Free Five Minutes in Heaven by Lisa Alther

grandfather’s mother, Abigail Westlake, whose forebears had lived in bark lodges by the river for centuries, fishing the slow-drifting waters and hunting the steep slopes of the Wildwoods. Later they put up a log cabin, growing corn and grazing cattle on the rich bottomland. By Abigail’s time, they had built a plank house, brought slaves from Charleston, converted to Christianity, learned English, and begun wearing white people’s clothing. Abigail’s brother married a missionary from Baltimore.
    One day, white soldiers came with rifles to round them up and march them off to a reservation in Oklahoma. When her brother tried to escape, a soldier shot him in the head. Coming home from gathering herbs, Abigail watched this from the Wildwoods, then hid in a cave while an unfamiliar white family moved into her family’s house.
    After several days, a neighboring farmer found her, nearly dead from cold and hunger and fear, and carried her back to his cabin on the ridge. He himself had recently arrived in America, having been evicted from his croft in the Scottish Highlands. He confronted the new family in her house and ordered them to leave. After they obligingly moved out, they burned her house to the ground. Jude’s father pointed out the cellar hole, which was now overgrown with a tangle of Virginia creeper. An early frost had turned the leaves the scarlet of spilt blood.
    Abigail learned from relatives who had survived the forced westward trek that her parents and sisters had died of typhoid in the Ozarks. As she lay in bed week after week trying to recover her will to live, she told the farmer about the dances in this valley when she was a child, at which warriors carrying red-and-black clubs painted their faces vermilion and circled their eyes with scarlet and black. About her cousins, who came down on horses from the deep mountain coves wearing deerskin leggings and embroidered hunting shirts and red-and-blue turbans, to watch the violent all-day ball games on the playing field downriver. About the shamen, who raked the ballplayers in their loincloths with turkey-quill combs to grid their flesh with blood for good luck. About the prophets who had recently begun painting their faces black and proclaiming the end of the Cherokee people.
    The farmer told her about having his hut in the Highlands burned down around him in the middle of a winter night because he refused to leave to make way for a herd of sheep. About his wife and baby, who died as he dragged them from the fire. About being forced onto a ship in Ullapool with his young son, bound for no one knew where. About being dumped at Cape Fear on the Carolina coast and wandering across the Smokies in search of an unoccupied spot where he could farm in peace. About the recent Cherokee raid on his cattle, during which his son had disappeared.
    Having loss in common, if nothing else, the two fell in love and married. Their son, Jude’s great-grandfather, grew up learning from his mother which parts of which plants to use for which ailments. When he became a man, people arrived at his new log house from all over the region for his remedies. During the War Between the States, he patched up soldiers brought to him by both sides, but he refused to join either, having also learned from his mother a certain skepticism about the projects of white men, whatever their proclaimed creed.
    Jude looked up from her digging to study her father. He had a big crooked nose just like her grandfather—just like the Indian on a buffalo nickel. And his cheekbones were so broad that his mahogany eyes seemed to be peering out from inside a cave. People always said Jude’s eyes were just like his. While he talked, the valley came alive, with painted warriors paddling canoes up the river and shooting deer with arrows in the Wildwoods. With teams of men in loincloths catching balls in the nets of woven squirrel skin at the ends of their long wooden spoons. With