Willis. Finally her gaze settled on her baby. When she spoke, her words spoke the night.
“A mother should not have to bury a child.”
This tiny scene was played out for only a few of us. The rest were running to render aid, only to feel the biting flames that claimed our school. My chest hurt and my lungs ached. I knew that something truly was breaking apart as I stood and watched, wounded by the biggest loss of my life, the loss of New Hope Academy for Girls.
We turned our backs on all of this and walked as the unseen dead might walk. Through smoky fog we walked, Roberta Jean and I, floating against the stream of urgent runners, drawn to their own drowning vision of hope. We wrapped our arms around each other’s waists, muted by our grief.
We returned to our small encampment and wrapped the blankets over our heads. We fell to the moist ground and went to grabbing and clutching at each other, first our hair, yanking and pulling, angry pulling, on whatever gave good holding place, arm or foot or ear or skin of thigh. We clinched our fists and flailed away, crying loud and biting even, all the while knowing we did so in the name of love, the only love still granted us in this the most perverse of bleeding worlds.
The Funeral and Efram Bobb
January 1897
Efram Bobb was a stonemason. He was trained by his father, who was himself a master mason. From his early teens Efram displayed, to the immense delight of Mister Bobb, a feel for stone that is impossible to teach. He matched stones for the sheer beauty of their porous skin.
“Every stone,” Efram said, “has its own way of speaking to a man who’ll listen.”
The first time Mister Bobb heard Efram speak of listening to a stone, he stood up and stared at the back of his son’s head. Efram closed his eyes and ran his fingers over the grainy calluses of rock, the slick, unbroken whisperings of stone. Mister Bobb shook his head in wonder. His eyes filled with tears and he whispered a prayer of thanks for having such a son.
As Efram grew, he matured in every way but height. Five feet five inches tall, he moved with the ease and grace of a small man, though his girth was anything but small. The daily pounding of his mallet chiseled Efram’s torso into a gaudy specimen of muscle, a tree stump with a belt and britches. His hands hung well below his knees.
Mister Bobb was so proud of Efram, he often flung his arms around his son to show his joy. The two sometimes boxed, slamming their fists against each other’s hardened stomachs. Seeing this, a way so counter to the tribal norm, kinfolks and friends would quietly laugh and mock the two.
Efram was seventeen years old when Taloa was born to his father’s sister.
“She’ll be as pretty as her mother,” his father said, standing over her cradle and smiling big and broad. She was not named Taloa on her birthing day. That name would come soon enough.
The Saturday following Taloa’s birthday, Efram and his brother Ben accompanied their father on a buying trip to the hardware store in nearby Spiro, a Nahullo town. They bought cattle feed and a new mule harness. While Ben spoke to loud-laughing Maggie, who ran the store’s affairs, Efram and his father stood on the sidewalk.
“Son,” his father said, “we need to talk about something.” When Efram turned to face him, his father swung a hard left fist and struck him squarely in the navel. “I can still kick your butt!” he said. “That’s what we need to talk about.”
It was the last thing his father ever said to him. As Efram doubled over, his father spotted a spike in the middle of Main Street.
“Somebody gonna get hurt,” he muttered, stepping from the sidewalk. He paused to let a mule-driven wagon pass. The lead mule stepped on the spike and lurched, loosening the strap from a hundred-pound barrel of flour. Efram stood helpless on the sidewalk and watched the barrel roll from the wagon and strike his father in the head before slamming into his chest.
From twenty feet away he heard the sharp and brittle crack of ribs beneath the crushing weight. Efram leapt to his father, lifted his broken body, and laid him on the sidewalk. A jagged piece of rib had pierced his father’s lungs and he drowned in his own blood.
The next morning Efram carved the tombstone for his father. Little Taloa, barely a week old, cried and cried with the grieving women at Mister Bobb’s funeral. Thus they named her Singing One—Taloa in Choctaw.
Following the burning of New Hope, Efram was asked to carve the gravestones for the twenty girls who died. The morning of the burial ceremony, he visited with grieving parents and family members, many of whom had traveled several days to attend the service. Beneath a shady grove by the gravesite they gathered, huddled in blankets from the cold. As he stood to speak, Efram’s eyes settled on the dark clumps of earth rising from the ground, and the bundled bodies in the twenty wooden coffins. Steamy fog hovered over the fresh-dug holes.
“All respect will be given in the cutting of the stone,” Efram said. Mothers and fathers nodded and cried softly, surrounded by their living children. They looked to Efram, who stood with his head bowed, holding his broad-brimmed hat in both hands and rocking slightly. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks and he made no move to hide them. Efram’s ten year-old cousin Taloa, they knew, was among those who died.
ef
Rose
As we neared the graveyard in the early morning dark, we passed under the arms of fat-trunked sycamore trees. Through the gray branches we could see the shapes of wailing women, their long black dresses, their heads covered with black scarves that hid their faces. My father pulled our wagon to the roadside and eased to a slow halt. Whiteface stomped the ground and munched on brittle sycamore leaves. We sat for a long while before descending into the world of grief.
My father took off his hat and closed his eyes. The old women howled and fell to the ground. When they rose again, their singing cut the day in half. There were two days, the day we lived in, ate in, slept in, smiled and cried in—then there was this day of grief, a day I never knew before.
Nothing was like before, nor would it ever be.
Unlike most funerals, with the wailers grieving for us all, many of the wailers on this day had lost a grandchild in the flames. Their cries took on a purple undertow of deeper grief. Mothers of the dead joined the older women, as they had never done.
“Minti! Minti!” a mother called. “Come, my baby, come!”
The sun came into view to the east and her cries took on an urgent air, as if her baby girl was lost and wandering in the woods. The mother grew more desperate as the sun threatened to rise and devour her baby, just as the fire had done.
My father stepped from the wagon and lifted Jamey and me to the ground, then helped my mother, then Pokoni, and Amafo. By the time we stepped through the trees, the sun was casting yellow rays on the graves of my newly dead girlfriends. A swell of anger took hold of me and shook my body till I could barely stand.
Pokoni reached from behind me and held me by the waist. She laid her head on my shoulder and there we stood, leaning one upon the other. I parted my lips and breathed in the gardenia fragrance, as much a part of Pokoni as her thick black hair.
Brother Willis always stood so strong, but on this day his whole body sagged, from the skin of his wrinkled cheeks to the knees of his britches, still muddy from his night of kneeling and praying in his garden. But when he lifted his eyes to the Choctaw gathering, the coming light took hold.
