by Kaki Warner
She rotated houses each week, which meant they could all enjoy a good Sunday meal. Today, Katse’e and the Abrahams would ride from the church in the Rylanders’ big four-wheeled carriage. Thomas would walk, as he usually did. No Dog Soldier would ride in a carriage.
That early spring Sunday was a good day. A light breeze from the west might push rain clouds over the mountains later, melting away the last of winter except for the snow on the highest peaks, but for now, it was sunny. He enjoyed having earth beneath his feet and silence in his ears.
He arrived late because he had stopped to watch a herd of wapiti—or elk, as the whites called them—drift out of the trees to graze the new grass sprouting across the flats between the church and the new houses built by the Scotsman and Hardesty. When he walked in, every head turned his way.
But not in welcome.
He stopped in the doorway, looking from one troubled face to another. “What is wrong?” he asked when no one spoke.
“Nothing,” Edwina Brodie blurted out, then fled into the kitchen.
“I’d better go help.” Lucinda Rylander thrust her squirming daughter at her husband and hurried after her.
Audra Hardesty and Josephine Jessup looked at each other, then left, too.
Thomas turned to Declan Brodie and waited.
“A letter for Ed came in the mail pouch today. R.D. brought it from the depot. It’s from Pru.”
“She in jail!” Katse’e shouted.
Brodie rounded on her. “No, Lillie, she’s not in jail. She was. But she’s out now.” He turned back to Thomas, a thin smile on his face. “Seems the judge was a staunch abolitionist with a kindness for Negroes.”
Jail?
“She comin’ back home, Daddy! She on her way.”
Thomas did not react. Could not. The words made no sense. Eho’nehevehohtse in jail? Why? Then Katse’e’s other words echoed through his mind.
She was coming back home.
The air went out of him.
Brodie came forward, an envelope in his hand. “Here. Read it for yourself.”
“No.” Thomas stepped back. “I do not want to read it. It does not matter.” He shook his head, not knowing what to say or do. Finally he found his words. “When the meal is over, send Lillian home with the Abrahams.” Spinning on his heel, he walked back out the door.
And kept walking. Retracing his steps past the church. Then the depot. Then turning left through town and following the trail up into the canyon. One step in front of the other, a calm steady drumbeat to the turmoil in his mind.
Home. His wife was coming home.
But not back to him. The letter had been written to her sister, Edwina Brodie. Not to him.
It did not matter. He had put her from his life. She no longer had the power to hurt him.
He hoped that by the time she arrived, that would be true.
It was late when he stopped in front of the Brodie Sunday house on Mulberry Creek, but there was still a light on inside. He walked up the front steps and sank down into one of the two chairs on the porch. A minute later, the light went out, then Declan came onto the porch. Without speaking, he settled his long form into the chair beside Thomas’s.
The late-rising moon cast bright splotches of pale light through the budding cottonwoods along the creek. Thomas watched the moon edge higher, dimming the stars as it rose into the night sky, and thought of the last time he had stood on this porch with Prudence Lincoln.
They had been watching over the Brodie children while their parents went with the Wallaces and Lucinda—Hathaway, then—to the meeting in Denver, where they would cast Heartbreak Creek’s vote for statehood. It was not long after Thomas had rescued Prudence from the Arapaho, and although she knew she was safe with him, he could still see her fear, and feel the tremble of it in her body when he touched her. He had hated to leave her, but needed to go after the others to warn them about evil men who tracked them.
He remembered what he had told her that night before he had left.
When I return, Prudence Lincoln, you will accept me as your heart-mate. You will join with me and become my woman. If you cannot do this, we will part our ways.
She had called him arrogant and laughed softly—a breathless, timid sound like the whisper of wind through the first green leaves in the spring. But despite her fear, she had let him kiss her, and touch her in the moonlight, and feel the beat of her heart beneath his palm.
When he returned two weeks later, it was in the back of a wagon, his body burning with fever from a bullet wound. She had tended him. Kept him alive. And when he was whole again, she had taken him into her body and her heart. But, a month later, in the sacred pool in the canyon, while fire danced above them in the night sky, she had told him good-bye.
That was almost a year ago.
Since then, there had been three other good-byes, and each one had left him bleeding in her wake. It had weakened him. Left him reeling. Their partings had taken so much from him he had little feeling left. He welcomed that numbness.
“Why was she in jail?” he asked Declan Brodie after a long silence.
“A man she knew disappeared. They thought she might have had something to do with it. Her, and a preacher named Sampson.”
Marsh. I did this to them by killing Marsh. Tension moved through Thomas’s arms and legs, tightened the muscles across his chest. He breathed deep and forced emotion from his mind. “Why did they let her out?”
“Found the man’s body at the bottom of a gorge. No marks of foul play. Figured he fell off the train when they passed over a trestle. Unlucky timing.”
Thomas felt his friend studying him, but did not look his way.
“You do that? He one of the men you killed in Indiana?”
Instead of answering, Thomas asked, “It is over, then?”
