Bonita Faye Page 5

  Billy Roy’s had shown with meanness and Harmon’s with goodness. Little Elly had the glint of innocence and mine, the spark of shrewdness.

  Not pretty, but it was mine own. And I learned to accept it.

  I don’t like surprises. Any surprises. But I am always surprised about how serious people take their religion.

  When I was growing up, I didn’t even know there was any such thing as religion. Mama certainly never told me nothing about it and I wasn’t the beneficiary of many people practicing it. And when I was, it was one of them surprises I didn’t like.

  You coulda knocked me over with a feather when Mama told me that the Swans were going to send me to church camp. We’d only been working for them about a month. School was out and I was looking forward to roaming free, heading out for some of the back country roads and trailing my bare toes through the hot dust of the barely scraped-out tire tracks that passed for a motor trail.

  I wanted to smell the dust and the heat and to listen to the chirping things in the trees say, “Lord, ain’t it hot?” And the one in the tree next to it would answer, “Lord, it shore is.” On they would go, complaining about the heat and passing on their wearisome message like a child’s game of Round Robin. I could walk a mile down them tree-shaded lanes and their tiresome chirping of the weather would always be announced right behind me and I’d catch the monotonous answer with my next steps.

  Pretty soon I’d wander off the road and find a shady spot where water was trickling through and I would sprawl on the ground and watch the little water things dart back and forth at the edge of the pool. If it was deep enough, and I was still enough, sometimes I’d see a big gar circle near the top of the water or a turtle yawn in the heat from atop a half-surfaced log.

  Before I went to Paris, France, that was the only way I thought summers should be spent.

  Mr. and Mrs. Swan were Baptists. Good Baptists. They paid my way along with their own twelve-year-old daughter, Little Alice, to a Baptist encampment in Glorieta, New Mexico. I finally agreed to go ‘cause I thought I was going to Mexico and would see some Mexicans. Was I surprised when I found out New Mexico was in the United States of America and who I saw was Indians. My ideas of geography was sadly deficient in those days. It’s a wonder I ever found Paris, France.

  That set of circumstances was how I found out about religion and the store that people set by it.

  Instead of picking up a smooth, round rock out of the road and popping it into my mouth to savor the heat and pleasing flavor of dirt, I found myself in the back seat of Mr. Swan’s Ford with two other girls on my way to Glorieta, New Mexico, U.S.A.

  Mr. Swan prayed afore we started the car for our “safe journey” and when we stopped to eat or go to the bathroom at a gas station he’d pray thanks for our “safe arrival.” After we had done our business, he’d start the cycle all over again. “Dear Jesus, our Lord. Please be with us as we cross this vast country. Keep us safe from careless drivers and evil travelers. Help me to protect my dear wife and sweet daughters of the Light during this trip to New Mexico. In Jesus’s name. Amen.”

  I quickly learned the etiquette of praying. You got real still and looked down at the floorboard of the back seat, watching the spider in the bottom corner of Mr. Swan’s seat spin its web. We took that spider clear to New Mexico and back.

  We drove straight through. No stopping. When it was dark and us three girls were sleeping, stretched out the best we could in the cramped back seat, I’d woke up and saw the back of Mrs. Swan’s head at the steering wheel. The Ford’s headlights rushed ahead to search the road for careless drivers and evil travelers while Mrs. Swan softly sang In the Sweet By and By. Mr. Swan slept, his head leaned against the window on the passenger side. His snoring kept accompaniment to his wife’s singing. I watched awhile and then fell back asleep myself. I dreamed I was being carried to a far-away shore in the hands of a pure white angel who looked like a big, feathered dove.

