“It was a fine day,” Da said.
Victor nodded and turned to watch Da whose eyes were focused on a hawk, a locust hawk, its wings tipping back and forth as if it were off balance. Da grimaced and Victor noticed for the first time that Da had not been wearing his hat and that the color of his skin now matched Victor’s. “Was everything in your diary true?”
Da turned to Victor now with this look of concern or perhaps it was compassion, upon his face. “I didn’t write in it to tell you lies.”
But indeed, when Victor woke the next morning and found Ma gone, he felt everything had led to a lie.
“No note? She simply left?” Victor ran down to the lake, back into the woods, then climbed up onto the hills to the east and to the north and to the west. When he returned, Da was there at the post’s door, his hands buried in his pockets, his face sallow, looking at him as if Victor should have known better than to expect a woman like Ma to stay.
Victor thought of the days before, tried to remember if there was anything different in her eyes. He remembered only that Ma had reminded him of what she said on their way to Da’s post: “The job of the child is to fight—to always fight for Breath. She is your mother.”
But Victor didn’t want another mother.
Victor ran to saddle Caleb. He would find Ma and bring her back. She could not have gotten far. He would convince her that his sisters would be well taken care of by the women of the clan, that Edward Rose and so many others loved them, that he—Victor—was the one who needed her most. But when Victor rounded the corner, Caleb was missing. And only Martinique was there.
“This is the note she left for you,” Da said.
5
1832
Martinique foaled toward the end of winter. And by spring, her filly was strong and lean and lovely. Victor had been angry he could not follow Ma the morning she left, but the risk to old Martinique seemed too great.
But now, Victor had the filly.
He broke the girl early and the two were inseparable—Victor and the pony he named Trinidad. He took her for long rides, practiced for their arduous journey back to Bighorn, and during their days alone, Victor thought often of how life would be when he returned to camp. What would it feel to live there again, to live among people who had known him as a boy, who had made offerings for him to grow into a brave man? What would they think of him now? Victor felt he knew the answers to such questions, felt that he would still be loved, for he knew now that home was something that couldn’t be denied him; home was not one place but rather it was one experience after another, one memory after another that left one feeling as if one had become more of who one was to become. And Victor understood he had been a fortunate young man after all. He’d been a young man of many homes.
Of course, Victor hadn’t come to such thoughts in one day, but rather he’d come to them over the nearly two years he’d been at Kullyspell, most especially after Ma left, when he began seeing her in his dreams, when he realized that Ma’s love showed in her leaving Victor to care for the things she cherished most—Da, Martinique, himself. And that in her absence, Ma had given Victor the chance to become the man he was to be.
Then one afternoon, after running Trinidad up into dry bluffs and down toward Pack River, Victor returned home to the post to see the backside of a packhorse being ridden by a hunched man. A man he was certain was Apsáalooke. Victor thought to go after him, for surely it must have been someone he knew, but Da was seated at the table with the door ajar, a cup of his mash next to him, with this look, this woundedness upon his face, as he upheld a sheet of onionskin. He held it up for Victor to see, saying something about the chiefs having sent it for him.
“Why would they write?” Victor said. “Tell me what he said to you, not what’s written.”
Da paused as though he wasn’t sure he should, as if perhaps he was uncertain what would become of Victor after the telling, and Victor felt then that something was terribly wrong, for he and Da had had too many words between them for this sort of silence now.
“Edward Rose was returnin’ home,” Da started. “He took some men cross the Rockies and traded with a small band of Sahnish. Under the cover of night, two Dutchmen in Rose’s expedition doubled back to the Sahnish camp and took a young girl’s innocence. Weeks passed and Edward aint knowed nothin’ about this. He’d collected his pay and had sent the men off, down toward Osage. Rose was three days from home when him and his men, includin’ a man named Glass, who was ill with fever, noticed some Sahnish advancin’. They hid themselves. Found a ledge of rocks, piled up more stones and some branches, givin’ themselves a real advantage, ’til them Sahnish tried to attack from the top of the ridge.
