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May 1843. Five days west of Fort John…
High in the driver's seat of their wagon, Elisabeth Ryan squinted into the white noon sky. Sweat beaded on her upper lip. Catching a drop with the tip of her tongue, she rubbed it against her
teeth, imbedding a speck of grit in the ridge where the front two just barely overlapped.
Twice now the train's pilot, Hobbie Sears, had twisted in his saddle and peered back at her. Though
she'd been expecting it, dreading it, when the weathered scarecrow suddenly wheeled his horse around, Elisabeth yanked on the reins. Winding the leather around her hands, her fingers burned as she watched him gallop
back to the end of the line.
Sears jerked his pony to a dusty halt. "So, where's your brother, Missy?" he demanded with a squinted eye.
"Inside...with a headache," she said. It wasn't really a lie. "I've given him some--"
Sears dug his heels into his roan and dashed to the back of
the wagon, grabbed hold and swung himself inside.
"Pull up, Missy! Pull up I say!" he squawked from inside.
Elisabeth glanced at her sister, Amy, perched
beside her. The girl's eyes were cobalt moons in a face so rigid and pale it appeared to have been molded in clay then whitewashed.
Sears' head poked through the opening behind them. "Get down. Both of you!"
Elisabeth's spine jangled when her feet hit the ground. Amy landed square on her
sister's left foot, but Elisabeth wouldn't give Sears the pleasure of seeing her react to the pain.
"Goin' back!" he barked after his own awkward landing.
"But" Elisabeth began, leaning away from his fetid breath.
"Back!" He smirked his pleasure at being the train's God Almighty. "Never liked
you carrot-tops," he said. "Not this cherry sister an' her teasin' freckles. That bigmouth brother. Those whiny nephews and their precious little curls. Most of all I never liked you!"
His tan face puckered like wrinkled burlap. "You're tall as a pine, plain as a post, and your hips are like a pickle barrel. Smartmouth, old maid. Satan's consort, pouring your magic teas
down everyone's throat all winter. This'll teach ya, holdin' us up, playin' doctor to those trappers who come in."
"But Elisabeth's hair is brown!" Amy protested, as if that were the issue of import.
Sears' crack about her face and figure slid right over Elisabeth. Being
bigboned had been an asset on the farm Da had lost acre by acre at the poker table. The old maid remark she heard all too often lately burned like a hornet's stinger.
She looked desperately
to the folks ahead who'd finally realized the train's tail had detached from its body. Surely they'd not allow this lunatic to forsake them in this wasteland of waving grass and endless sky.
Glimpsing the others nearing, Sears drew his guns and pointed them at Elisabeth's belly. "Yer turnin' round, I say!"
Her wideeyed gaze locked on the pilot's gnarled forefingers
playing on the triggers. Bitterly, she recalled nursing him when he'd nearly died after eating bad meat this past winter.
"You can't abandon us after all"
"Measles!" he announced, cutting off Elisabeth's reminder he was beholden to her. "Brother's in there all red pokiedots. Thrashin' like a salmon on a bed of coals."
Staring at the ground, the emigrants shuffled their feet. A few backed away as if something in the grass might gnaw their toes. A Bible salesman, preacher, clerk...each with a loved one or two
Elisabeth had tended in sickness.
"Stow the guns, Hob," said the farmer from Vermont, keeping his own distance.
Reluctantly holstering his weapons, Sears
grumbled, "If they hurry they'll be at the fort afore they's all sick."
"Can't we just stay way back from everyone?" Amy pleaded.
Sears
snapped, "Eighteen of sixtyfour already croaked on the first leg of this pitiful trip. Ain't killing the rest!"
"I just buried my Ruthie," Ina Plumb, leader of the Sunday
morning hymns, said. "I ain't burying any more to measles."
Caroline Holmes' head bobbed. "None of us had measles…"
The betrayal stunned
Elisabeth. Her gaze fell to the baby Caroline clutched in her arms, alive due to mash and tea Elisabeth spoonfed him when fever dried Caroline's milk that winter.
"Five, six days they'll
be there!" Sears said. "More trains will be comin' in! They can hook up with them in a few weeks."
Elisabeth shot him a look of venom. His eyes bulged in a face gone the color of wild grapes.
