Firebrand's Woman

by Vanessa Royall

  During the night the jackals disappeared into the forest, and in the morning all of them were gone.

  Chapter XIII

  Torch struggled to raise himself, bracing his body upon an elbow. He squinted toward the west. He could not see land, only brilliant sunlight, and water equally brilliant, which seemed to stretch on forever.

  “How can a river, one river, be so wide?” he asked.

  “But we have reached it, and that is the issue,” said Gyva, smiling at him. She knew in her heart that the river, reached with such difficulty, marked the beginning of a new life for her people and for herself. A new life and a better one.

  After their fortuitous abandonment by the Tennessee militia, the spirits of the Chickasaw had begun to recover. They were dispossessed, true, but they were no longer under the guard of their conquerors. They were on their own. Torch was slowly beginning to recover, but he was by no means strong enough to take an active part in deliberations. Gyva herself had called the Indians to council. Not only braves this time—few of them were not in some way wounded or incapacitated—but women, too, and young people who had accredited themselves well upon the trail.

  “There is the white man’s city called Memphis somewhere ahead of us,” she had told them. “And flowing by the city is the river which we seek, and which we must cross. Then we go south, as Jacksa Chula has spoken, until we reach the place where the Mississippi and the Arkansas meet, and then we go west, toward home.”

  There were a few protests, and even cries of “No! No! Perhaps Chula has lied!”

  Gyva refuted these doubts with the strength of her own belief. “Chula Was many things, but he was not a liar,” she snapped. “We had best decide right now to let old battles die, for they will but weigh upon our hearts. Our first problem is reaching the river. We cannot venture near the city. So we must each of us call upon all that we have learned in the lost hills of home, and travel by guile and stealth and cunning.”

  So the Chickasaw traveled by night, and on the morning of the third day they reached the blazing, sun-struck river.

  Torch leaned upon his elbow, still borne in his stretcher between the two horses, and regarded the colossal expanse of the Father of Waters.

  His eyes darkened, struggling with a memory. “I have seen this before…”

  He seemed stronger now, though by no means fit to leave the litter. Far away to the south, Gyva could see, were a great white house and numerous outbuildings of a plantation. Even now, gangs of black people were being herded together outside some of the sheds, to be driven to work out in the cotton fields.

  “We must cross at once,” Gyva told him. “We have no boats, no rafts. What say you, my chief? How shall we do it?”

  Torch turned his head and saw the plantation. It meant the presence of hostile white men. Discovery now would mean doom, as would delay.

  “We shall cross together,” he said, falling back upon the stretcher. “Place the children and the wounded upon our horses. Everyone else must swim. Some of us may be lost, but the river of summer moves slowly, and perhaps we shall be fortunate. Where is Bright Flower?”

  He looked around, seeking his young wife. No one spoke for a time. Gyva did not know what to say. Torch’s health seemed slightly better, and he was lucid again. The news of Bright Flower’s death—to say nothing of her manner of death—would surely wound him grievously in spirit. Then, too, there was the knowledge of all that had transpired between Torch and Gyva. No, she should not be the one to answer his question.

  Old Teva knew this. She tottered over to the stretcher and gazed at the chieftain. “Bright Flower is gone,” she said simply. “I will tell you of it someday, but not now. Just let me say, so that your mind will be at rest, that your wife died with courage and honor, with more of both than most of us will ever possess.”

  The young chieftain’s eyes darkened and he sagged back down on his stretcher. He lay there for a moment, flat and motionless; then he spoke. His voice was weak, but the words were given with an air of command. “Let us go West toward home,” he said. “Cross me as I am, between these horses. Only let someone swim beside, lest some accident occur.”

  “Dey-Lor-Gyva shall do it,” said old Teva. “She has taken you—she has taken us—all this way.”

  Torch looked up at Gyva. He did not speak. But his eyes overflowed with gratitude. And admiration.

  And so did Gyva and her people move on, across the river and into the trees. They forded the Mississippi that morning, the Chickasaw did, holding their children and the reins of horses in their hands, holding hope of safe haven in their hearts. Gyva, swimming, struggling against the suddenly swift midstream current, remembered—almost as if the memory were a prayer—the stories of her rescue by Four Bears at Roaring Gorge. With Jackson lying wounded and presumably dying in the trampled grass near the thundering falls, Four Bears had given his braves the order to mount up and ride. “Now we go west toward home,” he had told them. West toward home, thought Gyva. Swimming, she matched the words to her stroke. West toward home.

  The horses panicked slightly in midstream, where the current was strongest; but Gyva, who had been swimming beside them, crawled upon the back of one and seized the reins, patting the horse’s neck and crooning. It calmed, and so did the other horse. Between them, on his stretcher, Torch was soaking wet.

  “How is the crossing?” he asked, not thinking at all of his own safety.

  From the horse’s back Gyva looked up the river and down. Spread out on the water, the tribe was struggling, swimming, fighting for the shore. But they were past mid-river now, and they would be safe.

  Only then did Gyva allow herself a smile. “We have done it!” she told him softly, with pride and triumph, in spite of everything.

  “No,” he said, looking up at her. “I believe that when the future legends are told around the fires, it will be said that you were the one who led us to do it.”

  “I did only what I had to do,” she answered, guiding the horses up the western bank of the great river that Ababinili had created.

  “Just as a chieftain,” said Torch.

  Gyva halted the beasts and turned to assure herself that the Chickasaw were safely across. They were, and the warm sun beat down, drying them, soothing them. She looked back at Torch.

  “A chieftain?” she said, smiling. “You must know that our people cannot have two leaders at the same time. Also, I have a desire for a different position in life.”

  “And what is that?” he asked, smiling, too.