“With their water dwindlin’, one of Rose’s men escaped. When he got back to camp he told Rosa that it’d been Edward Rose who’d fell ill, and your Ma told the chiefs that she couldn’t let Edward die alone.”
Victor felt his breaths heavy now and to calm himself, began drawing circles with the tip of his boot into the wizened floor boles.
“She rode off with a hundred Crow, and by the time they got to the junction of the Milk and Missouri rivers, it was late mornin’. They found the Sahnish still levelin’ fire at the ridge, and so the Crow attacked while your Ma, intendin’ to rescue Edward Rose, rode ’cross the top of that ridge.”
Victor pressed himself forward, over Da, as if to make his presence known, as if that would keep Da from saying what Victor did not wish him to say.
“She didn’t understand that Edward Rose and Glass had taken days of fire from that exact spot. She was low, so as not to be a target for the Sahnish, but when she called out to Edward Rose, him and Glass ain’t hear her. But they seent somethin’ and leveled fire. And she fell from her spooked mare like a great tree.”
Victor heard the grunt beneath his own breath but didn’t know it’d come from him. He told himself that many had taken shots to their bodies, many had lived well past their injuries, and he looked again to Da, hoping there was more for him to tell, relieved when Da continued.
“When Edward realized what they done, he scrambled up, lifted your Ma into his arms …” Da cleared his throat, and Victor pictured Father with all his bigness, all his valor, carrying Ma. She would be safe with Father, he thought. Ma had told him so. She had told Victor that Father had been her anchor, that he had given her a place to hope again, given her a home again. “Edward Rose took seven Sahnish arrows to the back and tumbled down with Rosa onto the earth.”
This time Victor knew the grunt was from somewhere inside him, in some dark place where it had lived, waiting for the terror to be enough to take away Breath. Victor wished to ask Da to finish the story, but there were only grunts, with barely a lungful between them. And so the silence caused Da to look away, caused Da to consider the fireplace, dead and cold; consider the three plates, the three cups, the three chairs.
I should have been with her is what Victor thought but could not say. He didn’t know he’d never see his Ma again. Of course. If he had known, he might have done something simple and childish like smell her sweet-scented skin or stroke her face or watch her full lips move with each word. Victor wondered if his friends—if Lone-bull, if Fire-Bear, if the other boys—had been part of the fight to save her. And if so, he wondered if they had thought of the bighorn sheep, if they remembered the day they’d tempted fate. Victor knew that even if they had, his friends would’ve fought with honor and Victor wished for little else but that he’d been there, beside them, fighting fate, fighting for Father and Ma.
“Some of the men say your Ma wasn’t dead when they pulled her from Edward Rose’s grip. That they brung her back to camp with life still in her and that when she got there she spoke to her girls. But only them girls and the other women in the lodge know this for sure. And they won’t tell, saying that Rosa Rendón was a woman who wished to speak her own story. That she would not want them to put an end to it.”
Da dropped his face to hide his tears, and Vic
tor took the paper from him.
Cut Nose felled by Sahnish near River Missouri. Rosa traveled with warriors to retrieve him. Died before she returned home.
“‘Died before she returned home.’” Victor found the words there atop the grunts and the barely there breaths. Yet, as he read them aloud, he felt nothing more profound in the letter than in the anguish that had already darkened his heart.
Twenty words. Meaningless. For Ma and Da had already given Victor her story. Ma had already given Victor herself. He’d had her. All his years. And yet, as he stood next to Da, staring out the open door at pinkish clouds, Victor couldn’t help but feel as if all the hours with Ma had made no difference at all, for her absence felt as large as the biggest Bighorn sky and the emptiness seemed to have aged him years for each second since he learned that he’d never again feel her fingers working strands of his hair, never again sleep beside her, feel her warmth, and glimpse her as she watched him, watched him as though she’d harnessed all that love from that home she’d left behind and set it right there inside of him, wishing only to look at it, wishing only to look upon him.
“‘Died before she returned home,’” Da whispered. “Home.”
