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.
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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. He pulled a hymnbook from behind his back and became 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