I Am Regina (14 page)

T
he day after Nonschetto left, the rain began. It has rained for four days now. Water puddles in one corner of our hut. I have had to move my bed closer to the fire to keep from getting wet. Smoke stings my eyes and makes my head ache. But I am better now. My eyelids are no longer swollen and I can see.

Bad things come in threes. I learned this when I was small, like Quetit. You stub a toe, cut a finger and then you wait for the third bad thing. It always happens, and only afterward can you relax, knowing that, for a little while, you'll be hurt no more. Two bad things have already happened. Tiger Claw attacked me and he broke Tummaa's leg. What is to be the third bad thing? Could I call it the storm which has blown the shingles off our roof?

Outside, the wind mounts, slashing the rain against our hut. Quetit and I sew by firelight while Woelfin sleeps. I hope that she does not awaken soon. The damp air makes her bones ache and she is more ill-tempered than a wounded bear.

“Tskinnak. Look.” Quetit shows me the design she has been sewing in her deerskin square. A smattering of stars covers a brown expanse of sky.

“You must make your stitches small and even. Like you did with this one.” I point to a star she has neatly stitched in red.

Quetit unthreads all but the red star design and begins anew. She is good with her hands and patient, the way I was when my mother taught me how to sew. I still can picture the words stamped on my first sampler—“God Bless This Home.” It is strange how clearly I can picture these words, while the details of my home and family fade. It saddens me to think that this is happening, but perhaps it's better my mind works this way.

These deerskin squares are hard to work. The dyed porcupine quills we use are not like a needle and thread. I am pleased with Quetit's progress, pleased with my own creation—a picture of the woman falling through the sky. The woman holds her arms out in the shape of a cross. Birds fly under her arms, holding her aloft. I need to sew in the shapes of clouds, the outline of a mud turtle waiting for her, then I will give the picture to Nonschetto. I hope that she will like it.

I wonder where Nonschetto is. I hope she has found shelter from the rain and that her trading has been good. I feel so empty when she is gone. Especially now.

Tummaa sleeps at our feet while we sew bright quill designs of yellow, red and blue. His leg is slowly mending. When I see him hobble, I see Tiger Claw kicking him. I hope the wilderness swallows Tiger Claw. I hope he never returns from battle. That would be a good bad thing.

I create clouds of blue, a red and yellow earth. My picture is completed. The woman falls through the sky and a large mud turtle awaits her in a sea of blue. I sleep, dreaming of Nonschetto, her smile when she sees what I have made.

Bird song awakens me at dawn. Sunlight slants through the hole in the roof which the storm has made. It shines on Quetit's face. She opens her eyes and reaches toward the light, as if she could capture it and claim it for her own.

“Shhh,” I whisper when her eyes meet mine. “Do not awaken the old she-bear.” I glance at Woelfin who snores loudly on her bed.

Quetit giggles. She hops out of bed and together we quietly slip outside. The earth has been washed clean and the wet trees sparkle.

“Tskinnak. Look! Nonschetto's home is broken.” Quetit points to an uprooted locust tree which leans against Nonschetto's hut. We hurry across the village clearing, skirting the black water puddled in the bonfire circle. Up close, I see that the locust has crashed into Nonschetto's roof and a large branch bars the door.

This is the third bad thing, I think. And it is not so bad. A tree can be moved. A hut can be repaired. Thorns scratch my hands as I try to pull the branch away. Quetit tries to help me, but the branch is too heavy for us to move. We need a hatchet to cut it into pieces.

“You would mend a roof that shelters no one while we sleep in puddles?” Woelfin says when we ask for the hatchet. “Soon our hut will be filled with water. Where then will we light our fire? Take the hatchet. Cut the tree bark and patch our roof first. Pusik! Move!”

I do not want to patch our roof. I want to mend Nonschetto's. Woelfin knows this and she is jealous. She has always been jealous of the closeness Nonschetto and I share except ... when I was injured. I grab the hatchet and take my frustration out on trees, slicing the bark away in jagged sheets.

