The Bean Trees

"I had no idea," I said. I bought the postcards. I would send one to Mama, although she was married now of course and didn't have any use for our old ace in the hole, the head rights. But even so I owed an apology to great grandpa, dead though he was.

As we were leaving I asked her about the TV. "That's the one thing that's still the same. What's with it anyway? Doesn't anybody ever turn the sound up?"

"The stupid thing is broke. You get the sound on one station and the picture on the other. See?" She flipped to the next channel, which showed blue static but played the sound perfectly. It was a commercial for diet Coke. "My gramma likes to leave it on 9, she's just about blind anyway, but the rest of us like it on 8."

"Do you ever get the Oral Roberts shows?"

She shrugged. "I guess. I like Magnum P.I."

Somehow I had been thinking that once we got back in the car and on the road again, everything would make sense and I would know what to do. I didn't. This time I didn't even know which way to head the car. If only Lou Ann were here, I thought. Lou Ann with her passion for playing Mrs. Neighborhood Detective. I knew she would say I was giving up too easily. But what was I supposed to do? Stake out the bar for a week or two and see if the woman ever showed up again? Would I recognize her if she did? Would she be willing to go to Oklahoma City with me to sign papers?

There had never been the remotest possibility of finding any relative of Turtle's. I had driven across the country on a snipe hunt. A snipe hunt is a joke on somebody, most likely some city cousin. You send him out in the woods with a paper bag and see how long it takes for him to figure out what a fool he is.

But it also occurred to me to wonder why I had come this far. Generally speaking, I am not a fool. I must have wanted something, and wanted it badly, to believe that hard in snipes.

"I can't give up," I said as I turned the car around. I smacked my palms on the steering wheel again and again. "I just can't. I want to go to Lake o' the Cherokees. Don't even ask me why."

They didn't ask.

"So do you want to come with me, or should we take you to your church now? Really, I can go either way."

They wanted to come with me. I can see, looking back on it, that we were getting attached.

"We'll have a picnic by the lake, and stay in a cabin, and maybe find a boat somewhere and go out on the water. We'll have a vacation," I told them. "When's the last time you two had a vacation?"

Estevan thought for a while. "Never."

"Me too," I said.

Chapter 15 Lake o' the Cherokees

Esperanza and Estevan were transformed in an unexplainable way over the next two hours. They showed a new side, like the Holy Cards we used to win for attendance in summer Bible school: mainly there was a picture of Jesus on the cross, a blurred, shimmering picture with flecks of pink and blue scattered through it, but tip it just so and you could see a dove flying up out of His chest. That was the Holy Ghost.

We must have been getting closer to the heart of the Cherokee Nation, whatever or wherever it was, because as we drove east we saw fewer and fewer white people. Everybody and his mother-in-law was an Indian. All the children were Indian children, and the dogs looked like Indian dogs. At one point a police car came up behind us and we all got quiet and kept an eye out, as we had grown accustomed to doing, but when he passed us we just had to laugh. The cop was an Indian.

It must have been a very long time since Esperanza and Estevan had been in a place where they looked just like everybody else, including cops. The relief showed in their bodies. I believe they actually grew taller. And Turtle fit right in too; this was her original home. I was the odd woman out.

Although, of course, I supposedly had enough Cherokee in me that it counted. I knew I would never really claim my head rights, and probably couldn't even if I wanted to-they surely had a statute of limitations or some such thing. But it was a relief to know the Cherokee Nation wasn't a complete bust. I read a story once, I might have this confused but I think the way it went was that this lady had a diamond necklace put away in a safe-deposit box all her life, thinking that if she ever got desperate she could sell it, only to find out on her deathbed that it was rhinestones. That was more or less the way I felt on that first terrible trip through Oklahoma.

It was nice to find out, after all, that Mama's and my ace in the hole for all those years really did have a few diamonds in it: Lake Oologah, Lake o' the Cherokees.

"The Cherokee Nation has its own Congress and its own President," I reported to Esperanza and Estevan. "Did you know that?" I wasn't sure if I actually knew this or was just elaborating on what the girl in the restaurant had told me.