“WHAT?” Daisy answered the phone. I was headed out the bumpy county road to say hello to my dad before I came back to the apartment in St. Annes.
“What? What do you mean ‘what’? It’s your mom.” You never know what you’ll say when you become a mother.
“Duh,” she said. She was hanging out with her older sibling, a sarcastic teen brother. I could hear a TV laugh track in the background.
“Where are your manners? Have you eaten?”
“Tay made me a banana and peanut butter,” she said, ignoring the first question. “Where are you?” Now she sounded like a tiny version of me. I choked back a laugh.
“Going to check your granddad, if you all are doing okay.” There was no answer, just the laugh track of a rerun of “That ’70s Show.” “Hello?”
“What, Mom?” she said, impatient. She could go from needing me to thinking I was a nuisance in nanoseconds. When would I learn to ride the Ferris wheel of motherhood?
“Nothing. Tay’s with you, right?” I could picture the fluorescent-like TV flashes of colored light across their faces.
“Yeah. He says meat’s bad for you. Why do you feed us meat?” she said.
“Oh, god, is he off on his vegetarian rant again?” I said. I kept it to myself that I’d once practiced vegetarianism. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Keep the doors locked. I’ll be home in about an hour, okay?” I hoped my son hadn’t begun to choose the way of the culty environmental terrorists in response to a reactionary state. He was hanging out with the kids with dreads, cheek piercings, chains hanging from their pants. They discussed things like shutting down chicken farms with smeared blood. Friends they knew in Tallahassee had thrown homemade explosives into designer ham shops.
“Okay, love you, bye,” Daisy said in one breath.
I hung up as the road got rougher, with tar patches. I called Dad. “I’m stopping by. Just for a minute. I need to get home. And I’ve got a wedding and funeral tomorrow.”
“That’s my girl,” he chuckled. The connection to his landline was, as always, littered with static.
I turned off the county road onto the oyster shell drive with the homemade “Panther Pit” sign hung at the fence post. A stone pony sat on each side of the entrance. The shells chinked their music as the car’s wheels rode over them. When the county had built the road, they’d dug out lime rock on the property. This they used to lay the road, which left an ugly pit. But by some good fortune, road construction had hit a spring or the aquifer. The hole filled up with clear water, and now Dad owned the best twenty acres in the swamplands.
Dad had built the log cabin on the place with his own hands thirty years ago with the help of a plumber and an electrician. At eight, I’d helped out, hauling lumber and feeding nails to the bin after school, selecting the stone ponies. Now and again, we painted the pair. This year, I planned to put a black Santa on the right side pony and a pink Santa on the left. That would keep people thinking. I parked and slammed the car door shut. The wind smelled of night swimming.
“How’s my baby?” Daddy was outside waiting for me and held out long arms. Tall, bony, and hook-nosed like you see on sculptures of Indians in Mexican museums. I looked like him. I’d come home when my husband died, as much to care for him after his stroke as to crash at home.
“Fine, Dad.” I hugged him. Dusk. The curved blade of moon reflected in jags through the pond. “You need to come in for a hair trim. Your hair’s circling over your ears. How’s the garden?” I admired his broccoli and carrots, even oranges that he nurtured and covered. I wondered how he kept it all going when the cockamamie weather had us snowing next week.
He ignored the haircut remark. “You gonna go say hey to your grandma?”
“Okay,” I said. Grandma Happy always had a lecture and a warning. Dad had moved her from the Rez ten years before when she turned eighty-four. She knew about medicine, well, natural medicine, and she was full of folk superstitions. She believed in the Little People who lived in the trees. Claimed she talked to them. Of course, Dad had told me this Indian lore—that these Little People in the trees could give you knowledge, but they could also cause mischief. It sounded like believing in fairies, which, in truth, appealed to me. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. I gazed up into the pines as I walked to Grandma’s trailer, looking for glimmers in trees.
“Grandma!” I hollered. She couldn’t hear well. The screen door screeched open. She always made my heart stop—all four feet nine inches of her, a billowy turquoise Seminole skirt, the plaited knee-length hair piled carefully on her head, orange necklaces from her breasts up to her ears.
