After the Thunder

by Genell Dellin

  She glanced up at Cotannah, worry showing in her brown eyes.

  “If they didn’t let him go, he could already be on trial.”

  Cotannah’s breath left her.

  “Even with most people not able to get there?”

  Her voice sounded pitifully thin.

  “It’d probably be for the best,” Emily said. “Can’t you imagine all the carryings-on of the witch-hunt with half of the Nation going in to watch the trial?”

  Cotannah turned back to the window and glared out at the water.

  “It’s best I’m not there,” she said, “I couldn’t sit still for it.”

  “He may have already been cleared,” Emily said hopefully. “There may have been no trial. As soon as he can get here, Tay will bring him home—if he’ll agree to come.”

  From then on, until the rain stopped the next day at noon, they hardly talked of anything else. The following morning Cotannah got out of bed after what seemed her hundredth night of tossing and turning and having bad dreams, got dressed to ride before she even thought what she was doing, and went to Emily’s room. Instinctively, she knew, before she even knocked, that Tay had not come in during the night.

  Emily opened the door. She, too, wore a riding habit.

  They laughed when they looked at each other.

  “I’m worn out from thinking about it,” Cotannah said. “Let’s go. If we have to swim, we’ll swim.”

  They were outside within minutes, and mounted, not even bothering with breakfast. The day was bright and cool, with wind blustering at them from all directions.

  “This is going to whip my frazzled nerves into a frenzy,” Cotannah said, as they loped off the property and started down the road toward town. “I don’t know how I’ve managed to wait this long to find out.”

  “Um. We’re going to be covered with mud from head to toe,” Emily said, as her horse’s hooves threw another glob onto her skirts.

  “Slow down,” Cotannah agreed, much as she wanted to hurry. “This road’s so wet the horses’re liable to slip and break a leg.”

  So they did slow down and they tried to talk, but in the past days of being trapped in the house they had said every single word there was to say. Finally they relapsed into silence and slogged on, gasping and crying out at the cold water splashing on them when the horses swam the roiling Tulli Creek. By holding their feet up in the air, though, they escaped being soaked.

  An hour later, Cotannah spotted horses through the trees, on a curve of the road directly across from her and Emily.

  “Mimi! There! Horses! I didn’t get a good look at them, but I’d swear they’re both white or maybe gray. I know that’s them, I know it!”

  They rode leaning over, peering, but it wasn’t until both parties came into the bend of the curve that they could see each other.

  “It is,” Cotannah cried, “there they are.”

  She had the weirdest feeling then, at the moment she saw Walks-With-Spirits, a feeling like she didn’t even know who she was or what she was doing, a sensation of riding to meet a man she knew better than she knew herself when she didn’t really know him at all. Why did she have this sudden sensation at the sight of him that she had come home at last?

  But Emily gave a glad cry and urged her horse to hurry, and Tay trotted fast to meet her, so Cotannah rode up to Walks-With-Spirits. She stopped beside him, his horse facing one way, hers the other.

  He looked at her with his topaz eyes bright in his open, handsome face.

  “They turned you loose,” she said, and with the words came a rising sense of relief and tears that threatened to overcome her exhausted nerves. “Thank God.”

  He kept looking at her, then he blinked as if he’d only just then heard what she said.

  “For one moon only,” he said.

  She stared at him in turn, for the longest time, trying to force those words to make sense. Then they fell into her heart, one by one, like sharp hailstones of ice.

  “They found you guilty? No! No! It can’t be.”

  He looked at her some more but nothing changed.

  “Tell me it isn’t true!” she cried, twisting in her saddle to look for Tay.

  “Tay! Is it true …”

  But it was. Tay had given Emily the same news because she was weeping, leaning on him from her horse to his.

  This had to be changed, Cotannah thought. This was wrong. Somebody had to do something! She turned back to Walks-With-Spirits.

