Walking the Choctaw Road by Tim Tingle

Author:Tim Tingle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781933693477
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Published: 2016-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

The story should be over here. We should be drawing to a happy conclusion—our story of a child, once strayed, returning to his rightful ways. That would be the western way, but this is a Choctaw tale—and something happened that would change everything.

For the first time in their marriage, Zeke broke a promise. He woke up asking himself, “Where did she go?” Dressing quickly, he climbed out of the wagon. Zeke followed what he hoped were Tillie’s footprints, as best he could see them in the filtered moonlight, to the base of a tree. There he spotted the butcher knife.

“Oh no, please,” he said. “Where did you go, bleeding so bad? Woman, you can’t be in the woods bleeding. That cat will sniff you out!”

He grabbed his rifle and his gourd rattle. Remembering she had insisted on making it to the river, he ran in that direction. Zeke dove through the woods, slapping branches with his free arm. The forest was thick, and the deeper he went into it, the more the darkness seemed alive. He was glad he had his rattle.

Caleb was still swimming—now halfway to his Momma—when Zeke saw them both in the green waters of the river, the panther and his Tillie. He balanced his rifle on a cypress branch and reached into his belt bag for the rattle. In the soft pocket of fog floating on the river, the sound of the seeds shifting in the rattle seemed to come from everywhere. The panther froze. Tillie stopped her singing.

It should have been an easy shot, the way he’d lined the rifle, pointed right at the spot where the shoulder blades met the neck. But Zeke started shaking like never before. He knew his Tillie lived or died by this one shot.

Then everything was drenched in sweat, hot sweat, flowing from every pore. Zeke was sopping wet and tears came squirting from his eyes.

“This will not happen,” he said. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, took a deep breath, and cast a true, sweet aim at the panther, curling his finger around the trigger. Then Zeke heard a chattering in the tree limb just above his head. He looked up to see a squirrel. “Help me,” he pleaded.

“Ask and you shall receive.” That was the promise—and did he ever.

At that moment hundreds of squirrels came raining down from the trees, pounding his head, knocking his gun to the ground, and him, too. The next thing he knew, Zeke was laying face first in the dirt, looking up and wondering aloud, “What plague of locusts looking like squirrels has descended on me now?”

When he pushed the squirrels away and rose to his knees, he looked to the river and saw the most beautiful mother and child the world has ever seen. It was his Tillie holding his Caleb, alive as ever living be.

Zeke crawled to the bank and lifted Tillie and limp-bodied Caleb from the river. There they sat, rocking like triplets in a watery womb, till the dawn came burning its way through the blue.

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