat driving from the front seat, because she knows the roads. Turtle got used to the front seat on their long drive from the Northwest, and has now staked out a place between her mother and grandmother. She flatly refused the backseat when Taylor suggested it. Earlier today, Taylor confided to Alice that Turtle seems to be in a baffling new phase of wanting to have her own way; Alice replied, “About durn time.”

“That was your turn right there. You missed it,” Alice says.

“Well, great, Mama. Why didn’t you let me get another mile down the road before you told me?”

Alice is quiet while Taylor turns the wheel, arm over arm, exaggerating the effort it takes to pull the Dodge around. Taylor can’t stand it when she and Alice are at odds. The three female generations sit
staring ahead at the Muskogee Highway, torn asunder, without a single idea of where the family is headed.

Alice speaks up again, this time well before the turn. “That stop-light up there. You’ll turn into the parking lot right after that. Her office is in there next to a beauty shop, says Turnbo Legal something or other on the door.”

Taylor pulls into a fast-food restaurant before the light. “I’m going to drop you two off right here, okay? I need to talk to her first. You can have a snack and play around a little bit, and come on over to the office in fifteen minutes or so. That sound okay, Turtle?”

“Yeah.”

“No milk shake, okay, Mama? She’s lactose intolerant.”

“She’s what?”

“She can’t drink milk.”

“It’s because I’m Indian,” Turtle says with satisfaction.

“Well, aren’t you the one?” Alice asks, helping her out of the car, doting on Turtle as she has since their arrival in Oklahoma. The two of them are getting on like thieves, Taylor observes.

“Fifteen minutes, okay, Mama?”

“Right. We’ll see you.” She pauses before slamming the door, bending down to peer under the top of the doorframe at Taylor. “Hon, we’re all upset. But you know I’m pulling for you. You never did yet let a thing slip away if you wanted it. I know you can do this.”

Taylor pushes her sunglasses to the top of her head and wipes her eyes, suddenly flooded with tears. “Do you have a hanky?”

Alice shakes a wad of pale blue tissues out of her purse. “Here. One for the road.”

“Mama, you’re the best.”

“You just think that cause I raised you.” Alice reaches in to give Taylor’s shoulder a squeeze, then closes the door. Turtle is already off, her pigtails whipping as she runs for the glassy box of a restaurant. Taylor takes a breath and drives the two final blocks to her destiny.

In the row of commercial fronts, between a realty office and a place called Killie’s Hair Shack, she locates the law office. It seems deserted, but when she knocks on the glass door, Annawake appears
suddenly behind the glare. The door slants open. Annawake’s face is an open book of nerves, and her hair is different, a short, swinging black skirt of it around her face.

“I’m glad you made it,” she says, throwing a glance at the parking lot, seeing the Dodge and no one else coming.

“She’ll be here in a while,” Taylor says. “I left Turtle with Mama across the street at a restaurant so I could tell you some stuff first.”

“That’s fine, come on in. Taylor, this is Cash Stillwater.”

Taylor has to look twice before she sees the man in the corner sitting under the rubber tree. His worn, pointed-toe boots are planted on the carpet and his shoulders lean so that he seems drooped somehow, like a plant himself, needing more light.

“Taylor Greer,” she says with urgently insincere friendliness, extending her hand. He leans forward and meets her halfway, then sags back into his chair. His dark face seems turned in on itself from shyness or pain, behind the gold-rimmed glasses.

Taylor sits in one of the chrome chairs, and Annawake clears her throat. “Cash has asked us to help find his granddaughter, Lacey Stillwater. I guess Alice might have told you that.”

“Mama said there was maybe a relative. I don’t know how you’d prove something like that.”

“Well, there’s blood testing, but I don’t think we need to go into that at this point. Cash would just like for me to give you the information he has. His grandchild would be six now, seven next April. She was left in the custody of Cash’s younger daughter, an alcoholic, after his older daughter died in a car accident. The child was given to a stranger in a bar north of Oklahoma City, three years ago last November. We have reason to believe that stranger might have been you.”

“I can’t say anything about that,” Taylor says.

“We have no hard feelings toward you. But whether or not your adopted daughter is Cash’s grandchild, there are some problems here. If the child is Cherokee, her adoption was conducted illegally. You didn’t know the law, and I don’t hold you responsible in any way.
I’m angry at the professionals who gave you poor advice, because they’ve caused a lot of heartache.”

Taylor is so far past heartache she could laugh out loud. At this moment she is afraid her heart will simply stop. “Can you just go ahead and say it? Do I have to give her up, or not?”

Annawake is sitting with her back to the window, and when she pushes her hair behind her ears they are pink-rimmed like a rabbit’s. “It’s not a simple yes or no. First, if she’s Cherokee, the fate of the child is the tribe’s jurisdiction. The tribe could decide either way, to allow you to keep her or ask you to return her to our custody. The important precedent here is a case called Mississippi Band of Choctaw
vs
. Holyfield. I’ll read you what the Supreme Court said.”

She picks up her glasses and a thick stapled document from the desk behind her and flips through it, turning it sideways from time to time to read things written in the margins. Suddenly she reads: “The U.S. Supreme Court will not decide whether the trauma of removing these children from their adoptive family, with which they have lived for three years, should outweigh the interests of the tribe, and perhaps of the children themselves, in having them raised as part of the tribal community; instead, the Supreme Court must defer to the experience, wisdom, and compassion of the tribal court to fashion an appropriate remedy.”

“So,” Taylor says, trying not to look at the silent man under the rubber tree. “What does the voice of wisdom and compassion say?”

