Whoever Arrives First

The car had been at the mailbox since before six.

Castellanos told him so at half past eight, at the screen door, without opening it, in the voice he used for things that were not yet anything. It was a white car, he said, old, a saloon, with a Muskogee dealer’s plate holder round the number, parked on the verge of the gravel road at the bottom of the drive with its nose to the mailbox and its engine off and its windows down, and there were two people in it, an elderly man and an elderly woman, and they were asleep.

“Asleep?”

“Yes, sir. Both of them. Since six.” Castellanos looked through the mesh at the four of them round the kitchen table, at the toast, which Felix had not burned, for once. “Sergeant Kimura has been down to look. They are breathing. They are very old. There’s a cool box on the back seat and a thing wrapped in a sheet.”

“What kind of thing?”

“A flat thing, sir. Folded. About so.” Castellanos’s hands, at the mesh, made a shape the size of a pillow.

Frederick looked at him.

“Can’t you just go and ask them?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m federal,” said Castellanos, “and this is a Nation road in Craig County in the State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah, and they haven’t done anything.” He paused. “Yet. If they do something federal, I can deal with it. If they do something to you, I can deal with it, and I will, and nobody will argue. Sleeping in a car at a mailbox is not federal, sir. It isn’t anything. It’s just old people.”

“Then what happens?”

“I’ve rung it in,” said Castellanos. “Whoever arrives first deals with it.”

---

They arrived at nine o’clock, and they arrived first, both of them.

Frederick saw it from the porch, where they had gone to watch, all four of them in a row on the top step with their toast; and he did not believe it while it was happening. A car came along the gravel road from the left, from the direction of the town, white and green, with a light bar on its roof and lettering down its side that he could not read at that distance but could see was in two scripts, one above the other. And a car came along the gravel road from the right, from the direction of the highway, white and brown, with a light bar on its roof and a star on its door. And they came at exactly the same speed, from exactly the same distance, in two clouds of pale dust, towards the mailbox and the white saloon from Muskogee with the two old people asleep in it, and they slowed at exactly the same moment, and stopped, at exactly the same moment, nose to nose, with a yard between their bumpers and the white saloon beside them, and their dust rolled on over them both and met in the middle and went up together into the still air in one cloud.

The doors opened, both at once.

Out of the white and green car got a woman of about forty-five, broad and solid, in a tan uniform shirt with a patch on the shoulder and a dark ponytail through the back of her cap, who put the cap straight. Out of the white and brown car got a young man of about twenty-five, very tall and very pink, in a brown uniform shirt with a star on the pocket and a wide-brimmed hat, who put the hat straight.

They looked at each other across the yard of gravel between their bumpers.

“Della,” said the young man.

“Lonnie,” said the woman.

“I was first.”

“You were not first.”

“I was first, Della, I came round the bend at…”

“I came round the other bend at the same time, Lonnie, I saw you, you saw me, we both saw each other, and you put your foot down.”

“I did not put my…”

“You put your foot down,” said the woman, “in a county car, on a Nation road, past a school bus stop, and I saw you do it, and if you want to argue about who was first I will have to start by writing that down.”

On the top step of the porch, Theo put his toast very slowly down on his knee.

“Oh my God,” he said, softly, with reverence. “It’s the compact.”

---

Castellanos went down the drive.

He went slowly, the way he did everything, in his sports jacket, and stopped at the bottom of it, a little way from the two police cars and the white saloon, and stood, with his hands folded in front of him, and waited; and the woman in the tan shirt and the young man in the brown one, who had been about to go on arguing, both turned and looked at him, and then up the drive, past him, at the porch, and the four boys on the top step of it with their toast.

Their faces changed.

Frederick watched it happen on both faces at once, at fifty yards, quite clearly, in the morning sun: see him, and know him, and be surprised; and then, with the young man, a sort of collapse, the whole tall pink length of him going stiff and then soft, as if somebody had pulled a string out of the top of his head; and with the woman, nothing at all. Nothing. Her face did the first three things and then simply stopped, and stayed stopped, like a door that has been shut.

She said something to Castellanos. Castellanos said something back. The young man said something to both of them, very fast, waving his hat. The woman said one word to him without looking at him and he stopped.

Then all three of them looked up at the porch.

Castellanos came back up the drive. He came up it more slowly than he had gone down it, if that was possible, and stopped at the bottom of the porch steps, and looked up at Frederick with an expression on his face that Frederick had never seen on it before, and could not read at all, until he understood that it was the expression of a man trying very hard not to have an expression.

