EMERGING AUTHOR: Fiction by Eddie Chuculate

Abstract

EMERGING AUTHOR Fiction by Eddie Chuculate Introduced by Joy Harp We are story gatherers, no matter who we are or what path we follow. Our first breath is the promise we make to take on our own story, and to accept a place in the story field of earthly life. We gather stories any way we car:: across from the fire, at the kitchen table, by telephone, cell phone, Internet, and now texting. In our tribal traditions, those who could tell stories always had a place at the table, and friends wherever they traveled. With Cheyenne Madonna, Eddie Chuculate emerges as an important new talent in his generation of story tellers. The short story is his form. The place: straight out of contemporary Indian country. He's a journalist of the soul as he investigates the broken-heart nation of Indian men. The epicenter of action is the tenuous meeting place between boyhood and manhood, between fierce need and desire. Chuculate relates a world that is exactly wnai it is, with no romantic savage junk, and no temporary spiritual life preservers. In the midst of despair there's a shine of meaning that surfaces, like the miracle of sunrise after an all-night party. - Joy Harjo A Famous Indian Artist Eddie Chuculate Editorial note: From Cheyenne Madonna, copyright ? 2010 by Eddie Chuculate. Forthcoming in September 2010 and excerpted here by arrangement with David R. Godine (www. blacksparrowbooks.com). Many years after the burial, I drove a rented Cadillac sixty miles to The Ranch, as Johnson called it, to check out the old homestead for the last time. Gravel pinged and thumped under the floor boards along the twisting dirt roads, leaving a haze of red dust in my wake. I topped the last hill and there sagged the house, overgrown with weeds. A Century 21 sign was nearly invisible in the former front yard, which was now overgrown pasture. I picked up a stick and whacked my way to the front door. The old cement walkway was still there, leading from the dirt road to the front porch. The big veranda where Johnson had administered my first sip of Pink Chablis was no longer there; vandals had stripped away all the planking, leaving a long rectangle of dead yellow grass. Kicking around in it with my dress shoes I tapped an old beer can, faded gold and rusted but unmistakably Johnson's old Jax. I had to stretch like I was boarding a bus to get into the house; grabbing the doorway I cut my finger on glass. The door lay half caved in, knobs and glass long gone. Inside, wintry pink light bled through the skeleton of roof; clouds floated overhead and dust rained in shafts of light like snow in a paperweight. The place looked so incredibly small! This house that I thought of as gigantic in my youth, that held doz ens of sleeping, arguing cousins, aunts and u ncles, dogs, cats, Christmas and Thanksgiving feasts, and wild, drunken parties, now seemed as sir all as a dollhouse and just as alive. A black-and-white cat jumped in from outside and wove in and out of my legs, crying. I bent and picked it up. Purring madly with her eyes closed, she licked the blood off my finger with her sand paper tongue and twisted her head into my palm, rubbing her scalp. I took her forelegs and counted: six claws on the right paw. Johnson Lewis al ways had a cat with six right claws. I decided to take her back to San Francisco and went to the car and put her in the back seat. The old church across the road was still there, but it looked as decrepit as The Hacienda?another of Johnson's names f or the homestead. The hedgerows, once bushy and green, which ran alongside the dirt road and afforded the church privacy from us and vice-versa, were noth ing but bare, black branches. I walked across the road to see if the well and bell were still there. The same thick, frayed rope was tied to a rusted bucket. It used to knock from side-to-side...