Their marriage, my father’s first marriage, ended years ago.

I was young then, but I remember that day very well.

“I can no longer live with you. You need to go.” That is what she said to my father.

“Then I will leave,” he said.

Their voices were calm as they had that conversation. Neither one of them seemed angry. It was just a decision that my mother made, and my father agreed to it. My father gathered his things together and moved out of her house, his tools clinking together in a soft rhythm in his bag as he walked away.

Of course, I stayed with my mother. That is our Tsalagi way. She did not worry about my growing up without a father. My uncle Red Bird lived right next to us and among our people it is a boy’s uncle as much as his father who teaches him the things he needs to know. A Tsalagi boy always belongs to his mother’s clan, not his father’s. And my father had gone away before—for almost a year when he went to fight in the Red Stick War. He and the other Tsalagi soldiers won that war for the Americans and saved the life of General Andrew Jackson. It was when my father came back that my mother told him their marriage was over.

So his being away was nothing unusual to me. Back before he gave up liquor, when he was called “Drunken Sequoyah” by almost everyone, he had frequently gone off drinking with friends for days and days. So, even though I did miss hearing Sequoyah’s gentle voice telling stories when he was home and sober, my mother was certain that having my uncle Red Bird more than made up for my missing father.

I suppose she was right. While Red Bird was alive, I hardly ever thought of my father. That was especially easy over the last six years during which he was in Arkansas. Sequoyah was one of the party of Cherokee settlers who left Tennessee a few years after the Red Stick War. They wanted to make a new life far from the white men trying to drive them out of what was left of our homelands.

My father also had another reason for going west. It was to be in a place where he could work on his strange ideas without interference from suspicious neighbors. While Sequoyah had lived here during his last stay in Willstown—with the new wife he married after he and my mother parted—his strange behavior had resulted in his little work-cabin being burned.

But now, with Red Bird gone and my father back for some reason from the distant western lands, my thoughts seem to turn to him as regularly as the sun coming up in the east.

Since his return, my mother has not said anything bad about him. Whenever I have asked about him, her words have been careful.