Chapter 2
Tall Corn found the camp on the edge of his farm, next to the spring where it broke from earth into sunshine. A thin strip of pale smoke told him someone was burning hardwood at the edge of his largest cornfield. Having an unwanted camp on his farm angered him. But to camp at this location caused his ire to grow with a fierceness he had not known, for he held this a sacred place where earth, water, and sun, three of the holy gifts of the Great Spirit, came together as one.
Great Spirit watches the white man and the girl. It is their smoke that calls to mind Long Hunters and their camp, its puny smoke rising from their dying fire that drowsy morn, the year they cut their way west across his Turtleback Mountain. Perched on a rock ledge, fur-coated men crawled, humpbacked and beaver-like, one by one from lean-tos and stepped into brush to relieve themselves. They returned to squat before their meager fire and poke sticks into dying ash. Though a century and a half has passed, these two are not so different. It could have been yesterday.
Finding the camp by its smoke column set no obstacles for Tall Corn. He knew his land as intimately as he knew the ridges of his farming hands. One with the land, he, like the hawk perched on the oak limb, vanished from the white man’s sight.
This invader could only be a white man. Only a white man would dishonor the land of another by squatting in place rather than moving on. When Tall Corn came near the camp, he lowered himself to the ground and inched his way through thick underbrush. He crouched behind a stand of rhododendron once heavy with orange blossoms and watched.
The camp was nothing more than a small fire, an oily tarpaulin hung on a rope between two pines and a cast-iron spider, its three pointed feet deep in the fire’s ash. The odor of rancid grease from having been left in the spider too long and from frying fish too many times overpowered the earth’s scent. A black valise had been tossed to the side. Neither man nor girl had swept straw and branches away to make a livable spot within the stand of pine. The skimpiness of supplies there in the month of the Harvest Moon, the white man’s October, told the Cherokee the two would freeze during the coming mountain nights before they would starve.
A pale man in muddy black pants and canvas duster pulled back his coat to expose a hatchet hanging from his waist. He hunkered down before a small fire and poked at the flame as if the stirring would make the blaze bigger. Instead, he scattered wood and ash. The fire would not live. Tall Corn knew this.
A white girl, no more than thirteen summers and heavy with child, crawled from under the tarpaulin. She held her back as she tried to stand. She wore workmen’s boots far too large for her small feet. Tall Corn listened.
“Jackson,” she said, “I got to have help birthing this baby. I don’t know nothing. You don’t know nothing. I ain’t wanting to die just yet.” She attempted a laugh, but it hung itself in her throat. “I might not like how this baby come to be, but it’s alive in me and that matters.”
The white man rose. His craggy face blackened where a heavy beard refused to be shaved close, its bone structure so exact it looked carved. Taut leathery skin made him more stone than flesh.
Tall Corn smelled something more than woods and smoke in the air, something darker than the camp smoke now failing to rise. The odor of rot. The white man faced the girl. It was the man he smelled. The stench heightened with each movement the man made, intensified by what the girl called the man, rot rooted in the name “Jackson.” The white man’s name fueled Tall Corn’s resentment more. Only Uktena, the Great Serpent Himself, raised from beneath the waters, would sport such a name.
Was it not a Jackson, Andrew Jackson, who had divided Tall Corn’s people and sent them walking to death through a winter snow? Across frozen rivers that collapsed under their weight? Was it not Jackson that spilled Cherokee blood over half the country, without firing a weapon, so the white man could not question? But question the whites did, through their many tears as the Cherokee walked past. Even white men recognized man’s blood can weigh so heavy that he breaks under the realization of death he carries as he walks. As they walked. And walked. As they lifted dropped bodies, no matter how heavy, no matter how far yet to go, and carried them to sanctified ground for burial. This was the legacy of Jackson. A name ever reviled in the Cherokee Nation.
“Shut up, Mona. You ain’t dying yet.” Jackson spit tobacco juice into the dying fire. “Why I dragged you out of Virginia and into North Carolina, I’ll never know.” The man kicked at the fire with his boot. “Should have left you in Tennessee.”
The girl tried to sit. Her unbalanced body knocked her back. She plopped against the ground and tugged at her thin cotton skirt crumpled under her hips. “Here. Pull me up,” she said and stuck out her hand.
“Get up your own self.”
She rolled to her side and lifted her bulk by bracing her hands against the ground, trying to hoist herself up. “I’m hungry. What we got to eat?”
