Chapter 6

Olive Augusta Peele, 1909

The "little people" make their homes in the trees of the woods and those homes can be distinguished by extra thick growth and small twigs of branches in the trees, but the homes cannot be found in every tree. If no trouble is given to the little people, they do not harm one.

—Mose Lasley, 1937. Indian-Pioneer Papers Collection interview by Billy Byrd, field worker.

They look like small, skinny children, squatted outside our sleeping place, except that ain't what they are. Can't be. Not way out here in the woods, prowling before first light comes into the trees. Hoods hang over their heads to hide their all-black shiny eyeballs.

Come in with the fog, ridin' on it, them elves do. Reach out a bony hand and gitcha! Eat your juicy little livers and your soft little hearts, drink your blood and boil the eyeballs.They love eyeballs 'cause they ain't got any, Tesco says in my head.

Skinny fingers stretch toward us, and of a sudden I know Nessa's already awake. She's reached behind and grabbed my dress to rouseme.

Cut off the hand of the thing,Tesco whispers, send it howlin' back into the fog. I feel for Daddy's knife, sift through the pine straw. It's not there.

That hand almost has Nessa. Her breath comes fast, and she trembles against my stomach.

The fingertips touch her. It'll get her heart unless I do something.

I push hard into the straw again, find the knife scabbard. My palm settles over the deer antler handle.

Nessa whimpers.

Cut off the hand!Tesco says. Do it. Now!

In the turning of a minute, I'm up over Nessa, squashing her into the ground. My head knocks the dead log that's our ceiling. Light sparks around my eyes as I bring down the knife. It cuts through something, slices all the way to the dirt.

"Get-way!" The scream comes rough and low, like an animal's growl, and then I know it's me yelling. "Get away! Git! I got a knife! I got a knife!"

The sound dies in the fog.

Wings fan the air just above our shelter. Something takes flight. Something big.

They fly,just like Tesco said. They fly on the mist. But I cut one. I got its hand.

I don't want to look, to find out if they bleed, but I raise up and try to see into the dim. No blood. No cut-off hand.

No sign of the elf children.

A downed branch. That's all it was. Sliced clean in two by Daddy's knife.

It smells of pine sap bleeding out. A good smell. A safe smell, like the Christmas tree Daddy and me cut in the Winding Stair, and Mama decorated with paper snowflakes and homemade angels with hickory nuts for heads. I want to close my eyes and let the smell take me back there, but I can't. All I can do is huddle with Nessa against the dirt wall of our hiding spot, and hold tight, and wait on morning to come.

When I can see around us, I whisper to her, "Stay put." Then I crawl out with the knife, stand stiff and shivering in the morning cool. Down the slope twenty foot or so, the fog lies thick as buttermilk in a bowl, but around us it's clear enough to see that nothing's near except one big ol' crow resting on a branch. He wouldn't be there if danger was around.

Maybe I dreamed it all.

"Nessa, did you see them? Them things that wakened us?"

She answers yes in Choctaw, which'd get her a swat on the hand from Teacher, or a whipping if Tesco heard it. Choctaw talk ain't allowed, but I never told on her and Hazel for doing it. Sometimes I listened to see how many words I could make out when Hazel whispered stories to Nessa in bed.

"They're scared of my daddy's knife, at least. This knife's got magic in it. Big magic." I say it loud enough that if those elves are someplace in the fog, they'll hear.

When I look down, tracks are all over the ground. Little barefoot prints, smaller than Nessa's, just like a person would make. Three trails go through the silvery dew on last year's dead leaves. The elves didn't turn to fog and fly away from here after all. They ran, one right after the other. I can see their path cross the hillside, and go down.

"We best get our necessary done, then move on," I tell Nessa. "It's all right now. Elves can't come out in the sun." Tesco told us that once when he'd got us too scared to walk from the house to the barn.

"Okay, Ollie." Nessa's tummy growls as she teeters on her feet. "We ain't seen no berries in a while, huh?"

"Yeah, I know." I'm so hungry my head feels like it's floating off my body, but I can still feel the hurt all over from the logs in the river. "We'll find some soon, I bet."

Looking at the footprints in the morning dew, I wonder where they lead.

Take the game trails down the hills into the hollers,Daddy used to tell me when we'd camp out in the woods, hunting turkey or squirrels or rabbits while we looked for treasure caves. Wild things know where the water runs and where the forage is.

Is an elf a wild thing same as a bird or a bobcat? Or is it a spirit, a whiff of smoke?

It makes tracks the way wild things do. Anything that makes tracks has to eat. Daddy taught me that, too.