Soon the village comes alive as people emerge from their homes to clear away the branches that have fallen against their roofs and walls. Gokhotit sits astride his roof, two huts away from me. His strong hands work quickly, tearing off broken shingles. Gokhotit is not afraid of heights, but I am. They make me feel dizzy. I always fear that I will fall.

I stand on an upturned log so that I can reach our roof. One by one, Quetit hands me the sheets of bark and I piece them together, so that the sheets overlap, covering the hole in the roof which the wind has made. The work is slow and tedious and my arms ache with it.

By noon, the roof is finally patched to Woelfin's satisfaction. By noon, the others have finished patching their homes, too. Now Gokhotit, along with Gray Fox, Woates's husband, drags the locust tree away. It pleases me to see the tree removed. I hated the way its branches barred Nonschetto's door.

Outside our hut, a tired Quetit sprawls in the sunlight with Tummaa on a bed she's made with her deerskin draped over a pile of leaves. I carry our leftover bark to Nonschetto's hut. Gokhotit stands outside, his hands on his hips while he stares up at the roof. “This is an evil sign,” he says, pointing to the gaping hole. “Bad spirits will enter the hut and there is no one inside to scare them away.”

“Then we must mend the roof quickly, before they can enter,” I say, finding it all too easy now to picture these bad spirits. There are three of them and they perch in the dark branches of the locust tree, flapping large and scaly wings. Their eyes burn red like Meesing's and they look hungry. I race back across the clearing, their frightful image giving wings to my feet.

I gather the remaining sheets of bark and the village dogs start howling. They race through the black puddles in the bonfire circle, their hackles raised. Tiger Claw has returned, I think, prickles dancing up and down my spine.

But Tiger Claw does not come out of the forest. Thistle does. And Clear Sky walks behind her. But I don't see Nonschetto. Maybe Clear Sky took her to her village, to visit with her sister, White Cloud. She didn't tell me she was going there.

I drop the load of bark and run to Clear Sky. “Where is Nonschetto?” I ask, suddenly afraid of the expression I see on his face.

Clear Sky stares at me, his face like a mask. He brushes past me and halloos. And as this mournful death cry echoes through the village, as the men, women and children hurry out of their huts, the third bad thing, larger and darker and more terrible than I could ever imagine, grips me in its talons and does not let me go.

Stunned, I listen as Clear Sky now tells the assembled people what happened to Nonschetto. Of how she stood at the cabin door while inside, Clear Sky bartered with the fur trader. How she held Gokhas in her arms. Suddenly, there was the sound of hoofbeats, of white man's talk. Nonschetto said something in the white man's tongue. Then rifles fired.

The awful shame, the horror I felt when Tiger Claw attacked me, cannot match what I am feeling now. I taught Nonschetto how to speak like a white man, but only a little. Did my words trigger the white man's gun? “Hello.” “Do you have bread to eat?” “I trade four furs for one blanket.” “I ... love you.”

Quetit runs over to me and, sobbing, burrows her face in my deerskin skirt. Quetit's hair is matted, full of leaves. I pick them out, one by one; watch them flutter to the ground as Clear Sky tells how he buried Nonschetto with her feet toward the sunrise.

“The white man killed my wife, my son,” Clear Sky is shouting now. “My blood cries for revenge!”

And in the hollowness that was my heart, I imagine all the bad things in this world flapping in the wind. They come together, folding their scaly wings, and form the figure of large dark evil man. He is as bleak as death.

“Tskinnak.” Quetit pulls at my dress. She looks up at me, her face streaked with tears. “Clear Sky says Nonschetto has gone to
Assowajame,
the land beyond our sight. Can we go there too? Can we see Nonschetto? Tskinnak. Why did the white man shoot her?”

I brush past her, too filled with my own dark thoughts to answer. I wander aimlessly through the village and find myself outside Nonschetto's hut. No one has mended the roof, but it does not matter now. The bad spirits have already entered. The wind brings the smell of wet ashes. Gokhotit sweeps away the black water that has pooled within the bonfire circle. Gray Fox covers the wet ground with leaves and dry branches that have been stored within the lee of the sweat lodge.

Clear Sky lights the bonfire. I join the wailing women who surround the wet and smoking wood, Quetit cling, ing to me. The warriors begin to dance.

