Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [125]
Alice walks across the wobbly-planked bridge from bank to boat, hanging on to the coarse rope handrail to keep herself from falling in the water. The side of the boat is lined all around with old tires, like bumpers.
“You call this a lake?” Alice asks. “I could just about throw a rock to the other bank.”
“Well, I guess at this point you could call it a glorified river,” Annawake admits. “Did you have trouble finding us?”
“No.” She looks around to locate the “us,” but sees only Annawake and a lot of dragonflies. Annawake had said Ledger had to go bless a new truck in Locust Grove.
“Do you mind sitting out here? The mosquitoes will be here pretty soon, but the water feels great.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Alice sits beside Annawake and catches her breath, then takes off her tennis shoes and rolls her pants legs to her knees. When she plunges her feet into the cold, it feels like a new lease on life.
“That haircut looks real good,” she tells Annawake, feeling motherly in spite of herself.
Annawake runs a hand through it. “Thanks,” she says. “I kind of went crazy and cut it all off when I went to law school. I think I was in mourning, or something. Seems like it’s growing back now.”
“That was a good idea to meet out here. It’s nice.”
“Well, it’s private. We used to come out here when we were kids, for the summer, and we felt like we’d gone to California. We thought it was a hundred miles to Uncle Ledger’s. If anyone would have told me you could walk out here from town in half an hour I wouldn’t have believed it. Because nobody ever does.”
“Didn’t even take that long. Twenty minutes.”
“You’re a fast walker.”
“I always was. If you’re going someplace, I figure you’d just as well go on and get there.”
She and Annawake look each other in the eye for a second, then retreat.
“So, you’ve got something to tell me.”
“To ask, really,” Alice says.
“All right.”
Alice takes a breath. “Would it make any difference about who gets to keep Turtle if I was, if her mother and I were enrolled?”
Annawake looks at Alice with her mouth slightly open. After a while she closes it, then asks, “You have Cherokee blood?”
“We do. I found my grandma yesterday in that roll book.”
“The Dawes Rolls,” Annawake says. She blinks, looking at the water. “This is a surprise. I thought I knew what you were coming here to tell me today, and this is not it.”
“Well, would it make any difference? Would that make us Indian?”
“Let me think a minute.” She runs her hand through the hair at her temple, pulling it back from her face. Finally she looks at Alice with a more lawyerly look. “First of all, yes, if you enrolled then you would be Cherokee. We’re not into racial purity, as you’ve probably noticed. It’s a funny thing about us eastern tribes, we’ve been mixed blood from way back, even a lot of our holy people and our historical leaders. Like John Ross. He was half-blood. It’s no stigma at all.”
“That just seems funny to me, that you can join up late. Wouldn’t it seem like showing up at the party after they’ve done raised the barn?”
“I guess it could be seen as opportunistic, in your case.” Annawake gives Alice the strangest grin, with the corners of her mouth turned down. “But generally there’s no reason why enrollment should be restricted to full-bloods, or half-, or wherever you’d want to make a cutoff. Anybody who lives our way of life should have the chance to belong to the tribe. I sure don’t think outsiders should tell us who can be enrolled.”
“Don’t it kind of dilute things, to let everybody in?”
Annawake laughs. “Believe me, people are not lined up on the Muskogee highway waiting to join the tribe.”
“So I’d be as Cherokee as any soul here, if I signed up.”
“Legally you would be. And I’ll be honest with you, it couldn’t hurt your case.”
“Well, then, I’m going to enroll.”
“But that’s kind of missing the point, where your granddaughter is concerned. You’d be Cherokee legally, but not culturally.”
“Is that the big deal?”
Annawake presses her fingertips