Chapter 1

A woman stood on the drought-cracked clay in a storm of grasshoppers. They rattled through the air, veering in all directions, bouncing off of her, holding to her. She filled a black kettle with water and prepared to wash her hair. A rusted cricket plow lay at the edge of the garden, a few stunted melons all that was left of a thin harvest. The plow had belonged to old Tom, although she doubted that he ever pushed it.

The grasshoppers were thinning out today. A couple of days before, they had been so thick in the old orchard, millions of them climbing over each other on the trees, that they broke off limbs with their weight. They stuck to her hair as she washed it in borax and egg. The sun crawled in the rattling sky. She saw the outline of her face in the water. It had never ceased to be strange to look into a mirror at that image, a mask with wet dark eyes moving behind it.

She rinsed her hair in gyppy-smelling water from the shallow well. Down the hill the river was low and sluggish, crows stalking the bank for dead fish. It was the driest sickly season in many years.

She squeezed the water out of her hair and called up Faith.

The horse had a felon on her lip, and she decided to use a hackamore instead of a bit. Faith was a chestnut mare, not young anymore. She and Jim Reed had stolen her off of ... somebody ... some dirt-faced breed, but that had been a while back.

Right now she had to decide whether to go to Catoosa after her boy Ed or Fort Smith after Jim July. No reason to go after Jim July except for the fun of it, and there was a damn good reason to go after Ed. He'd taken her palomino and three hundred dollars and disappeared into the Territory, and if she didn't catch him pretty soon he'd surely lose the horse and the money. But then it was more complicated than that. She was getting down the Texas saddle, so she guessed it would be Catoosa. To Fort Smith she generally rode sidesaddle and ladylike.

Fort Smith was the courthouse--and Parker. Parker was a fact, a force as solid and indisputable as the weather or the turning of the years. Fat man. Six days a week, twelve hours a day, he sat behind the gavel of the Thirteenth District, Western Arkansas and the Indian Territory. She held no grudge against Parker, even for the nine months he sent her up to Detroit to weave cane-bottom chairs. It wasn't all that bad. Her nervous headaches had actually gotten better during that time. Her husband Sam Starr had received the same sentence but didn't make out quite so good busting rocks. Sam never did have the right idea about Parker. You played his game, or acted like you were playing it, and you had him half-licked. At the trial, Belle hadn't spoken a word out loud. She had written careful notes to her lawyer. She had worn nothing that could be considered gaudy. Act right, she had told Sam, act like a gentleman of your tribe.

Why was she thinking about Sam? Perhaps because Faith had threaded the maze of trails under Hi-Early Mountain virtually on her own, and right now they weren't two hundred yards from old Tom's graveyard, where Sam lay. The saddle was stiff and squeaky. She noticed that she had forgotten her shotgun. She reined in Faith. It was only thirty minutes back to Younger's Bend, but it would be an annoyance to have to retrace herself in this heat. The air smelled of ironwood and something rotten.

The horse skittered backwards, and Belle checked to be sure the hackamore wasn't rubbing her sore.

Lately she'd been doing this a little too often, forgetting herself and daydreaming through whole spaces of time, finding herself down a trail or at a crossing and scarcely knowing how she got there. An old woman with bad teeth and stiff bones and now, it appeared, addled wits. W. F. Wailes in Briartown sold these Phoenix Pills, and it seemed like they did some good for the stiffness but not much for the wandering mind. There were more different kinds of patent medicines than there were Arkansas whiskey peddlers these days -medicines for your head, your heart, your bowels, liver regulators, Black Draught, Bile Beans, Swamp Root, Stomach Bitters, Ague Busters, Botanic Blood Balm, Dromgooles English Female Bitters, Syrup of Figs, Dr. Miles Heart Cure, Nerve Seeds, Electric Bitters -and from what she'd seen, a lot of folks out here spent more money on medicine than anything else. As if a bottle of pills could keep down what starts happening to you after forty.