"Who the hell you think you are, Missy? Piercin' me with them
rattler eyes? Sendin' your venom into my brain. Like you was my Maw!" He whirled to the emigrants. "We vote!"
The Rocky Mountains loomed in the distance, a few more days
they'd have been crossing the divide. Elisabeth watched in shock and despair when after nodding their assenting votes, the emigrants crept back to their wagons. Sears leaned close to her.
"Them Biblethumpers might get hot under the collar if I shoot youcause of those brats inside there I noticed don't look much healthier than your dyin' brother." He bared brown teeth at Elisabeth. "I warn
youyou try followin' us, them holyrollers ain't gonna give a tiny poop if I shoot them ox of yours."
With a hitch of his trousers, Sears hawked a good one that missed Elisabeth's shoe by
an inch. Tipping her the brim of his dusty felt hat, he whirled and leaped onto his pony. Before he could giddyap, Elisabeth shouted one last reminder.
"You just remember, Mr. Sears,
next time you move your bowels, that I'm probably the only person since your mother who ever washed your behind when you were helpless!"
"Atta girl!" Amy said when Sears dashed
off to his place at the head of the line. Then she broke out into squeaky sobs.
"He didn't have to say anything about my freckles. I put Gran's cream on them twice a day." She wiped
her nose on the back of her hand. "Sure, you're almost tall as Joe, but with all this walking, your hips aren't big as a barrel. And being an old maid's no reason to hate you."
"That's not why he hates me," Elisabeth snapped.
Amy threw herself against her sister. "We're going to die!"
Elisabeth
pulled Amy close in a hug of comfort she was not feeling herself. "No. I'll get us to the fort. We'll hitch up with the next train out"
"But I don't want to go to Oregon!" Amy cried. "There's nothing for me there. No--"
"Hush," Elisabeth soothed. "We'll be among the
first. We'll build a school. I'll teach you the herbs and we--"
"You and Joe want that! You like teaching kids, taking care of sick people. I can't do anything. I'll be so
lonely."
Guilt squeezed Elisabeth's weary, twenty-two-year-old heart. She'd trusted the prophecies of the old Indian living in the woods adjoining their farm, believed in some esoteric
dreams of her own and Gran's. But this was no life for a fourteenyearold girl.
"We'll talk about it with Joe. Back at the fort," Elisabeth promised, then climbed onto the driver's
seat and turned the team. Within the wagon their sister Maura's threeyearold twins lay like ragdolls on their bed of quilts. Amy bathed Paddy, her pet since Maura's suicide two years ago.
"You won't let them die?" Amy said a while later when she took the reins so Elisabeth could tend to Kevin.
Elisabeth shook her head. Then, noticing her
sister's scarlet cheeks and glassy eyes, she ducked inside before Amy could see the trepidation in hers.
Murmuring one of Gran's old Gaelic lullabies, Elisabeth rocked Kevin against her
breast, as if the power of her own heart would keep his frail one beating. His skin was so pale, his features so delicate surrounded by damp, coppery curls. The image of Maura.
Maura. So beautiful, so vibrant...until she married Richard.
Richard Leary, wonderfully handsome, who, like Da, revered his whiskey and poker. Yet,
unlike Da, who had remained faithful to his saint of a wife even 10 years after her death, Richard was a womanizer. Maura, crazy in love, would change all that, we'd see, once they got married. But
Richard didn't want a noose around his neck, not even when Maura got pregnant with the twins.
But marry her he did, or take a shotgun slug to that handsome face.
The twins were six months old when Maura realized she was pregnant again. They were nine months old when Richard was shot dead by the husband of the woman he was having a rainy afternoon romp with. Bereft,
destitute, Maura allowed Gran and Elisabeth to pack her meager possessions and deliver her and the twins from the shack she called home, back to the farm, where Da's drunken tirades against his once favored daughter
destroyed what was left of her shattered emotions. The morning of the twins' first birthday, they found Maura lying cold and blue on her bloody sheets, Da's straight razor lying loose in her left hand.
Sudden doubt washed over Elisabeth. Having seen what marrying for love had done to Maura, should she, Elisabeth, have married Tim Andrews, even if she didn't love him? After all, he
was educated, wealthy, and good-looking to boot. If she had, they wouldn't be in the desperate circumstances they now found themselves.
How she wished Gran had been young and healthy
enough to come with them. Gran, more than the woman who had raised her after Ma's death. She'd been her confidant, her friend.
