House of Purple Cedar Read online

  Once outside, I stood clinging to Roberta Jean, shivering and watching the skeleton of our schoolhouse crack and fall, bone by bone. It finally heaved a shuddering breath and fell into itself. A flock of small flaming boards flew in our direction. We dashed to the woods, brushing embers from our blankets.

  This was not the fire I knew. There was nothing warm and calming in those yellow and blue flames. I was watching ice, cold bitter ice, come to life, rising from the frozen flames to claim our school.

  We were driven by fire to freeze in the ice.

  “Lillie! Lillie! Lillie!” The calls rang out through the mad darkness and fiery light. “Lillie!”

  “Why does that lady keep screaming Lillie’s name?” I asked, covering my ears. “Make her stop.”

  “It’s her mother,” said Roberta Jean.

  “Then she knows Lillie can’t hear her.”

  Those words floated back at me and I heard them for the first time. I stared at my own breath. Beyond my breath I saw the flames, like flicking and mocking tongues.

  Lillie Chukma, good Lillie, was deaf.

  She could not hear her mother.

  She could not hear the calls to leave the building.

  She slept like the seven-year-old baby that she was.

  So watchful and eager to please––so very, very deaf.

  I dropped my jaw and my face quivered. I tried to scream. Tears flew down my cheeks, tears that will never stop flowing till I see her at Judgment Day and wrap my arms around her. I will tell her how sweet she was and is and how much I loved seeing her every morning, how much I loved kneeling by her bed for prayers each night.

  “Lillie,” I finally sputtered when I had the breath to sob.

  Roberta held me closer and we pulled the blankets over our heads. Our knees shook and buckled and we drifted to the ground to sit in the melting snow, a dark green cone of wool and skin and bones and life while all around us swirled children and teachers and Nahullos and Choctaws and Cherokees and Christians all. But their running meant nothing.

  Death by fire had claimed Lillie Chukma.

  It was the Bobb brothers, Efram and Ben, who lifted the rafters from our fallen, smoking room and found Lillie’s body. Efram raised the roof while Ben kicked aside the still-burning boards to find her charred and fetal-tiny body. They gave it over to the Reverend Henry Willis and he carried Lillie Chukma to her mother.

  Roberta Jean tugged me after her and we shuffle-stepped to stand behind Mrs. Chukma. She took her daughter, Lillie Chukma, took her in her outstretched arms, all the while staring at Reverend Willis. Finally her gaze settled on her baby. When she spoke, her words spoke the night.

  “A mother should not have to bury a child.”

  This tiny scene was played out for only a few of us. The rest were running to render aid, only to feel the biting flames that claimed our school. My chest hurt and my lungs ached. I knew that something truly was breaking apart as I stood and watched, wounded by the biggest loss of my life, the loss of New Hope Academy for Girls.

  We turned our backs on all of this and walked as the unseen dead might walk. Through smoky fog we walked, Roberta Jean and I, floating against the stream of urgent runners, drawn to their own drowning vision of hope. We wrapped our arms around each other’s waists, muted by our grief.

  We returned to our small encampment and wrapped the blankets over our heads. We fell to the moist ground and went to grabbing and clutching at each other, first our hair, yanking and pulling, angry pulling, on whatever gave good holding place, arm or foot or ear or skin of thigh. We clinched our fists and flailed away, crying loud and biting even, all the while knowing we did so in the name of love, the only love still granted us in this the most perverse of bleeding worlds.

  The Funeral and Efram Bobb

  January 1897

  Efram Bobb was a stonemason. He was trained by his father, who was himself a master mason. From his early teens Efram displayed, to the immense delight of Mister Bobb, a feel for stone that is impossible to teach. He matched stones for the sheer beauty of their porous skin.

  “Every stone,” Efram said, “has its own way of speaking to a man who’ll listen.”

  The first time Mister Bobb heard Efram speak of listening to a stone, he stood up and stared at the back of his son’s head. Efram closed his eyes and ran his fingers over the grainy calluses of rock, the slick, unbroken whisperings of stone. Mister Bobb shook his head in wonder. His eyes filled with tears and he whispered a prayer of thanks for having such a son.

