Short Story - Finding Time

Jesse Martin sat in the rocking chair on his front porch waiting for the new day to emerge from the early morning darkness. He'd built his chair years back, but, nit much of a woodworker, he made the usual mistake - rockers too curved. The chair's action was so quick, the rock so short that the unaware could get bucked clean out  of it on their first rock. But for Jesse, more into sitting than rocking, it worked just fine.

The porch of his small cabin faced east, because early morning was Jesse’s favorite time of day. The sun hadn’t yet broken the horizon. There was but a suggestion of pink following the arc of the distant mounds that occupied his lower meadow. His family had managed to hang on to this 20-acre parcel of land when most of his Creek brethren were being marched out of Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi on their way to exile in Oklahoma. His great grandfather had secured the deed assisted by the maneuvers of a supportive white friend. It was up to his grandfather, father, and then Jesse, to pay the taxes each year so the land would stay in the family. Jesse never wanted much: the land, the rocker, the cabin and the mounds were more than enough.

With the darkness thinning, Jesse noticed a young girl walking through the tall bluestem clumps at the bottom of the meadow. The dew that peppered their feathery tops was not yet visible in the haze of early morning. The dusky light smudged her into the scattered mounds as she passed by each one, making her disappear then reappear like something ghostly. A smile crossed Jesse’s face as he watched young Clara making her way to his cabin. She was a funny kid to him, funny as in peculiar. Every morning she’d come check on him and then make his breakfast, sometimes with eggs she’d steal from her mom’s hens and hide in her knapsack, sometimes with bannock dotted with fresh berries she’d pick in the fields she passed through. She was small for her twelve years, elfish in stature, eyes as big and amber as marble shooters and her head covered with thin, wispy blonde hair that she’d slap back into place with her own spit. For all her prickliness, her heart was still a child’s, forgiving and with the wisdom of her primal instincts still intact. He didn’t mind her around. She was quiet by nature and self-sustaining, and at times even made him laugh, usually when she’d take on a project too big for her and end up in a heap beneath it. Then he’d have to dig her out taking care not to make a fuss out of it. She’d hammer him, if he started to tease. He understood her tetchiness. It masked uncertainty and distrust, the legacy of a family where a child can count on nothing but abuse.

Her first words of the morning were, “Well looks like you’re alive for one more day. How long they give old coots like you?”

“Long enough to get kids like you to respect their elders.”

“I don’t know any respectable elders.” As she said the word elders, she punctuated her sarcasm with a smug grin.

“My kin were respectable people,” he challenged her.

“Yeah, but they ain’t my kin.”

He was lighting his pipe, an old corncob, stuffing it with a bit of home-grown from his patch beyond the mounds. It grew big and tangy there, and sometimes he’d even let Clara have a puff or two when life at her place rattled her so bad she’d still be fuming after walking the two miles to his.

“Well what’s for breakfast, Cooky?”

She had just reached the porch steps, climbed up them dog-style and barked at him as she went past.

He shook his head never sure what to make of her, but thankful she was more wild than cultivated. The few kids he did see on the rare occasions he’d go to town frightened him, their eyes flat, their needs rampant and their minds rusted shut like old hinges. He’d not known a race of people like that before now. He knew them arrogant. He knew them racist. He knew them hateful. But vacant, that felt dead to him, like he lived among the walking dead. Nothing in his culture spoke to that except in prophesy, and he hoped surely that wasn’t about to come true.

Clara banged around in the living room come kitchen, clanging the stove lids down on the woodstove as if they had lipped her off. Finally, he smelled fresh coffee, toast and eggs and sat back like the man of the manor, laced his hands behind his head and waited to be served. She dropped the tin plate in his lap because it was burning her fingers, and it now got to burn his thighs through thins spots in his jeans.

“Yike,” he yelped as he sat up and then burnt his fingers pulling his shirt tail under the plate to stop it from roasting his legs. “When you bring the coffee, just set the mug on the floor. I don’t need third degree burns on half of my body. A quarter’s plenty.”

Clara shrugged. Since there was no other chair on the porch, she settled on the top step with her plate and mug, keeping a safe distance from Jesse in case she’d strained his sense of humor to the point of reckoning.

“Okay, what’s the problem?” He could always tell when she was stewing.

