When Jennie was ready to leave, he would bring her pony to the door, hold his hand for her to step on as she mounted; and he would turn glittering black eyes and grinning face up to her as she gathered the reins to ride away. She had known of Yellow Crest’s punishment; she knew that the full-bloods called the deceiving wife a “singing bird,” with notes to lure others than her mate; and in Lovely Daniel’s eyes she had read an invitation to sing!
When Jim had thrashed the half-breed, she wondered if that invitation would still hold good. The end of her wondering and weighing was a resolve to find out.
Two weeks she waited and planned before riding across Spavinaw Creek, and during that time news of Lovely Daniel drifted to her ears. He had crossed the line into Arkansas with one of the reckless Pigeon boys. They had secured whisky, had rioted in the streets of a border town, had been chased home to the hills by peace officers. The half-breed had brought back a new pistol from Maysville, and up and down the Illinois River and amongst his friends on Flint Creek he had sprinkled ugly threats against Jim. In mid-August, when she knew that he was at home, Jennie rode across to Betsy.
For half an hour, as Jim Blind-Wolfe’s wife made Betsy comfortable in a big chair beside the doorway and put the cabin to rights, Lovely sat on the doorstep digging at its worn surface with a pocket knife, saying nothing. Then he disappeared in the brush, to return presently with his saddle-horse. At sunset, after Jennie had cleared away the early supper dishes and tucked Betsy into bed, he was waiting to ride with her. Eyes lowered, fingers nervously caressing her pony’s mane, Jennie rode in silence. They crossed Spavinaw at the lonely ford, where she had often seen deer come down to drink, and went slowly up the steep, pine-covered slope. Near Jim’s clearing she stopped. Without raising her eyes, she put out her hand.
“Now you go back,” she half whispered. “I see you again.” Lovely crowded his horse close, took her hand, muttered:
“Look up, Jennie, let me see what is in your eyes!” But she turned her head away and answered:
“I am afraid of you, Lovely—good-by.” She pressed his supple, eager fingers, urged her pony forward. He dared not pursue, and turned back; at the ford he whooped, uttering the primitive burst of sound that expressed for him hatred, lust, exultation. His wildcat eyes glowed. Back at his cabin, when he had loosed his hobbled horse to browse in the brush, he sat in the doorway conjuring up pictures of the evil he meant to do Jim Blind-Wolfe and his young and foolish wife. First, he would make Jennie a sinister, branded outcast in the sight of the tribe, and then after Jim had tasted that bitterness he would lay for him. There would be a shot. Someone would find him, a stiffening corpse, beside a lonely road! Until long after the new moon had sunk he sat, at times crooning fragments of old Cherokee songs, or flinging an occasional gay word to Betsy.
At Jennie’s next visit, Betsy sent her brother to the Eucha settlement store for medicine. He had scarcely gone when Betsy called Jennie to her side, looking searchingly into her face.
“You are very dear to me, Jennie,” she said in Cherokee, her hand stroking the other’s face, fever-glowing eyes and a stain of tell-tale red on her thin cheeks emphasizing her anxiety. “Will you promise me that you will be wise, and careful—with Lovely? I do not want to lose you for the little time left to me!”
Jennie put her arm about her friend’s wasted shoulders and leaned to whisper:
“My sister, you will not lose me.”
“But Lovely—he is wild—he is Jim Blind-Wolfe’s enemy—and I am afraid.” Her words were hesitant, but suggestive.
“You are my friend,” Jennie assured her quickly. “What I do will be best for both of us—and Lovely too! You will trust me?”
Betsy nodded, fell quiet under Jennie’s gentle caresses.
Again Lovely rode across the ford with Jennie, rode close, begging for the promise that seemed to hang upon her lips; and before they parted she gave it, in a soft rush of speech:
“That will be hard, what you ask, Lovely, but some time when Jim is not with me I will let you know!” The half-breed’s whoop at the ford punctuated a snatch of song.
Jennie was committed now. She quieted Jim’s vague uneasiness at her visits to the cabin, by emphasizing Betsy’s need of her care and asserting that Lovely’s behavior was correct. By cunning degrees, she led the half-breed to reveal his plan for squaring accounts with her husband—that is, the part involving Jim’s assassination. To Lovely’s passionate outburst of hate she replied crooningly:
“Yes, I know. He hurt you, Lovely!”
