Even As We Breathe. Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

that monkeys have a strong sense of smell. I’m pretty certain Edgar was quiet because Edgar had to be quiet. To survive. I know a little something about that.

      Often, standing on the porch, even though I could not see his tiny black, brown, and white body, I could see his path zigzagging back to Tsa Tsi’s place over the hill. Pines bending. Oak leaves dancing. Maples swaying as if a strong gust of wind had managed to coil its way within the confines of the forest. His movement was in such congruence with the treetops I couldn’t help but feel he was naturally meant to be there.

      I guess it’s safe to say that the old man was the only one around who kept a monkey as a pet and the only monkey owner in the whole wide world who thought it perfectly natural to let said pet roam at will. Edgar caused more than one hunter to go into near cardiac arrest a time or two. But more folks in the area by then knew to be on the watch for him and would relay sightings to Tsa Tsi so he wouldn’t worry. Not that he was prone to worrying.

      A few years back, while I was up at his place helping to split wood, the old man, sitting on a stump rolling cigarette after cigarette, told me how he came to acquire Edgar. It seems that the carnival was making its way through Cherokee one summer. Early ’30s, late ’20s … something like that. The carnival wasn’t stopping here for a show because no one in Cherokee had any money anyway, but sometimes it would set up camp for performers to rest before moving on to another town for a week of shows. Edgar was a trained tightrope walker, wore a top hat and tiny red vest. Unfortunately, he also had a problematic tendency to lift ladies’ skirts and nip at children who tried to pet him. The carnival manager kept him in a minuscule metal cage for those reasons. “Weren’t fit for a possum.” Tsa Tsi shook his head, thinking back.

      Tsa Tsi told me that one day while the carnies were in camp, he went down to see if they might be interested in buying some wild greens or deer jerky. “They paid a fair price for fresh goods.” He told me that the place looked pretty deserted, so he eased his way into one of the larger circus-style tents for a look-see. When he saw Edgar the first time, the monkey was clenching the bars of his cage and shaking the entire structure so hard that the bottom kept lifting from the ground. As Edgar saw Tsa Tsi enter the tent and approach his cage, Edgar just stopped, and as Tsa Tsi says (though who’s to know what’s really true), “he began to grin like a fool” at Tsa Tsi and calmed right down.

      It all seems like a crazy story to me (and probably you) now, but the old man did tell me something that I took to heart. We were sitting outside the trading post on a split-log bench. I sipped an RC Cola, desperate to cool off from the walk down the mountain and he, as he always did, seemed to have been sitting there his whole life. I took a long drink as Tsa Tsi picked up the story at its midpoint.

      “And right then I knew what I had to do. See, Pap used to tell me about sneaking down to the stockade and taking food to his older brother and his family right before they moved ’em west during the Removal. He used to tell me that the government had made an animal of his brother and that he knew he could never get caught or he’d become one too. So he hid out in the mountains and later stayed with a family who’d been traded a small piece of land ’cause freedom was worth more than life.”

      And that’s why old man Tsa Tsi never left the Qualla Boundary either and how he came to end up with a capuchin monkey named Edgar, who I’m guessing he just up and stole—because Tsa Tsi wasn’t much for negotiations with white folk.

      I asked him once why he’d named him Edgar. He told me that he’d named him after Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t know what I think about that. Wouldn’t have suspected Tsa Tsi to have even read Poe; but then again, Tsa Tsi didn’t seem to fit into molds so easily.

      Now, as for Edgar, he was even more adventurous than Tsa Tsi and loved to explore and that’s why he nearly sent quite a few people to an early grave. Edgar had been seen as far away as Tennessee and Georgia. He always made his way back to Tsa Tsi, though. He might be gone a whole month, but he’d come ambling into Tsa Tsi’s cabin, hungry as hell, no worse for the wear. So I think Tsa Tsi saw no point in keeping him tied or locked up, and the rest of us got to enjoy having our very own capuchin monkey hanging out in our woods. We didn’t even have to go to a zoo for a taste of the exotic.

      Ever since I could remember, I wanted to escape Cherokee, and that feeling of suffocation just kept growing with my body. But just as I was about to finally get out, at least for a summer, I felt as if I was rushing carelessly out of the woods, saw briars pricking my bare forearms and legs, leaving trickles of blood to mix with the sweat of haste. I started thinking of all the things I would miss, like ripe berries left on the bush. Lishie’s hand over her mouth when she got tickled. The way a cool mist rises from the Oconaluftee as if sighing at the rising sun. The chattering of the indigo buntings. And a place where a monkey could scamper across oak and maple limbs like a tightrope performer. If I thought too much about the sweetness of my place in the world, I might never be able to leave it.

      Chapter Two

      Bud had one more job to scrounge up before I left for the summer to work at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, and though he would never admit it, he needed me. Bud and a few of his cronies had managed to covertly fell several trees following a major storm but were unable to convince the remaining railroad bosses to haul the load to the lumberyard. The river, with its infinite ability to expand and contract due to cloudbursts or man’s manipulation, offered the only solution. They would burden the beasts that had been retired to farming life and drag the load to the Tuckasegee River. They’d dam it, anticipating the expected summer rains, and wait for the push.

      The Smokies had long been a logging economy, ending only with the inception of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I had mixed feelings on such and probably harbor more distaste for the industry in my later days; but back then, logging was just another way to survive. Bud made what semblance of a living he could out of those woods.

      As the logging companies dried up, he siphoned every last opportunity they leaked on their way out of town, as if it were maple sap. The timber companies used to build great splash dams to push their haul down the rivers into the timber yards. Railroads couldn’t do all the work. The rivers and animals, as they always have, bore the burden of man’s desire to do things faster and cheaper.

      I was seated on a stump at the lumberyard removing my shoes at the edge of an ever-rising pool, watching the rounded, slick logs race down the river toward me. Waiting. My job was to be a river hog. “Gas money,” Bud reminded me. “ ’Bout time you can get off the teat.”

      “Yeah, just try and relax.” Thomas, a man I barely knew, nudged me. “Ain’t no big deal.”

      Little did I know I’d hear those words again in only a matter of weeks. Just try and relax. It took me a while to understand why suspicion would feel so much like drowning. I know now it was those words that connected the sensations for me. It was those words that would outlast the men who spoke them. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

      The log runners (those skilled, balanced men who spun endlessly on the glassy logs, prodding them into alignment) had left with the last whistle. I knew with my foot useless as it was, and well, to be honest, my body useless as a whole, I could never maneuver the way they had. I could swim, though. I could swim for hours. Surely I could push the few dozen poles into their stalls from the pool’s rim and, if need be, wade among them. I needed the money. Not just to put away, but to make sure I had the necessities when I got to Asheville. Places like that’ll make you pay for your uniform before you even clock in. That’s how you became more of an indentured servant than free-will staff, and I couldn’t let that happen.

      Bud gave no direction on how to accomplish the objective. He told me where to wait, where the logs should rest, and to keep my mouth shut about the splash pool to anyone else.

      The logs rushed down the river in a collective heap, fast and bulging from the waters like dark storm clouds mounting. I immediately felt my pulse quicken, and I turned, momentarily considering leaving this impending mess to Bud alone. How could I corral such a force of nature? It was obvious I would never be able to swim between the poles as I had imagined. I would need to, at the very least, mount them on