“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 bird-house 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 fry-ers, 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 weightlifting 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.