Warrior's Embrace

by Peggy Webb

  Through the open windows Eagle could hear the low, singing murmur of his mother’s voice as she directed her two youngest children in the clean-up after their family meal.

  “Not the pots too! Can’t they wait until morning?” Star’s wail of protest was tempered by the knowledge that she was engaged in a battle she would never win. “This is Eagle’s first day home.”

  Eagle didn’t hear Dovie’s soft rebuke, only the firm tone of her voice. Then the unmistakable sound of his brother Wolf’s laughter.

  “Hey, sis, what’s all the fuss about? You’ve got me.”

  They’d been mere children when he left, and now they were rowdy, raucous teens, full of the raw energy and the high, bright dreams of the young.

  “I don’t want you, toad breath,” Star said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s what you’ve got till we finish these dishes. Shake a leg, squirt blossom, or we’ll be here all night.”

  The argument in the kitchen was like the ones that had been waged years before. Nothing had changed except the names and the players. When Eagle was a teen, he and his brother Cole had been the ones bickering over the dishes. Dovie had always been a stickler for order. No matter what was taking place—weddings, births, homecomings, natural disasters—she always insisted that everything in the house be put in its proper place.

  Eagle and Cole had thought they were doomed to carry on the chores forever, and had sat together in the barn loft, smoking a forbidden pipe and planning their revolt, when the unexpected had happened. At the age of forty-two Dovie had given birth to a baby girl.

  “Who’d have thought the two of them were still doing it?” Cole said. He took a long draw on the purloined pipe, then passed it to his twin.

  “I thought the equipment quit working when you got old.” At the age of fourteen, Eagle considered anything over thirty ancient.

  A year later, when Wolf was born, Dovie and Winston proved once again that everything was indeed in perfect working order, and that they enjoyed making it work.

  Now a sophisticated fifteen, Cole and Eagle discussed this new turn of events over their first taste of alcohol—a bottle of cooking sherry clipped from their mother’s kitchen cabinet.

  “Papa’s as bad as that old stallion,” Cole said, and Eagle voiced his hearty agreement, but there was a certain element of awe and pride in their voices.

  Remembering now, Eagle smiled. Judging by the evidence, Cole had inherited his father’s prowess. His young wife, Anna, was ripe with child, and he already had two fine sons—Clint, secretive and stoic even at seven, and Bucky, exuberant and wild with the joy of childhood, racing around on his sturdy legs, defying his tender age of three by being as surefooted as one of the antelope that roamed the Arbuckle Mountains.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” Bucky yelled as he raced around the yard. “Watch, Daddy!”

  He lunged for the black Lab, and boy and dog went down in a heap. The Lab licked Bucky’s face, then dog and boy were up and running again. It was hard to tell who was chasing whom.

  “Watch, Daddy! Watch!”

  With his arms held up toward the sun, the child spun round and round, ending in a dizzy tangle against Eagle’s legs.

  “Whoa, there.” Laughing, Eagle lifted the child.

  His nephew. Issue of the brother whose very soul was twined with his own. As the soft little arms went around his neck, there was a blooming in Eagle’s heart ...and something akin to envy.

  “You’re dizzy, little sport. Time to slow down.”

  “Daddy?” Bucky put his dimpled hands on either side of Eagle’s face and cocked his head to one side.

  “No. I’m Uncle Eagle.”

  “Unca Eaga?” Bucky puckered his brow and looked from Eagle to Cole, then back again.

  Cole laughed at his son’s puzzlement. “That’s your uncle Eagle, son, the best man in Witch Dance besides your daddy. Give Uncle Eagle a kiss.”

  With the trust inherent in children, Bucky pressed his rosy mouth against Eagle’s, then squirmed out of his arms and gave chase to the dog once more.

  “‘Bye, Unca Eaga,” he yelled, his laughter lifting high and bright as a kite toward the fading sun.

  “You should see your face,” Cole said. “You look like you did that day you brought home the trophy for the debate team.”

  “I never knew that holding your own flesh and blood would feel like that.”