  Glorieta, New Mexico, was a big surprise. Not just that it was in the United States, but that it looked just like the Ozark Mountains. The trees were different and the mountains had a little sharper edge to them, but for that we could of been sitting down to have church service right near Queen Wilhelmina Lodge in Arkansas. Instead we sat on sawed half logs lined up like church pews in the middle of a raw encampment on the lip of a mountain edge in New Mexico. Behind the preacher’s place at the front you stared out at a huge valley full of tall trees. Sometimes the preacher talked about Jesus and God and sometimes we sang. And sometimes, someone behind a bush at the very edge of the mountain would read Bible verses that sounded like God himself was speaking out of nowhere.

  After I got over being scared of hearing a voice with no body tell me to “lift up my eyes unto the hills,” I became curious as to who was saying those words. I looked forward to that part of the service. (We had them three times a day.) Every time I was determined to catch someone coming out of the bushes so I’d know who was speaking to me. I got so excited with the voice in the bushes that I spent my whole time at each service with my eyes on them shrubs.

  After three days of Arts and Crafts and Bible Study and Sword Drill, one of the older counselors came over to me. “Bonita Faye, you are so smart and so joyful to teach that we counselors have voted to let you help us in our worship service. We don’t know of any other child who has been so eager or so attentive at the services. Since you read so well, we want you to read the Scripture behind the bushes at tomorrow’s sunrise service.”

  Well, flip me over and call me a pancake. I was going behind them bushes.

  They gave me my Bible verse to study afore we went to bed. I had it memorized in all of three minutes, but I spent the rest of the night in my bottom bunk practicing in my head just how I would say it.

  Early the next morning I met the counselor down by the worship spot and she showed me the mystery of the talking bush. There was a little rock trail down behind the bushes that you took to come up in a clearing in the middle of them. That way no one ever saw who was in the bushes. She led me there, put a finger to her lips and turned back down the trail.

  I couldn’t see through the shrubbery, but I could hear the faithful coming to worship. There was rustlings of feet and muffled coughing as they took their places on the split logs. The air was clean and cool. Looking backwards from my hidey-hole I could see clear down the mountain. Trees bigger than the camp’s main lodge were thousands of feet below me. Row after row of them marched up the mountainside.

  The preacher said his piece and the people sang, their voices sailed past me and flew on out in the valley below. I felt like I was going to wet my pants with the beauty of it all. Finally I heard the preacher give me my cue. I said my Scripture in a clear, loud speech just like I’d practiced in my head. My voice fought the wind, but I held steady and did my part.

  After I finished, there was silence. Then the preacher said, “Amen.” And the people stood and started back toward the camp. I was so thrilled with my performance that I didn’t take the little back trail to the camp. Though they scratched my face as I plowed through, I pushed through the bushes and came out among the campers. They was walking by me in a dazed look, tears streamed down the faces of some of them. “How’d I do?” I asked one of the boys I recognized. He looked at me like he didn’t see me. Like he was seeing a foreign shore in his eyes. I tugged at his sleeve. “It’s all right. That was me. How was I?” He shrugged away my hand and walked on. I stood still as the people passed. They flowed by me like ants around a mud puddle.

  That’s when I first knew that people take their religion so to heart. They didn’t want to know, like I had, about the mystery of the talking bush. They didn’t want to know it was me speaking. They wanted to believe. In my lifetime since, I’ve experienced other examples of how sincere folks take their religion, but I was never as surprised about it again as I was that morning that I stood in the bushes on a mou
ntain top in Glorieta, New Mexico, and said in a sweet, innocent voice through the leaves, “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

  “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

  “And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”

  There were only two other surprises at Glorieta. No, make that three. One was the warm way I felt when we sat around the campfire at night and sang Kumbaya. The second was how I felt when I was one of only two campers who made it to the top of a steep hiking trail. Thin and scrawny, all stick arms and legs, I was the last one the young counselor thought would make it all the way. He and the other camper, a boy, and I left the others along the way. Only the three of us arrived at the summit. After slapping us on the back, the counselor took out his knife and let us carve our names on a tree. I like knowing, even to this day, that high in a pine tree in New Mexico, scratched in its trunk, are the words “Bonita Faye Was Here.”

