Pigs in Heaven

He feels sure he’s never seen the plants before this moment, although he could have been hanging his hat and coat on the rubber tree for months, for all he knows. As usual, the place is being taken over benignly by women, without his notice.

The front door jingles and Pollie Turnbo brushes past the violets. She comes into her husband’s office cubicle and sets a basket on his desk. “I made bean bread, it’s still warm,”she says, breathless as if she herself were fresh from the oven.

Franklin never makes it home for dinner on Monday nights, though their ritual is that he pretends he’ll try, and she pretends she just happened to be passing by his office with food in hand. He stands up to kiss Pollie. Her hair is coming loose at the back of her neck and her eyes are bright, in a hurry. She looks like the African violets. Franklin wishes Pollie would stay and talk, but she won’t.

“I have to get out there and keep the boys from running under cars,” she says, as if the boys had a plan to do that.

He looks into the basket after she’s gone. Bean bread, pork chops, much more than he can eat. Pollie misses him these days; he is working too much, and it’s her way to try to make up for every loss with food. She still cooks all the old-fashioned things that take more time than most women have had for decades. She learned from her mother, a full-blooded Cherokee, who grew up around Kenwood and never learned English. Franklin’s mother is full-blood too, but his father is white, and Franklin grew up in Muskogee. His mother served time in the kitchen only at Christmas and when it was her turn for the PTA bake sales. Franklin never gave two thoughts to being Cherokee until he began to study Native American Law—like many his age, he’s a born-again Indian. He laughs at this. Annawake would like him better if he had that title on a little plaque on his desk.

Thinking of Annawake brings the return of his dread. He leans out his door and asks her to come into his office.

Franklin already knows what she is going to do, but has to make the show of talking her out of it.

“Would you like something to eat? Pollie makes this bread.”

Annawake shakes her head. “Thanks, Jinny just brought me a Big Mac, and like a fool I ate it. I should have waited.”

“No baby at your house yet?”

Annawake smiles and shakes her head. “We think it’s waiting for a new administration.”

She breaks off a slice of bean bread anyway, and Franklin uses the silence to wrestle his doubts. The AILTP is paying her to work in his office and learn from him, but he feels like an ungenuine article—a new car put together from the parts of a lot of old ones and given a fresh coat of paint. A born-again Indian lawyer. Annawake learned about truth from her old uncle, who, Franklin has heard, comes from a medicine family and lives on a houseboat on Tenkiller and shoots squirrel with a blowgun.

Franklin opens his mouth for a long time before talking, and then starts slowly, the way he would get into ice water if he had to.

“This case you’ve opened. You have to have something on a birth parent,” he tells her.

Annawake slaps crumbs off her hands and leans forward, her eyes alive. “Okay, but look. In the case of Mississippi Band of Choctaw versus Holyfield, the mother voluntarily gave her children to the white couple. The children had never even lived on the reservation. And the Supreme Court still voided that adoption.” Annawake apparently has learned enough white-lawyer ways to leap into ice water without flinching.

“And how does that apply here? In that case, both birth parents were known and involved.”

She lifts her chin a little. Annawake always enunciates her words as if she can taste each one and there is nothing else left to eat. “The birth mother gave the children up, but her choice was overruled.”

“Meaning?”

“It shows the spirit of the law. The Indian Child Welfare Act is supposed to protect the interests of the Indian community in keeping its children. It’s not supposed to be defeat-able by the actions of individual tribe members.”

Franklin waits until there is a question, and Annawake finds it. “So why do we need a birth parent?”

“The Supreme Court recognized that the tribal court had exclusive jurisdiction over that adoption, you’re right,” he says, correcting her as tactfully as a knife touching up a pencil point. The Holyfield decision was handed down just weeks ago, and Annawake appears to have memorized it.

“But if I’m remembering it right, that birth mother was domiciled on the Choctaw reservation, making the child a tribe member. In this case, we have no idea whether this child falls under our jurisdiction. You don’t have a domiciled parent or an enrolled parent because you don’t have a parent.”