Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (30 page)

"Does Nola still live across the lake?" I heard Dad say in the next room.  I dried the last of the dishes and left the kitchen.  I found him with Granny in the sitting room.

"Why on earth should she have moved?" Granny said.  "It's not as though anyone died in her house."

Shoshone immediately abandon a house that someone's died in.  In fact, you're not even supposed to tear the house down, which is exactly why I'd found my old house still in tact, albeit decrepit, only months ago.  I don't know whether the driving factor is respect, superstition, or a combination of both, but that's one of the very few pieces of culture Dad imparted on me when I was young.

I looked, alarmed, at Dad.  He couldn't possibly plan on walking around the reservation in broad daylight.

"I'll be fine, Cubby," he said.  "But I've got a lot of business to attend to still.  I'm sorry.  I'll see you tonight."

He kissed the side of my head and left me all over again, my stomach in knots.

The state of my stomach didn't improve at all that morning.  I went to Annie's house and we cooked dinner enough for a small army, and after that we delivered a stack of wrapped meals to Reverend Silver Wolf, who was sick with a minor case of mumps.  Annie analyzed me mercilessly on the walk back to her house.  "You're a little distracted today," she remarked.

Dad's here in Nettlebush
, I signed.  If there was anyone I trusted not to blab, it was Annie.

"Oh, so he's safe!  How wonderful!"

I'm not sure how safe he really is.  But you're right, it's a huge relief.

We found Grandpa Little Hawk sitting on the porch with Joseph, who was playing a racing game with his little wooden horses.  Joseph ran to me and dropped one of the small toys in my hand.  I smiled sunnily at him.  I was back in his good graces, for the time being.

"We're playing Cowboys and Indians," Grandpa Little Hawk said, grinning broadly.  "Go on and club those good for nothing cowboys!"

"Granddad," Annie said sternly.  Sometimes I wondered whether she hadn't acquired a third child to look after.

I settled down on the porch to play mock battle with Joseph, always making sure to let my herder lose spectacularly to his Plains chief, who was called Chief Charging Duck and hailed from the aptly named Little Hawk tribe.  Aubrey stopped by just in time for the climax of the fight.  He had a handful of posies from his farm as a gift for Annie, and she responded with a gleaming smile and a pretty little blush and ran inside to put them in water.

"How about we head to the woods?" Aubrey asked brightly, when she had returned.

We went out to the grotto together, my stomach in knots again.  The willow loomed in view, and then the creek around it, and the cave.  And there was Rafael sitting in a patch of sunlight, his notebook open on his lap.

"Does this creek join the lake, do you know?" Aubrey asked Annie.

"I don't think so.  I've never seen any trout in it."

Rafael looked up, a pencil behind his ear, and waved vaguely before his attention returned to his sketch.  I felt burning coals press against my heart and realized why.

I had to tell him, somehow, about what my father had done to his.

Annie plucked Aubrey's elbow, and the two of them, mid-debate, followed the creek's right-tributary to figure out how far the water went.  I could hear Annie's high ripple of laugh even when they were yards away, their backs to me.

Tentatively, I sat next to Rafael.

"Hey," he said, distracted.  His hands were stained with charcoal.  I glanced over his shoulder to get a look at his latest drawing.  A wolf and a coyote stood side by side beneath a dual sky, sun and moon shining at the same time.

"They're brothers," Rafael said.  He laid his charcoal on the grass.  "Wolf is wise and judicious.  Coyote's a trickster.  They're the two faces of God.  Everything in the world is dual-natured.  Even God isn't all good or all bad."

He told me about how the sun used to be married to the moon before they quarreled and parted ways, leaving the sun to rule the world at day and the moon at night.  He told me how the Wolf had sewn us all out of seeds and put us in a cloth bag to keep us safe, but the Coyote had clawed the bag open and everyone had spilled out, landing and taking root in different parts of the world.  He told me about the girl with Two Faces, one half of her face devastatingly beautiful, the other half impossibly ugly, and the man who loved her for it anyway.  He told me about the days when death lacked permanence and ten different generations lived together beneath the same stars.