  We half slid back down the mountain, picking up the stragglers as we went. Victorious, we reached the bottom and jumped into the cold stream to cool off and to wash the poison ivy from our scratched and exposed skin. When I killed Billy Roy ten years later, I shoulda remembered that was how you got rid of poison ivy.

  My last surprise was when we got into the car for the trip home. I had lowered my head to pray for “our safe journey” and saw blood trickling from my shorts, down my leg. I had started my periods. I watched the spider in its thick web in the corner of the floorboard of the back seat of Mr. Swan’s Ford. I knew it was going to be a long trip home.

  That was my introduction and education into religion. So this is the very last thing I ever have to say about souls. I found mine looking back at me from the bathroom mirror while I was getting over the poison ivy. Whatever it told me while I was up there leaning over the sink, squinting through swollen eyelids, is my affair and right there in that little old add-on bathroom in Poteau, Oklahoma, is where that business stays.

  Let’s just say I felt squared away with me and myself and my eyeballs about killing Billy Roy.

  TEN

  It took me nearly six months after Billy Roy died to get everything in order. I had to get over the poison ivy, get my health back, work on my relationship with Harmon and collect the insurance money.

  When that next spring rolled around I was going to be ready.

  I went around the house singing and humming “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa…la…dee…daa…dee…da.” My U.S.A. passport was in the third right drawer of my bureau right under my real Paris nightgown. Every so often when I was cleaning or cooking or packing, I’d stop right where I was and hug myself and say, “Ooh la la, Bonita Faye, you’re going to Paris, France.”

  Then talk about surprises.

  While I was squaring everything away with God and the insurance company, Harmon was out making himself a hero. And once he learned how, he went on to make himself a double hero. It was just like a double-dose of poison ivy.

  Three convicted killers from the McAlester State Penitentiary escaped and headed across the open ground toward the tree groves that surround the prison. One of the three was a full-bloodied Indian and he led them other two, hillbillies both, clean out of the search area. Using tricks he shoulda used to make himself a credit to his tribe, John Falling Eagle outsmarted the search parties and their howling hound dogs ever which way for Christmas. Falling Eagle drug those other losers through thickets, creeks and dusty, fallow fields and, wouldn’t you know it, straight into the arms of Oklahoma’s finest highway patrolman—Harmon Adams.

  All I knew of what was going on was from the radio. I didn’t see or hear from Harmon the four days the fugitives were on the loose. Well, one phone call to say, “Bonita Faye, you stay inside your house and lock the doors. Better yet, go stay with Patsy, but if you do stay home, get Billy Roy’s shotgun from the closet, load it and keep it with you at all times…even in the bathroom. I got to go now. I love you, Bonita Faye.”

  There…he’d said it. It took three killers on the loose from a state penitentiary afore Harmon Adams could actually say what he and I both knew as far back as our midnight ride to Cavanal Hill the night after Billy Roy was killed. ‘Course I knew it the minute Harmon had put his arms around me in the doorway of my house that first Sunday morning. Maybe I didn’t know enough to put the name love to it, but I knew it felt right.

  Now here he was out tracking killers, one of them an Indian who knew what you think an Indian ought to know about the woods, and the river, and about getting away from the devil himself. And that Indian probably would of, too, except for the same bad luck that had turned Falling Eagle into a vicious convict instead of a noble warrior. The cards were stacked against him.

  If he hadn’t had the hillbillies, if he hadn’t headed our way, and if he hadn’t run into Harmon Adams, who carried a little red Indian blood in his own veins, Falling Eagle woulda made it. Maybe. His kind, just like Billy Roy, always seem to follow their own black star toward a bad end.

  One of the hillbillies had a cousin in Panama, a little town just a long spit northwest of Poteau, and he convinced Falling Eagle they would be safe there, if they could just reach his cousin’s shack south of town.