“Sir,” said Castellanos. “Officer Hummingbird of the Cherokee Nation police, and Deputy Tidwell of the Craig County sheriff’s office, present their compliments.” He paused. “They would like to know, sir, if you saw who arrived first.”

---

There was a silence on the porch.

“Me?” said Frederick.

“You were the only witness, sir. Apart from Sergeant Kimura, who was looking at a bird.” Castellanos’s face did not move. “Under the compact, sir, whoever arrives first deals with it. If they arrived together, they deal with it together. But one of them says she was first, and one of them says he was first, and the paperwork has to say one or the other, or both, and the paperwork is sorted out afterwards, but somebody has to say what happened before it can be.” He paused again. “They would accept your account, sir. They were both very clear about that. The deputy said so twice.”

Frederick looked down the drive at the two police cars nose to nose and the two officers standing beside them in the sun, looking up at him; and at the white saloon from Muskogee beside them, in which, astonishingly, the two old people had not woken up.

“Is this an engagement?” he said.

“Sir?”

“Ms Fenner would say it’s an engagement. The King adjudicates a jurisdictional question under the cross-deputation compact. She’d put it in the Programme.”

Castellanos looked at him.

“Sir,” he said, “with respect, Ms Fenner is in New Westminster, and those two have been at school together, and they’ve been arguing about who was first since the fourth grade, Officer Hummingbird says, and it’s ninety-four degrees.” Another pause. “And the old people are waking up.”

Frederick looked. In the white saloon, the old woman in the passenger seat had sat up, and was looking round her, at the police car on one side, and the other police car on the other, and at the mailbox in front of her, with the bewildered dignity of somebody who has woken up in a place she did not go to sleep in.

He put his toast down on the step and stood up.

“At the same time,” he said, loudly enough to carry down the drive. “Exactly. I saw both of you. Neither of you was first.”

At the bottom of the drive the young man in the brown shirt took his hat off and put it on again. The woman in the tan shirt did not move at all.

Then she nodded, once, up the drive, at the porch, as if a referee had given a decision she had expected and did not like and would abide by.

“Then we both deal with it,” she said, to the deputy, perfectly audibly, at fifty yards. “Put your hat on straight, Lonnie. And don’t talk.”

---

They walked to the white saloon together.

Frederick watched them from the porch. He did not mean to go down. He had decided he would not; that this was not his, that it was the compact’s, and the Nation’s, and the county’s, and Castellanos’s, and that the whole point of an ordinary summer was that when a car parked at your mailbox, other people dealt with it. But Officer Hummingbird bent down at the open window of the white saloon, with her hands on her knees, and said something to the old woman inside it; and the old woman said something back, and turned, and reached into the back seat, and brought out the thing wrapped in a sheet, the flat folded thing the size of a pillow, and held it on her knees, and said something else; and Officer Hummingbird straightened up, and turned, and looked up the drive at the porch, at him, for a long moment, with her shut face.

Then she beckoned.

He went down.

---

The old woman’s name was Mrs Ida Truesdale and she was seventy-nine and she was from Muskogee, and her husband, Vernon, who was eighty-two and had driven the whole way, eighty miles, in the dark, because she had asked him to, was still asleep at the wheel with his mouth open and his hands in his lap, and she said that he would sleep through the Second Coming, and had slept through two tornadoes and the birth of both their children, and that it was a mercy.

“We didn’t mean to sleep,” she said. She was very small and very upright and very neat, in a blue cotton dress with white buttons and a cardigan, like Mrs Ledbetter’s, in spite of the heat; and she looked up at him through the window of the car from the passenger seat with her hands on the thing in the sheet on her knees, and her eyes, which were brown and old and very clear, did not do any of the things that other people’s eyes did. They did not see him and know him and decide. They had known him, he understood, for a very long time. “We got here at five. Vernon said we couldn’t come up to the house at five in the morning, it wasn’t decent, we’d wait till nine. And then we sat. And then we slept.” She looked at the two police officers, on either side of him. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

“It’s no trouble, ma’am,” said Deputy Tidwell at once, and then looked at Officer Hummingbird and stopped talking.

“How did you know I was here?” said Frederick.

Mrs Truesdale looked at him as though he had asked her how she knew the sun was up.

“My niece’s girl works at the bank in Vinita,” she said. “She saw you go by on a bicycle on Tuesday. With a car behind you.” She looked at him. “You can’t keep a thing like that quiet in Craig County, honey. Not from family.”

He did not know what to say to that.