  But he slid down off his horse as calmly as if nothing in the whole world worried him and walked through the mud to the edge of the woods, where he stood looking into the trees. Giving a long, musical whistle that sounded like a mockingbird, he cocked his head to listen as if he expected an answer.

  Cotannah watched him while recognition of the whole horror spread through her like a burning, itching rash on the inside of her skin. This was her fault. He was sentenced to be shot because of her. She had drawn him into a fight and got him hurt and caused him to betray his beliefs and do black magic and now she would be the death of him.

  This was all her fault. This was the disaster Cade had predicted, the consequences of her behavior that he’d warned her about.

  Yes. One moon from today, she, Cotannah Chisk-Ko, would be just as much a murderer as whoever had killed Jacob, except that she would be worse because she would have killed a good man, a man who had never brought harm to anyone. The cold truth made her sick to her stomach.

  At the same time it made her shake with rage at the injustice of life. Why was it the innocents who always had to suffer? Look at all the bad things that had happened to her when she was just an innocent girl! And now the ignorant, superstitious witch mongers had made her into a guilty woman, guilty of killing an alikchi!

  She slapped her heels to Pretty Feather and rode over to him, bending down to shake him by the shoulder.

  “You can’t be standing around waiting for the day they’re going to shoot you!” she cried. “Walks-With-Spirits, you have to leave here. Come with me—I can take you to Texas!”

  He frowned and brushed her off as if she were an annoying fly, then squatted on his haunches as Taloa and Basak burst out of the brush and into his arms. She thought she would choke on her panic while he hugged them and let them lick his face.

  “You should have sicced those two onto the Lighthorse instead of letting them arrest you,” she shouted.

  He was rubbing his hands into their fur, crooning in Choctaw, telling them how good they had been to stay hidden in the woods until he called them, taking his sweet time, carrying on as if he hadn’t a worry in the world. It was enough to send her into a fit.

  “Walks-With-Spirits!”

  He acted as if he didn’t even hear her.

  Desperate, she whirled her horse toward Tay and Emily.

  “You have to help, please. Oh, Mimi, Tay, this is all my fault!”

  Tears broke through the knot in her throat and poured into her voice, drowned the rest of the words on her tongue.

  A sudden calm flowed over her. If it was her fault, then she would have to be the one to do something about it. She would have to find out what really did happen to Jacob if the Nation’s Judges and Lighthorsemen were going to believe that he died of Walks-With-Spirits’s curse.

  The next moment, Walks-With-Spirits was beside her, standing at her stirrup. He reached up and laid his hand on hers, and the touch made the calm in her go even deeper. So did his words.

  “Don’t blame yourself. Jacob Charley’s actions were his own, my actions were mine. I’m the one who put the death curse on him.”

  She seized that moment of his full attention.

  “You didn’t mean it,” she said, staring intently down into his topaz eyes. “You told me yourself that pronouncing that incantation was just your baser instincts taking over for an instant. Such an empty curse couldn’t kill him.”

  He listened to her, for all the good it did.

  “It might. I said the words, and in
my anger I did wish him dead.”

  “But the moment you calmed down you didn’t.”

  “No. But maybe by then it was too late.”

  “You didn’t use the saliva at dawn, did you?”

  “No.”

  “So,” she said, “he died of something else. Maybe he had an illness he’d never noticed before.”

  She turned to throw a questioning look at Tay and Emily, both of whom were listening carefully.

  Tay shook his head.

  “Jacob was never sick.”

  “He was young and strong,” Walks-With-Spirits said. “It may have been the curse that killed him. I certainly can’t say that I’m innocent.”

  Cotannah turned her hand and closed her fingers around his.

  “Incantations take their power from the spirit, don’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your spirit is good, good to the bone. I knew that even more surely after you set Sophie’s arm. A good spirit can’t kill someone.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Then maybe it’s my time to leave this world. This world is only part of Life.”

  “I don’t want to hear that again,” she said. “I intend to find out all I can because I know you didn’t kill Jacob and I know there’s more to all this than meets the eye.”