“The white man is evil,” Woelfin says, her dark eyes wet with tears as her fingers clutch my arm. “He must die.”

I pull away, hating the feel of her curled fingers. The warriors howl and Clear Sky raises his tomahawk. He curses the Yengee devils and drives the blade into a post.

The warriors' answering cries of revenge cut through me like a knife. Suddenly, I understand the savage anger that drives them to burn and pillage and I want to go to war alongside them. I want to kill the white man who shot Nonschetto—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

And yet, just as clear and sudden as my anger, I hear my father's voice. “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also ...” And I see my father more clearly than I have in many moons—his pale hands hang limply by his side while dark insistent ones search his clothes for weapons he has never owned.

Gray Fox flings his knife at the painted post. The knife point burrows into the wood, the blade quivering, reflecting the firelight, the awful confusion I am feeling.

I push past the women crowding around me. I run into the forest, blood pounding through my head. Brush pulls at my leggings, grabs my hair and I welcome the pain. Behind me, Quetit calls my name.

I push on, fording the stream where the tree was struck by lightning. Icy water soaks my moccasins. I scramble up a muddy bank and see the clearing in the trees. The clearing where I have prayed to God for strength. The clearing where I have sung praises to Him in the white man's tongue.

God, the white man has killed Nonschetto.

Grief as dark, as sudden as Nonschetto's death, envelops me. My chest pounds with pain, as if my very heart were breaking. I curl myself down into a ball and hug my knees. Wings are beating the air above me. Large, black wings. Now I feel them curl around me.

“Tskinnak?” It is Quetit's voice.

“Go away.”

“Tskinnak. Hold me. Please.”

I open my eyes. Something about the way she reaches out to me. Something about the loss and confusion I see written on her tear-stained face breaks through the blackness that is drowning me. I grab her outstretched hands as if they were my only lifeline. I enfold Quetit in my arms and we rock together, she and I, locked in sorrow.

“Alone, yet not alone am I, though in this solitude so drear ...” I find myself singing my mother's hymn for Quetit. I sing it for me and for Nonschetto. Where is she now?

In the sky above, clouds drift like wind-blown feathers.

We are all but feathers.

Oh, God, please, be the wind.

 

 

 

T
iger Claw returned in the month the trees crack with cold, one moon after Nonschetto died. I was skinning the carcass of a rabbit when he came through our door-flap. I stared at him, my hands red with rabbit blood, as was the knife I held—the hunting knife Nonschetto gave me.

Tiger Claw looked away before I did. He gave Woelfin two red blankets, a brass kettle he must have looted from a white man's cabin, a finely beaded belt and a promise of deer meat to see her through the winter. Woelfin was pleased with his offering. She did not scold him for his absence, nor remind him of what he tried to do to me.

But I have not forgotten and I never will. I go to sleep each night with Nonschetto's knife tucked in the folds of my deerskin blanket. Tiger Claw has watched me finger the sharp steel blade. He knows that I am not afraid to use it. Tummaa still sleeps by my bed. He is almost full-grown now. He is bigger and stronger than Thistle, his mother. Tummaa bares his teeth whenever Tiger Claw comes near. Tiger Claw keeps to his side of the fire and we, to ours.

Clear Sky and his warriors returned soon after Tiger Claw. But seeing the two brown-haired scalps they took in revenge for Nonschetto's death gave me no pleasure. Scalps cannot bring Nonschetto back to me.

Nonschetto is gone and with her is buried all memories of my white man's home. It was not something that I wanted to happen. It just did, the way new skin covers wounds.

Quetit was watching Woates nurse her newborn son the morning I discovered what the shock of Nonschetto's death has done to me. It was during the month in which the - ground squirrels begin to run. Quetit, her eyes wide with wonder, turned to me. “Tskinnak,” she said, pointing to the baby. “Was I once small like this?”

“Yes,” I replied, watching the baby's hand grasp his mother's thumb, the way that little Gokhas once clutched mine.

“Did I have a mother like Woates?”

“You had a mother and she held you the way Woates now holds her son.”

“What did my mother look like?”