By late August, when dying summer had released upon the night myriad insect sounds, above whose clamorous fiddling and chirring casual noises were hard to distinguish, she had stirred Lovely to a very frenzy of impatience. More than the desire of vengeance drew him now. He wanted Jennie for herself. He had sworn to come to her when the new moon was as wide, at the center of its crescent, as the red ribbon that bound her hair. He would come to the edge of the clearing some time before dawn—Jim would be asleep—and twice he would utter the hoot-owl’s cry. She must slip out to him. If she did not, he swore that he would cross the clearing cat-footedly, open the door very slowly and quietly, come in and shoot Jim as he lay asleep. And then—
“Oh, no, not blood!” she cried, fighting desperately to alter his determination. He raved, boasted. She held out, pleading:
“No, no, not blood, in my sight! Wait until I come to you.” As he persisted, she threatened: “If I hear you coming to the door, I will scream and Jim will rise up and kill you!”
Night after night she lay, sleeping fitfully, listening for the double owl cry, straining her ears to catch, above the high-pitched monotone of the insects’ singing, the sound of footsteps in the dead grass. Twice during that time of waiting she visited Betsy and fought off Lovely’s importunate advances with the warning:
“It must be safe—no blood. I will let you know.”
The moon had filled its crescent, was swelling to fullness, before the opportunity Jennie had waited for arrived. Then Jim told her of the coming secret council in his cabin of the leaders of the Kee-too-wahs. They would eat supper and talk all night. She would prepare a pot of coffee for them, set it beside the fire and go to sleep in the out cabin. She weighed the peril, decided, and slipped across to Spavinaw to tell Lovely Daniel:
“Come to the out cabin before dawn, as you have said. Come to the little window that looks toward the creek. Tap, and I will open and say if all is safe.” In a quick upward glance from her lowered eyes, Jennie saw the half-breed’s grin of triumph. Trembling, she sent him back to the ford and his whooping rush up the opposite slope. In his eyes she had read—love of her? Yes; and death for Jim! Lovely’s hatred of the giant who had all but killed him with a blow of his fist had become a crackling blaze in his breast.
Ten days of strain and nights of broken sleep had fined the edges of Jennie’s nerves. She lay quite wide awake now, certain of herself, confident; and now she did not care about the foolish insect noises. She leaned out of bed to place her deerskin slippers at just the spot she desired to have them and hang a warm shawl over a chair where she could seize it with one movement of her hand. Fingers clasped behind her head, she lay watching a little square of starlit and moonlit sky through the window.
A rooster’s crowing announced midnight; a little later she heard Jim’s heavy step on the east porch of the main cabin as he emerged to sniff the fresh air, and then the slam of the door as he went in; she was aware of the pleasantly nipping coolness of the period before daybreak; again there was a stir on the east porch.
Cold, passionless men’s business Jim and his three companions were busy about now. Impersonal, free from individual angers, jealousies, attachments, they sat, like remote, secret gods, in judgment on the conduct of a community, the policy of a tribe. Kee-too-wah tradition, the old conception of tribal integrity, the clean spirit of ancestors who had successfully fought against race deterioration and the decay of morale in the long years o
f contact with the whites in Georgia and Tennessee—these were their preoccupations. They harked back to legendary days, to the very beginning, when the Great Spirit had handed over to the tribe a sacred fire, with the injunction to keep it burning forever; and they strove to keep alive in the minds of an easy living, careless generation the memory of that road of Calvary over which their fathers and mothers had been driven when the then new Indian country was settled.
Jennie could understand but vaguely the purpose which dominated the four. It seemed shadowy, very different from the flaming, heart-stirring enterprise that concerned her! She lay taut-strung, like a bow made ready, thinking, feeling. Soon now, perhaps when the talk in the cabin had thinned and sleep was close to the eyelids of the four, she would hear a tapping at the window. She began to listen, to watch for a shadow at the little opening.
