“Horse,” Michael said patiently.
Sunny stepped forward. “Is it okay if I touch him, too?”
“Sure.” He angled his body so she could stand next to them.
The hair was silkier than she had imagined, the flesh warm beneath her palm. She could smell a slightly intoxicating scent of sweat and man, maybe a hint of a spicy soap, but it was hard to tell what was horse and what was human. To Jessie, she said, “Two Moon.”
Jessie made her funny little concentration face. “Who that?” she asked again, making sure.
“Two Moon.”
“Aw. T’Moon.”
Michael smiled. “Smart.”
“As a whip,” Sunny agreed.
“The others are in the corral,” he said, pointing. He carried Jessica easily, and Sunny hung back for a half second, admiring the look of his lean body with plump white baby legs kicking around his back and tummy. Beneath the cloudy skies, he looked as straight and strong and reliable as a tree, rooted deep into the earth.
And as he started pointing to the other horses, she felt herself hanging back for another reason. The outsider reason. Horses were completely alien to her. They scared her a little with their big heads and heavy hooves, and they moved quickly, a little nervously, maybe because of the smoke. Michael told Jessica all of their names and what colors they were—a reddish one was called a chestnut; another a bay. The third was the one who caught Sunny’s imagination, though. “Who is that?” she asked, coming up to the fence.
Michael’s chin lifted, and his eyes softened. “Beauty is her name.”
“Like Black Beauty?”
He nodded, gaze still on the horse.
“It fits her,” Sunny said. The horse was dancing a little, as if enjoying the wind, and the muscles in her body shifted and slid with such smooth grace beneath her shiny black skin that she took Sunny’s breath away. Every inch of her was darkest black—her body and legs and face, even her long tail and mane, blowing in the wind. A strange emotion moved in Sunny’s chest, wonder and awe and something very like a crush on a boy. She laughed and put her hand on her chest. “She’s making my heart race!”
He turned his head, as if surprised, started to say something, then turned back to Beauty. “These are Arabian horses, the oldest and wisest of all the breeds of horses.” In his voice, Sunny heard his passion and respect. “The Bedouins, in the Arabian deserts, bred them and loved them. Imagine,” he said, “how the Indians felt when they saw these creatures for the first time. Maybe one like this, running across the prairie, free and proud. And then they discovered how loyal they were, what wise creatures, and they made them their own.”
“What kind of horses did they have before these?”
He grinned. “Dogs.”
Sunny blinked. “Really? I always thought horses were sort of always here.”
“Nope. The Spanish brought them.”
“What do you think of that, Jessie-girl?”
“Horse!” she said with awe.
Both adults laughed.
“Hey, I know something even better than horses,” Michael said. “Want to see some kittens?”
“I do!” Sunny said.
“C’mon!” Jessie said.
“They’re in the barn.” They walked across the yard, and Michael scanned the sky. “Those look like real rain clouds.”
“There were rain dancers in town yesterday. Maybe it helped.”
“You believe in that?” He paused, his arms clasped around Jessie so easily he looked like her father. “Rain dances?”
Sunny sensed there was more to the question than just simple curiosity. “Maybe. I mean, it’s not much different from a prayer, is it?”
“You believe in prayer?”
“I believe there’s something. Listening.” She stroked her daughter’s dewy arm, remembering the heartfelt begging she’d done late at night in hospital waiting rooms lit with greenish fluorescents. “You?”
His lips turned down the slightest bit. “Maybe. Mostly, I believe in the land.”
“That works.” She smiled up at him. “Probably the important thing is to believe in something.”
He grunted.
The barn smelled of grass—or maybe it was hay—and the light was pale and dusty. He led them to a corner where a Siamese cat nursed four balls of fluff. “They’re four weeks old,” Michael said, bending down to dislodge a furry gray ball. It squeaked at the same moment Jessie shrieked in delight, “Kitty!” and reached for the baby in ecstatic hunger.
Michael gently held the kitten close to Jessie’s tummy, letting her kiss and rub it. “Easy,” he said quietly, and Jessie looked up. “Softly,” he said.
