A Dangerous Age (11 page)

“Crow did it every night until it was finished,” one of the wives said. “She did nearly all the work herself.”

“Thank you, Grandmother,” Olivia said. “I thank you with all my heart for this wonderful gift.”

“You will wear it all day tomorrow,” Crow said. “But you can put it on now and wear it also.”

Olivia took off her shoes and shirt and long pants and nylon hose, her jewelry and brassiere, and stood before the dress. She picked it up and let it slide down over her body. Then she turned and faced the women.

“Oh,” they all said. “Oh, yes,” they murmured.

A
T THREE IN
the afternoon the dances began. Olivia had changed back into her regular clothes and put on boots and tied dancing ornaments around her ankles. With the women following her, she walked out to the pasture and saw the earth island and could not keep from crying when she saw it.

Bobby was with the men, sitting in a circle before the island. The hired dancers were putting on headdresses and bells, and the musicians and drummers were preparing to perform. Olivia and the women sat in the places readied for them. The drumming began and the first dancer leaped into the circle around the fire and began to dance; one by one the others joined him.

It was a dance of fire and then a dance of war. It was a dance of warriors, and it was for Bobby Tree.

The pasture slowly filled with people. By the time the war dances were over and the dances for the blessing of the bride and groom began, there were three hundred people spread around the pasture watching, standing mostly, but some were sitting on blankets and some on folding chairs.

The dancing went on for hours. At the house were tables laden with chicken and venison and bowls of fresh and cooked vegetables. There was corn bread and biscuits and thick flat-bread made of beans, and many desserts, as most of the visitors had brought some sort of pie or cake or muffins. There were bowls of fruit and pastries made from the hard green apples that grow in that part of Oklahoma. There were pitchers of iced tea and plenty of hot coffee. The cold held off until around six at night, but after the sun went down people began to come to the house and stay longer and longer, except for the ones who were dancing.

Around eight o’clock the medicine man called Bobby and his three best friends and Little Sun and several of his sons and nephews to come to the sweat tent and begin the purification rites. Little Sun was not going to stay long in the tent because of his age, but he wanted to be there for the beginning of the ritual.

At ten o’clock everyone in the pasture began to come pay their respects to Crow and Olivia, after which they left, promising to come back the next day.

The last visitor was preparing to leave when Olivia’s father, Daniel Hand, came in the front door and went to her and embraced her and stood beside her, holding her hand. “Am I too late for the sweat tent?” he asked. “I wanted to be here for that.”

“Come with me,” Little Sun said. “I will take you. They made me leave because I am an old man. Now, with you here, perhaps they will let me come back in.” He took Daniel away from Olivia and led him from the house.

They would not return until morning.

A
T ELEVEN O’CLOCK
, Olivia went to her old room and got into her bed and fell asleep and slept until dawn, which was not early, since it was deep into winter in Oklahoma and the sun didn’t show until almost seven in the morning.

When Olivia wandered into the kitchen, her father and grandfather and Bobby Tree were already at the table, eating ravenously after their night in the sweat tent.

“When will you put on your dress?” Bobby asked.

“As soon as someone gives me some food and gets ready to be dazzled,” she answered. “Well, I’m glad you all made it. I’m glad no one is dead.”

The men looked from one to the other, but they would not answer. The sweat tent was sacred and the ritual was not shared with women.

At nine that morning, Olivia dressed in her ceremonial dress and put on the cowrie shell bracelets and anklets that
had been in the Wagoner family for a hundred years. Then she walked beside her groom out to the freezing pasture and sat on deerskin hides before the earth island, and the medicine man blessed them, and Little Sun did his blessing in Cherokee and then in English, and then people began to arrive and came one at a time to talk to them and give them presents and wish them a happy life.

By noon the ceremony was over, and everyone was back at the house warming up and eating the leftover food from the night before.

“It should have started at dawn, but it’s too cold this time of year,” Olivia kept telling people.

“It’s going to be in the paper next Sunday,” she told other people. “Be sure and get the paper and look for it.”

