Two in the Field (22 page)

Nodding as if having made a satisfactory diagnosis, he gathered up a bundle of my stuff, walked over to Mr. P., whose ears pricked up nervously as he approached but otherwise made no objection as he mounted with an upswing of his stubby leg. I had the grudging thought that he and Mr. P. looked in proper proportion. He said something to me—did he really think I understood a damn word of it?—and rode away.

The sun was coming up and he’d left me to die.

I drifted off into yellow, splashy fever dreams.

When I woke again, I discovered that he was back. He’d constructed a sunshade by tying my bedroll and a burr-encrusted, horrible-smelling blue blanket between two willow saplings. The prairie was broiling in the midday heat and he had shaded me. Why?

I heard what sounded like an infant’s cry nearby. Must be hallucinating. It came again. I turned my head and saw a tiny brown face poking up from an Indian traveling crib covered with elaborate beadwork. Seeing me, the baby stopped crying and stared at me with obsidian eyes, the little lips curling in a delighted smile. I stared back in wonderment.

The Indian held out my tin cup to me. I thought he’d brought me water, but it was a greenish-tinged liquid that tasted vaguely like chicken liver. Crushed white flakes coated the cup and my lips. It left a pungent aftertaste.

“What is this stuff?”

Saying something that sounded like
woka
, he pressed the cup on me again. I shook my head. He brandished his knife and thrust the cup forward. I drank, gagged, tried to push it away, felt the blade at my throat, and drained the cup.

Next time I awoke, it was late afternoon and I felt markedly better. The Indian had tied an amulet around my neck: dangling from a string were some feathers and what looked like a half-chewed bunch of grass and tobacco. He motioned for me to leave it alone and brought another cup of the green stuff. It went down easier this time. I sat up gingerly, gratified that my insides didn’t feel like they were in spin cycle.

He pointed to the baby and slowly made a sign. Something about the motion of his hands seemed oddly familiar. To my amazement, I thought I got it. Once, writing a feature on adjustment
problems faced by deaf kids, I’d picked up some ASL signs. I gestured for him to do it again. He brought his hands up on the left side of his chest, palms inward, then lowered them quickly, opening the fingers as he did so. Like throwing something away. The ASL signer had done it more frontward, but it was the same idea. He was saying that the baby was abandoned.

Or maybe that
he
was abandoning it.

I nodded that I understood. “So?”

He beckoned for me to stand up, then pointed to the southeast. At first I thought he was giving me directions; O’Neill City
did
lie that way. Then I saw a burial scaffold limned darkly against the sky, a melancholy sight. Cupping a hand against his chest to suggest a breast, he pointed again to the scaffold.

The baby’s mother was up there.

As if cued, the infant stirred and began to cry.

Christ, I thought, she must have just died. I pointed to the baby, and then to the Indian, eyebrows raised in a question:
Yours?

Whether he understood or not—I thought he did—he answered simply by pointing at me. Message painfully clear. The baby was now mine. With deft movements he demonstrated how to unwrap the cradle board, then he hung the baby’s swaddling cloth—I saw that she was a girl—on one of the willow poles to dry in the gathering evening breeze.

“Hey.” I spread my palms wide to convey helplessness. “I can’t do this.”

Grinning, he made the nature of our exchange clear by pointing first to Mr. P. and me. Then to the amulet and tea and blue blanket he’d provided. I was surprised to see one of the gold eagles he’d taken also sitting there. Finally he pointed to himself and the bundle of my former possessions. That it was a done deal became obvious as he picked up the bundle and walked toward the tall grasses. Having nursed me to health, he’d taken
what he must have considered a fair price. He’d unloaded a baby on me but allowed me to keep my horse so that we’d have a chance at surviving.

“Wait!” I pointed to the infant and cupped my hands to my mouth and then spread them, trying to indicate speech. “What’s her name?”

He pointed at me again, and then with a few quick steps vanished into the grasses.

Naming her, I gathered, was up to me.

And, oh yes, keeping her alive.

Looking up at the scaffold, I posed the silent questions, What would
you
like me to do with her? I tried to think it through. If the infant was the Indian’s daughter, as I suspected, why was he giving her away? Didn’t the Sioux single-parent? I’d heard that in some tribes girls were valued far less than boys, and couples who produced no boys were stigmatized. Had that happened in this case? Would he be keeping the baby if it were a boy?

A wail came from beneath the little tent.

Only a few hours of daylight remained, and she would need milk very soon.

I had only one idea where to get it.

 FOURTEEN 

We made a most unlikely threesome as we entered O’Neill City. I rode in the lead, legs dangling down Mr. P.’s sides, and behind me, on a dappled mare, came Kaija Tihönen, the baby in its traveling crib strapped to her.

They were still in their own world.

For three days Kaija had talked nonstop to the infant. Talked in Yankton and talked during the whole trip. Every once in a while I asked what she said. She replied that she was telling of the midnight sun and reindeer and Laplanders and gypsies, of planting seeds according to the moon and watching the sky for portents. The baby looked up at her with her shiny black eyes and seemed to listen.

I’d advanced Kaija five dollars, leaving myself only that much, and offered her the job of wet nurse for two months, figuring in that time I’d be able to find a replacement. Newspapers everywhere carried ads for wet nurses, since “genteel” women as a rule didn’t relish nursing.