"Get away from all this death and darkness.
Go with Joe to that new territory. Take Amy and those wee babes. Your future is out there, Bethie. I saw it, and I know you have, too."
Kevin rattled a sigh. Elisabeth brushed her
fingers through his damp, coppery curls. Her gaze locked on the plain band she wore on the third finger of her left hand, as if just sight of the golden token of her gran would bestow them some special blessing.
The two Crow warriors lay prone just over the ridge of the hill. Their ponies munched new grass at the base of the slope.
"Your dream aside, why do you think the others abandoned these women?" Basukose said.
Arakashe turned his gaze from the two women struggling in the rain to
attach some kind of dark material to the cover of their wagon. He cocked his right eyebrow at his brother-in-law.
"They are white," he stated as though to say, why else?
Basukose smiled. "Ahhthen you do realize those are white women down there. And there are two. Are you sure…"
Arakashe brushed a
dripping lock of hair away from his eye with a finger. "We don't know what is inside that wagon. There could be more." His gaze returned to the women. He watched the smaller, redhaired girl list into the side
of the wagon. The dark woman ran to her, held her close.
"They would have come out during all that commotion."
"Not if they were sick,"
Arakashe replied, his brow furrowing while he watched the dark one lead the other to the rear of the wagon and help her inside.
"Did you see the color hair of your dream woman?"
Arakashe shook his head. The silver glow given off by his vision spirit had obscured her hair. He'd attributed the paleness of her skin to that same illumination. Unthinkable
that she be white. Yet, this was the place to which Old Man had directed him.
Rain ran into his eyes and he blinked hard. "I saw just her eyes." Like rich pine resin.
"That firehair is a bright little bird," Basukose commented.
Arakashe grunted. "My sister would serve your heart still beating to the coyotes."
Basukose sighed. "I am married. Not dead."
The wind picked up, swirled over the warriors and swooped down the knoll. Racing around the wagon, it lifted a
portion of the cover the redhaired woman hadn't finished tying down. Dim light glowed through the canvas top. A woman's shadow moved back and forth, side to side. Then slowly she sank to the floor and only her
silhouette from her waist up was visible to the warriors.
Arakashe watched the shadow bow its head to its hands. He felt himself stung by an emotion somehow akin to loss, a bonedeep grief and
loneliness.
"What will you do now?" he heard Basukose say through the growing whirl of wind.
"We'll make shelter. We'll smoke on this. I need to
think. They've released their animals, they're not going anywhere."
He needed to pray. To be sure. To be sure that the woman bowed in the wagon was the woman of his vision.
For three days wind and rain relentlessly shook the wagon that now smelled like a pile of forgotten laundry. Lying within, Joe and Kevin thrashed and moaned. Elisabeth dipped rags into a bucket
of rain water to cool their fevers. At times, Amy and Paddy lay so still they seemed dead, and she would hold a mirror to their lips and watch for telltale fogging on the glass. With a fire kept burning under a piece of
India rubber hacked from the wagon cover, she boiled water, steeped Gran's herbs, and spooned the teas past their cracked lips. Through the long gray days, in shadows cast by the lantern, Elisabeth waited. She shivered
in the damp cold, trembling with fear they would die. In this solitude she was beset by loneliness and could no longer believe in secret dreams, mystic predictions.
The third afternoon,
stalled just miles from where they'd been abandoned, the hard rains lightened to a mist.
"We've got to get back to the fort!" Elisabeth cried to the oxen. "Get up!" she
hollered, stumbling from beast to beast, slapping their rumps until her hand was raw. She strained with screaming muscles, but alone she couldn't lift the yokes. She kicked the white one closest to the wagon, then
hauled herself back inside.
Asleep, Kevin sucked on his thumb. She noticed that his spots had faded even more than Joe's, who, for the first time in days was snoring. Amy whimpered then
moaned.
Paddy was still, that scrapedraw appearance gone from his cheeks. Elisabeth stared at him. The shadowed light lent a blue cast to his skin. She leaned low, hands reaching. He was
cold. His emaciated body hung limp when she picked him up.
Tremors shook her body. Don't wake them up, was all she could think while wrapping him in a small quilt.
"I can't do this," she whispered, digging the shallow grave. "I cannot do this."
