Where the Broken Heart Still Beats (3 page)

The handsome horse was still there. It had not been put in the corral with the other horses. She laid her hand on the animal's nose and spoke quietly to it, calming it. Then quickly, as she had done many times with her own horses, she untied it and sprang up on its bare back, hugging the baby to her chest. There was probably a saddle in the shed, but she didn't need to look for it. She was used to riding without one, to directing a horse with the pressure of her legs and leather reins she had braided herself. But this horse had not been as carefully trained as the People's ponies, and it did not know how to respond as well as it should. Still, it was a strong horse, and she thumped it with her heels to urge it across the hard-packed earth.

She glanced at the sky and saw that the horns of the new moon pointed up. That meant rain, or even snow. It meant her trail could be easily followed in the damp earth. She would have to press the horse to its limit to keep ahead of those she knew would pursue her.

She was accustomed to riding hard. After a raid on a white settlement or on an enemy tribe, the People drove their ponies furiously, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their enemies. Only much later when they believed it was safe did they allow themselves and their horses to rest. She had been on many raids with her husband. She had ridden as hard as he had.

During the night she and Topsannah headed straight into the teeth of a harsh wind that swept across the plains. Clouds gathered, covering the moon, and it began to snow. Fine swirling, needle-sharp flakes stung her face. Naduah wished she had her buffalo robe to keep them warm and dry, but that foolish woman at the soldiers' camp had taken it from her and kept it. She wished it not for herself, but for the child, awake now and crying with cold.

I truly believed we were making great progress with Cynthia Ann, but now I see that I was wrong. Just as I began to hope that we will succeed in civilizing her, something dreadful happened.

Three nights ago Cynthia Ann stole Jed's horse and rode off with Topsannah while everyone was asleep! Of course they found her the next day. It had snowed during the night, so her trail was easy to follow. She had traveled quite a long distance, but the cold must have been too much for her, or maybe for Topsannah, and she had stopped to make a fire.

Papa and Jedediah and my brother Ben brought them back wet and shivering with cold. We were all quite shocked that she would do such a thing, although I was less surprised than the others because I can see her deep unhappiness. Now Grandfather says someone must watch her night and day, and the "someone" turns out to be me during the daytime. I do not enjoy the idea of being a jailer, but I suppose it must be, at least until she comes to accept that she must stay here with us and gives up her idea of returning to the Indians. If she ever does!

This event spoiled Martha's visit from Jedediah. He is busy with the Rangers, protecting our settlements from the depredations of the Indians, and has little time to stop with us. He talks of resigning soon, as does his friend Capt. Sul Ross. This is no life, he says, once the excitement is over. Jedediah dreams of becoming a merchant, a business he feels would be profitable with all the new people moving into Texas from the east.

Martha has confided to me that they plan to marry in October, after her sixteenth birthday and after the cotton crop has been brought in. I am to say nothing to anyone until Jedediah has spoken to Papa. I am quite excited at the idea of a wedding in the family, although I cannot bear the thought that Martha will be leaving us.

Last evening Papa pressed Jed for details about the attack on the Comanche camp up at Pease River. He has told us little, except to say that he believes Cynthia Ann's husband was a war chief much respected by his tribe. Capt. Ross claims to have shot and killed this warrior, Peta Nocona, but Jed is not certain of that. He says he is sure there were fewer men in the camp than some Rangers claim, that perhaps most of them were off on a hunt and the chief may not have been there at all. I do hope for Cynthia Ann's sake that her husband is not dead, although the world is surely better off without him. As Papa says, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

My brother Ben hangs on Jedediah's every word, because he is determined to be an Indian fighter when he is old enough, even though crippled by the loss of an arm from a rattlesnake bite. Martha is more tenderhearted. "But I cannot believe your men would shoot helpless women and children," she cried, thinking, I am sure, of Cynthia Ann being fired upon and nearly killed by her own people, after all these years.

