A sign at the gate of the Ceremonial Grounds says: VISITORS

WELCOME, NO DRINKING, NO ROWDINESS. Alice and Cash have fallen quiet. Several trucks are ahead of them and a station wagon behind, all rolling through the gate into a forest of small oaks. They pass a dozen or more open shelters with cedar-shake roofs and cookstoves inside, where women are gathered in thick, busy clumps. Above the roofs, the chimney pipes puff like smoking boys hiding out in the woods, giving away their location.

The dirt road ends at the edge of a clearing, and in its center Alice can see the round, raised altar made of swept ash, knee-high and eight feet across. The fire is already burning there, glowing inside a teepee of stout logs. At the edges of the fire a large log lies pointing in each of the four directions, giving it a serious, well-oriented look, like a compass. Cash has warned Alice that this fire is special. It’s as old as the Cherokee people; someone carries off the embers in a bucket at the end of each ceremony and keeps them alive until the next monthly dance. Someone carried this fire over the Trail of Tears, he says, when they were driven out here from the east. Alice has only the faintest understanding of what that means, except that it’s a long time to keep an old flame burning.

The altar is surrounded by a ring of bare earth some twenty yards across, and at its perimeter a circle of middle-aged oak trees stand graceful and straight-trunked, their upper limbs just touching. People are beginning to gather and settle on hewn log benches under the oaks, facing the fire. Cash gets out a pair of folding chairs and they settle down in front of the radiator grill. Alice can hear little overheated sighs and pops from the engine, and the buzz of a bee that has gotten tangled up there with the metal in an unlucky way.

“You reckon that’s one of Boma’s bees?” she asks Cash.

“Could be. We drove right by her place.”

It was true. Alice saw her standing in her yard, wearing a fedora with a giant white ostrich feather cascading backward into a curl behind her left shoulder. It gave Boma a dashing look, like one of the three musketeers out checking the pressure on the propane tank. Alice feels a little guilty about the bee stuck here writhing on the radiator. “Sugar says Boma loves those bees,” she says.

“Oh, she does. Bees are only going to stay living in your eaves if you have kind feelings toward them.” He takes off his hat and gently swats the bee, putting it out of its noisy misery.

An old man ambles over to chat with Cash. He has a wonderfully round face and like every other man here wears a straw cowboy hat that has darkened and conformed itself to its master around the crown. Cash introduces him as Flat Bush, leaving Alice to wonder whether this is a first or last name, or both. The two men speak in Cherokee for a while.

Alice is surprised that she can follow the general gist because of words like “Ace Hardware” and “distributor cap” that regularly spring up shiny and hard-edged from the strange soft music of the conversation.

People have begun to arrive now in a serious way, parking their trucks in a ring facing the fire, reminding Alice of a crew of friendly horses all tied nose in. She sneaks looks at the old women nested nearby in sag-seated lawn chairs. They all have on sprigged cotton dresses, dark stockings, dark shoes, and black or red sweaters.

Their long white hair is pent up in the back with beaded clasps, and their arms are folded over their bosoms. Alice hopes she hasn’t done anything wrong by wearing pants, or having short hair. But that’s silly; no one has been anything but kind to her so far, or for that matter, looked at her twice.

She listens in on the old women’s conversation and it’s the same over there, except that the hard, shiny words are

“permapress” and “gallbladder” and “Crisco.”

Roving bands of teenagers move through the woods from here to there: long-haired girls in jeans and Keds, and long-haired boys in jeans and complicated athletic shoes. Some of the boys are tough-looking, with black bandanas pushed high on their shiny foreheads and knotted in the back. They hail each other through the woods in English, but when they address the older people, their greetings are Cherokee. Even toddlers, when they run up to slap dark skirts with grubby hands, open their small mouths and let out strange little bitten-off Cherokee songs. Alice is fascinated. She thinks of the holy-roller churches in Mississippi, where people spoke in tongues, though of course in that case it was more or less every man for himself, whereas here they understand one another. She had no idea there was so much actual foreign language thriving right here under the red, white, and blue.

The idea thrills her. She has always wished she had the nerve to travel to foreign lands. Whenever she suggested this to Harland, he reminded her that anything at all you could see in person you could see better on TV, because they let the cameras get right up close. She knew he was right, but always felt misunderstood, even so.