“Shhh,” Jessie said, but she seemed to understand. She kissed the kitten’s head and made a noise of love. “Rock-a-bye,” she sang.
“Yeah,” Sunny said, “it’s such a pretty baby, isn’t it?”
“You can hold one, too, if you want. Been around kittens before, haven’t you?” His eyes twinkled.
“They’re not so exotic, even in cities.” A tubby black one waddled over to her ankle and mewed, and she bent down to pick it up, inhaling the laundry-scent of kitten fur deep into her nostrils. “Ooooh, you are so cute!” It curled up close to her cheek, letting itself be rubbed, and started to purr.
“Who that?” Jessie asked, pointing to the black one.
“He doesn’t have a name.” Michael squatted, putting Jessie down so she could check out the others, now dancing out to see what the excitement was about. He scooped up the mama and tucked her into the crook of his elbow. “This is Ming, and she doesn’t get nearly enough attention now that these rotten babies are stealing all of her thunder.”
“Ming!” Jessie repeated. “Ming!”
He took off his hat and rubbed his head, and Sunny was pierced to see the tenderness—maybe even hunger—on his face as he looked at the little girl playing with the little cats. She shrieked with delight, squatting to look at one, her hands close to her chest, then laughing over her shoulder at him. “Wow!”
He laughed, showing strong white teeth, and it made his eyes crinkle up at the corners. “Man, she’s cute.”
“Miss Charming, that’s for sure. I’m going to have my hands full when she gets to be about…oh…thirteen.”
“Oh, yeah.” He was still grinning as he glanced up at her. Light broke over his high-bridged nose, washed over his angular cheekbones, and Sunny found herself wanting just to stare at him, drink in all the details. He didn’t look away, as if he were noticing things about her, too.
At the moment she would have had to decide whether to look away or be bold and keep her eyes on his, Jessie spied something else in a dark corner. “Ball!” She pointed, and looked hopefully over her shoulder at Michael. “Ball?”
He looked puzzled, then stood. “Even better than a ball.” He took Jessie’s hand, led her to a dry corner where a number of items were stored on a tarp, with a dusty covering over them. One side of the dust cover had come up, revealing a large drum made of animal skins. Intrigued, Sunny stepped closer. There was even a little hair left on the hide, and she wanted to touch it. From Jessie’s lower angle, it probably did look like a ball.
He pulled it out a little, tossed the dust cover aside to scramble on a table in the back for a drumstick covered with hide, and banged. A deep, throaty sound came from it, and Jessie’s eyes widened. She slapped a palm against it, making a hollow noise, and Michael drummed again. Lightly at first, the sound murmuring out of the body of the instrument into the stillness of the barn like a singer warming up.
“Is it yours?” Sunny asked.
He shook his head. “My father’s. I played with him, but it was his, made for him a long time ago by an elder.” As if in memory, his body shifted and he started to drum out a heartbeat-like rhythm with some force, and beside the drum, Jessie started to bounce. He laughed. “That’s it! Dance!” He paused for a minute, reached into the darkness of the stacked items again, and brought out ano
ther stick. Holding out it out to Sunny, he said, “You want to try?”
Here it was, that moment of reaching out or holding back. It seemed she’d lived her whole life on the outskirts of everything, observing the world carefully to be sure she knew the rules of all the worlds that were not her own—which were nearly all of them—before joining in. “I don’t know how.”
“It’s easy.” He held the stick out patiently. “You’ll like it, trust me.”
“Okay.” She accepted his offering and stepped up to the thigh-high drum. “What do I do?”
“Just keep time with me. Don’t be afraid to hit it hard.” He shifted his attention to his hand, caught some internal rhythm and started drumming. Hesitantly, Sunny joined in, and he said, “Harder!” so she swung it and felt the reverberating energy run up her arm into her shoulder. The resonant, deep sound of the drum moved through her, into the room, and Jessie started spinning around, singing a wordless song in time. She watched the tendons in Michael’s forearm tense and relax, over and over, and a breathless excitement filled her chest. She raised her head with a beaming smile, and found him looking at her. He nodded, raised the tempo, gave one last bang and stopped.
