The Morning River

by W. Michael Gear

  Willow unlaced her moccasins and slipped her dress over her head before taking one last look around. Placing her war club on the folded leather, she waded slowly out into the water. She was within a body length before he looked up, stunned. His mouth dropped open, but no words formed.

  "What a good day," she said by way of greeting, stepping off into the deeper water and seating herself on the gravelly bottom. She splashed water over her hot skin, then used sand to scrub under her arms.

  "What . . . What . . ." Ritshard had huddled into a protective ball. His tanned neck and hands contrasted with the stark white of the rest of him. How could skin be that glaringly pale? Ritshard's chest wasn't covered by the dense mat of black hair she'd seen on some of the engages, but rather with a mist of brown curls that gleamed in the sunlight.

  "Bath," she told him. "Doesn't it feel good?" She used a thumbnail to chisel dried buffalo blood from her cuticles.

  His agonized expression betrayed growing horror. What could possibly be causing him to panic so?

  Willow dipped her head in the water to wet her hair before she lifted her face to the sun and wrung the water out. Tarn Apo! He hadn't been bitten by something poisonous, had he? "Are you all right?"

  "You . . . you're naked!"

  "Naked. I don't know this word."

  "B—Bare! No clothes!"

  Her brown knees bobbed up as she lay back in the water and gave him a curious glance. "Yes. Take off clothes for bath. You did."

  "But—I mean—you're a woman!"

  She thought for a moment. "Ah! I see. White women take bath with clothes on? How do they do that? I think it would be hard to wash all over through clothes."

  He swallowed hard. "Willow. Men and women . . . they don't bathe together!"

  She used a wet finger to clean out her ear, then splashed her face, rubbing it vigorously. "They bath with clothes on?"

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "Among whites, it is considered inappropriate to see each other without clothes on."

  "I'm not White."

  His gaze kept straying to where her breasts floated in the chest-deep water. In the end, he looked away, whispering, "This isn't proper."

  "I could go away." Willow began scrubbing her long legs, then rinsed the sand from her muscular thighs and calves. The current carried her closer to where he squatted, his feet solidly planted under his tightly tucked body.

  He rubbed his face with a wet hand and gave her a worried smile. "No, it's all right. It's me. Not you."

  "Ritshard, easy, coon." She gave him an annoyed look. "Why do Whites not bath together? They have separate rivers?"

  "No, it's done inside. In a building. It's just not proper, that's all."

  "Why?"

  "You're not supposed to see another person's brea . . . body!"

  "I did not know this. Among my people, we bath together all the time. Why do Whites think this is bad? Are they all ashamed of being so . . . white?"

  He gave her a miserable look and shook his head, still crouched, arms crossed tightly in his lap. "It's just not proper, Willow. Because . . . because that's the way it is."

  "You saw Trawis's body when you sewed it up."

  "That's different, I didn't see his . . . uh . . . man part."

  "Are man parts not all the same? You know ..." She made a fist with her left hand, dangling the index finger of her right over the top in a semblance of a penis over a scrotum.

  "I suppose."

  "Then why are you so afraid I might see you?"

  "Because it makes a man think of things he shouldn't." He squeezed his eyes shut. "And I'm not thinking the things I'm thinking right now. I'm not. I'm really not thinking them—not even a little bit."

  A slow smile curled her lips. "Ah." This time she wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the index finger of the right and made suggestive sliding motions. "How silly." Willow splashed him with water and shook her head. "I will never understand Whites."

  "Well, don't try this with the engages. At least, I'm a gentleman. And right now, I'm concentrating on Saint Jerome, on Anselm, Aquinas, and thinking about what happened to Peter Abelard when he let his carnal desires lead him astray."

  "Ritshard," she said wearily, "I am Willow, clothes on or off. Do Whites think a person changes with the clothes they wear? Where does this come from?"

  "From two thousand years of Christian thought, from the Bible, from our scholars and teachers."

  "I don't know these words."

  "I'm starting to wish I didn't either." This time when she looked his way, he was watching her with unabashed interest. His expression of wonder grew as his gaze traveled her body. He wet his lips, taking a deep breath. Her heart skipped, her own interest suddenly perked by his fascination. Not even her husband had ever looked at her with such adoration and longing.

  "I understand," she whispered, staring down at her firm breasts. Crystal beads of water caught the sun, contrasting with her smooth brown skin. "What the White man thinks is forbidden, he desires most."

  "We have stories about that. Adam and Eve." He raised his hands. "And here I am in the Garden. I guess it's pretty hard for you to understand." He slapped at the water with a cupped palm. ''Thinking about it now, I guess I don't understand, either." He paused. "Don't Dukurika men want women more when they see them naked?"

  She settled back in the water, excited by his desire. "I don't think so, Ritshard. When a man desires a woman, he makes signs that he's interested. She either agrees or not, as is her wish."

  "Do your people—when they bathe—do they stare at each other?"

  "We grow up seeing each other at the river. It isn't anything strange to us. Not like it is to you. I wouldn't have come here if I'd known."

  "But you've been on the boat. You don't..."

  "The engages are not my friends. I don't trust them. When they look at me, I see lust in their eyes. That is the word—lust?''