  And they woulda been, too. I hadn’t said too much about that side of Oklahoma folks, but just like the Indians, and most of the folks in that part of the country had some Indian in them, them Oklahoma folks were a breed unto themselves. Still are. The dust bowl exodus of the late thirties didn’t affect them none. They never farmed anyway. Just did their bit to stay alive one day and got up the next morning to do their bit to make it through another one. When the half-starved farmers left to go to California during the Depression, it just left that much more scrabbling room for those survivors of the area. They weren’t all mean or unlawful…not all of them…but they was all tough as nails.

  Harmon Adams passed into legend that day in Panama, Oklahoma, while I was toting a loaded shotgun into the bathroom every five minutes just ten miles away. The radio news kept close watch on the progress of the search and everyone knew the escapees were in the area.

  This the way I understand it, the way Harmon told it to me, and the way I’m going to tell it to you.

  It was a cold day—late January usually is in northeast Oklahoma. It was about five, five-thirty. The wind was blowing. Looked like another blue norther headed our way. What sun there had been was setting and the creeks were icing over. Any dog with a lick of sense was at home or heading home toward a fire and a hot meal.

  Harmon and his side-kick, a dingy, young rookie trooper named Joe, were finishing up an unsuccessful sweep outside Panama. They was on horseback and was cold as Eskimos. They stopped at the gas station to see if Idiot Ed had any coffee going. Don’t know what they planned to do next ‘cause next never came. Sippin’ on hot coffee that was more engine oil than coffee beans, Idiot Ed started in telling them about Bad Bill, one of the McAlester State Penitentiary escapees. A local boy.

  Well, Harmon knew that. He’d been a rookie himself when Bad Bill had killed his Indian wife on a drunken Saturday night four years before. What he didn’t know and what Idiot Ed told him and Joe was that Bad Bill still had kin in the neighborhood. Paul Watts, a cousin, lived just south of town. Harmon didn’t know that.

  After getting directions, Harmon and Joe headed their horses out Paul Watts’s way. It was really dark now and it had started to sleet. They had to turn off the road onto a side one. It was a dirt road, full of water-filled ruts and the horses’ hoofs broke through ice with every step. They was almost up to the shack afore they saw it, a pale glow coming through the panes of the one window, and a sleepy smoke cur
ling out of a tin pipe on the roof.

  There didn’t look like no one was around, but Harmon had Joe hold the horses and he crept up to peek through the dirty window. What he saw inside caused him to sneak back to Joe and tell him to hightail it back to a phone. Idiot Ed didn’t have one, but Harmon thought there was one at the tavern. For him to call the Highway Patrol Headquarters and tell them they’d found the three escapees. He, Harmon, would wait there. Wait as long as he could.

  Which turned out to not be long.

  Just minutes after Joe rode away, there was a crack of a tree limb on the ground behind Harmon. He heard a curse and then a mutter, “Thought I heard something out here. Well, it’s the last time you’ll ever come visitin’ somebody uninvited, lawman.” It was Paul Watts and he shot at Harmon.

  And in the gathering darkness, his shot missed. Harmon’s didn’t.

  There was silence in the shack. The fire was put out and the glow from the window disappeared. Harmon could see the smoke from the stove pipe thinning and it soon blackened and faded into the night.

  Harmon yelled, “You’re under arrest. Come out one at a time with your hands up.” I know it sounds like a dime store novel, but what happened out there is where they get the stories for them novels.

  These were desperate men and they all three came pouring out of the shack, each firing some kind of gun. Easy targets Harmon said later, silhouetted as they were against the whitewashed shack. He wouldn’t have shot at them except they didn’t have the same worthy regard for him. With bullets and buckshot flying all around him, Harmon Adams took aim and killed them all. A bullet a man. Even the Indian.

  The sheriff and his men…I guess you call them a posse…hadn’t been far away. They had run into Joe half-way into Panama. When they had all headed toward Paul Watts’s place, they heard the shooting. They crept up to the clearing and started shining flashlights. Three men were slumped against the shack and Harmon Adams stood over them, his gun still smoking in the cold.