Authors: Lalita Tademy
Rose, so intent on willing Eugene toward them, missed what happened next, but did see Hawkins lay his hand on Jake’s shoulder, and saw Jake draw back his arm. The next thing she knew, Hawkins was on the ground, looking up at Jake with a lethal determination. There was no compromise in his face.
She saw a quick motion, and the glimmer of something shiny as Hawkins scrambled back to his feet, and she realized how outnumbered they were in this dangerous crowd. Jake always carried both knife and gun, but she had gotten him to come straight from the pasture, and wasn’t sure how prepared he was if it came to a fight. Other grafters didn’t rush to back Hawkins up yet, more worried about protecting their own groups of citizen recruits, but they might come to his defense if they thought their marks could be inspired to desert.
She felt the weight of the rifle at her side, and raised the weapon, training it on Hawkins. “He has a knife,” she said to Jake.
“Everybody has a knife,” Jake said calmly, pulling his Colt from his waistband, keeping one eye on Hawkins while assessing the mood of the crowd. “Let’s go, Eugene. Walk to me.”
Eugene came toward them as if pulled by a string, unsteady but obedient, aware enough to give Hawkins wide berth as he staggered just beyond his reach. As he came close, Rose grabbed Eugene’s arm to lead him away from the station in the direction of their horses, balancing her rifle with one arm and pushing her son in front of her. She looked back to make sure they weren’t pursued, and for one long moment locked eyes with Hawkins, who stared after them, unwilling to leave the others gathered to retrieve the one he now lost.
The train rumbled as it approached, and the focus of the crowd shifted. The locomotive came to a hissing stop, and the station transformed. Grafters gathered their wards, prodding, pushing, threatening, cajoling, and prepared them to board the Muskogee-bound train.
Rose relaxed, just a bit, hoping the danger passed.
“Pa . . .” Eugene began. His voice slurred and he struggled to find the rest of his words.
“We don’t sell, we don’t lease,” Jake said. He pointed to his horse. “Get on.”
It took several tries for them to maneuver Eugene onto the horse, and once he was mostly upright in the saddle, Jake swung up behind and held him steady so he wouldn’t fall. The set to Jake’s jaw made clear his determination, but Rose saw the worry in his eyes. Rose mounted her smaller pony, and pulled Eugene’s horse by the rein. They rode out of town single file, toward the ranch, against the tide of those still pouring in toward the station for the next train. Rose followed southward in the wake of her men.
Eugene snored, his head resting heavy on his father’s chest. Jake’s back was rigid, but his arms encircled his son, tight.
Chapter 68
USUALLY, THIS WAS
the time of day Rose liked best. The heavy choring done for the day, children asleep in their beds, she fitting scraps for a quilt or busy with her sewing needles, Jake with his pipe. As if everything sought its place, and at last relieved, released a long, satisfying breath. But not tonight.
Rose picked up her darning needle and a hank of yarn to patch a pair of Jake’s socks worn almost clean through at the heel. She slipped her stitch twice, like a greenhorn new to the capability. She thought to go to the spinning wheel in the back room for a session, sure to calm, but the hour was late.
“Mama Rose.”
Her son stood tall before her. He was still growing, in height as well as brawn. Firm and muscled from ranch chores and cattle drives, he was a good-looking young man at seventeen. Eugene hadn’t given the family any more trouble since they rescued him at the train station, but Rose didn’t welcome a repeat of the argument they’d been having since supper. Jake sat in his favorite chair, eyelids closed, filled pipe at his side. He opened his eyes now.
“No more of that foolishness, Eugene,” Rose said. “The matter is settled.”
“The children all want to go to the parade. I’ll take them myself, see that no harm comes.” Eugene pulled up a straight-backed chair and set it across from them, between Jake and Rose, and sat, eye
level. “
I
want to go to Muskogee to the parade.”
“No Simmons child gonna hoot and holler and dance and carry on like a good thing’s coming because they got fireworks or some parade,” Rose said. “That’s not for us.”
“It’s the future,” said Eugene. “And a bit of fun. What’s wrong with a bit of fun?”
Rose put down her needle and snatched up the newspaper from the side table.