She looked at him and suddenly the face of a frightened child was all he saw. Then she went steely again, reset her jaw and remained silent.

In such moments, there was no use messing with her, so he ate his breakfast and watched the sun pour over the top of the mounds as if they were worn-down mountains. At this time of morning, he could see the flow of the light, see it like it was water, watch it stream toward him, engulfing everything, until, like a wave, it surfed over him, renewing his awareness of That-Which-Moves-In-All-Things. In that moment, he felt his relations there with him, and he’d relax into that old familiarity. He knew this child had never known such assurance from the earth. It left her a stranger to a world he sensed as kindred, able only to relate to him as a stray dog seeking shelter.

Finished with his breakfast, he shut his eyes and listened to the world. It was waking. He acknowledged the voices speaking to him—the birds, the trees, the wind and the mounds. Just as he was relaxing into the geniality of this time of day, Clara blurted out the answer to his earlier question at the top of her lungs.

“Mom says I can’t come over here anymore. She says old men are trouble and I’m old enough now to get into it.”

Jesse, reeling from the sudden explosion of sound, almost bucked himself out of his rocker. As he caught himself, he pushed his fingers against his forehead, leaned back and squinted away the jarring return to the world this child triggered.

“Timing is not your strong point, girl. Gawd.” He shook his head, then looked at her.

She was staring straight ahead, reed stiff. He knew what she wanted, for him to talk to her mom. But he felt the same futility as Clara when it came to doing that. It was a waste of time. When that woman wasn’t drunk, she was high with a mean streak running through her. He wasn’t one to write people off, but he wasn’t sure that lady had ever signed on. And he had no more idea than anyone else how to deal with her.

Jesse pulled himself out of the chair and went back in the cabin to fill his coffee mug. When he came out, he sat at the other end of the same step Clara occupied. He put his back against the newel post and stared at her. He lit his pipe again and hoped its smoke would clear his mind.

“You live in tough times, kid.” Jesse began. “Something’s happening to people, like they’re in a fog. Something is really wrong when family members don’t take care of each other. I saw a bit of that happening with my people toward the end of our great time, the time we roamed free and knew all the world like brothers and sisters. We respected the earth. We sang songs to remind us we were part of all this. His hand without the coffee mug swung wide to indicate everything there. We sang songs of thanks to the Great Spirit to keep harmony among us.” He stopped as he got caught up in the images his words were bringing to him.

Her voice was now low and hissing with anger. “I don’t have any Great Spirit, and I’d say your life doesn’t look a whole lot better than mine.” She glanced at the cabin bare of power and phone with no vehicle parked beside it. “I don’t see any family here, any money or people you can count on. You might have freedom, but you don’t have any way to get anywhere.” She threw the words at him as if they were rocks she heaved through his window.

Jesse puffed on his pipe. Clara sat stone-faced staring at him. She took a deep breath and blew it out noisily, her fingers drumming on the porch floor impatiently.

“What do I tell my mom?” This time her voice suggested defeat and frustration rather than bad-temper. “She beats me anytime she gets a notion. And she knows I won’t report her, because I don’t want to be taken away. I want to be able to be here.” Clara threw her hands apart indicating Jesse’s home place. “This is the only place I’m safe.” Any pity she may have felt for herself had long ago been distilled into anger. It held her rigid, protected.

“You can tell your mom, I’d slap you silly if you ever tried to seduce me,” he said. Then he chuckled and puffed out a big belch of smoke.

Try as she might she couldn’t stop the snort of a laugh that scenario drew from her as she processed the words. She looked the wizened native in the eye, the hitch of an upward curve in her mouth still there. Then her shoulders even shook a little as she obviously played that scene through her mind a second time and giggled inwardly.

Clara sat there, finally receptive. He thought he’d chance it. “There are good times, ya know. They’re always here. You just have to know where to look.”

She responded to his words with a smirk.

“How brave are you? Huh? I want to show you something, but I don’t want you to go all goofy on me. What do ya think?”

“You can’t scare me, old man, not even with some spooky Indian crap. When do you want me here?”

“Get here just as dark is settling in. I’ll meet you on the porch.”

“Okay. Mom will be passed out by then. Don’t start without me though.”

