Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [102]
“I don’t think you understand what I mean.” Annawake’s jaw tenses with this familiar frustration: explaining her culture to someone who believes America is all one country. She thinks about what she wants to say, and sees in her mind family, a color, a notion as fluid as river. She tells Alice, “I used to work at the Indian hospital at Claremore, checking people in. Sometimes it would be years before we’d get straight who a kid’s mother was, because one aunt or another would bring him in. Maybe the mother was too young, so another family member raised him. It’s not a big deal who’s the exact mother.”
Alice blinks, taking this in. “So with all this love going around, how does it happen that somebody walks up to my daughter’s parked car one night and gives a baby away?”
Annawake watches two girls passing by outside on the street, Flossie Deal’s granddaughters, she thinks. They are walking fast, with earnest, bobbing heads, the way only adolescent girls can move. Annawake also had speeches in her head, and she too has forgotten them, or lost her introductions. “God knows why,” she says. “What’s happened to us is that our chain of caretaking got interrupted. My mom’s generation.” Annawake feels her stomach harden. “Federal law put them in boarding school. Cut off their hair, taught them English, taught them to love Jesus, and made them spend their entire childhoods in a dormitory. They got to see their people maybe twice a year. Family has always been our highest value, but that generation of kids never learned how to be in a family. The past got broken off.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” Alice says.
“Yeah. The ones my age are the casualties. We have to look farther back than our parents, sometimes, to find out how to behave.” Annawake feels unsteady. “The woman who gave Turtle to your daughter, I think I could probably tell you her sad alcoholic one-bad-man-after-another story. She gave Turtle up because she had no idea how to save a baby from repeating that life. But I also know that baby fell out of a family that loved her, and she’s missed.”
Alice’s expression changes. “You know that for sure? There’s relatives here that want her back?”
Annawake touches the pad of her index finger into the sugar on the table, making a perfect circle, deciding how much to tell. “Yes,” she says finally. “I could have told you, before I knew anything about the specifics of this case, that somebody here was missing that child. And it turns out I’m right. I found out just recently as a matter of fact, more or less by accident. At a hog fry. People talk about things here, and it comes around.”
“Well,” Alice says, glancing around, nervous again.
“It doesn’t really change anything. The law is still the law, Turtle’s adoption is invalid, whether relatives come forward or not. Our job is to figure out what’s the next step.”
“Does Turtle have any say-so in all this?”
“Sure she does. And I’m sure she would say she wants to stay with Taylor. I understand that.” Annawake begins pushing the sugar into another shape, making a point on the bottom of the circle. “We’re not going to decide anything today. The best we can hope for is just to get acquainted.”
Alice takes the offensive. “What happened to your mama, after the boarding school?”
Annawake stares at the heart shape she has drawn in sugar on the table, wondering what in the world it is doing there. “Bonnie Fourkiller;” she says. “Tried hard to be an all-American girl, but she had none of the assets and all the liabilities. Pregnant at sixteen with my brother Soldier, who they tell me was born blue and died pretty quick. She married a Kenwood kid with less talent for making money than she had for conceiving boys. Three more brothers, then me and my twin, Gabe. What I remember is Dad always somewhere tracking down work, and Mama begging us for mercy and drinking seven days a week. Lysol on Sunday mornings, so she wouldn’t smell like liquor in church.”
“Lord,” Alice says.
“She was institutionalized at the age of thirty-five. But