“Listen,” she said to Eugene. She smoothed the pages of the
Muskogee Phoenix
and extended the fusty broadsheet farther from her face until the blurred print came into focus. “‘There is a new light in the East,’” she read. “‘The brightest day in all the history of the Red Man’s land has dawned.’”
Her whole body shook as she slammed the newspaper back onto the table. “This just makes it easier for the white man to figure a way to crush us.”
“There’s no stopping them making us a state,” Eugene said calmly. “Oklahoma. Indian Territory. What’s the difference?”
“You don’t understand the evils that follow white man’s thinking,” said Rose. “Statehood is bad for Indians. Even worse for us, now that white majority rules. Grampa Cow Tom would be sorry to see this day.”
“But tomorrow is just a parade, and everybody’s going,” said Eugene. He looked to Jake. “Papa?”
“Your mama already spoke her mind,” Jake said.
But Eugene wasn’t giving up. “We could all go, and you could tell us what Grampa Cow Tom would find so wrong. There’s more than one way to look at a thing,” he said.
“Nobody goes,” said Rose. “Not you, not the children, not the growns.” She took up her needle again. “Long as you’re under my roof, you do what I say. I’ll hear no more about it.”
Eugene leaned back in the chair, jaw clenched tight, as if physically struck. But when he stood, abruptly, his face was a tight mask. “I am a man,” he said, the words quiet but distinct. “I won’t ask
again.”
In three long strides he was across the room and out the front door without once looking back, and a deep silence descended. Rose couldn’t say exactly what, but something between the two of them had shifted and hit a new place, like a key finding home in its lock. There was a disturbing finality to the exchange.
“Why does he have to challenge?” she asked Jake. “Like he can barely tolerate me.”
“Just trying to find his place,” said Jake. “But don’t drive him off.”
“Me? Drive him off? I’m doing all I can to make him stay, see his fit on the ranch.”
“There it is. You can’t make him stay. You can’t force him to do anything. He’s right. He’s a grown man.”
When did it happen, so much sourness? First the statehood business and now Eugene in open rebellion. She thought briefly of Kindred, but refused to bring the old hurts forward to mix with the new.
“We built something here, you and me. Four days into August. That’s when we’ll celebrate, like we used to. On Emancipation Day. Why’d we ever stop? It was good enough for Grampa Cow Tom, it’s good enough for them. And no Simmons celebrates statehood or they answer to me.”
She pushed aside her worry about Eugene for the moment. Oklahoma statehood was another changing of the rules in answer to their mastery of the old system. As hard as things had always been, there was an additional layer of protection, albeit thin, within Indian Territory, something that gave them room to maneuver, defined them as off-limits to the full-on force of chattel politics, shielding them just enough from the crippling dismissiveness of Negro in the southernmost states of the country of which they were now an official part.
Rose took up the newspaper again and shook it, as if to make the words spill off the page and reverse themselves. “They try to
make it sound good, and fair, but Indian Territory is supposed to be for us. We are Creek citizens.”
“You know my thoughts.” Jake relit his pipe, ingesting the smoke slow and deep. His very calmness stoked an even broader sense of wrong and fury in Rose.
“No different than mine,” she said.
“The deed is done, Rose.”
Jake refused to emote tonight on cue around the very thing he’d been worrying over and railing about for the last several years. And yet she couldn’t stop poking at the notion of how much they had to lose, how yet again they’d been caught up in the giant maw of history and put at risk, as if they could never reach a safe place no matter how fast they ran.
“Leastways they could have kept Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory separate,” Rose said. “Haven’t we suffered enough? Haven’t enough promises been broken? There’s only folly in this for us.”
“Rose.” Jake didn’t raise his voice, but the tone was of warning. “No need fixing on how things coulda been. Shoulda been. Eugene was right about that part. Oklahoma is a state now. That’s fact.”
“Statehood,” Rose said in contempt.
This time Jake didn’t respond. Instead, he tapped out his hot pipe bowl in the dish and leaned back, closing his eyes again for a minute before hoisting himself from the chair.
He’d taken only a couple of halting steps toward the bedroom, the remnants of a limp from the recklessness of breaking a new horse two weeks prior instead of letting one of the other hands do it, when Rose spoke again.
“What’s it mean, Jake?” she asked. “What happens now?”
