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 lead 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.
In Sugar’s driveway, a banty rooster threatens to run under the wheels of the truck. Alice gasps a little.
“He’ll run out of the way,” Cash says. “If he don’t, we’ll make dumplings.”
He turns off the key but the engine keeps chugging for a little while. Just like Cash, who can’t seem to stop talking.
“A week before Christmas, them roosters start crowing all night,” he tells her. He reaches in his pocket and slips something into Alice’s hand. It is dry and flat and sharp as a tooth. She examines it.
“An arrowhead? Where’d you get that?”
“Found it. While you was eating up all the berries.”
“You take it home, then,” she says, although she loves the feel of its ripply bite against her thumb, and doesn’t want to give it up.
“No, you have it. I got about a hundred at home.”
“You found that many?”
“No. Some I found, but most of them I made.”