“To vote you do.” Sugar holds the chicken wing at arm’s length, turning it this way and that as if it were some piece of sculpture she were working on. “You have to enroll. Which is easy. You’ve just got to show you come from people that’s on the Census Rolls, from back in the 1800s. Which you do.”
“Well, even if that’s true, it don’t seem right. I don’t feel like an Indian.”
Sugar places the chicken bones in a bag inside her purse, and touches a napkin to her mouth. “Well, that’s up to you.
But it’s not like some country club or something. It’s just family. It’s kindly like joining the church. If you get around to deciding you’re Cherokee, Alice, then that’s what you are.”
Alice can’t believe it’s 2:00 A.M. and people are still driving in. The crowd has grown to several hundred. The turtle-shell girls are assembling around the fire again, and when the dance starts, Sugar and Alice are among the first up. Alice feels endurance creeping up on her gradually. This time the singing lasts longer, and she forgets about her arms and legs.
It’s surprisingly easy to do. The music and movement are comforting and repetitious and hypnotic, and her body slips into its place in the endless motion. For the first time she can remember, Alice feels completely included.
The instant a dance stops, she becomes aware of her body again, her muscles and her sleepiness. She understands how, if she kept dancing, she could keep dancing. A keen, relaxed energy comes from forgetting your body. She sees how this will go on all night.
Midway through the next song, she realizes Cash has moved into the line behind her. She smiles as she moves her body through the siss-siss of the turtles. He is back there for a while, and then by the time another song begins, someone else is. She sees Annawake out to the side of her, once. She thinks she sees Boma Mellowbug too, without her feather.
For a while she tries to keep tabs on where Cash is, but then she forgets to think about it, because she can’t quite locate herself in this group either. She only knows she is inside of it.
At the end of each song the voices stop and then there is only the watershell hiss, vibrating inside a crystal jar of quiet.
It’s a sound that loses its individual parts, the way clapping becomes a roar in the hands of a crowd. It is as many pebbles as there are on a beach. Alice’s life and aloneness and the things that have brought her here all drop away; as she feels herself overtaken by uncountable things. She feels a deep, tired love for the red embers curled in the center of this world. The beloved old fire that has lived through everything since the beginning, that someone carried over the Trail of Tears, and someone carried here tonight, and someone will carry home and bring back again to the church of ever was and ever shall be, if we only take care of it.
At home, with morning light seeping under the yellow-white shades in Sugar’s spare room, Alice lies in bed hugging her own beating heart, afraid of falling asleep. She takes stock of where she is, without believing any of it. Her black suitcase yawns against the closet door, exposing a tangle of innards, and Sugar’s ironing board stands near the bed under a pile of wrinkled laundry, burdened like a forward-leaning pack mule.
If she sleeps, the magic could be gone when she wakes up again in this room. She might be merely here, in a cousin’s ironing room, with no memory of what has happened tonight. It seems like a fairy tale, and the stories say spells get broken and magic doesn’t endure. That people don’t really love one another and dance in the woods for no other reason than to promise goodness, and lose track of themselves, and keep an old fire burning.
27
FAMILY STORIES
A YOUNG WOMAN WEARING A lot of beads and a complicated hairdo leads Alice and Sugar through the basement hallway of the Cherokee Heritage Center. She unlocks the door to a small room with a huge oak table in the center.
“You need help finding anybody?” she asks. Alice has noticed that the girl is trying not to chew the gum in her mouth while they are looking. Is that what old women look like to the young? Their fifth-grade teacher?
“No thanks, hon, I’ve done all this before,” Sugar replies.
Their guide leaves them, chewing her gum earnestly to make up for lost time as she heads back upstairs to the gift shop. The big table is covered with old brown ring binders, sprawled out hodgepodge across one another like farmhands taking a break. One wall of the room is covered with an old-looking map of the Cherokee Nation districts, and some sort of film-viewing machine crouches against the other wall.
Lined up across the back of the room are antique wooden cabinets of the type that might sit in a country doctor’s office. Alice feels exactly that kind of nervousness—as if she’s about to get a shot, for her own good.