Jesse questioned her bravado. He hoped she was as brave as she thought. Mostly, he hoped this would work. He'd never been inclined to share with white people anything about his heritage. But this case was different.

He'd been harangued for years by anthropologists, museum directors, professors of ethnic cultures and reporters looking for a news scoop on a slow day. They didn’t care about him or his people, only the mounds. The mounds were something they could see, something tangible that was different from anything white people had done on this continent. At first, they came telling Jesse what the mounds were. Jesse said nothing. Then they came asking him what they were. Finally, they came demanding to be told what they were, and why they were there. All the while, Jesse smoked his pipe and remained silent. Finally, they made up their own stories and stopped coming.

His family didn’t hold on to this property because they believed in ownership. They’d always known, rather than owners of the land, they were stewards. They held on to these 20 acres to protect the mounds. Jesse often thought if he were in a spaceship, he would be able to know where his home was because of these large rounded man-made hills. He was sure they’d act like a beacon he could hone in on because of all the energy they’d been imbued with over thousands of years. They weren’t just piles of dirt. Only a few were burial sites and a few others, places of festivity. But there were those that could work wonders, and wonders were what he needed now.

As the dark claimed the world once again, Jesse sat waiting. When he caught a flash of her white T-shirt in the otherwise dense pitch which night becomes in the countryside, she was running across the meadow. She arrived late, panting.

“Damn that woman. The one night I wished she’d get drunk, is the one she decides to entertain. I couldn’t get away until they went off to the bedroom. Then I made up my bed to look like I was in it, but by then it was late.”

“It’s okay,” Jesse soothed, “you’re here now. You need to quiet yourself down before we can leave.”

“Where we going?”

“Just out in the meadow.”

“I’m going to smoke one bowl full, and then we’ll walk out there. You forget about home, your mother and anything else that might get you all head up, so you’re ready when I stand.”

The cicadas had gotten very loud and one lone whippoorwill warbled his eerie song. It was so dark, all that could be seen was a bit of Jesse’s face from the glow of his pipe ash each time he sucked in air.

Suddenly, Jesse rose, grabbed Clara’s hand and about yanked her to her feet. “Not a word,” was all he said. He began walking with long deliberate strides that Clara could match only be adding extra steps. He headed toward a far mound and stopped twenty feet from it, then sank slowly into the grass, sitting cross-legged and still. Clara was almost touching him, trying to stay close as the hair on the back of her neck prickled.

A sound in her head began to get louder and louder until something popped and a depth of silence she’d never known swallowed her. She forced herself to sit on her hands as she wanted desperately to swing them around in search of Jesse. All other preoccupation with Jesse ended, however, when she heard the yelps, the coyote-like noises natives made in dancing or getting each other’s attention across distance. She had no idea what was happening, but she was not afraid. She was instead enthralled. Then she heard hoof beats and a horse galloping toward them such that it made her start to shimmy backwards. Suddenly it was there and rearing up, visible as if there was a fire or some sort of light close by. Clara saw the mounted warrior as he stared cold-eyed down at her, his bright red war paint covering his face, his horse snorting and stomping, both so alive and powerful and real. Then like a curtain coming down on a stage, the darkness blotted out the light, and the sounds in the field were once again cicadas and a whippoorwill. She felt Jesse, who was next to her, rouse and stand. He pulled her up, put his finger across her lips to ensure her silence and walked her home.

The next morning Clara was already there when Jesse came out in the darkness to sit in his rocker. She was sitting on the top step.

“I’m not hungry yet.”

Scrappy, she snapped back at him, “I’m not cooking yet.” Then in a quieter voice tempered by uncertainty she asked him, “Where were we last night?”

“How would I know? We were with my people. That’s all I know. I came out to the mounds one night now long ago and suddenly I was sitting next to an uncle of many years gone. I showed this to you so that you would stop wasting time being angry and victimized. That you might know time for what it is, like a giant hand that holds all that has ever been, is now and will be, in its palm. You are free to access any of it. You are not a prisoner to any time unless you choose to hold yourself there through useless emotion. I have had a good life, sitting on this porch, living as I do. Don’t be so silly as to think the world is only what you’ve learned.” The girl, uncommonly pensive, appeared to be considering what he said. She didn’t stick around after breakfast. He saw her walk out to the mounds, circle each one and then walk home. Jesse thought it best to give her time to ruminate. He wasn’t concerned when she didn’t show up the next day.