  "But you trust me?"

  She reached out, touching his arm, smiling. "The eye of my soul has seen into yours, Ritshard."

  "And what do you see now?"

  "That you want me. In the way that a man wants a woman." She felt him tense, the corners of his eyes tightening.

  His voice turned husky. "How does that make you feel?"

  Willow, if you tell him, you'll be committing yourself. Are you sure? Instead, she said, "You're so—white."

  "It would be like lying with a corpse? Like mating with your dog?" They were her words from the night they'd removed Travis's stitches.

  She traced patterns in the water with a slim brown finger. "My husband died six moons ago. He filled my heart so full that I wonder if another could ever find a place in it again. I think about you—as a woman does when she is interested in a man—but I don't know if I want to join with you."

  The tension had eased from his shoulders. "That makes me feel better." But she could see that it didn't.

  "What would become of us, Ritshard? What I think is all right, you think is wrong. You are not Dukurika. You don't know our ways. How could you come and live among my people? What would you do? The men would laugh at you, make you miserable.''

  He pursed his lips, then said, "I can't be an Indian, Willow."

  "Besides, Ritshard, you are going back to Boston. I have listened when you and Trawis have talked about Boston. I don't think I want to go there."

  He gave her a weary smile. "I'll admit, I dream about you, Willow, about the way you walk, how I'd love to touch your hair, how I'd love to hold you. And then I think about Boston, about you in Boston. I might be starting to love you, but you're right. I'm not Shoshoni, and you're not white. People would never let us forget that."

  She watched a flight of ducks flash past in a pounding of wings. A honeyed sadness filled her. Why, Willow? This is just the way it is, isn't it?

  "God, how I've changed," he mumbled. "Look at me! Laying naked in a river, talking to a naked woman!"

  She lifted an eyebrow. />
  His soft brown eyes had begun to twinkle with amusement. "When I look back at the sort of man I was, and compare that to who I am now, I can't help but wonder." He paused, frowning. "How long were you married?"

  "Four years."

  "Children?"

  "A son. He died when my husband did."

  Ritshard frowned, resettling himself. "I never think of you like that. Married, I mean."

  "He was a good man. My soul still aches. It always will."

  "Obviously you're not a virgin," he whispered.

  "I don't know that word."

  He gave her an irritated glance. "A woman who's never laid with a man."

  "Wirgin." Why did she have such trouble with the V sound? "V-v-v-virgin."

  Ritshard tilted his head back. "Well, another dream slips away like mist in the morning."

  "I don't understand."

  "Oh, nothing," he growled.

  She studied him from the corner of her eye, aware that he'd settled back in the water, braced on his elbows, white knees poking up. She could see him now, white like a fish belly except for the black mat of his pubic hair. With skin that pale, she'd halfway thought his pubic hair would be white, too.

  "Among my people, we have stories of Pachee Goyo, the Bald One. He's an irritating young man who wants everything—and rarely listens to his elders. He sets out on a journey, and never seems to realize how he changes as he travels. It isn't until his escape from the great Cannibal Owl that he realizes he's become a man."

  Ritshard watched the water flowing over his hand. "A cannibal owl?"

  "Cannibal Owl catches Pachee Goyo beside the lake where the Underwater Buffalo live, and carries him far to the north, to an island in the middle of a big lake. There, among the bones of the dead, Pachee Goyo makes an arrow of obsidian, and kills Cannibal Owl before it can eat him. To escape the island, he makes a boat from the owl's huge wing and sails for days until he makes shore and can find his way home."

  She kicked her legs out to float and studied her toes where they stuck out of the water. "Until I saw Maria, I never would have believed anything could float so far."

  "Your husband," he asked halfheartedly. "What was his name?"

  She fixed her eyes on the sky. "Among my people, we do not say the name of the dead. It can affect the mugwa."

  "Mugwa?"

  "The life-soul, the spirit. It leaves the body when death comes."

  "Ghosts," he muttered, still irritated with himself, or her. She wasn't sure which. "Do you believe in ghosts?"

  She flicked water with her toes. "I don't know, Ritshard. The souls must go someplace when we die. I buried my husband and my son according to Kuchendikani ritual. It was what he wanted. I have to believe it is so for him. By believing, his mugwa will find its way to where he wanted to go."

  "That isn't a very sound philosophical framework."

  "Framework?"

  "Uh, basis, foundation, support."

  She nodded. "I believe for him, so that it can be true for his souls. I can do that because I still love him."

  "But what about for you?"

  She laughed, kicking hard enough to splash water in a silver sheet. "For me, Ritshard, I question. I don't know what my mugwa will do when I die. If it comes free of my body, fine. If it travels to the Land of the Dead, fine. If it stays in my body and rots with the rest of me, fine." She lifted her hand. "But I hope it goes free of my body and I can find my way to Tarn Apo."

  "God? Why?"

  "I want to know why He made the world the way He did. Don't you wonder why winter has to come? Why does the world have to freeze? Why do men have to die? Why can't we live forever?"

  He leaned forward, brown eyes gleaming, a hunter closing on prey. "What's the Shoshoni reason?"