It came. Lovely’s head and shoulders made a blur against the small luminous square; his tapping was as light as the flick of a bird’s wing, insistent as the drumming of the male partridge in spring. Jennie stepped into her slippers, flung the shawl about her shoulders, flitted silently to the window.
She would not let him in at once. She knew the steps which she must take in order to test his ardor, stir him to impetuous frenzy. She knew the privilege of her who turned singing bird to savor the preliminary delights of song! She pushed the tiny sliding window aside a crack and whispered:
“Who has come?” At Lovely’s fatuous answer, she laughed a faint ghost laugh and breathed: “Why have you come?” Then, before he could speak, “no, don’t tell me; wait and let me talk with you here for a time.”
In throaty whispers, only half coherent, the man pressed his suit. Jennie went silent in the midst of his jumbled speeches, so stirred by inner turmoil that she scarcely heard his pleading. Then her trembling voice insisted:
“You must wait a little while longer, Lovely. I am afraid. But I will let you come in before it is light. I promise!” Her shawl was drawn across her face, and as she put timid fingers in his reaching hand he felt them shake. Again, in maddening repetition, she sang the refrain:
“Wait; and tell me once more what it is that you and I will do after tonight. Wait a little. I will not be afraid to let you in after a time.” When he threatened to leave the window and go round to the door, she protested in great agitation:
“No, no. The bar is up against you, and if you rattle the door Jim will hear. He will come and spoil everything. He would—” her voice all but faded in her throat—“he would kill you, Lovely!”
* * *
At length the last note of the singing bird had been sounded, and Jennie answered to Lovely’s frantic entreaty:
“Come now to the door swiftly and silently, in bare feet. Leave your coat there.” She pointed, and stood breathless, watching his movements. He dropped shoes, coat, belt and pistol holster in a heap. With a gasp of relief, she ran to unbar the door.
“Quick!” she urged, pulling him into the blinding darkness. Then, close to his ear, “wait for me here!” She flashed by him, stepped through the doorway, closed him in and reached up to trip the stout greased bar that she had prepared. It slid noiselessly across to engage iron stirrups fixed in the heavy door and the massive logs of the door frame. Clasping her shawl tightly about her body, she ran to the cabin where Jim and his three friends sat in silence, cross-legged in front of the fireplace. She opened the door and called:
“Jim!” He jerked his head up, rose. “Don’t be troubled,” she told the others. “Jim will be back soon.” She shut the door as the great bulk of her husband emerged.
“Quick, Jim, come with me.” She seized his big paw and dragged at it. “Quick! quick!” He followed at a lumbering trot, dazed and uttering fragments of questions. To the back of the out cabin she led him, ran to the dark heap of Lovely Daniel’s clothes, seized belt, holster and pistol and thrust them into Jim’s hands.
“Here, what’s this!” he bellowed. Inside there was the sound of bare feet rushing across the floor, an ineffectual yank at the door, a snarl of disappointed rage—then silence.
“Jim!” His wife was on tiptoe in the effort to bring her lips nearer to his ear.
“In there is Lovely Daniel. He came to kill you, Jim.—Listen, Jim: he came to kill you, do you understand? I knew why he was coming and I—I made him believe I was a—a singing bird, Jim! And he came to me first.—But I did not, Jim—I put down the outside bar that I had fixed, as soon as he came in, and ran to you. —Come and see. Come and see how I fixed it.” She pulled him round to the door, showed him the bar firm in its place. “See, I fixed it so to trap him. You see, Jim?”
A faint glimmer of daylight had come, and big Jim stooped to look into the shining eyes of his wife. His gaze was like a down-thrust knife, cutting clean and deep into her soul. It found there only a turbulent fear for him, a sunburst of adoration that excited in him a surge of primitive joy. He came erect.
“Ah, you Lovely Daniel!” he shouted savagely. “You try to make singing bird out of my wife!” He broke into the old Cherokee killer’s dread warning, the wild turkey’s gobble.
