Tisha (7 page)

“Oh yiss,” he said.

“She must be very nice.”

“She beyoodeeful, Tisha—like you.”

“I’ll bet. Is your father in Chicken too?”

“Yiss.”

“What kind of a man is he?”

“Big man,” he said. “Got plenty guns, lotsa things. Got big glass eyes see far.” He curled both his fists in front of his eyes to make binoculars. “I no like him,” he added.

“Why not?”

“He no like me and Et’el.” “Is Ethel your sister?”

“Mmm … You got nice school?” he asked drowsily.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet.”

“You let me come?”

“Sure. Do you like school?”

“Like too much,” he said enthusiastically. “School plenty warm. Big. Miss Wintuhs make good grub for kids. You make good grub you school?”

“I never have, but I probably could. What do you like to eat?”

He didn’t answer. He’d fallen asleep.

We were up at five the next morning and on our way an hour after a hearty breakfast.

Right from the start Chuck was lively as a squirrel, riding that mule as though he’d done it all his life. In fact a couple of times he gave me a turn, slapping the mule to make him jog and pretty near falling off in the process.

He was comfortable around me, but not around Mr. Strong. For the whole trip I never heard him say a word when Mr. Strong was in earshot. Not that he talked much when we were alone either. Aside from the talk we had before he went to sleep the previous night, the only real conversation we had was about George Washington.

“You know Geo’ge Wash’ton?” he asked me.

“I’ve heard of him,” I said.

He started giggling. “He chop down cherry tree.”

“What are you laughing at?” I asked him.

“Cherry
tree.
Fun-ne-e-e.” He kept giggling.

“Why is it funny?”

“Cherry grow on
tree.
I no believe.”

“They do, though.”

“You see?”

“Oh, yes.”

“See
apple tree?”

“Loads of ’em.”

That really made him laugh. “How apple get on
tree?”

“They just grow there. Oranges, pears—they all grow on trees.”

He shook his head. It was hard for him to accept. “Potato?” he said mischievously.

“No, not potatoes.”

“Leddus?”

“No, lettuce grows right out of the ground. You know that.”

He laughed so much he had
me
giggling about it. When you saw it from his point of view, big pieces of fruit hanging from a spruce tree, or a birch, it did seem kind of funny.

Around noon, Mr. Strong stopped the pack train as we were making our way through a dense growth of cottonwood. The cowbells that had been clanking all the way down the line were quiet all of a sudden, and all I could hear were the merry waters of the meandering creek we’d been crossing and recrossing for a while.

“There it is, madam,” Mr. Strong said. “That is Chicken.”

I could barely make it out through the trees—a settlement about a mile away and a little below us. It was too far to really see what it was like.

“If you don’t mind, Mr. Strong, I’d like to change my clothes.”

“What is the matter with what you have on?”

Miss Ivy had always told me that first impressions were important. “Always look your very best,” she said to me once. “No matter where you are you must try to be a lady.”

“I’d feel more comfortable if I were more properly dressed.”

Mr. Strong dismounted. “Will you want to wash up too?”

“I’d like to.”

He was nice about it, unpacked the suitcase I asked for and brought it to the edge of the creek.

“We camp here?” Chuck asked.

“No,” I said, “I’m going to change and wash up.” I took off the army coat, Chuck watching me, interested. I asked him to turn around before I took off my shirt and knickers. “And don’t look until I tell you to.”

“Why I do this, Tisha?” he asked with his back to me.

“It’s not important,” I said. “Just stay that way until I tell you it’s all right.” It would have been too much
trouble to explain. When it came to modesty he didn’t have any, urinating and moving his bowels in full view without embarrassment.

After I finished I put the army coat back on and brought my suitcase back. I’d changed into a long black skirt, cotton stockings and white blouse. “You look quite nice, madam,” Mr. Strong said gallantly.

He put my suitcase back, then started moving down the line, checking the loads for the final time. “When we break out of these trees,” he said, “the animals are going to be in a hurry.”

There weren’t as many as we’d started out with, about ten left now. The rest had been left along the way.