  He shook his head slowly, giving her the slightest smile.

  “My spirit will never be killed. And I must feed it with harmony, with the bright trees and the smoky breezes of the fall that is coming.”

  His piercing bright gaze never wavered.

  “Well, I must try to find out what really happened to Jacob.”

  Stating that out loud, meeting his eyes as she said it and then Tay’s and Emily’s, deepened her feeling of calm. She had a purpose now. For the first time in her life she had a real purpose.

  “Come on, everyone,” Emily said, her voice shaking. “Let’s go home and have a hot breakfast, then we’ll talk about this. Rosie’s coffee will make us all think better.”

  So Walks-With-Spirits threw his leg over his horse and rode beside Cotannah, with Basak and Taloa at the white horse’s heels. Tay and Emily, talking quietly, rode a little way ahead.

  But she couldn’t think of anyone but Walks-With-Spirits. He rode beside her like some rustic god of the woods, his fringes swaying like the leaves in the wind, all the colors about him blending in with the trees behind him.

  His hand had felt indomitable on hers, massive and warm and now hers felt cold without it.

  Tay’s voice came floating back to them, he was talking loud enough for Emily to hear him over the sounds of creaking saddles and squishing hooves.

  “… Jacob was connected to the Boomers,” he said, as Cotannah listened.

  Instantly she quickened her mare’s gait to catch up to him.

  “What? How?” she called. “How was Jacob connected to the Boomers?”

  Tay shot her an annoyed look over his shoulder.

  “I don’t know how or even whether it’s true,” he said. “All I know is that I’ve heard the rumor from three different directions.”

  “Who? Who told you that?”

  “Cotannah, I’ve already tried every way I could,” he said, “but I’ve never been able to trace the whispers back to a source.”

  “Well, let’s figure it out,” she said. “If Mimi and I help, too, surely we’re bound to find someone who knows more about this.”

  “Jacob would’ve tried to keep it a stone secret, obviously,” Tay said dryly. “I doubt we’re bound to find out.”

  “What connection could he have had with the Boomers?” Emily said.

  Cotannah tried to think. “What could he do for them and what could they do for him?” she said.

  “All they could want from him was treason to the Nation,” Emily said thoughtfully. “They want our land; they want all the Indian Nations dissolved.”

  Tay nodded.

  “Maybe they were paying him to try to talk up the whole idea of individual allotments,” he said, “but I never heard him go quite that far.”

  “No, but he preached cooperation with the whites and assimilation with them every chance he got,” Emily said.

  “Yes!” Cotannah cried. “He did that at supper the first day I was here, remember?”

  “All right, now, let’s think,” Tay said. “Jacob was talking assimilation and cooperation with the whites, and he was criticizing his father for encouraging the old ways and believing that Walks-With-Spirits is an alikchi. Maybe he was planning to progress, a few months from now, to preaching the benefits of individual allotments. Maybe he would’ve warned us all that we could never survive if we continued holding our land in common as a Nation.”

  “But then the Boomers wouldn’t kill him,” Emily said. “If he was killed. If he wasn’t murdered by magic, which none of us believes, how did he die? Maybe his heart stopped of natural causes even if he did look young and healthy.”

  “Maybe he was demanding more money, more than he was worth,” Cotannah said. “And they threatened him and he died of fright. Jacob was a coward.”

  “Or maybe some patriot threatened him,” Tay said. “Some loyal Choctaw who believes in the old ways and who accidentally found out about Jacob’s deal with the Boomers. Maybe that was who was in the mercantile that he called back to.”

  “We need to question some of the Boomers about Jacob and see if they act suspicious,” Cotannah said. “That might lead us somewhere.”

  “The Boomers hate Tay with a passion,” Emily said. “They’d never talk to him, and they’d probably recognize me, too.”

  “They don’t know me,” Cotannah said.

  “They won’t talk to any loyal Choctaw,” Tay said.

