Sam has to get back to work, so Dean takes her into the city and drops her off and barrels back to help Abigail canvas the area. He’s had his fill of empty stares. A few more days, Dean is thinking, after chasing pavement all morning and afternoon, a few more days and they’ll have given it the old college try.
He parks outside the Wright City burger palace where he left Abigail this morning and the translator is already waiting for him, here she is tap-dancing up to the driver’s-side mirror, happy-go-lucky, a Styrofoam go-cup in hand. She curtsies down level with the window frame, a shit-eating grin weaseling across her face.
Abigail has found something.
“What do you think you have?”
She slips him a folded piece of notepaper.
“This is the grandmother’s address. Billy’s father’s mother. I just spoke to her on the payphone. She’s expecting us for lunch tomorrow in Antlers. Her name is Caroline Amos.”
Dean leans out and kisses her full on the lips.
• • •
In her starched blue jeans, polished cowboy boots, snap-fastened western shirt and bolo tie, it would be easy to mistake Caroline Amos for a man. But the silvering braid of hair falling down her back gives the woman away. A mixed-blood Choctaw Indian, Caroline’s wiry, expressive hands compensate for a careful, pidgined diction.
“My Grammy claimed she could be seeing the future.” Caroline Amos puppets all ten fingers before her face in a jokey kind of jazz-hands taa-daaa!
“She was always saying about some big troubles that was coming. How the earth was getting too heavy for all these people. How the buildings are going to break apart and fall into fire and things like that. She repeat this over and over but I never did believe it.”
Now the fingers are making flame.
“But then I hear about those fires burning in Los Angeles two years ago. Then there are the earthquakes in California. And that mountain that was exploding there in Oregon. So all that’s coming about now, just like Grammy said it would.”
They are sitting in a cozy sunroom overlooking the quiet street where Caroline has lived her entire life. Dean on the couch, Caroline in the rocking chair, Abigail in the love seat beside her. Cold cheese sandwiches and hot tea on the coffee table. Spread flat on Dean’s lap is a family tree resembling a basketball tournament bracket. Billy’s name is penciled in the center.
Dean tries getting Caroline back on task.
“You were born and raised here in Antlers? Raised by your mother and grandmother?”
Caroline smiles innocently back at him, gently rocking.
Dean looks to Abigail for help. As the translator explains, Caroline’s eyes light up. “Mammy and Grammy are come from Mississippi,” she clarifies, pointing east, “before here.”
“But you were born here . . .” Dean double-checks his notes, “to Tuesday Amos.”
“That’s right.”
“In 1940. When was Tuesday born?”
“Don’t know. Though Grammy was always saying Mammy is too young to be birthing babies.”
Dean scratches two question marks next to Tuesday Amos’s name. “Tuesday dies in 1979. You have your son Joseph with this . . . Hiram Deek?”
“Joe.”
“Joe Amos, right. Born in 1956. Then Joe and Peggy Grimes have Billy in 1972.”
Caroline is nodding, smiling, rocking.
“Billy takes Peggy’s name,” says Dean. “Joe takes your name. You take your mother’s name.”
The smile fades, the fingers clench. When Caroline suddenly stands and walks from the room her chair rocks audibly on the hardwood floor behind her. Dean looks to Abigail, puzzled. But the translator doesn’t have any answers for him so Dean stares outside. Careful now, she’s about to give you something. Beyond the sunroom window, a middle-aged man is sauntering somewhat idly along the sidewalk, casting hooded glances at the strange Oldsmobile parked before Caroline’s house. A concerned neighbor.
Caroline returns clutching a turquoise leather photo album. She sits beside Dean on the couch, caressing the album.
“You are right in this. I wish I could be saying it was because of the old ways, but it was mostly being on account of shame. When I was born, my daddy was already married to another white woman over there. Though Mammy didn’t care. Daddy was more handsome even than my Hiram, if the truth is told. Just look in those pictures.”