The graveyard was on a little plateau above the trail. Tom and Sam were both there, and a whole passel of other Starrs. She didn't particularly like visiting the place. Some of the graves had little houses over them, Indian style. She got down and found Sam's stone. It had cost her forty-five dollars from a sculptor in Whitefield. Just his name and years and a simple legend: SON OF TOM STARR. Who was the meanest son-of-a-bitch Cherokee in the Nation, it ought to have said, but didn't. Grasshoppers clung to it.

She felt nothing but tired. It was too early in the day to feel tired. And irritated at the prospect of going all the way back to the house for the shotgun.

If she could talk to Sam what would she say to him? Funny she'd never thought of that. What would she say after three years? "Hello." Maybe that was all. She really couldn't think of what to say. They had talked a pretty good bit while he was alive, a lot of it business, horses and cattle and shipments, but then Sam hadn't always been interested in that. He wasn't what would be called a real hardworking thief. He did business in fits and starts somewhat like his daddy had done. During the in-between times, he could be just about as lazy as any old Beanbag Cherokee--lazy and gregarious and improvident and hospitable and loving the kids (everybody's damn kids)--and sometimes in the summer when it got real hot, his clothes would fall away piece by piece until he even looked like an Indian, and he'd be happy puttering around in the squaw patch for two months, talking about nothing but squash, corn, beans, horses. But then he'd get started, steal a few horses or get up a whiskey deal, and one thing would lead to another until he had ten deals going and a half-dozen warrants out on him, and Parker and the Lighthorse and the Choctaws all looking for him at once, and then he'd have to make himself scarce, keep moving, keep working, which was not his true nature, she supposed. Not really. He'd get crazy in his nerves and start acting like a wild buck. She'd been with him when he did it for the last time--over at Aunt Lucy Suratt's at a green-corn dance.

Forgetting the shotgun, she mounted Faith and headed on out of the hills. Tom and Sam always used to get onto her about the trails, telling her to be careful and not take the same one every time and beat out a regular road to the home site. It was a habit with them, keeping the place as distant from the law as possible. Which wasn't hard considering where it was. About as far south from the capital of the Cherokee Nation and as hidden in the hills as Tom Starr could have put it, right north of the Choctaw boundary and not a day's ride from the Winding Stair Mountains; Younger's Bend was below, between and beyond, and there weren't too many people crazy enough just to go out looking for it.

On the plain north toward Okmulgee, she ran into a locoed steer, his hair bristling up like quills. He stood in the scorched grass, ears cocked up listening, eyes clouded white. He was blind. A lot of them, including the hundreds and thousands of cattle up north in the Cherokee Outlet, were sickly or dying this year because of the drought. The cattle business had been down for two or three years -seriously down -because of bad weather and overinvestment and now the land being taken over by settlers. The Indian Territory had the "last free land in the west," the railroad posters said. And last April over in what had been Seminole country there had been a "land rush," an interesting new invention of the railroads and banks and federal government which enticed armies of people to abandon the northern plains and move here just in time for the drought. She had seen cowboys plowing the creek bottoms for water. She'd seen steers like this on sale for a dollar a head.

He rared feebly, rolling his white-globe eyes, skin dangling off his bones like a dirty robe. He was -or had been -wild as a deer. He tweaked his ears around and nodded his head.

Over two slow rises she came across a shack that she didn't remember seeing before. Nothing special about that, since there were now whole tribes in the Nation that she didn't know anything about, as well as about five times as many white settlers because of the land madness. There was no immediate sign of anyone around the shack, no crop or garden visible from there, but something about it seemed occupied. The door wasn't barred, and one of the windows in the lean-to kitchen was open. Through that window she saw what looked like the outline of a person standing, holding something out -as if to show her .... A strong urge came out of her body--up her spine--to get the hell out of there. She spurred Faith around the cabin and out across the plain.

A woman, was it? Offering to share food? Maybe an Indian, her man out hunting or something, wanting to show that she was friendly. Not a bad idea, the way things were. Punk breeds following their pistols around like bulls following their balls, knocking over anything that got in their way.

