“I said no more about it that night. I just sat there in silence next to that fire and listened as the talk turned to other things. Agili and my other friends thought I had given up on my foolish idea.”

“This all happened many years ago. In the years that followed, many of our people did what my cousin Agili had done. They learned to read and write English.”

My father looks at me. “You have, but that was not the way I chose. It was hard, but I did not give up. There had to be some way to make marks that could be understood as easily as white men understand English writing. Perhaps I could even find a way to make marks that would be easier to understand than the English way of writing. But I did not yet know how to do it.”

CHAPTER 15

Going to War

My father has been silent for longer than usual. The look on his face has changed. It is as if a cloud has come across it. Then he lets out a long sigh.

“The Horseshoe,” he says.

I do not understand. I lean forward. “You want me to get a horseshoe.”

A brief smile moves across his lips. “No,” he says. “I have come to a trail that is hard for me to follow. It is hard to talk about. But you should know this darker path, a bloody path that led to war, because it is part of my story.”

“Uh-huh,” I say because now I understand. My father is speaking of Horseshoe Bend, that place along the Tallapoosa River where the Cherokees fought by the side of the Aniyonega in a great battle against other Indians during what was called the Red Stick War. I have often wanted to hear about that, but none of my elders who fought there ever wanted to talk about it.

My father pauses to tap out his pipe. He slips it into his pocket, his gaze and his memory reaching far away and looking back in time.

I bite my lip and wait for his words. And when they finally come they do so as slowly as the first drops of water released by a bank of snow touched at last by the sun.