I looked off at the settlement, my stomach doing flip-flops. This is it, I thought. I’m almost there. I’d come to a far place, just as my Grandmother Hobbs used to tell me I would. When I was a little girl back in Colorado I used to hate the places I lived in: Blazing Rag, Big Four, Laveta, Evansville. Mining towns full of company shacks, they were all ugly. I felt sure I’d be living in them forever, but Granny said no I wouldn’t and she’d been right.

“You be a teacher, Annie,” she used to tell me, “an’ you can go anywhere in the world you want.”

When I thought about her now I could see her as clearly as if she were right in front of me. As a little girl I used to wish that when I grew up I could be just like her. She wasn’t like anybody else in our whole family. The rest of us were light skinned and had blue eyes—or gray eyes like mine—and we were all very serious most of the time. But not Granny. She was a full-blooded Kentuck Indian and her face had been brown and broad, with wonderful black eyes that usually sparkled and laughed. If it hadn’t been for her I couldn’t think of what might have happened to me. More than likely I’d be sitting around somewhere feeling sorry for myself—the one thing Granny wouldn’t ever let me do.

My father had never cared anything about me, nor my mother either for that matter, but Granny had adored me. Every time my father lost his job or left
the house I was sent to live with her, and I couldn’t wait to get there. I’d sit on the train coach overnight with my cardboard suitcase on the seat beside me and I could barely sleep for being so happy. She had a little farm in Deepwater, Missouri that had hardly any kind of a house on it at all, just a little ramshackle place in the backlands, but I thought it was wonderful. It made me smile just to think about it now. All the house had was one tiny bedroom that, even though it was three feet above the kitchen, had no stairs to it. Whenever Granny and I went to bed we had to shinny ourselves up. She must have been close to seventy the last time I was there, but she was able to scramble up almost as fast as I.

Living with her had been like living with another little girl who was just older and smarter than I was. There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do, except maybe handle a plow. At home my father had never let me help him because he said that I couldn’t do anything right, but Granny had let me help with everything—milking the cow, tending the chickens, cooking and baking. She even let me help plant the vegetable garden, another thing my father wouldn’t let me do. I couldn’t keep the rows straight, he used to tell me. But Granny said she didn’t give a hoot about straight rows. The potatoes I planted in her garden grew all over, sometimes crossing into the spinach, which curved around behind the tomatoes. It was less of a garden than a living salad, but when it all came out of the ground Granny couldn’t get over how smart I was to have performed such a miracle, or so she told me.

I’d lived with her for a whole year that last time, and I’d never forget how terrible I’d felt when my mother finally wrote me to come home because my father was working again. Granny couldn’t read, so I’d even thought of not telling her what was in the letter, but I couldn’t He to her. She felt as bad as I did, but there wasn’t anything we could do.

That last night we’d spent together we tried to pretend that it was just like any other night. We went to bed right after supper the way we always did and I read to her from the Bible for a while. I knew the Book
of Psalms was her favorite, so I was reading from that. Granny had decided she couldn’t abide beds after my grandfather died, so we were lying on thick patchwork quilts on the floor. It was warm enough so that we didn’t need a blanket, and she was curled up beside me, her knees pulled up and poking at her cotton nightie, her hair done in a long braid down to her waist. Her eyes were closed, and after a while I thought she was asleep, so I put the Bible away.

Before I leaned over to turn down the oil lamp I looked at her face, seeing the deep lines in it. It was so dark and looked so Indian that I could almost imagine her living in a tepee, sewing hides and things like that. She wasn’t asleep, though. Her eyes popped open and she smiled at me. She was a tiny little thing, thin in the shoulders and heavy in the waist. Even though I was only eleven I was bigger than she was.

“You fooled me,” I said.

It was a game we played sometimes. If she fell asleep while I was reading I could go without washing my hands and face the next morning. But if she caught me I had to wash my neck and my ears.

“No, I jus’ dozed off. I really did.”

She took my hand and squeezed it. I could feel the calluses on hers. “I’m gonna miss you, Annie.”

I’d tried hard not to whine or cry up to then, but I couldn’t keep it up. I managed to blurt out, “Granny, I don’t want to go home ever again. I just don’t want to. Please let me stay.” Then I started to bawl so hard I didn’t think I’d ever be able to stop. Granny got up and held onto me the whole time. She didn’t say a word until she knew I was done.

“Annie …”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know I don’t want you to go home …”

“Yes.”

