Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [26]
Tahlequah is a town that might as well roll up its sidewalks at sunset. Annawake knows what night life there is—the stray dogs stealthily marking streetside oaks, and the bootleg liquor houses where music from parked cars stakes an otherworldly claim on the night air. She’s walked these streets after dark since high school, pacing the length of her loneliness, Annawake the perfectly admired untouchable. Tonight she has nearly finished her circular route home. Her restlessness had no destination until just now, when she thought of a shoebox of old things she stashed in Millie’s carport shed years ago, before she left for Phoenix. The box seemed empty at the time; the only thing of any value at all was the gold locket her mother used to wear for luck. But tonight she could use the company of family secrets. She turns up Blue Spring Street, finding her way by moonlight.
The back shed has a metal door that complains when she scrapes it open. She snaps the chain of the overhead bulb at the same moment a thin slice of white cat, an antishadow, slips past her legs. “Hi, little ugly,” she tells it. The cat skits away and turns its head far sideways like a bird to look at Annawake. It’s been hanging around for a week or two—Millie even put out a can of tuna for it, and now the can is empty but the cat has nothing to show for it, still just ears and bones. Annawake feels guilty for getting its hopes up. In the pocket of her backpack she finds half a hard peanut candy bar degenerating to sand. “Come on,” she says, holding out the candy on her flat palm. The cat watches her with its head oddly tipped; it might be blind in one eye. It makes no move to come to her, but when she sets the candy bar on the doorsill the cat makes a predatory leap, holding the candy down with its paws, making cracking sounds as it jerks its tiny head up and down, laboring over the peanuts. It’s pitiful food for a carnivore. With one finger Annawake tentatively strokes its back. The cat allows this, but its little back is nothing. A hammock of fur slung between shoulder blades.
She finds her shoebox wedged under a pile of Millie’s baby equipment waiting to make its comeback. Annawake sits cross-legged on the floor with the box on her lap, sorting its treasures with her slender fingers. She finds the locket and works the catch gently to open it. Inside is a photograph of her mother and father in front of the old brick Cherokee County courthouse on the day they married. Her mother’s hair is blowing across her eyes, and she looks worried. She’s already carrying the beginnings of a boy whose name will be Soldier, who will die before he’s old enough to fight back.
Annawake closes the locket and tucks it into her pocket. She doesn’t want to jinx it, but she seriously doubts its power. Her mother was wearing it the day she met her husband and thereafter believed in it so thoroughly she wouldn’t go anywhere important—not to a baptism or a funeral or even the landlord’s to borrow another month—without it. It’s difficult, though, for Annawake to picture the more luckless version of that life.
She wishes her mother had left her something that held more promise for blessing her decisions: a beaded medicine pouch with oak leaves inside, or ash from a ceremonial fire. But there’s no chance; all the ceremony is on her father’s side of the family. Her mother would have called anything of that nature a piece of junk. Annawake smiles a little, hearing her mother’s profound Okie accent say “a pace of ju-unk.” Bonnie Fourkiller was a die-trying acculturated Cherokee, like most of her generation, who chose the Indian Baptist Church over stomp dances and never wore moccasins in her life. She owned one pair of nylons at a time, throughout her lifetime, each folded carefully into the same piece of tissue paper that had harbored all its forebears.
Annawake leafs through other mementoes in the box. A photo of Redbird, her dog, taken in front of their house in Kenwood. Several other shots of her Uncle Ledger’s shantyboat on Tenkiller Lake, where she and her four brothers