“Thank you,” Bobby kept telling people. “We thank you for coming and supporting us.” He kept adding, “I’ll be all right. I’m a mechanic. I might have to go on patrols, but I’m not an infantryman. I won’t be in the line of fire unless they attack the motors of the machines.”

“Sand repellent,” he told others. “If you think of any way to keep sand out of eyes and engines, let me know.”

“No, they don’t have chiggers,” he told one little boy. “But I’m sure they have something worse. I’ll let you know when I get back.”

B
OBBY AND
O
LIVIA
had meant to drive back to Tulsa that night but changed their minds because Daniel was there.
They all sat in the kitchen talking. Olivia was still wearing her dress and sat beside her father holding his hand. “The last time I was here, you had a tornado, and now I’m getting a grandchild,” he said. “What do you folks do on ordinary days around here?”

Olivia and Bobby and Mary Lily and Crow went to bed early, but Daniel and Little Sun stayed up late, asking each other questions and telling stories.

At dawn, Bobby and Olivia got up and started driving back to work. “When you’re gone, I’ll make it up to the newspaper,” Olivia said. “I know they think I’ve been goofing off and I have been, but when you’re gone, I won’t have anything to do but work.”

“The blessing was the best thing I’ve ever known,” Bobby said. “Your dad’s going to stay with your folks for a few days; then he’s coming to stay with us. Is that the deal?”

“I guess so. He’s so mellow since he quit drinking. I don’t know what he’s up to. He’s just like his father used to be. My granddaddy. I guess we all revert to type.”

D
ANIEL
H
AND ENDED
up staying in Tahlequah for four days. He and Little Sun rode the countryside in Little Sun’s pickup truck. They spent an afternoon riding Arabian horses at Kayo’s stables and another afternoon trout fishing and took the trout back to Crow, and she fried them in a black iron skillet and they ate them with corn bread and cooked spinach and carrots.

They explored the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation and
watched a film about the Trail of Tears, which made Daniel cry. They talked about horses and fescue and politics and war and found they were on the same side in just about everything.

B
OBBY WAS SCHEDULED
to leave on January 30, a Sunday. His company was to meet at 5 a.m. to be bused to the airplane. “I may be second in command at a Motor Transport Division,” he told her the night before. “That’s the latest word anyway. So you don’t need to start worrying about me until I call and tell you to worry. The government’s not putting any Americans in the line of fire at this point, and by the time I get there, the Iraqi election will be over and things will be cooling down. Look at me. Promise me you won’t worry until I tell you it’s time.”

Olivia stood up and put both her hands on her slightly protruding belly. She held her shoulders back. She felt very beautiful and it showed. “I will be a warrior too,” she promised. “Go on, then. Get out of here.” She allowed him to caress her; then he picked up his pack and started out the door to the front walk. A man he knew was picking him up to take him to the armory.

“I’ll get home for the birth if there is any way,” he said.

“I can have a baby by myself if you don’t. I’ll have so many people around I probably won’t be able to think.”

“Good-bye.”

“I love you.” Then he was gone. Olivia walked back to her office and began the editorial for Tuesday’s paper.

W
EAPONS
C
OMPANY
, Third Battalion, Twenty-fifth Marines, Fourth Marine Division, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had twenty-six men from the Cherokee Nation, six Arapahos and nineteen Chickasaws. The rest were men from small towns in the area and of mixed Scotch, English, Irish, German, and Italian stock. There were six Hispanics and four African Americans. There were identical twins from Healing Springs, three members of the 1996 Hogscald football team, and a young man with a missing finger, who had just gone to work as the assistant director of sports news for the University of Tulsa. None of these men were happy about being called back to duty, but only a few were talking about it.

At five in the morning on a bleak, cold, rainy day, it seemed a pretty unhappy-looking group of men, and Bobby Tree wasn’t in the mood to try to cheer them up.

“I just got married and my wife’s pregnant,” he answered the elderly civilian who checked off their names as they boarded
the bus that was taking them to the transport plane. “How the hell do you think I feel?”

