Medicine Man

As I was walking up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn'tthere again today.
I wish, I wish he'd stay away. 
-Hughes Mearns (1875 - 1965)

An angel of the Lord came to Joseph in a dream...
-Matthew 2:13

I keep getting visits from a little old guy who tells me he is a
medicine man.  He hunkers down on his heels beside my bed of stuffy nose
and starts telling me about the split in the tribe and that he is the
medicine man for one faction and that Old Lady Lisa Wheeler is the one
for the other faction, but no matter how often I ask, he has never come
right out and told me which faction.  He always tells me his name, too,
but it always disappears from my mind when I want it.  Maybe he's a
witch.  And who the hell is Lisa Wheeler?
I always want to believe in him, because he's one of those little
bandy-legged, big-bellied guys that you have only to look at to know
they're Cherokee.  My daddy wasn't as bandy-legged, because he was a
farmer, not a horseman, but he had that belly, even though it was all
muscle.  I could never understand it:  He never drank, he worked hard,
and he ate pretty abstemiously, but by the time he was 40, there was
that belly.  It didn't hang over his belt; it was too muscular for that.
 There was just enough of it to make you feel like he should be wearing
blue jeans and a fancy belt buckle, even when he was dressed for town. 
Well, that's what this medicine man, or whatever he is, looks like.  I'm
beginning to wonder if his belly is a whisky belly, though.  He never
smells of it, but his stories always have it in them - usually being
originally mistaken for tea.  "They was this young couple I he'pped
once, you know.  They was in a bad way, so I said, 'Why don't you have a
glass of that ice tea in the window sill?' but it turned out to be
thunderjuice."
"Are you in the faction that Orange Starr was in?" I ask him.  Orange
Starr was the official medicine man when I was a kid, the one who gave
me my Cherokee name; he was a whiteman's doctor, too, so maybe it was
just a play on words.  He lived somewhere near Tahlequah, but always
came to the Presbyterian Church's green onion supper every spring.  He
was Charlie Starr's brother.  Charlie was another one of those little
bandy-legged, big-bellied old guys - just like Charlie Alton, come to
think of it, but Charlie Alton was skinnier and littler.  Charlie Starr
always seemed tall, but I don't ever remember seeing him anywhere except
sitting in a rocker on his front porch or on a horse.  And I was little
kid, so he would have seemed tall, anyway.  I remember once (maybe it
was green onion supper time) when their sister - was her name Ruth?  No I
don't think so.  She seemed really sophisticated in that leathery,
ranchwoman-who-lives-in-the-big-city way - came to see my Grandma.  "I
wish I could tear out every drop of white blood in my body," she cried
out at one point.  Maybe they were Keetowahs, but I don't believe it. 
Nobody from Claremore was.  The Keetowahs were the ones who didn't
believe in white men's education.  At least that's what I always
thought.  None of the elders would talk about it.  When I first read
Stand Watie's letters, I thought they were really romantic.  Sort of
like Sir Walter Scott crossed with Count Tolstoy.  But when I asked Aunt
Ruth about him, she didn't want to talk about it.  "He caused too much
strife among families," she said.  Maybe that's why Grandma Hanes
stopped speaking Cherokee after she married my Great-Grandpa Charles
Edward.  Maybe that's why we never knew our Thornton cousins.
I've always wondered.  My Cherokee family was always so enthusiastic
about visiting and family reunions, that I could never understand why it
all stopped with Grandma Hanes.  We were always being told that Joanna
Hause's father was a distant cousin or that the Starrs were distant
cousins, and I'm sure that it's true, but we must have had much closer
cousins no farther away than Tahlequah.  Grandma would always say, "We
don't wash our dirty linen in public," and I agreed with her.  But you
know, I sometimes wonder if my Cherokee family kept its baskets of dirty
linen locked up too tight.  Or maybe it was just that Grandpa Hanes lost
contact with his family in Wayne County, and Grandma wanted him to feel
that they and their children were their family and it just got to be a
habit.  Grandma Anne never mentioned meeting cousins when she was at the
seminary.  Was that because Grandma Delilah didn't want her to or
because the Thorntons didn't want to have anything to do with her?  I
suppose I'll never know.
But my uninvited medicine man acts like he doesn't hear me and starts
talking about how hard the life of a medicine man is.  I have just
started to think to myself, You're no medicine man.  You're just a con
man like George Hause.  (Grandma would have been very disappointed to
hear me say that:  "When he comes around collecting for a wreath for
someone's funeral, we all know he'll use the money for himself, but it's
a small price to pay for his pride.  Just make sure you're never in the
house alone with him.")  I'm not even sure you're a Cherokee, I think. 
The real Cherokees I know have too much pride to talk about money,
except to make a joke of it.  I ask him for a business card, thinking
that I can maybe send him some money later when he's not right there
begging.  He may not care about his pride, but I do.  And then there's
this loud voice that says, "Pat!" and I wake up.  I'm not sure whether
the voice is Daddy or not.  Whoever it is, he saves me from being rude.
And maybe it's just the voice of my body telling me that the filter is
clogged and has joined the enemy, so I'd better get up and turn it off
if I want any more sleep.
 -Patricia Dickerson Lemon, March 9, 1997