The following day found Jesse, as the rays of another morning’s sun poked beneath the cabin porch roof, sitting in his rocker smoking his pipe, content and waiting on breakfast. The coolness of the morning hinted that summer was on the wane. The sun’s rays filled out and warmed the world, but not sufficient to wake the cicadas. That left only the morning song of the loon to call forth the day. Jesse began to feel hungry and wondered where Clara was. He hoped he’d not complicated her life with what he’d shared with her. He had no way of knowing the Department of Child Welfare had shown up the prior morning and removed Clara from her home.

Fall closed in. Clara was seemingly history. Jesse was not in the habit of questioning destiny. He knew his province in life was simply to live it, not to direct it or interfere.

One night before snow whispered across his meadow, he sat once again at the base of the largest mound, and then slipped through time, going home. In the spring, Jesse’s body remained only as a pile of bones picked clean by the coyotes. New green shoots of meadow grass pushed up among them. The seasons ticked off the years. The mounds remained. The rocker weathered. The cabin endured. The taxes somehow got paid, and the land in its wisdom attended to itself.

On a spring morning, a decade or so later, the long legs of a willowy young woman kicked the old hay aside as she crossed the meadow. When she passed the mounds, she paused and stared at them for some time. Her next step toed into something hard. She bent over and pulled a few bones fragments out of the matted dead grass. As she held the pieces in her hand, she glanced toward the cabin and sighed. She replaced the bones as it felt like they were already in their rightful grave, and continued toward the cabin. She climbed the stairs and paused to listen. Nothing came to her ears but the wind. No one had told her he was gone. She sat on the top step, leaning against one of the uprights that supported the porch roof and stared in the direction of the old rocker that could barely earn its name as such. There in broad daylight, without the conjecture darkness can introduce, she saw him as if he’d never left; head tilted back gazing toward the mounds. “Well, where’s my coffee?” he barked out, then chuckled slowly.

She jumped straight up and flattened against the log support she’d been leaning on. She wasn’t ready for that. She wasn’t the tough nut of her youth now. Years of foster care had studded her childhood certainties with doubts. She turned abruptly and ran for the door. It wasn’t locked but as usual it stuck, as it always did, on the warp in the floor. Panicked, she booted it, then shouldered it open and slammed it shut. Leaning against it, she gasped for air is if she’d just run a mile, but otherwise staying perfectly still, listening. The tears came next; for her, for him and for the lost and wretched intervening years. Memories she’d not permitted now reeled through her mind. She watched, stomaching them to get to what she knew would be the last frame. She wanted to see that warrior again. She wanted to feel the astonishment she sensed that night, the fearlessness, the awe. Without thought, she moved slowly across the room and began the task of lighting the stove. Wood was still in the wood box, matches in the tin match holder on the wall, and old newspapers stuffed next to the wood. Strangely a capped quart sealer stood on the counter with clean water in it and coffee in a tin can. As strange as this all was, she wasn't about to  disparage this moment by demanding it reflect her understanding of the world. When the side of the stove directly above the firebox garnered sufficient heat, she set the old percolator on it and waited.

As soon as she ceased her bustling about, reality caught up with her, and she stopped, stood still and spoke aloud, “What am I doing?” She hadn’t considered their last night together for over ten years. Now Jesse’s words came back to her. Tumbling out of seeming nowhere she heard in her head: I showed this to you so that you would stop wasting time being angry and victimized. That you might know time for what it is, like a giant hand that holds all that has ever been, is now and will be, in its palm. You are free to access any of it. You are not a prisoner to any time unless you choose to hold yourself there through useless emotion.

The sound of the suck and gurgle of the percolator brought her back and the smell of coffee scenting the room incited new tears of loss. She filled two mugs and took them steaming out onto the porch. She set the one mug by the rocker and sat, with the other one, in her old place on the top step. She hadn’t expected him to be there yet, but he had been for a moment. All which seemed so hokey years back, she was now willing to allow.

Come evening, she had house-cleaned the cabin, gotten fresh water from the spring and concluded her day sitting in the rocker staring out toward the mounds. Unlike Jesse, she had no family to visit her, but she had Jesse and she had time.