“It is good to see new faces banding with Peter,” she said, her voice as thick as molasses. “He needs more children on his side, more who are aware of their choices.”
Rosemary eyed all the strange jars and pouches that littered the floor of the teepee and hung from indefinable places above. “Growing up is a choice, isn’t it?”
“In more ways than one,” Old Willow answered. “After all, even if you do choose to age, that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to grow up. Here, my daughter, give the bones a shake and let us see what they say about you.”
Rosemary remained happy, but Gwen could see gears turning in her mind now. She was as pensive as an eight-year-old could be as she considered bigger questions than most children were ever given a chance to answer. She took the leather bag and shook it, jostling the dry bones within. Rosemary handed the bag back to Old Willow, who dumped it out between them on the blanket. Gwen watched, her eyes panning over every chunk of bone and the strange symbols etched on them. Like uneven dice, they fell and settled, waiting to be read.
“Mmhm.” Old Willow sighed. “What an interesting life you will lead, Little Jackrabbit. Let no one discourage you or sway your decisions. Your heart is the purest of those around you, which will guide you smartly, even as you surround yourself with others more knowledgeable or even more quick-witted.” Old Willow touched the bones tenderly, prodding them without moving them. The two that had fallen farthest from the rest of the pile were of particular interest to her. “I have never seen this blessing bone with this curse bone before. It is uncommon that these two should go together…”
“Curse bone?” Gwen asked, concerned for her younger sister.
“Everyone has a curse, and everyone has a blessing,” Old Willow said. “We walk through life with the good and the bad. There is no escaping the reality that both find us.”
Equal parts timid and bold, Rosemary asked, “What’s my curse?”
“Yours is the curse of a long life,” Old Willow replied, her voice serious but not dark. “Everything you know now will someday change, and everyone you love will someday be gone. Your life will fill you up with memories, some of which will be very hard for you to carry.”
Rosemary considered this, her little lungs breathing deeply as she contemplated the prophecy. Gwen watched fear creep into her little sister’s body, and then a shudder ran down her own spine as she listened to Rosemary’s young voice form the question, “Are people I love going to die?”
Old Willow had frightened her with reality, and now tried to comfort her with it as well. “Everyone dies, Little Jackrabbit, everyone… but yes, that is something you will come to know for yourself.”
“What’s her blessing then?” Gwen asked, her voice betraying how desperately she wanted to move away from this subject. Was Rosemary going to outlive her? Was that part of what Old Willow was communicating? Gwen suddenly envisioned her little sister as an old woman, burying her, growing older than Gwen would ever be…
Fortunately, Old Willow had that answer ready. As the fatty candles trickled down and cried wax, they illuminated the medicine woman’s face. “You will die—and live—without regret.”
“Huh,” Rosemary mused, looking at the bone Old Willow’s squat finger pointed to. It looked like a finger bone, etched with a symbol like the sun.
“Few people, let alone anyone who lives as long as you are destined to, can claim that. Your life will be long, but it will be good, Little Jackrabbit. Make your own choices, and you will stand by them until the day that you die.”
“Wow.” The word escaped Rosemary like a whisper, but it was a quiet exclamation.
Old Willow reached down past the collar of her leather dress and pulled out a long necklace that hung around her wrinkly neck. It contained on its black leather chain a single, turquoise pendant. “Take this, my daughter,” she said, placing the jewel around Rosemary’s neck. Rosemary graciously accepted it, immediately grasping the bluish gem in her hands, feeling its smoothness and admiring its aquatic color. “I am old, and I will be dead someday, but you are young and will live countless moons. Keep life in that gem, and tell the story of the redskin who gave it to you so that people do not forget that we were once a great people, too, on this land.”
“Oh my gosh, thank you so much.” Rosemary threw herself to her feet. “I’m going to go show Peter. Oh my gosh, this is so cool… redskin jewelry!” She took off in a gleeful fervor, racing out of the teepee without so much as a goodbye. Her head was buzzing with what the Medicine Woman had told her.
Gwen snickered at her sister’s enthusiasm, having no other response to it. She felt slightly uncomfortable to be left in Old Willow’s company alone, forced to face her scattered bones on her own. The redskin woman was piling the bones back into their leather bag, still kneeling on the blanket just in front of Gwen. Once finished, she reached over to a wooden chest and began sifting through its contents.
“I notice you flinch at that word,” Old Willow remarked. “You don’t like to hear voices say ‘redskin,’ do you?”
“I was taught it was inappropriate.”
“In the world you come from, yes. Things are much more complicated over there, aren’t they?”
“Terribly.”
Old Willow pulled a pipe out of her wooden chest. As she sat across from Gwen, she lit it and began smoking. After a few puffs, which she seemed to find deeply relaxing, she extended the long pipe and offered, “Would you care to join me?”
“No, thank you,” Gwen replied, shaking her head to communicate how totally she did not want to share in whatever Old Willow was smoking.
Old Willow did not seem offended, which relieved Gwen. “May I ask why not?”