Gently, she placed him in the hole. Shoveling in the dirt, she felt her heart split in two.
Behind her, the wagon creaked. She turned. Joseph crouched beneath the
rear flap. She went to him, helped him down.
"What are you doing?" He eyed the shovel.
Elisabeth choked. "Paddy."
Joe moaned and bowed his head. Elisabeth stood in the rain feeling like some plaster garden statue, skeleton stiff, exterior features dissolving.
Minutes later, he said, "Amy and Kevin?"
"Getting better."
He looked at the cold iron sky. "What time is it?"
"Two or three," Elisabeth estimated. She'd not even thought about winding their mantle clock these past days.
The few miles they'd gain by traveling
now was not worth the effort of hitching the team. She warmed beans and made biscuits and coffee. The first swallow stuck in her throat.
By morning Amy was cognizant, and her first words were
for Paddy. Her keening reminded Elisabeth of Gran's when they'd found Maura dead.
"You could have saved him," Amy accused hours later. Then she spoke not one more word to Elisabeth.
The sun beamed from the prairie sky. The rich aroma of wet earth and renewed spring grasses rode on warming breezes. Strength returned to the ill. Striving for a return of muscle tone, Joe
walked alongside the wagon. Elisabeth drove, skirting drying mud ponds, aiming for where she guessed the fort was, since their original trail had long since washed away.
"We're making
better time," Joe said, clambering up beside her to check on a blister he said he felt forming on his left heel. "Should be spotting the fort soon."
One hand shielding her eyes, Elisabeth scanned the horizon. Something's wrong. She looked to the sky and sucked in a breath.
"Joe--we're heading the wrong way!"
Indeed, according to the sun's position in the sky, instead of heading southeast, they were driving north. The river
they'd followed away from the fort had slipped from their sight.
Joe shrugged. "So what? We'll turn around. One thing we're not short on now is time."
A
chill trembled her spine. Elisabeth nodded, her gaze dropping to the glittering gold ring on her left hand.
They rumbled over a knoll slick with damp grass. Below them a creek meandered
through a thick grove of willows and adolescent cottonwoods, and they stopped to rest the oxen and refill their barrels.
Joe left to follow tracks he'd discovered along the stream. Elisabeth
grabbed a pile of smelly clothes, a bar of brown soap, and took Kevin to the creek. Amy arrived with her own bundle and did her scrubbing twenty feet downstream.
Hurt, and resentful that Amy
would think she'd deliberately let Paddy die, Elisabeth finally hauled in a breath. "Amy"
Eyes of blue ice turned to her. "I'm going home."
"We don't have one anymore," Elisabeth replied wearily.
"Maybe you don't," Amy said, swishing a soapy skirt through the water.
"How will you"
Amy smirked, gave the skirt a hearty twist. "With the turnarounds who'll find their senses by the time they
reach the fort."
"But where--"
"Back to Gran!" Amy's eyes narrowed. "She might've been too old to be saddled with me and the boys,
but without Paddy, I won't be any trouble to her. You keep Kevin." She threw the wrungout garment to shore. "Besides, I'm sure it won't be too long before I'll be getting married. They won't be calling me
old maid."
Elisabeth wanted to slap her face. "Have anyone in mind?"
With a secret smile, Amy shrugged. "Been thinking about Tim."
"Tim Andrews?"
"Why not? I'm prettier than you. And younger." Her smile slipped away as if a magic wand waved by her face. "This is all your fault. Joe got measles cause you had to help those trappers. Paddy died
because" She choked. "If you married Tim, we never would've been here. Da wouldn't have been so humiliated he shot hims"
"Da bet me in a goddamn poker game!"
"He had a straight to the Knave!" Amy shouted.
"Morgan Andrews had a straight to the King!"
"So!" Amy insisted. "All you had to do was marry his son! Instead we lost the farm"
"I'd rather be dead!"
"I wish you were," Amy hissed.
Kevin wailed. Elisabeth whirled as he plopped into the water in confused misery. Grabbing him, she clasped his cold, wet body
to her breast, soothing him with whispered croons while she plowed through the kneehigh water to shore.
A sudden yip and howl rolled from the rise behind them.
"Oh!" Amy gasped.
"Just a wolf," Elisabeth said, not bothering looking back.
A string of ululations replied from their
left, and this time Elisabeth scanned the vast and vacant rolling hills.