“Come in.” She gave me a hug. She wore nine-plus decades of knowledge no one else much cared to hear about. “Now I got to give you a tonic.” She always was abrupt like that. No sweet talk.
“Grandma, I don’t need one.” She scowled, the only evidence that she heard me. Here we go, another lecture on Indianness. She’d be all night making up a batch of something.
She beckoned me in and showed me a dark red tea she had going on her stove. The scents of her kitchen unfolded—coffee, chocolate, mint, and holy basil, dust. I had to admit, she knew the natural remedies for bug bites, coughs, and colds. Mostly they came from what you’d call yard weeds. She’d been around before cars, before TV, before movies, air conditioning, cell phones, before the big bombs. I couldn’t fathom what she’d absorbed in her lifetime.
Indians didn’t have the answer for bad teeth, though. She only had ten left—six on top, four on bottom, only four total in the front. She poured some of the red tea into a thermos and screwed the top on. “I been talking to them,” she said. She meant the Little People. “You got opposites going tomorrow. You be careful.” She wagged her bent brown finger at me, then put the potion in my hand.
“Dad told you,” I said.
“A funeral and a wedding. Opposites. You need tonic.”
I didn’t argue. She was stubborn. “Thanks, Grandma. I have to get home to the kids now.”
“And take this,” she said. She placed a big gnarly root the size of a tennis ball in my other hand. “Ginger. Ordered it on-line from far away. Shave some off and put it in the kids’ food. Keep their hearts good.” I didn’t ask how she got on-line, and I didn’t want to know where ginger grew that big, so I nodded and thanked her, waving goodbye. “You young ones go too fast,” she shouted in her old voice. She muttered some Seminole profanity on her way back into the house. She’d begun using this profanity more lately. We ignored it. Who’s going to tell an Indian lady going on one hundred years old not to cuss like a redneck war veteran?
Dad handed me a battered basket filled with a just-picked batch of broccoli. We stood near my car, and the floodlight of his front porch shone down. A bat swooped down and past us.
“You think that Lutz thing’s for real?” he said, speaking of Trina Lutz’s death.
“What do you mean?” I said. The last thing he needed was to know and to worry. A hanging black branch swayed in the wind.
“Can’t see that girl committing suicide.” A whippoorwill called from across the pond. The world had shifted, and evening was giving in to night. It reminded me of growing up on the pond. Crickets, mourning doves, the wind in the treetops. I slipped my arms around his waist.
What would it have been like to slip an arm around my mother, had she lived? Suddenly, I missed Walter again. Not him, just the company. I hadn’t had time to yearn for her in a long while. “Too many people dying of cancer around here these days,” he said. “Nobody died of cancer thirty years ago.” Cancer? I hadn’t mentioned cancer.
“Well, Dad, Trina didn’t die of cancer,” I said. “And besides, you know—the bad food we eat, the plastic, the pollution in the water. And those fishermen—they never protect their skin.”
“All those still births? That’s not normal,” he said. I just let his words call out like the whippoorwill, echoing across the pond.
“That Fletch.” He shook his head as he spoke of Trina’s husband. “I wouldn’t put nothing past him.” Dad squinted, staring across the pond. “He killed somebody once. They said it was accidental.”
“Really?” I said. “What happened?” A barred owl started up in the woods, the sound echoing across the pond.
“Don’t remember. But I do know it was a gun involved. Even if it weren’t an accident, he’s protected. All that family covering for each other. Like the mafia or something.”
The weapon that killed Trina was a razor or a very finely sharpened knife. “Interesting,” I said, then opened the car door, broccoli and tea in the other arm.
“Dad?” I said. “What’s that got to do with cancer?”
He shrugged.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he hollered. “And send those grandkids around here sometime. I need Taylor to help me move chicken wire.” I promised I wouldn’t and that I would and rolled up the car window. This land, the pond, each other. It’s what we had.
As I rolled back onto the county road and headed back to St. Annes, I thought as always about our fresh water underground. Thus, our clear water on the property. It always made me think about the waterway just below this surface.
A whole system of underground caves ran just feet below our car wheels, a groundwater system holding water from the metro area down to the Gulf. Like Grandma Happy’s legend of Little People in the trees—you couldn’t see it, but it was there.