Victor sat down, for his big toe tingled, and he placed his head on the table, remembering the first time Ma fed him there. Fish broth from an Ocean Woman. An Ocean Woman from a faraway land.
“She had to change so many times. Maybe even death is only a change for her.” Victor mumbled this inside the crook of his arm, as he hoped to make sense of it before the grief began to eat. “Sepanee.”
What else was there to believe of this woman? A woman like Ma fights on, yes?
“We gotta go,” Da whispered.
Victor saw Da’s sights set on the door where his saddlebag rested. Victor noticed now new lines in Da’s damp face, deep shadows beneath his eyes, a more silvery silver in his hair.
“Where to?” Victor wiped his eyes.
Da put his hand to Victor’s chest so Victor could feel the words. “If they are yours, if they are Crow, if they are Edward Rose’s, them girls is still hers, and so they’re mine too,” he said. “We is we.”
Creadon Rampley would have written those three words on the final page of his diary if they had not left just then.
Acknowledgments
Only a divine being could have given me this novel when I felt so in need of it. The day it arrived, I was very low and beginning to think I might never write a story worth reading again. And so I thank God for the gift of this fully formed story, for the gift of renewals, of which I have had many.
I’d like to give special thanks to those who make this writing life possible. To my mother, Jen, who by all accounts was my first love and to my Dad who always knows exactly the words to say to keep me writing, even when I don’t feel I can. To my children, Sage and Ava—you are each uniquely magnificent and I can’t tell you how much I look forward to every day with you two, despite the chaos. To Anand, for a deep and restorative love. Sometimes I marvel at us. To my sister, Halcyon, who knows how to evoke the most perfect giggles when I need them most. Thank you to my in-laws, Anita and Khem Sharma, for your support and nourishment, and to my trio of sitters, Johanna Lopez, Nia Smith, Taylor Forbes, for being the big sisters and aunties my girls needed. Thank you to my friends, Tanisha Brown, Tricia Bent-Goodley, Tebogo Skwambane, Raqiba Bourne, Cathy Goldwyn, and Amanda Bastien for your love and encouragement. Real friendship seems a dying art but you all make me still believe. Thank you to Elizabeth Nunez for giving me some new tools to put in a toolbox I almost forgot I had. Thank you to Bernice McFadden for taking my calls and offering your story as a reminder of purpose. Thank you to Dolen Perkins-Valdez and Tiphanie Yanique for offering me a seat at the table. Thank you to those who gave their time to make this story the best it could be, including Andrea Perry Webber, fellow carpool mom whose phenomenal researching talents brought this book to life; Scott Bear Don’t Walk, who held my virtual hand through the scariest parts of writing about a community that I hoped to honor in my depiction; Jade and Chaz Bends for those extraordinary and magnificent hours on your mountain; Tim McCleary and the library staff at Little Big Horn College; Margaret Ball, for slapping my wrists for the love of horses; Renata and Antonio David for your command of languages; Mat Johnson, Renee Sims, and Peter Ho Davies for your time and assurances. Any and all errors in this book are mine alone. Thank you also to my beautiful and bad-ass agent, Victoria Sanders, for your love and support, and to all the women in her agency, most especially Diane Dickenshied, Bernadette Baker-Baughman, and Jessica Spivey. Also to Benee Knauer and Gilda Squire, both of whom I was happy to have with me on another journey. To my editor, Amy Hundley—thank you for loving this story and for all your hard questions and careful attention. And to all those at Grove Atlantic who’ve been behind the scenes championing this book, with a special shout to Deb Seager, Kaitlin Astrella, and Savannah Johnston. I wrote much of the first draft of this novel at MacDowell Colony—I can’t thank them enough for making the kind of space that allows for deep extended artistic dives. Thank you to Jen Grotz, “Queen of Bread Loaf,” for being a wonderful mentor and friend whom I get to work alongside while we do work that I believe is crucial to our art. And thank you to all my readers who sent encouraging emails and messages, reminding me that you were patiently waiting. I hope you enjoy.
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