Stillbird
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The three elder women of the tribe approached Stillbird’s cabin at dawn, quietly until one of them muttered that something was wrong, someone was there, and they all looked around carefully but saw no one and continued on to the cabin to wake Stillbird. They led a pony with a sled on which were the makings of a sweat lodge, and they explained to Stillbird, whom they still called No-Name, that they had come to help her purify herself and to find a new name. They said this was important now, albeit sooner than they would have done, because a young man of the tribe had fallen in love with her and wanted her as his wife. Stillbird realized that he must have brought the stove and the food supplies and she was grateful, but also resentful that he had seen her and she had not seen him, and perhaps they thought she would be so grateful for a husband that she didn’t have to look him over first. Stillbird agreed to the ritual of the sweat, but told them she already had a name given to her by the birds of the river, and she told them what it was, and they simply nodded, neither approving nor disapproving, which was the best she was going to get from them, clear enough.
First they laid the boughs in the appropriate ways with the appropriate prayers, and then they covered them with the skins they had brought. They built a fire and heated rocks, and when the rocks were hot enough, they moved them with tongs into the center of the sweat lodge. Then they filled a pot with river water and placed it next to the hot rocks and filed in to huddle close around the rocks.
The sweat had been constructed to accommodate only the four of them and they were crowded over the steaming rocks in the center. The leader started to chant and one by one the others joined her, Stillbird joining in last. As the leader sprinkled river water over the rocks, making more and more steam, Stillbird thought she would faint from the closeness and the extreme heat. She knew she was being tested as well as purified and she never faltered in the chanting, but she put her two hands behind her back and crept her fingers out under the skins to touch the cool earth outside and breathed in the coolness of the earth and a bit of snow through her fingers, and she felt better and stronger. Each time the heat seemed about to overwhelm her, she would reach about with her fingers to find a piece of cold snow and feel it move up through her veins to her shoulders, and thence to her throat and her chest and her head, and she chanted on with the elder women until finally it was over and they all smiled at her as they filed out of the sweat to sit around the fire, catching the smoke and fanning it about their bodies in the continuing ritual of purification.
Hidden in the woods across the river, a young Cherokee man watched, and Abel, hidden in the woods of the hillside above the cabin, watched the man watching the women. Abel went away then thinking to die, then thinking to wait, then waiting to die, and then, when he didn’t die, thinking to pray. Abel prayed to women: to Mary mother of God, and Mary Queen of Scotland, and to his mother. And he prayed that he had given Rosie a child, and that she would have no choice but to love him.
II