"I thought they only howled at night!"
"I don't know," Elisabeth said. "They're probably signaling, trying to find each other"
"Indians! Indians do that!"
"Hush!" Elisabeth wrapped a blanket around Kevin, glancing again to the horizon where a hawk shadow skimmed across a grassy knoll. The plains remained silent.
A voice sounded behind them.
"Deadfall dammed the creek, and there's a pool in the middle of a willow thicket." Emptyhanded but for his shotgun, Joe shot
Amy a dark look that confirmed he'd heard it all. "Sun's shining right down on the water and it's warm."
He climbed into the wagon, returning with a quilt, towel, a change of
clothes for Elisabeth, and her drawstring bag.
"Go get some rest--alone," he said, running a rough finger down the side of her face.
Defeat weighing on her shoulders, Elisabeth nodded.
Fat tears rolled down Kevin's cheeks, around the thumb stuck in his mouth as he struggled in Amy's arms.
"Mama, me go too!"
Not this time, baby. She craved a respite from the clinging, the demands and needs of others. She needed some solace.
Elisabeth spread her quilt by the pool. Beyond the wagons a wolf keened. Indians do that!
A second wolf yelped a response and she wondered if indeed wolves howled only at night. Standing still, she listened. All sounded calm, peaceful.
Dumping out the pink and white bag Gran had
stitched and filled, she smiled. She'd as much need for those sweetsmelling toiletries falling to the quilt as the oxen had for ballet slippers. Scented soaps, brush, mirror, ivory combs. Tiny pots of lip balm and rouge
made with beeswax and berries. Her journal hit the quilt. She'd shoved it deep in the bag after having written, "Paddy died today."
She knelt to unfold a fine cotton shift
Gran had edged with lace. There, like an emerald cushioned in a bed of new snow, she found a vial of perfume, her only keepsake of her mother. Dab it on, Bethie, whenever ye need to charm y'self with the essence of
the hardiest woman I ever known. Loneliness aching in her breast, Elisabeth wondered for whom Gran thought she'd wear it.
After washing her blouse and skirt, she stood to remove her
shift. A bird trilled across the pond to her right, an unfamiliar melody, sudden in the dense quiet. With the material gathered at her hips, her hands stilled.
An identical tune save for two
notes at the end came from her left. Elisabeth scanned the bushes, an expectant birdsong of unease shivering through her body as she let the cloth slide back down her legs. She'd bathe in the shift. Ridiculous,
nevertheless, she felt uneasily exposed, vulnerable.
She waded into waist-deep water. As if cleansing away months of toil and grief, she lathered soap over her exposed flesh. She washed her
hair. With a quick glance to the trees, she pulled the shift over her head, then scrubbed it clean. Leaving the soap and garment on a poolside rock, she returned to the deeper water where she floated on her back.
A dewy ache flowed from her deepest center as the sun touched her wet skin with tender kisses. Suddenly, Tim Andrews invaded her mind. Sculpted lips teasing hers, sapphire eyes pleading. Smooth
hands everywhere they shouldn't be. Her pulse quickened, a lump rose to her throat. With a profound sense of sadness threatening to pull her under, Elisabeth emerged from the water.
Wrapped
in a towel, she spread her laundered clothes over a bush. Looking at the patchwork quilt, she thought, just a nap. I'll feel better then. A sense that an event of magnitude was about to
happen, kept Arakashe's heart beating anticipation day and night as the two warriors followed the zigzag trail of the solitary wagon.
Bored with these secret observations of the scrawny group
of whites, Basukose rode off to scout the area. Arakashe would not leave his hideaway in the willows bordering the creek.
The dark woman came alone to the pool. She was taller than he'd
thought, with wide shoulders and hips. She removed her clothes and he gazed at her full breasts, the sharp inward curve of her waist. Her legs reminded him of a colt's, long and sleek.
Suddenly he felt like a sixteen-winters brave peeking through bushes at the village women indulging in their morning bath. Yet he could not look away from her.
A warbled birdsong interrupted
his study. Basukose was returning. Arakashe trilled a reply, and heard the tune again, closer, higher pitched. Something was wrong.
"Utes," Basukose whispered.
Swiftly and as silently as ghosts, they grabbed their weapons, a pouch of paints, and mounted their ponies.
