A Dangerous Age (23 page)

“
T
HE BODIES ARE PILING UP
,” Louise said when Winifred called her with the news.

“Two dead, one wounded,” Winifred answered. “That’s not so many, and none of them were really kin to us. I mean, they aren’t blood kin.”

“Your husband’s blood kin,” Louise answered. “His blood is mingled with ours in my daughter. He’s a perfect biological match to my husband, so he’s kin to me.”

“They’re having a memorial at Nellis next week,” Winifred said. “Bobby and the other man who died were from here, and a colonel and his aide are wounded. I don’t know when it’s going to be.”

“What can we do to help Olivia?”

“Nothing. Any more than you could help me. It never goes away, not if you slept with them. I had slept with Charles. He was the first man who ever really loved me. He loved me when I was fat. He liked me fat as much as he liked me later.”

“You weren’t fat. Slightly overweight.”

“Fifteen pounds overweight. It was all around my waist. I
love Brian. I really deeply love him. But I love Charles too, and I will always love him and mourn for him.” Winifred started crying, and Louise couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Don’t cry,” she said at last. “Go for a walk. Cook something. Iron a blouse. E-mail Olivia.”

“I’ve talked to her twice already. Okay, good-bye. I have to call some more people. I love you. I’ll see you at the funeral, I guess, if not before.”

T
HEY BURIED
B
OBBY
on a rise of land above the snakelike earth island Little Sun and Kayo had built to celebrate Bobby’s wedding to Olivia. Little Sun and Crow had cleared the burial place years before. They had even planted a grove of cherry trees near the site and kept the pine trees from taking over by picking up the cones each spring. It was a small hill formed when melting glacier water came down over that part of Oklahoma and made the creek that flowed into the river and left the springs that made the pond beside the earth island. Deer lived among the trees behind the site, and at all seasons birds called in the trees and came down onto the cleared places to search for food left in the gullies after rains. Little Sun had thought he would be the first to be buried there, but now it would be the father of his great-grandchild instead.

“I want a headstone that can be seen from far away,” Olivia said. “I like to see country graveyards with headstones sticking up. I want it to be some native stone from around these parts; maybe I’ll find something later and we can have part of
it polished so we can write his name and leave a place for mine. Anyway, if it’s okay with you all, that’s where I want to bury him.” She was talking to his father, Bud Tree, who had come to her house two days after Bobby died and cried a lot while she talked to him. “He loved you a lot, Bud,” she went on. “He was proud of you. I was thinking I might put one of his buckles in the casket. I guess we’ll bury him in his marine uniform. What do you think? I don’t know when they’ll send him to us or what he will be wearing.”

“You do whatever you want to do,” Bud said. “I’d be proud to have him buried on your granddad’s place. Anything’s okay with me.”

T
HEY BURIED
B
OBBY
at ten o’clock in the morning on a hot early June day. The hill beside Little Sun’s pasture was filled with all the people who had come to the wedding, plus many more, including Olivia’s cousins from North Carolina and their husbands, and her sister Jessie and Jessie’s husband, and her uncle Niall and her aunt Helen and her aunt Louise and both their husbands. Her cousin Winifred’s husband, Brian, and her cousin Louise’s husband, Carl, both stood with the color guard, and a marine played bagpipes, and then four dancers from the Cherokee Nation danced the death rites and laid their spears beside the coffin, and a Baptist minister and a Cherokee medicine man said prayers, and then the coffin was lowered into the grave, and Bud Tree walked up to the grave, and took up the first shovel, and then the men of the tribe began to cover
the coffin with the hard red clay of eastern Oklahoma, of the Cherokee Nation.

S
OME OF THE
Hand family stayed in Tahlequah for several days. Olivia’s uncle Niall came out to the Wagoner farm very early the next morning to sit with Little Sun and Bud Tree beside the grave, and to watch while Roper Wagoner and his sons hauled the huge piece of limestone that Olivia had found in a back pasture to the gravesite and set it into the ground above the grave. A man from Muskogee was coming to smooth a place on the stone to write the names of people buried below it.

