Reason To Believe (46 page)

"It hasn't always been
in
to be Indian," Clara remembered Ben telling her. Dewey had kept a few cows and done odd jobs, but there had been times when there was no work, no money, and only the occasional gift from those who had kept the traditions.

But they had not suffered from lack of food on this journey, as Sitanka's band had done a century ago. During the ride Clara had given much thought to the problem of hunger. The aroma of coffee brewing in big percolators in the corner of the room stirred mouth and stomach alike. More than a week on the South Dakota trail had served to remind her of some of the things she took for granted, like easy access to a quick snack. But what would it be like to look into the half-starved face of her own child and have no food to give her? She hoped she would never have to experience that kind of heartbreak, but she needed to be aware that many women did, and it was the ride that had seeded the need. When it was over, she vowed to open her eyes and ears, to read and look and listen with her heart and to do what she could, to care at the very least.

Margie Bigger, Joe's wife, had spent most of the day in the kitchen. She announced that she was taking a break as she joined the women at the table. She'd heard them talking about raising teenage girls, the girls themselves taking exception to some of the claims, and she broached the subject again.

"How do you handle mixing the two backgrounds?" Margie asked Clara. Joe was white, but Margie was Oglala Sioux, from Pine Ridge Reservation. "My daughter is half-white, too. She has a lot of white friends, which is fine. I never knew too many white people growing up, and I think it's good. You have to get to know other people. Otherwise you believe all the stuff you hear, like white people are all stingy, or they think they know it all, or they smell like they've been eating broccoli."

Clara smiled. "Broccoli?"

"I don't even know what broccoli smells like. Joe likes to make sauerkraut, though." Margie pinched her nose and gave her head a tight shake. "But it's good the way he makes it. I never thought I'd like it after that first time I saw him skimming the mold off, but it turns out good." She deliberated a moment, concentrating on making a neat row of dents in the rim of her Styrofoam cup with her thumbnail. "I used to be pretty shy about being around white people, but since we've been married, well, being around his people helps me understand him better."

Clara chuckled. "You mean, like, it explains his bad habits?"

"Nah, we've both got bad habits." Margie looked up and tossed off a shrug. "But the differences, you know? Like, sometimes it's food or clothes or whether to let the dog in the house, or the way we treat company or the way we handle a death in the family. Or the way we raise kids. He wants to set down more rules for the kids, while I'm more likely to let them decide a lot of things for themselves." She leaned back in her chair and gestured expansively. "It's not that any one way is good or bad. Just different. The more I get around other people, the better I understand."

"I know what you mean," Clara said. "Where we live, the population is pretty homogeneous. You really have to go out of your way to meet a variety of people, and in this day and age, I think we'd better
start
going out of our way to get to know each other face-to-face, or we're all going to be in big trouble."

"Aren't we in big trouble already?" TJ said. "Kids shooting each other for a little pocket change."

"There's hope. There's always hope." Clara glanced from the older faces to the younger ones and smiled. "That's what being a woman is all about, I think. Building bridges for our children to cross."

"Yeah, just look at me." Anna thumped her fists on the table, then drew an arch in the air with her finger to illustrate. "There's Mom's world, there's Dad's world, and I'm the bridge."

"Not the kind people can walk on, however," Clara put in.

Anna laughed. "Just let 'em try."

"Your dad'll be right there to throw 'em off," TJ said.

"I can pretty much stick up for myself, but my mom—" She leaned over to give Clara's shoulder a quick squeeze. "Mom just hates it when people don't take us for mother and daughter right away, which they never do. Right, Mom?" Mother and daughter exchanged a shared-experience look. "I think it's funny sometimes, but sometimes I don't. They look at you funny, and they ask the dumbest things, like, is she your real mom? Was your dad married before?" Anna wagged her forefinger Clara's way. "Remember that nurse?"

"You mean, last winter when you had that sinus infection?" Clara nodded and picked up the story. "We were in the exam room, and this woman was taking down Anna's symptoms. Anna was sitting up there on the exam table, feeling miserable but patiently answering the questions, even though the woman kept trying to talk to me rather than to Anna. Finally she looked at me, and out of the clear blue she asked, 'Is she from the group home?' "

"What gave her that idea?" TJ demanded.

"It wasn't an idea. It was ignorance."

But Anna laughed, demonstrating with splayed fingers. "You should have seen Mom's hackles just stand right up. She said in her crispiest voice, 'Anna is
my daughter.
I have the stretch marks to prove it.' God, you should've seen the red face on that lady. Did she look stupefied! She just went, 'Uh-uh-uh... ' "

Emerging from the kitchen with a cup of coffee, Ben had gone unnoticed, but the story had put a grin on his face. "Mom's a she-bear when it comes to her cub."

Margie laughed. "I wonder if bears talk about being like a
she-human
when it comes to her child."

"I was thinking this morning about the women with Sitanka's band," Clara said. "And now, thinking back, I realize that I felt threatened by that nurse's remark, which was really nothing more than thoughtless. But Anna is my little girl, and when I think of the hostility there is out there... I mean, you'd think it would be safer now, after a hundred years, that there would be real understanding and tolerance, but..." She sighed, shaking her head. "Things haven't changed that much. It's the worst kind of fear, being afraid for your child."

"And that day there were men with guns all around, and no way to protect the children," Ben said quietly
.

"To see those guns pointed at her," Clara said, watching Anna whisper something in Billie's ear. "I would want to swallow her whole. Put her back where she started, inside me, where I could—" She slid her hand over her flat stomach. "But when the test actually comes, we don't always come through for our children, do we? We think we would, but then—" She looked up at Ben. "Sometimes we're all caught up in other things."

