But first he had to look around the old farmhouse where he'd been doing odd jobs for the Redbirds. He'd been fortunate that the fools in law enforcement had been circulating photos of him as he'd looked when he was first taken into custody so many years before in Chicago. He looked quite different now, what with a full beard, glasses, a road map of wrinkles and sunken eyes in deep shadow. He'd put on some weight about his middle, somehow making the hunchback less pronounced nowadays, giving him a harmless Yoda or aging-old-man appearance, his graying hair brittle as fence wire.
The people around the reservation didn't ask questions. The Cherokees here were a displaced race, and miscegenation had done the rest so that there were hardly any full-bloods remaining, and so the small amount of Cherokee blood that flowed through Matthew Matisak's veins had been enough to suffice, getting him past old Mr. Redbird's threshold into one of the oldest standing homes on the reserve.
The old place was mightily ran down, chimney heaving to one side, roof faded and worn, shutters half on, half off, and the barn lived up to the old saying that you could throw a cat through any wall, but the Redbirds worked harder than most to keep their yard and front porch free of clutter: no used appliances sitting beside the front door, no rusted-out bikes on the lawn, no cinder-block sculptures or half-built outhouse shells, everything neat but the overgrown weeds, save for the ancient rusted hulk of an old, useless Ford touring car on cinder blocks and below canvas out back.
The house with its small barn needed fresh paint, and he had promised to do the work, if they'd get the materials, which they had been scraping together. In the car port a usable old Chevy rust bucket of a pickup waited now for Matisak, the keys in the ignition.
Old Redbird, in his khaki pants and red plaid shirt, had stepped into the barn that morning, curious, wondering if his visitor had finally chosen to move on. He'd told neighbors that the younger man's father had been his brother-in-law, which wasn't true, but even the People felt foolish nowadays to take in a stranger from the outside world, and the old-timers in particular felt they had to present some excuse for such behavior. If they followed the old custom of never turning away someone on their doorstep-a custom Matisak's grandfather had mentioned a thousand times-nowadays they risked the ridicule of the younger generation, even their own children. But of the Redbirds' three children, two had died young, something to do with booze and a joyride, and a third had somehow gone from the res years before to take up a life elsewhere.
Most of the traditionalists simply accepted the fact that Red-bird must house the man who showed up on his doorstep claiming a kinship. It was taboo, long-standing tradition; you never turned away anyone who knocked at your door unless he was a known enemy. It was a custom begun generations before and perfected by the great and famous chiefs who opened their own homes to any and all who traveled great distances to see them.
Such was the case with the last of the great chiefs, Keeows-kowee, or John Ross, who prospered well here in what was once Indian Territory as both a businessman and the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. His Light Horse Guard still rode, but nowadays they were on motorcycles and in Toyotas and were known only as Res Police. The Res Police seemed very interested in the stranger at first, and had asked Redbird many questions when he had gone into Tahlequah to the Cherokee Feed amp; Grain Store. They had told him to expect a squad car out at his place before he went to bed tonight. The old fool had stupidly confided this to Matisak, telling him that if he had anything to fear from police, he'd better “skee-daddle.”
Matisak only nodded, went outside without any breakfast and disappeared. He waited in the shadows inside the barn for Redbird to come out to milk his single played-out old cow. Matisak had some milking of a different color in mind.
It was then that the old man felt a slicing, blood-letting blow to his right temple, just barely seeing the business end of the spade before he blacked out. His final thought was a worry, a worry for his bride of forty-seven years-Hillary.
From inside the house where she was preparing a chicken for dinner, Hillary had watched her old man amble bowlegged into the barn, swallowed up by the darkness there. When she'd first married him, he was doing the southwest rodeo circuit. He'd been so handsome and such a fine horseman, and he'd spoken of one day owning a big, fine ranch filled with horses, but he could never get enough money together, and after the trampling he'd received when that bull named Angel's Breath in Ardmore threw him under its pounding weight, well, neither he nor his long-held dream was ever the same again. Still, she'd continued to love Redbird, despite the arguments of her family, and she made a good home for him, and she was the best wife she could be for him, and they had had a good life together, despite the most heartrending moments, as when they'd buried their two sons, who'd run their car into the Verdigris River and been too drunk to swim out, or when Aaron had left for college and never returned.
She was brought back from her reverie on hearing the annoyed whine of one of the plow horses and the wail of the milk cow, but nothing else. She, like her husband, was glad to have seen the last of their “nephew” by marriage. Jack Thomas Elkheart Mankiller, he'd pronounced himself that first night, laying out a string of tenuous details connecting the family to him, despite his obvious whiteness, which he claimed was due to some sort of illness similar to what Michael Jackson, the famous singer, had. And there was something around the mean eyes that reminded Hillary Clay Redbird of Big John Mankiller, who'd been married for near thirty-four years to Winnie Elkheart over near the Arkansas line, but both John and Winnie were years in the grave now. John, though, had been a massive fellow, nearly three hundred pounds, when he'd died of a heart attack, while this man was sickly by comparison. Of course, if the man could be believed, he'd been orphaned in Chicago, shunted about from foster home to foster home, as many a poor Indian child had been, hardly able to fend for himself. Little wonder he bore such scars and the crooked back. His face was sallow and etched with pain and menace, however, and Hillary felt too old to become anyone's fool, despite her good Christian upbringing.
Hillary had confided to her husband in their bed the night before that she'd taken to sleeping with her gun below her pillow from the moment the stranger had arrived. This had somewhat shocked Earl, but he'd seemed all of a sudden to understand her need. He'd drawn a hickory ball bat he kept in the closet closer to the bed that night as well. She'd asked him about it, but he'd just grunted something about the Res Police looking in on them and their newfound relative tomorrow.
But now it was morning and the birds were chattering away, chasing one another in the apple orchard, the light dancing along the leaves, a brilliant blue sky made the more blinding by great billowy Oklahoma clouds that hung so low she thought even a little woman like herself might reach up and touch them.
She looked up again from her work, expecting to see Earl come out of the blackness of the barn with the eggs and milk she'd requested. Couldn't make a proper stuffing without either. He'd also said that he had to fetch a hoe and a rake, to do something with the cucumber and squash patch alongside the house. So where in tarnation was he now? Had he forgotten what he was doing again?
She grew impatient, and thought again about Jack Thomas Mankiller. Mankiller was an old, even ancient tribal name, and there were Mankillers up and down the hills here, spread across the state. One of them had been the first Cherokee woman ever to become Principal Chief at the longhouse. So, why didn't this Jack stay with closer relatives who might better know him and who surely had more to give a passing stranger than they? She didn't mind being charitable, but there was a limit, blood or no, custom or no.