What am I thankful for? Ah. Hmm. It was just before the summer break that my father’s trial for trying to kill my mother began and they decided that I should be sent away. I’m thankful for that. My mother wanted to attend the trial every day and sit behind the defense table to lend him support. Ah. Leon, that’s him, had blamed me for everything and Squint, that’s her, well, let’s just say that I had never been her favorite daughter. The other two, Lillian and Marcella, were gone about two years by then, up to Colorado and Wyoming to work in the kitchen shacks of sheep ranches. Yes, two years, that’s right. Anyway, none of Leon’s Reese side of the family would take me. They believed him. My mother’s family hemmed and hawed about it for days. I didn’t blame them. I was, in my mother’s words, a fourteen year brass-assed brat of a girl. One by one, first, the sisters and then the aunts, then the grandmothers all said “Sorry.” or “Can’t just now.” Or something like that. That’s how I ended up going to stay with my great-aunt, Sweet Tea Moonkiller.
Squint and I took the long drive up from Tulsa to Nelogany. Nelogany, if you can even find it on a map, is in the middle of nowhere and Sweet Tea’s house, if you can call it that, was on the far edge of nowhere. We got there about mid-morning. It was a cold day for May. One of the front windows was halfway open and a curtain had been pulled out partway by the wind, signaling to us as we drove up. I got out of the car and walked up onto the porch with my little suitcase. My mother motioned that I should knock on the door, but I just turned the handle and walked in. “Hello?” I said loudly, “I’m here. Hello?” There was no one there. I turned and went out of the door. “Okay.” I yelled, “See you later! Bye!” She backed the car down the driveway and gave me a little wave. Two beeps on the car horn and she was gone up the road.
Her name wasn’t really Sweet Tea, it was Su-et-
ti-ah which means Swamp Dog, what most people call an otter. My father used to say it meant Smells Like Wet Dog, but he never knew anything Osage or much of anything else. I didn’t know any of that then, this was forty years ago. I just knew what my sisters told me, her kids were all grown, she lived herself, she was a little crazy and Sweet Tea Moonkiller had the powers.
I wandered around the house for awhile. We, my mother’s family, weren’t Moonkillers anymore. Most of us shortened the name to Moon. One uncle, Redbird Moonkiller, had changed his first name to Bert and his last name to Mooney, better for the oil business, I guess. The powers, my sisters said, were kind of magical and kind of not so special, some were weird and some my mother told my sisters to shush up about. Sweet Tea, so they said, could point at a cloud and it would shrivel and disappear. If she saw a crow flying she could make it turn left or right or go back to where it came from. Once a horse was dying of the strangles and she was called to come look. When she walked in the barn the horse got up and shook himself and was fine as could be. A lady who was there started yelling that Sweet Tea was using the Devil to do good. "Shucks," she’d replied," since when does the Devil do good works? "Then she left, but people did a lot of talking my sisters said. Oh, and I almost forgot, she could talk to coyotes. Ah.
I went outside, looked for the well. The house had been added onto several times, a mudroom off of the kitchen, a fairly large workshop with a big window that was covered by a big blue tarp and duct tape and a kind of lean-to that stretched almost twenty yards out into the backyard. The pump was in there surrounded by garden tools, some peach baskets filled with potatoes, some hard squash. There was a cup chained to the pump handle. I had a long, cold drink. I remember the taste of that drink even today.
Ah, but let me get to the story you want to hear. All of a sudden here she was in front of me wanting to know who I was. I hadn’t seen her since I was five or six. The family had gone to a three day drum ceremony. I remembered her as bigger, but here she was about as tall as me with a big round face like my aunt Celeste. She was carrying a long stick and not looking too happy. We were in the side yard by the woodpile. I said I was Leon Reese’s kid, Squint’s kid, ChiaChia Reese. She said “Well, what are you doing here?”
She didn’t know anything about me coming. I told her about two words about the trial, she said “Unh.” I told her about the other aunts. She said nothing. I said one of the aunts was supposed to call Mae Quicktree since Sweet Tea had no phone and she was supposed to walk over and ask her about it. She said she had seen Mae up on her porch one day, but she figured she just wanted to borrow something so she had stayed in the woods until Mae left. I said I could start hitching back to Tulsa, but she said there won’t be a car on this road for two days, but she didn’t mind me staying so long as I would help out. I thought about it, maybe it was my mother’s little wave, maybe it was my father now so far away, safely far away, maybe it was the drink of water. I said I would stay. So that was my welcome.
Yes. Yes. I know, thankfulness. I’m getting to that. First, I cried for a week, a brass-assed brat just crying her eyes out and Sweet Tea didn’t say a word to me about it. She’d ask me to go get water or wood and I’d go and come back crying the whole out and back. She’d cook something, eggs and grits, or some kind of fried potatoes and greens and we’d eat and I’d sniffle. We’d work all day in the garden or fixed up something or just cleared some space in the junk in the yard. At night you could see every star in the universe and listen to the coyotes.
Sweet Tea was one of those people who look old but aren’t. Her eyes were surrounded by folds of brown skin darker than the rest of her face. She had a little stoop in her shoulders and she favored her left side when she walked, always with a stick of some sort for support. When she pulled her hair back before bed, she revealed two ears that seemed huge to me, the right one had a V-notch cut out at the top. She wore dresses but she always wore a pair of jeans under them and boots, the lace-up kind, when she went out in the woods.
