Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [117]
“Well, how in the world?” Alice doesn’t quite know how to go on.
“Did I think to call you up?” Cash asks.
“Yes.”
“Letty told me.” He looks at Alice again, bringing the truck to a complete, unnecessary stop at a quiet intersection on a thoroughly deserted road. Alice has her window rolled all the way down and can hear birds in the forest, fussing themselves into whatever activity it is birds perform at night. “She let me know you was interested,” Cash says finally.
Alice is stupefied. “Well, I would have been, if I’d known you from the man in the moon, but I didn’t. Sugar told me, she said Letty said…” She can’t finish.
Cash begins to laugh. He tips his straw cowboy hat far back on his head, smacks the top of the steering wheel with both his palms, and laughs some more. Alice merely stares.
“You have to know my sister Letty.” He runs his index finger under his lower eyelids, behind his glasses. “Oh, law,” he says. “If she had free run of this world, she’d like to get that Pope fellow fixed up with some nice widow woman.”
Alice blushes deeply in the dark.
Cash reaches across and brushes Alice’s cheek with the back of his hand before driving on. “And every once in a while,” he says, “the old gal chases a pair of folks up the right stump.”
A sign at the gate of the Ceremonial Grounds says: VISITORS WELCOME, NO DRINKING, NO ROWDINESS. Alice and Cash have fallen quiet. Several trucks are ahead of them and a station wagon behind, all rolling through the gate into a forest of small oaks. They pass a dozen or more open shelters with cedar-shake roofs and cookstoves inside, where women are gathered in thick, busy clumps. Above the roofs, the chimney pipes puff like smoking boys hiding out in the woods, giving away their location.
The dirt road ends at the edge of a clearing, and in its center Alice can see the round, raised altar made of swept ash, knee-high and eight feet across. The fire is already burning there, glowing inside a teepee of stout logs. At the edges of the fire a large log lies pointing in each of the four directions, giving it a serious, well-oriented look, like a compass. Cash has warned Alice that this fire is special. It’s as old as the Cherokee people; someone carries off the embers in a bucket at the end of each ceremony and keeps them alive until the next monthly dance. Someone carried this fire over the Trail of Tears, he says, when they were driven out here from the east. Alice has only the faintest understanding of what that means, except that it’s a long time to keep an old flame burning.
The altar is surrounded by a ring of bare earth some twenty yards across, and at its perimeter a circle of middle-aged oak trees stand graceful and straight-trunked, their upper limbs just touching. People are beginning to gather and settle on hewn log benches under the oaks, facing the fire. Cash gets out a pair of folding chairs and they settle down in front of the radiator grill. Alice can hear little overheated sighs and pops from the engine, and the buzz of a bee that has gotten tangled up there with the metal in an unlucky way.
“You reckon that’s one of Boma’s bees?” she asks Cash.
“Could be. We drove right by her place.”
It was true. Alice saw her standing in her yard, wearing a fedora with a giant white ostrich feather cascading backward into a curl behind her left shoulder. It gave Boma a dashing look, like one of the three musketeers out checking the pressure on the propane tank. Alice feels a little guilty about the bee stuck here writhing on the radiator. “Sugar says Boma loves those bees,” she says.
“Oh, she does. Bees are only going to stay living in your eaves if you have kind feelings toward them.” He takes off his hat and gently swats the bee, putting it out of its noisy misery.
An old man ambles over to chat with Cash. He has a wonderfully round face and like every other man here wears a straw cowboy hat that has darkened and conformed itself to its master around the crown. Cash introduces him as Flat Bush, leaving Alice to wonder whether