“Just because men say it is so does not mean it is so,” she said.
Often, Victor found himself confused by his mother’s way of speaking, a spattering of phrases in French, Spanish, and English, sentences that spoke not only of her indifference to linearity but also of her unwillingness to plumb the depths of Apsáalooke words and purposeful Apsáalooke silences. It angered him at times, for it reminded Victor of how he was unable to think or dream or even speak in one tongue, reminded him that he was not of one place and of one people but of many places and of many people he’d never know.
“Maybe Like-Wind paid for my conceit that day.” This was not what Victor believed. He believed it had been the forbidden killing that had taken his friend. But he could not tell Ma this.
“Your spirit is not tied to Like-Wind’s,” Ma said. “You are no more responsible for his absence than an elephant stamping the earth in Africa.”
Africa. Elephants. Victor smiled, for it was all he could do with his Ma at times. He wasn’t always certain that she understood him so he found it odd that that day he felt comforted by her words. “I only wished to beat him. He was best at everything.”
“He wasn’t best at being kind.”
Ma’s words struck Victor as a betrayal, though he knew them to be true.
“Don’t humble yourself in victory to make others forget you are victorious.”
“You say this because I’m your son.”
“Not true.”
“Because I’m your only son.”
She laughed. “I do not—”
Outside, the twins shouted, their delight resounding like chicks at first flight. They peeled back the lodge’s flap so Ma and Victor might see their flickering eyes, their four little hands fluttering.
“Like-Wind is here!”
“He’s brought something!”
The path through camp was long and winding, lodges lined on both sides for as far as the eye could see, as women cooked at hearths, beat dust from mats, treated nits on the heads of naughty boys with bitter pulps and seed oils. As Victor hastened alongside his sisters, he worried that Like-Wind might have returned unwell, and felt a nervous perspiration bubbling at his neck. But as they arrived at the edge of camp, where the snow still lay quite thick, Victor spied Like-Wind beneath a yew, still tall, still crimped with muscles, smiling, as the other warriors surrounded him as though he were victorious and the women hovered about something Victor could not yet see.
“I see you got lost, eh?” Victor embraced Like-Wind. His damp hair stuck to Victor’s face, and Victor smelled an unfamiliar air upon him.
“Brother, I am never lost.” Like-Wind laughed and began telling Victor his story until Like-Wind’s mother, at the center of the women, called out for him to explain what he’d brought. Like-Wind told them he believed his vision had meant for him to ride east. That he didn’t know the purpose until he found the girl in a clump of ninebark bushes peeling off her skin with a whittled branch. He said he assumed that a Hutanga warrior had crossed paths with the girl, for she had corn in abundance and the ill-fitting robe she wore, now like a misty web, had Hutanga paint upon it.
The women quieted, as if saddened by the horrors that lay in the empty spaces of the girl’s story. Then Like-Wind told them of the whispers he’d heard of wars in the east, tribes forced from their lands. The women crossed their fists over their hearts, hoping none of it was true, then Like-Wind’s mother told him to carry the sickly girl inside their lodge. When the women opened the circle, it was only then that Victor could look upon her.
“What is she?” one of the twins said, picking at the sinew thread on Victor’s leggings.
He paused for a moment, watching the girl’s dark hair separate at her shoulders to show the skin on her back like spackled clay, and he tried to recall what Ma had called it. “I think she may be a slave.”
2
Ma was asked to see about the girl. She picked her special barks and gathered her dried healing leaves, crushing them with rocks until they powdered. She told Like-Wind’s mother to give the girl nothing else but the medicinal tea. When Ma returned home she stopped at the entrance of the lodge and washed her hands and feet with fresh water. Later, she told Father that “nothing good will come from that girl being here.”
After the women wrapped the girl with verbena burn dressing, the girl told the one elder who spoke her tongue that her Shawanwa mother had been taken captive during the Battle of Tippecanoe by a French-speaking warmonger. That when she was born the man moved them west into Arkansaw Territory. For many years her mother planned their escape but remained too affright to leave, until the man, who was also the girl’s father, began to take the girl away in the nights. When her mother threatened escape, the man told her mother there was no place he wouldn’t uncover them. But still they ran. Until the morning the girl woke to find herself alone in a land she did not know, her mother dead beside her.
