Keeper of the Tribe

Amy Blackmarr

There is a bend in the eastward path at the far end of the Dills’ cotton field where I often stand and watch the wind move in the pines that edge the rows upon rows of cotton. In the fall, after the farmers bale the cotton and turn the deep earth up to await spring planting, I watch for a hard rain to wash the dirt off the rocks and then a long spell of bright days for the fields to dry and lighten in the sun. That’s when I go hunting for the fluted arrowheads, the stone knives, the shards of pottery that speak of the lives of those others who minded this land when it was still forest and creek, before it was shaped into field and farm and pond. I like to turn the evidence of those other lives over in my hands, examine the patterns of slender rope pressed into the clay pot rims, marvel at the sharpness and symmetry of the points wondering which were the ones for birds, which for deer, which for fish.

When I hold these things, I can envision the ones who made them. I can look up from the piece of clay in my palm toward the edge of the wood and see the encampment there, at the far end of the field, in a clearing just up the slope from the creek. Not far from a live oak, a woman squats beside her cooking fire, scooping a hole in the embers. Her daughter kneels beside her, taking meal from a bowl and patting it into thin cakes in her hands. By a separate fire another woman blows embers into flame, then calls to a boy whose grandfather is teaching him to knap flint. Two girls work at opposite ends of a deer hide, scraping away the flesh, and its pungency comes to me on the breeze. At the edge of the camp, a short man stands straight and quiet, looking on. He wears leggings, but his chest and feet are bare. His right hand holds a spear, its tip pointing skyward.

To my right, the path through the field winds away southward, then disappears down a low hill and into the woods, where it widens into an old logging road. The road crosses the dam at the alligator pond, then wanders past the twisted pine and on another mile to the swamp. After a long stretch of rainless days I can follow that road all the way through the swamp to a small, high clearing that is almost perfectly round.

Ringed by water oaks, cypresses, black gums, and a sprawling primitive undergrowth of mosses, palmettos, ferns, and pale pink swamp honeysuckle, the earth there is covered in clover and deep-colored ground ivies that bloom only in that damp, fragrant darkness. Mosquitoes and water bugs and dragonflies with iridescent wings thrive around the tea-colored water of the Willacoochee River that twines around the cypresses and overflows its low banks to make the clearing inaccessible in wet weather except by boat.

The road ends in that clearing now. But ten mossy pilings still stand high out of the water where a railroad trestle once led into the clearing from the long stretch of forest on the far side of the branch. In the trunks of the trees that border the low-lying places, rusted spikes show where a train carried its load of pines back to the pulp mills closer to town.

I gave my sister a tour of the swamp on a late July afternoon in sweltering heat. Stupidly carrying no water, and having bathed in bug spray that did little to daunt the stinging yellowflies, now we were picking our way over the exposed tree roots and around the wide puddles of black silt that covered the swamp floor, keeping watch for moccasins and the alligators I’d never seen back there but was positive were only hiding in the shadows, masquerading as logs.

I was thirsty and a little spooked, but I was playing the big-sister part well enough, forging fearlessly ahead of Kelly to reach the edge of that first long stretch of swamp, batting away the low-hanging Spanish mosses, poking my walking stick into the thick grasses that covered the path to the clearing.

Kelly was miserable. The bandanna I had tied around my head was keeping the insecticide-laden sweat out of my eyes, but Kelly’s baseball cap wasn’t doing the same for her, and her eyes were puffy and red. Still, she didn’t want to turn back, and we were about to cross a low spot not far from the clearing when I stopped. “Don’t move,” I said, turning quickly to look back at Kel.

She stopped. “What? What is it?”
“Snake,” I said. “Big one. By that tree.” I nodded toward a big cypress a yard away on my left.
Her shoulders stiffened. “Oh God,” she said.
“Where’re the dogs?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere behind us.”
“Good. Keep still.”

I craned my neck to see better. The snake was blue-black and shiny, as long and thick as the cypress knee it lay wrapped around. “I think it ate something,” I said. “There’s a hump in the middle.”

Kelly peered at the snake. “Is that a moccasin?”
“Just a minute.” The snake was lethargic and didn’t seem to notice us. I took a tentative step toward it, trying to get a closer look at its head. Not flat. Good. No pits behind the eyes. Good. Way too big to be a cottonmouth, I thought.