Kaija asked what I planned to do with the infant.

When I said I had no clue, she looked like she was about to cry.

Which worried me. “Well, what do you think?”

“Kyllä,”
she whispered.

“What does that mean?”

She looked at me from the corners of her eyes. “It means yes.”

The baby suckled for the first time then, her hair a spiky dark mass against Kaija’s snowy breast. Looking on, I felt a glow of semi-paternal pride. Or maybe a matchmaker’s satisfaction. The dreamily absorbed expression on Kaija’s face told me we were off to a good start.

Now, after three days, I was letting myself entertain hopes that she would keep the baby for good. Thus solving a big problem for me—and coincidentally producing America’s first Finnish-speaking Sioux child.

I’d been gone from the Irish Colony only a week, but things were different. The biggest change was the presence of John O’Neill, who had returned with affidavits proving that Seamus Devlin had pocketed a healthy portion of the colony’s subscription money. Devlin had fled within minutes of the General’s return, taking with him revenue from the exorbitant rents he’d levied. And so, by way of restitution, O’Neill had temporarily suspended further rents. Which definitely helped me, since Mr. P., the clothes on my back, and ten dollars represented all my worldly goods—plus one Indian baby.

Kaija moved aggressively into the colony, going around to shake hands, saying, “I am Kaija Tihönen.” A dramatic moment came when Cait opened her door to the towering blonde Finn with a dark-skinned infant in one arm, the other outstretched for vigorous shaking. After her introductory declaration, Kaija added, for reasons known only to herself, “I come with Mr. Sam.”

Cait’s eyes swept to me, positioned discreetly at a distance. I offered a polite nod. Cait’s puzzlement and surprise morphed to something unreadable—I’d have sworn it contained an unguarded instant of jealousy—before she recovered and bent over the baby with a smile. Probably just wishful thinking on my part. Still, it was the first halfway satisfying moment I’d had since finding Cait.

Linc laughed when he found me sharing his soddy again that night. He’d cleaned it up almost to military standards since I last saw it. I’d ensconced Kaija and the baby nextdoor in a small structure that was half sod dugout and half frame lean-two. It
was drafty, but Kaija didn’t seem to mind. She informed me that flowing air was healthy. She also said that Finns were the world’s cleanest people, and set to work immediately, brushing the dirt walls and scouring the few pieces of crude furniture.

I took Linc over to meet them. Shaking Kaija’s hand shyly, almost reluctantly, he mumbled a hello and seemed to look everywhere but at her. Kaija kept smiling and talking in Finglish and gazing around at the settlement as if the soddies were luxury condos. After Yankton, maybe they were.

With the baby Linc was a different story, kneeling and taking her in his arms, making nonsense noises with his rumbly voice and chucking her under the chin. “What’s her name?”

I’d been so wrapped up in devising fanciful strategies for dealing with Cait that I hadn’t considered it. I asked if they had any ideas.

Kaija said something in Finnish that sounded like “stwish.” If it was a name suggestion, forget it.

“Sioux get named more than once,” Linc said. “The first usually has to do with something around the time they’re born.”

“How about, ‘Dumped On White Man?’ ” I joked.

Kaija gave me a reproachful look.

“Did the Injun say anything to you?” Linc asked.

“ ‘
Woka
’ is all I remember,” I said. “That’s what he called the stuff he dosed me with.”

“It means ‘lily.’ ”

“What?” Kaija said.

“In Lakota it means ‘lily,’ ” Linc repeated. “They boil the roots of pond lillies, make a tea of it to remedy diarrhea.”

“It worked,” I said. “It cured me.”

“Lily!” Kaija exclaimed. “It’s beautiful!”

Which settled it: the baby was Lily.

“How’d you know about that?” I asked Linc.

“Fought ’em,” he said. “Worked with ’em, too.”

It turned out that after losing his family he’d scouted for the Army and picked up a fair amount of Lakota.

“You’re one hell of a quick worker,” he commented as we watched Kaija take Lily inside her lean-to.

“It’s a business proposition,” I told him. “Nothing else.”

I could tell he didn’t believe me.

Now that John O’Neill was back, Linc expected to pick up a good outlying plot, build a house, and start farming. When I told him I was nearly broke, he said I could help him bring logs from Eagle Creek. No cash in it, but I could barter for necessities. I agreed. Unlike him, I had no long-range plans beyond winning back Cait.

I didn’t see her the following week as I rose with Linc before dawn each day and returned at sundown. But I heard a bit more than I wanted to.

“Yesterday Miz Cait helped with Lily again,” Kaija announced as she served coffee and biscuits before we rode off on our timbering chores, a task she had taken over despite Linc’s stated preference for his army cooking. “I like her—and Mr. Tip, too.”

Mr. Tip? Give me a break.

“She say anything about me coming back?” I asked.

“Why, no,” Kaija replied cheerfully. “But I tell her how you get so drunk in Yankton.”

Wonderful.

Seeing my expression, she added, “I always say how nice you are, Mr. Sam.”

“Tell Cait I have no intention of leaving.”

Kaija’s eyes widened as she processed this new information. “I think,” she said slyly, tapping a finger against her temple, “Miz Cait don’t poke-poke with Mr. Tip.”

Well, that was something.