For once, Gwen didn’t go out of her way to be tactful. “It smells bad.” Old Willow threw her head back and laughed, blowing smoke out of her mouth as she did so. Gwen felt compelled to reinforce her excuse. “I don’t really like—er, I don’t have an interest in—smoking anything or, you know… doing drugs.”
Old Willow grinned, her white teeth beautiful against the vivid colors of her painted face. “You really are still a child, aren’t you?”
Had it been said under any other circumstances, Gwen would have taken it as an insult, but here… Old Willow announced it as though Gwen had just proved her character in the best way possible.
“Children are so straightforward. They know better than to get involved in what is openly unattractive to them. And they are not yet so disillusioned with the weight of the world that they seek to relieve themselves of it.”
“Do you wish you were still a child?” Gwen asked.
Old Willow put the pipe aside. “At my age, everyone does.”
Gwen didn’t doubt it. She thought that adults were always envious of youth. She suspected that was the reason so many adults were such bullies with their authority. Jealousy, plain and simple.
Gwen rephrased her question. “Do you regret growing up?”
The medicine woman picked up the bag of bones again and began playing with it in her hands, slowly tossing the old bits and turning them within their cloth. “It is not for redskins to remain children. This land does not give us that gift as it does you. It was not a choice for me to grow up. But if you’re asking whether I would have remained a child if I could have… certainly.”
Old Willow’s answer would have been melancholy had she not been so peacefully resigned to the reality of her circumstances. Gwen thought about her own childhood, the time before she had started growing into her present sense of teenage identity. She had not wanted to remain a child at that time, but she had not wanted to grow up either. Childhood was all she had ever known, and Gwen mistakenly believed at that time that nothing could ever seriously change… but how things had! Nothing, no game, no belief, no attitude she’d had in childhood had been left untainted by adult perceptions and expectations. “I used to play cowboys and Indians all the time when I was little,” Gwen said. “Now I don’t even feel comfortable l
istening to the others say redskin.”
Old Willow looked at her tranquilly. “What is your question?”
Gwen refocused, trying to find the train of thought that was lurking behind her words. “How did I lose that?” Gwen asked. “Why did I have to, and how is it all still here, untouched by everything that taught me it was wrong to play cowboys and Indians?”
Gwen had been bottling so many feelings and thoughts since she arrived in Neverland, afraid to share them with Bard or Peter, lest she appear too grown-up for their liking. The truth of the matter was that she was thinking like an adult though, in so many respects. She was years ahead of the other lost children, and that had brought far too many shades of grey into her life. Once, she resented that Peter had come to take Rosemary away. Now, her only regret was that he had not come and taken them both away sooner. As thoroughly as Gwen enjoyed Neverland, she felt that some of its magic was lost on her, and forevermore would be.
“You already know the answer to that,” Old Willow replied. “Girls like you… they never ask questions they don’t know the answer to.”
Gwen would worry about deciphering the logic behind that remark later. In the meantime, she acknowledged its truth. Deep inside of her was an answer, and Gwen began speaking in the hope that if she tried long enough to articulate it, eventually she would.
“You redskins are like the mermaids and the fairies… you’re not real. Not back in the real world. You’re just this fictional, romanticized version of a real culture of people who mostly have the short end of the stick these days. But it’s like everyone’s so afraid of you because you are more real than mermaids and fairies and magical creatures….You’re nothing like Native Americans, but a little like their history, and that inbetweeness of real and make-believe scares people. Like we’re going to forget the difference between real Native American people and the Indians in our western movies.”
Old Willow nodded. “There is a time and a place for everything, and if there is no place for redskins in what you call ‘reality,’ then this is where we will be… until they choke us out as well. There are those who would not have us even exist here. People think that only the serious is important. They forget how essential it is to remain whimsical.”
“Is that what Peter is fighting for?”
“Peter is fighting for many things,” Old Willow answered. “Because he knows what he believes.”
Gwen curled up on the rug, hugging her knees to her chest. She envied Peter’s confidence and whimsy. The world was simple for him, and he had all the answers his heart desired. “Some days, I don’t even believe what I know,” she confessed.
Old Willow’s smile was soft and subtle, but her eyes remained hazy and strange. Gwen seemed to be able to prompt nothing from her unless she asked a direct question. Even then, she didn’t know how much sense Old Willow’s answers made… or whether it mattered that things didn’t make sense when she was sitting in a teepee in Neverland. Gwen realized there was sometimes very little correlation between whether something made sense and whether it was true.
They could still hear the drumming and chanting at the fire. Gwen was growing tired, and was overcome with the desire to creep into a cozy bed and sleep away all of her doubts, exchanging them for the lighthearted dreams everyone around her seemed to be living. Before she did so though, she knew she could not leave Old Willow’s tent without a few more nebulous answers for her to consider. Straightening the headband Dark Sun had given her, Gwen sheepishly asked, “Will you throw my bones, too?”
Old Willow’s face remained passive as she handed Gwen the leather pouch. Feeling as though her fate were in her hands for a brief moment, a sense of power filled Gwen as she shook the bag and jostled the ancient bones. When she handed it back to Old Willow, the medicine woman dumped them out between them and watched them scatter.