“Indigo snake,” I pronounced. I took a breath. “They’re harmless.” I pointed my walking stick at it, and it slithered away into the swamp just as the dogs came running around the corner.

“Indigo snake?” said Kelly. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“Well, that’s not the only thing back here, so keep your eyes open.”
We walked on.

Kelly had never seen the swamp, and I’d been there only a few times myself: too much rain. I was curious to see how she would respond to it. There were some tree-covered bluffs in eastern Kansas I almost owned once. I called the place Many Paths. The first time I saw it, I burst into tears. So did Kelly.

The clearing is like that. There’s something about it that touches you, makes you feel raw and open—a kind of sincerity. At Many Paths, it was the quiet, I think, or the rustling of all those hardwoods or, after a rain, the creek moving over stones. Down in the swamp, it is the remembered echoes of men’s voices, the crack and rush of trees falling on trees, the keening of a train whistle that no longer sounds, yet sounds still in the scarred trunks of cypresses, rusted spikes, vanished trestle, road.

When we reached the clearing, I pointed out the pilings, and Kelly walked down to the water to look at them. The dogs plopped down on the bank beside her. I went looking for owl feathers and left her to herself.

It is the night before, and it is late. Kelly and I are sitting on the sofa in the cabin, drinking wine. The only light is from my last candle, which has now burned down to a stub. The cabin door is open, but there is no breeze, and the air is balmy and close.

I am telling Kelly about the swamp, how I hope we can get through to the clearing the next day, how I’m hoping it won’t rain. “Don’t let me forget the bug spray,” I say. “Did you bring your running shoes?”

“Uh-huh.” She’s making shadow puppets on the ceiling. In the candlelight, the forms flicker in and out of darkness. She makes a swan.

“Good one, Kel,” I tell her. “All I can do is a rabbit.” I make a rabbit—that is, I stick up two fingers and wiggle them.

“What’s this?” Kelly says, crooking her wrist to form a witch with a bent nose.
“Amazing. How’d you do that?”

She shows me but I can’t make the nose bend. It is her hands. I am always surprised by my sister’s hands. She is thirty-two now, but her hands seem the same to me as when she was twelve. They are delicate, finely shaped, sensitive hands, and they have made her an exceptional pianist and a far more artful guitarist than I.

“My fingers won’t do right,” I grumble.

“You can do this one,” she says, and she straightens her hands and makes two lines separated by a width of white space.

“What’s that?”

“Me and Sean,” she says. Sean is Kelly’s husband. After eight years, they are breaking up.

“Oh,” I say. There is nothing else. In a dozen long-distance phone conversations, we’ve already said it all.

I make Kelly a place to sleep out of blankets and Therm-a-Rest pads on the floor next to my bed, and we settle down. She asks me to leave the candle, but it soon dies.
I am lying on my back with my arms folded under my head, waiting for sleep but not really sleepy, listening to the frogs and the cicadas, excited about showing Kelly the clearing in the swamp. Eventually, after a long while, it dawns on me that she is crying, that she has been crying for some time, that she is trying to muffle the sound with her pillow.

“Kelly?” I whisper, alarmed. “Kel?”
She doesn’t answer. I listen and fidget, feeling awkward and inadequate.

Then suddenly she isn’t crying any more. She has shoved the pillow aside and she is weeping, and it is that bottom-of-the-soul weeping, that all-out despairing weeping that begins soft and slow and a little sad but before long winds itself out into something that feels like the fresh reopening of every wound that ever left a scar.

I hate this. I have always hated it when Kelly cries, but this is way beyond crying. This is not something simple, something that will wear itself down after a few minutes of my silent discomfort, and I am lost inside the sound of it, having not the least idea what to do about it.

Or rather, knowing exactly what to do, but unable to make the gesture. I am not one to curl up in the blankets with my little sister and fold my arms around her like those wonderful Victorians in the novels, like when Jane Eyre climbs into bed with her frail best friend Helen Burns and holds her while she dies. My family isn’t given to that kind of intimacy. Oh, I love Kelly enough to do it, God knows, and I long to do it, would give anything to cradle her like that, rock her, stroke her hair, say soothing things to her until her weeping subsides. But I just cannot do it.

