
"What the fu--!" I jumped, never having heard him creeping up on me which I'm sure he loved.
He threw the book up at me and thankfully I caught it-- if I had missed, I'm sure it would have given him one more reason to think I was unworthy of his precious son.
"Read it. You might learn something about--" and this is where he adds air quotes-- "The Cause."
And then he turns and marches off into the swamp. Unfortunately, I couldn't keep my mouth shut.
"Hey, I'm pregnant, you know! You could have made me fall out of the tree!"
He slowly shook his head and mumbled something that sounded like "Oh, lord" but it could have been something in Muskogee before he told me without turning around to "Read it, leetle girl. They'll be a test next time around the campfire."
The raggedy old book was called The Rebel by Albert Camus. It looked like Busimanolotome had been reading it since it was first published in 1951. The brown and water stained paper was dogeared on nearly every page with notes filling the margins. I looked up from the book at the man disappearing in the hammock, his Seminole jacket the only thing giving away his presence, and thought, "Man, this guy really is a 'riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma'."
And then I read the book because the last thing I wanted was to look bad around the ol' campfire. And, although I'm pretty sure the great French philosopher wouldn't have agreed with the NS tactics used to achieve "The Cause," it was then and is now reassuring that rebelling against a status quo that endangers Gaia has the approval of a Nobel Prize winner.