Nessa and me get ourselves ready, cold and sore, then start across the hill, and down till finally the mist swallows us up. My heart beats fast as the ground turns slippery and wet, and I have to put the knife in its scabbard, so I won't cut myself if I fall.

Anything could be hiding in the fog.

The dew trail turns sideways again, goes along the slope to where the elves stopped at a clear-water spring dripping from the rocks. Nessa and me drink and drink, then fill the canteen and move on, because the dew's melting fast and so's the trail. It takes us down the slope and into a valley, where the last of the fog meets the morning sun. The elf tracks turn through a meadow grown over with cedars, green briar vines, and blackberry bushes budding with spring leaves.

I figure out where the trail's going before we can even see it. Off in the distance comes a low, steady rumble. We're headed toward the Frisco train tracks.

What would elves want with a train?

But their trail sign takes us right to a tall, round water tower marked SLSF for the St. Louis–San Francisco Railroad. Beside it stands a little section-workers' tool shed. A scruffy black cat waits on the doorstop like it's a passenger with a ticket.

Looking up at that tower makes me think of Daddy taking Mama and me on the train when he brought us the final leg from Fort Smith to settle in the Winding Stairs. Mama smiled so big while he told us about our new place in the high-meadow valley and how we wouldn't be able to breathe when we saw it, because it was just that pretty. Spreading oaks as old as the hills, and cliffs with moss and maidenhair ferns and wild violets growing from their rocky faces, and a stream where you could catch all the fish you wanted, or dip your feet in the dead of summer and feel the cold springs from deep underground. I remember Mama's laugh, and our basket of cheese, and salt meat, and bread, and apple butter, and pecans Daddy had shelled for the trip. And I remember how happy we were.

The Frisco train gets closer and the memory further off. The slow chinka-chunk-chink-ssshhh says the engine is bound for a water stop at the tower.

"Get down in the brush, and don't move unless I say," I whisper, and Nessa and me take cover. "Best that nobody sees us." Tesco could be on that train, or Sheriff Gowdy, or any of Mr. Lockridge's men. But a plan's starting in my mind. If I can figure out how the Frisco comes and goes, maybe when one passes through headed the other direction, we could sneak onto it and be miles from here in no time, even all the way to Talihina.

Across the track, the brush rustles, and two more cats come out, a brindle and an orange tabby. The tabby's got kittens. They sit down at the edge of the gravel and wait.

The bushes move some more, and I think, How many cats are in there? Then for just a second, I see a face. A person face. A small one.

I think it sees me, too.

Soon as it's there, it's gone, but I keep watching for it till the Frisco rolls to a stop betwixt us. The train's a short one with only freight, timber, and tanker cars. No passenger coaches. That means Tesco can't be riding it. If we sneak on a train, we need one like this, with not many eyeballs aboard, but ours has to be going north.

The fireman hurries to the tender car. Quick as a sneeze through a screen door, he pulls the tower's waterspout down to the hatch, then yanks the chain and here comes the water. While the tender fills, the engineer climbs out on the steps. The cats trot up, and he makes some fun out of throwing bits of food to them from a square tin plate. A handful of crows fly in, and the fireman pulls a poke sack from his pocket, then tosses scraps for the crows to catch in the air. The cats jump up, trying to grab it first, and fight the crows. Train men laugh and point, yelling over the noise of the engine and the water, making bets on who'll get the food, till finally the fireman shuts the tower valve and sings out, "She's a' fu-u-ull up!"

The waterspout is just raising toward the tower when I hear him holler, "Har! Har! Git away from that, ya sorry devils. Git!" Right quick, he runs to the fuel bin and starts pitching chunks of coal at something, but I can't see what it is he's after. Laying my head on the ground, I look under the train, and there're three little kids with matted black hair, scampering around, fighting crows and cats for the scraps. They're barefoot, and one's more naked than dressed.

"Har! Har!" the fireman calls again. "That ain't fer you! Git, ya useless mud larks!"

Coal flies everywhere. Crows scatter, and cats hiss and yowl. The kids duck and dodge and keep grabbing food, till finally a coal rock hits the smallest kid on the head, and it yelps and topples over.

"I got me one!" the fireman cheers, starting down the ladder. "I'll teach you to dally round railroad property!"

The two bigger kids try to get the little one away, but they're not fast enough, and the fireman is almost on them.

Next thing I know, I'm up out of my hiding place, running at the engine and hollering, "Hey! Hey, you there!"

All the commotion stops, and the fireman and the engineer look at me, standing in the middle of the tracks waving my arms.

Their jaws hang open like they just laid eyes on a ghost.