  As Efram grew, he matured in every way but height. Five feet five inches tall, he moved with the ease and grace of a small man, though his girth was anything but small. The daily pounding of his mallet chiseled Efram’s torso into a gaudy specimen of muscle, a tree stump with a belt and britches. His hands hung well below his knees.

  Mister Bobb was so proud of Efram, he often flung his arms around his son to show his joy. The two sometimes boxed, slamming their fists against each other’s hardened stomachs. Seeing this, a way so counter to the tribal norm, kinfolks and friends would quietly laugh and mock the two.

  Efram was seventeen years old when Taloa was born to his father’s sister.

  “She’ll be as pretty as her mother,” his father said, standing over her cradle and smiling big and broad. She was not named Taloa on her birthing day. That name would come soon enough.

  The Saturday following Taloa’s birthday, Efram and his brother Ben accompanied their father on a buying trip to the hardware store in nearby Spiro, a Nahullo town. They bought cattle feed and a new mule harness. While Ben spoke to loud-laughing Maggie, who ran the store’s affairs, Efram and his father stood on the sidewalk.

  “Son,” his father said, “we need to talk about something.” When Efram turned to face him, his father swung a hard left fist and struck him squarely in the navel. “I can still kick your butt!” he said. “That’s what we need to talk about.”

  It was the last thing his father ever said to him. As Efram doubled over, his father spotted a spike in the middle of Main Street.

  “Somebody gonna get hurt,” he muttered, stepping from the sidewalk. He paused to let a mule-driven wagon pass. The lead mule stepped on the spike and lurched, loosening the strap from a hundred-pound barrel of flour. Efram stood helpless on the sidewalk and watched the barrel roll from the wagon and strike his father in the head before slamming into his chest.

  From twenty feet away he heard the sharp and brittle crack of ribs beneath the crushing weight. Efram leapt to his father, lifted his broken body, and laid him on the sidewalk. A jagged piece of rib had pierced his father’s lungs and he drowned in his own blood.

  The next morning Efram carved the tombstone for his father. Little Taloa, barely a week old, cried and cried with the grieving women at Mister Bobb’s funeral. Thus they named her Singing One—Taloa in Choctaw.

  Following the burning of New Hope, Efram was asked to carve the gravestones for the twenty girls who died. The morning of the burial ceremony, he visited with grieving parents and family members, many of whom had traveled several days to attend the service. Beneath a shady grove by the gravesite they gathered, huddled in blankets from the cold. As he stood to speak, Efram’s eyes settled on the dark clumps of earth rising from the ground, and the bundled bodies in the twenty wooden coffins. Steamy fog hovered over the fresh-dug holes.

  “All respect will be given in the cutting of the stone,” Efram said. Mothers and fathers nodded and cried softly, surrounded by their living children. They looked to Efram, who stood with his head bowed, holding his broad-brimmed hat in both hands and rocking slightly. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks and he made no move to hide them. Efram’s ten year-old cousin Taloa, they knew, was among those who died.

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  Rose

  As we neared the graveyard in the early morning dark, we passed under the arms of fat-trunked sycamore trees. Through the gray branches we could see the shapes of wailing women, their long black dresses, their
heads covered with black scarves that hid their faces. My father pulled our wagon to the roadside and eased to a slow halt. Whiteface stomped the ground and munched on brittle sycamore leaves. We sat for a long while before descending into the world of grief.

  My father took off his hat and closed his eyes. The old women howled and fell to the ground. When they rose again, their singing cut the day in half. There were two days, the day we lived in, ate in, slept in, smiled and cried in—then there was this day of grief, a day I never knew before.

  Nothing was like before, nor would it ever be.

  Unlike most funerals, with the wailers grieving for us all, many of the wailers on this day had lost a grandchild in the flames. Their cries took on a purple undertow of deeper grief. Mothers of the dead joined the older women, as they had never done.

  “Minti! Minti!” a mother called. “Come, my baby, come!”

