Citizens Creek by Lalita Tademy
“No son of mine would throw in his lot with the ignorant mixed-bloods and liquored-up freedmen the grafters rounded up in the last few days,” said Jake. “We raised Eugene smarter. If he’s daft enough to go that direction, he’ll lose the land sooner or later anyway.”
The set of Jake’s jaw convinced her he’d settled on his thinking. Jake wasn’t a man to turn his back on family, but he didn’t always intuit truth even when directly in front of his face. There was more denial in his words than either acceptance or resignation.
“You need to talk to him. Forbid him. He’ll listen to you. What if he still goes to town? He could give away his birthright for chicken feed.”
“He’s grown, Rose. I was on my own at his age. On my own with no help from anybody, least of all family.”
She’d lost one of her sons. She refused to lose another. “After what happened to Kindred . . .”
Jake stopped her.
“That one is gone, and this isn’t the same. Eugene isn’t the same. He’s older, and smarter. A man has to make his own choices, and be willing to live by them. Have faith in him.”
Jake turned over and soon fell quiet, through with talking. Rose decided to try again in the morning. She changed to her nightdress and lay under the covers, and spent a goodly part of the night listening to Jake’s soft snores before finally easing to sleep.
When morning came, Jake was up and out early, and not long after, Eugene came to Rose.
“I’m going to Muskogee today on the free train,” Eugene told her.
“The sharpers will try to strip your allotment and throw you a pauper on the government for support.”
“I mean to hear the offer,” he said.
“Please. Stand fast. Give up the notion of selling.”
“We can’t keep going round,” Eugene said. “I’m telling you as courtesy, and I’m gone.”
He left her in the kitchen. She listened to his horse’s hoofbeats fade, and for a while did nothing. Finally, she roused herself. She wouldn’t stand by idle while her son made such a serious mistake. Rose wrapped a bit of sofki and hardtack in a kerchief, left the older girls in charge, grabbed her rifle, and rode off on her pony toward Jake in the south field.
She found her husband with a ranch hand not far from the corral, tending a crippled calf, and when he looked to her on her pony in the fading light, it was as if she saw him for the first time. His eyes were still an arresting blue, more watery now than when he first captivated her in the Okmulgee kitchen all those years ago, and the crow’s-feet around his eyes were so deeply etched from the sun they seemed a birthmark. He looked puzzled, not understanding why she was there.
“He’s gone for the train,” was all she said by way of greeting, trying to speak in code, not wanting to air their family business in front of the hand, although Old Sam had been with them for over ten years and was most likely as aware of their secrets as everyone else on the ranch.
“Then I’ll go get him,” Jake replied. He gave a few quick instructions to Old Sam, and stood to get circulation back into his legs from squatting so long on the ground.
“I’m going too,” said Rose, and Jake didn’t object.
They didn’t put the horses to full gallop, but rode at a brisk pace for almost an hour through sagebrush and tumbleweed on the main road. The closer they came to town, the more people they saw on the dusty path, whether by horse, by wagon, or by foot, traveling in the same direction. Rose assessed every familiar-looking shape and face, in case Eugene was one of these pilgrims, but she didn’t see him. By the time they came within sight of the Okmulgee train station in the distance, the road was choked with travelers. Rose didn’t know what to expect, not having been to town for several years, since registration for the Dawes Roll. Before they got close, the press of so many people overwhelmed her. Even Jake gave a low whistle at how many people waited for the special train bound north for Muskogee that grafters chartered.
The town was thronged with clusters of mixed-bloods and freedmen lounging everywhere, on the few benches sprinkled in the station, leaning against the embanked wall, lying in the dirt in the middle of the outlying street, sitting on the planked sidewalks. They were of all descriptions, young and old, agitated and sedentary, ragged and well dressed, but there was one common denominator among those who waited—whiskey. More jugs and bottles than Rose could count were passing from one citizen to another. Liquor sellers didn’t bother to hide themselves, alcohol hawked by both white and Indian grafters providing an endless supply to their recruits and keeping it moving. Many of the men were clearly drunk, whether in quiet stupor or boisterous engagement, so intoxicated they appeared to not know where they were.