The grave was still covered by the flowers the funeral home had brought in the hearse with the coffin that held Bobby’s patched-together body dressed in his marine dress uniform. The belt buckles from his first two rodeos were beside his right hand, as though he might need to rise up and use them for weapons if evil spirits came to disturb his rest.

Bud Tree and Niall Hand and Little Sun took the flowers and carried them deep into the woods and spread them beneath the trees. They took the small painted sticks that had held the flowers together, and the ribbons that were attached to the flowers, and the envelopes with messages from people who loved Olivia and Bobby printed by the hands of people in florist shops in Tulsa and Tahlequah. Niall kept the cards that had been in the envelopes to give to Olivia, and they took the rest of the debris and made it into a small pile near the earth island, and Little Sun knelt beside it and added cedar bark he crushed into
powder with his hands and set it on fire. The small plume of smoke rose straight up into the hot, windless morning, and the men left it burning and went back to the gravesite to help Roper and his sons unload the huge, jagged, rectangular piece of limestone Olivia had found.

“I
WOULD HAVE PUT
him in a tree the way the old Indians used to do,” she told her cousin Louise, “but it’s against the law. Anyway, now I have to get back to work and I have to make sure this baby comes into the world proud and strong and ready to have his life. At least I don’t have to name him some corny fucking name now. Bobby wanted to name him all sorts of crazy things, but I’m going to name him Robert Daniel Tree. So what are you doing in Washington? Are you getting anything done for your work?”

“I’m taking care of Carla Louise. You can’t get anything done when you have kids. It’s the wildest thing, how much energy she sucks out of me.”

“I’m glad you brought her. I liked having children at the funeral. It made it seem as if we have a real family and not just a bunch of people spread out all over the United States talking to each other on cell phones and e-mailing each other.”

“We have a family,” Louise said. “Uncle Niall’s going to have us a family reunion. He’s been working on it for months.”

“When are you all going back?”

“Carl and I are leaving from Tulsa tomorrow morning at eleven.”

“I might ride back with you.” Olivia stood up and stretched her arms over her head. “I’ve got to get home and get to work on my life. I can’t hang around Tahlequah acting like a widow. Where are the men? Where’s Carl?”

“They’re out in your granddad’s pasture, moving that stone you found and doing things to the grave. They’re all, well, more morbid, I guess you could say. Uncle Niall went out yesterday morning to help move the flowers into the woods. If I was still into photographing graveyards, I would have had a camera going on this production. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound, well, disrespectful.”

“Bobby would be laughing his head off if he could see all this. All his workers and his partner crying and all of that.”

“If you want to go with us tomorrow, we’ll be glad to come out to the farm and pick you up.”

“I’ll be ready at eight. Any time you get here is all right with me.”

A
T NINE THIRTY
the next morning, Olivia was back at her house in Tulsa, alone, as she had insisted she wanted to be. As soon as Louise and Carl left, she went to the phone and called Kathleen and told her to meet her in the morning at the track. Then she called her cleaning lady and told her to come over and help her pack Bobby’s clothes to send to the Goodwill.

Then she went into the bedroom that had been her office before Mary Lily moved in, and started turning it back into an office.

At noon she called Big Jim Walters and told him she wanted to come to the newspaper and work three days a week, and he said, “Hooray. When do you start?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “I’m in good health; nothing’s wrong with me. I’ll be in by eight.”

S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
. Olivia and Little Sun and Crow and Mary Lily were in Olivia’s living room. Crow and Mary Lily were sitting on the red leather chaise, Little Sun was sitting on the blue chair, and Olivia was cuddled up in the double papasan chair she and Bobby Tree had bought one afternoon right after he moved into her house and before they decided to get married. The eight-month-old baby boy in Olivia’s womb was lying on his side, listening and sucking on his left thumb. He had sucked it so much that when he was born he was going to be a quick learner in the sucking milk department, so quick he would astonish the nurses, not the last time he would acquire a trick with which to astonish women. For now, however, he was content to suck his thumb and listen to the voices and the sounds matter makes in space.

