the man we knew.
If ever I have had—in the course of all that I have witnessed in my eighty-four years—reason to doubt the presence of the good and living God, I only need turn to the doings of Brother Willis on this sacred day of mourning to restore my faith in the Everlasting.
“We will sing a hymn before we hear the word of the Lord,” he said. “Oh, Come Let Us Adore Him,” he sang, and how could we not but join him?
Oh, come let us adore him,
Oh, come let us adore him,
Oh, come let us adore him,
Christ the Lord.
For he alone is worthy,
For he alone is worthy,
For he alone is worthy,
Christ the Lord.
He sang a Christmas song of adoration of the child, and how could we not but join him? Standing all together, the living and the dead, how could we not but join him?
Am enchil ahleha oklat holitoblit,
Talowh chitoli ka ho haklo
Klolia, klolia, ekselsis Teo.
Oh im aiala momat, oh im aiala momat,
Oh im aiala momat, ho tushpa.
I marveled at Brother Willis and how he took us from this world. Then the song was over.
He stumbled in his words and before he could announce another page number, Amelia Chukma cried Oooooo, and everyone stood shaking and crying. The crying was deep and good. We wailed and looked into each other’s eyes and sobbed out loud. I never felt so free to shout my grief and many others did the same.
As if called to join us, our gone-before Choctaw kinfolk covered the graveyard. Through my watery eyes, I saw people standing by their own graves, holding tight to their families. I saw a thousand Choctaws, dead and buried long ago, and all of us were weeping.
Brother Willis let us cry. He stood with his head bowed and his cheeks shone with tears. We stood for what must have been the better part of an hour, and then his voice boomed with the scripture reading.
Following the singing of funeral hymns, we carried our baskets of food from the wagon. Grape dumplings, roasted corn, beans and onions, banaha bread, and two large kettles of pashofa. Other families brought chicken and strips of pork, fried and boiled.
Mister Folsom backed his wagon up the dirt roadway and pans of food were placed at the wagon’s rear. Pokoni put her arm around me and led me to a cluster of women gathering to begin the serving. Elder women came first, then men and boys, and young women and girls. The usual feasting talk gave way to quiet sobs.
I saw Samuel Willis, even Samuel, lift a finger to his cheekbone and trace the path of a fresh tear. Samuel was distant as the dark he wandered through, but on this day the rolling bones of his face were home to shiny tears. I sighed and wished my fingers too could touch his face.
I turned to Pokoni and she wrapped her thin, strong arms around me. Later, after her death, I found myself thinking that she caught my looking at Samuel that burying day. She felt my sighing, and more than that, she saw the home we would someday make together, Samuel and I. My gift of seeing came from Pokoni, of this I have no doubt.
After everyone was served, we sat in family groupings, without the usual mingling and talking. Long before sunset the last wagonload of grievers, led by two lazy mules, pulled away from New Hope Cemetery.
ef
During the grieving, Efram leaned against the pine tree shading his family. He longed to be about his task of cutting and carving. When his mother appeared at his side with a plate of pork and dumplings, he slid down the trunk of the tree and buried himself in the food, though—in his thinking—this feasting time denied him his work.
While his brother Ben helped their mother to the wagon, Efram untied his horse from the rear of it, nodded his goodbyes and headed to the quarry. An hour later he dismounted twenty feet from the granite quarry’s edge, where he had already cut and dragged three of the needed twenty stones. Removing his mallet and carving chisel from his saddlebag, he lifted the first stone to the slab of rock that served as his carving table.
Efram had decided, seeing his family so deep in grief, to carve Taloa’s stone first and present it to her mother and father—his aunt and uncle. He stood over the dull slab and gripped the chisel with his left hand to lightly chip the faint outline of letters.
He tapped the chisel barely enough to stir dust from the stone, and his father entered his thoughts. Efram loved his cousin as he did his father. With the birth of the one so soon followed by the death of the other, he saw the events as connected, as did many Choctaws. Taloa, they knew, was sent to take and hold the spirit of the elder.
Now both were gone. Efram whispered her name, then gripped the chisel tight and swung hard, cutting deep the leg of a “T.”
“Taloa,” he said louder, and swung again, harder still, sending the blade into the groove.
“Taloa.” With every swing he called her name louder, with every shout he buried his cut deeper.
“Taloa!” he shouted, till the stone split and Efram slumped to the ground, sweating and panting.
With only a sliver of moon to light his way, Efram lifted the two pieces of stone and stumbled to the edge of the quarry. He held the granite high over his head, swayed back and forth, and flung the stones to the bottom of the pit. As the stones shattered, he fell backwards, stubbornly refusing to break his fall and landing hard on his back.
He struggled to his feet and watched as shadows danced over the shards of twinkling, shattered granite. His anger seemed out of place as he beheld the spectacle of light rising from the dark hole. He mounted his horse and returned to New Hope Cemetery.
Across the road from the burial grounds, trees had been cleared for farming. The five-acre plot still held its stones intact. Limestone chunks of every size and shape decorated the field. Efram glanced at the graves, twenty mounds of dark dirt, then turned to the stones.
He approached a round stone three feet high and rocked it back and forth, loosening the dirt. With a slow and steady tug, Efram lifted the stone from the earth. He rolled it across the uneven road and onto the burial ground, settling it at the head of a grave.
Efram worked till dawn, digging stones from the field till his hands bled and his fingernails were chipped and broken. On stone number seven a buried sliver of limestone cut deep into his left palm. By the time Efram realized he was bleeding, his britches, shirt, and face were covered in blood, and his hair was a thick mass of sopping red.
Just after sunrise Lavester McKesson arrived at the cemetery with a wagonload of fresh-picked flower bundles to set among the graves. He was surprised to see twenty white stones sitting by the graves. Some were tall and cylindrical, some flat to the ground, others were round or oblong, but all shared one unforgettable bond. Blood. They were, each and every one of them, spotted with handprints of blood.
Efram slept at the base of a tree.
“What a sight to see,” Lavester later said. “Me