Brodie nodded. “Case closed. They let the preacher go, too. Asked them both a lot of questions about an Indian hanging around at the time of the disappearance, but she told them the last she heard, he had gone back to Oklahoma Territory. That’s why she wrote to Ed instead of you. To draw them away from Heartbreak Creek. To keep you safe.”
Pain moved through Thomas’s chest, as if a hand had reached in to squeeze his heart. Keep him safe? Or to pretend he no longer existed. “When does she come?”
“End of the month. Maybe later. Letter said she had some things to clear up at the courthouse in Indianapolis first.”
With Prudence Lincoln, something always came first. As Thomas rose from his chair, it felt as if the earth were shifting beneath his feet. He felt unsettled, his mind more troubled than ever. Did she want him to be here when she returned? Was she coming back to him, as well as the town? Or was she hinting she wanted him gone to Oklahoma by the time she arrived? Did he even have a wife anymore?
He did not know what to think. He did not know what to feel. Or if he should stay, or go. There was that hole she had left inside him, and he doubted even her return could fill it.
He started down the steps.
“What are you going to do?” Declan called after him.
Thomas did not know how to answer, so he kept walking.
Seventeen
“What you mean, you leavin’?”
“I will be gone for only a short time, Katse’e.”
Thomas had already asked Rayford Jessup to take over his sheriff duties while he was gone, and had arranged for Fred Driscoll, who ran the livery, to let Tombo Welks stay in his barn. He had also filled the larder at the Arlan house and asked Curtis to take Lillian to and from school. Now, all he had left to do was convince Katse’e that she would be fine without him.
“Why cain’t I go with you?”
Hearing the wobble in her voice, Thomas pushed his chair away from the eating table and pulled her onto his lap. “You told me poor blind black girls did not sleep outside.”
“You sleepin’ outside?”
“Until I set up my xamaa-vee’e, yes.”
“You tipi?”
“Yes. But this one will be larger and will take longer to make.”
“How you build one of them things?” Curtis asked from his seat across the table. “Looks like it’d fly off in a stiff breeze.”
“It is tied to the ground.”
“What kind of skins you planning to use?” Winnie asked.
Lillian wrinkled her nose. “Skins stinky.”
“If not cured right, they can be.” Thomas explained that since there were more wapiti than buffalo in the area, he would use elk hides and tan them with the brains of the animals he killed. While the hides dried, he would cut and skin many long, slim poles to form a framework. After smoking the hides so they would shed rain and snow, he would stitch them together in a pattern that would cover the poles from top to bottom.
“Sounds like a lot of work,” Curtis said.
“It is. But a good tipi will last many years.”
“How you get it to stand up on its own?”
“You fo’get do, Mr. Curtis,” Lillian reminded him. “How do you gets it stand up.” She gave a prim smile. “Old Lady Throckmorton teaching me to talk right. She say ev’ry time I do it wrong, she’ll poke me with her cane. But my blind stick longer. Next time she poke me, I whack her good. She a mean ol’ bitch.”
“Oh, Lawd,” Winnie muttered.
“Where did you hear that word?” Thomas asked her, even though he could guess.
“Joe Bill. He’s not a Quaker, so it’s okay.”
“It is not okay, Lillian. It shows dishonor to your elder. You will not say it again. And you will not hit people with your blind stick. Did we not talk about that?”
“Maybe. But I didn’t promise, so it doesn’t count.”
Ignoring the couple grinning at him from across the table, Thomas said sternly, “Then you will promise me now.”
“If I do, you promise not to leave?”
“I cannot do that.”
“Then I won’t promise, neither.”
Curtis must have seen that Thomas had reached the end of his tether. “You were saying how you get the tipi to stand up on its own?”
Accepting his latest defeat as a father, Thomas sighed. “Start with three poles. Plant one end in the ground and tie the crossed tops together. Stand up the other poles until they form a circle on the ground.” He went on to explain that before placing the last pole, he would tie one end of the sewn hide to it, then walk the sewn-together skins around the wooden frame, leaving two smoke flaps at the top, and an opening for a doorway. “The entrance must face east to welcome the rising sun, which will bring wealth and good fortune. I will also add a small fire pit inside for warmth.”
“Sounds complicated,” Curtis said.
Thomas shrugged. “Once the hides and poles are prepared, it is easy to set up. Even our women can do it.” At Winnie’s look, he quickly added, “They are better at it than the men and take pride in painting symbols on the sides.” That seemed to ease her anger. Thomas knew better than to offend the woman who cooked his food and kept his house.
Lillian made a snorting noise. “I don’t understand why you do all that when you got this nice, warm house right here.”
Thomas wondered how to answer. “I am Cheyenne, Katse’e,” he finally said. “Sometimes living in this nice, warm house and walking in my grandfather’s shoes makes me forget that. But I do not want to forget. So I am making a place where I can go to find peace and harmony with the earth and sky.”
“You cain’t find that here?”
“Not always.” Glancing over Lillian’s head at the two black people sitting across the table, Thomas gave a crooked smile. Three months ago, he had been a man with few ties to hold him down. Now he had two old people, a horse, a dog, a cat, and a whole town looking to him for protection. He also had a wife who did not want him, a big wooden house he did not build, and a girl-child who confounded him. The Abrahams understood his burdens.