"There are more than I first counted," Basukose
said after they'd dismounted and crawled to the top of a nearby hill.
From their vantage point they could see without being seen. Arakashe dipped two fingers into his horn cup of black
paint. Starting high on his left cheekbone he drew his fingers diagonally down his face toward his mouth.
"What are you doing?" Basukose said with a worn sigh. "There are too
many. Killing ten or twelve will not save themor us."
"There is a small child" Arakashe began, smearing red paint across his forehead. "The women" Suddenly he felt
his heart stop. Then it began a slow beat of understanding. "She's the one. If she remains hidden...."
He'd not been close enough to see the darkhaired woman's eyes. Yet he knew.
Knew that when she would look into his, it would be with the eyes of his vision's Moon Spirit.
"Father, make their entry into the Other Side swift," he prayed for the whites, again
filling with a sense of bonedeep grief, that mingled with that anticipant fear of fulfilling a long awaited promise. Faroff cries slithered into her dreams. Screams and war cries, terror and
savage glee. A shotgun blasted.
Elisabeth jumped up. The towel came undone, tripped her. She hesitated. She ran for her shift.
The damp material stuck to itself,
twisted. She struggled to pull it down over her hips. She lost her balance and stumbled to her knees. She crawled, pushed herself up and ran. Those wretched cries rallied, ebbed.
At the edge
of the thicket her foot caught under an exposed root, her ankle folded. She sprawled. Ripping pain held her stunned, her vision blurred with reflexive tears. She sucked in a breath, blinked.
Indians, garishly painted and costumed, dashed around the wagon, slicing open the canvas, torching anything that would catch. She saw a savage scoop Kevin--himself howling louder than any demon--off the ground and toss
him to a mounted warrior. A scream lodged in her throat. She tried to rise, to help Kevin. She fell back.
Frantic, she looked to Joseph aiming his gun. He would save the baby! But then an
arrow shot into his back, causing the discharged bullet to fly astray. It caught the warrior's horse in the neck. The sorrel reared. The Indian lost his grip and Kevin dropped to the dirt. Lethal hooves stomped a
frightened dance and the boy cried no more.
Elisabeth's wail was lost within savage whoops. A heathen crouched over Joe. She saw the flash of a knife, then Joe's scalp displayed in a bloody,
upraised hand. Another warrior howled approval, brandishing a waving red ribbon of Amy's hair.
The Indians mounted their ponies. They fled in triumph. Their victory cries faded. Within the
prairie's silence burning wood crackled. A dark tower of funeral smoke ascended to a bleeding sky. For many minutes Elisabeth was insentient stone. Then she imagined she heard their souls calling out to her.
With a desperate lurch, she gained her feet. Something ripped in her twisted ankle. She twirled on one foot like an erratic top wobbling amid the debris, hunting for the baby.
"Kevin!"
A banshee wail flung to the frenzied wind and whirled over the prairie where it echoed off the bewildered hills.
KEVVIINNN…Eviinn…Evinn…vinn…
Bunched and crumpled as he was, he appeared as one of many scattered garments discarded by the Indians. Elisabeth swept him to her
breast. She hobbled to her brother and slid to her knees. Pushing him onto his back, she fell across his chest, Kevin secured between them.
"Joseph---what am I going to do!"
The sun crept away, as if humbled by the massacre it had witnessed. She sat up, dazed eyes scanning the carnage. Blood streaked the white oxen. The tripod sprawled over a tipped kettle,
shattered jars littered strewn household goods useless to the Indians. Bloody scalps had been their goal. A wolf howled. Recalling the earlier howls, her guilty gaze crept to Amy.
Appalled
that she'd done nothing for them in their dying, she would not allow them the indignity of having their battered flesh further violated by the beasts of the night.
She searched the litter,
found a scorched blanket and wrapped the boy. His blood dried on her shift, her hands and face. She set him in the crook of Joseph's arm. She cradled Amy and begged forgiveness. Trembling fingers attempted to close her
eyes, but those sightless eyes refused to relinquish the ruddy sunset.
We're going to die.
A wail, a demon's cry fired from the bowels of the earth, rose
from her soul, long ululating cries that rivaled the wolves' chorus and brought them to silence.