  “Remarkable, isn’t it?” Cole wrapped his arm around his wife’s thick waist. “It makes a man proud. Two sons already and another on the way.”

  Anna smiled at her husband, never daring to suggest that the child she carried might not be a son. She loved her tall, handsome husband with an adoration that bordered on worship and took every opportunity to show it.

  If he let himself, Eagle could envy that too.

  “Now that you’re back, it won’t take you long to catch up,” Cole said.

  Inseparable as children, Eagle and Cole had done everything together—ridden their first horse, climbed their first tree, bagged their first deer. They’d even broken their arms at the same time, the left ones, fractured when they’d fallen from the barn loft in an ignoble heap, drunk on their mother’s cooking sherry.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you to carry on the family name,” Eagle said. “At least for a while.”

  “You always were a visionary.” Cole leaned down for Anna’s kiss, then watched as she waddled off toward the house. “You build your bridges: I’ll make sons.”

  Winston Mingo didn’t miss a single nuance of the exchange between his sons, not Cole’s triumph at having finally bested his twin brother at something, nor Eagle’s sense of having sacrificed too much for his vision.

  “Speaking of building, Dr. Colbert is building a new clinic.” Winston said, watching his sons’ reactions.

  He’d been doing that a lot lately, watching, weighing, judging. Cole’s expression darkened, and Winston shifted. Only part of his discomfort was due to Cole’s reaction. No matter what he did these days, it seemed that he couldn’t get comfortable. Dovie had sewed a cushion for his chair, even though he had told her the rain would ruin it. But she’d shushed him, and every morning he saw her checking the weather before she marched outside and arranged the bright red cushion in his favorite outdoor chair.

  Eagle leaned forward, excited at the news ...as Winston had hoped he’d be.

  “He’s moving back, then?” Eagle asked.

  Clayton Colbert had left tribal lands twenty years earlier and had never come back except for summer vacations with his blue-blooded Bostonian wife.

  “No, he’s helping a young protégé of his, Kate Malone.”

  “A white woman,” Cole said. “We don’t need her.”

  Her skin was like lilies, creamy and cool to the touch. Eagle remembered it well. Too well.

  “It seems to me that we need every clinic we can get,” he said, “...and every doctor.”

  “We have a hospital.” Anger curled through Cole like smoke.

  “Only one,” Winston reminded him. “And it’s too far from Witch Dance for convenience.”

  “What does convenience matter if we lose sight of who we are? They’ve come here in droves with their white skin and their holier-than-thou attitudes. They’ve raped the land and corrupted our young, then gone back to their posh lives, convinced that they’ve done their duty on the reservation.”

  Twelve years had been too long to stay away. Eagle was seeing a brother he didn’t know.

  “How do you know Kate Malone is like that?” She’d been sobbing like a child when he carried her from the river, then defiant as a wildcat when he’d questioned her commitment.

  Kate Malone with hair bright beyond imagining. He’d wanted to touch it. Only the certain knowledge that doing so would be like crossing a bridge, then blowing it up behind him, had stilled Eagle’s hand.

  “Because she’s not one of us,” Cole said.

  “Embracing new ideas and new people doesn’t necessarily
mean we must lose sight of the old ways.”

  “You sound awfully passionate for someone who hasn’t been around in twelve years.” Cole turned his fierce scrutiny toward Eagle. “Or is your defense personal?”

  Having a twin was like having a second soul, a second conscience. Cole had always been able to ferret out his secrets. Though why he should keep his encounter with Kate secret was a mystery to him.

  His silence damned him.

  “You embrace her, Eagle. I have family duties.” Cole stalked toward the house without looking back.

  Disquieted, Eagle left his seat on the redwood picnic table and walked to the fence to look out over the pasture. The stallion that had been a gangly colt when he left flung up his head and flared his nostrils, catching Eagle’s scent. Restless, the stallion trotted around the enclosure, his mane and tail flying out like flags as he increased his pace. In the last rays of the dying sun his polished coat gleamed as black as patent leather.

  “He’s magnificent,” Eagle said as his father came up beside him.