Had she noticed that Belle was a woman? A white woman? Probably not. Her skin had gotten to the point that she looked like a field hand. Of course her daughter, Pearl, was a different story. She kept herself white as a railhead hussy. Which at her present rate was just about what she was going to be.

She hit the Okmulgee Trail at the North Fork but decided to head east of Okmulgee, cross the Arkansas at Tulsa and go from there to Catoosa. Okmulgee was the "capital" of the Creek Nation -a huddle of shacks on the prairie which she had no reason to visit.

The sun was going down when she reached an old campsite that they had used back in the cattle business days. There was a little spring nearby, which she was glad to see still flowing. The water was so chalky that it would probably give a killdeer flying too close a case of diarrhea, but this was the last water until the Arkansas, and she didn't want to ride into Tulsa after dark.

After tethering Faith on twenty feet of rope within reach of the spring, she went about making herself a place on the ground. Mosquitoes and grasshoppers weren't too bad, probably because they couldn't stand the smell of the water. Tin cans littered the ground around the spring. Jim July wasn't far from wrong when he said that if it wasn't for canned tomatoes, most of these settlers wouldn't make it. She gathered some weeds, piled them up and arranged her blanket. She hadn't slept outside in a good while.

Faith's boil was swollen to the breaking point, and she decided to drain and cauterize it. That required a fire, which was okay, she supposed. She hadn't heard of any trouble out here lately. Gathering dry sticks and heating her knife, she thought of the woman in the kitchen back at that shack holding out whatever it was.

When she lanced the felon the horse flinched and snorted but then went right back to nibbling weeds. Belle pressed the heated blade against the draining sore, and the horse started backward, shaking her head vigorously. Belle felt a little better then.

She didn't have anything to eat but a little salt side that she'd carried along, and chewing on it with her front teeth, she smelled the evening air for signs of trouble. She felt ... almost nothing.

It had been a while since she had been on a good ride. All summer she'd been no farther than Eufala. And now where was she going? She ought not to go chasing after her boy. She ought not interfere with his doings any more than she already had, no matter how stupid he acted. If he called her it would be different, but just chasing after him like this wasn't right. She was what he was trying to get away from in the first place. Well, he'd be sending word for her pretty soon anyway, into some kind of trouble, tangling himself up like a steer with its head through the fence. Catoosa was the place for it, all right, a poisoned town like only some of these little Creek and Seminole places a good way out in the Territory could be. Ed had gotten in trouble there before and sent after her. He was a pretty boy, all right, and no coward; he just wasn't mean enough. He was mean enough to get himself into trouble but not to get himself out of it. She had been trying to teach him ever since Sam died.

Sam, Sam, it was a day to think about Sam.

The night at Aunt Lucy Suratt's when Sam shot Frank West, and Frank West managed to shoot Sam, and they were both dead within three minutes, the dance didn't stop and she didn't leave it. She danced all night.

The kids. She remembered the afternoon--when was it, maybe a week after they put Sam into the ground--when she watched Ed out in the river, naked, wading in the shallows. She realized that he had a good stout man's body. For sixteen years she had lived in one-and two-room cabins with the boy. She had changed his rags and taught him how to sit up at the table and feed himself, helped teach him how to ride, read, shoot, cipher, and a dozen, dozen other human tasks, and in all those years she'd never had anything like the feeling she had at that moment. He was unaware of her, daydreaming in the water, thigh deep. He was getting away from her. She was aware of his body and of the fact that it was not a mere forgotten appendage of hers. She watched him and perhaps in that moment made a decision.

She thought now: was it a decision? It was her belief -her assumption -that whatever she did she meant to do. So had it been at that moment when she decided to deserve her name?

She lay down now, the sky opening up above her. She had good eyes. Wondered if Jim July was having any fun in Fort Smith tonight. Doubtless was. He was probably down on Front Street in one of those prim little two-story whorehouses, playing cards, drinking and showing off how he could talk six languages. Trying to get a piece of ass without paying for it.

The stars were like gauze across the sky. Faith nickered. She didn't sound too bad off.