Artifacts by Mary Anna Evans Page A

first bow. He’s the one what taught me to shoot.”
    Faye wished she could call up Sheriff McKenzie and announce that Joe was not secretive. He just didn’t answer questions people hadn’t asked. Sheriff McKenzie wasn’t around, so she asked another one.
    “It must have been hard to leave your mama. What brought you here?”
    “She died a few years ago, when I was eighteen, and there just wasn’t much in Oklahoma for me, no more. Daddy wasn’t hardly ever home. So I told him I’d heard about somebody in Georgia who could teach me to knap flint the old way. He thought it was a good idea, so I left home.”
    A map of the United States flashed quickly in Faye’s mind’s eye. Try as she might, she couldn’t make Oklahoma be any closer to Georgia than it was. “Joe. You don’t drive. How’d you get to Georgia?”
    “I’d walk a ways, then I’d find somebody who needed some work done. I’m not smart, but I’m strong.”
    “And you got here—”
    “Same way.”
    Oklahoma to Georgia. Joe had walked the Trail of Tears. Backward. Each footfall echoed the mass removal of southeastern Native Americans to the Indian Territory in Oklahoma.
    The forced exodus of the Cherokees known as the Trail of Tears—more literally translated as “The Trail Where They Cried”—had come to symbolize the experience of all Native Americans who were cast out of their southeastern homelands a half-century before the western cowboys-and-Indians conflicts immortalized by Hollywood. Lust for the gold under Cherokee lands prompted the 1838 removal of an estimated seventeen thousand people. They were herded, mostly on foot, more than a thousand miles. Nearly one in four fell victim to brutal winter weather, starvation, or the cruelty of the troops “escorting” them.
    On his trek to Georgia, Joe had walked past four thousand graves.
    Faye wondered if he had any idea of the significance of what he’d done. She suspected he might. No Native American grew up in Oklahoma without knowing about the Trail of Tears.
    Faye was done with questions for the evening. She hoped the sheriff would give up and leave Joe Wolf alone. The idea of asking him outright, “Did you commit two murders day before yesterday?” made something inside her shrivel.
    “I went this morning and consecrated the grave we found the other day,” Joe said, picking up his last fish fillet and eating it with his hands. “It felt good to help the girl rest.”
    Faye didn’t know where Joe learned the burial ritual he used. She’d never had the impression that his parents had brought him up in the Creek religion, or in any religion at all. It seemed to her that he’d asked a lot of people a lot of questions, then cobbled the answers together into a spirituality that was natural for him.
    Consecrating a burial Joe’s way required a pure body, a pure mind, and a substantial time investment. That morning, as she was just beginning her day of struggle—with the government, with the past, and with her conscience—Joe had drained a cup of ceremonial Black Drink.
    Black Drink as Joe prepared it was no different than the Black Drink brewed by southeastern Indians hundreds of years ago. It was a noxious decoction that purified its drinker in several unpleasant ways. There was an excellent reason why the holly tree that lent its leaves to warriors needing purification was known to botanists as Ilex vomitoria .
    After recovering from the Black Drink, Joe had returned to Abby’s islet, bringing carefully wrapped coals from his own fire. After building a fire at the head of her grave and placing clay pots of food and tobacco beside it, he had sat with Abby. Just sat and kept her company for a while. Then he had rinsed his face and hands with water that had steeped all night in sacred herbs. Once clean, he had come home.
    Faye studied Joe. He looked like a man who had purified himself, then done an act of kindness for someone who could never return it—someone who would never