  “He’s still yours. So are the three mares.” Winston nodded toward a paint, a sorrel, and one beautiful mare so startlingly white, she looked like a ghost emerging from the shadows that gradually darkened the land.

  Eagle whistled, never dreaming he’d get a response. The white mare whinnied, then tossed her mane and cantered to the fence.

  “You remember me, don’t you, Mahli?” Eagle stroked her silky muzzle.

  “You always did have a way with horses.”

  “It’s one of the things I missed most while I was away—the horses.”

  “Mahli will be receptive soon. If I were you, I’d breed her to the black.”

  Winston was not a man to speak about issues closest to his heart until he’d had time to let his instincts kick in. He talked instead of horses and ranching and Eagle’s immediate plans.

  “I’ll take a few weeks off—perhaps the entire summer—before I open offices. The land is calling to me in a voice as seductive as a woman’s.” Eagle smiled. “I’m going to set up camp at the Blue River tonight.”

  “Dovie will be disappointed. She’d expected you to stay at the house, at least for a while.”

  “I’ll make my peace with her.”

  “Good. I don’t want to get on your mother’s bad side.” Winston smiled, recalling the many times he’d gotten on Dovie’s bad side and ended up sleeping downstairs on the couch. His bones were too old and stiff for that now. Besides, he still liked the feel of Dovie’s soft body curled against his. He slept better, somehow, just knowing she was there.

  Winston studied his son. Some deep secret pleasure was hidden in his eyes.

  “You know the woman ...Kate Malone?”

  “Yes. Her clinic will benefit our people.”

  “She’s not of our blood.”

  “You see too much, Father.” Solemnly Eagle placed both hands on Winston’s shoulders. “I am Chickasaw. I will never mix my blood.”

  Satisfied, Winston nodded. “May the Great Spirit guide you.”

  Eagle made his peace with his mother, then said good-bye to the rest of the family and rode off toward the shadowed mountains. The land was alive with scents and sounds. He rode bareback, the way he loved best, feeling himself one with the night-seeking creatures.

  When he came close enough to hear the whisper of the river, he pitched camp. Although it was the middle of summer with heat rising from the earth and warm winds blowing across the land, he built a fire. There was something mystical about a fire, something powerful.

  As his ancestors had done before him, Eagle opened himself to the fire so its strength could transfuse his soul. It was not a conscious move on his part, but an instinctive one. Myths and legends aside—and Eagle knew them all—there was a basic truth in the act of transfusion. A man’s psyche was affected by his surroundings on levels he never dreamed. Beauty transfused harmony; ugliness, hatred. Nature transfused peace; mechanization, strife.

  Stripped naked, Eagle paid homage to the four Beloved Things above in Muskogean, the ancient tongue of his people; then he spread his blanket under the stars, letting peace and harmony flow through him. Flames from his campfire leapt upward with a brightness that rivaled Kate Malone’s hair.

  The newly arrived medicine woman intruded so suddenly in his thoughts that desire caught him unaware. And he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was nearby that perhaps her nearness had led him to his campsite, and that she had already transfused his soul when he’d first touched her. When he’d carried her from the river.

  He lay on the blanket, staring at the stars, with Kate Malone heating his blood like a flame.

  o0o

  The watchers had moved closer, a small, tight band of them, standing as silently as the trees that bordered the clinic. Dr. Clayton Colbert gave them no more than a passing glance.

  It was the man on horseback who held his attention. Eagle Mingo.

  Everybody in Witch Dance and for miles around knew him, firstborn of the Chickasaw Nation’s governor, preceding Cole from the womb by mere seconds, dragging his reluctant brother by the heel, some said, emerging with a lusty war whoop that made every nurse on the maternity floor stop to listen. He’d been gone since he was eighteen, and twelve years had honed him to the lethal, keen edge of a knife blade.

  Riding on his fine black stallion, he sliced into Clayton’s consciousness and stayed there, striking sparks. Every nerve ending quivering, Clayton glanced at Kate. The lure of Eagle Mingo shone in her eyes. She stood motionless, the hammer hanging forgotten in her right hand, watching him as if destiny had come a-riding.

