House of Purple Cedar by Tim Tingle

Author:Tim Tingle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Published: 2013-12-19T05:00:00+00:00

Amafo Alone

Rose

When Amafo was struck by the marshal, he retreated into himself, protected and encircled by his Choctaw friends of many years. Pokoni guarded Amafo from even those closest to him, for only Pokoni knew of the deep wound he had suffered.

Amafo had experienced a taste of his own death. New intrusions appeared, like strange unwelcome fish, in the clear river of his thinking. His mortality was now real to him, and so was the weakness of his aging body. He was forced to admit that he could no longer protect either himself or his family. His body was old and weak.

Pokoni allowed my grandfather to know this, to adapt himself to this new knowledge. Even his closest of friends would tell him well-meaning lies.

“You could have taken him when you were younger,” they would say. “You would have made him eat that board!”

In the evenings Pokoni would sit alone with him for hours, bringing him coffee. I once sat with them on the back porch. My grandmother stroked his hand and said in a whisper that blended with the night music, the cicadas and the windy tree noises. “There are ways. There are always ways.”

Another time I heard her tell him, “Goodwill always has a place.” Pokoni sang to Amafo in his troubled time. For hours she sang to him, sweet Choctaw hymns they both knew.

And so it was that, nurtured by Pokoni, Amafo grew in the strength of his own goodwill. The marshal had his muscle and his board. Amafo had his smile and his forgiving nature. And his Pokoni.

Pokoni and Amafo together had defeated the marshal, and now Amafo was alone.

At the funeral service, Amafo sat on the front pew with Daddy on one side and Momma, me, and Jamey on the other.

Pokoni looked powdery and very dead in a pink dress she would never have chosen. Amafo wore a navy blue suit with a dark brown tie, a suit that draped him like a flag and flapped and swayed with every step he took, a suit that fit him no tighter than the dark folds of skin hanging slack from the bones of his sagging face. I have never seen a body so devoid of happiness as that which carried Amafo’s spirit to the burial service of the only woman he ever loved.

That evening, long after everyone retired, I heard Amafo moving in his room. “I will bring him chocolate,” I thought. “I won’t have to say a word. He’ll know I am showing my love in a wordless way, like Pokoni would.”

Half an hour later I climbed the stairs with the chocolate. Amafo stood by the window when I entered the room. The room was fully lit, but he moved as if in total darkness, feeling his way with slow-moving hands and fingertips that softly patted the walls and furniture.

I stood watching him, holding the wooden tray and his blue enamel cup, filled with steaming cocoa. Amafo knelt before his bedside table as if before an altar.

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