DE HAVILLAND HAND

1

The creation and first sixteen years of life of Olivia de Havilland Hand, only child of Daniel DeBardeleben Hand and Summer Deer Wagoner, of Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

First there had to be a revolution and there was one. In nineteen hundred and sixty-one the young people of the United States of America looked at their parents and said, Oh, no, I cannot bear to be like that. The girls looked at their mothers in their girdles and brassieres, with their diet pills and sad martinis and permanents and hair sprays and painted fingernails and terrible frightened worried smiles and they said, There’s got to be more to life than this. This is not for me. Then the boys looked at their fathers dreaming of cars and killings in the stock market and terrified of being embarrassed or poor, poor fathers with their tight collars and tight belts and ironed shirts and old suits, with their hair cut off like monks, and the boys said, I don’t care how much he beats me, I won’t look that way. Then the boys and girls turned on the brand-new television sets and saw images of a new president and a new time that was dawning and they said, Let’s get out of here, something new has got to happen, something’s got to give.

 

Then the earth moved a fraction of an inch to the left or right of its orbit and the music began to change. Singers sang of changing times, feeling good, trying new things. People began to dance sexy Negro dances. Poets appeared in Iowa and Minnesota, in Boston and New York City, in Mississippi and San Francisco and L.A. Smile faces were sewn onto the rear ends of blue jeans. Girls started burning the brassieres. Boys quit going to the boring brutal barbers. Small bags of marijuana began to circulate. Then the children stopped going to school, or else they smoked marijuana, and then they went to school. Let them bore us now, the children chuckled to themselves. Just let them try.

By nineteen sixty-six the revolution was in full swing and taking up the front pages of every newspaper in the United States. News of it had even reached Charlotte, North Carolina.

Daniel Hand was having a hard time in school anyway. Even without marijuana he kept going to sleep reading The Pearl and The Lottery. What a bunch of nuts, he would think. Why would anybody act that way? Daniel liked to read comic books or books about football or, better yet, nothing at all. He liked to do life, not read about it. Then he broke his collarbone in the first game of his last season in high school and a week later his girlfriend got sent to Switzerland to school and as soon as she was there she wrote and told him she was in love with a boy from Winston-Salem. That was it as far as Daniel was concerned. He tied his arm up in his purple sling and went down to the record store to find out where to buy some marijuana. A month later he was out in California with the hippies.

 

A year before, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Summer Deer Wagoner, who was two years older than Daniel, had become bored with her brothers and sisters and trying to be a Cherokee Indian in the modern world. She was bored with living in a tiny house with seven other people on the outskirts of Tahlequah. Summer Deer had known about marijuana all along. It grew wild in the Ozark Mountains and bootleggers had been harvesting it and selling it to Mexicans for as long as anyone could remember. Then some white kids at universities around the area began to smoke it and some of the more ambitious ones began to drive out to Colorado and California to sell it to richer kids at richer schools. The year Summer Deer was eighteen she was invited along on such a trip. She told her brothers and sisters goodbye and headed west in an old Buick with four of her friends. By the time Daniel arrived in Berkeley she was settled in and was well known for her common sense and her unbelievably long and beautiful black hair. She was also much admired for her promise as a poet. “The White Man Is No Man’s Friend” was a poem she had written that had been printed up as a flyer and tacked to a thousand telephone poles in the area.

The white man is no man’s friend,

Even his own woman

Even his own child

So sorrowful, like a river

Without water

That was the whole poem. It was the only poem Summer Deer had written. The sight of it tacked up on telephone poles was very strange to her. Sometimes it made her happy to see it tacked up beside notices of meetings to stop the war or pleas to outlaw prefrontal lobotomies. Mostly, however, it made her afraid to write another poem for fear it would not be as good as the first one.

On the day Summer Deer met Daniel she was sitting on the lawn in front of Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus. She was sitting cross-legged on a blanket breathing in the morning air and cultivating her reputation for reticence and silence. Occasionally she would reach down into a bag from the baker’s and take a bite of the cinnamon roll she had bought for breakfast. Then she would go back into her stillness. Daniel did not know of Summer Deer’s reputation for enjoying solitude. He thought she looked like she was lonely. He was lonely. He had been in Berkeley for three days without finding anyone to talk to for more than an hour at a time. He stopped his bicycle to admire her long black hair. Then she smiled at him. She was wearing shorts and a khaki T-shirt that said KISS in long drips of red paint. Underneath the letters her breasts moved and rearranged the word. Daniel returned her smile. He was a gorgeous young man with curly dark blond hair and eyes as blue as the sky. Summer Deer liked the way his hair lay against his forehead in ringlets, plastered down by the sweat he had worked up riding the bicycle to the campus from his rented room twenty blocks away. She smiled through her solitude. She smiled again.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Daniel Hand from North Carolina. I just got here. I’m looking for friends.”

“You want to smoke a joint?” she asked. She lifted her head and smiled at him again. One breast moved into the angle of the K, the other moved into an S. Her hair fell across her shoulder.

“Sure,” he said. “You got anything? I’ve got lots of money if you want to buy anything.”

Six hours later they were in her room near the campus smoking Arkansas Razorbud marijuana and making love on a pallet of hand-loomed blankets. By midnight they were eating pizza and telling each other the stories of their lives. By the fall equinox they were married in a ceremony in Golden Gate Park attended by fourteen of their friends and several hundred other people they barely knew. In January, on a night when the moon was full and they weren’t even stoned, they made Olivia. Neither of them had dropped acid for a week. Fog was blowing down the street and beginning to lift. The moon rode high in the January sky. Four miles away the great whales rolled against each other in the ocean. All around them the children of the revolution slept in their lumpy rented beds and sleeping bags and bedrolls. In the living room of their tiny apartment four guests from New Orleans were curled up on the floor. In the midst of that Daniel rose from his sleep and took Summer Deer into his arms and they made Olivia. Or, to be exact, Daniel contributed his sperm and the next day Summer Deer’s egg began to fall. It was at ten o’clock the next morning when Olivia was actually made. Summer Deer was walking home from the market where she had gone to buy vegetables and eggs for lunch. She stopped beside a tree and put the basket down, feeling the sharp quirky pain of ovulation, and she remembered that she had forgotten to use the sponges in the night. What the hell, she told herself. She couldn’t get pregnant. She had been screwing nonstop for two years and she wasn’t pregnant yet. He was so sweet last night, she was thinking. He looked like a movie star doing the dishes with that yellow hair. If I go to India with the Peace Corps he’ll come along. I know he will. Jesus, he’s got the most money of any boy I ever shacked up with. Where does he get all that money? He doesn’t even sell dope. I ought to send a picture of him to Tahlequah. They won’t believe I’m shacked up with someone so good-looking.

She picked up the basket and walked on. The sun was out in full force now. The sidewalks were full of people, wearing T-shirts and sandals, wearing headbands, passing out pamphlets against the government, against the war, giving away flowers and joints and poems. It was the New World and she was here to share it.

The money was coming from Daniel’s mother. No matter how many times Daniel’s father told her not to, she wired Daniel money when he called. She believed him when he said he didn’t have a place to sleep or enough to eat. She could not believe he would smoke or swallow or inject drugs because it was impossible for her to imagine anyone doing something she would not do. Finally, her husband found out about the money she was sending Daniel and closed her bank account. When Daniel realized the jig was up where money was concerned, he suggested to Summer Deer that they should go and visit his family in Charlotte.

“I’m really worried about all that acid we’ve been doing,” he said. “I think we ought to stop dropping acid. People are getting too weird.”

“How can we get to Charlotte? We don’t even have a car.”

“They’ll send us money to fly. I called my father this morning. He wants to meet you. They all want to meet you. I wish you’d go. My sister Anna’s there. You’ll really like her. She’s a lot like you. She’s real liberated.”

“They might not like me. I don’t know about going to see a lot of society people. They don’t have any society where I come from. In Tahlequah everyone is the same.”

“I thought you said you were a princess or something.”

“I am, because my grandfather was a chief. But I’m just a farm girl really. I grew up in the country.” She stood before him with her chin up. No matter how strange he made her feel she never let it show. Still, she was falling more in love with him all the time. It was making her weak. She was falling in love with the orderly side of his nature. He cleaned up the apartment. He made a budget and stuck to it. He made up the bed and shaved and combed his hair. He brushed his teeth. He was like a movie star. He was so polite to people. People came over all the time to talk to him and tell him things. She was lucky to have him. There wasn’t a girl in Berkeley who wasn’t waiting to take him away from her.

“We love each other, don’t we?” Daniel said. “That’s all that matters.” Then he pulled her into his arms and the chemistry took over.

“Okay, I’ll go,” she said. “If you really want to go, I’ll go with you. How cold is it there?”

“It’s cold this time of year but there’ll be clothes there you can wear. Or Dad will buy you some. He really wants us to come home. He said not to worry about money. We could have all the money we needed if we’d come on home.”

Then Daniel called his father and his father called a travel agent and the tickets were ordered. Daniel put on his shoes and walked down to the American Airlines ticket office on Telegraph Avenue and picked up the tickets. When he got back to the apartment Summer Deer was waiting for him, sitting on the floor on her prayer rug, dressed in a pair of cutoff blue jeans so old they were as soft as velvet. On top of the jeans she wore a black T-shirt that said DEATH SUCKS in drips of white paint. It had been made by the same T-shirt artist who made the shirt she was wearing the day Daniel met her. As long as Daniel lived, whenever he thought of Summer Deer he would think of her breasts moving around beneath the mottoes and innuendos and warnings on those T-shirts. REGRET NOTHING in green on green. LIVE NOW in orange on pink. LONG SLOW LOVE in blue on lavender.

“I got the tickets,” he said. “The plane leaves at twelve tomorrow.”

“Let’s smoke a joint,” she said. “Then we’ll go eat.”

They went up on the roof and smoked a joint and then wandered down to a coffee shop and had fruit and rolls for lunch. It would be their last lunch as part of the revolution. They sat on a little balcony watching the cloud formations as they ate. Clouds were all over the sky when they ordered their meal. By the time they finished a huge hole had appeared in the center and the sun was breaking through. Lines of blue and pink and mauve and violet and gold appeared along the edges, like ancient paintings of the skies where the gods live. Daniel’s mother had a painting like that over the sideboard in the dining room. Daniel was so stoned he decided that he and Summer Deer could just step through the clouds and end up in his mother’s dining room. “How wonderful to see you,” Mrs. Hand would say. “Won’t you please come in.”

“We’re going to North Carolina to see his folks,” Summer Deer told a friend who stopped by the table. “Won’t that be a kick?”

“You better wear a different shirt.” The friend laughed. He was older than Summer Deer and Daniel.

“He thinks they aren’t going to notice I’m Indian.” Summer Deer laughed with the friend. “He says they’re going to love me.”

“They might,” the friend said. “But you ought to wear a different shirt.” He was a nice man, who had once been a history teacher in a girl’s school in Virginia. He only meant to be helpful about the shirt but the damage was done. Now Summer Deer would definitely wear the shirt on the plane.

The Hand family was waiting at the airport. Mr. and Mrs. Hand and Daniel’s older siblings, Anna and Helen, and Helen’s husband, Spencer Abadie, and James and Niall. Daniel’s baby sister, Louise, held her mother’s hand. Always on the lookout for a threat to her domain, she was the only one who didn’t smile at Summer Deer when Summer Deer moved toward them. Louise had the heart of a sergeant of arms of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She could tell at a glance this wasn’t going to work. While the rest of the Hand family cooed and smiled and was gracious, Louise inspected Summer Deer’s unshaved legs and T-shirt and leather vest and knew disaster could not be far away.

“Do you have luggage, son?” Mr. Hand said.

“Yeah. We have a lot of bags. We came to stay. I told you that we would.”

“We’re so glad,” Mrs. Hand said. “We are so happy to have you here.”

Summer Deer was quiet on the ride into town. Daniel kept his arm around her and the Hand family kept trying to bring her into their conversations but she pulled deeper and deeper into herself. They were in two cars. The car she was in was a Buick. Mr. Hand was driving. They turned off into a neighborhood and began to drive past bigger and bigger houses. Finally, they pulled up a driveway past gardens of wisteria and azaleas. Above the azaleas were tall delicate dogwood trees. In this season they were black leafless sculptures. Behind the gardens was a three-story Victorian house painted gray. There was a tower and porches around three sides. It was a rich house. The richest house that Summer Deer had ever been invited to. The car stopped. Daniel got out and picked up a basketball that was lying beneath an azalea bush and began to shoot the ball through a basketball hoop attached to a garage. “Look at this, Summer,” he said. “My old basketball. I haven’t seen it in so long.”

Ten days later Summer Deer was on her way back home, hitchhiking across the country with sixty dollars in her pocket and enough rage to keep her heart from breaking. She thought she was lucky she hadn’t killed anyone in Charlotte, North Carolina. The main thing she thought about was how much she had wanted to kill several people.

She caught a ride with a truck as far as Nashville, then took a Greyhound bus to Memphis. In Memphis she stopped for a few days to visit some old friends from the Ozarks. A black musician and two poets from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Summer Deer had not felt well since she left North Carolina. All the way across the country she had been sick at her stomach. She couldn’t even light a cigarette without wanting to throw up. She suspected she might be pregnant but she couldn’t believe it. How could such a thing happen to her? One of the poets was a scrawny little judge’s daughter who had worked at a hospital when she was young. “I think you’re knocked up,” the poet said. “You better go and get a test.”

“I’ll get one when I get home,” Summer Deer said. “I can get one free at the clinic.” She lay her head back down on the pillow and thought about how terrible she felt. I wish I had killed some of them, she thought. I wish I’d killed his mother and maybe Helen.

That night, in an effort to cheer Summer Deer up, they went to a dilapidated movie house near the Memphis State campus to see some old movies. The first movie came on, a film starring Olivia de Havilland in a story about a woman locked up in an insane asylum. Summer Deer began to cry in the movie. She cried so hard the black musician had to take her out to the lobby and get her a drink of water. He held her in his arms. Behind them the popcorn machine popped happily away. “Go on and cry,” he said. “Shed your tears.”

“I guess I’m pregnant,” she said. “I guess I’m really fucked.”

“We thought you were,” he said. “We thought you must be.”

“I’ll name it Olivia de Havilland,” she said. “Since it’s driving me crazy.”

“How come you have to have it?”

“I might not. I might get fixed when I get home. There’s a doctor there that will do it.” She leaned into the black man’s arms. His name was Willy Bugle. Six years later, when Olivia was five years old, he would make a big splash on Broadway in a musical from New Orleans. For now, though, he was only a trumpet player trying to make a living and he held Summer Deer in his arms and let her cry.

Summer Deer didn’t get it fixed. She didn’t even go to a doctor until she was five months pregnant. She stayed around Memphis for a few more days and went to hear the poets read their poetry in a bar and went to hear Willy play his trumpet with a band. Then she took the rest of her money and caught a bus to Tahlequah. She was so tired when she got home she slept for several days. By the time she woke up she was feeling better. Spring was coming to the Indian nation. An early spring with cold sharp rains and warm spells in the middle of the days. The rivers were filling up. I can get rid of this baby any time I want to, Summer Deer decided. All I need to do is get on a horse and ride.

“This guy’s rich?” her married sister, May, asked. “Really rich?”

“Yeah, he’s got all kinds of dough.”

“Go on and have it then,” her sister said. “You’re halfway there. When you get it you can sue him for some money. You can make him send you money to take care of it.”

“I might do it,” Summer Deer said. “Or else I might go riding.”

“You can get child care from the government, too,” May said. “You could be rolling in dough.”

Summer Deer thought it over. May was right. She was halfway to having the baby already. Besides, it might be a nice good-looking kid. A big blond boy, or a girl, either one. “I might take the money from the government,” she said. “But I won’t tell him about it. I don’t want his money enough to have to talk to him.” She held out the letter she had gotten from Daniel the day before. It was a letter that said his father had arranged for him to get an annulment of the marriage. “Since you won’t even answer my letters,” the letter said. “And since it doesn’t count since we were stoned.”