“I dreamed last night that Mother returned to me,” Olivia said. “It was morning in the dream and I looked out the kitchen window and a parade was coming down the hill, friends of mine and kinsmen, and Bobby was there. Mother was in a wheelchair, but she was pretty and happy to see me. She was
smiling and not young like in the photographs, but older, with a round face and hair pulled back like mine. She was very happy, as if she knew she was giving me a great gift to return to me in such good health and the right age to be my mother now that I am older.”

“Bobby was with her too?” Crow asked. Ever since Bobby died, Crow and Little Sun and Mary Lily had been driving to Tulsa on Sunday afternoons to visit for a few hours; then they’d drive back. If Olivia was busy at the newspaper, they went to museums or had ice cream cones at the mall and watched the skaters on the indoor ice-skating rink and then drove home. Little Sun had bought a new car for these trips, a Toyota Camry with a sun roof and a CD player.

“Bobby was pushing her wheelchair, but Momma was not a cripple. He was just pushing her to be nice.”

“Did they speak to you?” Little Sun asked.

“No. They just went on down the hill, in a good mood and happy, and then I woke up and it was dawn, and I thought about the dream all day and wrote it down when I went in to the office.”

“Next time they will speak to you,” Crow said.

“They came to tell you they are all right,” Little Sun answered.

“They came to see if you were all right,” Mary Lily put in.

“I have had such dreams,” Crow added, “but never one in which two dead people are together, smiling at me.”

“It wasn’t the first dream,” Olivia said. “Well, I’m starving.
Let’s put that food on the table.” She got up and Mary Lily joined her and they went into the kitchen and began to fix supper. Crow had brought bowls of tomatoes and corn and green beans and a baked chicken, and they warmed those in the microwave and made biscuits. It was the first time her family had agreed to stay and eat supper when they came for a Sunday visit.

“Y
OU NEED TO
spend the night and drive home in the morning,” Olivia said. “I don’t want you driving home in the dark.”

“There is a full moon and many stars. It is nice to drive home in darkness in the Toyota,” Little Sun said.

Olivia sat down in her chair. The baby was beginning to move around, as he often did when there were people talking. “The baby’s listening to us,” she said. “He gets excited when people are talking. I wish you could have seen Momma’s face in my dream. It was shining with happiness. It made me happy.”

“That is why they came.” Little Sun turned to Crow. “We will stay here tonight. She wants us to stay.”

“Yes,” Crow said.

A
FTER THEY ATE DINNER
, they went out to the backyard and sat on the dilapidated yard furniture a former owner had left there, and Olivia finished telling them about her dreams of the past two months. “At first it was Bobby, all blown up but still in one piece, and he wanted me to help him
find a place to be buried, and I tried to help him. Then he came and he was the way he used to be and I wanted to lie down with him, but it was not possible, and he said not to be sad, but I was sad and I cried in the dream, and when I woke I cried some more. Then one night he came and took my hand, and I knew that was all there was and all there would ever be. I think he said, ‘Take care of our baby.’ I told him that when I heard he was dead, that was the first thing I thought, and he said that was good and not to feel bad about it.”

Little Sun and Crow looked at each other and then they both got up and went to Olivia and stood beside her. “Let’s go back in the house now,” Little Sun said. “I will think about these dreams and tell you what I think. Many times the dead come to help us understand their leaving. It is good you are having dreams. I am glad to hear about this.”

They went back into the house, and Olivia moved her papers from the bed in her office and turned down the covers for her grandparents and then went into the second bedroom to help Mary Lily put sheets on the smaller bed.

“It is the first time your grandfather has slept away from home in many years,” Mary Lily said.

“I know.” Olivia giggled, and Mary Lily started giggling with her. “That’s why he has lived so long in good health. I hope he will be comfortable in there.”

“If the bed is hard, he will like it,” Mary Lily said. “If not, he will get up and sleep on the floor.” They started giggling again and finished making up Mary Lily’s bed, and then Olivia went
into her own room and put on her nightgown and got into her bed and fell asleep almost before she could turn off the light.