Gear, W Michael - Novel 05 (81 page)

 
          
 
"But you trust me?"

 
          
 
She reached out, touching his arm, smiling.
"The eye of my soul has seen into yours, Ritshard."

 
          
 
"And what do you see now?"

 
          
 
"That you want me. In the way that a man
wants a woman." She felt him tense, the corners of his eyes tightening.

 
          
 
His voice turned husky. "How does that
make you feel?"

 
          
 
Willow, if you tell him, you'll be committing
yourself. Are you sure? Instead, she said, "You're so—white."

 
          
 
"It would be like lying with a corpse?
Like mating with your dog?" They were her words from the night they'd
removed Travis's stitches.

 
          
 
She traced patterns in the water with a slim brown
finger. "My husband died six moons ago. He filled my heart so full that I
wonder if another could ever find a place in it again. I think about you—as a
woman does when she is interested in a man—but I don't know if I want to join
with you."

 
          
 
The tension had eased from his shoulders.
"That makes me feel better." But she could see that it didn't.

 
          
 
"What would become of us, Ritshard? What
I think is all right, you think is wrong. You are not Dukurika. You don't know
our ways. How could you come and live among my people? What would you do? The
men would laugh at you, make you miserable.''

 
          
 
He pursed his lips, then said, "I can't
be an Indian, Willow."

 
          
 
"Besides, Ritshard, you are going back to
Boston. I have listened when you and Trawis have talked about Boston. I don't
think I want to go there."

 
          
 
He gave her a weary smile. "I'll admit, I
dream about you, Willow, about the way you walk, how I'd love to touch your
hair, how I'd love to hold you. And then I think about Boston, about you in
Boston. I might be starting to love you, but you're right. I'm not Shoshoni,
and you're not white. People would never let us forget that."

 
          
 
She watched a flight of ducks flash past in a
pounding of wings. A honeyed sadness filled her. Why, Willow? This is just the
way it is, isn't it?

 
          
 
"God, how I've changed," he mumbled.
"Look at me! Laying naked in a river, talking to a naked woman!
"

 
          
 
She lifted an eyebrow.

 
          
 
His soft brown eyes had begun to twinkle with
amusement. "When I look back at the sort of man I was, and compare that to
who I am now, I can't help but wonder." He paused, frowning. "How
long were you married?"

 
          
 
"F
our years."

 
          
 
"Children?"

 
          
 
"A son. He died when my husband
did."

 
          
 
Ritshard frowned, resettling himself. "I
never think of you like that. Married, I mean."

 
          
 
"He was a good man. My soul still aches.
It always will."

 
          
 
"Obviously you're not a virgin," he
whispered.

 
          
 
"I don't know that word."

 
          
 
He gave her an irritated glance. "A woman
who's never laid with a man."

 
          
 
"Wirgin." Why did she have such
trouble with the V sound? "V-v-v-virgin."

 
          
 
Ritshard tilted his head back. "Well,
another dream slips away like mist in the morning."

 
          
 
"I don't understand."

 
          
 
"Oh, nothing," he growled.

 
          
 
She studied him from the corner of her eye, aware
that he'd settled back in the water, braced on his elbows, white knees poking
up. She could see him now, white like a fish belly except for the black mat of
his pubic hair. With skin that pale, she'd halfway thought his pubic hair would
be white, too.

 
          
 
"
Among my people, we have stories of Pachee Goyo, the Bald One. He's an
irritating young man who wants everything—and rarely listens to his elders. He
sets out on a journey, and never seems to realize how he changes as he travels.
It isn't until his escape from the great Cannibal Owl that he realizes he's
become a man."

 
          
 
Ritshard watched the water flowing over his
hand. "A cannibal owl?"

 
          
 
"
Cannibal Owl catches Pachee Goyo beside the lake where the Underwater
Buffalo live, and carries him far to the north, to an island in the middle of a
big lake. There, among the bones of the dead, Pachee Goyo makes an arrow of
obsidian, and kills Cannibal Owl before it can eat him. To escape the island,
he makes a boat from the owl's huge wing and sails for days until he makes
shore and can find his way home."

 
          
 
She kicked her legs out to float and studied
her toes where they stuck out of the water. "Until I saw Maria, I never
would have believed anything could float so far."

 
          
 
"Your husband," he asked halfheartedly.
"What was his name?"

 
          
 
She fixed her eyes on the sky. "Among my
people, we do not say the name of the dead. It can affect the mugwa."

 
          
 
"Mugwa?"

 
          
 
"The life-soul, the spirit. It leaves the
body when death comes."