“Wow,” Sunny said, and laughed. “That’s amazing.”
“Make you want to shout, huh?”
She nodded. “Thank-you.” Putting the stick down, she tucked her hands in her back pockets and took a step back. Her heel caught something and she managed to stop just in time before stepping down all the way and breaking it. The movement made her unbalance a little, so she was spinning around, tilting to the side, and her knee caught a piece of something and knocked it over. She made a dive for it at the same moment as Michael and their arms laced, his hand landing on hers and they kept the object from falling, but in that split-second, her nose was close to his neck and she could smell that scent again, a hint of spice and sweat and man, and it went right through her, rippling beneath the skin of her forehead, neck, breasts, belly, thighs before running through her feet into the ground.
“Sorry,” she managed, and managed to extricate herself, looking for Jessie automatically, and seeing her with one drumstick in each hand.
“No big deal.” He didn’t look at her as he pulled the thing upright. “I need to get this cleaned up one of these days, decide what to do with it all.”
“Is that a cradleboard?”
He held it in front of him, an oblong shape mounted on two boards fitted with straps. The main part was beaded in a geometric pattern in blue, yellow, red, white and black. “Yeah. It’s pretty old, I think. I know my mom actually used it for me and for the baby who came after me, but he died.”
“How terrible!”
He gave a single nod, braced the cradleboard on a table and touched the beadwork. “I remember him. He was a fat little baby named John.” His fingers moved tenderly around the opening. “He got bit by a rattler when he was two and died before they could get him to the hospital.” He raised his head. “I don’t think either of my parents really got over it.”
Impulsively, Sunny touched his arm. “How ‘bout you?”
“I was only four,” he said without emotion. “I don’t remember it.” But he used care in returning the cradleboard to its place. “Wonder if I could sell it on eBay?”
“That would be kind of a shame.” She dropped her hand. “Maybe you could put it in your house. On a wall or something.”
He lifted a shoulder. “Maybe.”
Sunny sensed an ending to the moment, and stepped away. “Well, I guess we should be getting along. Didn’t mean to eat up so much of your time.”
“No trouble,” he said, pulling the sheet down over the assorted things. “I enjoyed your daughter quite a bit.”
“I’m glad. Jessica, it’s time to go home now.”
“Kitty?”
“No, sorry, we can’t take a kitty with us. They’re too little. They need their mama still.” She turned back to Michael. “Are you going to give them away?”
His smile was kind. “Have your eye on a particular one?”
“Not really. But it might be nice to have a pet. She hasn’t ever had one.”
He nodded. “Think about it. I’d be glad to give her one.”
He walked them out to the car, scanning the sky again as Sunny settled Jessie into the car seat. “That’s more than smoke up there.” He lifted his chin, breathing in. “Smell it?”
Sunny inhaled, and caught just the faintest whiff of rain. “Oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful? It would feel so good. You have that drum—know any rain dance songs?”
He paused, one hand on the door as she straightened. It put their bodies fairly close together, and he didn’t move away. Sunny dared herself not to back away, to meet his eyes. “I might,” he said.
“Go sing it then, Mr. Chasing Horse. I would truly love some rain.”
“Maybe I will.” He hesitated a minute, and for one hot second, Sunny wondered it there might be a kiss in the offering. It seemed as though it might be in his mind, the way he swayed forward the smallest bit, the way he seemed to be looking at her mouth. But then he seemed to change his mind, and moved back to let her get in the driver seat. “See ya.”
“Thanks again.”
As she drove toward home, Jessica said from the back seat, “Wow.”
Chapter 4
After Sunny and Jessica left, Michael found himself uncovering the pile of discarded goods in the barn. Thanks to the sale of his cattle and his decision not to plant his forty acres of farm land this year, he had little to do, and the time had been weighing on him.