"There is nothing helpless about those women," Jedediah said, his voice turning hard. "They can ride and shoot as well as the men, and they're just as fiendish. There will be no peace on the frontier until we've gotten rid of every last one of those red devils." I could see Ben nodding vigorously in agreement.

These seemed like such harsh words, but Papa reminds us that our people have suffered greatly from atrocities committed by the Indians. Our own family was nearly destroyed: my great-grandfather Elder John Parker scalped and mutilated, my great-uncles the same, including Cynthia Ann's father. Grandfather was indeed fortunate to escape harm. Two of his sisters-in-law were captured and treated horribly. And look now at Cynthia Ann! Mama and Papa believe that her mind has been forever destroyed by the harsh experiences of her capture and the years of living among savages. But we do not say this to Grandfather, who insists that our kindness and good care eventually will heal her.

Mama and Martha have decided that it will be better if Cynthia Ann learns useful work and that perhaps she will remember some English if she is kept busy with us. And so this morning, as the day was unusually mild and sunny for this time of year, we washed our clothes. We filled the tubs outside with Water, and then we showed her how to work the clothes and bedclothes in the soapy water with a wooden stick. She is a strong and able worker, but she seemed to have no understanding of what we were trying to accomplish.

"Surely she has done this in her home!" I whispered to Mama, who said grimly, "Surely
not
, Lucy! Those barbarians never wash themselves, never clean their clothes. And I'm told their camps are so filthy they have to move often because it gets to smelling so bad. Mrs. Evans sent word from Fort Cooper that the poor thing arrived there full of lice. She destroyed all of Cynthia Ann's clothes, except for the buffalo robe, which she tried to wash. She thinks it might be made clean again if left outside in the sunshine."

It makes me shudder to think of that! How could any white child forget every bit of her upbringing and turn into a filthy savage? That is one question I ask myself. I look at my own younger sister, Sarah, who is a happy little girl, as Cynthia Ann must have been, always glad to help us with our chores. It pains me to think that something so sickening could have happened to such a young and innocent person.

Does Cynthia Ann remember those happy times with her family? She gives no sign. I see her watching our Sarah run and play, and I wonder what thoughts are in her mind. If she does remember, I hope her memories are of those early, happy days and not of the cruel ones that followed her capture. We have heard stories that captives are treated brutally. Papa, Mama, and Grandfather will not tell me what sorts of horrors they are made to suffer, and I frankly cannot imagine what they might be.

Grandfather has brought us a length of good blue calico so that Cynthia Ann may begin to learn to sew and make clothes for herself, as nothing of ours fits her properly. Mama has no patience for this, and so I suppose it will fall upon me to instruct her. It is logical, for I am the one who spends the most time with her as her "guard." I wonder if she knows that is my duty.

Slowly we are teaching Cynthia Ann what it is to be a white woman and to do the kind of chores a white woman does. As we work together, I make it my business to say the words of each thing that we do, and she has begun to repeat them after me, but very reluctantly. Often her mind seems far away, as though she does not hear me. Other times she seems to remember words from long ago and the language comes back to her in fits and starts.

Many of the things that we take for granted she appears not to know. She has never baked bread, that much is plain, for yesterday we showed her how to knead the dough, and she seemed mystified by its rising. Has she never seen a butter churn? I guess not, although according to Grandfather the Comanches have stolen many of the farmers' cattle, herding them right out from under our neighbors' noses and driving them west across the border into New Mexico to sell to the
Comancheros,
the Spanish-speaking traders. But with all those cows, it seems the raiding Indians did not bother to milk them, let alone to turn the milk into butter.

The strangest thing happened after Cynthia Ann had churned the cream and worked the curds in a bowl with the paddle until she had a crock of butter ready to take to the springhouse. She asked for some, and we gave it to her, thinking she wanted it to spread on the bread just taken out of the oven. Instead,
she put the butter on her hair!