Help me!
she cried to the empty evening and fell to her knees. As if the baby's life lay beneath the blades, she yanked out clods of grass. She raked the dirt with her nails until she'd made a shallow declivity in which to lay the shrouded child. She piled stones from the firering on the mound, the kettle.
Like a mad whirlwind, she spun through the camp picking up a singed sheet, one lace curtain, two filthy shirts. She covered Joe and Amy. She stumbled to the creek and back with stones and
weighed down the coverings.
Such fools she and Gran had been to trust in something so intangible as dreams. Somehow worse, was the betrayal Elisabeth felt in remembering that ancient Indian
she called Old Grandfather who had filled her heart with promises for her future.
He--your destiny--awaits you, Granddaughter. A healing of your long ago past. Yours and his.
With a harsh laugh, her eyes scanned the carnage. He awaits you. That perfect man who would right all the wrongs in her life. Well, He was Death, and He
was hungry. She was all that remained. A final course, sweet dessert. Tears rolling down her cheeks, Elisabeth limped back to the pool.
Arakashe raced back to the thicket. He could not allow her to enter the massacre!
But already it was over, almost as swiftly as it had begun.
Watching the white woman spin through the ruined camp, his chest ached, remembering his own anguish in senselessly losing loved ones to an enemy. Witnessing her rip out a shallow grave for the
child, his hands itched to thrust into the earth to spare her the pain.
She stumbled back to the pool, and his legs trembled with need to support her under the weight of weariness and grief.
Through his screen of willow branches, he watched her stride into the water where she bent and scrubbed the blood off her arms and hands. She lost her balance and fell sideways. Gaining her feet, she looked down at her
clinging garment, the blood stains that had recouped their red brilliance in the water. Then she threw back her head and a cry shot from her throat to pierce his heart.
Even so, he saw the
way her garment clung like a transparent veil to her body, the dark points of her breasts, the shadow between her thighs. His heart beat with the force of a hundred war horses. His gut twisted in a knot that would take
a moon of suns to undo. Shame burned him at the fire stirring in his loins, the desire so sudden and raw his thighs shook. The woman was suffering! He needed to see her eyes, see into her soul.
Emerging from the water, she yanked the wet garment over her head and tossed it over a low cottonwood limb. She stooped for another dress and pulled it over her head. Sitting on her blanket, she
stared at her scattering belongings. She picked up a looking glass. For a moment she gazed at those features he so longed to study, then she dropped the mirror to the blanket as if it had scorched her fingers. Then,
almost in slow motion, she reached for a small dark object by her foot. He watched her twist it, tip it. She touched a finger behind an ear and trailed it down her neck. Then she listlessly repeated the motion
down the other side of her throat.
Arakashe smiled in recognition when she took a white man's book of written symbols into her hands. His curiosity stirred in watching her mark in the book
with a writing stick, then pause to wipe a tear from one cheek. She closed the book and lay it by her hip. Her chest swelled with a sigh and her hands went to the back of her neck, where her fingers fanned out her hair.
Closing her eyes, she lay back, arms by her sides, palms up, fingers curled.
Arakashe wondered how she would react, respond to him, after having just witnessed her people's slaughter by red
men. But she had no choice. She was the lone survivor. She now belonged to him.
He warbled a song to Basukose biding upstream. He parted the branches and moved silently to stand above her.
Wake up, Granddaughter. It is time.
Weary, Elisabeth opened her eyes.
Indian!
Her breath caught
in her throat, locked around her heart. Elisabeth scrambled back. The painted savage loomed down and a whimper scuttled up her throat. The heathen locked his fingers onto her upper arms and hauled her to her feet. Pain
tore through her ankle. Her leg jerked up, tipping her off balance into his buckskincovered chest. She yelped and wrenched back. His fingers gripped tighter, forcing her still, inches from the pungent smell of his
shirt. The aroma she'd once so loved in Old Grandfather.
Painted Indian's out for killin'! Hobbie Sears crowed in her mind and Elisabeth looked away from that painted mask. She leaned
back. The Indian pulled. His right hand released her arm, moved for her face. Such long fingers. Long and lean and strong and she imagined them closing around her throat. Squeezing her eyes shut, she turned her face
aside.
The Indian grasped her chin. "Dictawice."
His voice was unexpected, deep and quiet. She shuddered and moaned, straining to pull from his
touch, his scrutiny.
"Dictawice," he repeated, and then again, "Dictawice!"