“You done et it all.” Jackson threw his poking stick into the underbrush.
“What’re you doing? That stick’ll set these whole woods afire,” she said as she rose. “Go into them corn rows and get us a few and I’ll boil them up.” Bracing her back with her hand as if holding the baby in place, she started after the smoldering stick.
“Do it yourself. I ain’t no thief.” He crawled under the tarpaulin.
“No,” she sniffed and muttered to herself as she wiped dirt from her cheek. “But you’re damn good with a knife when you want to be.” Her fingers followed two scars down her cheek.
She turned toward Tall Corn, staring, seeming to see nothing before her but what had been. If he moved, she would see him. A thin, white scar, like a tiny rip, ran down the girl’s left cheek. Just under that ran another, this one black, as if someone had filled it with soot before it closed. And so it had been.
Tears ran down the scars and into the corner of her mouth. Tall Corn had never seen a person swallow her own sorrow. He would have to ask Beloved Mother about this. He thought it could not be a good thing. The sorrow would water its own root and grow stronger.
The girl Mona and her hunger stirred a spirit Tall Corn had not known. He wanted her to have food. He wanted to gather corn for her, parch it in the oven he had built for his mother. He wanted to collect squash and beans for a feast. Bake sunflower seeds and boil a rabbit stew for her. He wanted to cover her bread with sweet honey and draw back a blanket so she could sleep away from damp ground. He offered none of these things. Instead, he watched her waddle into his cornfield and break off two ears of corn before he stole away.
Tall Corn returned for three days. During each journey from his house to the edge of his cornfield, his spirit talked to him, reminded him that the girl was white, that the man rotted from within. If this child had been sired by the white man called Jackson, the child could be spawned by evil himself. Yet he continued to come observe the camp. Each day, he watched silent as a waiting fox as the white man growled and clomped about like a wounded bear. The more the man swore, the more the girl cowered.
On this third day, he first smelled her fear. It was the fear he felt when his father took him one night deep into the forest as a child, blindfolded him and left him sitting on a stump. Fear of being abandoned. Fear of unrecognizable noises. It was fear that brought sorrow to his eyes and questions to his heart about why his father would leave him alone in the dark. He had known this fear. It sat thick and heavy within and left him trembling, not from cold, but from the anguish of loss.
He recalled, also, the joy of removing the blindfold as he felt the sun on his arms when it began to warm the night chill. He knew the elation of finding his father sitting silent beside the stump, as he had done throughout the night.
Tall Corn’s spirit assured him he could become the father he lost to a spring storm’s sharp lightning strike. He could ease the white girl’s uncertainties, as truly as he eased his animals during birthing. He could teach the child the Cherokee way. Each day he returned. Each day she seemed more fawnlike, a skittish innocent waiting assurance that she was safe.
Beloved Mother sat by a curtain-less window and smoked a rolled cigarette. She spilled out of her chair like a mound of dough left to rise in a bowl too small. Dressed in yards of orange skirt and a puffy white blouse, few of her features, except her creased, sun-scorched face and worn hands, showed. Her thick hair hung in a plait down her back. Gazing out the window to staggered mountaintop waves, each a fainter blue than the one before, Beloved Mother listened to her son.
Tall Corn came to Beloved Mother on the fifth day. He told her of the stench of the white man called Jackson. He told her of the weight of the child and the sorrow the girl carried. He asked for permission to offer the girl the polished shell so she could send the white man back to his people.
He had grown tall, tall as the corn itself. He honored his Cherokee name, traditions of the people and the land. He was truly of the land. She did not want him to dishonor himself by approaching the white man called Jackson. She did not want him to weaken his Cherokee blood by lying with this girl. The tribe’s source of wisdom, she readily advised others, but this was her only son, her husband’s offshoot. He was all that was left of her life as a Cherokee wife, the root that afforded her trunk its stability. She was not sure she could live with a white woman in her house.
Tall Corn’s spirit recognized his mother’s problem as she listened wordless. As son, he had served her well. He had built her a solid white man’s house, and he farmed the land so abundantly that he could share each crop with the village. Yet he was a man of twenty-six summers and acknowledged a Cherokee woman had the final say. In this situation his throat tightened, choking words that he feared would destroy his chance to persuade Beloved Mother. He could not swallow his anxiety for the girl as easily as she drank in her own sorrows. He must surely rescue the girl from her demon as he would one of his lambs from the slick yellow panther. He could not allow this white man to beat her into submission, for he sensed she had within her the essence of the land itself.