It was beautiful in Tahlequah that spring. Forsythia bloomed, then redbuds, then mystical white dogwoods, then wildflowers everywhere. Summer Deer went out at night with her friends and drank beer and smoked and talked about her life in California. The baby in her womb wasn’t any trouble. She was so young she barely knew it was there. Her breasts grew round and full, her thighs widened, her face became as beautiful as a dogwood blossom. “You look great,” her friends all told her. “You can get money from the government when it comes. You can get enough to stay at home.”

“Yeah. It’s okay,” she answered. “It’s nothing having a kid. See if Judie has a joint on him. Let’s get stoned. You ought to feel it move around when I get stoned. Yeah, I’m happy with it. There’s nothing to it. I don’t even go to the doctor. You don’t need a doctor to have a baby. My sister’s going to deliver it. Yeah, it’s a piece of cake.”

It was a piece of cake until the end. Then, in September, Summer Deer traded in her life for the baby’s. It was true what she had told her friends. She had only gone to the doctor twice. Once to make sure she was pregnant and once for a checkup. The second time the doctor was tired. He’d been up all night with a difficult delivery. He was short with Summer Deer and she decided he was a snob. She was always on the lookout for snobs. She didn’t go back after that and she didn’t pay the bill. She did remember the date he said the baby was due. Five days before the date she began to get impatient. She had been a good sport about the pregnancy and now she was sick of it. She wanted to get back to real life. She wanted to put on some tight jeans and go dancing. She wanted to find a boyfriend and get laid. So she began to walk. For six days she walked the hills around the house. She walked all morning and half the afternoons, up and down the hills, down to the road and back. On the sixth day her back began to hurt. All day her back drove her crazy. That night she went to bed. Her mother and grandmother and Mary Lily stood by. They called the midwife and the midwife came. The pains would begin, then they would stop. Another day went by. On the second night the midwife called a second midwife. The second midwife was very old. She knew what was wrong. The baby was upside down. She reached up inside of Summer Deer and turned the baby with her hands. Summer Deer began to scream, then she began to bleed. “We should call the doctor,” Mary Lily said. “I’ll call him now.”

“No,” the midwife said. “Give her time. It will happen now.”

“Get the doctor,” Summer Deer screamed. “Get some dope. Get him to bring some dope.” Mary Lily went to the phone and called the hospital in Tahlequah. “I called them,” she said, coming back to the bed. “They’re on their way.”

“We don’t need them,”‘ the midwives said. “It takes its time. It’s coming now.”

“I want some dope,” Summer Deer screamed. “Get some dope for me.” A terrible pain went through her body and then another and another. Olivia moved down into the birth canal, down the small tortured pathway to the light. There were sirens in the distance now. “They’re coming,” Mary Lily said. “They’re on their way.”

Olivia’s head emerged, then her shoulders, then her arms. Summer Deer stopped screaming. She was leaving now. She was leaving it for good and she regretted that. She regretted bright blue skies and rain and jazz and sun and lysergic acid and cigarettes and beer and sandals and flowers and food. She regretted rivers and trees and stars and full moons rising behind white translucent clouds on warm nights in the Ozarks. She hated leaving fucking. She had loved to fuck. She hated leaving Olivia crying in her sister’s arms. It had been a good pregnancy. Up until the end it had seemed like a good thing to do.

The family gathered around the bed. Little Sun and Crow Wagoner, grandparents of the newborn child, May Frost, the married sister, Roper, the oldest son, Creek, the youngest, Mary Lily, the old maid. It was late September. The trees were gold and rust and silver and red. Maples, walnuts, sweetgum, birch and sycamore, sumac and cedar. Round bales of hay were in the fields. Small yellow flowers covered the pastures. Huge crows made their deliberate journeys from the tall white birch trees to the taller pines.

The Wagoners gathered around the bed.

“Her name will be Olivia,” Mary Lily said. “Summer wrote it on a piece of paper.”

“We should tell the father,” Crow said. “The father should know.”

“We tell no one,” Little Sun said. “The child is ours. Mary Lily will care for her.” He took the child from his wife’s arms and handed her to his youngest daughter. “Here, Mary Lily. She is yours. She is entrusted to you.”

2

The house where Olivia was born stood on five acres of land beside a creek that ran down to join the Illinois River. The land belonged to the Cherokee nation but the house was the Wagoners’ and no one could make them leave as long as they wished to stay. Two miles down a gravel road was a highway. Three miles farther was the town of Tahlequah. As Olivia grew she was allowed to travel farther and farther from the house. First she could go to the edge of their property. Then she could go to the Hawkkiller place, then all the way to the highway. She would rein in her pony beside the last fencepost and watch the cars come down the winding highway going into town. She could not understand what kept them on the road. She thought it must be the Holy Spirit, but the priest said no, the Holy Spirit was too busy for cars. Cars were guided by Saint Christopher.

When she was six years old she began to walk the two miles to the highway. There a dilapidated school bus picked her up and took her to the Roman Catholic school.

“I don’t want to go,” she told Mary Lily. “It’s boring there. You can’t take off your shoes.”

“You have to go,” Mary Lily said. “It’s the law.”

“Don’t tell them you have me. Say I’m gone. The bus smells bad. It smells like poison gas. We have to sit, sit, sit. I won’t go anymore. I won’t go there.”

“Never have I seen a child talk so much,” Little Sun put in. He was sitting on a straight chair watching them. “Talk, talk, talk, like a magpie. Talk all day.”

“Like a jaybird,” Crow agreed.

“Like a dove,” Mary Lily added. “Always calling.”

“Why do I have to go?” Olivia said. “I won’t go after this. No more after today.”

“We’ll find the goats this afternoon,” Mary Lily bribed. “They’ve been eating up the yard.” She swooped the child up in her arms and tried to kiss her. “Getting so big,” she said. “Too big for me to carry.”

“I won’t go,” Olivia said. She laid her hands against Mary Lily’s cheeks, a move guaranteed to get her anything she wanted. “I will stay with you and help you beat the goats.”

Wild goats lived in the woods behind the Wagoners’ house. They came in at night and ate the gardens and the low branches of the trees. There were also blue curved-horn sheep in a corral and three hens and a rooster. There were five fox terriers, several cats, a bee box with no bees, nine bronze turkeys in a pen, a pet deer, and four apple trees. Olivia’s bedroom window looked out upon the apple trees. As long as she lived the sight of blossoming apple trees could make Olivia lonesome for the hard brown soil of Cherokee County and the timeless days when she was smelling and hearing and watching everything and was earnest and terribly momentous and sweet and hot and brave.

 

When she was six she learned to read. The nun who taught first grade at Saint Alphonsus was good at reading out loud. She made Olivia hungry for books. “I want books to read,” Olivia told Mary Lily. The next weekend there was a bookshelf in her room and Mary Lily set to work going to yard sales to fill it up with books. A Girl Scout Handbook appeared, a copy of The White Cliffs of Dover, The Best Loved Poems of the American People, a set of five Nancy Drew murder mysteries, The Cat in the Hat, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Do You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday?, a book of Cherokee history, three Bibles — the New Catholic Bible, the King James Version of the Bible, and an illustrated children’s Bible. Also, a complete set of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia.

One of the main reasons Olivia hated going to school was that it kept her from staying home to look at her books. Especially if it rained. On rainy days she loved to stay in bed with her books all around her and read them to herself and tell herself stories. In Volume B of the encyclopedia there was a story of a family of bears getting ready for their hibernation. She read it over and over again. Sometimes she would take the story into her grandfather’s room and snuggle up beside him and beg him to tell her stories of real bears when the Cherokee hunted them. “The head of the bear was a great treasure in the old days,” he would begin. “The father of my father owned three such heads. He earned the first head when he was only sixteen. He went out all alone in spring to trap his bear.”

“How can I make her go to school if you fill her head with stories?” Mary Lily complained. “No wonder she pretends to be sick all the time.”

“I’m sick now,” Olivia would say and clutch her stomach and begin to groan. “I threw up all night long.” Then her grandfather would laugh out loud and Mary Lily would go to work and leave them there.

3

When she was nine years old Olivia asked Mary Lily for a photograph of her father. She already had a photograph of her mother, a five by seven school yearbook picture taken when her mother was seventeen. “Now I must see a picture of my father,” she said. “You must get me one.”

“There isn’t one,” Mary Lily said. “There is no such thing.”

“Then write to England.”

“What makes you think he is in England?”

“I think so. I’m pretty sure that’s where he must be. We had it in school. It’s where those white cliffs are in that poem.”

“He might not be in England.”

“I think that’s where he is. He will be coming to get me before too long. I need to know what he looks like.”

That night Mary Lily discussed the conversation with her father. “Tell her what we know,” he said. “Yes. Tell her.”

“No,” Mary Lily answered.

“If she wishes to know what he looks like, tell her what we know.”

“We don’t know. We never saw him. Well, there is a photograph in the box of Summer Deer’s things. Some photographs.”

“Then give them to her.” Little Sun put his hand on his daughter’s arm. “She wants it. She has a right to it. Let her see it.”

“In a while,” Mary Lily said. “After a while.” When she left the room Little Sun worried about her. She was too fat for men so she had given all her love to the little girl. It was too much love for one child. The child is not like us, Little Sun told himself. She will leave us someday and then where will my daughter be. He folded his hands. There was no use to borrow trouble. Trouble would always come. In the meantime he would keep his own counsel and wait and see.

Mary Lily walked around for two days looking like she might cry. She even stayed in bed one day running a fever. The third day was Saturday. She took Olivia into her grandfather’s room and opened the safe and took out the shoebox with Summer Deer’s things. There were letters and a marriage certificate and an envelope with photographs. Seven snapshots made one day in Chinatown. Olivia looked at the photographs a long time. She kept returning to one of Daniel and Summer Deer together. Daniel had his arm around Summer Deer. Behind them was the great arch of the entrance to Chinatown. In the photograph Daniel was wearing cutoff blue jeans and a blue shirt. His long skinny legs stuck out beneath the jeans. A big grin was on his face. He had his arm around Summer Deer’s shoulders. She was wearing white shorts and a stretched white T-shirt. She was wearing her mysterious look.

“It is very warm there, isn’t it?” Olivia asked.

“It is California,” Mary Lily explained.

“Is that where he is?”

“No. He’s in North Carolina.”

“Oh.”

“Well, that’s enough of that for now. Let’s go out in the yard and feed the deer. I saw him peeking over the fence this morning. He’s hoping you’ll come and see him. He is far away from his people. If we don’t pet him he might die.”

“I want to keep this picture,” Olivia said, holding up the one of Daniel and Summer Deer together.

“All right. Keep it then.” Mary Lily gathered up the rest of the things and put them away in the shoebox and put the lid on it. Then she tied the string back around it and put it back in the unlocked safe and shut the door. Nothing was ever locked in the Wagoners’ house. There was nothing they owned they thought was valuable enough to need to be secured.

The safe was always there, in her grandfather’s room, and it was always open, but it was several years before Olivia decided to look at the photographs again. It was the fall she was eleven. One Saturday morning she was alone in the house. The other members of the family were in the woods gathering pecans for Thanksgiving cakes. Olivia had gone out with them early, then come back to the house. She was pulling off her sweater as she passed her grandfather’s room. One arm was still in the sleeve as she came to the door. The house was very still. The smell of blackberry jelly they had made the day before was everywhere. Olivia stood in the doorway of her grandfather’s room and looked at the emptiness of the bed and the chair and the space beside the window. She pulled the other arm out of her sweater and went into the room. She went over to the closet and opened the door and sat down beside the safe. She opened the safe door and took out the shoebox with her mother’s things. She carried it very carefully over to the space beside the bed, below the window, where sunlight was shining on a braided rug. She put the box very carefully down upon the rug and untied the string and removed the top. She looked at the photographs for a while, setting them up around her. Then she took the papers out, one by one, and began to read.

The first paper was an elaborate marriage license with flowers all around the edges in gold and pink and blue and red. The other papers were letters.

Dear Summer,

I am sending this to Jimmy because I called him at Elsie’s and he said maybe he knew someone that knew where you were. We are married in case you forgot. Please just let me know you’re okay. My mom says to tell you she liked you a lot.

Love, Daniel

Dear Summer,

My dad called the Indian reservation in Oklahoma where you said you were from but they never heard of you. If Jimmy gets this to you please call me up right away. It’s important.

Love, Daniel

Dear Summer,

I have gotten this girl in trouble and we have to get married pretty quick. She is the daughter of my dad’s business partner. I guess you can see I have to talk to you as soon as possible. I know damn well you are getting these letters. This is mean as shit not to call me. My dad’s lawyer says he can go on and get me an annulment, have the marriage declared illegal, since we were stoned. I guess I’ll do that.

Love, Daniel

When she had finished all the letters Olivia folded them carefully back into their envelopes and put them in the box and put the top back on and put the box away. She kept one picture, a picture of Daniel standing beside a grove of eucalyptus trees on the Berkeley campus. Daniel, she said to herself. His name is Daniel. Daniel of North Carolina.

The sisters at the Catholic school sent out a letter to the parents saying the children should be taken to visit a public library and given a library card, so Mary Lily drove Olivia into town and introduced her to the library. It was an old Carnegie library that rose like a temple between frame buildings on either side. Olivia thought she was entering heaven to go through such wide painted doors and come into a room with so many books on shelves so high. “Can I come every Saturday?” she asked the librarian. “Is it all right to come here all the time?”

“There is a bookmobile that goes to your neighborhood,” the librarian said, looking at the address on the card. “It goes to the Hitchcock store on Highway Sixty-two every Saturday at ten. Haven’t you seen it there?”

“I don’t know what it is,” Olivia said. She looked at Mary Lily, but Mary Lily just shook her head.

“It’s a bus filled with books that comes around. If you take your card you can check out books without coming into town. You can tell them which books to bring and they will have them the next Saturday. If they’re in.”

“Can we go?” Olivia asked, turning to take Mary Lily’s hands. “Can we go to the bus?”

“Of course you can,” Mary Lily said. “We’ll go next Saturday.”

So Olivia’s world expanded beyond Dr. Seuss and the Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia. Every Saturday morning she would ride a pony down the gravel road to Highway 62, tie him to the fencepost, and walk down the highway to the store. If there was plenty of money that week her aunt would give her fifty cents to buy candy at the store. She would go to the bookmobile first, climbing up into the little airless space between the books, staying all morning choosing the ones she wanted. Then she would present her card and check out four books and only then would she go to the store for her candy. Then, carrying the candy and the books in her backpack, she would hike back to the gravel road and climb on her pony and ride back to her house. “Here she comes with her books,” Mary Lily would say. “I wonder what she got this week.”

“See how she rides,” the grandfather would say. “She rides without stirrups like an Indian should.”

“She is not an Indian,” Crow said. “She is a cuckoo bird.”

4

“This is North Carolina,” Olivia said. “This is where my father is.” She was sitting on the floor, playing with a puzzle map of the United States. Mary Lily was sitting at the dining room table in a straight-backed chair. It was late in the afternoon and Mary Lily was tired. It was the year she worked at the canning factory. She had on her uniform shirt and a long black shapeless skirt. Her hair was pulled back in a bun. She had imitation jade earrings in her ears. Except for the earrings there was no adornment of Mary Lily anywhere. The work at the factory was loud and unpleasant. It was the worst job Mary Lily had ever had. When she was through for the day she came home to Olivia, to watch her do homework or read her things out of the newspaper or take her to yard sales. Mary Lily loved yard sales. She would scan the newspapers for yard sales as far away as Springdale, Arkansas, or Muskogee or Broken Arrow. Olivia would poke around among the used books while Mary Lily looked for pieces of clothing and toys and utensils for the kitchen. The puzzle map of the United States was one of Mary Lily’s prize finds. She had bought it for twenty-five cents because it had a piece missing. Nebraska was missing, so Mary Lily had cut a small Nebraska from a map and glued it to a piece of cardboard.