 
          
 
"Ghosts," he muttered, still irritated
with himself, or her. She wasn't sure which. "Do you believe in
ghosts?"

 
          
 
She flicked water with her toes. "I don't
know, Ritshard. The souls must go someplace when we die. I buried my husband
and my son according to Kuchendikani ritual. It was what he wanted. I have to
believe it is so for him. By believing, his mugwa will find its way to where he
wanted to go."

 
          
 
"
That isn't a very sound philosophical framework."

 
          
 
"
Framework?"

 
          
 
"Uh, basis, foundation, support."

 
          
 
She nodded. "I believe for him, so that
it can be true for his souls. I can do that because I still love him."

 
          
 
"But what about for you?"

 
          
 
She laughed, kicking hard enough to splash
water in a silver sheet. "For me, Ritshard, I question. I don't know what
my mugwa will do when I die. If it comes free of my body, fine. If it travels
to the Land of the Dead, fine. If it stays in my body and rots with the rest of
me, fine." She lifted her hand. "But I hope it goes free of my body
and I can find my way to Tarn Apo."

 
          
 
"God? Why?"

 
          
 
"I want to know why He made the world the
way He did. Don't you wonder why winter has to come? Why does the world have to
freeze? Why do men have to die? Why can't we live forever?"

 
          
 
He leaned forward, brown eyes gleaming, a
hunter closing on prey. "What's the Shoshoni reason?"

 
          
 
"In the beginning, Tarn Apo created the
world and all things in it, including Coyote. Some say Tarn Apo took the form
of Wolf to do this. At that time, men and animals looked the same. How they
came to be different is another story."

 
          
 
"Wolf and Coyote," he whispered,
gaze unfocused. "Go on. Willow. Tell me about Wolf and Coyote."

 
          
 
"Coyote and Wolf constantly argued about
the world Tarn Apo had created. Coyote looked around and saw people everywhere.
In those days, when a person died, he could be brought back to life by shooting
an arrow into the ground underneath him. Coyote told Wolf, 'We should let some
of these people die. The mugwa can float away in the breeze and the rest can
turn into bones.'

 
          
 
"Wolf was tired of hearing Coyote
complain, so he agreed, but Wolf made sure that Coyote's son was the first to
die. Coyote, of course, was very upset, and immediately shot an arrow into the
ground underneath his dead son. When the boy didn't come back to life, Coyote
ran to Wolf, complaining, k My son has not come back to life/

 
          
 
"Wolf told him: 'It was you, Coyote, who
complained that too many people were in the world, who asked that when people
died, their mugwa would drift away on the wind, and they would rot into piles of
bones. This I have granted you.'

 
          
 
"And so, death is forever."

 
          
 
Ritshard gave her a skeptical glance.
"You don't believe that, do you?"

 
          
 
"Perhaps. I would ask Tarn Apo about
it." She fished a rock from under her bottom and threw it out past the sand
spit to splash in the muddy water of the main current. "Why do we have to
suffer grief and sorrow because Wolf and Coyote had an argument just after the
world was created?"

 
          
 
"The sins of the father. ..."
Ritshard made a face and rolled over to stare at her. His white buttocks bobbed
like pale stones. "It sounds like you worry about the problem of God's
justice with the same passion that whites do."

 
          
 
She narrowed her eyes. "It makes my
people very uneasy when I ask questions like that. That's why I left the
Kuchendikani. I was afraid my husband's brother's wife would accuse me of being
a. . . what was the word? Witch?"

 
          
 
"Witch," he agreed.

 
          
 
"That's it. I was on my way back to the
Dukurika mountains when Packrat caught me."

 
          
 
Ritshard stared into her eyes with that look
that betrayed the Power in his soul.

 
          
 
You will dream of him tonight, Heals Like A
Willow. You will stare into those eyes, and wish to feel the warmth of his
body, the strength of his soul twining with yours. Her blood quickened. Unbidden,
her hand reached out to his, their fingers lacing together.

 
          
 
"So," he mused, "you're an
outcast, too. I know how that feels, Willow. To ask questions that make others
nervous. I, too, would question God, for if He is all-powerful, all good, and
all-knowing the way my people believe, why does He allow suffering to exist? He
must hear the sobs of a mother weeping over the body of her child . . . like
you over your husband and son."

 
          
 
At his words, the grief tightened in her
chest. "I would have given anything to save them. I begged and cried to
the Spirit World. I offered anything to save them." If only I had had the
courage to send my soul into the Land of the Dead to bring their souls back.