"We're human," TJ said. "We can't always see the dangers. Even if we see them, we can't always run interference for someone else."

But when that someone else is inside you, Clara thought, when it's your baby... The memory burned, along with the regret. She watched a young mother shoulder her just-fed infant and pat his back. Then she looked at her own child, almost a woman, and thought, it wasn't that long ago that I fed her and held her the same way.

But I wasn't eager to have the second one, she reminded herself as she left the table for a coffee refill. Or maybe he wasn't eager to have me. Maybe he had an inkling about me, that I wasn't...

She'd always thought of the baby as
he,
probably because a boy had been next on her grand-scheme schedule. She'd often been ribbed about her fixation with clocks and calendars. Ben, Dewey, Anna, her students back in her teaching days.

Mrs. Pipestone's schedule had definitely gone awry.

But somehow it was beginning to seem okay. She was following somebody else's itinerary, and for once she wasn't questioning it. She was just going, from one marker in the middle of nowhere to another of the same. Just trying to stay warm, stay in the saddle, watch out for her daughter, keep an eye on the hoop. And think things over. Memories were the mile markers of this journey, but it wasn't enough simply to remember. This was a
journey,
not an exercise in dwelling on the past. She was being called upon to take the memory out and
do
something with it. Discover what it really was and move on.

The question was, move where? How far? How...

Ah, the question. Her questions always begat more questions, to which she always needed comfortingly, reassuringly precise answers. And suddenly she had none. She had only feelings. An uncontrollable flood of them, and it was the uncontrollable part that was scary.

A white ball bounced across the floor in her direction. She switched her coffee cup to the other hand and tried for a one-handed snatch. She missed, but someone made a solid catch right behind her. She turned as Ben tossed the ball back into the children's game. He plucked a cigarette from his mouth, pushing his fingers through his thick black hair as he spat the smoke away from her. His eyes seemed to read her mind, and his wistful smile seemed to sympathize.

But rather than give a reading, he asked, "Lost in your thoughts?"

"Second thoughts," she admitted.

"Hmmm." He took another pull on the cigarette, damming the smoke in his chest for a moment, then blowing it away speculatively. "Those old wish-I'd-taken-the-high-road kind of thoughts?"

"You'd never guess what was on that road, though. The one I've been wishing we'd taken." She sat down on a homemade bench, her eyes suddenly glued to the white ball as it passed from one small hand across the tiled floor to another. "We should have had more children. I mean, I wanted more children, but..."

"But you had me?" He put one booted foot on the bench and smiled knowingly. "A kid for a husband?"

"No. I had me." She stared sightlessly at the ball, which had gotten loose again. "I didn't want to take the time. This is a day of rest, and it's dedicated to women. A woman should take the time for her family. What kind of a woman doesn't want to take the time?"

"The kind who thinks everything she does has to be done perfectly. It doesn't, Clara. Give yourself a break." She looked up at him, surprised by the invitation. He shrugged. "Then maybe you'll be able to give the rest of us one, too."

"You're right. I'm much too demanding."

"I didn't say that. I said, give it a rest. You're a good woman. Not perfect, mind you, but basically pretty damn good. You finished with that?" With a jerk of his chin he indicated her nearly empty cup. She gave it to him, and he took a final drag on the cigarette before he doused the remains in the dregs of her coffee.

He sat down beside her. "Clara, you can drive yourself crazy with should-haves, but it doesn't change anything. You can't go back and do it over. Just ask me."

"I know. I mean, I really do know that, I just..." She laid her hand on his thigh. "You know what else I feel bad about? When you did something wrong, it made me feel all that much more right."

"I screwed up and you fixed it?" He found it easy to chuckle over it now, remembering how he'd come to expect it, depend on it, alternately loved her and hated her for it.

"But I really couldn't, could I? You're the one who's good at fixing things. You fix cars. You fix things that are really broken. Around the yard, around the house..." Her hand stirred on his thigh, an old comforting habit, but also a loving gesture. "You fix things that most people would throw away."

"Guess there's something to be said for growing up poor, although I wouldn't recommend it as a goal in life."

"But you would recommend repairing things rather than throwing them away?"

"If you can. If it's something you like and it's still got a few good years left in it." He shifted, angling toward her, looking into her eyes. "Maybe it'll become a collector's item, and you'll wanna keep it forever."

"Not the way it was." She flexed her hand, squeezing gently, urgently. "There are parts we'd both have to fix, Ben. You've made a good start. I'm still..."

"It's okay." He put his hand over hers. "I needed a head start. I was all messed up, Clara. In some ways I'm glad you dumped me, because if you hadn't..." It was his turn to do the squeezing. In response, she turned her palm to his, and they held hands and smiled at each other like a couple of lovesick kids. "So you fix your part, and let me fix mine."

"Then I'll let you play with mine if you let me play with yours?"

"I am shocked, Clara-bow." His smile turned sensual. "Besides, that's the easy part. Those parts seem to be workin' just fine."

"No, don't take that for granted, Ben. It's not easy. Not for a woman. Not for me." Her hand-holding tightened, became a frantic appeal. "You think your infidelity was a small mistake. I think it was a big one. Is that the difference between a man and a woman?"

"I might have said that then. I don't think so now."

"I want to believe that. I'm not sure broken dreams can be fixed."

"This ride is about people who died for dreams, Clara. And here we are, all of us, remembering their dreams, trying to build or rebuild our own and lookin' for some reason to believe some part of those dreams might come true. That's what this journey is all about. We're lookin' for a reason to believe."

She nodded, studying their hands. "What if we don't find it?"