“Where’s Nebraska?” she said now. “You haven’t lost it, have you?”

“How do you get to North Carolina?” Olivia said. “Could we go there in a car?”

“When you are sixteen years old we might go. Your father has another life now. He might not remember all these old things.”

“I am twelve years old. He will want to know where I am. I think he is thinking about me.”

“What would you say to him if you saw him?”

“I would show him my horse. I would take him to our baseball games. I bet he’d like to come to them.”

“I don’t see Nebraska anywhere. I think you lost Nebraska.”

“No, I didn’t. It’s right here.” Olivia put North Carolina back into its slot below Virginia and searched in the box for Nebraska. “Here it is,” she said. She held up the blue Nebraska. “It’s right here.”

Mary Lily reached down and touched her hair.

Girls’ baseball games in Tahlequah were wild events. They played on a field by the swimming pool and parents came and cheered and yelled and whistled. Olivia was a great but erratic hitter. She would swing at anything and pitchers tried to walk her at crucial points in tight games. Once or twice she had even managed to hit pitchouts and drive runners in. She was also a fast runner. Once she had hit the ball she would sprint around the bases, never looking to see where the ball was. This was Olivia’s Achilles’ heel in baseball, however, and she had made some devastating outs by overrunning the bases. When she was up at bat the coach would tell the girls coaching at the bases to slow her down if necessary.

Mary Lily and her married sister, May, were very proud of Olivia’s baseball prowess and never missed a game. May would bring her children and they would sit in the stands eating homemade fudge and yell and scream and cheer.

Still, the ball games often made Olivia sad. If she had made a good play or hit a home run she longed for a father to slap her on the back and say well done. She watched other girls going off with their fathers after games and thought, He didn’t see that and I might never be able to do it again. “Cut it out of the paper,” she told Mary Lily, whenever there was a mention in the Tahlequah Bugle of the scores of the games. “Someone might want to see it someday.”

An English teacher inadvertently led Olivia to find her father. The English teacher was young. It was her first year teaching high school and she was very eager and worked hard to find new things for the students to read. She was teaching Olivia’s class out of an anthology that included a story by Olivia’s aunt, Anna Hand. A story about a young girl whose mother was a drunk. The teacher was worried that the story might be too sophisticated for sophomores in high school but she was wrong. The students understood the story better than she did. There was hardly a boy or girl in the class whose life had not been touched by alcoholism.

Olivia read the story several times. Then she looked in the back to find the biography of the author. “Anna Hand,” the biography said. “Born in 1942, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The oldest of six children, Ms. Hand’s stories often deal with the trials and tribulations of family life.”

The next day Olivia waited after class to talk to her teacher. “This lady has the same name as I do,” she said. “I would like to write to her. How do you write to a writer?”

“Let’s see,” the teacher said. “There should be a copyright acknowledgment in the back. Oh, here it is. See, this is the name of her publisher. We can go to the library and find out the address and write her there. I’m so glad you want to write the author. That’s wonderful. I used to do that sometimes.”

“She’s kin to me,” Olivia said. “She has to be. She will know how to find my dad.”

5

As soon as she had the address of the publisher Olivia went to the public library and took out all of Anna Hand’s books. She took them home and read them as fast as she could, skipping from one book to the other. Then she sat down and wrote the first of the letters that would lead to her becoming a liar and cheat. All she needed was a box of stationery, a pen, and a few blank report cards from Tahlequah High.

Dear Mrs. Hand,

I think I am your niece. If you have a brother named Daniel. My mother was named Summer Deer Wagoner and she was married to Daniel Hand in 1967 in California. I have their marriage certificate. I have read all your books they have in our library and I think they are wonderful. I am enclosing a photograph of myself. If you have a brother Daniel tell him I am writing to him too. Here is my address if you would like to write me back. Please write back to me.

Yours most sincerely,
Olivia D. H. Hand

P.S. It is hard for me to write this letter. I am afraid it might startle you like a snake in the grass. I am not a snake in the grass. I am a very nice girl. I am fifteen. I’m a cheerleader and I make straight A’s. I think you would be proud to be related to me.

Dear Mr. Hand,

I hope this won’t come as too big a surprise to you. I think you are my father. If you were married to Summer Deer Wagoner. If you are the Daniel Hand on the marriage certificate to my mother then you are my father. If so, I am dying to see you and know you.

My mother died when I was born and my grandfather said I could write to you when I was sixteen years old. I am fifteen and I can’t wait any longer. I am enclosing a photograph of myself and a copy of my grades for the last six weeks so you can see I am not someone you would be ashamed to know. I don’t want anything from you. I just want you to know I’m here and maybe sometime in the future let me see you.

Yours most truly,
Olivia De Havilland
Hand, age 15
Birth date, September
21, 1968

Dear Aunt Anna,

I can’t believe you wrote back to me. I came home from school and the letter was propped up on the salt and pepper shakers waiting for me on the table. I almost fainted I was so excited. I can’t believe you are my aunt. I told my English teacher today and she said she can’t believe it either. Listen, I’ll have to write to you again and tell you everything I am thinking about. But for now I want you to know that I got the letter and I love it so much.

I am sorry it is cold there and you are having a hard time living in the city. I think it would be hard for me too. I was in Kansas City once and I have been in Tulsa many times. It is not good to have that much noise morning, noon and night. Maybe you should go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at the paintings. I have this book about a girl who went there to live when she ran away from home. They didn’t find her for months. To tell the truth everything I know about New York I know from books. I bet it’s not as bad as you think. You ought to see Tahlequah. Talk about dead. You could die of boredom here in the winter. But it’s always beautiful here the rest of the year.

I’ll write more later.

Love,
Your Niece, Olivia

Dear Father,

I cannot tell you how much it meant to me to hear from you. If there is any way you could come here to see me sometime it would mean a great deal to me. Here are my newest grades. Glad you liked the other ones.

Love,
Olivia

Dear Aunt Anna,

I’m sorry it won’t work out for me to come up there and visit you but I think you are right. It will be better if you come here and see me and see what my life is like. It might give you something to write about. We have a museum with the history of our people in it. Of course, it is only half my history. I guess you could call me a halfbreed, couldn’t you? Well, it turned out all right for Cher, didn’t it? So I guess it can turn out all right for me. Especially with you writing to me.

I love you,
Your Niece, Olivia

Dear Aunt Anna,

It’s sooooo boring on a Sunday afternoon in Tahlequah. It’s boring all the time but especially on Sunday. We went to Kansas City on a bus to see the art museum. There was a show there from Washington, D.C. I was thinking of you constantly while I was there. I kept thinking I bet she would like this or that. There was a picture called The Girl in the Red Hat. I kept thinking this means more than just that. It was about something you could never forget once you saw the expression on the girl’s face. She is waiting for something, I told myself. Something is going to happen.

We are going to study the pictures in class next week and talk about them. We didn’t get home until twelve last night and Aunt Mary Lily had to come down to the school to get me. I didn’t get to sleep until two. I guess going to the city Friday and Saturday makes Sunday especially bad for me.

Have you talked to Dad lately? I have written to him twice but he only wrote me back once. I guess he’s pretty busy this time of year with his business and everything. I guess Christmas is about to come to New York City, isn’t it? Don’t take that for a hint to mean I want a present. You have already given me the greatest present of my life by writing to me. Your loving (not so bored now) niece.

Olivia

Dear Father,

Of course I understand why you can’t come now. I bet it’s really hard running a business in this day and age. Don’t worry about me. I am doing fine as you can see from my grade report. I guess you could say I am a book worm. Well, I guess that runs in the Hand family. Anyway, I love having you write to me and I’ll be here when you get time to come and see me.

Your loving daughter,
Olivia

P.S. Here is my new school picture. It’s pretty silly. I always end up clowning around when they take them. Could you send me one of you if you have one and if you have time?

Those were the letters that were mailed. There were other letters that were not mailed, letters Olivia knew better than to mail but could not throw away. She kept them in the bottom of her cedar chest, underneath the hand-loomed blankets that had come down to her from her mother.

Dear Father,

My friend, Bobby Tree, and his father took me deer hunting yesterday. I wonder if you hunt deer there. I had a rifle of my own to take with me. A Winchester that belonged to my uncle when he was my age. He was my uncle that was killed on a motorcycle. I am a good shot and can hit five bottles in a row when my grandfather sets them up on a post for me.

I got the first deer. I guess you can’t imagine me killing a deer, especially without a license. We don’t pay much attention to licenses here. It’s our land, all the land we have left after you kept North Carolina. I guess you know the whole state of North Carolina belonged to the Cherokee nation until they were sent out on the Trail of Tears. Half of them died on that. The ones that lived are here. Well, back to the hunt, I was in a blind with Bobby. It was a bad blind because his father had taken the best one. They really wanted the deer. They wanted it to eat. You don’t know anything about that if you are rich and live in a city. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that. Look, I was drinking beer with them last night and I’m in a pretty strange mood for me today.

The deer I shot was an old buck with beautiful antlers. They are going to clean the antlers for me and Grandfather will mount them for my room. I am putting off what happened when we cut into the deer. It felt like it wasn’t dead yet, the stomach and blood got all over our hands and the entrails, the intestines, spilled out. I didn’t care. It was no different than killing a bird or anything you need to eat. It is a kinder death than getting old as the hills like my grandfather and barely able to hear and no one pays any attention to you anymore. Father, I would like to be there with you when you get old and help you if you need it but if you keep treating me like this then you will be alone when you are old and I won’t know you.

The deer lay on the colored leaves, green and red and orange and yellow, all wet on the forest floor, and silver clouds moved across the sky and the sun could not be seen. It was very still and no birds sang. They had flown from death. The deer I killed lay on the forest floor and we cut it open and mutilated it. I was Cherokee then and no kin to you and I thought of you and hated you. I hated Aunt Anna too for writing to me and getting my hopes up but never coming to see me. She said one time she would send me a ticket to New York City to visit her but she broke her promise. She said she was sick. She said she would make up for it by coming here but she hasn’t done it.

The meat is in the freezer now. Part of it is in the freezer behind Mr. Tree’s trailer and part of it is downtown in a freezer for Grandmother and Granddaddy and Aunt Mary Lily and me. The blood was everywhere. It was on my boots and on the leaves of the forest floor. I was the killer and the bringer of food to people. I could stay here and marry Bobby and never see you. I could give up my hopes of education and go on and forget your bad blood inside of me. I could go on and be a Cherokee but your bad blood won’t let me.

I think I’ll go sleep in the woods alone tonight. I might spend the night where the deer fell and build a small fire or maybe not have a fire to warm me. There isn’t a thing out there that can hurt me. The things that hurt me are people. I am very young to know so much about the world but I have only had old people around me all my life so what do you expect me to do?

Your daughter, Olivia

Dear Father,

I have fallen in love with a boy but not really in love. Only I think about him all the time now. I think he must look like you did when you were young. Because he is strong and can ride better than anyone in Oklahoma his age and can calf rope better than the men. He lives in a trailer with his dad because his mom is dead and there isn’t a woman to take care of them and make them a home. The trailer is in a trailer park two blocks from our school and is nice like a neighborhood. It has been there since the Second World War. They call it Jones Park. I was over there the other night and helped them cook hamburgers for supper and then we sat around and talked about everything. I told them about North Carolina and that you are coming to see me soon. Aunt Anna said she would come soon. She wrote to me five times this year but I have told you that. Now I have to go. I was going to tell you my dream but I will not. This is silly. Well, you will never see it anyway.

Dear Aunt Anna,

I think I am in love with a boy. The boy I have been going with. He took me to Kayo’s room on Running Deer and we went in and lay down on the bed and I almost let him do anything to me, then I remembered my mother and how she ended up. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let anyone do that to me. Stick it in and maybe kill me. I don’t have anyone to talk to. If I told Aunt Mary Lily this she’d kill me. I am so different from the girls here. None of them read anything but the paper or movie magazines and the rich girls are snotty to me. I liked the books you sent me. Especially the one about Mahatma Gandhi. I have read it twice and am reading it again. I also like The Little Prince, although I guess that’s a children’s book. I have seen the desert. We drove to New Mexico to see some friends of my aunt’s. They live on the side of a red mountain. In the afternoons it was so beautiful, everything would turn purple. This purple light was on everything. Anything that was white was turned purple. The man we were visiting is a painter. He and his wife asked us to come back but we never have. Maybe you would like to go there with me someday.

Say hello to Dad for me and tell him I’m waiting to get to know him. I am still making all A’s. Well, I won’t mail this. It’s too mixed up. It’s stupid but I liked writing it.

Dear Dad,

This morning I went riding at dawn. It was drizzling rain by the time I had gone two miles. The hills behind me were full of mist. It is beginning to be spring here, my favorite time of year. I need to see you so much. My heart is bursting with the things I want to say to you. I am a very nice girl and everyone loves me. I have brown hair. I don’t look much like an Indian. I would never embarrass you. I know I will never mail this letter so I can go on and tell you my dream.

We were in a canoe together, on a wide river like the Arkansas below Lee Creek. We were together in the canoe and I was all dressed up in my new green suit Aunt Mary Lily bought me. I had on high-heeled shoes and a beautiful white blouse with lace down the front. I looked so nice and you were taking me to meet my cousins and water was all around us. Finally, we came to a curve in the river and I slid out of the boat and got into the water and I was pulling the boat along. I still had my shoes on. Somehow they did not fall off into the water when I swam. I was sorry I had gotten all messed up but in a way I didn’t care, because I looked behind me and there you were, smiling at me as if it didn’t matter that I was all wet. We were going somewhere together, maybe to visit my mother’s grave, but I doubt that. I think we were just riding along in the canoe, watching the trees. Birch trees were all around us, yellow and green and white, and the light came down between the branches and you were smiling at me.

When I woke up I was weeping. I was crying like a baby from that dream. Please come to see me or let me come there. Is that too much to ask?

6

It was Mary Lily who supplied Olivia with the report-card forms on which she was creating the straight-A student the Hands were becoming interested in. Anna Hand thought she had finally found a child who had inherited her genes for language. Daniel Hand thought he had miraculously fathered a child who was smart in school. He couldn’t help being excited by the prospect of a child who did well in school. Daniel had been kicked out of three preparatory schools and had never even been able to finish the University of North Carolina. He never finished college because he was spoiled and indulged and drank too much but he thought it was because he was dumb. With the marvelous intuition of the young, Olivia had found the perfect way to make the Hand family think they needed her.

Mary Lily didn’t mind giving Olivia the first handful of report-card forms. Olivia was with her at the office of the high school, where Mary Lily had a Saturday job cleaning the offices. The forms were sitting on a shelf with many others. “Can I have these?” Olivia asked. “I’ll just take a few.”

“Okay,” Mary Lily said. “Just a few.”

 

By the time Olivia needed more forms Mary Lily had caught on to what she was up to. Olivia talked so much that sooner or later she told everyone around her everything she knew. “I need some more report-card forms,” she said one afternoon. She and Mary Lily were sitting at the kitchen table eating a sack of doughnuts Mary Lily had picked up on her way home from work. “Will you get me some on Saturday?”

“No. I won’t do it anymore.”

“He’s a rich man. If he thinks I’m worth it, he’ll send me to college.”

“No. We won’t do it anymore. We won’t take things.”

“They’re only pieces of paper. They aren’t worth anything. It isn’t stealing.”

“It’s stealing. It’s a sin.”

“Rich people steal things all the time. They stole North Carolina from the Cherokee. I only need two more. Two or three. That’s all.”

“No. I won’t do it.”

“Then I’ll do it. I’ll go in Saturday and help you clean. I’ll take them. Then you won’t have to tell the priest.”

“No. I won’t do it.”