The girl spoke Shawanwa, but also a broken English that looped and spiraled like weaving bark. So Like-Wind’s sister began teaching her Apsáalooke words: ishté for eye, apé for nose, bilé for water. Static words, though Apsáalooke was a language of movement. The women said the girl was a quick study of words that had no life.
“She’s traveled a long way,” Father told Ma as they broke fast the following morning. “She’s very brave.”
Ma nodded, but Victor knew there was something more. When they were alone, he asked her what she thought of the girl and Ma wrinkled her nose as if it had caught a whiff of something sour. “I have little tolerance for people who don’t wish to battle their own fright.”
Victor did not know what Ma meant, but he had felt, since Like-Wind’s return a week earlier, that there had been a difference in the texture of his days, a coarsening he could not yet grasp. He did not understand why Like-Wind had left the way he had. To Victor, it had felt like a small betrayal. Yet there were no words between men that could convey such feelings, so Victor decided to give it time.
Meanwhile, the girl, though made to feel she would be accepted by the women who nursed her, had little idea that many referred to her as “Yellow-Eye,” for her skin was quite fair and her ways not Apsáalooke ways. Yellow-Eye, or baashchiile, meaning “one who wishes for everything he sees,” was the name the Apsáalooke had given to two of the earliest Europeans they encountered. Victor did not know if the girl wished for anything other than Like-Wind, but to the women of the clan that seemed too much want. The girl was plain, the women said of her, wide-eyed as if in a never-ending state of surprise; her stringy hair lacked elegance, and she had a habit of nibbling at her upper lip, leaving it pink and swollen—a habit the elders suggested might be indicative of a weak mind.
In the weeks that followed her arrival, the girl rarely left Like-Wind’s side. With this, Victor and Like-Wind had had little time to catch up their stories. So when Bluegrass asked Victor what Like-Wind had told him about the girl, Victor was unable to answer.
“Circles the Earth with His Toe,” Bluegrass said, using the endearment he’d bestowed upon Victor as a child. “I worry about Like-Wind. I need you to learn more about what he intends to do with the girl.”
The next night, after the clan was seated around the nightfires, Victor squeezed himself into the space between Like-Wind and the girl. Turning his back to her, Victor found his friendship with Like-Wind unchanged, for Like-Wind laughed his buoyant laugh, and each settled across from the other like wings on opposite sides of a dove. It seemed only seconds after Victor felt the relief of this confirmation that the girl mounted him. She pummeled Victor with heavy fists, which felt like logs jamming into the flesh of his neck and arms, making Victor feel as if he should pound the girl’s face into the earth.
“Let off!” Like-Wind pulled the girl away. But she bit at Like-Wind’s hand, and while the women who’d once cared for her sat aghast, the girl bared her pink gums and growled.
Later, Ma told Victor that his restraint had been commendable but th
at he needed to keep his distance from Like-Wind and the girl. “Remember what I said about her fright? Wait until Like-Wind comes to you,” Ma said.
It was the next afternoon when Like-Wind asked Victor to walk along a path of still-dormant grasses, away from the stack of lodgepoles the women had begun collecting. When they came to the creek, they pelted rocks as if angry with it, the sheets of ice floating, unconcerned. There, Like-Wind apologized as though he could speak for the stranger among them, tossing his hair over and again, a thing he did only when nervous.
“Brother, she’s not well,” Like-Wind said. “But she’ll mend.”
“She’s mad! You can’t heal madness.”
“She lived with many who were captives like her. This fact is shameful to a proud girl.” In Like-Wind’s earnest expression, Victor was certain Like-Wind had taken a serious severe liking to the girl. “They were beaten and put to work. They all ran away.”
