Page 10 of To the Moon and Back
STEPH THIS DREARY EXILE OF OUR EARTHLY HOME
A month later, when school was out, Brett took the family to Cherokee, North Carolina.
It was the first time there’d ever been a Tri-Council meeting, the first time the three bands of Cherokees had been united in our homelands since the Trail of Tears.
I was secretly still heartbroken about Meredith and didn’t want to go.
My mother promised me that, so long as we didn’t miss the mound-building ceremony at Kituwah, on the second day she would drive me the four hours to Duke University.
Dr. Lars Carson, my second-favorite astrophysicist, would be speaking there.
The last part of the drive to Cherokee had us winding up and down mountains, and I didn’t want to put away my Dr. Carson book.
We pulled over twice for me to throw up.
When I got back in the car the second time, Kayla and my mother were holding hands.
Brett was beaming. All three of them looked out at rolling forested mountains in every direction.
“It’s like we’ve finally come home,” our mother said.
“I can feel them with us,” Kayla said.
I turned around, leaned out the window, and threw up again.
The next morning, we sat in an elementary school auditorium. We were late and had missed the kids from the United Keetoowah Band. According to the program, they had opened the meeting in prayer.
Five Cherokee Nation kids shuffled onto the stage.
The girls pulled at their tiny tear dresses, and the only boy fiddled with a black-and-red finger-woven sash worn tied over basketball shorts and a wifebeater.
He tugged the ends around his neck and looked like he’d strangle himself.
A teacher yanked it from his grip and ran back off the stage, while the children sang a short song about a baby bear.
Then it was the Eastern Band’s turn—this was their school, full of grown-up visitors. Their girls were in tear dresses, too, but their boys went all out with little bandolier bags and shirts and leggings, even finger-woven garters. They sang the Cherokee song “Orphan Child” and skipped no verses.
The announcer said, “We will now move to our first item on the agenda. Are the council members prepared to vote on Resolution 101-A?”
The morning passed slowly. People talked too close to or far from the microphone about motions to petition the Library of Congress to digitize its Cherokee language texts, and to further fund a summer biking trip for youth that would trace the path of the Trail of Tears.
Someone onstage would motion for a second and they’d get it, then the nays and yeas—mostly yeas—and then on to the next one.
Each decision, painstakingly noted and debated and voted into law, felt small to me.
What if we got hit by an asteroid? What could the three councils of Cherokee bands, even finally united for a weekend, do about that?
I was relieved to have my geo-journal, the thick, heavy sketchbook I bent over as the hours dragged on.
“It’s my get-into-college project,” I often told people.
If I was feeling petty, which I often was, I said that my stepfather had bought it for me after my mother forced me to turn down my full-ride scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the oldest and most prestigious secondary schools in America.
This was true, and it was also the reason Brett had promised to pay for and drive me to an SAT prep course in Tulsa.
To Kayla, though, my geo-journal was more than that.
She knew it tied me to my life, to the one I was meant to have on another planet.
I collected soil and rock shavings, and had Brett laminate them in the teachers’ lounge at school.
I labeled them and studied them and indexed them and slipped them into little envelopes I’d glued to each page of the journal.
I surrounded them with notes in thick, black ink—classification, observations, whatever I could find on the area’s geological history.
Kayla, on a good day, would lie next to me on my bed and prop a pillow under her arms and sketch an image from memory of almost anywhere I described.
My geo-journal was for geological maps of the fourteen counties in our tribal jurisdictional area, a place my sister felt complete belonging.
If I asked her to draw somewhere she’d never been, like Oologah or Catoosa or Chelsea, she’d find an older boy with a car to drive us out there on a Sunday.
Finally, it was time to break for lunch. We filed through a line in the school cafeteria, elders first, and sat at big, round tables.
Our mother sat on Brett’s right, Beth on his left.
Our mother touched his elbow with her free hand, but mostly kept quiet and ate.
I watched the adults, the easiness between Brett and Beth.