  The black bile of despair clogged Clayton’s throat. His grip tightened on his own hammer as Eagle dismounted and strode toward the lumber skeleton that would soon be a clinic.

  “Kate.” Eagle stood tall and magnificent before her.

  She flushed as if he’d kissed her. The intimacy in his voice was more riveting than the most searing embrace she’d ever imagined.

  “What brings you to the clinic?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for the doctor.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Yes. This.” He held out a bouquet of Indian paintbrush, freshly plucked. “On behalf of my people, welcome to Witch Dance.”

  His skin drew hers like a magnet, and when she reached for the flowers, she couldn’t let go.

  “Thank you.”

  She had turned to liquid. Neither her hands nor her feet would move. Eagle closed her fingers around the fragile flower stems; then, stepping back, he nodded in the direction of the watchers.

  “Are they causing trouble?”

  “No. Only observing.”

  “I spoke with them. They’re merely curious.”

  “I hope so.”

  “When they become accustomed to the idea of the clinic, they’ll leave.”

  His bow was formal, but there was nothing remotely formal about his eyes. His burning gaze held Kate as her tongue flicked out and wet her bottom lip. Eagle watched as if he were guarding a recently staked gold claim.

  Envy and despair rendered Clayton helpless. There was a low moan like an animal in pain. To his horror, he realized he’d made the sound. Not only that, but he’d shown his true colors to Eagle.

  Clayton felt himself shriveling under Eagle’s intense scrutiny. He wanted to trot off to his house like a whipped puppy and pee in the middle of the rug. Instead, he held his ground, returning the fierce stare with his head high.

  They were like two proud bucks—one hoary with age, the other virile with youth—rutting after the same doe. The air was thick with challenge.

  In a quicksilver shift Eagle nodded formally toward Clayton, then mounted his horse and galloped away.

  The entire encounter couldn’t have taken more than three minutes, but Clayton felt as if he’d been wading through quicksand for three hours. His hands shook as he poured himself a cup of water.

  “You know him?” he said when he
was finally calm enough to turn toward Kate. The glow of Eagle Mingo was still on her skin.

  “I met him yesterday at the river.”

  She didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t dare ask.

  “Well ...it’s good that the governor’s son approves of your being here.” Blackguard. Liar. Clayton squashed the paper cup and water ran over his hands.

  “Let me get you another.” Kate laid her flowers on the sawhorse and gave them one last, lingering caress. Fresh envy slashed at Clayton.

  “Your face is flushed.” Kate’s hands were cool when they touched his, cool and tender as the stems of flowers. “You’ve been working too hard. Sit over here and rest.”

  She led him to a shade tree with the same care he’d seen her lavish on the old people who populated the hospital wards. He wasn’t old—sixty, with most of his hair and his body gone only slightly to fat—but he must seem ancient to her, abloom as she was with youth and lust.

  His gut clenched again as she plopped down beside him and stretched out her bare legs, tanned now from the sun. Smiling, she patted his arm affectionately, as if he were an elderly uncle or a favorite pet.

  God, how he hated it, that casual touch ...and how he loved it. That was his burden to bear, his cardinal sin: He was in love with her.

  His wife knew.

  “Don’t lie to me, Clayton,” she’d said before he left. “You’re not building this clinic because of altruism. You’re building it so you can lure her to your side.”

  “I’m building a clinic to help my people.”

  “You had no people until you met me. And don’t you ever forget it.”

  How could he? She never let him.

  Sitting in the shade with the scent of Kate making his old sap rise, he thought of Melissa Sayers Colbert, the woman he’d left behind. Elegant, sophisticated, with the kind of cool beauty that drew second glances. Patron of the arts, chairman of numerous foundations, and benefactor to the underdog—including an outcast half-breed Chickasaw named Clayton Colbert. He owed his medical degree to her and his fancy Beacon Hill house and his chairmanship of the Department of Endocrinology.

  He’d been a broken-down trick rider in a Wild West sideshow when she found him sleeping on a pier in Boston Harbor. Melissa Sayers of the Sayers Chocolate fortune had a habit of slumming in her chauffeured white stretch limousine.