  “To be the one closest to our leader,” she said, “in every way there is.”

  Their eyes were fixed upon each other; they touched eyes and gave each other all that they were and would be. One life had ended, but a greater one had just begun.

  “That is a serious aspiration,” he said, reaching out and taking her hand. “But I do not think we need hold further council upon the matter. Beloved-of-Earth and of me, I grant you your desire.”

  Epilogue

  One beautiful evening, as the setting sun melded red dusk and the dry red plains of Oklahoma, the old woman decided that it was too hot to sleep inside the wigwam. “Come,” she said to her husband, “let us go out, as when we were young, and sleep again beneath the stars. We have not done so in…how many circlings of the sun?”

  He smiled at her, half amused, half touched by tender memory, and together they took up their blankets and found a spot not far from the village. It was a quiet village, and a peaceful one; and the prairie that lay about it, once so alien and inhospitable, was full and fragrant with blossoming crops. Fat cattle grazed, tended by children, and a pale ghost of the moon that would shine tonight rode the eastern horizon. They spread the blankets on the grass, sank down, and embraced with long affection. The woman was smiling mischievously when the embrace ended, and the man wondered why.

  “I found something today,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, it will mean nothing to you, I think. You
will have forgotten.” But still she was smiling.

  “I have forgotten nothing,” he countered, slightly vexed. “As you well know.”

  From beneath her buckskin skirt the woman withdrew a pouch of leather, the leather itself dry and cracked with age, but still delicately beaded. And from the pouch she withdrew small white polished stones.

  “Just as I feared,” she teased. “You do not remember.”

  He kissed her for an answer. “Fifty years,” he said.

  “More.”

  They touched eyes and did not speak, thinking of time. Andrew Jackson lay cold in his grave in distant Tennessee. He had captured his dream, and presided tumultuously over his nation, but with a sad heart. His beloved Rachel had passed on before the power came to him.

  So many people had died since those times—including old Teva, whose last prophecy had told of black gold lying in wait beneath the dry grass and red dust of Oklahoma. Everyone thought she had become addled in her last days, that she was thinking of the coal in the mountains of Tennessee. Yet not everyone discounted prophecy. Four Bears had been right, for example; One with a name strange to the Chickasaw had appeared to save them, and she had been Dey-Lor-Gyva, returned to the tribe as Delia, the name bestowed upon her by Jason Randolph, her white husband. Indeed, to live fully, one could not safely ignore the veracity of prophecy, the power of dreams.

  Once, too, long years ago, a young chieftain called Torch-of-the-Sun had awakened at dawn, while the Chickasaw were encamped at the juncture of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers. They had been on their way to Oklahoma then, and he had turned and gently shaken the beautiful young woman asleep beside him.

  “I have seen them,” he whispered, his face alight with joy and discovery.

  “What?” she asked, struggling out of sleep. “What have you seen?”

  “The words. The words of the vision.”

  He told it. He had found his way back into the dream, the vision of his manhood ritual. He had found his way back within sleep to the river of a second sleep, and to the sand in the bend of the river where the golden stick lay buried. This time he had been wise; this time he had not forgotten.

  “What is the secret?” she had asked, barely breathing.

  “I am a little surprised, though,” he faltered. “It is not at all complicated or portentous.”

  “Tell me, so that I may judge.”

  “‘The future is filled with hope only if the past is free of regret.’” he said, speaking very slowly, reading the words from the image of the stick he had captured with his mind, “‘and the sunset is as beautiful as the dawn.’”

  That is it? she had wondered at the time, lying beside him on that long-ago morning. That is the secret of life?

  But now, so many years later, lying beside him still, she knew that his vision had been true. The secret of life was very simple, but difficult to understand, for it required the patience and wisdom that only time could bring.

  The sun had dropped below the horizon now, and it was growing dark. Cattle lowed in the distance. Crickets called, and frogs, croaking in the wet sand by the well. Another day gone, time passing, and all the deeds of long ago took shape in memory. Dey-Lor-Gyva accepted the memories. She was at peace with herself and had no regrets. All prophecies would come to pass; all tales would eventually be told. Even those things that could not be accomplished on earth, those things for which there was no time, did not really matter. Because, in the end, all that was left undone upon the earth would be completed beyond a river even greater than the Mississippi, beyond a final sunset. Dey-Lor-Gyva, who, as her grandfather had prayed, was both beloved of earth and beloved on it, gazed up at the star-riven sky, and for a moment she was no longer upon the red plains of Oklahoma, but already where she would be one day, with Four Bears and Jason, with Andrew and Teva and all the others, far out among the flowering fields of light, beyond the North Star, where dawn blazed forever, and would never die.

  Torch-of-the-Sun died in 1876, while riding along the Chikaskia River in northern Oklahoma. He was alone at the time, and had apparently stopped and dismounted to allow his horse to drink. His body was discovered by one of his seven sons—he and Gyva also had four daughters—who had been sent after him when he did not return for the evening meal. His visage was composed and showed neither suffering nor alarm. A warrior, he was buried along the Chikaskia, near the sound of flowing water. A bracelet in the form of a serpent circled his arm in death, and his widow tossed into the grave what appeared to be a very old leather purse.

  Years afterward oil was discovered in Oklahoma, and a great deal of this black gold was found beneath Indian lands. Dey-Lor-Gyva and her children became quite wealthy, and over the decades exerted much influence on behalf of their people. Today the grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of Firebrand’s woman live in all parts of the country. Her blood lives on in their veins, and her adventures live on in their tales. Gyva herself died while on a visit to Tulsa in 1893 and, according to her wish, was buried in the mountains south of Knoxville, Tennessee. Upon her gravestone is a design to puzzle the tourists and quiet passersby:

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