Page 13 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH HOW MANY INDIANS DOES IT TAKE

Brett and Beth got caught having sex. I should have known it would happen. I should have told my mother two years ago, when I saw his hand on her leg in North Carolina. But I didn’t. For two extra years I’d had a father, a good one. I wasn’t sure what would happen next.

Brett had been staying with his parents for three weeks. Supposedly to fix their roof, but Kayla and I were too smart for that. He and our mother needed space.

In the meantime, he’d been making moves.

He was probably on the road right now, driving into town to officially announce his campaign for principal chief.

I was seventeen years old, full-time employed for the summer, and saving up for my college application fees.

I didn’t give a shit about his run for office. My sister did.

Kayla followed me into the bathroom. She said we had to be seen standing next to Brett at his rally, because a gesture like that “matters more than you think.”

“What? Where is this coming from?” I said. It was bizarre for her to care how people, or at least Cherokee people, saw her. I had to get ready for work.

“Are you coming or not?” Kayla said.

At the sink, I wrapped my head in a turban.

The kind Sequoyah wore in the painting in our living room.

I worked as a reenactor in a pre-Removal Cherokee village, and my boss Will had requested the turban as a compromise.

My haircut made me look like a lesbian, he said, and lesbians were historically inaccurate.

Kayla sat on the rim of the tub in an oversized T-shirt. Years before, a cheerleader had shot it at her during a baseball game Brett and Beth had taken us to together. We should have known.

“I’m serious!” Kayla said.

“You know it’s weird that you’re worried about his little event,” I said. “Don’t you have other things on your plate?”

Kayla’s blog had just celebrated its six hundredth subscriber.

She designed and sewed and sold (and posted about) truly beautiful powwow regalia, and I often heard her on the sewing machine late at night.

What I didn’t hear about, ever, was a concrete plan for her life.

I worried she’d end up abused or pregnant or both, three kinds of disaster I kept top-of-mind.

Kayla leaned back, flailing a little before catching herself on the faucet.

“You’ll split your head open,” I said.

Kayla said it would be a huge embarrassment if I bailed. “There’s gonna be a picture in the newspaper.”

“Okay, and?”

“Well, that’ll affect, like, how people see our family? If they don’t see us up there, it’ll change how they think about us!”

I made a face. “But you don’t care what people think about you. It’s, like, your one redeeming quality.”

“Very funny,” she said.

I’d meant it, though. If the gossip around Brett had shaken my sister, I’d never forgive him. At least with our father before Brett, my mother and I had known not to trust him. In that way Kayla had been easier to protect.

“Even Mom’s going to this thing,” Kayla said. “You think this is harder for you than for Mom?”

“Don’t you have to get ready for work?” I said.

She stood up, pulled off her shirt, threw it on the floor, and shimmied a lifeguard-red bathing suit up her tanned body. “Ready,” she said.

A car honked, and I looked out the bathroom window. John, this month’s boyfriend, was here to pick her up. He was, as was his custom, shirtless.

Kayla pushed past me. “Three p.m.,” she called behind her. “Tribal courthouse. Maybe you’ll think about someone besides yourself and be there.”

The first tour came too soon. We weren’t allowed to wear watches, which Will said “didn’t exist yet.” But if I kept my head down and listened, I could hear my way through the day.

The elders scraped their tools, coughed, and muttered under their breath. Theirs was quieter work, softer than the shouts coming from the stickball field. Even the carving of arrowheads was only the click of rock against rock.

I heard the shuffling of feet coming up the dirt path. Ten or so in this group, maybe more. I dipped my hand in the creek and ran a wet finger along my lips. They were dry, near to bleeding.

I registered what I could of the people around me. Sandals, strappy purple heels, and a pair of orange boots. Bright pink jelly shoes, orthopedic whites, and a dusty black cane. Rows of running shoes.

“This is my friend Saloli,” said Will. “That’s Cherokee for ‘squirrel.’ Anyone wanna try and say that?”

The girl in jelly shoes answered. “Osiyo, Saloli!”

I smiled big and waved. “Osiyo!”

That was all I had to do. Will did the talking for us all.

“Saloli is our basket weaver,” he said. “Now, Cherokee basket weaving began thousands of years ago and was traditionally done by women. Saloli’s baskets are made from all natural materials. Cane, white oak, honeysuckle… Her work is for sale in the gift shop!”