His parents had moved to Colorado from South Dakota after a family rift between his father and his only living relative, a brother. Michael had never been able to sort it out, what exactly had happened that would be so extreme his father would leave the reservation and strike out on his own, so far from his people. It had been hard on his mother, who missed her circle of women, her sisters and cousins and friends. Once a year, usually around the sun dance, she returned to the reservation with her son, and they stayed for a week or two, then came back to the lonely ranch. Once, an old man from some extended branch of the Chasing Horse family had come to visit Michael’s father. The two men had drummed and sung, had gone to sweat in a little hut they made from willow branches, smoked together on the back porch late into the night. Michael had been about eight. When the old man left, Michael’s father remained unmoved about returning to South Dakota, no matter how his mother cursed him for a stubborn old fool, or wept silently and bitterly. She had hated the land, hated the loneliness, hated being so far from home. The bitterness turned into a snake in her belly, one that ate her up from within, and she had died when Michael was fifteen.
Donald Chasing Horse had gone quiet the day she died, and had spoken few words in the ten years he lived after his wife’s death. He’d shown Michael the legacy of the land, shown him how to care for the animals and plant to maximize water, instilled, in his silent way, a deep and abiding love of this particular plot of land, the land that would be his legacy.
Now, looking through the things his parents had left—photos of Indian men and women who were likely his relatives or people he would have grown up with—he had to wonder if his father’s stubbornness lived in him, too. What could have been so dramatic a disagreement that his father had left everything behind—hundreds of years of connection and tradition—to come out to this land that had cost him a son and his wife?
As it had cost Michael his own wife. There was a trunk full of her clothes beneath the drop cloth, for she had taken nothing when she left, not even a pair of socks. Michael, stunned and grieving, had hardly known what to do with it all except box it all up and put it out here. As he’d done with his parents’ things.
And here it all sat, going unused, giving no pleasure to anyone.
There was nothing else to do this smoky, cloudy day. Without realizing he was doing it, he started sorting things into piles. The drum and cradleboard went to o
ne side, joined by the photo album and a box of letters with return addresses in South Dakota and other things he’d hardly realized were there: a hand-carved flute, a pipe wrapped carefully in soft flannel. A medicine bag that must have been his father’s.
Into another pile went things that he had no use for and never would; an end table he’d never liked and a crate of china his wife had brought with her, a boxful of her clothes, some outdated, cheap paintings.
The kittens, delighted to have human company, crawled around the piles and chased each other around his ankles. The mama cat came and sat at his feet, content to be stroked every now and then.
And as he sorted, he thought of Sunny. Often. There was a sense of a fresh wind about her, about the easy way she laughed and the wry but gentle way she flat-out adored her daughter. He liked her eyes, clear and straightforward.
Yeah, yeah, said a cynical voice in his head. It’s all about freshness, huh? Get real.
Opening an unmarked box, he found a tangle of nightgowns and undergarments that had belonged to his wife. One silky turquoise gown caught his eye, and he tugged it out, trying to remember if Kara had ever worn it. If she had, he couldn’t remember.
But he could see Sunny in it, see how the color would highlight her shoulders, the luminous quality of her skin.
The voice snorted.
He rubbed the fabric between his thumb and fingers, pulled the silkiness through his palm and admitted more. He would like to see her breasts, plump and white, ever so lightly encased in this fabric, would like to see how her round rear end would move beneath it. He’d told himself lately that what he needed was a rangy ranch woman, square of shoulder and lean of hip, a woman built to work and withstand the challenges of this country. But here came Sunny with her curvy, soft-looking body and he’d been thinking about it ever since they’d spoken the first time.
Biology, he thought. Go figure. He’d fallen for the same body type in his wife, all lush female curves, ripe as purple grapes, and look what it had gotten him. Biology wasn’t a directive, it was just instinct. He’d promised himself he’d use his head as much as his heart—or sexual drives—in choosing another wife. If he ever chose one.
Lakota Legacy: Wolf DreamerCowboy Days and Indian NightsSeven Days Page 18