  The sun came into view to the east and her cries took on an urgent air, as if her baby girl was lost and wandering in the woods. The mother grew more desperate as the sun threatened to rise and devour her baby, just as the fire had done.

  My father stepped from the wagon and lifted Jamey and me to the ground, then helped my mother, then Pokoni, and Amafo. By the time we stepped through the trees, the sun was casting yellow rays on the graves of my newly dead girlfriends. A swell of anger took hold of me and shook my body till I could barely stand.

  Pokoni reached from behind me and held me by the waist. She laid her head on my shoulder and there we stood, leaning one upon the other. I parted my lips and breathed in the gardenia fragrance, as much a part of Pokoni as her thick black hair.

  Brother Willis always stood so strong, but on this day his whole body sagged, from the skin of his wrinkled cheeks to the knees of his britches, still muddy from his night of kneeling and praying in his garden. But when he lifted his eyes to the Choctaw gathering, the coming light took hold. He pulled a hymnbook from behind his back and became the man we knew.

  If ever I have had—in the course of all that I have witnessed in my eighty-four years—reason to doubt the presence of the good and living God, I only need turn to the doings of Brother Willis on this sacred day of mourning to restore my faith in the Everlasting.

  “We will sing a hymn before we hear the word of the Lord,” he said. “Oh, Come Let Us Adore Him,” he sang, and how could we not but join him?

  Oh, come let us adore him,

  Oh, come let us adore him,

  Oh, come let us adore him,

  Christ the Lord.

  For he alone is worthy,

  For he alone is worthy,

  For he alone is worthy,

  Christ the Lord.

  He sang a Christmas song of adoration of the child, and how could we not but join him? Standing all together, the living and the dead, how could we not but join him?

  Am enchil ahleha oklat holitoblit,

  Talowh chitoli ka ho haklo

  Klolia, klolia, ekselsis Teo.

  Oh im aiala momat, oh im aiala momat,

  Oh im aiala momat, ho tushpa.

  I marveled at Brother Willis and how he took us from this world. Then the song was over.

  He stumbled in his words and before he could announce another page number, Amelia Chukma cried Oooooo, and everyone stood shaking and crying. The crying was deep and good. We wailed and looked into each other’s eyes and sobbed out loud. I never felt so free to shout my grief and many others did the same.

  As if called to join us, our gone-before Choctaw kinfolk covered the graveyard. Through my watery eyes, I saw people standing by their own graves, holding tight to their families. I saw a thousand Choctaws, dead and buried long ago, and all of us were weeping.

  Brother Willis let us cry. He stood with his head bowed and his cheeks shone with tears. We stood for what must have been the better part of an hour, and then his voice boomed with the scripture reading.

  Following the singing of funeral hymns, we carried our baskets of food from the wagon. Grape dumplings, roasted corn, beans and onions, banaha bread, and two large kettles of pashofa. Other families brought chicken and strips of pork, fried and boiled.

  Mister Folsom backed his wagon up the dirt roadway and pans of food were placed at the wagon’s rear. Pokoni put her arm around me and led me to a cluster of women gathering to begin the serving. Elder women came first, then men and boys, and young women and girls. The usual feasting talk gave way to quiet sobs.

  I saw Samuel Willis, even Samuel, lift a finger to his cheekbone and trace the path of a fresh tear. Samuel was distant as the dark he wandered through, but on this day the rolling bones of his face were home to shiny tears. I sighed and wished my fingers too could touch his face.

  I turned to Pokoni and she wrapped her thin, strong arms around me. Later, after her death, I found myself thinking that she caught my looking at Samuel that burying day. She felt my sighing, and more than that, she saw the home we would someday make together, Samuel and I. My gift of seeing came from Pokoni, of this I have no doubt.

  After everyone was served, we sat in family groupings, without the usual mingling and talking. Long before sunset the last wagonload of grievers, led by two lazy mules, pulled away from New Hope Cemetery.

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  During the grieving, Efram leaned against the pine tree shading his family. He longed to be about his task of cutting and carving. When his mother appeared at his side with a plate of pork and dumplings, he slid down the trunk of the tree and buried himself in the food, though—in his thinking—this feasting time denied him his work.