It wasn’t. I had almost no experience, and there were rough-palmed and sharp-fingered women who’d been supporting their families on baskets for decades.

They didn’t want to sit out in the heat, though, and tourists would rather look at a barely capable young woman than a skilled one over forty.

So I posed next to baskets I hadn’t woven, with a hundred dollars or more going to the artist when one sold.

What few pieces I finished myself, my mother displayed in our living room.

I ran my thumb against the calloused side of my index finger.

As a child I’d wanted hands like this, like my mother’s.

I used to think the hard skin on her fingers and palms made her strong.

She carried couches and fixed plumbing and bent over the hood of a car with swim goggles and a dirty cloth.

She went out in the woods and chopped piles and piles of firewood, every year saying she’d take us camping so we could roast marshmallows.

Every year she forgot, or got tired, or said her body was too sore from work.

Her knees and back always hurt from the hours on her feet, but then off she’d go into the woods with an axe.

Maybe all she’d really wanted was to cut something down.

Will shut the gate behind the fourth group of the day.

The village fell back into itself. The older ladies put down their yarn and wrung out their fingers.

Mr. Jack put his blowgun down and sat back on a bench with his head in his hands.

Meredith, Shannon, and Brittany walked past me into the woods, carrying plastic water bottles and avoiding eye contact.

Meredith still acted like I was contagious, two years after our last kiss.

I dropped my basket and stepped down to the creek.

I liked to press my back against the rocks and let what water we had wash over me.

If I stretched out right, I could catch it under my arms. Me, a dam.

Best part, besides the smell of summertime, which was really the smell of muddy water and grass and what comes after rain, was the sound.

The not-sound. The creek came up high enough to split at my feet and then skirt along the sides of my legs.

High enough to fill my ears with quiet. I heard nothing and saw nothing but the blue up ahead, the occasional whishing back and forth of a tree branch.

But mostly nothing. Nothing and blue. On clear days I’d look at the daytime moon.

Someone splashed water on me. I startled. Will stood on the edge of the creek bed, breathing hard. A clipboard was tucked under his arm, and his copper arm cuff clicked against the wood.

“What happened,” I said.

Will’s cell phone was folded open like a clamshell. He squinted at it and smashed down on the buttons.

“Will?” I said.

“Shannon got bit by a snake.”

I asked if it was poisonous, and he didn’t know.

“I mean venomous,” I said, remembering the difference.

Brett had taught me that. Will didn’t answer.

I asked what kind of snake it was, and he said no one on staff could recognize it.

He’d asked six stickball teens and two elders before deciding to drive her to the hospital.

What did it look like? Long and thin. It was like a joke.

How many Indians does it take to ID a snake in the wild?

Shannon was lying in the back of his truck, a handkerchief tied around her ankle.

“You’ll be me on the next tour,” Will said.

I nodded.

“Starts in five minutes,” he said.

I nodded. “ Wait! I’m you ?”

Will was walking away. He yelled behind him. “We need the others ready at their stations, but anyone can do yours. You got this!”

He was at the gate.

I said I wasn’t ready.

Will said, “Break a leg!”

I swung open the gate. “OSIYOOO, NIGAD!”

Quiet.

It wasn’t the crowd I’d thought it would be. Just five people, looking at me. I was still wet from the creek and embarrassed they might think it was sweat. The dust in the air had stuck to my skin, leaving patches of dirt across my arms and legs.

“Okay,” I said. Then even quieter, “Okay.” My voice sounded strange and far away, like when you hear a tape recording of how other people must hear you every day and you’re embarrassed to be alive.

A Black woman, maybe my mother’s age, stepped forward. She had red-lipsticked lips and tight curls, her nose and cheeks shiny in the sun. “This is the right place,” she said, “right? The Cherokee village tour?”

I smiled. “Sure is!” I opened the gate all the way and stepped to the side. “I’d be honored to show you around my home.”

I walked the group to Miss Marie. She took one look at me, leaned back against the dry mud wall of the house she pretended to live in, and said, “This oughta be good.”

“Let’s start here,” I said, “and I’ll tell you about the ancient, um, traditional art of beading.”

The only child on the tour belonged to the only woman, a little boy with curls like his mother’s. They swung around as he jumped up in place. He bent to rip grass from the ground. Got it. I had to pick up the pace.