“Please, Aunt Mary Lily. It’s so important. It’s my future. All you have to do is take me with you.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it’s good.” Mary Lily stuffed the remainder of a doughnut in her mouth, thinking of the trouble it could make. She could lose her job, Olivia could get caught, she would have to tell the priest. She chewed the doughnut. Olivia watched her with pleading eyes. Mary Lily began to change her mind, persuaded by the sugar and the loss of North Carolina, not to mention North America. “I’ll let you go with me,” she said. “But only take one. One or two. You’re going to get in trouble doing this.”

“No, I’m not. I just want them to send us some money.”

So, the following Saturday Olivia went with Mary Lily to the office and took a handful of report-card forms and began to think about the computer. I could change the grades on the computer, she decided. They would never know the difference. They have so much to do they probably wouldn’t even know I did it. They couldn’t prove it even if they found out. I make good grades. All I’m changing is the math. By the time they find out I’ll be in North Carolina being rich.

Olivia kept the blank forms in a cedar chest with the un-mailed letters. It was a chest Mary Lily had bought at a fair when Olivia was a baby. It opened on brass piano hinges and had a brass pole to hold the top open. The outside had been sanded and shellacked but the inside was unfinished and smelled like the woods in winter, when snow is on the ground and the creek is frozen to a trickle. Mary Lily kept Summer Deer’s possessions in the chest. Three quilts, a brown leather vest with silver fittings and fringe (the vest had hung down to the tops of Summer Deer’s boots when she wore it with no shirt and no brassiere in the heat of summer in San Francisco), a small red velvet box that contained three pieces of jewelry. A small gold watch Summer Deer had bought at a pawn shop in Tahlequah, a golden chain with glass beads, and a thick gold wedding ring with writing inside. DH to SW, 1967, then a peace sign. Olivia would put on the necklace and the watch and the ring and look at herself in the mirror, then take them off and put them back in the box and replace them underneath the quilts.

There were other things in the chest. A black dancing dress, a pair of ballet shoes, a cheerleader sweater with a dark red T intersected by a warbonnet, a notebook from a biology class, and a history textbook with five names on the first page.

7

It was several weeks before Mary Lily had time to go to confession and talk to the priest about the report-card forms. “She took some more of them,” Mary Lily said. “I’m sure she did.”

“She shouldn’t have left Saint Alphonsus. I wish you had been able to stand firm.”

“I couldn’t help it. She doesn’t listen. She says she can’t go to college if she didn’t change. She wants to go to college. It’s all she thinks about.”

“Is she still seeing that boy?”

“He’s a good boy. She doesn’t love him. She doesn’t love anyone but herself. She’s like her mother was. Like our father, cold.”

“You are doing a good job, Mary Lily. You’re doing what you can.”

“I’ll make her put them back. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Good. You’re a good woman.”

“Do I have a penance?”

“Oh, yes, five Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers. Bless you, my child. Good child.” He slid the window shut and listened to her shuffling around pulling herself together. Shook his head. The things they thought of as sin. They should have been in Chicago. Father, forgive us. Dear people, such dear people, I do not deserve to be here with these dear people. I don’t deserve this easy job.

Mary Lily went home full of resolve. She called Olivia into the kitchen and told her she had to give back the grade-report forms. “Tomorrow I will put them back where they belong. Then it’s over.”

“I’m not doing anything wrong,” Olivia said. “I’m just making sure I can go to college.”

“You could go to college. There’s a college here. Anybody can go to Northeastern. You get loans. You can go.”

“I want to go to another school, somewhere I’ve never been.”

“What did you do with them?”

“I put them away. There were hundreds in the box. They’ll never miss a few.”

“It’s stealing.”

“No, it’s what I have to do.” Olivia stood in front of Mary Lily and looked her in the eye. “I want to go up there and see them. I want to know who I am.”

“They don’t want to know you. If they wanted to they would have come to see you. Just because they write to you doesn’t mean they want you up there.”

“They will come. Wait and see.” Olivia left the kitchen and walked out across the backyard and into the barn. She took a bridle from a peg and climbed the fence to the corral where two old mares were standing flank to flank against the fence. “Come on,” she said. “You, Chaney, it won’t hurt you to get some exercise.” She slipped the bridle on the mare’s head and carefully adjusted the bit in its teeth. Then she led the horse into the yard and pulled herself up onto its back. “Okay, I know your teeth hurt. I won’t use it if you don’t make me. Come on, let’s go to Baron Ford. You know the way.” She led the horse, half by the bridle and half by its mane, out of the yard and down the gravel road in the opposite direction of the highway. The gravel turned to dirt, then led back across a meadow to Baron Ford Ranch where Olivia had worked as a groom one summer. As soon as the mare sensed the direction, she shivered with excitement and began to run. Olivia moved her heels down under the mare’s body and lay down against her neck and forgot lost fathers and Mary Lily’s sad disapproving face. “Let’s go,” she whispered to Chaney. “You are a yearling. Take me to the king.”

Of course, she wasn’t going to a king, although Baron Ford Ranch was as close to a palace as anything in northeast Oklahoma, two thousand acres of pastureland and woods, with a forty-room mansion and an absentee landlord and air-conditioned stables for the horses. It employed two fulltime grooms and five stable boys and the weekend services of a landscape architect and a forest ranger. One of the stable boys was a young man named Bobby Tree, whose ancestors were Assiniboin hunters and Italian immigrants. In another world he might have been a baseball player or a rugby star but he had grown up in a trailer park in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, so he had learned to calf rope and barrel race instead. Bobby was so good with horses that the grown men at Baron Ford deferred to him. The chief groom, Kayo, was his uncle. He let Bobby have the run of the place just for the pleasure of watching him grow up. If there was such a thing as a prince in a world this poor, Bobby Tree was a prince. He had things just about the way he wanted them. Except for being in love with Olivia Hand. No one had things the way they wanted them with her. She walked around Tahlequah High School as if she owned the place. Bobby had seen her first when she was a freshman and he was a senior and he had been in love with her ever since. He had been in an upstairs window of the school and seen her get out of her aunt’s car and come walking up the sidewalk to the front door, walking as if she was twenty years old, as if nobody was even around, as if she didn’t care if anyone liked her or not. She always looked to Bobby as if she was thinking about something else. Even when he managed to get introduced to her, even when he took her to a rodeo and won three events with her watching, even when he managed finally after seven months to get her onto a bed and make her come, after all of that she still acted as if she didn’t care if he called her up or not. All she ever talked about was whether or not she would get pregnant and how he had to pay for the abortion. With every girl in Tahlequah in love with him he had had to go and fall for this snooty little kid, Olivia. “All she talks about is her rich relatives in North Carolina,” he said to Kayo. “I get sick of hearing it.”

“Maybe you aren’t doing it right,” Kayo said. “If it don’t make her want you.”

“It isn’t that. She just goes off and forgets it. She’s calling the shots on me, that’s how it is. She always says she’s studying. Then she comes over here.”

“Well, that’s women,” Kayo had answered. “Stick to horses is my advice.”

Bobby Tree was sitting on a fence talking to Kayo when Olivia came riding up. “Here she comes,” Kayo said. “Hold on to your heart.”

“Hello, princess,” Bobby said. “Long time no see.” She reined the horse up to the fence.

“I started to jump her but I was afraid to do it. She’s got bad teeth. You can’t even use the rein.”

“You ought to shoot her,” Kayo said. “Or turn her out. She’s too old to ride.”

“She likes me to ride her as long as I stay away from her teeth.”

“Well, come on,” Bobby said. “I’ll get you a real horse.”

“Can I leave her here? You got anything in this pasture?”

“Nothing that would do her any harm. You want to see Solomon go through his paces?”

“No, I just want to ride. There’re two hours of daylight. You want to ride with me?”

“If Kayo says I can. Can we take off, boss?”

“Sure, go on. But get the horses back by dark.” Olivia dismounted and took the saddle and bridle off Chaney and she and Bobby walked toward the stables.

“So what you been doing?” Bobby said. “I been missing you.”

“I’ve been taking care of my future. I’m trying to get my dad to come and see me.”

“That’s still going on? Well, he’ll show up. I know he will. You want to ride the Arabians? They need a workout.”

“Sure. Let’s do it.” They walked down the open space between the stalls and found the Arabians and began to saddle them, calling to each other from stall to stall.

“He’ll come see you. He’ll go crazy when he sees how nice you are.”

“Yeah, he might. I don’t even care anymore. I just want to make sure he pays for my college.” She tightened the cinch on the saddle and led the Arabian out of the stall. He was prancing, getting itchy. She could hear Bobby behind her. Now they would go riding. Now they would ride. “Don’t talk about it,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Where do you want to go?” he asked. “You want to go to the place on the river?” He was beside her now, shoving open the gate. She moved in front of him, keeping a short rein on the gelding, as the horse was jittery from being kept in a stall. “Sure,” she said. “Let’s go. I’ve been missing you too.” She allowed the horse to prance, then gave him his rein and let him run. The great muscles stretched out beneath her thighs.

Kayo watched them from the office door. “Hot stuff,” he said to his assistant. “Shit, I’d give anything to be that age again.”

Olivia led the way for a while, back across the meadow and down into a pasture of winter wheat. Bobby was behind her, reining in, letting her get in front of him. When she stopped at the far side of the field he turned his horse loose and rode to her side. “You lead now,” she said. “I don’t know the turns of the path.” He moved out in front of her and led his horse to the entrance to the woods. A bridle path opened before them, a path Bobby had groomed the week before. He had spent five days cutting the low branches and digging roots and making a manicured path that the owner of Baron Ford would probably never even see. The whole time he was working Bobby had thought of Olivia riding there. “I cleared this,” he called back over his shoulder, and she nodded her head but didn’t seem to hear. “I cleared this goddamn path,” he called again. “I worked my ass off. Say you think it looks great.”

“It looks great,” she called back. “I knew you did it. It looks like you.”

He stopped beneath an oak tree. “What do you mean, it looks like me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It looks nice, like you did it right.” She moved nearer to him. The flanks of their horses touched. He leaned out of the saddle and kissed her on the mouth. “There’re some things I want to do to you,” he said. “Goddamn, I think about you all the time. Do you know that?”

“I know. Okay,” she added. “Let’s go do it then. If I get knocked up you have to pay for the abortion.”

“If you get knocked up I will.”

They rode through the woods until the path came out at the bottom of a hill that led upward to where a modern house stood on a rise overlooking the river. It wasn’t the main house. It was a river house so the owner of Baron Ford could see the sunset on the river in case he ever came to Tahlequah and got tired of staying in the main house. Bobby had made himself a key from one Kayo had lent him when he helped out cutting bushes on the lawn. He had it on a key ring in his pocket.

They rode around to the river side and tied the horses to a hitching post near the boat dock. Then they walked up the steps to the house.

“You’ll get fired if they catch us,” Olivia said.

“They won’t catch us. Kayo knows where we’ve gone. He won’t let me get in trouble.”

“Does he know we do it?”

“He knows I’m in love with you.” He kept on walking, not looking at her as he spoke.

“Why are you in love with me? I don’t give you anything you need.”

“Yes, you do. You give me everything.”

“I don’t give you anything. I’m just selfish. I only think about myself.”

“You’re fine. You’re the one I want. The only one I want.” They were at the top of the stairs now, on a wide wooden patio that looked down across acres of deserted land and a winding fork of the Illinois River. The patio was furnished with wooden settees with yellow cushions. Bobby picked up a cushion from a settee and shook the leaves from it and put it back down upon the wooden stand. He wasn’t sure where to start. You never knew what to do with Olivia. You never knew where you stood. She might say one thing and do another. She might change her mind. I could pick her up and break her in two, he thought. I could fuck her anytime I wanted to, but she’s not scared of me. Well, she doesn’t need to be. She’s got the pussy and she calls the shots, just like Kayo said. As long as they have the pussy they get to tell us what to do. He hung his head, looked down at the river, waited to see if she’d make a move.

“How come he never comes down here anymore?” she asked. “Why does this just sit here?”

“He’s in Chicago doing business. He’s a nice guy. He can ride like a son-of-a-bitch when he has time. You ought to see him ride. He’s a good guy. He’s going to start a polo team. He’s sending us some polo ponies.”

“Well, I’d live here if it was mine. I’d have a helicopter and come here and spend the night.”

“You want to go inside?”

“Not yet. I think I’ll stay out here.” She walked over to a railing, inspected some moss that was growing up in a groove on a railing board. Bobby walked to her, touched her arm, the skin of her arm made his throat tight, made him tremble. “Oh, baby,” he said. “I think about you all the time.” She turned around to him then and let him take her into his arms. “Uh huh,” she said. “Oh, yes. Yes indeed.”

He took her hand, led her toward the door. They went into the high-ceilinged glass-walled room and moved across the fine blue rugs and found a bedroom and a bed and sat down upon the edge and Bobby began to undo her blouse. Olivia didn’t care about any of it now. Didn’t care if he wore a rubber. Didn’t care if they got caught. Didn’t give a damn about a thing in the world but having him inside her and keeping him there.

“Take your clothes off,” she said.

“You take them off.”

“Okay. I will.” Then they made love on the blue silk coverlet of the bed and on the floor and on a straight-backed desk chair. They made love with awkwardness and seriousness and hot young murderous desire. They made love until the sun had left the sky and the blue and lavender lights of evening had completely faded and the moon was riding eastward through the clouds.

“When was your period?” he said. “Are we in trouble?”

“No. It’s okay. If I didn’t think it was okay I wouldn’t have done it. I’m not crazy, you know.”

“You ought to go to Planned Parenthood. I’ve had enough of this. This is Russian roulette. I don’t want you getting pregnant. I don’t want some doctor cutting on you.”

“Okay.” She lay back against the blue linen sheets. Stretched her hands across the fine damask-covered down pillows, moved her legs against his own.

“Okay what? Okay, you’ll go?”

“Yeah, I’ll go.”

“When will you go?”

“I’ll go tomorrow. I’ve been meaning to.”

“You want me to go with you?”

“No. It’s okay. Frieda will go with me. She used to work there. She had a job there last year.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.” She sat up and began to put her clothes back on. He sat across the room from her, smoking a cigarette. His legs were trembling. She always did that to him. She was the strangest girl he had ever known. She never called him up. Sometimes she wouldn’t even talk to him when he called. She acted as if she was twenty-five years old. When she wanted him she came and got him.

Olivia watched him. She loved it when he trembled. He was beautiful, sitting in the dark room, smoking and looking at her. He’s so pretty, she was thinking. I can’t help wanting to do it with him. I can’t help it because he’s so good-looking and so tough and he never makes mistakes with the horses.

Outside, the Arabians were neighing, stamping their hooves. They had been making unhappy noises for half an hour but Olivia and Bobby hadn’t heard them.

“They want to go,” Bobby said.

“Yeah, they’re tired of being tied up. We’d better go.”

“Yeah, I guess we had.”

They walked down together to where the horses were tied. The moon was moving through a line of cirrus clouds. The moon was very full. “It’s a perfect night,” Bobby said. “Everything’s always perfect with you.”

“You just think that. I didn’t make the moon.”

“Maybe you did. I might not know it was there if you weren’t here. I might be playing cards or something, shooting pool.”

“You shouldn’t waste so much time. You ought to go back to school.”

“I don’t like school. I don’t like to be inside.” He was close beside her. Their arms touched as they walked. Nothing they said mattered now. Now words didn’t matter. For a while words could not harm or part them. The smell of the river was in the air, moonlight and river and honeysuckle and pine trees, night smells and sounds and the beautiful Arabian horses, stamping and waiting to be ridden.

They untied the horses and walked them to the path, then mounted and rode through the woods. The trees cast elaborate shadows on the ground. The horses were subdued by the moonlight, cautious and quiet, remembering panthers and coyotes and bears. Olivia and Bobby were quiet also. They came to the pasture and galloped the rest of the way to the stables. Then Bobby unsaddled the horses and led them into their stalls.

“Horses shouldn’t be penned up,” Olivia said. “If I was rich I’d buy this place and turn all the horses loose.”