This made an awful mess and quite upset Mama, who is convinced that Cynthia Ann is truly, hopelessly mad. "If she continues to behave like this," she complains to Grandfather, "I don't know what I will do."

"We must pray for her, Anna" is his reply. This is always his response to our problems. Grandfather is determined that Cynthia Ann will become a Christian again, as she was as a small child. Each night he gathers us together and reads aloud from the Bible, hoping, I suppose, that the words themselves will affect her. And keep her from buttering her hair.

Loo-see draped the length of dark blue cloth around Naduah's body and held it while Loo-see's Ma-ma marked it with a white stick. Then they spread the cloth on the table and cut it with two knives connected in the middle. Naduah had seen this doubleknife among the goods the traders offered the People, but it hadn't interested her. Now she saw how the thing worked, opening and closing to cut. Loo-see began to sew the pieces of cloth together.

Loo-see showed her a tiny metal tool with a very fine cord looped through a hole in one end. "Needle," Loo-see said. "Thread." She began to push the needle in and out of the cloth, drawing the thread through. "This is called sewing."

Naduah watched for a while and then took the cloth and needle from Loo-see. This she understood. She continued sewing the seam Loo-see had started, struggling to make her stitches as small and neat as Loo-see's. The little needle seemed clumsy in her big fingers.

Naduah had always made her family's clothes from the skins of deer and antelope that she had prepared herself. Sewing cloth took less effort, she found, than stitching skins. When she and the other women made their buckskin dresses with the long, rippling fringes that moved so gracefully when they walked, first each hole had to be punched in the leather with an awl, a bit of bone sharpened to a point. Then a length of sinew, taken from along the backbone of a buffalo, was poked and pulled through the holes with the fingers. It was slow, tedious work for the women, who made their tipis as well as all the clothing for their families.

Now, leaning close to a flickering lamp in the dim cabin and working the tiny needle in and out, like a fish swimming through water, Naduah remembered things she had almost forgotten.

She remembered the time when she was young, like Sarah, and new to the People. She was a slave then, sent to live with Calls Louder, wife of Speckled Eagle. The old woman shouted at her fiercely and made her cry when she did something wrong. She had to gather sticks and fetch water and do hard work, much harder than she had ever done before. Sometimes Calls Louder hit her, but more often she simply yelled at her. Then one day Calls Louder handed her a piece of buckskin and an awl and a bit of sinew and showed her what to do.

She was clumsy at first, even clumsier than she was now with this tiny needle and tiny stitches. Calls Louder was not patient, as Loo-see was. The Comanche woman slapped her and made her do it over and over until finally Naduah learned to sew well enough to please the old woman. The other girls her age—Sarah's age—were learning, too, but not as fast as she was, because they were children of the People, not slaves, and their lives were different, better than hers. She had not always been one of the People, she remembered now, although she had nearly forgotten the time when she was not.

Naduah sewed steadily on the blue calico, searching for other things to remember. First there was that life before the People, and then she was with the People and was a slave. But how did she get there, among the People? She did not know. Her life had been one way, and then it was another. Her memory would creep up close to what had happened to change her life and who she was, but it always slipped away before she could grasp it.

It was easier to remember her life after she had been with the People for a while, when she was no longer a slave but a member of Speckled Eagle's family. Speckled Eagle was a respected hunter and warrior, and she had come to think of him as her father. There were other children in the family, mostly older, a few younger. Father had two wives, Calls Louder and Walking At Night. Calls Louder was old and mean, but Walking At Night, the second, younger wife, was not so mean. Yet when it came right down to it, Calls Louder took better care of her, taught her more of what it meant to be a woman of the People. They had given her her name, Naduah:
She Who Carries Herself With Dignity And Grace.

There was much to learn, and Naduah learned it well. Maybe it was after she was able to understand their tongue and to speak it that she was no longer a slave but one of them.

She could make clothing, of course, and she had gained a reputation in the tribe for making the best tipi covers. Some of the women even came to her to ask for help when it was time to prepare the buffalo hides for their tipis.