ON THE HOTTEST DAY IN THE SUMMER, TWO Spuds showed up at the big house before daybreak. Eli had limped out to the back veranda before dawn and perched on his rocking chair, waiting for the rising sun to light the Bighorns. He heard the pinto coming and had to squint to see the horse cantering out of the lingering dark. The pinto was lathered some and Two Spuds was riding bareback, using a rope hackamore instead of a bridle. He wore a bear-claw necklace over his bare chest, buckskin leggings and moccasins and he made a fearsome sight—a man six foot four and well over two hundred pounds, his face pocked with smallpox scars like soft brown earth struck with hail, his hair greased in long braids which hung down over his chest. Two Spuds carried a gunnysack, within the sack an object about the size and shape of a human head, which put a different slant on things. He dismounted by kicking his right leg up and over the horse’s neck and landed on his toes, lithe as a cat. Even with a touch of dew still on the ground, little fantails of dust trailed his steps all the way up to the porch. The gunnysack dripped blood in the dust. He dropped the sack on the porch and squatted on his heels next to the rocking chair. Eli’s big dog Rufus stuck his nose in the sack and Eli had to pull him back, but Two Spuds said nothing. It was a trait that Eli valued. You had to appreciate a man who could come for a visit and stay two hours and leave without saying a word.

Eli knew better than to come right out and ask what was in the gunnysack. Two Spuds would state his business when he was good and ready. The Choctaw people had learned patience the hard way. They had been the first of the tribes forcibly uprooted and sent west along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, their reward for fighting with Andrew Jackson against the British in the War of 1812. Once in the White House, Jackson bundled the Choctaw off to the Territories along with the Cherokee and the Chickasaw, nor did the president folks called Old Hickory trouble himself if half of them died along the way. Two Spuds was born in 1900, nearly seventy years later, but the old ones still talked about the Trail of Tears.