With his hand on the door, and before he could lift the bar, he saw his friends emerge from the main cabin. Old Spring Frog peered round the corner from the east porch. He had heard the turkey gobbler signal! Jim thought swiftly; these men must not know that Lovely Daniel was in the out cabin, where his wife had slept. In a voice forced to calmness, he called to Spring Frog:
“I just now hear a big old gobbler, yonder.” He pointed across the clearing toward the creek. The three returned to their places in front of the fire.
Jim flung up the outer bar, swung the door wide and struck aside the knife-armed hand that leaped toward his breast. The weapon dropped, and Jim grabbed Lovely by the shirt to drag him forth.
“Put on your clothes,” he ordered. With one hand helpless from the force of Jim’s blow, the half-breed made slow progress with his dressing, and Jim had time to think, to make a little plan of his own. With shawl drawn closely about her body and over her head, Jennie stood waiting at the corner of the out cabin, watching the dawn change from gray to pink-shot silver.
Dressed, Lovely Daniel stood still, in a sort of frozen apathy, awaiting he wondered what terrible retribution. Jim grasped his arm, turned his head to speak to Jennie:
“Stay in here until I come.” She disappeared into the shadowy cabin, closed the door, ran to crouch against the thick pillow and the rude headboard of the bed—and waited.
Jim led the half-breed round to the east porch of the main cabin, opened the door and thrust him into view of his friends. They looked up, curious, expectant.
“Ah,” muttered old Spring Frog, “I did hear what I heard!”—Jim’s warning gobble.
“This fellow—” Jim shoved Lovely Daniel close to the cross-legged group—“come to kill me. My wife, she hear him coming and she run to tell me just now.” He fell silent, waited for a minute, then:
“You know this fellow, what I done to him. You know this fellow, how he kill Blue Logan, how he make Yellow Crest outcast woman, how he make Looney Squirrel a man ashamed. —We get rid of this fellow?” The last words were more a statement than a question, but his friends nodded assent.
“Let that be done,” old Spring Frog, staunch Kee-too-wah defender of Indian probity, made a sign; it was repeated by Panther and The Miller. The three rose to stand beside Jim Blind-Wolfe.
Sure of his friends now, Jim’s face framed a smile, a kind of savage radiance. He spoke rapidly for a minute, reached for the brown whisky jug that was a blob of darkness on the wide, lighted hearth—the jug from which the four had drunk sparingly throughout the night. Still smiling, he handed it to the half-breed.
“This fellow like whisky—drink!” Lovely Daniel took the jug, tilted it and drank deep, the Adam’s apple in his lean throat working rhythmically as he gulped the raw, hot liquor. When at last he removed the jug from his lips he shook it to show how little remained. They would not say t
hat he had been afraid to drink! Jim’s smile turned to a low laugh as he spoke to his friends:
“I take this fellow outside now; you wait here for me few minutes.”
The two stepped out to the east porch, facing a fast-mounting radiance that presaged the coming of sunrise. Jim carried the halfbreed’s pistol. He led Lovely Daniel to the end of the porch; they stood in silence, Jim’s eyes fixed on the other’s face. At the edge of the clearing they heard a crow’s awakening “caw! caw!” and the jarring call of a jaybird.
Jim spoke musingly, earnestly:
“Listen, Lovely Daniel: If you want to do that, you can go away from here—clear away from all Cherokee people, and I will not kill you!” Jim’s stunning speech hung suspended, and Lovely’s eyes sought his face; he resumed: “If you go away, it must be for all time. You must be outcast always. You try to come back, Kee-too-wah will know and I will then kill you. You know that?” The other nodded somberly. Jim spoke again, his gaze boring into eyes that wavered: “But I don’t think you want to go away, like that, to stay always, lost man. Well, then?
“Listen: I will tell you one other way. Like this, Lovely Daniel—you can go up yonder, if you are brave man—“solemnly Jim pointed to the crimson-streaked sky—“on the back of the sun! Old Cherokee folks tell about how Eenyans go home to Great Spirit on the back of the sun. I don’t know; maybe so; you can try. —You try?” His face had become stern now, and menacing; he bent close to peer into the drink-flushed face of the half-breed.
Lovely Daniel weighed the alternatives swiftly. Reeling, aflame with the fiery liquid he had drunk, his mind seized upon Jim’s suggestion.
Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers Page 5