They fell simply… except for one. It was rounder than the others—it must have been, to roll so quickly and so far—unevenly running to the edge of the blanket as if trying to flee its brother bones. They watched it, not daring to interrupt its course, and glanced at each other for an explanation once it had finally come to a stop. “Which bone is it?” Old Willow asked. Gwen cautiously crawled over to pick up the stray bone, but by then, Old Willow had already searched the bones and answered her own question.
Gwen picked it up between two fingers, not wanting to touch it any more than she had to, and set it gently down in front of Old Willow. “This one,” she softly answered.
Old Willow didn’t need to look at it. “You are very different from your sister. Similar though you may seem, you have very different spirits. Your heart is too confused, and following it will lead you to conflict. Whatever decision you make will bring with it untold chaos.”
“Is that my curse?”
“Your curse rests within that. Follow your heart, and it will break. You are not your sister. You will make terrible decisions, which will ultimately bar you from all that you want and seek out. Acting on your heart will defeat you.”
It was a wretched condemnation. How had Rosemary left with such a small curse as to merely know she would live many years beyond her time? This was so much worse… to think that every time Gwen felt confident in herself, she would be on the verge of making a terrible and regrettable mistake? She wished she had never let Old Willow throw the bones for her.
“So every time I follow my heart, I’ll know I’m dooming myself?” Gwen was bitter with the woman now.
“Oh no,” Old Willow replied, sparking a hope which she then immediately crushed, “because you will never know if the choices you are making are really in line with your heart’s desires. Should they be, then yes, you will thwart yourself with them… but you will not know.”
Gwen felt her spirits sinking as though they were a physical thing, pulling all her blood and warmth down with them. “Then what’s my blessing?” Her voice had become sardonic, thinking that no blessing could make up for such a curse.
Old Willow held her eyes with an iron-fast intensity, which caused Gwen to look away, down at her own pink toes. The thick, warm voice of the medicine woman spoke. “You will always be happy.”
She looked up, utterly confused.
Old Willow smiled at her naivety. “There is a tremendous difference between what you want and what will make you happy. But you will never be able to judge the difference through the haze of confusion that haunts your heart. All you will know, when all is said and done, is that you are happy.”
Gwen did not know how to feel about that. It made it sound as though everything she did, all that she worked for, would be utterly in vain. She would never get what she wanted… Was the solution then to stop wanting? To just let the future take her where it would? That was impossible, Gwen knew, if only because she was a sixteen-year-old girl. Desire was inescapable, and choices abounded. As if the nebulous nature of decisions and their consequences were not convoluted and unknowable enough, Old Willow reminded Gwen that her heart beat a paradoxical rhythm. Even as it contracted with one desire, it was certain to relax with another. If someone cut her, surely indecision would pour from her veins in place of blood.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, standing up.
“There is something more here,” Old Willow remarked, prodding the little bone fragments. Gwen couldn’t help herself. Although she did not sit back down, she waited for the old woman to tell her the last detail of a future she did not want to know, let alone live. “I see two others, deeply knit into the fabric of your future. They are a boy and a man… both of whom you will love.”
Gwen stared at her. Old Willow was giving her a chance to walk away with only that much information. The old woman’s eyes betrayed greater knowledge, and Gwen could not resist the temptation to question what more was knowable about her future. “And?”
“One will stand beside you until the day you die. The other, you will lose forever.”
Gwen towered over the grey-haired woman, but felt small as Old
Willow’s eyes held her with such confident ease.
Gwen swallowed, finding her voice. “And you already know which one is which.”
Like a statue, Old Willow did not need to gesture or speak in order to affirm Gwen’s suspicion. The girl’s remark was just that though—a remark. There was no question in it. Old Willow would not give the answers for questions that went unasked, so she remained silent and seated as Gwen bid her goodnight.
She turned from the woman, but did not look back for fear the redskin elder would see her quivering face, even as Old Willow gave her parting words, “Lily on Fast Waters, that is who you are, my daughter. A blossom caught in a chaos of a conflict that exceeds her. Goodnight, Lily on Fast Waters.”
Gwen bit her lip and snuck out of the tent, throwing herself into the rich smell of the campfire and nightfall. The scent of Old Willow’s incense and pipe stayed with her, as if clinging to her skin the way the bone’s prophecy clung to her heart.
The children were scattered, no two of them focused on the same thing. Jam threw more kindling into the fire without reason, and Bard had usurped the drum, now banging on it as an amateur musician. Even Newt and Sal had broken away from each other to etch shapes in the dry dirt and run around teepees.
Rosemary, however, was curled up near the fire in a beautiful woven blanket. Wrapped up like a little inchworm, she seemed to have fallen asleep beside the enticing warmth of the fire, using her poofy hair as a pillow.
Gwen walked over to her little sister and put a hand on her back, rubbing the way that their own mother used to when the girls were going to sleep in their beds. Ages and ages ago, their mother had stopped doing that for Gwen, but she could still do it for Rosemary.
The girl stirred and looked up endearingly at her big sister. “Hey, Rose,” Gwen said, wanting nothing more than to gaze at the familiarity and love in her eyes.
The Neverland Wars Page 15
