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A sign at the gate of the Ceremonial Grounds says: VISITORS
WELCOME, NO DRINKING, NO ROWDINESS Alice and Cash have fallen quiet Several trucks are ahead of theate into a forest of small oaks They pass a dozen or more open shelters with cedar-shake roofs and cookstoves inside, where woathered in thick, busy clu boys hiding out in the woods, giving away their location
The dirt road ends at the edge of a clearing, and in its center Alice can see the round, raised altar ht feet across The fire is already burning there, glowing inside a teepee of stout logs At the edges of the fire a large log lies pointing in each of the four directions, giving it a serious, well-oriented look, like a compass Cash has warned Alice that this fire is special It’s as old as the Cherokee people; someone carries off the embers in a bucket at the end of each ceremony and keeps them alive until the next monthly dance Someone carried this fire over the Trail of Tears, he says, when they were driven out here fro of what thatti
The altar is surrounded by a ring of bare earth some twenty yards across, and at its periraceful and straight-trunked, their upper liather and settle on hewn log benches under the oaks, facing the fire Cash gets out a pair of folding chairs and they settle down in front of the radiator grill Alice can hear little overheated sighs and pops froled up there with the metal in an unlucky way
"You reckon that’s one of Boht by her place"
It was true Alice saw her standing in her yard, wearing a fedora with a giant white ostrich feather cascading backward into a curl behind her left shoulder It gave Bo look, like one of the threethe pressure on the propane tank Alice feels a little guilty about the bee stuck here writhing on the radiator "Sugar says Boma loves those bees," she says
"Oh, she does Bees are only going to stay living in your eaves if you have kind feelings toward the it out of its noisy misery
An old man ambles over to chat with Cash He has a wonderfully round face and like every other man here wears a straboy hat that has darkened and conformed itself to its master around the crown Cash introduces hi Alice to wonder whether this is a first or last name, or both The two men speak in Cherokee for a while
Alice is surprised that she can follow the general gist because of words like "Ace Hardware" and "distributor cap" that regularly spring up shiny and hard-edged froe soft un to arrive now in a serious way, parking their trucks in a ring facing the fire, re Alice of a crew of friendly horses all tied nose in She sneaks looks at the old wo-seated lawn chairs They all have on sprigged cotton dresses, dark stockings, dark shoes, and black or red sweaters
Their long white hair is pent up in the back with beaded clasps, and their arms are folded over their boso pants, or having short hair But that’s silly; no one has been anything but kind to her so far, or for that matter, looked at her twice
She listens in on the old women’s conversation and it’s the same over there, except that the hard, shiny words are
"per bands of teenagers irls in jeans and Keds, and long-haired boys in jeans and co, with black bandanas pushed high on their shiny foreheads and knotted in the back They hail each other through the woods in English, but when they address the older people, their greetings are Cherokee Even toddlers, when they run up to slap dark skirts with grubby hands, open their se little bitten-off Cherokee songs Alice is fascinated She thinks of the holy-roller churches in Mississippi, where people spoke in tongues, though of course in that case it was more or less every man for himself, whereas here they understand one another She had no idea there was so ht here under the red, white, and blue
The idea thrills her She has alished she had the nerve to travel to foreign lands Whenever she suggested this to Harland, he re at all you could see in person you could see better on TV, because they let the caht, but always felt misunderstood, even so