He talked, as he always talked, without any real purpose, clearing his head of the cluttering thoughts that had gathered and built up until he could pour them into me.  I accepted each one of them while secretly using the time to figure out how I was going to tell him what he needed to know.

"Is your dad sticking around?  He didn't say anything about taking you away from Nettlebush, did he?"

Rafael always read me like an open book.  Sometimes, like now, I was glad for it.

I took the pencil from behind his ear and opened to a clean page in his notebook.  I felt Rafael watching me while I debated what I was going to write. 

Remember how you told me that the tribal council had your father killed?

There was a guarded expression on Rafael's face when he read what I had written.  He nodded.

I hesitated, the tip of the pencil hovering above the paper.  I thought about how Ms. Siomme had leapt up from the table to call Mrs. Red Clay when I told her Dad was on his way home.

They did.

I could see that he was confused, at first.  He read the same line twice; three times.

I saw darkness flood his eyes, his brown face hard as earth.  He raised his eyes slowly, each second an intolerable agony.  His eyes met mine.  I could feel his gaze probing my own, culling all the voiceless thoughts trapped in my head.

He looked away, dispassionately.  It was so unlike him that it scared me; everything he did was filled with passion; he could even make a yawn look passionate.

"That's called blood law," he muttered.  "When you have the right to revenge, you never give up.  Even if it takes eleven years."

I wanted to touch him.  I was afraid to.

Rafael looked at me.  His cool eyes flashed with emotion, burning emotions that threatened to scald him from the inside out.

"My dad's been alive all this time, and he never even tried to contact me?"

I learned a new brand of pity just then.  I couldn't imagine what a horrible, conflicting, contradictory existence it was to be Rafael.  To love one man more than any other; to hate that very same man more than anything.  I couldn't fathom the depths of that pain.  That dual nature.

I reached for him.  He snatched his arm away.  He was hurting.  He was on fire.  "The hell do you know?" he said, his voice like poison.  "Your dad came back for you.  You were wanted."

And the implicit afterthought was: 
And I wasn't.

I knew what I wanted to say.  I wanted to tell him: 
You
are
wanted.  Your mother wanted you.  She couldn't have you, but that's no fault of hers.  Your uncle wants you.  Annie and Aubrey want you.  I want you.  I want you so much.  I think I want you more than anything and that scares me, sometimes.

I took his head between my hands and forced him to look at me.  He wasn't on fire any longer.  He was a raging ocean, sea storms in his eyes.  I had a crazy thought just then, that if I didn't look away, and soon, those storms were going to eat me up; they were going to eat me alive and drown whatever was left of me and spit out my bones.

I couldn't look away.  He didn't look away.  Whatever anger had been on his face dissipated, the sun breaking through the heavy gray rain clouds.  Rafael had a way of looking at me like I was something he wanted to take great care not to break.  It was a soft, inherently protective look.  I loved that look.  He was wearing that look now.  I didn't think he had any right wearing that look when he was the one so capable of breaking easily.

"I'm not mad at your dad," Rafael said.  "He's allowed to do whatever he wants to his wife's murderer.  That's blood law.  But it's blood law that got us into this mess to begin with."

Confused, I tilted my head.

"I mean with the FBI.  All the hoops and hurdles we have to jump through with them if we want to get any justice done.  Don't you know about Crow Dog?"

I shook my head.

"The hell do they teach you in white schools?  Anyway, there was a Plains chief called Spotted Tail.  He was Lakota.  He was abusing his people, giving away their land and taking their wives, so a subchief, Crow Dog, killed him.  Crow Dog had every right to it--blood law.  The whites went totally nuts.  They wanted to see Crow Dog punished--don't ask me why.  But they couldn't do anything about it because it happened on a reservation, and reservations had their own governments.  Those were the terms of the treaty we'd established with the white colonists.  So the colonists broke their own treaty and made up the Seven Major Crimes Act.  Blood law's illegal now.  If the feds know that your dad enacted a blood law, he's in trouble."