Their parents were the same kind of country people, the same kind of poor.
One of the things I knew about my own ancestors was that they’d wanted to be different from Cherokees like that.
“Upwardly mobile,” my mother had said once about her family, “until they weren’t. ”
Brett and Beth leaned into each other, laughed, told jokes in the kind of Cherokee that was impossible for me. The kind that came from parents instead of worksheets, where the grammar might not follow what we’d memorized, and the speaker sometimes couldn’t say why.
Our mother took Brett’s and Beth’s empty paper plates and piled them over her own. She dropped Brett’s arm and stood there for a minute—three plates, three forks, three cups in her hands. Brett said something to Beth, and she laughed.
At afternoon recess on the first day of Tri-Council, our mother took Kayla back to the hotel to get changed into her tear dress and moccasins and etched-copper crown.
Kayla was near the end of her reign as Junior Miss Cherokee, which she had won with her language skills (such as they were), her platform (Raising Awareness of Cyberbullying), and a talent portion that centered on her Trail of Tears paintings.
She’d gotten a six-thousand-dollar grant she could only use toward college, which she wasn’t sure she wanted to go to unless it were a fine arts conservatory in Italy or the Institute of American Indian Art.
It took a long time for Kayla to get dressed.
Every time she wore her tear dress she added a little something that she’d made herself—a beaded hair clip, copper cuffs, finger-woven garters tied at her knees.
Beth’s aunt was teaching Kayla to make a turkey feather cape.
I knew this because Kayla had a blog with one hundred and three subscribers, and regularly posted photos of her works in progress.
I was bored and tired. I reread a few pages of an article on quasars by Dr. Lars Carson, which I kept folded into a little square in my wallet.
He described quasars—he described all elements of the universe—as simply what they were.
His articles were nothing like how my father had described the universe, which I still remembered as terrifying. I went looking for Brett.
I started with the higher grades’ classrooms and worked my way down the hall. The fourth grade had diagrams of photosynthesis on its classroom door, and the third had hand-drawn family trees.
I turned a corner, passed the first-grade classroom and on down the hallway. I looked through the window in the door of the kindergarten classroom.
Brett and Beth sat side by side on the teacher’s shining wooden desk, ankles dangling, their feet knocking lightly against each other. They were reading from Beth’s gray binder, her council notes open in her arms. Brett held her thigh in his hand. Beth pressed her forehead to his shoulder.
I touched the door handle. It was cold, and I felt suddenly afraid. His fingers slid higher, and closer, and up past the hem of her skirt, and I turned away.
At Kayla’s meet-and-greet that afternoon, I stood beside our mother.
Close, our arms touching. I watched her take photos of Kayla in her regalia beside children in a park.
The Eastern Band version of Miss Cherokee was there as well, in a beautiful cape of brown turkey feathers.
“Ma, it took her sixty hours!” Kayla shouted between photos, turning back to continue interrogating her fellow pageant princess.
I thought, What happened to the turkey? I thought, I have to tell my mother what I saw.
I said nothing that afternoon, or evening, or night. In the bed beside the bed I shared with Kayla, my mother and Brett lay side by side.
When Brett first came to us, I’d been afraid of many things.
But he sat beside me with a telescope and let me look.
He showed me the moon close-up. Every night we’d sit together on the roof and search for things in the sky, shivering in the cold or burning the bottoms of our feet on still-hot shingles.
Every night my mother watched us from the window.
Brett was my one ally on the journey to space. I couldn’t lose him.
The next morning was Duke Day! Dr. Lars Carson Day!
There was one last morning council session, which Brett couldn’t miss.
The mound ceremony at Kituwah, the only part of the weekend that mattered to my mother, would happen two hours earlier that evening than originally scheduled.
I could tell my mother wanted to take back her promise, to not risk her one shot at a traditional ceremony in the homelands.
“Mom, we can’t be late for the lecture,” I said, standing beside an open car door. She looked at me, silent, then drove to Duke as if at gunpoint.