Elisabeth's eyes flew open. She heard his sharp
breath and drew in her own as eyes so black they seemed onyx shone through those ghastly slashes of red and black and yellow paint. His hands crept hot and damp up the sides of her face. His eyes darted back and forth
to hers, hoarsely whispered words coming from his throat.
His fingers spread through her hair to the back of her head, a light pressure drawing her closer. She realized with awful finality
that while her family fed the wolves, she'd be the feast for this savage's lust.
"No." She retreated two steps. His hands at the back of her head drew her in. His head lowered, that
ugly mask closing in until she felt his hot breath brush her mouth.
"Please," she whispered, to him, to God, "not this...."
She trembled in a
cold sweat. Her teeth chattered. Was it for this she'd spurned Tim, saved her virginity? To have it torn by a monster who'd not appreciate its worth and would then strangle her and take her scalp. "Please…"
The mask retreated, the paint on the forehead and between the brows drew in. He tipped his head. The bright features relaxed, the paint cracking as the skin eased back into place.
"Tsire'sa," he said in just above a whisper.
That voice, almost soothing, so incongruous to the hideously colored face. His large hands on her cheeks
felt unseemingly gentle. He was so tall. His buckskin smell so untamed. He pulled her closer. Her knees buckled.
"Help me…" Her knees touched the ground. A twig snapped under the
left and pierced the skin. He knelt before her, hands tight on her arms. "Sweet Jesus, help me…"
He stilled. Barbarous infidel, the Indian heard her prayer and stopped. He released
her and Elisabeth sat back, lowering her head to her bent knees.
Enough...enough...I've had enough...
"Bi ikya," he said and touched her arm.
"Bi ikya, huu!" He got easily to his feet and drew her up with him. She resisted and he commanded, "Arahuuwa!"
More gruff words tumbled from his mouth,
accompanied by abrupt hand motions ordering her to gather her belongings.
He was taking her with him!
Elisabeth couldn't move. For all she knew he was one of
those savages that had, without reason, slaughtered her family. Sparing her was no reprieve, she was sure. Lurid tales of beatings and rape raced through her mind. She stared at him without breath or beating heart.
The warrior nodded to her clothes on the bush. Authority shot from those coal black eyes. He was so fearsome, so imposing. She knew she couldn't resist. Trembling with fear, and frustration at
her helplessness, she limped away to do his bidding.
She snatched her clean yellow dress from the quilt and pulled it over her head. Slowly, stalling, she folded each laundered garment when
taking it from the bush. Skirt, blouse. Towel.
The damp, bloodstained shift she suddenly twisted and yanked in fury, but the fibers held. She balled it up and shoved it into the bag. Soap,
brush, mirrorshe caught a glimpse of her face in the glass and she hurled the mirror through the air. Hitting a tree trunk, the mirror exploded in glittering shards.
Absolute silence echoed
around them as her gaze dashed over the ground. A gleaming jewel caught her eye. With a kick she sent it flying. She looked straight ahead but glimpsed from the corner of her eye the Indian retrieving the
perfume.
The savage blinked. Wide eyes looked to hers as if to say, this is your aroma.
He shook the bottle, fiddled with the stopper until it
came off. He put a drop of the liquid to his finger and touched it to the tip of his tongue. Grimacing, he wiped his tongue with the back of his hand. Elisabeth felt perversely amused.
Narrowing those glinting eyes, he held out the vial. Her fingers shook when she hurriedly dropped it into the bag.
"Arahuuwa!"
he commanded and began walking away, stopping when she did not follow. He frowned. "Sahpe?"
He waved for her to come on. Elisabeth took a step. He turned, and a tremulous
sigh arose from her heart. She stopped, looked behind, and slowly she turned to the path.
Charred ruins, the wagon leaned above a broken wheel. Wind whistled low, unearthly tunes through the
burnt frame. Feasting coyotes gamboled over the oxen. Elisabeth snapped her head to her loved ones' raised grave. She clasped a hand over her mouth and whirled away. She'd not helped them in their deaths and now she
would abandon them to the wolves.
The savage at her side touched her elbow. She faced him in profound misery.
"Diru t'atsisahimahtsiky,"
he said as if trying to reassure her of something. "Huu, di awakuawimahtsiky."
The painted red man took her arm and led her into the shadows. |
