Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [39]
“Here,” he says. “Let’s have a party. Kennedy and Khrushchev drink to a better world.” He sits beside her, very close, and she can feel his body heat through her jeans. Strangely, she feels comforted rather than threatened, as if Jax were one of her brothers. Possibly it’s because she has only heard her brothers, and no other man before now, confess to her his absolute love for some other woman.
Jax leans back on one elbow and begins pointing out constellations: Ursa Major, which Annawake has known since she could walk, and the Pleiades.
“The what?”
“Pleiades. Seven sisters.”
She takes a long pull on her beer and squints at the sky. “You people must have better eyes than we do. In Cherokee there are only six. The Six Bad Boys. Anitsutsa.”
“Anitsutsa?”
“Yeah. Or disihgwa, the pigs. The Six Pigs in Heaven.”
“Excuse me but you’re making this up.”
“No. There’s a story about these six boys that wouldn’t do their work. Wouldn’t work in the corn, wouldn’t fix their mothers’ roofs, wouldn’t do the ceremony chores—there’s always stuff to be done at the ceremonial grounds, getting firewood and repairing shelters and things like that. They weren’t what you’d call civic-minded.”
“And they got turned into pigs.”
“Now wait, don’t jump ahead. It’s their fault, they turned themselves into pigs. See, all they wanted to do, ever, was play ball and have fun. All day long. So their mothers got fed up. They got together one day and gathered up all the boys’ sgwalesdi balls. It’s a little leather ball about like this.” Annawake holds up a green apricot. “With hair inside. Animal hair, human, whatever. And they put all the balls in the stewpot. They cooked them.”
“Yum, yum,” says Jax.
She throws the apricot, carefully aiming at nothing. “Okay. So the boys come home for lunch after playing around all morning, and their mothers say, ‘Here’s your soup!’ They plop those soggy old cooked balls down on their plates. So the boys get mad. They say, ‘Forget it, only a pig would eat this,’ and they rush down to the ceremonial grounds and start running around and around the ball court, asking the spirits to listen, yelling that their mothers are treating them like pigs. And the spirits listened, I guess. They figured, ‘Well, a mother knows best,’ and they turned the boys into pigs. They ran faster and faster till they were just a blur. Their little hooves left the ground and they rose up into the sky, and there they are.”
“Holy crow,” Jax says. “Your mom tell you that, when you wouldn’t make your bed?”
“My Uncle Ledger,” she says. “There’s a lot of different versions of all the stories, according to what mood you’re in. But you’re right, that’s the general idea. The Pigs, and also Uktena, this big snake with horns—those are the Cherokee boogeymen. I was always very civic-minded when I lived with my uncle.”
“So that’s your guiding myth. Do right by your people or you’ll be a pig in heaven.”
Annawake thinks this over. “Yes. I had a hundred and one childhood myths, and they all added up more or less to ‘Do right by your people.’ Is that so bad?”
“Myths are myths. They’re good if they work for you, and bad if they don’t.”
“What are yours?”
“Oh, you know, I heard the usual American thing. If you’re industrious and have clean thoughts you will grow up to be vice president of Motorola.”
“Do right by yourself.”
Jax finishes the last half of his beer in one swallow. She watches his Adam’s apple with amazement. “You think Taylor’s being selfish,” he states.
Annawake hesitates. There are so many answers to that question. “Selfish is a loaded word,” she says. “I’ve been off the reservation, I know the story. There’s this kind of moral argument for doing what’s best for yourself.”
Jax puts his hands together under his chin and rolls his eyes