Sally smiles and nods. Then she continues past the blazing fire to place those papers on a shelf near the door. I hadn’t noticed it before. There are other papers there, some of them folded together like the letters I have seen at the missionary’s place. There’s also a book there. I can read its cover from where I sit. It is an English spelling book.

I’m confused. Why does my father have an English spelling book? It has always been said that Sequoyah cannot read English and he never speaks it. And why did Sally pretend she was going to throw my father’s papers into the fireplace? And why was his chuckle when she did that answered by her smile. Then I remember the story of what happened just before my father left for Arkansas. It is a story that people have begun whispering about since his return. I’ve heard bits and pieces of it here and there—at the store, at the Council House, or on the ball field—being told by people who’ve stopped talking as soon as they’ve noticed me listening and recognized me as the son of the man about whom they were gossiping.

Gradually, though, I’ve been able to put those whispered scraps of story together—the way my mother sews patches of cloth together to make a quilt. And the pattern they’ve made, the tale they’ve shaped, is a troubling one. Here is the blanket of story I pieced together.

Sequoyah had stopped working at his forge. He no longer even helped Sally with the crops or the livestock. He had built a little cabin in the woods and spent all of his time there making marks on paper. When he ran out of paper he would take chips of wood and make marks on them.

The way he was acting made Sally worried, but what people said worried her even more.

“Your husband,” a hunter who came to her cabin told her, “I think he is crazy. I found him sitting in the middle of the forest. He was playing with pieces of wood like a little child. He was talking to them. When I spoke to him, he did not reply. He did not even notice I was there.”

Many people said that he had lost his mind. Others wondered if he was engaging in witchcraft. Was he making evil spells to hurt people? The old penalty for being a witch was death. Some began to whisper that perhaps Sequoyah should be killed before he brought harm to others. That worried Sally Guess and those who cared about him.

My father’s best friend at the time was Turtle Fields.

“Sequoyah,” Turtle said. “People are worried about the strange way you are behaving. They say you are making a fool of yourself. You are going to lose your good name.”