I wonder how I didn't throw up on the spot.  The last thing I wanted was more trouble for Dad.  If the FBI came back to the reserve, or even Ms. Whitler...  No, I told myself.  We were going to protect him.  There had to be something we could do, some way we could hide him.

Dad didn't show up at dinner that evening.  I sat on the ground with Joseph and Lila and tried--and failed--to find an appetite.  Lila shot me a patronizing look. 

When the stars came out and the families began to pack their silverware, Mrs. Red Clay rose from her folding chair.

The effect she had on the community was palpable and instantaneous.  Nobody moved, except to sit back down.  A respectful silence fell over the crowd.  Even the wind seemed to yield to her and quiet down.

"There are two matters I would like to address," Mrs. Red Clay said.

"The radio petition is now located at the tribal council building.  Anyone who still wishes to sign may come and visit between five o'clock AM and five o'clock PM.  The votes will be tallied mid-September.  Should the motion pass, finances will be extracted from the tribal fund.  The final cost will be posted at the council building to be recovered in May.

"Over the next several weeks, you may or may not find that the reservation plays host to the FBI.  You will recognize them when you see them.  Should they approach you, do not talk to them.  They cannot compel you to answer their questions.  If you notice anyone on the reservation who looks as though he or she does not belong here, we implore you to come straight to the council headquarters and alert us."

It unnerved me, how no one even thought to ask what the FBI would be doing here.  Attentive, inexpressive eyes were all trained on Mrs. Red Clay.  Either they knew already, or they didn't want to know.

I swallowed, my throat dry, when the congregation broke for the evening.  I picked up Granny's folding chair and followed her home.

Dad was waiting in the sitting room.  He sat cross-legged on the floor by the hearth, drinking a strong draught of yaupon tea out of one of the glazed cups I'd made for Granny.  He looked up and smiled distractedly when we came into the room.

Granny muttered something irritably--I caught the word "fugitive" beneath her breath.  She waved at us dismissively when she tromped off to bed.

And over the next couple of days, Dad certainly acted like a fugitive.  Whenever someone knocked on the door or tapped on one of the windows, he darted up the staircase and out of sight.  It was never anyone hostile coming to visit--usually it was Ms. Sunflower or Mr. Sun Hat--and Granny quickly lost her temper and took to yelling after Dad's receding back.  I couldn't blame him for hiding.  I was pretty antsy myself during those days, always on the lookout for handcuffs and guns.  No one was going to take my dad away.

Dad took himself away every morning and all afternoon, leaving Granny and me to our own devices.  I had no idea what the heck he was up to during that time and found it just a little frustrating that he didn't feel the need to tell us.

"Maybe he's getting to know his old friends again," Aubrey suggested.  He and Annie sat by the creek with handmade fishing rods, trying to trick the trout out of hiding.  "He's been gone for very long, hasn't he?"

That was true.  But I didn't know who any of his friends were, and the enforced anonymity kind of bugged me.  I knew Granny's friends by sight; she knew mine by name.  I thought that was the way it ought to be with a family.

"Aha!  I got one!  No, wait, it's only a minnow--"

"I wonder what's gotten into Mopey all of a sudden," Annie commented enigmatically.

I looked over my shoulder.  Rafael sat brooding by his lonesome beneath the curtains of the willow tree. 

"Hmm, I don't know," Aubrey said.  "He always has those quiet spells.  Remember in school, when he--"

I interrupted him with a smile.  Aubrey took the hint and stopped talking.

When I sat next to Rafael, I found his brash melancholy largely unchanged.  He wasn't reading, he wasn't drawing--he didn't even have a pencil tucked behind his ear.  He threw himself down on the grass like a sack of flour and made an impatient sound in the back of his throat.