Beloved Mother watched the rending of her son’s heart through his dark eyes. She could not deny him this chance to prove his manhood, not as a warrior of old, but as a man who fought for what he believed was right among men. She rose and walked to the fireboard, opened a polished cedar box and lifted out the shell.
Tall Corn had only heard of the shell. Seeing it now resting on a scrap of woven wool in Beloved Mother’s hands, he looked upon it with awe. A mussel shell larger than his palm, it had been rubbed to a glossy white, an iridescence that reflected the kerosene lamp’s flicker. His throat opened and he sighed.
Beloved Mother had answered. He had permission to speak to the girl, to ask her to send the white man called Jackson back to his people, to bring her and her unborn child to his home and live with him and Beloved Mother. Tall Corn bowed his head and extended his hands, cupped, to receive the sacred shell.
The following afternoon, Mona climbed the bank from the stream, struggling with a bucket of water. A Cherokee man stepped from behind a thick tree, lowered his head and offered his hand to take the water. She looked at his russet face, his black hair pulled back and bound by a leather strap at the nape of his neck. His black eyes with their flecks of gold eased her. He had emerged from the woods like the breeze that dried sweat from her neck when she lifted her brunette hair. She handed him the wooden bucket’s rope handle and sat on a pine log that marked the path Tall Corn had once cut to the branch.
Tall Corn squatted before her. He surveyed what water remained in the bucket. “Not much,” he said.
The girl spoke with a nervous laugh. “Most of it sloshed out coming up that rise.” She glanced up the incline. Jackson was nowhere in sight. She did not need to be caught talking to a stranger. Not a stranger who was clearly Cherokee.
After a moment, she asked, “We camped on your land?”
“The land’s a gift from the Great Spirit. It’s not mine.”
“That mean the Great Spirit wants us to move on?”
“If you had to travel on, you would have known it four moons ago.” Tall Corn continued to look at her face.
Mona glimpsed away. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Walks in Tall Corn,” he answered. “They call me ‘Tall Corn’.”
“Why?”
“The Cherokee who have long names carry shorter forms. You’re ‘River of Two Tears’.”
“No, I’m not.” She turned to him and chuckled. “I’m Mona Parsons.” With an afterthought, her shame spoke. “Mona Parsons Slocomb.”
Shame had forced her over this trail, whispering in her ear that she deserved whatever Jackson Slocomb wielded out. He called her his “road whore.” At night, thoughts of facing her ma and pa and the disgrace they would inflict on her if she returned kept her from sleep.
Tall Corn spoke. “You’re Two Tears from now on. Great Spirit named you to me the first day I saw you. When the white man made you cry with hunger.”
The girl stood up, towering over Tall Corn. “You’ve been spying on our camp.” She started toward the footpath.
“I watched to see that the white man who rots inside does you no harm.” Tall Corn rose before her. No taller than she, he met her face level with his own.
“What would you care about that? You don’t know me.” She drew back.
“You’re of the land. You have a love for all that lives,” Tall Corn spoke as if lulling a child to sleep.
“Humph.” She stared at this man’s eyes. She wanted to believe that his soul was honest. “Who told you that?”
“Great Spirit. And Beloved Mother. She allowed me to bring the shell.” He reached into his shirt pocket and drew out the shell.
“What’s that and who’s Beloved Mother?” Mona asked, not sure he was reasonable. Not that I’ve always been reasonable, Mona thought. I ran off with the scum asleep under the tarp.
“This shell is sacred to my people. You, now as a Cherokee woman with a Cherokee name, have the right to give it to the white man and he will have to leave. You can stay with me, in my home with Beloved Mother. You will be my wife.”
“Be your wife?” An unusual tiredness cramped her back. Her hands gripped above her hips, and she dropped back down on the log. Sweat covered her face.
“Come with me. It’s best for your child. Beloved Mother’s always present at a birth.” Tall Corn tried to pull her off the log.
“I’m not going nowhere with you.” She twisted away from his grip. “I don’t know you.”
“You came away with the white man. You didn’t know him.”
“How do you know such?” Mona’s back pain cut toward her belly.
“Beloved Mother told me.” He lifted her off the log. “We can see to the white man later.”
“Where you taking me?” Mona asked.
“To Beloved Mother.”