  “But I have enough white blood that I don’t look Choctaw for sure, do I?” Cotannah said, as Walks-With-Spirits rode up beside her. “Couldn’t I pass for a … well, part-Spanish, perhaps? From Texas. I’ll be a cattlewoman from Texas.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, absently. “Oh, if we find that Jacob was being bribed by the Boomers to encourage cooperation with the whites, that will crush Olmun all over again. It’ll kill him.”

  “Yes,” Tay said, frowning in sympathy. “There’s no greater Choctaw patriot than Olmun. How he could have had Jacob for a son, I’ll never know.”

  “Who is a Boomer?” Cotannah demanded impatiently. “Where can I find one?”

  All of them laughed at her eagerness.

  “Hold your horses,” Tay said, “I think it’s too dangerous for you to be going around those people asking questions alone. Let’s see, I’ll find a man to escort you …”

  “To where?”

  “I think the place to start would be McAlester, the newspaper offices of the Oklahoma Star. That filthy rag was created for no other purpose than to agitate for the dissolution of the Indian Nations.”

  “Its editor, Millard Sheets, makes virulent, vicious attacks on Tay,” Emily said, her tone clearly aggrieved. “Not just on his political positions but on him as a person.”

  “They print the news of every murder that occurs in any of the Nations in all big print like a headline,” Tay said. “Trying to prove to the white world that Indians can’t govern themselves.”

  “What will you tell him, ’Tannah?” Emily said. “How can you ask him about Jacob?”

  “I’ll think of something on the way to McAlester—it’ll take nearly a day to get there.”

  “We’ll talk about it over breakfast,” Tay said, as the big house at Tall Pine loomed into view. “We’ll help you make up your story, and we’ll send for a man to go with you, too.”

  “I’m going with her,” Walks-With-Spirits said.

  All three of them turned to stare at him.

  “She’s going on my account,” he said, in explanation, looking at Emily and Tay, each in turn, with his calm, wise eyes. “Therefore, I’m going along to protect her.”

  For a single moment happiness burst through Cotannah’s veins like a stron
g wine in her blood.

  Chapter 10

  Early the next morning, Cotannah, Emily, and Tay waited at the back steps of Tall Pine with the two horses. Cotannah’s overnight satchel was tied to her saddle and a long leather bag containing biscuits filled with ham, apples, cornbread and fried chicken was tied to Walks-With-Spirits’s horse. Emily checked the fastenings one last time.

  “Don’t worry, Mimi,” Cotannah said, pacing up and down the yard, ostensibly to keep warm but mostly to fight her restlessness to be off—and, she had to admit, her eagerness to see Walks-With-Spirits. “If we lose one bag, we can live for a week on what you’ve packed in the other.”

  “You think that now, but riding in the cold makes a person hungry and Walks-With-Spirits …”

  “May not be coming,” Cotannah interrupted, worrying out loud. “Maybe he’s changed his mind.”

  “He’ll be here,” Tay said. “The sun’s barely up yet.”

  The back door opened and all three of them turned. Peter Phillips was emerging from the house, nattily dressed, as usual, for his day in town at the new mercantile.

  “Well, well,” he said, closing the door gently behind him before he walked across the porch, his plump stomach bouncing a little with each stride. “Saddled horses at this hour of the day! Who’s going where on this beautiful fall morning?”

  His cheerfulness irritated Cotannah unmercifully in spite of the fact that usually it amused her.

  “Why are you so happy?”

  He gave her a sharp glance as he bounded down the steps.

  “Point well taken, my dear,” he said, and let his round face fall into solemn lines, “but I can’t let the loss of my partner cast a pall over my professional life, wouldn’t you agree? No customer is attracted to a store filled with an atmosphere of gloom.”

  “That’s true,” Emily said. “Jacob’s death is very sad, but both you and Olmun must go on.”

  “Yes, and it’s Olmun I’m most concerned about,” he said. “I don’t know if he’ll ever have the heart to return to business or not.”