its security, but rather become the very circuit for which the charge swells. The energy’s force overcomes everything idle and ordinary. And you know it from the moment the air vibrates with warning thunder. Her future, everything that would come after her nineteen-year-old reality, was too powerful for most of us to follow.
I knew this the first day I saw her, over a decade prior to our trip. She was a child of maybe seven or eight playing in the cool shallows of the Oconaluftee River, downstream from where I fished for speckled trout and dug ruddy crayfish from beneath mossy rocks. Her goldenrod skirt was hiked up to just above her scarred knees, and dark strands of hair fell ragged along the slopes of her downward-peering face. She, too, was searching for fish, but not to snare as I had set out to do. While I was dedicated to their capture, she was more concerned with studying the free movement of the fish that maneuvered past her stick-thin legs. Out of a patient stillness, she darted after a quick-moving knotty head, marveling at its agile speed, then snatched it from the water, only to release it immediately. Within minutes by the river, I had slipped on the filmy rocks and busted my ass. I was soaked. Though she took far fewer precautions, she never fell. She never even seemed to come unbalanced.
However, judging from the way she introduced herself on the sagging porch of her father’s cabin all these years later, she remembered nothing of me. And judging from the past fifteen minutes of this car ride from Cherokee to Asheville, she did not care to.
The sum of her words amounted to “Hello. Pleased to meet you. I’m Essie Stamper. Thank you very kindly for the ride.”
I’d done my best to conceal my excitement when the request came from Preacherman to help Essie arrive safely at her summer job at the Grove Park Inn. I wanted credit for a burden borne, and to earn that I had to at least appear as if I were actually burdened. I figured it could help to pardon me from a few Sunday or Wednesday nights’ church services. Despite my resolve, it was still difficult to shoo away the grin as I loaded her suitcases into the car’s trunk. I felt something intimate about preparing for a trip together, even if others had arranged most of the preparation.
Preacherman told me that Essie was just working at the inn for the summer to earn money for college. “One smart cookie,” he offered one day after church. “If you keep your mouth shut and ears open, you might just learn a thing or two.”
I hoped that Preacherman did not provide Essie with an overview of my own background, which would include a failed attempt at Oak Ridge Junior College (an institution I’d only been accepted into as recognition of my father’s World War I service and been able to afford with federal relief aid dollars), and the last year of my nineteen-year-old existence working odd jobs in Cherokee. I coveted this opportunity to introduce myself on my own terms, to present the Cowney detached from family binds or awkward tales of my fumbling youth. Though I was unsure if she had any impression of me at all, I wanted desperately to craft one for her. I wanted us to be immediate confidants, as if we shared years of inside jokes, had nicknames for each other, could speak without vocalizing words. I wanted to assume that Lishie’s recollection of being distant cousins was merely the ramblings of an aging grandmother insistent that the whole damn reservation was related. I wanted to speak to her like I am speaking to you now. I wanted her to have never heard anyone else’s opinion of me save, perhaps, my mother’s and Jesus Christ’s.
Some apparent nervousness pinched the tint from her lips. We were well into our two-hour drive and she hadn’t uttered more than her initial introduction. She clutched her black purse on her lap and left her ankles uncrossed, though seemingly fused together.
The silence pressed deep into my chest. I waited for a change in her demeanor as if I was checking the ripening of a Cherokee purple, unsure of the perfect time to pry it from the vine when it peaks—before it spoils.
Oh well, I rationalized. No better way than to just jump in.
I leaned over and gave her a sideways glance. “There’s rumors about this place, you know.” I shrugged. “Heard it’s built on graves.”
The car’s vibration unnerved my voice.
She feigned interest. “Oh. Whose?”
At least maybe she wanted to pass the time as much as I did. Optimism grew. “I don’t know. People’s, I guess.”
“No. Which people? Indian? White? Your great-aunt Sally?” Essie sighed as if exhausted with her own questions.
“Cherokee,” I gushed. Grateful I had an answer. “That’s what they say.”
“They do, huh?” From the corner of my eye I saw her slip out a smile too glassy for me to grasp.
“Yeah. Lots of people. Heard it’s built on graves.”
The smile disappeared as quickly as it had come. “Of course it is. White folks with money tend to find moving dead Indians easy.”
“Ah, they’re not all bad,” I offered, thinking she might like to hear me acting diplomatic.
“That’s true. But they sure don’t like to be reminded of us.”
I felt a warm, wet embarrassment wash over me because of how confidently she spoke when I was always grasping just to stay in the conversation. I had pissed away my opportunity. Preacherman was right. Anyone could tell by the way she cut her dark, Greta Garbo eyes toward me that Essie was smart or mean or both. I knew I had better figure out which one as quickly as possible or the rest of the ride would be miserable. More troublesome, there would be no second ride, and I could not imagine an existence without at least the possibility of seeing how fully Essie’s long, perfectly curved body would fill out the baby blue maid’s uniform at the inn. These daydreams did not help my execution of words.
“Anyway. Makes sense given some of the rumors about that place at night.”
“Oh, you have friends there?”
“No. People just tell you things when you say you are going to a place like that.” The truth was, if I didn’t have friends in Cherokee, which I didn’t, then I sure as hell didn’t have any in Asheville.
“What kind of things do they say?”
At least she was listening.
Essie stared out the window at the blurred crimsons, gingers, auburns, and verdant greens of the budding trees, a Monet masterpiece appearing through the Model T’s passenger window.
“You’ve heard the stories, right?”
She still did not turn. “What stories?”
“Of those people staying at the inn. Of why they’re there and why the owners can’t keep no help longer than a few weeks.” This would get her.
Essie turned her face toward me, but did not commit her body to the same engagement. “Any,” she responded. It wasn’t a question and she noted my confusion. “Any. They can’t keep any help.” Her tone was sharp.
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Anyway, you’ve heard rumors of those death camps? These are the types of people who run those places. Higher-ups. You think they just left all that behind when they got captured? It’s like a blood thirst.” My hands gripped the steering wheel as if I was driving a tank myself.
“So you’re telling me they’re some sort of German vampires?” She had a way of twisting my words to make me sound fool-ignorant.
I loosened my grip. “Never mind.” I looked into my rearview mirror so she’d know I was too busy to be chided.
“No … I’m sorry, Cowney.”
She remembered my name.
“Go on. Tell me what you think. I need to get as much background as I can if I am going to work there.”
I was beginning to see that this was typical for Essie. That she was somehow cold without wanting to be, just needing to be. My early impressions of her could have been wrong. Maybe all those years ago she wasn’t scowling down at the river but shielding