“I won’t tell,” said Mrs Truesdale. “Nobody will. Nobody’s told. My niece’s girl told me and I told Vernon and that’s all. Vernon won’t tell, he can’t remember anything past Tuesday.” She looked down at the thing on her knees. “I only wanted to give you this. And then we’ll go home.”

She held it out, through the window.

---

It was a quilt.

He unfolded it on the bonnet of the white saloon, because there was nowhere else, with Officer Hummingbird holding one corner and Deputy Tidwell the other; and it was a baby’s quilt, small, square, a yard across, made of a great many pieces of cotton in pale blue and yellow and white, sewn together in a pattern of stars, eight-pointed, each star made of eight diamonds, with tiny stitches, hundreds of them, thousands, so small and so even that you could hardly see them; and in the middle of it, in the centre star, embroidered in blue thread on a square of white, there was a crown, small and slightly lopsided, and under the crown, in blue thread, in a careful hand:

F. 2 May 2013.

“I made it when you were born,” said Mrs Truesdale.

He looked at it on the bonnet of the car.

“It took me from the May till the October,” she said. “I didn’t have the blue I wanted, I had to send off for it to Tulsa. And then I didn’t know where to send it. I thought I’d send it to the Palace, and then I thought, well, they’ll get hundreds, they’ll get thousands, and somebody will put it in a cupboard, and he’ll never even see it.” She looked at it too. “So I kept it. I thought I’d keep it till you were old enough to want it. And then I’d find a way.” She looked up at him. “And then you came to Craig County. On a bicycle.” She smiled for the first time, a very small smile, and her whole face moved round it. “So I thought, well, Ida. That’s the way.”

Frederick put his hand on the quilt.

He had been given a great many things. He had been given things since before he could remember, by everybody, from everywhere, in boxes and crates and envelopes and with ceremonies, so many that there were rooms for them, under the west wing, and people whose work it was to write and say thank you for them, in his name, in two paragraphs, which he signed. He had never in his life been given a thing by the person who had made it, at the side of a road, on the bonnet of a car, sixteen years after she had made it, because she had waited.

“Thank you,” he said.

It was not enough. He knew it was not enough. He said it anyway, because it was the only thing there was, and Mrs Truesdale nodded, as though it were enough, as though it were exactly the right amount.

“You’ve grown,” she said.

---

Vernon Truesdale woke up at twenty past nine, and looked out of the window at a Cherokee Nation police officer and a Craig County deputy and a protection officer in a sports jacket and the King of the United Kingdom of America holding a baby’s quilt on the bonnet of his car, and said well, Ida, I guess we’re here, and started the engine.

Officer Hummingbird bent to his window.

“Sir,” she said, “you’re going to drive home now. Slowly. And you’re going to stop in Vinita and get some breakfast, and some coffee, before you get on that highway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you’re not going to stop anywhere else.”

“No, ma’am.”

“And when people ask you where you’ve been,” said Officer Hummingbird, “you’re going to say you went to see some family in Craig County.”

Vernon Truesdale looked at her, and then at his wife, and then at the young man holding the quilt, and something went across his face very slowly, like a cloud going across a field.

“Well,” he said, “that’s true,” and put the car in gear, and turned it round on the gravel, very carefully, in five movements, and drove away towards the highway at exactly the speed limit, with Ida Truesdale in the passenger seat looking back through the rear window, and not waving, and then waving.

---

The paperwork took longer.

They did it on the bonnets of the two police cars, side by side, nose to nose, with the sun on them, Officer Hummingbird on hers and Deputy Tidwell on his, each with a clipboard, each with a pen, each writing, and each, every so often, leaning sideways to look at what the other had written. Frederick stood with the quilt folded over his arm and watched them. He did not know why he stayed. He thought that it was because he had never seen paperwork done before, the way he had never filled in a form, and that he wanted to see how it went.

“What are you putting?” said Deputy Tidwell.

“Vehicle at residence. Occupants asleep. No offence.” Officer Hummingbird wrote. “Gift delivered. Occupants departed.”

“I’ve put well-wisher.”

“Then put well-wisher. That’s fine.”

“Do I put the King?”

Officer Hummingbird stopped writing.

She looked at Deputy Tidwell across the yard of gravel between their bumpers for a long moment. Then she looked at Frederick, standing by the mailbox with the quilt. Then she looked down at her clipboard.

“I’ve put resident,” she said.

Deputy Tidwell looked at his own clipboard. He looked at it for some time. Then, slowly, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth, he crossed something out, carefully, with a single line, and wrote something above it.

“Resident,” he said.

