The Removed(48)

After about twenty minutes I walked back to the house. I didn’t go down to the basement—Vin needed to sleep it off—but I felt the need to go back inside and check all the rooms. I peeked inside my bedroom, then I closed all the blinds in the house. I checked the hall closet, the bathroom, under the bed, and in the shower. After all that, I sat quiet on the kitchen floor so that I could hear Vin in the basement underneath me if he woke up. It was five in the morning, and the sun would be coming up soon. I wasn’t even tired. I picked up his phone and scrolled through his messages, emails, and photos.

Fuck him, I thought. On his phone there were several photos of other women. I deleted them, along with all his other photos, except for the ones of Luka. I deleted his phone numbers and contacts, and then I posted on his social media accounts: “I hit a woman tonight. I hit a woman. I hit an Indian.”





Tsala


BELOVED, THE EARTH WILL always speak to us when we need to hear her the most. Even in my time we were worried about rising oceans and burning land. I always looked for warnings. Our family believed strongly in Tecumseh’s warning of the soldiers coming to remove us from our land: there was a drought. There were high winds and a bitter cold winter.

You are aware that this was a terrifying time for us. We were frightened but ready to defend our home. Our people would refuse to leave even though we were tricked by the government with their fraudulent treaty. We did not trust them.

It was raining the night we rounded up a few families and quietly snuck away to hide in a cave in the mountains. I told the other people in the Cherokee language: What we do will affect our people for years to come. I thought of all my visions, our visions, the prophecy of the coming migration, and hoped they would be proven false. That night, in the cave, one of the wives was so afraid for her new baby that she ran out into the rain with a tomahawk, yelling, “Kill! Kill!” She felt the presence of a spirit’s strength so powerfully that she threw the tomahawk into the night sky, in the rain, and it never came down again, was never found anywhere. That night it hailed large ice pellets.

We were there ten nights before they arrived to destroy our homes. We watched from afar as the ones who swarmed on our land like a pack of wolves began firing their weapons. Now there was a great threat upon us. The soldiers were ordered to be civil, but they destroyed our cabins and barns. They slaughtered our chickens and hogs and cattle. They prodded our wives and elders with bayonets as they forced them out of their homes and to stockades. By the end, many of our people had nothing but their clothes—everything else was gone. We felt a great misery spread throughout our land. Soldiers dug into graves to steal the gold from our dead, never bothered by the stench of corpses that filled the air. Though we were safe in seclusion, two other men and I couldn’t stand that we were not helping our people, so we set out, armed with our weapons. And you, my brave son, you came with us.

At once the soldiers saw us approaching, and soon they surrounded us. We attacked and fought, but there were too many of them. One of them hit you with a shovel, and I lunged at him with my knife, cutting his arm. The other soldiers pulled me off and held me down. They tied us with rope. I told them to kill me first, but they did not agree. I closed my eyes and lowered my head as they pointed their rifles at us. I begged you not to open your eyes, even when they told you to.





Edgar


SEPTEMBER 5

I KEPT WAKING UP, coughing. In sleep I dreamed that a woman brought me a seed basket full of rainbow-colored corn, turkey gizzard beans, and trumpet vine seeds. She was very beautiful, slender with long raven-black hair.

“My gift for you,” she told me. “I’m planting pink cherry blossoms to swell in the gray world. The Seven Dancers, the Pleiades star system, is our home. Look for my cherry blossoms along the road and follow that road out. Remember the Tsalagi is about harmony.” I saw smoke drooling from her mouth as she walked away.

After that I drifted in and out of sleep until the room brightened and I knew it was morning. I woke feeling I needed to leave Jackson’s house. I lay in bed for a while, then got up and saw that Jackson was gone. I made an omelet and coffee and turned on the TV in the living room. The Darkening Land was on fire, according to the live newscast. Flames were roaring everywhere. Chopper 8 showed the view from above a bridge, heavy plumes of smoke and flames. The reporter said fire crews stated that someone had started the fire near Devil’s Bridge. The reporter interviewed a witness, a young man holding a red helmet, who said he was looking for people in the restricted area of radioactive mud pits near the bridge. “I’ve seen people all around here in the past,” he said.

“What’s the helmet for?” the reporter asked.

“It’s for a game. That’s all I’m saying.”

On TV I saw plumes of black smoke floating over the bridge. I saw dancing flames. I finished my breakfast and watched. “This is a former military base for nuclear testing,” the city manager told the reporter. “We’ve detected underground nuclear explosions for the past fifty years and I can tell you with the utmost certainty that the explosions have left radiation in the area. That’s why it’s restricted. Someone started a fire in an act of arson.”

I stepped outside on the back porch for a smoke. A light drizzle fell. Across the yard, a blurry image hovered around the bushes like a dark fog, and through the drizzle I saw a solitary bird on the horizon. The bird circled in the sky before disappearing into the low clouds. It was quiet outside, too quiet, and soon enough I heard a church bell ringing in the distance. Back inside, I put on a Bauhaus record. It was after five in the afternoon. I lay on the floor and listened, staring at the ceiling. When the music finished, I turned the record over and played the other side. I kept doing this, listening to one side and then flipping the record and listening to the other.