“No one knows what they would do if they get rich. I had a friend who married a rich girl in Tulsa. He went crazy being rich.”

“Who was that?”

“A guy I played ball with in high school. He married Ellie Baumgarten. They own a lot of land in Tulsa.”

“I don’t need to get rich. I just want to get out of here and get somewhere where something’s happening.”

“Things happen here. Things happened tonight.”

“Yeah, I know. I better not get knocked up, that’s all I can say.”

“You’re going to go to Planned Parenthood, aren’t you? You said you would.”

“I’m going tomorrow. Or Monday. I’ll call Frieda and go on Monday.”

An hour later Bobby delivered Olivia to her door. They had left Chaney in a pasture and he had driven her home. “You going to be in trouble?” he asked.

“Not if I was with you. They think you’re the hottest thing since sliced bread. Well, it was great.” She took his arm and they walked toward the steps to the kitchen. “I’ll come over and get Chaney this weekend. I might come tomorrow.”

“I’ll take care of her. I’ll put her in a barn.”

“Well, it’s been great. Thanks for letting me ride the Arabian.”

“I hope those guys come see you. Your dad and your aunt and all of them. Shit, I can’t imagine they don’t want to know you. You’re the greatest.”

“Well, you think so anyway.”

“Olivia.” It was Mary Lily standing in the door in her bathrobe. “You and Bobby come on in here. It’s ten o’clock at night.”

“I got to go,” Bobby said, and backed down the path. “Hi, Mary Lily. Thanks for letting her go riding. She’s a hotshot. She’s a pistol.”

“Hi, Bobby,” Mary Lily said, and held open the door. Olivia climbed the wooden stairs and went on in. “I rode an Arabian,” she said to her aunt. “They’re really something. Listen, they’re going to get some polo ponies. Mr. Shibuta’s starting a polo team.”

“What have you and Bobby been doing all this time?” Mary Lily folded her hands into her nightgown, searched Olivia’s face.

“Nothing. We went riding. Then we had to groom the horses. Well, I’m dead. I’m going to bed. I’m about to fall asleep standing here.”

8

The next day was Saturday. Olivia woke up thinking about Bobby. She pulled her knees up to her stomach and rubbed her hips with her hands. She was getting horny again just thinking about it. I guess I’ll go back over there today and get Chaney, she decided. I guess we might as well make a weekend of it. I couldn’t get pregnant four days after I stopped bleeding. I don’t care if I do. If I do we’ll go to Tulsa and get an abortion. He’s making plenty of money. We could do it.

She wriggled deeper down into the covers, thinking of sitting across his lap on the chair, doing it. That was great, she decided, that was the greatest of all. Well, I’m getting up. Goddamn, I’m starving.

She got out of bed, pulled on a flannel bathrobe and a pair of socks, and padded into the kitchen to find something to eat. She stuck two pieces of bread into the toaster and began to cut an orange. The phone was ringing. That’s him, she decided. He probably woke up horny too.”

It was a woman’s voice on the phone, a voice Olivia had never heard. “Olivia,” the voice said. “Is that you?”

“It’s me. Who’s this?”

“I’m your Aunt Anna. The one you’ve been writing to. I want to come and see you tomorrow. I can’t wait another day. Will that be all right? Could someone meet me in Tulsa? Is Tulsa near there?”

“Oh, yes,” Olivia said. “We’ll come. I can’t believe it’s you.”

“I should have come months ago. I made a reservation on a plane for tomorrow. Is your grandmother there? Is there someone I should talk to? Oh, my darling child, I’m dying to meet you.”

“Oh, God. Wait a minute. I don’t believe this. You’re coming here?”

“As fast as I can get there if you’ll let me. There isn’t anything to worry about. We’ll love each other. I don’t care who you are, what you look like. I am coming there so we can know each other. If you’ll let me.”

“Of course I will. We can come to Tulsa. We go up there all the time. We can come whenever you want us to.”

“Tomorrow afternoon. Look, is there someone else I need to talk to? Is your aunt there? I guess I ought to ask her, don’t you think so?” The voice was so sweet, so kind, so gentle. There was nothing to fear from it and Olivia wasn’t fearful. The voice was right. There was nothing to fear.

Then Mary Lily got on the phone and took down the details and later that day Olivia drove into town and bought a dress to wear to meet the plane, a thin white cotton dress with lavender and green flowers.

“It costs too much,” Mary Lily said. “You don’t need that dress to meet her.”

“Yes I do. And I want you to get dressed up too. We have to make a good impression.”

“I don’t have anything to wear but my own clothes.”

“You’ve got that gray suit you had for when the archbishop came.”

“I don’t know if it still fits me.”

“Please wear it. Please do this for me.” Olivia moved in close. Put her hands on her aunt’s face. That had never failed to get her her way and it did not fail now. Mary Lily found her gray suit and Olivia shook it out and inspected it and the next morning, after neither of them had had a bit of sleep, they got dressed and drove to Tulsa and waited for the plane.

Then Olivia’s father’s sister Anna got off the plane and took Olivia in her arms and hugged Mary Lily and began to talk very fast, being so charming, so vastly, endlessly charming, that even Mary Lily began to soften up and unbend. Every time Mary Lily would stiffen up and get scared, Olivia’s Aunt Anna would pour on the charm. The charm she exuded was real. She was terribly glad to be there. She was charmed and excited and thrilled to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma, claiming her niece.

“I want to know everything,” she said. “I want to know everything I’ve missed.”

“There’s not much to know,” Olivia said. “I wrote you all about myself.”

“I should have come months ago. I should have come the day I got a letter.”

Then the three of them got into Mary Lily’s old Pontiac and started driving back to Tahlequah. They were sitting together in the front seat. Every now and then Anna’s hand would reach for Olivia’s hand and touch it. She’s here, Olivia thought. My famous aunt. But she’s old, a lot older than I thought she would be. She’s as old as Kayo. I wonder how old she is. I better not ask.

“I can’t believe I’m here,” Anna said. “I can’t believe it took me so long to come.”

“Is my dad coming? Is he coming too?”

“I don’t know, honey. If he doesn’t I’ll take you there. Will you go with me to Charlotte?” Mary Lily speeded up at that, began to drive the Pontiac at breakneck speed down the two-lane highway leading from Tulsa to the Indian nation.

The next day Olivia stayed home from school and took Anna driving around the country. She took her to downtown Tahlequah to see the Indian museum and out to the replica of the Indian village and to the Methodist camp on the river and drove her around the outskirts of Baron Ford Ranch. “They’re going to have a polo team,” she said. “This friend of mine is going to be on it. I guess he’ll be the star.”

“Is he your boyfriend?”

“No. I don’t want any boyfriends. I just want to go to college and get out of here. Do you think my dad is coming down and meet me? Or not?”

“He’ll come. He’s just afraid, Olivia. Men aren’t as brave as women are. Haven’t you noticed that?”

“The men I know are brave. The ones I know aren’t afraid to see their own kids.”

“He’ll come,” Anna said. “And when he does I hope he’ll beg you to forgive him.”

“I don’t want him to beg me for anything. I’m not mad at him. I’m just tired of waiting.” They were standing beside a creekbed near the ranch. Olivia bent over and picked up a flat smooth rock. She held it out in the palm of her hand. Anna watched her in a kind of wonder. Everything she did seemed charged with meaning, purpose, intent. She was a strange girl, half child, half woman, half mystery, half light. Water and light, Anna knew. Starcarbon, that’s all we are. Olivia broke the spell. She sailed the rock out across the creekbed and scared a crow up from its perch on a tree.

The waiting wasn’t over either. It was February before Daniel invited Olivia to visit North Carolina. It was an awkward, unsettling meeting and Olivia was relieved when it was over. Then, as soon as she was home, she began to dream of going to North Carolina to live. She wrote to Anna of her plans and called her several times to talk for hours in hushed hopeful terms. Anna was her support in her dealings with the Hands. Then, in November, without saying goodbye to anyone, in secret and with great haste, Anna took her own life. Knowing it would harm other people and Olivia among them, she died as she had lived, alone and in her own way, without giving a damn who liked it or what happened next.

When she learned of Anna’s death, Olivia got on a plane and flew to Charlotte and stayed several weeks. In their grief the Hands grabbed hold of her and thought they loved her. Whether they needed her or not, now they would not let her go. When she returned to Tahlequah it had been decided she would come to Charlotte and go to school with Jessie.

It was a terrible decision, a stupid destructive thing to do. To take her away from a place which had nurtured and protected her and transplant her to a world that would never really accept her and which she would never understand or be able to love.

Still, there was no stopping her once the Hands told her she could come. She was tired of Tahlequah. She wanted some excitement and she wanted to be rich.

There was one problem. Now a transcript of her grades would be sent to Charlotte.

9

“I have to fix those grades,” Olivia told Bobby, as soon as it was settled that she was going to Charlotte to live. “I have to do it before they send my records. Will you help me?”

“What do we have to do?”

“We have to change the computer.”

“Goddamn, Olivia. We could go to jail for that.”

“For changing some grades on a high-school computer? There’s nothing to it. Anyone could break into Tahlequah High. They don’t even have a guard at night.”

“Why don’t you just tell them the truth?”

“Are you kidding? Well, if you won’t help I’ll do it myself.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. Why can’t you do it when your aunt goes in to work? You told me once you were going to do that.”

“She won’t let me. She doesn’t want me to leave here.”

“Neither do I. That’s another thing. Why should I help you leave me?”

“Well, will you? Will you or not?”

“Okay, I will.”

 

The following night they went over to the high school and jimmied a window and climbed in and Bobby held the flashlight while Olivia keyed into the computer and changed her grades. At first she made all the grades into A’s, then she thought better of it and changed a few math grades to B’s. When she had figured out a transcript that satisfied most of the lies she had told the Hands, she turned off the computer and she and Bobby locked the window behind them and went out through the gym door.

“Piece of cake,” she said, when they were back in the car. “I won’t forget you did this, Bobby. When you want a favor you can come to me.”

“Next time ask me something hard,” he said. “Like what I’m supposed to do with this thing in my trousers.”

“I know what to do with that,” she said. “But you better have a rubber.”

Then it was time for her to leave. On a Saturday in the early morning Bobby came to tell her goodbye. It was so early mist was still on the ground. Silver half-frozen water closed in around the house, covered the swing beneath the oak, muffled every sound. Olivia stood in the doorway looking out on the mist and waiting. When Bobby drove up she ran down the stairs and got into the car and gave him a crazy jerky kiss.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“I’m okay. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where you want to go?”

“I don’t care. Go to the lake. I wouldn’t mind going to the lake.”

They drove across the Arkansas line to Lake Wedington and sat in the car and watched the mist settle onto the water and kept on watching until it lifted.

“Well, I guess this is it,” Bobby said.

“Yeah. I guess so. I’ll be coming back to see everyone.” She sat with her hands on her legs, desiring him, but fighting it. I guess I’d get knocked up, she decided. That would be about my luck. I’d be knocked up in North Carolina where I don’t know how to get an abortion.

A wind was blowing the leaves of the oaks, the scarce yellow leaves of the walnuts. A few leaves had blown onto the surface of the lake and floated there.

“You won’t come back,” he said.

“Yes, I will.” The wind was picking up, blowing the fog and the leaves across the water.

“I’ll write to you.”

“Good. I want you to.” He reached for her but she wouldn’t let him kiss her. It was over. She was leaving now. Leaving the woods and the lake and Bobby and the smell of saddles and Camel cigarettes. It will be real clean where I am going, she thought. The cars will be clean and smell like Aunt Anna and her perfume. I’m going to get me some of that perfume. I guess you have to go to New York City to get it.

“We’re going to Switzerland in the summer,” she said, unfolding her hands, spreading them out on her knees. “They all go there all the time. To Europe and Paris and Switzerland.”

“Ray Faubus went with his band,” Bobby said. “He said the food was terrible. He said he couldn’t get anything to eat he liked.” He paused. “Well, I guess you’ll be in better places than Ray was.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, rolled down the window, lit one. The wind was really blowing now, bending the branches. Bobby started the motor and drove back to town.

10

The first month she was in Charlotte Olivia was too busy to think about Tahlequah. Her mind raced through the days, cataloging people, trying to find out who to be. At the private school where she was enrolled she pretended to be a brainy eccentric who couldn’t settle down. At home she pretended to be a loving sister to Jessie, an awestruck grandchild to her grandparents, an interested listener to her aunts and uncles and cousins and their friends. For a couple of weeks it was a pretty convincing performance and almost convinced Olivia herself. Then the blackbirds in her head started singing. Bullshit, bullshit, they came singing. What is all this bullshit? What are these people talking about? Who do they think they are? I can’t stand these boring bullshit dinners. I wish they would stop asking me how I feel. I wish Dad would let us go somewhere at night. I wish they had a polo team.

Bobby had written her that Mr. Shibuta, the owner, had come back to Baron Ford to live and was building a new barn for his polo ponies. He had hired the whole Tahlequah football team to come out to the place and learn to play polo against him so he could practice. A rival team was starting over in Arkansas and everyone in Tahlequah was looking forward to the summer when the teams could play against each other. “I guess I’ll be the star,” Bobby wrote. “It’s easy as shit if you know how to barrel race. All you got to do is swing a club at a ball and not fall off. What a deal. He’s giving me a raise just to fool around with him while he practices. We might go down to New Orleans this summer and play some teams down there. Well, I miss you, baby. I sure could use some loving.”

By the time a month had gone by Olivia had taken to spending as much time as she could in the country, at the Hands’ country place. At least out in the country she could think. At least out there no one was around to ask her how she was feeling all the time. At least out there she didn’t have to think about how lost she was in all her science classes and in math.

Olivia stood by a tall black fence, watching her father’s horses. There were mares with colts in a pasture. In another were yearlings and a two-year-old her father had said was her own. “He was born on Shakespeare’s birthday,” Daniel said. “You should like that since you are our scholar. Born down in the woods. You can have him. He’s all yours.”

“Can I break him?” Olivia had asked.

“Sure, if you want to. No, on second thought, of course you can’t break a horse. It’s too dangerous. We’ll get someone to do it.”

“I know how. There’s nothing to it. It just takes time.”

“Well, go ahead then. Do it if you want to. I’ll come out and help.”

That conversation had been a week ago. Now Olivia stood by the fence watching the two-year-old and thinking over all her lies. Well, maybe she could break him. Maybe she’d get killed and it would save her the trouble of going to jail, or wherever they were going to send her when they found out about the grades.

If I could figure out the math it would be all right, she decided. But I can’t try harder than I already am. What else could I do? I could kill myself. Or I could get a lawyer and make them keep me. They can’t just kick me out. It would be too embarrassing for them. I could go on and tell Dad the truth but I can’t. He’s too nervous. I can’t tell him anything.

She climbed down from the fence and walked toward the two-year-old, watching him as she walked, feeling in her pocket for the sugar he had come to expect.

“Come on, Sugar,” she said out loud. “Come and get your sugar, Sugar.” He raised his head and looked at her, shook his neck, opened his nostrils. He could smell it. He trotted toward her. “You beauty,” she said. “You gorgeous boy. Come to de Havilland Hand, your master.” She crooned to him, hiding the sugar behind her back. Then held it out for him to eat.

“I’m here now,” she told him. “I might as well enjoy it while I can.” It was true. She was there, right where she had dreamed of being. Being petted and indulged, going to the finest school in town where the girls talked continually of things she didn’t understand and people and places she had never known. In this world there was more of everything than anyone could use, more clothes, more houses, more money, more horses than anyone could ride. She was here and everyone liked her and was amused by her and at any moment it could end.

She pulled the colt’s neck toward her own, rubbing his backbone so he would be accustomed to weight when she moved her body onto his. I really will break him, she decided. The black boys will help me. It will make up for never getting laid. Jesus, there’s no one here to do it with. I wouldn’t do it with any of these dumb boys for any amount of money. There’s always King. He might not always be in love with Jessie. They might break up. He likes me too. I’ve seen him look at me.