“An’ you know I never told you a lie.”

“I know.”

“Then you know if I tell you you’re a lucky girl, that’s the truth.”

“How can I be lucky?”

“’cause a lot of people when they unhappy, they
can’t do nothin’ about it. But you can, ’cause you’re smart. You got brains. An’ when a person’s got brains they got a ticket to any place they want to go—a ticket to the whole world.”

“What kind of a ticket?”

She tapped her head. “Right up here. Didn’t you tell me that if you was to work hard an’ really study you could be teachin’ school by the time you’re sixteen?”

“That’s what my teacher said.”

“Then that’s what you got to think about, about bein’ a teacher an’ gettin’ outta them dirty minin’ places.”

“I’ll never be able to do it, Granny, never.” I was ready to start crying all over again, but Granny told me to stop right away. “An’ listen to me, ’cause I ain’t gonna say this twice.”

She told me to sit up. “You’re gonna do big things some day, Annie—real big things. But you can’t do them big things if you’re gonna go round feelin’ sorry for yourself.” She stopped for a second and she looked a little sad. “Your pa’s my son, child. He ain’t an easy man, but he ain’t a bad man neither. Whatever you think about ’im you just remember he always stood on his own two feet an’ he learned you the same. An’ he always paid his own way. That’s what the Hobbses is like—all of ’em. Maybe him and your ma ain’t been too understandin’ of you, but they fed you good an’ give you a roof. That’s more than many’s got …”

“But they don’t really want me, Granny.”

“Yes they do. They jus’ don’t know how to show it. But never mind that. If you got just
one
person in the whole world who loves you an’ believes in you, why that’s wonderful, don’t ya see. An’ you got one—me. I love you, an’ I believe in you. So anytime you get to thinkin’ you ain’t gonna make it, or that you can’t do somethin’ for your own selfs sake, you do it for my sake. Will you?”

“Yes.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“That’s what I want to hear. You’ll see, Annie. Some
day you’re gonna go off to a new land just like a pioneer—just like your grampa an’ me did. ’cause you’re that kind—a big person. An’ that’s the kind that goes to a new land.”

“But there’s no new lands, Granny. They’re all gone.”

“Shoot, child, there always be new lands.”

“Where?”

“California maybe, I don’t know. Or Alaska … Now there’s a new land, Alaska.”

I asked her what she knew about it, but she’d begun to get sleepy and so had I. A few minutes later we were asleep.

“Madam?” Mr. Strong had finished checking the animals over and had mounted up again. “I asked you if you are ready.”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

As we moved forward I thought of that last morning I’d spent with Granny. When it was close to train time a neighboring woman had ridden into the yard with a buckboard. Granny had gone as far as the main road with us, then we hugged each other good-bye. She’d felt like a strong little bird.

As the buckboard drove off and I turned around to see her waving to me I had to fight to hold in the tears. “Don’t worry,” the driver said, “you’ll be back some day.”

I hadn’t answered her, not knowing how to explain that I wasn’t crying because I was going away, but because my grandmother had looked so small and alone as she stood in the middle of the road gently waving good-bye.

I’d never seen her again after that. She’d died during the first year I’d been teaching. I hadn’t found out about it until three weeks after it happened. She had died in her sleep, my mother wrote me, and she had left me a legacy.

She sure had, but it wasn’t the legacy my mother had written me about. It was one she’d given me a long time ago when I needed it most. And for that I’d never forget her.

“You’d best keep a tight rein on him, madam,” Mr.
Strong was saying. As soon as we’d broken into the open, just as he’d predicted, the pack train speeded up and so did Blossom. I pulled back on the reins.

We’d descended into a small level valley. About a quarter of a mile ahead were maybe twenty-five or thirty buildings strung along the same side of the creek we were on.

“Is that all of it?”

“Just about.”

I’d imagined it would be something like Eagle—a town—but from this distance it looked more like the Indian village we’d gone through. It couldn’t have been built in a better place, though, set down snug on the valley floor. Low hills ringed the valley, rolling away from it into a blue haze of high mountain peaks. The creek was deep and narrow here, spilling down from the slope behind us. It got wider as it went, and right smack in the middle of the settlement a wooden bridge arched across it.