Victor knew what Like-Wind wouldn’t say. Ma had told Victor long ago that people believed only those with black skin might be undone in this way. Victor understood that many in the tribe believed death to be better than any enslavement by Yellow-Eyes, but Ma had told him that there should be no embarrassment in coming from a people strong enough to battle for life. She told him that choosing to live is not the same as being scared to die. Victor didn’t know if he believed in Ma’s words. But he knew Like-Wind had never had to twist his mind to make sense of them. Not until then. And it seemed only because of the girl that Like-Wind could now admire the survivor’s courage.
“Bluegrass is worried about you.”
“My father worries too much,” Like-Wind said. “He says the girl is not suitable for life with us, says he will smoke against her if I don’t let her alone.”
“Bluegrass asked Father and Ma if she could stay with us, in our lodge.”
“She would never agree to that,” Like-Wind said, as if surprised at the suggestion.
“I think you mean Ma wouldn’t agree to that.”
Like-Wind’s nose flared and Victor knew they’d come to the end of their talk. It had gone nothing like Victor planned. When they returned to camp, they seemed further apart, and Victor thought about the grinding in the chest he’d felt when he believed Like-Wind to be dead. He wanted things back as they were.
“Tomorrow,” Victor said, “bring her with us to care for the horses.”
The next morning Like-Wind and the girl met Victor in the open fields near Stink Hill. The winds there carried words so they spoke little and instead unhobbled three horses, tethered them, led them to drink. At Like-Wind’s urging, Victor showed the girl how to brush the horses, remove their loose hairs, trim fetlocks, and the girl seemed pleased, fawning over the beauty of Victor’s favorite mares. Victor thought then that a softening had come over the girl, and he, at once, saw a glimpse of what Like-Wind had seen in her, a gracefulness in her manner that perhaps he’d overlooked.
“Brother, you’ll sit with us at the nightfires tonight?” Like-Wind said this when they were back at camp, pulling his hair behind his ears, making his face open before looking to the girl, as if for approval.
That night the three of them sat side by side at the nightfires. Like-Wind and Victor told the girl stories of their hunts, and of the first time they smoked a pipe, when Victor vomited chunks and Like-Wind curled into a ball and sucked his thumb. The girl laughed a charming laugh, and Victor found himself watching her with new eyes, this girl who smelled candied, like fresh honey, her mouth pregnant with words as she struggled in Apsáalooke to tell them of the place she once lived, four moons away, off a soft clay road.
“My mother said we might have to run from my father forever,” the girl told them.
Victor did not understand this life the girl described. Not the work, the harsh words, the violence. Not the father who did no fathering. He did not understand, in all the terrains he’d traveled, where there could be a place where one could not run or jump or speak or laugh or bathe or eat without permission, where one’s next breath turned on the whim of men predispositioned to find one’s breath dispensable.
“Did you see her dead? Your mother?” Victor was not certain why he wanted to know this. But he’d imagined that the story the girl would tell of that moment would be gripping.
The girl leaned back onto both arms. She did not seem to like his question, but he could not swallow it back down. “Like-Wind told me you went to sweat three times.”
The girl uttered the words with great satisfaction, and Like-Wind shrugged, for he had told Victor many times that there should be no shame in seeking a quest. Yet Victor wondered, if this were true, why the subject had come up at all between Like-Wind and the girl.
“Is it because you are not Apsáalooke?”
“My father’s blood is not Apsáalooke blood, but he is still a chief.”
The girl grinned a grin that would not be considered sister to a smile. “You are not your father.” She bit her lip, gnawing the thick skin that nested there. “You are nothing like him.”
Victor knew Like-Wind had told her this too.
The girl went on. “And why does your mother stare at me so?”
The girl’s gaze rested on Ma, who sat plaiting the twins’ hair. Victor watched his mother, her dark fingers slithering like snakes in a scorched field, and he felt a new shame. And this new shame swelled like it had its own pride when the girl winced at Ma, who was by then smiling down at the twins.
“She doesn’t belong here,” the girl said. “And you don’t either.”