“You promise to come back, Daddy?”
“I will always come back to you, daughter. You know this.”
She grinned at his shoulder, showing the latest gap of another lost tooth. “You bring me a present when you do?”
He tipped his head to see her face. “A necklace of bear claws?”
She rewarded him with a grimace. “I’m thinkin’ maybe a new blind stick.” Leaning forward in his lap, she groped until she found her stick leaning against the table. Waving it like a war lance, she knocked over his cup of water, sent the lid to the butter crock crashing to the floor, and almost poked out Curtis’s eye. “That stinker Joe Bill crack this one with his head.”
Two days later, Thomas traded his white man clothing for Cheyenne leggings, moccasins, and war shirt, strapped his rifle, tools, and supplies on a spare horse borrowed from Rayford Jessup, and rode into the canyon, singing as he went.
* * *
“Such a precious little jewel,” Edwina Brodie crooned, her heels clicking on the floor as she rocked Rosaleen in the Rylander suite of rooms at the hotel. “Don’t you just love cuddling babies?”
Lucinda Rylander yawned. “Not at midnight. Then three in the morning, and again at six.” One uninterrupted night’s sleep. That’s all she wanted. Maybe two. She hardly recognized the haggard face that stared back at her from her bureau mirror, and this morning she had found three white hairs tucked in among the blond. She’d be a crone by the time the precious jewel hit her fifth birthday. And Tait had the gall to ask her if maybe next time they might have a boy. Next time? Was the man demented?
“It’ll get better, Luce, I promise.”
Lucinda ardently hoped so. She remembered how overwrought Edwina had been after baby Whit was born. The prospect of finding herself in such a deep depression would have made her shudder if she’d had the energy.
God must be a man. Why else would He give women childbirth, and breasts, too? It seemed entirely unfair.
“Thomas has wandered off,” Edwina said.
“Where to?”
“Who knows?”
Lucinda heard the peevishness in Ed’s voice and hoped the volatile Southerner wasn’t getting herself worked up. “He’s an Indian. They do that.”
“Well, I don’t like it. First, he won’t talk about Pru, then Pru doesn’t even mention him in her letter—other than that odd reference to an Indian and Oklahoma Territory—and now, just when Pru’s about to come back, Thomas rides off into the mountains to do God knows what. And he never smiles anymore. It’s as if he’s walled himself off from the rest of us and gone back to being the stoic Indian. Something’s not right. Even Declan thinks so.”
Lucinda was too exhausted to dredge up much interest. “They’ll work it out,” she said around another yawn. “They always do.”
“If he actually wants to. What if this time he doesn’t come back? What if he’s done with her?”
“She did send him away every time he went to visit her,” Lucinda reminded her. “No matter what her reasons were, I wouldn’t blame him if he washed his hands of her.”
“Lucinda!” Ed’s heels hit the floor with jarring thump. Lucinda held her breath as the jewel’s eyes popped open, rolled for a moment, then slowly slid shut again. “This is my sister we’re talking about. She adores Thomas. He adores her. We have to do something.”
Lucinda relaxed back into her chair. “I thought we were doing something about Helen and Buster Quinn.”
“Well. There’s that. When will those two realize they’re in love?” Ed resumed rocking, her face thoughtful.
Which didn’t bode well. For all her Southern charm and sweetness of nature, Edwina Brodie could stir up a hornet’s nest faster than anyone Lucinda knew. She was the essence of busybodiness.
“Do yo
u think they’ve . . . you know . . . consummated?” Edwina had lowered her voice, even though the door was closed and no one could have heard her.
The woman was a catalog of contradictions and had the strangest sensibilities and ideas of propriety. But what would one expect from a woman who married a man, sight unseen, then insisted on a three-month courtship after the marriage? “I do not know, nor do I care to know if Buster Quinn and Helen Bradshaw have consummated.” Tipping her head against the back of the chair, Lucinda closed her eyes. “But I think not. Quinn is much too proper.”
“I wonder if Thomas and Pru have.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it. What else would send a man chasing after a woman the way he has?”
“Is that why Tait chased after you all the way from New York?”
“Give me my daughter. Your thoughts are entirely too nasty to be holding an innocent child.”
Lucinda said it without rancor, but she definitely didn’t want to discuss what she and Tait may or may not have done on that train after she’d fled her own wedding . . . back before she’d started sprouting white hairs and her hips had spread with childbearing and her once-perky breasts had become giant leaking teats.
“What if that’s why Pru won’t come back? What if she found herself in a family way and has snuck off to have her baby and leave it on the steps of an orphanage? It happened to one of the McCardle twins. What a scandal that was.”
“Don’t, Edwina. Please . . . just don’t.” Lucinda hadn’t the strength for dramatics, either.
“I could never give away my baby.”
Lucinda had once thought that, too. But over the last two months, she had considered it. Several times. Then Rosie would fall into a milk-sated sleep, and Lucinda would think she was the most wonderful child in the world.
“What’s that?”
Cracking open one eye, Lucinda saw Edwina peering at the crate in the corner. “Something for Thomas.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t open other people’s mail.”