“Good,” said Officer Hummingbird. “Coffee. The café. Ten minutes. We’ll sort it out there.” She tore the top sheet off her clipboard. “And you’re buying, Lonnie, because you put your foot down.”

---

She came back up the drive alone, after Deputy Tidwell had gone, with something in her hand.

Frederick was on the porch again. He had laid the quilt on the swing, open, so that the stars showed, and the others were looking at it, not touching, Marcus with his hands behind his back; and he heard her boots on the gravel, and then on the steps, and turned round, and she was standing at the top of the steps on the porch boards, with her cap in one hand and a long envelope in the other.

“There’s the other thing,” said Officer Hummingbird.

She held it out.

It was a long envelope, cream, heavy, with a seal on the flap in black, a seven-pointed star in a wreath, and his name on the front, typed, in English; and under it, typed, in the other script, the one on the sign at the edge of the town, the syllabary, a line of characters he could not read.

“I was going to bring it anyway,” said Officer Hummingbird. “This morning. It came down from Tahlequah yesterday to the station. Then the call came about the car, and I thought, well, Della, that’s a way.” She looked at him, with her shut face. “It’s from the Nation.”

He took it.

“Do I have to wait?” he said. “For an answer?”

“No.” Officer Hummingbird put her cap back on. “Nobody’s waiting. It doesn’t need one.” She looked at him a moment longer. “But you can give one. If you want. You can give it to me, or to Loretta, or put it in the post. It’ll get there.”

She went down the steps. At the bottom she stopped, and turned round, and looked up at the porch, at the four of them and the quilt on the swing, and at Kimura, who had come round the side of the house without anybody hearing her and was standing by the corner with her binoculars, looking at a tree.

“Mrs Sixkiller taught me the eighth grade,” said Officer Hummingbird. “And Lonnie. Different years.” She looked at the screen door, which was shut. “She tell you about the door?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” said Officer Hummingbird, and went away down the drive to her car, and drove off towards the town, and the café, and the paperwork.

---

He read the letter on the porch, on the swing, with the quilt beside him.

It was one page. It was typed, in English, and below the English the same again in the syllabary, line for line, so that the page was in two halves, and he read the half he could read, slowly, twice.

To George, King of the United Kingdom of America.

The Cherokee Nation is informed that you are staying within its reservation, at the residence of a citizen of the Nation, for the summer.

You are welcome here, as any visitor is welcome. The laws of the Nation apply to all persons within it, and its courts and its police are at your service in the same measure as they are at the service of every other person on this land, neither more nor less.

The Nation does not ask anything of you. It wishes you to know two things.

The first is that the Nation holds treaties with the Crown that are older than the Realm, made in the names of your predecessors, and that it has kept them.

The second is that the people of this Nation came to this country in 1838 under military escort, in winter, in the name of the Crown, under an instrument that their government did not make and had refused, after the Crown’s own court had held that they could not be moved; and that a great many of them did not arrive. The Nation does not ask you to answer for it. It asks you to know it, while you are here.

The Nation wishes you a quiet summer.

It was signed by the Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation, a name he did not know, Ellen Walkingstick, in ink, in a small upright hand; and below the English signature, the same name again, in the syllabary.

He sat on the swing with the letter on his knee.

The swing creaked. In the oak a bird he did not know the name of said something short and went away. Beside him, Theo had stopped looking at the quilt, and was looking at him, and not saying anything; and Marcus and Felix, on the steps, had gone quiet too, the way they had gone quiet in the King’s sitting room in New Westminster when the map came round on the easel.

“What does it say?” said Felix, at last, very carefully.

Frederick gave it to him. He did not know why. It was not a box. It was not secret. It had been typed in two languages so that anybody could read it, and he thought that it was the kind of letter that was meant to be read by anybody who was there.

Felix read it. He gave it to Marcus. Marcus read it, and gave it to Theo, and Theo read it, slowly, with his lips moving very slightly at the second thing, the way they did when he was reading something in Wisconsindeutsch that he had to get right, and gave it back.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

“Are you going to answer it?” said Theo.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to ask the Private Secretary?”

Frederick looked at the letter.

“No,” he said.

---

Mrs Sixkiller came at four, to look at the well.

She came up the gravel road in her clean blue car at exactly the speed limit and stopped by the oak and got out, in a cotton dress and a straw hat and gardening gloves, and did not come to the house. She went straight to the concrete box under the oak and lifted the steel lid and looked at the dial with the needle.

Then she looked at the bucket, which was standing by the porch steps, galvanised, empty, where Felix had left it on Tuesday.

Then she looked at the house.