Caroline surrenders the album to Dean. It begins with a single pinhole portrait of a beautiful Indian girl, no way she’s older than fifteen or sixteen, and a skinny white kid with a five o’clock shadow. Caroline’s mother and father.
“What was your father’s name?” Dean asks.
“Eli Cain. Like that brother in the white Bible. Daddy was living here in Antlers while he did live. But he and his white wife die right before I was born. So Grammy raise me up there in the Choctaw ways because Mammy was too distress to do it herself. She wasn’t wanting people to know I was a bastard child. Just like my Joe and his Billy.”
Dean scratches in Billy’s bracket: Eli Cain (b: ??) (d: ~1940 - Antlers).
The rest of the album is filled with more recent shots of Caroline in her youth: Caroline and Tuesday, Caroline and her full-blooded Choctaw grandmother, Caroline and this Hiram fellow. Other pictures too, color Polaroids of a chubby brown boy and his haggard mother. There are birthday parties and picnics, swimming holes and yellowed summer Sundays lazing around the television set.
“These are of Billy?”
“Billy and Peggy. She give them to me before she move to the city. All in a tizzy, like.”
The neighbor outside is looking straight at Dean, unseeing. From the way the man shields his face Dean can tell that a sun flare caught in Caroline’s window has him blinded. Dean is briefly reminded of the observation room at Passages.
“Can you tell us more about Joe and Peggy?”
“Peggy was being Choctaw like Grammy. She was out on the carpet ready for marrying Joe. But he started getting the church ways into him, that white church over there. Joe was getting Jesufied just in time for Peggy to be pregnant with Billy in her belly. So he leave on a mission like they do it. Never did come back. Peggy raised Billy in the Choctaw ways just like Grammy did me. But one day she give it up for a white man from Tennessee. She give me these things and take Billy into the city over there to live with her sister. Never did come back, too.”
“Did you ever visit Billy in Oklahoma City?”
Caroline waves Dean’s question away.
“I don’t like to be remove from my home. That is happen so much in the past. That is coming again soon enough, too.”
“What’s coming?”
“Grammy was always saying to us about a third removal is coming. The first removal to Mississippi. The second removal to Oklahoma. Then the white man is going to push us out into the forever and things like that. I start thinking that that can happen. Like her other seeings, that this can be coming true now. We don’t disappear all in one sudden but bit by bit till the days are finish. Now we have the white man and the Choctaw being all mixed together in one blood. Grammy was always saying she think I will come out spotted, way Mammy got the hankering for white boys like that.” A curt, crooked laugh. “That I got it from her, too. All this loving is thinning the blood. This makes me kind of wondering if that is the third removal.”
Abigail is transfixed.
“So the third removal is love,” the translator says.
“Yes. But even if it isn’t always lasting, love is nothing to be scared of. Grammy was saying it will happen when there is no difference between inside,” Caroline presses a palm into her breastbone, “and out.” The other hand waves wide, an invitational flourish, indicating this chair, that desk, the noontime light outside. “Saying how scared I should be for these things, the end of time, like. When the night comes twice in one day, she said, then I will know it is true. But here it is. Here you are. And I think things are not so bad.”
“I’m not tracking this,” Dean says to Abigail.
Abigail opens her mouth to translate but Caroline rests a hand on Dean’s left knee, way ahead of her.
“You were saying your name is night,” she continues, squeezing softly. “So night will come twice today. You are bringing word of my grandson, my great-grandson. Alla nakni. Blood of my heart beating free in the world.”
Not so free, Dean thinks.
“Would you mind terribly if we borrowed the photo album?” Abigail asks. “It could help your grandson, Billy.”
“We’d make copies of the pictures and have it back to you within the week.”
“Okeh.”
“What does this mean about the end of time?” asks Abigail.
“Nothing means nothing while it’s meaning. It only means something once it’s meant.” Caroline cackles. “’Course by then the time for changing is going past.”