Free Five Minutes in Heaven by Lisa Alther Page A

bayoneted soldiers herding little children like cattle. With blazing houses and screaming people.
    But when her father stopped talking, it all vanished and everything fell silent, except for the whirring of grasshoppers in the withered alfalfa and the cawing of a crow from the top of a sycamore.
    Her father scraped soil from a pointed shard of rock and handed it to Jude. She and Molly looked at it. It was shiny black with a vein of white down the center and pointed wings at the top for tying it to an arrow shaft.
    â€œHang on to that,” her father said. “Some ancient cousin of yours probably made it.”
    Jude kept inspecting the chipped edges of the arrowhead with her fingertips. It seemed strange that all that was left were these bits of rock, herself and her father, and her father’s stories, told to him by his grandfather, who was told them by his mother. At school, they played a game called Gossip in which everyone sat in a circle and one person whispered something in the ear of the next, who whispered it to the next, and so on. By the time it had gone around the circle, it was completely wrong or stupid.
    They drove up to the Wiggly Piglet, which featured an outline of Porky Pig in flashing neon, with a slogan beneath that read: “Our pigs are dying for you to eat.” A high-school girl in a cowboy hat and boots arrived to take their order of pulled-pork sandwiches and peanut-butter milk shakes. As the girl strutted away, Molly reported that she had had goose bumps on her thighs below her short shorts.
    After the waitress returned, carrying their order on an aluminum tray that she attached to their car window, Jude asked her father, “Why did the soldiers want to march Abigail Westlake’s family to Oklahoma?”
    â€œThe white settlers wanted their land,” said her father, handing out the wrapped sandwiches. “That soil along the river is very rich from centuries of flooding.”
    â€œBut that’s not right, just to take it like that.”
    He smiled faintly as he unwrapped his barbecue and poured extra sauce from a tiny paper cup onto the coleslaw atop his pork. “No, it isn’t. But the Cherokees were sitting ducks. They believed that land belonged to everyone. It never occurred to them that it could be taken away.”
    â€œBut you said they owned slaves?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œNegro people like Clementine, who had to do all the work for free?” A speaker attached to the restaurant roof was blaring Hank Williams singing “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBut that’s not right, either,” said Jude. The barbecue sauce was so spicy that her nose was starting to run.
    â€œNo, it’s wrong. Very wrong.”
    Jude sat beside Molly on the backseat, sucking her milk shake through a straw, trying to figure out how the same people could be right and wrong, both at the same time. She glanced at Molly.
    â€œWhen your grandfather told you those stories, did it make you sad?” Jude asked, watching the cowgirl write down the orders of three boys in ducktails who were sitting in a convertible with an elevated rear end and an elaborate chrome tailpipe. PARTY DOLL was painted on the fender. She and Molly had already decided to be waitresses here when they grew up, so that they could wear the cowgirl outfits.
    â€œYes. It made me sad to know that people would treat each other that way. It still does.”
    â€œWhy do they?” asked Jude, determined to get this settled once and for all.
    â€œAh, the question of the ages.” He wadded up his wrapper and napkin and stuffed them into the paper bag.
    â€œBut what’s the answer?”
    â€œJude,” he said, “I’m afraid you may be one of those people who spend their lives searching for that answer.”
    â€œBut what is it?” Jude was starting to feel frantic, as though this was a joke that everyone