Frederick came out through the screen door, and shut it, and went down the steps, and across the yard to her, with the others behind him at a distance, as if following him to the headmaster’s study.

“Twenty-one,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It was thirty-four on Saturday.” She looked at the needle. “It doesn’t go from thirty-four to twenty-one in six days. Not with four boys. Not unless somebody filled something up.” She looked at the bucket. She looked at Felix.

“It was medical,” said Felix, in a very small voice.

Mrs Sixkiller looked at him for a long time.

“Medical,” she said.

“He’d ridden fourteen miles. In a hundred and two. On a bicycle. From Vinita.” Felix swallowed. “He’d carried a house.”

Mrs Sixkiller looked at Frederick. She looked at him for about as long as she had looked at him on Saturday, by the well, in her funeral hat. Then something happened at the corner of her mouth, very small, and stayed there, a little longer than it had on Saturday.

“Then it was medical,” she said. “One bucket. Not two.” She shut the lid of the well. “No showers tonight. Any of you. Swim in the lake. It’s what it’s for.” She turned to go back to the car.

“Mrs Sixkiller,” said Frederick.

She stopped.

“I need to ask you something.”

---

He wrote the answer that night, at the kitchen table, under the lamp, with the moths on the screen door and the luna moth not among them any more; and he wrote it on Mrs Sixkiller’s notepaper, which was white and plain, from a pad in the drawer, because he had nothing else and because he did not want anything else; and he wrote it with the bait-shop pen, which he held in his fist between every sentence to keep it warm.

He wrote it four times. He tore up three. He did not ask anybody. Theo sat at the other end of the table, not looking, with his chin on his fists, and did not ask either, and did not go to bed.

To the Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation.

Thank you for your letter, which a police officer of the Nation brought to me this morning, after she had dealt with a car at the gate.

I know the two things. I knew them before I came, because I was taught them, and I have read the judgment of 1833 and the treaty of 1835. But I know them differently here, in a house that a Cherokee family built, on land that is yours, and I think that is what you meant me to do.

I cannot answer for what was done in the name of the Crown in 1838. I would not know how to begin, and it would not be mine to answer alone. But it was done in that name, and the name is mine now, and I will not pretend that it is not.

I will keep the Nation’s laws while I am here, the same as anybody, neither more nor less. I would like that very much, actually. Nobody has ever asked me to be neither more nor less before.

Thank you for the quiet summer.

He signed it George R., because it was the King she had written to.

And then, under that, because he had asked Mrs Sixkiller at the well, and she had looked at him for a long moment in the afternoon sun with the gardening gloves on, and taken off one of the gloves, and taken the bait-shop pen out of his hand, and written it for him on the back of his own hand, on the skin, in blue, so that he could copy it, and said it’s how you say it, it’s not how you spell it, there’s a difference, and you’ll get the difference wrong, and it won’t matter, he wrote, slowly, carefully, copying it off the back of his hand under the lamp, one character and then the other, in the syllabary:

ᏩᏙ

He looked at it on the white page. It was crooked. The second character leaned. He thought that he had got the difference wrong, and that it did not matter.

In the morning he would take it to the blue door, for Mrs Sixkiller to give to Officer Hummingbird, to send to Tahlequah. He had asked her at the well, and she had said she would.

“What is it?” said Theo, from the other end of the table, not looking.

“Wado,” said Frederick. “It means thank you.”

Theo did not say anything for a while.

“That’s a good word,” he said, at last, to the wall, where the horse was.

---

At midnight he lay on the porch boards on his back with the quilt folded under his head for a pillow, because it was too small for anything else and because he wanted it there; and above him the galaxy went across the sky from the trees to the barn, edge on, the whole of it; and on the refrigerator door inside, behind the screen, the back of page fourteen of the Proposed Summer Programme had three ticks on it, and a half, and a small pencilled (Mon) beside number four in Theo’s hand; and tomorrow was the fair.

He thought about Ida Truesdale, keeping a quilt for sixteen years for somebody she had never met, because she did not want it to go in a cupboard.

He thought about the Nation, keeping its treaties for longer than the Realm had existed, with a Crown that had not kept them.

He thought that keeping was a stranger thing than he had known, and that he had been kept, himself, all his life, by a great many people, very carefully, in a great many rooms; and that tonight, for once, on a porch in Craig County with the insects breathing in the trees, he had been the one handed a thing to keep, and had been told what it was, and had been trusted with it.

He did not know what to do with that. He lay on the porch and held it.

The whip-poor-will in the oak said its name, and said it again.