They found Eugene’s horse tied to an outlying hitching post.
“We need to find him fast,” Jake said to Rose.
He sounded angry as he tied his horse to the same post and waded into the sea of men, leaving Rose several steps behind.
Chapter 67
ROSE FOLLOWED THE best she could in her husband’s wake, putting on more of a brave face than she felt. She had been around all manner of ranch hands, rough-hewn and sometimes dangerous. She’d grown up in the midst of competing Indian tribesmen, fighting for the last kernel of corn. She’d served middle- and upper-class Indians, privy to the secret depravities of the well-off, but she wasn’t prepared for this.
They navigated and pushed their way through the men on the platform, many of whom were stinking drunk, falling-down drunk, sleepy drunk, mean drunk. One grabbed at her skirt, and another made lewd, slurred remarks, but for the most part, they’d drunk themselves into relative docility. The grafters among them were easy to spot, usually less inebriated, but not always, jealously guarding their marks, like shepherd to sheep, trying to keep another grafter from poaching their claimed territory, men persuaded to join them on the train ride to sell off their land allotments.
Rose heard Eugene’s voice before she saw him. He stood with a motley assortment of rough-looking Creeks on the far side of the station, swaying, slightly apart, but his voice was loud and argumentative. Rose had seen her son at the jug at the end of a long workday, sipping, the hard edges of his face softened to slackness, but she had never seen her son this stage of drunk. He looked as though he might soon come to blows with a scrappy freedman a full head shorter but menacing-looking nonetheless. The only other person Rose recognized was Hawkins, the self-appointed guardian who had come to the ranch last year, watching over his collection of recruits.
Rose pointed to Eugene, and Jake strode over with such authority Rose couldn’t keep up.
“Eugene!” Jake called.
Even over the din of the mob scene, Eugene heard his father’s voice, confusion clouding his face as he tried to sort through the familiarity of the sound.
By the time Jake reached him, Hawkins, alert to threat, stepped between father and son.
“Eugene!” Jake repeated, his voice a command. Hawkins put out his hand to stop Jake’s advance.
“He’s mine,” said Hawkins. He let loose a stream of tobacco juice in the dirt at Jake’s feet. “Go find your own.”
Rose arrived out of breath, caught up to her husband at last, and stood beside Jake. She watched the momentary puzzlement on Hawkins’s face as he recognized her and pieced together the connection between the three of them—Eugene, Rose, and Jake. Immediately, Hawkins smiled wide, a fawning gesture, and put his hand out in greeting.
“We haven’t met, but your son agreed to come to Muskogee with me,” he said to Jake.
“No he won’t,” said Jake. He didn’t extend his hand, and Hawkins’s smile faded, his arm dropping limply to his side. Jake turned instead to Eugene, who watched with a certain amount of uncomprehending dispassion. “Come on home now, Eugene,” Jake said.
“He’s committed,” said Hawkins. “He’s coming with me.”
Jake ignore
“He’s staying,” Hawkins said. “He’ll be back after he signs, at midnight.”
Rose, so intent on willing Eugene toward them, missed what happened next, but did see Hawkins lay his hand on Jake’s shoulder, and saw Jake draw back his arm. The next thing she knew, Hawkins was on the ground, looking up at Jake with a lethal determination. There was no compromise in his face.
She saw a quick motion, and the glimmer of something shiny as Hawkins scrambled back to his feet, and she realized how outnumbered they were in this dangerous crowd. Jake always carried both knife and gun, but she had gotten him to come straight from the pasture, and wasn’t sure how prepared he was if it came to a fight. Other grafters didn’t rush to back Hawkins up yet, more worried about protecting their own groups of citizen recruits, but they might come to his defense if they thought their marks could be inspired to desert.
