Suddenly there is a sense of quiet, although everyone is still talking. The men are moving toward their trucks. Cash leans over to Alice as he gets up. “Ledger’s just got here,” he explains.
“Who?”
“Ledger Fourkiller. Our medicine chief. He’s over by that standpipe.”
Alice spots him: a small man in jeans and a hat and plaid flannel shirt, hardly one to stand out in the crowd. She doesn’t know what she expected, surely not war paint, but still. “Where you going?” she asks Cash.
“Nowhere. Just to get my eagle feather.”
The other men are doing the same: each producing a large brown feather from a glove compartment to tuck into a hat-band. Alice would like to see Boma Mellowbug, but she doesn’t. Instead, a woman with a walk like a she-bear is waddling over to Alice with two cups of coffee. She says something like “Siyo” to Cash. Cash introduces his sister Letty to Alice.
“Pleased to meet you,” Alice says, though she actually feels just about every other known emotion besides “pleased.” But she takes the coffee gratefully. The night has grown clear and chilly against her bare arms.
“You all looked cold. I thought you needed some hot coffee.” She gives Cash some sort of look, but Alice has no idea what it means. Another woman, even shorter and broader than Letty, comes up behind them and reaches up high to clap Cash on the shoulder.
“This here’s Alice,” Letty tells the woman. “She’s staying over at Hornbuckles’.”
“My daddy’s sister married a Hornbuckle,” the woman tells Alice. “Did you know that?” she asks Letty.
“Well, now, sure I did. Leona Hornbuckle.”
“No, not Leona. She was a Pigeon, before she married.
I’m talking about Cordelia.”
“Well, sure, Cordelia was your aunt. I knew that.”
“She was a Grass. Cordelia Grass.”
“Honey, I know it. I’ve got Grasses related to me through my oldest daughter.”
“No, them’s Adair Grasses. This is the Tahlequah Grasses.”
Alice listens as the argument winds its way through Grasses, Goingsnakes, Fourkillers, and Tailbobs. At that point Cash touches his sisters arm and points to the fire circle. Both women give a little start and begin to move toward the fire. Cash leans down and touches Alice’s hand.
“I’m going to go smoke this pipe. I’ll see you later on.”
The benches have filled up entirely and the chief now stands by the fire. He’s a man of slight build, maybe sixty, distinguished by the fact that a long, pale leather pouch hangs down from his belt. To Alice it looks like a bull’s scrotum.
Sugar appears in the lawn chair next to Alice, out of breath. She leans over and grabs Alice’s arm like a grammar-school girlfriend.
“I didn’t want to interfere with anything.”
Alice has had about enough of the entire Cherokee Nation organizing her love life. “What’s that he’s got on his belt?”
she asks, nodding toward the chief. “Balls?”
“Naw, just tobacco and stuff. Plants. It’s his medicine.
They’ll all smoke it directly. It isn’t nothing bad.”
“Well, I didn’t think that,” Alice says. She wouldn’t expect drugs; it has already struck her that there is no alcohol here.
She can smell woodsmoke and coffee and the delicious animal scent of grease on a cooking fire, but none of that other familiar picnic odor. It’s odd, in a way.
A hundred pickup trucks on a Saturday night, and not one beer.
The chief raises his head suddenly and sends a high, clean blessing to the tree branches. His voice is so clear it seems to be coming from somewhere above his ears. When he paces to the east of the fire he seems to grow taller, just from taking long strides. He takes some tobacco from his pouch and offers it to the fire, speaking to the fire itself, the way you might coax a beloved old dog to take a rib bone out of your hand.
The fire accepts his offering, and the chief paces some more, talking all the while. He fills a slender white pipe that’s as long as Alice’s arm. The old people move toward the fire, then nearly everyone else shuffles into single file behind them, making a line that circles the whole clearing.
Sugar leans to get up. “I got to go smoke the pipe now,” she whispers. “Afterward, you come sit with me on the Bird Clan benches. You can’t sit with Cash, he’s not Bird, he’s Wolf Clan.” She winks at Alice. “Just as well. You can’t marry inside your clan.”