“Maybe it won’t last much longer,” the man said. “You never can tell. If the Republicans lose Congress in the next election, this all could change.”

“Well, don’t tell that to anyone else this morning.” Bobby threw back his shoulders and started acting like a soldier. “We got a job to do.”

“Whatever,” the man answered. “Well, here’s the list. Have them sign by their names. You’ll be on the plane in an hour and then we’re off to the races.” The civilian was a retired fireman. He worked weekends at a casino on the Arkansas border, and then on the air base whenever they called him in. He had profited from the war. He’d made five hundred dollars doing part-time work in the past month, and maybe fifteen or sixteen thousand dollars since the thing began. He needed the work and had gotten in the habit of following the war closely on television and in the newspapers. Some days he was glad the United States had declared war on Iraq, and sometimes he was sorry and wished it would hurry up and end.

It was eight in the morning before the company was on the plane to take them to begin their basic training. As soon as everyone was seated and strapped in, Bobby got out his notebook and began his first letter to Olivia.

Dear Olivia,

I don’t know what they will let us write, so this may be held up or parts marked out. Since I don’t
know anything yet, I don’t know what I could write that I shouldn’t write. Anyway, we are on a transport plane and in a few minutes should be taking off for six weeks of training before we’re posted. You can probably fly there before I leave, but they may let me come home if I’m being sent overseas.

It’s not bad being with the men. Most of them are acting good, only two really griping, and I’m not in the mood to start yelling at people yet.

When our folks went to war, they knew who they were fighting and what they were protecting or who they were mad at and for what. Men don’t have that anymore. We have to trust our leaders. That’s what Semper Fi is all about. That’s what the marines are about, trusting the chain of command, so I’m going to do that until I see a reason to stop doing it, and I’m going to do it then too.

I’m a good soldier and I’m proud to be an American. I know you hate that kind of shit, but I don’t hate it.

I think about the baby a lot. Let me know as soon as you find out if it’s a boy or a girl. I can’t help wanting a son, but I don’t care.

I love you, baby. Take good care of things there and take care of yourself and the baby, boy or girl. I love what’s in there, hidden in you, and made of you and me.

Maybe I’ll write a country-and-western song. Send me my guitar. Just kidding.

Love,

Bobby

While Bobby was writing this letter, Olivia was sitting at her desk in the newspaper office, eating a tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat bread and thinking about a poem she had found that morning on the Internet. It contained a metaphor of such power that she had thought of nothing else since she read it, was seeing everything she thought of in the context of the poem.

She called her secretary into the room and gave her a copy of the poem and told her to find out what it would cost to reproduce it in the paper.

“We should be publishing a poem a day,” she announced. “I told Jim that was what I wanted ten months ago and then I forgot about it. I’ll just start doing it and see if he yells. I want to start with this one. Mary Oliver is a famous poet. It’s Beacon Press. Call an editor there and see what they say.”

“I like this,” the secretary said, looking up from the poem, “but I’m not sure I know what it means.”

“It’s a metaphor. Think of the bear as this war. Think of it as nature in all its glory and death. Or hell, just read it. I don’t want to tell you what it means.”

“It’s about spring,” the secretary said. “It says ‘Spring’ right here in the title.”

“Read it out loud,” Olivia said. “Maybe it
is
only about spring. Maybe I’m projecting.”

“Read it out loud?”

“Sure. Read it. Indulge me.”

The secretary, whose name was Callie Mayfield, and who had been a good student in English classes when she was at the university and would have majored in English, but her father made her go to business school because he thought the humanities were run by a bunch of gooks, stood up and put on her best manner and read the poem out loud.

“Wow,” Olivia said. “Where did you learn to read like that?”

“I acted in all the plays in high school. I was Miranda in
The Tempest
. It’s on my résumé.”

“You’re right, it’s about spring. It’s just with Bobby gone . . .”

“What do you hear?”

“Not much, not yet. He’s applying to be a technician on some special ops thing they are doing in Nevada. He takes the tests next week. Say a prayer he gets in. It would keep him in the States.”