“I don’t know. I’m not that voice. Child Welfare Services has the final say. They can give or withhold permission for a child to be adopted out. Assuming we’re sure of jurisdiction here. Once we have all the facts, I’ll make a recommendation to Andy Rainbelt in Child Welfare, and he’ll make the decision.”

“Do I get to talk to him?”

“Sure. He’s planning on meeting you this afternoon. And I’ve agreed not to make any recommendations until I’ve heard what you have to say.”

Taylor is aware of being the white person here. Since her arrival
in Oklahoma, she has felt her color as a kind of noticeable heat rising off her skin, something like a light bulb mistakenly left on and burning in a roomful of people who might disapprove. She wonders if Turtle has always felt her skin this way, in a world of lighter people.

“Sir?” Taylor speaks to the man, Mr. Stillwater.

He leans forward a little.

“What was your granddaughter like?”

He crosses an ankle on his knee, looks at his hand. “I couldn’t tell you. She was small. Me and my wife, we looked after her a whole lot when she was a little bit of a thing. I’d say she was a right good baby. Smart as a honeybee. Right quiet.”

“Did she ever talk?”

“Well, she started to. She’d say ‘Mom-mom,’ that’s what she called her granny. Little baby words like that.” His eyes light then, behind his glasses. “One time she said ‘hen apple.’ That’s what I called eggs, to tease her, when we’d play in the kitchen. And one morning I had her with me down in the yard. One of the hens was stealing the nest, and I was looking for it, and she crawled off through the bean patch and into the weeds and here in a minute she hollers, ‘Hen apple!’ Just as clear as you please.” He wipes the corner of his eye. “My wife never would believe me, but it’s true.”

Taylor and Annawake avoid looking at each other.

“Then after her mama died, seem like she quit talking. Of course, I didn’t see a whole lot of her. She was with my other daughter and a young fella over to Tulsa.”

Taylor bites her lip, then asks, “Did she go to her mother’s funeral?”

He stares at her for a long time. “Everybody goes to the funerals. It’s our way. The funeral is at the stomp grounds, and then the burying.”

“Do you have any pictures?”

“What, of the funeral?”

“No. Of the child.”

He folds himself forward like a jackknife and slides a curved brown wallet from his pocket. He flips through it for a moment like a small favorite book, pauses, then pulls out a tiny photograph,
unevenly trimmed. Taylor takes it, afraid to look. But it has nothing of Turtle in it. It’s merely a tiny, dark infant, her features screwed with fresh confusion. Her head is turned to the side and her wrinkled fist holds more defiance than Turtle ever mustered in her life. Until last week.

“Here’s her mother, my daughter Alma. First day of school.” He reaches across with another small photo, and she takes it.

Taylor makes a low noise in her throat, a little cry. It’s a girl in saddle shoes and a plaid dress with a Peter Pan collar, standing tall on a front porch step, shoulders square. Her eyebrows hang an earnest question mark on her high forehead. The girl is Turtle.

Taylor holds the photograph by its corner and looks away. She feels she might not live through the next few minutes. The photo leaves her fingers, but she doesn’t watch him put it away.

Taylor says, “The girl I’ve been raising came to me when she was about three. She had been hurt badly, before that. The night she came to me she had bruises all over her. That’s the reason I kept her. Do you honestly think I should have given her back? Later on when I took her to a doctor, he said her arms had been broken. It was almost a year before she would talk, or look at people right, or play the way other kids do. She was sexually abused.”

Mr. Stillwater speaks in the quietest possible voice to his boots. “I was afraid to death, when they took her to Tulsa. That boy beat up my daughter. She was in the hospital twice with a broke jaw.” He clears his throat. “I should have gone and got her. But my wife was dead, and I didn’t have the gumption. I should have. I done wrong.”

There is a very long silence, and then a yellow leaf falls off the rubber tree. All three of them stare at it.

“I’ve let her down too,” Taylor says. “In different ways. I made her drink milk even though I should have seen it was making her sick.” She continues looking at the curled leaf on the floor, released from its branch. “Since all this came up, we’ve been living on the edge of what I could manage. I had to leave her alone in the car sometimes because I couldn’t afford a sitter. We didn’t have enough money, and we didn’t have anybody to help us.” Taylor tightens and releases her
grip on the wadded blue tissue in her hand. “That’s why I finally came here. Turtle needs the best in the world, after what she’s been through, and I’ve been feeling like a bad mother.” Her voice breaks, and she crosses her arms over her stomach, already feeling the blow. How life will be without Turtle. It will be impossible. Loveless, hopeless, blind. She will forget the colors.

She feels Annawake’s eyes turned on her, wide, but no words.

When Taylor’s own voice comes back to her, she hardly recognizes it or knows what it will say. “Turtle deserves better than what she’s gotten, all the way around. I love her more than I can tell you, but just that I love her isn’t enough, if I can’t give her more. We don’t have any backup. I don’t want to go through with this thing anymore, hiding out and keeping her away from people. It’s hurting her.”

Taylor and Annawake gaze at each other like animals surprised by their own reflections.

Suddenly two shadows are at the door, tall and short. Annawake jumps up to lead them in. Turtle is hanging so close to Alice’s knees they bump together like a three-legged race. Her eyes are round, and never look away from the man in the corner.

“Turtle, I want you to meet some people,” Taylor says through the hoarseness in her throat.

Turtle takes a half step from behind Alice, and stares. Suddenly she holds up her arms to Cash like a baby who wants to be lifted into the clouds. She asks, “Pop-pop?”

Cash pulls off his glasses and drops his face into his hands.