“Olivia.” It was Jessie, calling from the fence. “What are you doing? Dad wants us to go to town with him. Come on in. Dad’s waiting for you.”

Olivia allowed the horse to go. Turned her back to him and faced her sister, stuck her hands in her pockets and waited.

“Don’t turn your back on him,” Jessie called, scrambling over the fence. “He’s wild as anything. Olivia, come on. You might get hurt.” Jessie was hurrying toward her, long blond hair blowing in the wind. “They kept me there until five o’clock. I’m so dumb. I’ll never figure out algebra as long as I live. I don’t care anyway. Get out of here, Sugar.” She clapped her hands in the air to spook him and continued walking toward Olivia. “Mrs. Guest loves you. All she can talk about is you. She said I ought to let you go to school for both of us, since you like it so much. Well, Dad’s waiting on us. He wants to go to town to see something at the bank. Some art show one of his girlfriends did. I don’t know which one.” Olivia watched her sister. What a baby, she was thinking. What babies they are, every one of them. “I’m coming,” she said. “I’m going to break this colt in the summer. As soon as I can.”

“You can’t do it this summer. We’re going to Switzerland to live on the lake. Don’t you remember? You said you’d go. You’re going, aren’t you? I’m not going if you don’t.”

“Switzerland,” Olivia said. “Oh, sure, Switzerland. I’d forgotten about that.”

They walked across the pasture to the house their great-grandfather had built when the place was a working farm. This land belonged to the Cherokee before it belonged to the Hands, Olivia was thinking. White people stole North Carolina from the Cherokee, then sent them off to die. They can’t throw me away. I have more right to be here than they do.

Daniel stood in the doorway watching them. His child by Sheila he had fought so hard to keep, and this strange powerful girl he had left in the womb of Summer Deer so long ago in California. He had them both now, one by the defection of her mother through death and the other by her mother’s stupidity and evil. They were his, his reasons to get up every morning and go out and face the assholes of the world. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to get to town. Come on in and wash your faces and hands and don’t start changing clothes because we have to go.”

They climbed into the Mitsubishi and headed into town. It was Daniel’s hunting truck and was filled with guns and shells and orange vests and camping paraphernalia.

“Where are we going?” Olivia asked.

“To the bank to see Doreen’s paintings. She’s got a show and I promised her I’d bring you.”

“Doreen’s the one with the long hair?” “Yes.”

“She’s a buyer for Montaldo’s,” Jessie put in. “That’s where she gets all those clothes.”

“We’re going to the lake first,” Daniel said. “I want to show you something.”

“It’s the turkeys,” Jessie said. “He always shows us the turkeys.”

“Well, you need to look at something besides yourself.” Daniel shifted into low gear and began to drive across a field toward the scrub woods on the back of the property. He had been cultivating wild turkeys for six years now and the flocks were everywhere. He drove slowly down across the pasture and stopped and got out to open the gate. Olivia jumped down from the other side to close it for him. She climbed back in and they drove farther down into the scrub and stopped beside a lake surrounded by cottonwood trees. A beautiful still lake fed by springs that joined an aquifer that led all the way to the mountains. No one had ever cultivated this part of the property or used it for a thing until Daniel decided to raise turkeys on it. Not to eat and not even to hunt really but because he was growing older and was tired of flying around the world getting drunk with people he barely knew and spending money he had to fuck with assholes to replace.

“Here,” he said, and pulled two pair of army surplus binoculars out of a knapsack. “Get these adjusted so you’ll be ready when we see them. They’re used to the truck. But don’t talk. They spook if they hear voices.” He handed a pair of binoculars to each girl and waited while they adjusted the lens.

“What time is Doreen’s show?” Jessie asked. “We’ll be late.”

“Hush up, honey,” he said. “I’m taking care of that.” He began to drive the truck across a narrow dam in the middle of the lake. The truck was so wide and the dam so narrow that the wheels were almost in the water on both sides as they inched their way across. They arrived on the other side and Daniel put the truck into low gear and pulled up a hill and came to a stop beneath a cottonwood. “Look there,” he said. “There they are.” He reached up and turned Olivia’s glasses in the direction of the turkeys. There were about thirty of them, fat and beautifully colored, their amazingly small heads bobbing back and forth on their stringy necks. They were eating seeds, moving as a wave across a narrow stretch of field to the east of the lake.

“That’s the fescue,” Daniel said. “They love it.”

Olivia watched them move, two and three as one, a family, she thought, they are a family, as I dreamed we would be. Behind the binoculars she felt her eyes fill with tears. Tears began to fall down her face onto her blouse and vest and hands. Terrible motherless, fatherless tears. “Oh, please,” Jessie said. “Don’t cry. There’s no reason to cry.”

“It’s just so beautiful,” Olivia said. “Everything is so beautiful here.”

The next morning Daniel called his sister Helen and told her about the crying incident and asked what he should do. “She started crying for no reason,” he said. “We were looking at the turkeys. I took them out to see the turkeys. There wasn’t a thing to cry about.”

“Did you drive across that low water dam?”

“Of course. What’s that got to do with a little girl bursting into tears while she’s looking at a flock of turkeys.”

“Because it’s dangerous and you shouldn’t have driven over there with those girls in the truck. I’ve driven with you, Daniel, remember that. It might have scared her and she was too embarrassed to say so.”

“Look, Helen, she wasn’t crying about driving across the dam. She’s the bravest kid I ever saw in my life. She rides the horses bareback.”

“Well, we need to get her into therapy. She’s had too many shocks too fast, Daniel. Anna dying and Daddy driving them home. Coming here to live. It’s very traumatic to change schools in the middle of the year. I don’t think Lynley’s recovered yet from when we did that to him. I told you not to do that. How’s she doing in school?”

“She’s doing fine. They’re having some trouble getting her records from that place in Oklahoma. Aside from that they’re all crazy about her.”

“I’ll come over this afternoon and see about it, talk to her. Will you be at home?”

“Sure. Come after five. We’ll be there.”

“I’ll see you then.”

“Thanks, Sister.” Daniel hung up the phone and began to straighten the pencils and miniature tractors on his desk. Good, Helen would come over. Helen would sort it out. Women crying. He shook his head, lined five pencils up in a row and took a miniature DC-8 and pushed them into a neat stack and carried them over and set them up beside a desk calendar his mother had given him for Christmas. Then he called his salesmen in and went to work.

11

Back at Tahlequah High School a ninth-grade music-appreciation teacher named Mrs. Walker was pondering a problem. She had taught Olivia music appreciation and had directed her in the chorus of a play. Like everyone else at Tahlequah High, Mrs. Walker had been delighted when she heard the girl was going to North Carolina to live with her father. The problem Mrs. Walker was pondering had to do with a piece of paper she had noticed on the new secretary’s desk. It was a copy of Olivia’s transcript. Mrs. Walker had glanced at it out of curiosity and noticed that Olivia was credited with an A in music appreciation. Mrs. Walker almost never gave A’s. She was very stingy with A’s as she had received her degree from Indiana University and had very high standards where Music was concerned. She was certain she had not given Olivia an A.

There were A’s in almost everything. There were not many straight-A students at Tahlequah High. The only straight-A student Mrs. Walker could think of was a Jewish boy whose father was a lawyer. Mrs. Walker walked around thinking about the transcript for several days. She was not a person to rush into things. Finally, she sought out the freshman-sophomore mathematics teacher during a break and asked him some questions.

“Do you remember Olivia Hand when she was here? The girl who went to North Carolina at the beginning of the term?”

“Sure. Nice kid.”

“Was she a good student for you?”

“Good enough. Average. I don’t know if she learned anything. I don’t think I teach ninety percent of them a damn thing they will remember.”

“She didn’t make A’s?”

“Oh, God, no. She barely passed.”

“Well, thank you.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Nothing. No reason. I was just thinking about her the other day. She was in that production of The Music Man we did. Did you see it?”

“I’m afraid not. We don’t go out at night much. I’m sorry.”

“No reason to be.” Mrs. Walker put her tray on the revolving dumbwaiter, shook her head. Her aunt works in the office, she remembered. Oh, I hate to get involved with this. I hate to start something like this. It might not be true.

The transcript was lying on the secretary’s desk because the school in Charlotte had written to Tahlequah High asking for a copy. “We think there might be some mistake in the mathematics grades,” the letter had said. “Could we also have any test scores for Olivia? We want to make certain that we have her in the right class. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this.”

The principal handed the letter to his new secretary to take care of. The letter annoyed him. The letter was exactly the sort of thing he expected to get from a fancy private school in North Carolina. Arch, apologetic, asking him to waste his time on some bullshit detail. Why didn’t they give the little girl a test themselves if they wanted to know which mathematics class she belonged in? They had plenty of money and time and extra office help. Not to mention the implied assumption that being from Tahlequah High she was deficient in basic skills no matter how good her grades had been. “Take care of this when you get time,” he told the secretary. “It’s low priority.”

“What?”

“Put it on the bottom of a pile.”

“Oh. Okay.”

So the letter from North Carolina lay on the bottom of a stack of unanswered mail and the transcript sat on the desk beside some stationery order blanks. The secretary filed her nails and talked to her sister on the phone about the sister’s recurrent bouts of cystitis. It was spring and the golf courses had just dried off from the winter snows. The principal had been a champion college golfer and he wasn’t interested in unanswered mail. He was out at the Tahlequah Country Club every afternoon playing golf with the pro and getting ready for a tour he planned to make in June.

If Mrs. Walker hadn’t walked by and noticed Olivia’s transcript, it might have lain on the desk for years.

12

The students at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal School were filing out into the parking lot and climbing into their cars. They were getting ready to enjoy their only real freedom of the day. All the way home from school to their houses no one would be trying to civilize them or watching them to see if they were drinking or taking dope or getting pregnant. All they had to do for the next hour was get into their cars and turn on their radios and talk to one another. It was freedom, or, at least, it felt like freedom. It could pass for freedom. They climbed into their cars and threw their books and satchels on the floor and began to drive out of the parking lot, waving and calling to each other in the most heartfelt and democratic camaraderie of the day. There’s Larkin Sykes in her daddy’s BMW, they were thinking. Look at old Travis in that Jeep, that’s cool. I wish I had something to drive besides this beat-up Honda. I wish they’d let me have the Buick. I wish I could win a lottery.

Along the boulevards and neighborhoods near the school, the Bradford pear trees were in bloom. Even the most corrupted mind among the children was not immune to that much beauty on a bright spring day. Five weeks to go, they were thinking. Five more weeks and summer’s here.

Jessie and Olivia were among the envied ones. They threw their book satchels into the back of an Oldsmobile convertible and Jessie got behind the wheel. The convertible was old but it was in good repair and had been painted the year before. A convertible of any kind was better than a sedan or a family car. A convertible was right up there with a Jeep. Not that Jessie and Olivia were thinking they were lucky or envied. Olivia was thinking about her forged grades and Jessie was thinking about how sick she was of having Olivia live with her. I don’t care, Jessie told herself. It’s too much. Every day there she is, asking me questions. I don’t know what she wants with me. I can’t even go off with my friends unless I take her along and she keeps asking about King. I don’t believe Dad did this to me. It’s Aunt Anna’s fault. If she hadn’t died none of this would have happened and we’d be like we used to be.

“You ready to go?” Jessie said. “You got everything?”

“Yeah. Go on. How’d you do on the English test? Did you do all right?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have time to finish all the questions. She never gives us time.” Jessie drove out of the parking lot. “I talked to Dad at noon. He said to come straight home because Aunt Helen was coming over to talk to us.”

“What about? What do they want to talk about?”

“Oh, nothing. He always gets her to talk to me if he’s worried about anything. Maybe he wants her to take us shopping.”

“I don’t need anyone to pick out my clothes. I can pick out my own stuff.” Olivia sat back. Maybe it was nothing.

“Well, anyway, we have to go straight home.” Jessie speeded up, moved onto a boulevard of blooming pear trees and potted flowers. There had been a Flower Festival the week before and the street department had planted thousands of forced blooms along the streets, tulips and lilies and daffodils.

Jessie drove the convertible down the boulevard of flowers. Olivia slumped down in the seat beside her. “I have a lot of homework to do,” she said. “How long is this going to take with Aunt Helen?”

“How do I know? All I know is he called and said he wanted us to come straight home. He got me out of a study period. Why were you crying yesterday?” Jessie stopped for a stoplight.

“I don’t know. It just seems hard somehow. I don’t know what to do to make him like me.”

“He’s Dad. That’s how he is. He doesn’t make over people.”

“Does your mom make over you?”

“No. She doesn’t either.” Jessie shifted into low gear and took off, going as fast as she dared. She went down a ramp and out onto a freeway. “I might get a letter from King today. That’s all I care about. I don’t want my parents to make over me. I want to get married and have a life of my own.”

“You got a letter a few days ago.”

“He’s trying to fix it so we can be together this summer. We can’t live on phone calls and letters.”

“Maybe I need a boyfriend.”

“You’ve got that great-looking boy in Oklahoma. He was the best-looking boy I saw out there. But I guess you want someone in Charlotte, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I want. I’m really not thinking about boys right now.”

“Coleman Toon’s got a crush on you. Dad would like it if you went out with him. You ought to go out with someone, Olivia. You can’t just study all the time. I go out, even if I’m in love with King.”

“I have to study. This school’s a lot harder than the one I went to. I don’t know if I can even pass some of this stuff.”

“Well, I can’t help you with that. Look, Olivia, I’m sorry we’ve been so mean to each other lately. I don’t know what’s going wrong. It makes the house so cold. Let’s try to be nicer to each other, okay?” She turned her head. She smiled. She was determined to try, or to pretend to try. She didn’t know why she felt such confused feelings toward Olivia, or why she kept having such bad dreams at night, dreams in which Olivia pushed her off of cliffs or wouldn’t help her from the water.

“We ought to do something together,” Olivia said. “Let’s go out to the farm and ride tomorrow. Let’s go spend the whole day. You want to do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like to mess around with Dad’s horses unless he’s there. They don’t get ridden enough. You can’t tell what they’ll do.”

“You don’t like to ride, do you?”

“I got hurt a couple of years ago. An Appaloosa threw me. I can’t stand to even think about it.”

“Why’d he throw you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I lost attention. Dad almost beat him to death. It was the worst thing. One of his girlfriends was there. The one who’s a model. She ran after him and dragged him away to make him stop beating the horse. Well, I guess I shouldn’t tell you that.”

“Where I’m from everything happens. I’ve seen men beat up other men on the street. Well, I guess you don’t want to go riding then, do you?”

“I’ll go. If we take Spook to saddle the horses.”

“I’ll saddle them and I’ll ride yours until he settles down. We can go back to that lake and have a picnic or something. That lake’s so beautiful. It’s got a mystery to it.”

“Aunt Anna loved the lake. She used to swim there in March when she was young. She had to be the first person to swim every spring. Aunt Helen said she’d disappear and they would always know that’s where she’d gone. We have to be friends, Olivia. She wanted it so much. Remember what she wrote to us.” She reached over and touched her sister’s hand. She raised her eyes and met her sister’s serious, hopeful smile.

“I’ll take care of the horses,” Olivia said. “I won’t let you get thrown again. You have to see how they’re feeling. They have moods, like people, like the weather.”

When they got home, their aunt Helen was waiting in the library, dressed up in a Chanel suit with matching jewelry, planning on catching a plane at seven to fly to Boston. The last thing she wanted to do was come over to Daniel’s and sit around trying to counsel his crazy daughters. Still, the Hands came when they were called. No matter what they were doing they had to help out if one of their siblings called.

“You look nice,” Jessie said, coming into the library, throwing her book satchel on a leather sofa. “Why are you so dressed up?”

“I’m on my way to Boston to work on Anna’s papers. Hi, Olivia, how are you doing? How are things at school?”

Olivia stayed several feet away, still wearing her book bag on her shoulder.