Okay, so one day after the crying had stopped for a few days, she says to me, “Are you going to tell me what happened?” And I said, “No.” She said, “Okay.” And we went back to work hoeing the garden of beans, peas, squash, carrots and some other stuff. I turned to her after a while and said “Will you tell me something?” She just stopped and nodded. “Will you tell me about the powers?” And she laughed so hard she scared a couple of birds out of the trees.
We went to the well to rest; it was a hot June day by then. She wanted to know which powers I was talking about and I said I had heard she could make clouds disappear. “Hmmh”, she nodded her head a little, “Most anybody can do that.” And I asked her about making a crow turn right or left or go back and she said she didn’t think anybody could that. Then I asked about the curing, she said “Shucks.” I didn’t know what to think so I asked about talking to coyotes. “Oh,” she brightened up, “My, yes, that’s fun.” She took a drink from the cup. “Tell you what. I’ll take you out for a coyote talk if you will tell me what happened.” That started the crying all over again.
I’m sure there was a July that year, but I don’t remember it at all. No one came for me. In August I saw Mae Quicktree in her truck and asked if she had heard anything, she hadn’t. Sweet Tea and I picked everything out of the garden before it frizzled in the heat. We pickled and packed all the beans and tomatoes and peas and squash into jars and put them down in the cellar. September came. Mae Quicktree walked up to us in one of the fields and told us that Squint’s phone had been disconnected and none of her sisters knew where she was.
That’s when I told.
I remember now, just now, I didn’t cry the first time I told Sweet Tea what happened, I just told it out, brass-assed brat, his hands, his breath, his whispers. She sat in the porch chair and listened.
That night we went on our first coyote talk. There was a half-moon. We took blankets and walked way out past the woods to the edge of a section of tallgrass. This is a good time, Sweet Tea said, the coyote boys are just beginning to look for girlfriends, we can have some fun. First, we just listen to see who’s out there. We listened. There came some howls way off. “That’s Big One, he’s too old, we can’t fool him, we have to listen for some young ones. Hunker down.”
We waited. Pretty soon there was a series of yipping noises and then a long howl. Sweet Tea answered with some yips of her own and finished with a kind of woof.
“I’m telling them I’m here.”
More howls followed. Sweet Tea woofed and yelped and crooned, it was so musical.
“I’m telling them, there’s two of them, that I’d like to meet up with one of them.”
That led to several howling matches with Sweet Tea interrupting along the way.
“I said I was hungry.”
Sweet Tea was so happy, I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I know it must have been shining.
“Oo, they want to know if I want a chicken or a rabbit. I told them a rabbit, I don’t want them getting in anybody’s chicken house.”
Then she started really laying it on, yip-yips and long low snarly kind of oo-woos. There were answers to her from just off to our left and we could hear something crashing around in the grass in front of us.
And then, there he was. A coyote about as big as a collie, maybe a little shorter, definitely a lot skinnier and in his mouth was a flailing, screaming rabbit.
“Woof, woof” cried Sweet Tea and the coyote dropped the rabbit and ran like the dickens. We rolled around in laughter. The look on his face when he saw us, my oh my.
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Oh, since I was a kid. There’s not much to do out here in the grass.”
“Do you think you could teach me?”
“How good can you listen?”
That when the listening started. The next night after supper we went to go sit on the porch. We were going to listen to coyotes, but first she wanted me to listen to something. “I’m going to tell you back what you told me, you tell me if I have it right.” And then she did. She told me the whole story as if it was happening to her, that’s the Indian way of telling stories, not like the one I’m telling you now. One person tells, the other listens and then tells the story back. When she was finished, she said, don’t tell me what I got wrong or right, just tell it again.
So, I did. I told the whole story over, the whole two years, the hands, the eyes, the whispers and that time I did cry. Then Sweet Tea Moonkiller told my story back to me again and this time the story seemed to float between us and then drift off.
We listened to the coyotes deep into the night.
By Thanksgiving Day, Sweet Tea and I had traded my story back and forth many, many times. I started going to school in Pawhuska, late, the month before. My name was as it is now, Patricia (Chia chia) Moonkiller. Leon was in jail, no one knew exactly for how long but, after Bert Mooney drove me down to the District Attorney ‘s office in Tulsa and I told my story, he was sure to spend some time longer. This was in the days when it only took a few words to right people at McAlester prison to make a parole hearing disappear. My sisters and I began to write each other, to share our stories, we’ve never stopped. Squint Moon-Moonkiller Reese was never heard from again. I’m not thankful for that.
If you watch enough clouds they will talk to you. They will tell just about everything about themselves, where they have been, where they are going and, this is important, when they are deciding to disappear. That’s just about when you tell someone you are going to make it happen and then you point, the cloud disappears and everyone gasps. Huh. It wasn’t like the cloud didn’t just tell you.
If you listen to enough coyotes, you can learn their names, who’s got a mate and who’s looking for one. Which one has a new den and territory, (so watch out and keep out) and who has shacked up with a coydog from over the next hillside. You can learn the yips, the woofs and barks. You learn to yodel out the right howls for the right moment.
If you listen to your story many, many times and tell your story many, many times it becomes both part of you and part of something beyond you. And the pain of it goes softer. It never goes completely, it is always with you, but it doesn’t get in your way of pointing at clouds or living your own life.
So, what am I thankful for? I’m thankful Sweet Tea stayed in the woods when she saw Mae on the porch. I asked her about that later, if she would have said yes.
“Oh no, she said, pulling my hair, what would I want with a brass-assed brat like you?”
Joe(oo-woo)Nation
I'm going to go run this afternoon. Right now I need breakfast and a nap.