She felt the weight of the rifle at her side, and raised the weapon, training it on Hawkins. “He has a knife,” she said to Jake.
“Everybody has a knife,” Jake said calmly, pulling his Colt from his waistband, keeping one eye on Hawkins while assessing the mood of the crowd. “Let’s go, Eugene. Walk to me.”
Eugene came toward them as if pulled by a string, unsteady but obedient, aware enough to give Hawkins wide berth as he staggered just beyond his reach. As he came close, Rose grabbed Eugene’s arm to lead him away from the station in the direction of their horses, balancing her rifle with one arm and pushing her son in front of her. She looked back to make sure they weren’t pursued, and for one long moment locked eyes with Hawkins, who stared after them, unwilling to leave the others gathered to retrieve the one he now lost.
The train rumbled as it approached, and the focus of the crowd shifted. The locomotive came to a hissing stop, and the station transformed. Grafters gathered their wards, prodding, pushing, threatening, cajoling, and prepared them to board the Muskogee-bound train.
Rose relaxed, just a bit, hoping the danger passed.
“Pa . . .” Eugene began. His voice slurred and he struggled to find the rest of his words.
“We don’t sell, we don’t lease,” Jake said. He pointed to his horse. “Get on.”
It took several tries for them to maneuver Eugene onto the horse, and once he was mostly upright in the saddle, Jake swung up behind and held him steady so he wouldn’t fall. The set to Jake’s jaw made clear his determination, but Rose saw the worry in his eyes. Rose mounted her smaller pony, and pulled Eugene’s horse by the rein. They rode out of town single file, toward the ranch, against the tide of those still pouring in toward the station for the next train. Rose followed southward in the wake of her men.
Eugene snored, his head resting heavy on his father’s chest. Jake’s back was rigid, but his arms encircled his son, tight.
Chapter 68
USUALLY, THIS WAS the time of day Rose liked best. The heavy choring done for the day, children asleep in their beds, she fitting scraps for a quilt or busy with her sewing needles, Jake with his pipe. As if everything sought its place, and at last relieved, released a long, satisfying breath. But not tonight.
Rose picked up her darning needle and a hank of yarn to patch a pair of Jake’s socks worn almost clean through at the heel. She slipped her stitch twice, like a greenhorn new to the capability. She thought to go to the spinning wheel in the back room for a session, sure to calm, but the hour was late.
“Mama Rose.”
Her son stood tall before her. He was still growing, in height as well as brawn. Firm and muscled from ranch chores and cattle drives, he was a good-looking young man at seventeen. Eugene hadn’t given the family any more trouble since they rescued him at the train station, but Rose didn’t welcome a repeat of the argument they’d been having since supper. Jake sat in his favorite chair, eyelids closed, filled pipe at his side. He opened his eyes now.
“No more of that foolishness, Eugene,” Rose said. “The matter is settled.”
“The children all want to go to the parade. I’ll take them myself, see that no harm comes.” Eugene pulled up a straight-backed chair and set it across from them, between Jake and Rose, and sat, eye level. “I want to go to Muskogee to the parade.”
“No Simmons child gonna hoot and holler and dance and carry on like a good thing’s coming because they got fireworks or some parade,” Rose said. “That’s not for us.”
“It’s the future,” said Eugene. “And a bit of fun. What’s wrong with a bit of fun?”
Rose put down her needle and snatched up the newspaper from the side table.
“Listen,” she said to Eugene. She smoothed the pages of the Muskogee Phoenix and extended the fusty broadsheet farther from her face until the blurred print came into focus. “‘There is a new light in the East,’” she read. “‘The brightest day in all the history of the Red Man’s land has dawned.’”
Her whole body shook as she slammed the newspaper back onto the table. “This just makes it easier for the white man to figure a way to crush us.”