  While his brother Ben helped their mother to the wagon, Efram untied his horse from the rear of it, nodded his goodbyes and headed to the quarry. An hour later he dismounted twenty feet from the granite quarry’s edge, where he had already cut and dragged three of the needed twenty stones. Removing his mallet and carving chisel from his saddlebag, he lifted the first stone to the slab of rock that served as his carving table.

  Efram had decided, seeing his family so deep in grief, to carve Taloa’s stone first and present it to her mother and father—his aunt and uncle. He stood over the dull slab and gripped the chisel with his left hand to lightly chip the faint outline of letters.

  He tapped the chisel barely enough to stir dust from the stone, and his father entered his thoughts. Efram loved his cousin as he did his father. With the birth of the one so soon followed by the death of the other, he saw the events as connected, as did many Choctaws. Taloa, they knew, was sent to take and hold the spirit of the elder.

  Now both were gone. Efram whispered her name, then gripped the chisel tight and swung hard, cutting deep the leg of a “T.”

  “Taloa,” he said louder, and swung again, harder still, sending the blade into the groove.

  “Taloa.” With every swing he called her name louder, with every shout he buried his cut deeper.

  “Taloa!” he shouted, till the stone split and Efram slumped to the ground, sweating and panting.

  With only a sliver of moon to light his way, Efram lifted the two pieces of stone and stumbled to the edge of the quarry. He held the granite high over his head, swayed back and forth, and flung the stones to the bottom of the pit. As the stones shattered, he fell backwards, stubbornly refusing to break his fall and landing hard on his back.

  He struggled to his feet and watched as shadows danced over the shards of twinkling, shattered granite. His anger seemed out of place as he beheld the spectacle of light rising from the dark hole. He mounted his horse and returned to New Hope Cemetery.

  Across the road from the burial grounds, trees had been cleared for farming. The five-acre plot still held its stones intact. Limestone chunks of every size and shape decorated the field. Efram glanced at the graves, twenty mounds of dark dirt, then turned to the stones.

  He approached a round stone three feet high and rocked it back and forth, loosening the dirt. With a slow and steady tug, Efram lifted the stone from the earth. He rolled it across the uneven road and
onto the burial ground, settling it at the head of a grave.

  Efram worked till dawn, digging stones from the field till his hands bled and his fingernails were chipped and broken. On stone number seven a buried sliver of limestone cut deep into his left palm. By the time Efram realized he was bleeding, his britches, shirt, and face were covered in blood, and his hair was a thick mass of sopping red.

  Just after sunrise Lavester McKesson arrived at the cemetery with a wagonload of fresh-picked flower bundles to set among the graves. He was surprised to see twenty white stones sitting by the graves. Some were tall and cylindrical, some flat to the ground, others were round or oblong, but all shared one unforgettable bond. Blood. They were, each and every one of them, spotted with handprints of blood.

  Efram slept at the base of a tree.

  “What a sight to see,” Lavester later said. “Me carrying sweet-smelling flowers for the little dead girls, and there those stones were. Grave stones, no doubt. That’s what they were. But no date or name. Just twenty white stones covered in blood.”

  “Mon up, son,” Lavester said, lifting Efram by the armpits. “Lemme hep you. You not hurt bad, are you?”

  “Huh? No, I’m not hurt,” Efram said, seeing the blood covering his shirt and britches. “Just a cut on the hand is all.”

  “Well, let’s get you home. I done tied your horse to my wagon. He’ll follow along behind. Been a long day for everybody.” Efram rose and followed Lavester to his wagon, where two old mules raised their heads in welcome. One sniffed and snorted and the other stomped the ground at the sight of him.

  While Lavester pulled away from New Hope Cemetery, a growing number of late-arriving relatives, out-of-towners, approached the gravesite. Climbing from wagons and sliding off horses, they moved without speaking to the fresh piles of dirt over the twenty graves. As on the burial day, they carried blankets and baskets of food and settled onto the grounds for a daylong grieving.

  As the day settled to a close, the mourners trudged their way to the waiting wagons. In the hovering light of sunset, the stones glowed a soft farewell.