House of Purple Cedar. Tim Tingle

tombstones, till he learned a life lesson he would never forget. One of the world’s ugliest sites is the close-up view of a skunk’s backside. With the tail raised.

      The skunk sprayed young Blue Ned with a cloud that could be seen––and smelled––from all the way inside the church. Blue Ned rolled on the ground, rubbing his eyes and crying. As the skunk disappeared into the woods, his brother George remarked, “Jesus just wants to be left alone, look like to me.”

      Reverend Willis simply prayed a closing prayer and waited by his wagon, his head bowed and clutching his Bible, while the Bobb brothers and Mrs. Willis handled the situation. Older brother Samuel, sitting on the front pew with his mother, never even turned his head to see what trouble his brothers were causing. He soon joined his father on the buckboard.

      We had been married for over forty years, Samuel Willis and I, and were visiting what was left of Skullyville one Sunday afternoon. He told me how later that evening, during one of his night walks, he found a rope and a burlap sack in the woods by the cemetery, the sort of sack one would use to tote a skunk. Someone, out of meanness, had planted that skunk to disrupt our Easter worship service. The memories came flooding back and we shook with laughter, a very hard thing to do, seeing how the woods had reclaimed our once fine community.

      “My daddy thought he would never get the congregation back. Every time he spoke the word Jesus…”

      “In that booming voice of his…”

      “I can hear him now…”

      “Wish we could…”

      “Someone would start coughing…”

      “To cover up their laughing.”

      “But he did it,” Samuel said. “Oh yeah. He did it. He brought us back. I don’t know who laughed that final laugh. I was too scared to turn around. I knew how mad he was getting, Sunday after Sunday. My father leaned over the pulpit and told us all, ‘Make your choice. Either get up and follow that Hell-bound skunk to the woods or let Jesus return to his church, but don’t be stinking up this temple with your laughter when his Holy name is spoken!’ Nobody laughed after that.”

      I thought Samuel was about to break out in tears when we came to the clearing where the church used to stand, where his daddy was buried, but he didn’t. Samuel just looked at the well-kept graves for the longest time.

      “I never thought they would burn the church,” he finally said.

      "At least the church was empty,” I replied. “The school was full of girls.”

      First and Final Days at New Hope Academy

      Rose • 1896

      Yes, I always feared death by ice. But fire was nothing to fear. You could control fire. The sun was fire. Summer was fire. Cooking, that was fire.

      Ice was different. It rode the air. It stung everything it touched. Ice killed the corn, stopped the rivers, killed weak animals. On walks in the woods you would find them frozen dead, their mouths open and crying for something to stop this burning ice.

      Roberta Jean and I were boarding at New Hope Academy for Girls that year, rooming with twenty other girls. The school was only a few miles from home, but we were young girls. I was eleven and Roberta Jean was twelve. We would just be better off staying at school during the week, our parents figured. We were home by supper every Friday and back to New Hope after church and Sunday dinner. While home we gathered whatever we needed for the next week at school—clothes, pencils, knitting thread and needles.

      A week before Christmas we moved back home for the holidays. Christmas Eve we all climbed on Amafo’s wagon and Daddy drove us to church. For three hours we sang Christmas songs in Choctaw to welcome the baby Jesus. “Away in a Manger” was always my favorite.

      Christmas morning Daddy appeared with a wreath he’d carved from cedar branches. “I saw Maggie selling them at the hardware store in Spiro,” he said, “but I made this one.”

      The wreath was decorated with red and green ribbons, and he proudly hung it on the wall. When we opened presents, Daddy untied the ribbons from the wreath.

      “Rose,” he said, “these ribbons are for you, to wear when you go back to school.”

      “Yakoke, Daddy,” I said and gave him a long, sweet hug.

      On the last day of December of 1896, the frost was sifting down, heavying the tree limbs with a silvery shine. We arrived back at school in the early afternoon. Tomorrow, New Year’s Day, was a grand day of celebration for everyone, girls and teachers too. The boys from Fort Coffee would wander over, those shy and mumbling boys who almost never spoke so you could hear them.

      We would share our first meal of the new year, 1897, with the boys. The cooks from New Hope would work all morning, according to Roberta Jean, “dashing and fussing and frying and stewing,” while we girls put finishing touches on gifts we had made for our friends. Our boy friends!

      I was new to the school and I shook all over with excitement. Since I did not have a special friend, Amafo helped me make a pair of stickball bats for some nice young man.

      “Some lucky young man’s gonna get ’em,” my Amafo said, whacking the sticks against each other. “These make good chant sticks come dancing time!”

      All the girls talked at the same time, showing everyone what they had made. Hoke, not everybody talked. I spotted Lillie, a shy little girl and tiny as a toddler. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, folding and unfolding a blue handkerchief she had made. She didn’t talk. She never talked, at least not so anybody could hear her.

      Lillie was deaf and talked with her hands. I didn’t know her kind of talk, but I was learning. I walked to her bedside and she looked up at me. I pointed to the handkerchief and then to Lillie.

      She nodded quick and a bright new smile crawled across her face. I reached out my palms and she handed it to me. I held it to my face and made a big but soundless word with my lips.

      “Achukma, good,” I said. Lillie nodded and her hands made a sign.

      “Thank you,” they said. I knew that word.

      Besides Roberta Jean, Lillie was my favorite friend at New Hope. She was like my little sister, my sweet and precious Choctaw sister.

      Dark came early that night.

      “Everybody to bed,” Miss Palmer shouted. “We have a long day tomorrow.” The frost snuck up on us that New Year’s Eve. We were caught without any warm blankets. All we had were the school blankets of thin green wool, worn almost threadbare by years of use.

      I don’t know how long I had been asleep when Roberta Jean woke me up crawling under the covers.

      “Too cold to sleep alone,” she said, and her breath floated in the air.

      She brought her blanket with her and snuggled up close, but she was freezing cold from being out of bed for just a minute. She rolled over, facing away from me. The soles of her feet touched my calves. They were so cold I shivered, but I kept my mouth shut and rode out this little sliver of cold, knowing that in a few minutes her body warmth would feel good and we could sleep like the Choctaw sisters we were.

      I soon drifted off to dreaming, dreaming about the most beautiful Sunday of my life. I was maybe five years old. The snow fell overnight in fat, light flakes, twisting and dancing outside my window when the moon peeped through. I pulled up the quilts, propped myself up and watched for hours, moving my palms in a snowfall hand-dance, all to the rhythm of the snow.

      I heard my grandfather creak down the stairs to light the fire. I leapt out of bed, wrapped the lightest quilt around me, and went to visit with him, just me and him. We could have a good talk.

      “Rose, baby. What you doing up so early?”

      “Just come to see you, Amafo.”

      “Well, ain’t that nice. You come set your blanket on the floor here by the stove.” Amafo was stoking