There is something else, too, that is keeping my stomach clenched and my arms stiff at my sides, something I have only begun to understand since the drama of Kelly’s divorce has woven itself into the patterns of my own life. From the time my parents separated when I was seventeen, I’ve felt the mantle of family caretaker settle on my shoulders as the older sister. I need to be the strong one, undaunted, unshakeable: I have to mind the womenfolk, protect the ones who have been left in my care. So when they suffer, their suffering falls hard on me. Because if I suffer too much with them I might let my guard down. I might even disappear. It is who I am: that strong one.

I know what this is for Kelly, this divorce. I went through it over and over and then over again myself between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine, although never with a marriage as solid as hers has seemed. But it was hell anyway. Always, always, always. My mother endured it, and then I, and now Kelly, and I know what it is, and everything it is, and everything it feels like. But all I can offer is words.

“I hate to see you like this,” I say finally into the dark, when I can suffer my reticence no longer.
“I know,” Kelly manages to say between sobs.
“It’s because I can’t fix it,” I explain, as if explaining will absolve me. “I want to fix it, but I can’t.”
“I know. I’ll be okay. I just need some…time.”
“I love you,” I blurt. “But it’s not enough. It doesn’t feel like enough.”
There is a silence.
“Kel?”
“It’s enough.” And again, more softly: “It’s enough.”

I picked an ivy blossom and took it to Kelly where she was sitting under a cypress tree beside the river. The dogs had left her side and were wandering around farther back in the swamp, where the water had receded. Kelly was rubbing her eyes, and I must have had one of those big-sister looks on my face because she said quickly, before I could ask, “I’m okay, Ame.” She smiled and pushed her cap back on her head.

“Your eyes are really red.”
“Well, at least I cried all the bug spray out.” She looked away, toward the pilings. “It’s this place.”
“I know. That’s why I wanted you to see it.
“It’s like Many Paths. It gets to you."
“Yeah. That’s what I thought, too.”
I stood a minute, watching the water. “Well,” I said, “you ready? I have some more stuff to show you.”
“Okay,” she said.
I called the dogs and we left.

So on our hike back to the field, I showed my sister the alligator skull with the teeth still in it that Mom and I had found on a hike to the swamp four years ago, and the cow boneyard, and the twisted pine with the moss on the north side, and the spot where Max got his paw caught in the steel trap. And there was the piece of garden hose left behind by rattlesnake hunters after they gassed a gopher turtle den, and the rusted beaver trap with the door that wouldn’t close, and I was about to show her where an otter had humped up some pine straw at the alligator pond when she stopped. “Ame?” she said.

“Huh.” I was busy examining the pine straw. “Hey. Look at this. Fish-scale otter scat.”
“Ame?” she said again.
The tone in her voice made me look up. “What is it?
“How did you know it was an indigo snake?”
“Oh.” I thought about that. “Practice. Snakes are everywhere.”
“They are?”
“Ubiquitous.”
“Oh.”
“They come in through the windows,” I said. “Get into the toilet. Lie around in the driveway. You have to get to know them. Look at this.” I pointed to the scat.
“I see,” she said. “It’s pink.”
“Been eating crawdads,” I said importantly.
“Crawdads are pink?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”

When we got back to the Dills’ cotton field, I took Kelly to the spot where I liked to stand. “Look out there, Kel,” I said, pointing to the live oak at the far end of the field. “That’s where they were. It’s like I can see them.” I told her about the Indian campground, the women at their fires, the man looking on from the edge of the encampment, holding the spear. “It’s why I look for arrowheads,” I said, which was an interest Kelly didn’t share and had wondered at in me.

“But now it makes sense,” she said. “That’s you.”
“What’s me?”
“He’s you. I mean, look at you.” She pointed to my walking stick. “That’s your spear,” she said.
“Oh.”
“You’re watching, he’s watching. Just look how you’re standing.”

I looked down at my feet, my wide stance, my walking stick, then back at my sister. It’s one of the reasons I like her. She sees things I can’t see.

We started for the cabin. Kelly stayed on the path while I walked between two rows of cotton, scanning the ground. It didn’t take long to find it, even though it was half buried. It was white flint, sharply triangular, with edges so fine it still could have cut through leather.

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