El Paso, Texas
House of Purple Cedar. Copyright © 2014 by Tim Tingle. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in case of brief quotations for reviews. For information, write Cinco Puntos Press, 701 Texas, El Paso, TX 79901 or call at (915) 838-1625.
Printed in the United States.
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tingle, Tim.
House of purple cedar / by Tim Tingle.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBNs 978-1-935955-69-6 (Cloth : alk. paper); 978-1-935955-24-5 (Paper : alk. paper); 978-1-935955-25-2 (E-Book).
1. Choctaw Indians—Oklahoma—Fiction. 2. Oklahoma—History—Land Rush, 1893—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.I525H68 2014
813'.54—dc23
2013010570
Book and cover design by Anne M. Giangiulio
Hoke, hoke.
Electronic edition handcrafted at Pajarito Studios.
To Dr. Geary Hobson, the quiet leader and patriarch
of a generation of North American Indian writers
A Note Before the Reckoning
Rose • Winter of 1967
The hour has come to speak of troubled times. Though the bodies have long ago returned to dust, too many ghosts still linger in the graveyards. You are old enough. You need to know. It is time we spoke of Skullyville.
I was born and raised in the Choctaw town of Skullyville, where I attended New Hope Academy for Girls—till it burned on New Year’s Eve, 1896. My grandmother went there too. She met my grandfather when he was a student at nearby Fort Coffee School for Boys. By the time Oklahoma became a state, all of downtown Skullyville had burned. The stores, the businesses, the stagecoach stop, all burned. We knew Nahullos set the fires. They wanted us gone.
Almost everyone from that time is dead now, their faces blurred, their stories scratched like formal words in old, old letters.
But once we were alive, all of us, and when good people, Choctaw and Nahullo both, step over our Skullyville graves, we sing as best we can, we sing those old hymns and songs, for they were everything to us. Our religion, our joys, even our sins, they all made up the music. We Amen! at the top of our lungs beneath the brush arbors, we sweat and toil in our gardens and fields and brood over our livestock and our babies both.
I am speaking as a dead one now, and soon I will be. No time to waste. This story must be told. To see not only the unfolding of events but the meaning I ascribe to them, you must know of the vision, for the house of this story is built upon my vision.
The dream came sometimes once a week, sometimes not so often, and always in the deepest hour of night, when neither day’s end nor dawn cast any light. This vision that I thought was a nightmare began when I was twelve years old. Though many years passed, in the vision I am always twelve, always sitting in the same church pew, always with my family in what at first appears to be a normal Sunday morning.
Pokoni, my grandmother, has not yet entered the church. I am saving her a seat next to me near the window, where we can both stare out at the swaying trees. Brother Willis reads the scripture in that ponderous tone of his, before he lurches into a sermon “likely to raise the dead,” as Pokoni always said.
When Pokoni appears, she walks past our row and approaches the altar, ignoring all else and staring at the wooden wall behind the pulpit. Soon everyone is following her gaze. Even after years of witnessing, I am still startled at the strangeness of the sight.
A man, and I thought I might never know who it was, is slumped over and hanging, his clothing nailed to the back of the church. His body is slowly writhing, his head lifts with every breath, and his vacant eyes return our stare. Always when you thought you knew who hung before you, then you saw another.
Brother Willis steps aside and Pokoni continues walking, but she now becomes a panther, black and silky-skinned, and now she is my Pokoni, then the panther once again.
Through all the days of death and suffering, I longed to see the face of this writhing one, nailed to the cedar planks of our church.
Fire and Ice
Reverend Willis & the Boys
Young Rose • January 1896
I always feared death by ice. Much more than death by fire. Even as a little girl listening to Brother Willis preach about how the world would end, I was never afraid of fire, of burning up. Fire was warm and if it got to be too hot, you just scooted away. The only real problem with fire was starting it in the morning. Everybody else was asleep, and you had to climb out of bed and freeze your fingers fetching firewood so they could stay curled up and comfy.
“Rose, are you up yet?” Momma said every morning, while the moon still shone and the sun hadn’t even thought of waking up. The walls in our house were so thin, she never had to shout.
“Is it morning yet?” Daddy asked, and I could hear him roll over. I knew he covered his head with his pillow to block out the coming day.
“It will be soon,” Momma always said. “No need to waste it.”
No need to waste it meant they could sleep for half an hour longer, but I better get up and start the morning fire. My grandma and grandpa, Amafo and Pokoni, lived with us too. I guess it’s better said we lived with them since this used to be their house. Daddy liked to tell about cutting the cedar and sawing the boards, helping Amafo build this house when he was still a boy.
“I was just a neighbor kid, but I knew if I was a good worker, he’d let me court your mother someday,” my father used to say. My little brother Jamey always made a secret face when he heard this. But there were no secrets, not from Momma.
“You don’t want to be like those lazy Willis boys, do you, Jamey?” she’d say. “They get whippings sometimes. You don’t want a whipping, do you?”
Course that never happened to me or Jamey, neither one. We never got a whipping. But the Willis boys did––and always by their momma––never by their preacher daddy. I never liked seeing anybody get whipped, but especially not the Willis boys. I know they gave living Hades to their big sister Roberta Jean, but there was just too many of ’em to expect anything good, and the how many of them there were, that wasn’t their fault.
“Even a good man, a preaching man, brings troubles on himself sometimes,” Pokoni used to say, shaking her head at the Willis boys.
I remember her saying that very thing one Easter Sunday when the boys stole the baby Jesus from the packed-away Nativity box. They buried him in the graveyard by the church to see if he would rise from the dead during the service. While Brother Willis was telling about how the stone was rolled away, seven-year-old George Willis started hollering.
“Jesus lives!” he shouted. “He’s coming outta the ground right now! Everybody come see!”
What those boys saw was a skunk stirring up leaves around the baby Jesus gravesite, but they didn’t know it. They all scrambled out the windows yelling louder than their daddy ever did. Blue Ned Willis was five at the time, and he chimed in with, “We’re going to meet Juh-eeee-sus!” He said it over and over again, sounding more like his daddy every time.
The