Her husband turned around then and paused, as if considering how to answer. They’d been together far too long to sugarcoat, not long enough to lie outright.
“What it always means,” Jake told her. “We mind our business; we pay what taxes come to us and what bills we owe; we pray for
good weather and crops and a healthy herd; we answer to whatever the United States government asks, no matter they think us simpletons and incapable and ripe for misuse; we answer to the Creek government, no matter they think us less than Indian; we stay away best we can from the old-style white hate sure to come unleashed in our direction each by each; we remind ourselves and everyone else that this is our land as long as we work it; we raise our children to expect more and fight if we’re not able; and we put as much as we can away in case we have to start over.”
He looked tired, the contours of his once-unlined face deep and sagging, his shoulders stooped, his hair uncombed, still carrying the sweat-line indent circling his head from his cowboy’s hat, though the hat itself lay flat against the hook by the door until morning. And Rose felt, deep and final, each one of her ten additional years of tiredness above her husband’s age. How many times could a body start afresh, or be threatened with the possibility of needing to do so?
“What of the ranch? Will they come for the ranch?”
“Someone’s bound to try.” Jake was matter-of-fact. “Grafter or boodler, government or settler; the only thing we don’t know is when. But we fight for what matters. We change as time demands.”
What had Grampa Cow Tom said in the death tepee? Carve the life you want. She’d fought for Jake, and she’d fought for the land, with success at both, but at such cost. So much else had slipped out of her reach in the process.
“Yes,” said Rose. “We’re warriors. And we fight for what we want.”
Chapter 69
AT DAYBREAK, MONTHS
after the sting of statehood passed, Rose pulled two baskets’ worth of ripe cucumbers from the garden, packed her pistol, left Laura in charge of the house for the day, hitched up her favorite pony, and set out for the pasture. She selected four cows from her own herd, including a milk cow and calf, and began to drive them north.
“Cows!” she called out to get them on their way, and again, each time they threatened to stray from the course she’d set.
She’d used this pony to move her cows before, from grazed area to fresh pasture, but never as far a distance as she intended this morning. She gathered the four graceless cows in a loose herd and kept them moving, zigging and zagging on her pony to keep them calm but in motion, their hooves clopping on the dry ground.
For the second time this week, Rose followed parallel to the creek until she came to the homestead of a distant neighbor, a widow with two small boys. Seminole. The woman had lost her husband in a gun accident the year before, and was struggling to hold on to her land. The family came to Rose’s attention through loose ranch-hand gossip, and for the fact that she had never thought to search out such a family before, she was ashamed. But at least she was here now.
The trip took two hours, and when she arrived, the widow was already in the field outside, hoe in hand, weeding squash. Her dark, long dress had seen better days, but she wore rows of bright beads around her neck, Seminole-style, as she had when Rose talked to her the week before. Her young boys, from the look of them ten
and twelve years old, worked lines of cornstalks by the side of the small log cabin. The widow put down her hoe when she heard the clatter of hooves, and Rose stopped short of the house to let the cows graze.
“I’ve beans if you’re hungry,” the widow said.
“I’ve somewhere else to be,” said Rose, “but once the cows are settled, some coffee will send me on my way.” She offered one of the baskets of cucumbers. “For you and the boys.”
The widow accepted. “Your hand came round earlier in the week and helped me patch the fencing for the cows,” she said.
She was even younger than Rose initially thought. She’d guess twenty-eight, no more than thirty. She’d gathered up her abundant hair in a topknot, but her work in the garden had loosened several locks that hung straight and limp against her damp skin.
“I still don’t understand why you do this for us,” the widow said. “I can’t pay.”
“If neighbor helps neighbor,” Rose said, “fortune balances out.”
The widow seemed puzzled, but didn’t press further, perhaps afraid Rose’s generosity would be rescinded. Rose didn’t, she couldn’t, explain that she strived to fulfill a commitment long overdue. How many years ago she’d sat in Grampa Cow Tom’s death tepee and made him promises, and then went about her life picking and choosing which to keep. Over thirty years. A lifetime ago. Her early disillusionment that her grandfather committed shameful acts in wartime had vanished alongside her young womanhood, but he’d asked her to help him atone and she’d done nothing. Rose owed him that and more. She’d made too many promises she hadn’t kept.