“There’s no stopping them making us a state,” Eugene said calmly. “Oklahoma. Indian Territory. What’s the difference?”
“You don’t understand the evils that follow white man’s thinking,” said Rose. “Statehood is bad for Indians. Even worse for us, now that white majority rules. Grampa Cow Tom would be sorry to see this day.”
“But tomorrow is just a parade, and everybody’s going,” said Eugene. He looked to Jake. “Papa?”
“Your mama already spoke her mind,” Jake said.
But Eugene wasn’t giving up. “We could all go, and you could tell us what Grampa Cow Tom would find so wrong. There’s more than one way to look at a thing,” he said.
“Nobody goes,” said Rose. “Not you, not the children, not the growns.” She took up her needle again. “Long as you’re under my roof, you do what I say. I’ll hear no more about it.”
Eugene leaned back in the chair, jaw clenched tight, as if physically struck. But when he stood, abruptly, his face was a tight mask. “I am a man,” he said, the words quiet but distinct. “I won’t ask again.”
In three long strides he was across the room and out the front door without once looking back, and a deep silence descended. Rose couldn’t say exactly what, but something between the two of them had shifted and hit a new place, like a key finding home in its lock. There was a disturbing finality to the exchange.
“Why does he have to challenge?” she asked Jake. “Like he can barely tolerate me.”
“Just trying to find his place,” said Jake. “But don’t drive him off.”
“Me? Drive him off? I’m doing all I can to make him stay, see his fit on the ranch.”
“There it is. You can’t make him stay. You can’t force him to do anything. He’s right. He’s a grown man.”
When did it happen, so much sourness? First the statehood business and now Eugene in open rebellion. She thought briefly of Kindred, but refused to bring the old hurts forward to mix with the new.
“We built something here, you and me. Four days into August. That’s when we’ll celebrate, like we used to. On Emancipation Day. Why’d we ever stop? It was good enough for Grampa Cow Tom, it’s good enough for them. And no Simmons celebrates statehood or they answer to me.”
She pushed aside her worry about Eugene for the moment. Oklahoma statehood was another changing of the rules in answer to their mastery of the old system. As hard as things had always been, there was an additional layer of protection, albeit thin, within Indian Territory, something that gave them room to maneuver, defined them as off-limits to the full-on force of chatt
Rose took up the newspaper again and shook it, as if to make the words spill off the page and reverse themselves. “They try to make it sound good, and fair, but Indian Territory is supposed to be for us. We are Creek citizens.”
“You know my thoughts.” Jake relit his pipe, ingesting the smoke slow and deep. His very calmness stoked an even broader sense of wrong and fury in Rose.
“No different than mine,” she said.
“The deed is done, Rose.”
Jake refused to emote tonight on cue around the very thing he’d been worrying over and railing about for the last several years. And yet she couldn’t stop poking at the notion of how much they had to lose, how yet again they’d been caught up in the giant maw of history and put at risk, as if they could never reach a safe place no matter how fast they ran.
“Leastways they could have kept Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory separate,” Rose said. “Haven’t we suffered enough? Haven’t enough promises been broken? There’s only folly in this for us.”
“Rose.” Jake didn’t raise his voice, but the tone was of warning. “No need fixing on how things coulda been. Shoulda been. Eugene was right about that part. Oklahoma is a state now. That’s fact.”
“Statehood,” Rose said in contempt.
This time Jake didn’t respond. Instead, he tapped out his hot pipe bowl in the dish and leaned back, closing his eyes again for a minute before hoisting himself from the chair.
He’d taken only a couple of halting steps toward the bedroom, the remnants of a limp from the recklessness of breaking a new horse two weeks prior instead of letting one of the other hands do it, when Rose spoke again.
“What’s it mean, Jake?” she asked. “What happens now?”
Her husband turned around then and paused, as if considering how to answer. They’d been together far too long to sugarcoat, not long enough to lie outright.