Like-Wind nudged the girl to quiet her while Victor searched the campsite, trying to make sense of her words. The clan had spent the end of fall and all of winter at that camp, Awáassheele Hátchke, at the foot of the Bighorns, near the mouth of Lodge Grass Creek and within view of Red Springs Canyon. There, no fewer than a thousand men and women, boys and girls, had been protected by firm saplings, tall grasses, tribal sentries who stood at night like stout hills, monitoring their lodges constructed of brightly painted pelts and hides and grand lodgepoles that gave company to the heavens. The women made every new campground home, willing the mountains to welcome them, and each night they lit the center of camp where there was always laughter. So much laughter. Victor looked now at the boys who raised a new blaze in honor of the lost warriors and another so that the women could see the dances of their fat-bellied children, and he thought that this place, among these people, was all he’d ever known. If he didn’t belong there, where then did he belong?
“What does that mean?” he said to her.
The girl pursed her lips as if to grin again, and it was then that Victor felt a pinch upon his ear, the cartilage in a hot, angry kiss with itself as Ma upraised him with the hooks of her nails and pulled Victor along by the seat of his leggings, her French words plummeting into the stunned silence of the circle: “Ne sois pas bête!”
Overcome by Ma’s reaction, Victor did not resist Ma, and she said nothing to explain herself as they made their way through a rich black dark, between serviceberry shrubs whose debris created gruff earthen runners beneath them. When they reached the lodge, Ma lit a torch and, as always, Victor’s eyes were drawn to the jagged lines along her hairline, the carved necklace upon her throat like a tributary to deep cracks of tissue across her breasts.
“Why’d you do that?” He straightened his leggings, brushed Ma’s finger smudges from his arms, embarrassed, not solely because Apsáalooke did not correct their children in such ways but because Apsáalooke boys Victor’s age were no longer taken up by their mothers.
“That girl is Like-Wind’s business, not yours.”
“We were only talking.”
“I saw the way you looked at her,” Ma said.
“What way?”
“Like your eyes have teeth.”
Father arrived then and reminded Ma that to be among the Apsáalooke is to be as they are. He told Ma that without brothers, without her own family, she must confer the disciplining
of Victor to men—uncles like Bluegrass and other ā´sa‘kua in the clan—for people must begin to regard Victor as a man.
“Then take him with you on your expedition. Let him see the world like a man should.” Ma reminded Father that Victor had learned nearly everything a young warrior was to learn—to run fast and hard, to swim without the need for breath, to track under moonlight, to hunt until his back could carry no more. And that he had completed two of the four required war honors: taken both a weapon and a horse from the enemy.
But for Father, none of this seemed enough. “I leave in the morning. Forty men I’m leading this time. I cannot manage the boy.”
“Aah,” Ma said. “I’m not to embarrass him because he’s a man, but when I ask you to take him, he’s a boy, yes?”
Later that evening, after Ma and Father had quarreled about Father’s refusal and quarreled again about Ma’s insistence on quarreling over his refusal, Ma took the twins to the lodge where the men smoked and asked to speak to Father outside. The twins told Victor later that Ma had requested that Father visit the akbaalia and one of the clan’s chiefs. “He is getting confused. The girl is making things complicated for him,” Ma told him.
“She is just a girl,” Father said.
“Bluegrass does not think so.”
“When it comes to Like-Wind, Bluegrass has no mind,” Father said.
“I want Victor to go again to sweat.”
“You know it is not any chief who decides when he should—”
“There must be someone to speak to.”
“They’ll tell you the same as before. You know what must be done first.”
The twins said Ma paused for some time. “I cannot,” she said. “I will not.”
“Then there is no reason for me to speak to anyone.”
When Father returned inside, Ma and the twins followed. The other men and Victor, who had been smoking the pipe, sat upon their elbows as Father reached for the maps he had stored there, the ink smudged, the hide furrowing. Father began to refold them, pretending Ma and the girls were not there, and Victor imagined then that Father was recalling the risk he’d taken bringing Ma, an outsider, to live with him. Imagined how Father must have wished after all their years together that Ma would better conform.
Book of the Little Axe Page 2