“I’m doing okay. I need to study though. I’ve got hours of work to do. Do you mind if I go upstairs and do it?” She was backing into the hall.

“Well, your father asked me to stop by and see if there is anything either of you need. Do you need anything? Do you have everything you need?”

“I’m fine. I haven’t worn all the clothes we got last month. I need to write a history paper though, so if you’ll excuse me.” She had made it to the archway leading to the stairs. “It’s nice to see you though,” she added. “Have a good time in Boston.”

“Oh, it will all be work,” Helen began, but Olivia was gone up the stairs. “Well,” she said to Jessie. “Is she always that nervous?”

“I don’t think she likes it here,” Jessie said. “I think it was a mistake of Daddy to bring her here. She had a good life at her own home. She can’t even get a boyfriend here.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t know how to act. She acts too smart-alecky around boys. She does around girls too. My friends don’t like to come over if she’s here.”

“Oh, my. I’m so sorry to hear all that. Is there anything I can do? Have you told your father?”

“No. And don’t you. She’s my sister, Aunt Helen. I have to learn to love her. There are two hands on every person. That’s what Aunt Anna said. She said — well, never mind about that. I’ll find a way to get along with her. I have to, don’t I?”

“Anna didn’t always get things right, Jessie. She had a lot of romantic ideas about things.” Helen hung her head. Even from the grave Anna’s power over her was great. Anna had been the oldest and the most controlled. Anna didn’t get mad the way that Helen did. Didn’t get jealous and feel sorry for herself. She was perfect, Helen thought despairingly. She would never have said bad things about me. “Oh, God,” Helen added, out loud. “I didn’t mean to say that, Jessie. But Anna’s gone and we’re left with all of this. So what is it Olivia does that irritates you?”

“I don’t know. She’s just so changeable. She’ll be real sweet for a few days and drive me crazy following me around and trying to get me to play the piano or something. Then she’ll change and I think she’s mad at me. I don’t know how to act around her.”

“You’re an only child. You never had to put up with it. Well, I think it’s good to be an only child. Camilla is an only child, my best friend I play tennis with, and she’s a doll. Maybe I can have Olivia over to stay with us some weekend and give you a break.”

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know. It depends on how long it takes to sort the papers. Do you have any idea why she was crying yesterday? At the farm?”

“No. She might be homesick. Maybe she wants to go back home. We’re okay, Aunt Helen. It was nice of you to come over, but it’s fine. We’re going riding Saturday and try to be better friends. I’ll really try. I really will.”

“All right then. I’ll go on so I won’t miss my plane. Tell your father I was here.” Helen took Jessie’s face in her hands and gave her a kiss. “Take care of yourself first of all, honey. Don’t let this disrupt your life. And call me if you need me. You’re the important one to us. Not this girl.”

“She stays home every night and studies and Dad gets mad if I want to go out. That’s the main thing I’m mad about.”

“Tell him.”

“I already did.”

“Okay. Well, I’m leaving.” Helen was almost to the door. She stopped in the hallway and hugged Jessie again. “I love you, darling. You’re our darling, darling girl.”

“Thanks for coming by,” Jessie said. “It was really nice of you.”

Helen went down the flagstone path to her car and got into it and drove off waving. Jessie watched until she was out of sight. Upstairs a window slammed shut. There she goes, Jessie thought. Locking herself up to study. When he comes home she’ll be up there working like a dog and he’ll think I ought to too. Well, I’m not studying in the afternoon. I’ve been in school all day. Okay, I’ll look at them. I’ll just look at the history, nothing else. She marched back into the library and spread her books out on a table. Then she turned on the television to watch the Oprah Winfrey show.

It was a show about homosexuals trying different ways to get babies. There were people in the audience on their feet screaming at each other. On the stage were three homosexual couples who had found ways to adopt babies or have them. The homosexual men had adopted two orphaned street children. The women had used artificial insemination. At least they wanted to have a baby, Jessie thought. At least they love their little kids. I’ll be like that. If I ever have a kid I’ll love it to death. I’ll take care of it myself, not some maid. “We want to raise her to love herself and love the world,” one of the women was saying. “She is our flower. We try to teach her to respect all living things.”

“What’s going to happen when she goes to school?” an irate woman in the audience screamed out. “What’s she going to tell her friends?”

13

Saturday morning was beautiful and cool. Outside the windows of Daniel’s house the sun moved up the sky through a bank of clouds, robins sang, the sky was very blue. When he had been a rich man Daniel had commissioned a great architect to build him a house in which to raise his child. Make it peaceful, he told the man, so when she wakes up she’ll be glad she is alive. Then Daniel went off to Europe for the summer and left the architect with two acres of land in the middle of the best residential area in Charlotte. When he returned the house was almost done. A long rectangle of stone and glass with a staircase leading to bedrooms that looked out upon a line of apple trees. Daniel had paid the bill and moved in and started letting his girlfriends fill the place with furniture. It was eclectic, to say the least, but it was peaceful. Jessie felt the peace around her now, waking in the peach-colored sheets girlfriend number twenty-seven had bought for her one year. She moved her legs onto the floor and went over to the window and thought about Olivia. I will love her no matter what she does, Jessie thought. I will stop thinking she is in my way.

Across the hall Olivia woke up thinking about the country, of catching a horse and saddling it, swinging up into a saddle, riding like the wind to find a river. Only here it is a lake, she remembered, and all I’m going to have between my legs is an English saddle. She giggled and got back into bed and made herself come with her fingers. Oh, baby, she was saying, oh, baby, you make me feel so good.

“You can’t go out there alone,” Daniel said at breakfast. He was poaching eggs, cooking bacon in the microwave, making a terrible mess. “Eat this, Olivia. Both of you are thin as a rail. Go on, sit down and eat some breakfast if you’re going to the farm.”

“I can catch the horses,” Olivia said. “I’ll take the Jeep.”

“No, you’re not going alone. I’ll round up Spook and send him with you. I’d go myself but the goddamn Japs are in town and I have to talk to them.”

“We don’t need Spook.” Olivia nibbled at the eggs.

“Well, you’re going to have him. He’s been wanting to get out there anyway. He was raised out there.” Spook was the handyman at Daniel’s tractor company. Daniel had moved him into town when his wife died and he resented it. He wanted to go back out and live on the land.

“There’s no point in arguing about it,” Jessie put in. “If he wants to send Spook, he will. He always makes me take Spook out there.”

Daniel made a phone call and in fifteen minutes Spook drove up in his pickup. His real name was Marcellus Biggs but his cousins called him Spook because his hair was so light. He was sixty-seven years old but he hadn’t told his age in so long he had almost forgotten the exact age himself. He and Daniel loved each other. They were a matched pair for haughtiness and snobbery and always getting their way.

Spook was glad of a chance to go to the country. Since Daniel had moved him into town he had almost worn himself out getting laid. He had nightmares of horny young women following him through corridors. He wasn’t getting any fishing done and hardly any thinking.

“Do I have to let her drive?” he asked Daniel, indicating Jessie. There was no question of him getting in a car with Olivia at the wheel. He had taken one look at her and decided he didn’t trust her. “I don’t like the look of her,” he had told several people at the tractor company. Word of that had reached Daniel, who had it out with him while he watched him sweep the showroom floor.

“I ride with both of them,” Daniel said now. “So can you.”

Half an hour later they were headed for the country, Spook in the back seat of the convertible and Jessie driving.

“Who you going to ride?” he asked. “Them horses haven’t been ridden all winter. I’d take the palominos if I was you. Don’t go fooling with that red horse.”

“I can ride anything,” Olivia said. “I used to rodeo in Oklahoma.”

“I don’t care what you used to do. You ain’t riding anything but palominos today.”

“We’ll ride the palominos,” Jessie said. “That’s okay.”

“You better believe it’s okay. Daniel told me to catch the palominos.” Jessie speeded up and all further conversation was lost in the wind.

“This little mare’s the sweetest horse on the farm,” Spook said, leading the horse around and handing the reins to Jessie. “I was here when she was born. We bred her mother to the palomino Mr. Jody Kelley used to keep at stud on Monte Cristo. Hard to believe everybody’s gone to town.”

“We’re not in town now,” Jessie said. “We’re here.” She swung herself up into the saddle. It felt grand. Olivia was right. All they needed was to get out in the country and get some exercise. It would be all right. They would be sisters now and friends. She would stop thinking Olivia liked King. She would have the milk of human kindness where Olivia was concerned. And maybe, by the time she got home that afternoon, a letter would be there from him. It would say, I love you, Jessie. I will love you till I die. Love, King.

Olivia was mounted on a gelding. She was sitting very still, hardly touching the reins.

“How do you do that?” Jessie asked. “God, that looks so good.”

“Do what?”

“Do it without the reins.”

“I use my knees. I keep my weight where he’s going. Didn’t they teach you that?”

“I think so. I used to get thrown a lot. I wasn’t good at it, was I, Spook?”

“Sometime you was. When you wanted to be.”

“He knows I can be trusted,” Olivia went on. “You make them trust you. Then you’re safe.”

“Well, go on if you’re going,” Spook said. “Enough of all this talk. I’m going fishing.”

They rode to the back of the farm, past the deserted cabins and the deserted store, far back onto the land where their ancestors had created a life they could not imagine. Their father and aunts and uncles could remember the farm filled with meaning and life. To the girls it was only a place of ghosts and stories, on its way back to wilderness.

They crossed a gravel road into the oldest cleared part of the land, walking the horses through the rough parts and finding paths no one had used all winter. “The meadow’s back here,” Jessie said. “The one that joins Dunleith. You ever been back here?”

“Yeah. The first time I came to visit. Don’t you remember?”

“It’s so ancient back here. I’m so glad we came.” Jessie paused at the edge of the meadow, reached down into her jacket pocket, took out some cookies in a plastic sack. “You want a cookie?” She held one out and Olivia took it from her. They stuffed the cookies in their mouths and chewed them up. The sun was almost to its zenith now. It had turned into a perfect cloudless day.

“Did you ever bring King here?” Olivia asked.

“No.”

“We could bring him here if he comes to visit.”

“I might go there this summer. He won’t come here.”

“Why not? His grandmother’s here, isn’t she. Isn’t that old lady we met his grandmother? I thought that’s what they said.”

“Miss Clarice Manning, and she’s not an old lady. She was a great beauty. She’s grandmother’s best friend.”

“Anyway, I guess he has to come see her, doesn’t he?”

“He’s my boyfriend, Olivia. Look, you want to ride to the lake or not?”

“Sure. I was just waiting for you. You don’t have to get mad just because I said I wished he’d come and visit. I don’t want your boyfriend. I’ve got plenty of boys if I want them.” Olivia led her horse away from Jessie, sighted down across the meadow to the lake. Fuck them all, she was thinking. I can’t stand all this stupid crap they get into. She can’t even ride a goddamn horse. She’s scared to death to ride a tired old mare. Olivia lifted her head, caught a smell of wild grass, fecund, hot, the meadow and the earth. She rose up in the saddle and began to ride. She left so fast that Jessie was startled. She finished her cookie and wrapped the package back up and stuck it in her pocket. I can ride too, she thought. Anybody can ride a horse fast if that’s all they want to do. She moved her knees, urged the old mare on and began to ride down across the meadow. I will bring King here, she was thinking, but I won’t bring her too. I don’t have to take her everywhere I go. Oh, God, he’s so beautiful and sweet, he’s so manly, he has such a kind face. I love him so much. No one will ever know how I feel about him.

She was off in daydream. She and King together on a beach with dark skies and a storm coming. The mare galloped on. It was Jessie’s old problem with horses, daydreaming as she rode. She drove cars the same way, a foot on the gas pedal and her mind a million miles away. King turned to her now. The wild surf was pounding at his back. His white shirt was blowing in the wind. I love you until I die, King said. I cannot live without you. Will you be my wife?

The mare galloped on through real-life North Carolina. A real-life rabbit darted out in front of her hooves and she spooked and reared. Jessie jerked the reins. The mare reared again and turned. Jessie pulled her feet from the stirrups and began to fall. Her years of gymnastics stood her in good stead and she rolled as she fell. Rolled her neck down into her chest, her legs into her waist. The mare shivered, terrified, then galloped back toward the road.

 

When Olivia realized Jessie was no longer behind her, she turned around and began to ride back across the meadow, calling her sister’s name. She caught sight of Jessie’s jacket in the tall grass, then Jessie, with her face between her arms, stretched out flat upon the ground. She dismounted and tied her horse to a tree and ran back and knelt beside her sister. “Oh, God, oh, be all right. Oh, Jessie, please wake up. For God’s sake don’t die on me.”

The mare made straight for home. Skirting paths and flying across the gravel road barely missing a pickup truck. She stopped once to shiver and tremble, then galloped straight back to the farm. Spook was on his way to the pond with a six-pack in one hand and his fishing pole in the other. When he heard the horse coming he dropped them and went on a run for the Jeep. He had been on the farm when Clara Abadie had broken her neck in a riding accident and, although that was forty years ago, he remembered it as if it were yesterday. The riderless horse coming galloping back and the days that followed. He jumped in the Jeep and began to drive back across the pastures. At the road he stopped a passing car and asked them to call Daniel. Then he drove the Jeep as far as possible into the deadening, then he started running.

Olivia was sitting on the ground by Jessie, who was beginning to come around. “I’m okay,” she kept saying. “I’m okay now.”

“Please don’t move. You don’t know if you broke anything.”

“I didn’t break anything. I’m okay. We have to find the mare. She might kill somebody on the road. Dad’s going to have a fit. I never fell off in the ring. I never fell off a single time in the ring.”

“Maybe the saddle wasn’t right. I don’t think Spook knows what he’s doing with the horses. I had to tighten my girth. He thinks he’s so smart. He’s just an old man.”

“It wasn’t Spook’s fault. I wasn’t concentrating. I always have accidents. It’s always me.”

“Oh, Jessie.” Olivia reached out and very tentatively put her hands around her sister’s waist. It was the first time they had ever really hugged each other, except once, many months ago, when Jessie had come to the airport to take Olivia to Anna’s wake. Now, awkwardly, sitting on the dry prickly grass, Olivia reached for her sister, felt the small bones of Jessie’s ribs. For a moment she was so near it seemed light-years had blown away between them. “I take my sister to the lake at dawn. To search for the great liveoak tree at Mandeville. To stand naked in its arms and know spider and moss and oak and vine.” Where had she read that? What was she remembering?

“Go find the mare,” Jessie said. “You go try to catch her. I can walk back now.”

“No. To hell with the mare. I’m not leaving you.”

“We have to catch her. She might get out on the road.” Jessie stood up. Her hip was hurting but her legs moved. “I was thinking of the seashore,” she said, shaking her head, embarrassed, giggling. “I was thinking of the ocean, then I was flying through the air.”

“It isn’t funny,” Olivia said. “Nothing about this is funny to me.”

 

Spook came in sight, running toward them in his overalls, mad as hell and winded and ready to fix some blame. “What the hell you doing way back here? You know you not supposed to go on this side of the road. When Daniel gets here I hope he wears you out. You okay, Jessie? You going to make it?”

“We have to catch the mare,” Jessie said. “She ran off somewhere.”

“She ran home. How you think I know where you’re at?” He stood before them, breathing hard, hands on his hips. “I guess I’ll have my heart attack any minute. I sent a man on the road to call your daddy and the doctor. You shut up, both of you, and walk with me. Jeep’s across the road behind the fence. How’d you get across that fence? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“We went through the gate,” Olivia answered. “So stop yelling at me. I don’t let people yell at me. Nobody told me not to ride back here. Dad told me to ride anyplace I wanted to on our land.”

“Our land,” Spook muttered, pulling the girls along beside him. “Move in here and take up everything you like.”

“Let go of me,” Olivia said. “I’m riding the horse back home.”

Daniel arrived soon after they got back to the house. The message had been relayed to the country club where he had taken the Japanese to eat lunch and see the golf course.

“What happened?” he asked, striding into the house. Spook was in the kitchen eating a sandwich. Jessie was on the couch talking to King Mallison, Junior, long distance on the phone. Olivia was reading a book.

“They went back across the road to the old place. You told them to stay out of there. I heard you say it.” Spook looked up from his sandwich and motioned toward the girls. “It’s a wonder nobody’s dead. That pasture’s full of rabbit holes. I was here when Clara Abadie got knocked off by a tree branch and broke her neck. I seen what happened to all of them. Old Mr. Abadie never did get over that. You told them to stay on this side. I know you did. I wouldn’t have come out here if I’d thought they could go anyplace they liked.”

“It’s my fault for thinking it up,” Olivia said. “I thought it up.”

“I have to go. Dad’s here,” Jessie said into the phone. She put the receiver down into its cradle and pulled the quilt up around her legs. Daniel went straight to her.

“You got knocked out?”

“No. I was just scared.”

“Yes, you were,” Olivia said. “You were out cold.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was lying there but I could hear.”

“Let me see.” Daniel knelt beside the couch. He took Jessie’s head in his hands, began to feel for bumps. Olivia watched him in a sort of wonder of jealousy. He had not even spoken to her. Had not acknowledged she was in the room.

“I caused all this,” she said. “I know Jessie doesn’t like to ride. I know it’s dangerous for her.”

“It isn’t dangerous for me. The horse spooked. But it wasn’t the horse’s fault, Dad. Don’t blame the horse. Don’t blame anyone but me.”

“They was back across the road on the deadening,” Spook repeated. “They said you said they could ride back there but I heard you tell them not to go across the road. You want me to make you a sandwich? I guess you had to interrupt your lunch, didn’t you?”

“I ought to take you to the hospital,” Daniel said. “I think a doctor ought to look at you.”

“I’m okay, Dad. I’m perfectly okay.” She put her hand over his. She looked into his eyes, so exactly like her own. She seemed so perfect to him, so beautiful and fragile, so impenetrable a mystery. Olivia got up and came and knelt beside them on the floor. She added her hand to her father’s hand.

“She’s okay, Dad,” Olivia said. “We’re both okay.”

“You want a sandwich or not?” Spook asked again. “I’ll be glad to make you one.”

14

That same Saturday Mrs. Walker finally told her husband what she was worrying about. “They have so few chances to escape,” she said. “To get a real education anywhere. I was so happy for her when I heard she was going up there. Her father’s a wealthy man.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with your job, Marion. If you think the grades have been changed, you need to go to the principal. You’re an accessory if you don’t.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll call him then. Or maybe I’ll go over there and talk to him.”

“It’s your duty, Marion. You can’t ignore this. What did the transcript say?”

“It was all A’s. Except for a couple of B’s in math. She couldn’t have all A’s. There’s only one boy in school with all A’s. His daddy is a lawyer and they own that department store on the square.”

“Marion.”

“Yes.”

“Go do your duty.”

 

Mrs. Walker put on a dress and went over to the principal’s house and told him what she suspected. Then the two of them went to the school and keyed into the computer and looked at the grades. They pulled up Olivia’s junior high school grades and test scores. Then they called the registrar.

On Monday morning the principal called the headmaster of Saint Andrew’s Episcopal School in Charlotte and he called Daniel and at three that afternoon Daniel was sitting in the headmaster’s office waiting for Olivia. They had sent someone to get her out of gym class.

“This is serious, sweetie,” Daniel said, when she came in the door, still dressed in shorts and a sweatshirt. “We’ve got a problem here. Do you know what it is?” The transcripts were spread out on the desk. Olivia took one look at them and collapsed into a chair. “I wanted to come here,” she said. “I wanted to come so much.” She dissolved in tears, folded into a paroxysm of tears. Daniel and the headmaster looked at each other. Then the headmaster called for help. “Get Lila in here,” he yelled to his secretary. “Go get the counselor and tell her to get in here right now.”

“I’ll take her home,” Daniel said. “Come on, Olivia. We’ll go home. You can talk to me then.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Olivia sobbed. “I might as well kill myself. Now I’ll never go to college or have anything, anything at all. I can’t have anything.”

“Oh, my God,” the headmaster began. “This was badly handled. Olivia, we shouldn’t have called you in like this, with both of us here. I should have done something else. This was badly planned.”

“You better believe it was,” the school counselor said. She had arrived and was on her knees by the sobbing child. “What a crazy thing to do, bringing her in here and springing this on her like that. My God, Morgan, you know better than this. You should have called me. Goddamn, you make my work so hard. You make it impossible.” The headmaster hung his head. He and the counselor had been fucking each other on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and sometimes on Sundays for seven months now. He was so much in love with her he was crazy. He had never loved a woman the way he loved this bossy brown-haired psychologist from Greensboro. Now he had bungled this matter of the half-Indian Hand girl and she might never give him another piece of ass.

“Lila, I’m so sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Take her to your office. We’ll talk without her. Olivia, just one thing. Are you saying what we suspect is true?”

“Morgan, this is not the time,” the counselor said. “Shut up, for God’s sake.” She pulled Olivia up and started with her toward the door.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Olivia said. “I guess you’ll hate me now. I guess I’ll never have anything, will I?” She started sobbing again and Lila led her off into an adjacent room. Daniel stood up. “I better go with them.”

“No, give Lila time to calm her down. Well, I guess that’s it, then. I don’t think we have to go into an investigation here.”

“What are you going to do?” Daniel lowered his chin, did the mental equivalent of taking his hat in his hands, got wary, thoughtful, shrewd, weighed the public scandal, weighed Olivia’s chances of following his sister Anna to a suicide’s grave, wondered what Morgan needed, wanted, had to have. “I hope you won’t kick her out, Morgan.

We’ve been associated with this school for years. Sending money, sending kids. You can’t just kick her out, can you?”

“I might have to.” Morgan sat back in his chair, imagining the room filling up with the tormented parents he had counseled in the last six years, more tormented every year and more of them. “I have to run a school, Daniel. We have to have rules and principles. What if it gets out? That we condoned this kind of cheating. Lawlessness. This is lawlessness. Breaking and entering in Tahlequah. Forgery. I’m sorry. I know it’s your daughter but I have a responsibility to the school.”

“You want to ruin her life without giving her a chance? Goddamn, Morgan, she’s only a kid. I’ve only had her a few months. She’s a good little girl.”

“We know she is, Daniel. We all like her. But there may be criminal charges. I can’t even talk to that guy down in Oklahoma. He sounds like some kind of mad dog.”

“There must be some probation she could get on.” Daniel had been kicked out of three prep schools. They had always let him be on probation first. Surely this fairy had heard of probation. Daniel was getting mad now. He was too spoiled to be much good at hiding his temper. “So what are you telling me, Morgan? You’re kicking her out for sure then?”

“No. I have to think about it. She has to have some counseling, Daniel. No matter what happens here. You can’t take this lightly.”

Daniel stood up again. Began to walk around the room. “I’m not taking it lightly. Where did that woman take her? I need to see her.”

“Will you come back and talk to me tomorrow? After we sleep on this? After we all have time to think? I might have to consult the board.”

Daniel stopped pacing. He gathered up his store of balance, became his most courteous self. “Of course, Morgan. I’m sorry if I seem upset. She’s just a little girl. I don’t know those folks who raised her. I’m doing all I can. All I know how to do.”

“Let’s go find your daughter,” Morgan said, coining around the desk, taking Daniel’s arm. “You can take her home.”

The next morning Daniel rounded up his brother, Niall, and they went back to the high school to try again. Niall was the most civilized person the Hands had thrown up for three generations. He was a throwback to the old teacher and classics scholar who had given the family its proper names. Niall spoke four Romance languages and Greek and corresponded with Sanskrit scholars. He had met the Dalai Lama. Also, he traveled with Phelan Manning. He had hunted with Phelan all over the world. How does Niall justify Phelan to the Dalai Lama? Anna had always been asking. Tell me that. He just goes along, Daniel always answered. He doesn’t carry a gun.

This morning Niall was in his backyard fertilizing his roses when Daniel came over and rounded him up. “Calm down,” Niall said. “It will be all right. We’ll fix it.”

“She’s just a little kid. She was on the make, so what? We would have been in the same situation. Goddamn, Niall, that goddamn little fairy preacher. She was crying her little heart out. We had to get Momma over last night and Ben Torrey came by and gave her some tranquilizers. I gave that goddamn school two grand last year for their building fund.”

“Maybe it wasn’t enough.”

“Well, shit, what a thing to say.”

“How much is left in Grandmother’s education trust?”

“I don’t know. Louise raped it a couple of years ago. You know about that. She got Momma to give her all that money to go to England.”

“How much is left?”

“Forty thousand, give or take a grand.”

“Well, let’s go by and get Momma to give us a check big enough to get this headmaster in a good mood.”

“A bribe?” Daniel watched Niall spreading fertilizer on the straw beneath a rosebush. Niall never ceased to amaze Daniel. One month he was holed up reading books and voting for black candidates for mayor and the next month he wanted to bribe an Episcopal priest.

“He’s an Episcopal minister.”

“Well, he’s still got a school to run.” Niall put the sack of fertilizer back into a lard can and stood up and wiped his hands on his apron. Then he removed the apron and took his brother’s arm and walked into the house.

“I like your little dark-eyed girl, little brother. I can see the Asian in her. She will flower someday and make all this worthwhile. How I envy you those daughters. I was thinking of them the other day, for hours I thought of you over there with your riches.”

“You wouldn’t think so if you’d been at my house last night. She was crying and Jessie started crying. Then Ben gave them tranquilizers. House full of kids on tranquilizers. That’s what I’m down to. What do you mean, Asian? Goddamn, Niall, you get the nuttiest ideas.”

“American Indians came from Asia across the Bering Strait. I love the darkness in her, the brooding. I was so thrilled when I met her on the street one day last month.

She was out walking and I saw her from a distance. I don’t think she recognized me at first. To think, we have this young creature in our midst, with so much history in her face.”

“Are you going over there with me?”

“Would you like me to put on a suit?”

“Well, you can take off that old shirt. You want to go by Momma’s and see if she wants to give us a check?”

“You call her while I change clothes. Tell her we’re coming.”

The two men, Niall now dressed in a plaid shirt and khaki jacket like the ones his mother had bought for him down through the years, Daniel as always dressed to the nines in the finest slacks and sweaters his girlfriends could pick out at the best stores in Charlotte, went over and found their mother in her rose garden pruning her Frau Karl Druschkis and directing two men who were making her a bed for pink azaleas. There was nothing in the world that pleased Mrs. Hand more than the sight of good-looking men appearing in her yard at nine o’clock on a spring morning. She had been a belle and she was a belle and she needed courting. “My darlings,” she said. “Oh, Niall, Daniel is having such a bad time.”

“We need some money, Momma,” Niall said. “We need some money from Grandmother’s trust.”

“What for?” she asked.

“To give the school,” Niall continued. “We have to get the little girl out of trouble.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Hand said. She pulled off her gardening gloves, looking down, thinking that she was tired of handing checks to her children. “How much do you need?”

 

At ten-thirty they presented themselves at the high school. The school counselor was waiting in the anteroom and escorted them into the headmaster’s office. She was in a good mood this morning, wearing a dark silk dress with a string of pearls and a lot of Chanel 19. She and the headmaster had been at it for hours last night after they made up. He had gotten home so late it was sure to ruin his marriage. This time his wife could not pretend he had been working late. Even his dumb old wife would catch on now.

“Mr. Hand and his brother,” the counselor said, looking her lover in the eye, wetting her lips with her tongue. “I’ll wait out here, Morgan, in case you need me. I’ll tell Jennette to hold your calls.”

“We don’t want to fool around with this,” Daniel said, when she had left the room and closed the door. “We want to put it on the table. Mother gave us a check for ten thousand dollars. We want you to know how much we value this school. How much we thank you for all the help you’ve been to our family over the years.”

“The little girl deserves another chance,” Niall put in. “We ask for your compassion, Morgan. You know you can count on us. It won’t happen again. She won’t embarrass you. We’re asking a favor. We don’t know what would happen to her if you kicked her out. It needs to be covered up, Morgan.”

“I don’t know how far I can go. They know about it at the school in Oklahoma. It isn’t only me.” Daniel put the check on the desk.

“Will you call them? Will you ask them to let it lay?”

“I can keep her here.” The headmaster picked up the check. It was for the school. He could add it to the scholarship fund. Half for the scholarship fund, half for the new gym. He held it in his hand. He was goddamned if he would be ashamed of taking it. Money does God’s work. Money is food and clothes and teachers’ salaries. “She’ll have to have a math tutor, Daniel. And some therapy. We’ll help you find someone. And I can’t guarantee they’ll keep it off her records out there. The principal’s an irritable guy. I talked to him again this morning. He’s fairly intractable, I think.”

“But you’ll keep her here? She can stay in school.” Daniel reached over and squeezed his brother’s arm. “You won’t kick her out.”

“We like Olivia, Daniel. She’s a bright child. No one wants to kick her out. She has to have some counseling however. For her sake as well as ours. I didn’t realize she’d lost her mother at birth. If you’d told me that when you enrolled her, I would have suggested counseling then. Well, better late than never.” The headmaster stood up, feeling the long stretch in his loins that great sex always left him with. The wonderful itch that fresh money for the scholarship fund always gave him. Tell me there isn’t a God, he told himself. Tell me it just happened that Carole decided to spend a few more days with her mother just when I needed time with Lila.

He smiled his beatific pulpit smile and came around the desk and walked Daniel and Niall to the door. Lila was waiting by the water cooler. He laid his hand on her shoulder. “Go get Olivia and bring her here,” he said. “Get her out of class if necessary. Let’s put her mind at rest.”

Daniel and Niall got back in the car and started driving toward Niall’s house. “Do you have to go to work right now?” Niall asked.

“I guess so. If I still have a business. I guess it’s still there.”

“I thought maybe we could ride out to the country and go swimming in the lake. Don’t you think we should celebrate this morning’s work?”

“What for? We paid that fairy ten thousand dollars and now I’ve got to start paying some shrink to fuck up her head. Remember what happened to Louise when she went to that shrink? She turned into a nut.”

“Yes. She left us, didn’t she. Well, she seems happy. She’s working on some film in England now. A documentary about Stonehenge.” Niall reached over and put his hand on his brother’s knee. “Take the morning off, Daniel. Stop worrying. Things work out. We could go swimming. We could be back by three.”

“I can’t.” Daniel stopped the car in front of Niall’s house. “I’ve got those Japs in town. I got to get down there and talk to them.”

“Let’s see each other more often. Let’s take time to know each other.”

“If I can. If I ever get some time.” Niall got out then and stood on the sidewalk by his tulip beds watching his baby brother drive off down the street. Daniel’s huge freckled hands gripped the wheel of the car. His face was pointed toward the east.

Thank you, God, Olivia was saying to herself. If you’re there thanks and if you’re not thanks anyway. Now I’ll have to work my ass off. I’ll have to have a tutor and I have to go to counseling. I guess I’ll have to talk to Lila all the time. I saw her looking my dad over. No wonder she’s so nice to me with such a good-looking unmarried guy for my father.

I guess she thinks she’ll be coming over to see me at my house.

After they got through talking to me this morning I went back to history class and Mrs. Braxton was talking about the Korean war. She was saying they promised they’d get the troops home for Christmas and all I could think about was that Christmas when Bobby and I went out to the old Methodist camp and built a fire by the creek and sat around and smoked a joint. Then we got the idea to go down the river in the snow. We got one of the canoes from the camp and went all the way down to the island where the crows nest in winter. I don’t guess I’ll ever smoke dope again or get laid by anybody I like, but that’s okay. I guess that’s my childhood I have to leave behind.

Yeah, I won’t ever be that way again. All cocky and stretched out and fine like it was that day I lay back in the canoe and heard those crows and felt the small soft snow falling on us. Oh, baby, baby, he used to say. I bet all my life I’ll be a sucker for anyone who calls me baby.