  "In the beginning, Tarn Apo created the world and all things in it, including Coyote. Some say Tarn Apo took the form of Wolf to do this. At that time, men and animals looked the same. How they came to be different is another story."

  "Wolf and Coyote," he whispered, gaze unfocused. "Go on. Willow. Tell me about Wolf and Coyote."

  "Coyote and Wolf constantly argued about the world Tarn Apo had created. Coyote looked around and saw people everywhere. In those days, when a person died, he could be brought back to life by shooting an arrow into the ground underneath him. Coyote told Wolf, 'We should let some of these people die. The mugwa can float away in the breeze and the rest can turn into bones.'

  "Wolf was tired of hearing Coyote complain, so he agreed, but Wolf made sure that Coyote's son was the first to die. Coyote, of course, was very upset, and immediately shot an arrow into the ground underneath his dead son. When the boy didn't come back to life, Coyote ran to Wolf, complaining, k My son has not come back to life/

  "Wolf told him: 'It was you, Coyote, who complained that too many people were in the world, who asked that when people died, their mugwa would drift away on the wind, and they would rot into piles of bones. This I have granted you.'

  "And so, death is forever."

  Ritshard gave her a skeptical glance. "You don't believe that, do you?"

  "Perhaps. I would ask Tarn Apo about it." She fished a rock from under her bottom and threw it out past the sand spit to splash in the muddy water of the main current. "Why do we have to suffer grief and sorrow because Wolf and Coyote had an argument just after the world was created?"

  "The sins of the father. ..." Ritshard made a face and rolled over to stare at her. His white buttocks bobbed like pale stones. "It sounds like you worry about the problem of God's justice with the same passion that whites do."

  She narrowed her eyes. "It makes my people very uneasy when I ask questions like that. That's why I left the Kuchendikani. I was afraid my husband's brother's wife would accuse me of being a. . . what was the word? Witch?"

  "Witch," he agreed.

  "That's it. I was on my way back to the Dukurika mountains when Packrat caught me."

  Ritshard stared into her eyes with that look that betrayed the Power in his soul.

  You will dream of him tonight, Heals Like A Willow. You will stare into those eyes, and wish to feel the warmth of his body, the strength of his soul twining with yours. Her blood quickened. Unbidden, her hand reached out to his, their fingers lacing together.

  "So," he mused, "you're an outcast, too. I know how that feels, Willow. To ask questions that make others nervous. I, too, would question God, for if He is all-powerful, all good, and all-knowing the way my people believe, why does He allow suffering to exist? He must hear the sobs of a mother weeping over the body of her child . . . like you over your husband and son."

  At his words, the grief tightened in her chest. "I would have given anything to save them. I begged and cried to the Spirit World. I offered anything to save them." If only I had had the courage to send my soul into the Land of the Dead to bring their souls back.

  "But they died. I know." Ritshard tightened his grip on her hand. "God is either a bastard, or He isn't what we believe Him to be. There's always a flaw in the stories we're taught. At least, there is in the Christian dogma. From what you say about the Shoshoni, it's probably the same, right? Always a problem when you really think about what the story means?"

  "Yes!" she cried happily. "I was always told to fear the dead. That their ghosts would be angry if they weren't cared for properly and sent across the sky to the Land of the Dead. Why, Ritshard? My husband, he was a good man. His mugwa was good, because I saw it reflected in his eyes. Why would it change because of death?" She flicked a fly away.

  "Do all Indians have these beliefs? Or are some different?"

  "The Pawnee think the world was created by Tirawahat, The-Expanse-of-Heaven,' and Morning Star had to fight a war to mate with Evening Star. And from that mating, the first woman was born. The Pakiani believe the world was created by Napi. In the beginning it was all water, and an animal had to dive to the bottom to bring up mud for the Flat Pipe to rest on. Everyone has a different story. Can they all be true?"
r />   A twinkle glowed in Ritshard's eye. "I don't think any of them are true."

  "Why?"

  He took her other hand and floated closer to her in the warm water. "Because none of the stories I've heard tell of a purpose."

  " ‘A purpose.’"

  "Why did Tarn Apo, or Napi, or Wakantanka create the world, Willow? Think about all the stories you know. Wolf and Coyote and death. What is the meaning of all this." He gestured to the world around him. "Why did God do it? Why does it work the way it does? But the most important question is: What is the reason for the world? Does it have a purpose? That's what I want to know."

  She matched his smile with her own. "That is why I would seek Tarn Apo. I'm tired of believing things because the people tell you that's the way it is."

  Her spirit felt ready to burst. She had never dared speak these questions aloud. Now, here, so far from her mountains, she'd found a man who understood. They floated closer together, the hot sun beating down to sparkle off the water.

  Perhaps he read the glow in her eyes, for his muscles tightened as he held her hands. Honeyed sensations began to stir deep within her, born through her blood by each beat of her heart. The parting of his lips, the pulsing veins in his neck, betrayed his growing want.

  His hand rose to stroke the side of her face, his touch gentle. She closed her eyes, images shifting and whirling within her.

  Her arms went around him as they drifted together.

  "Willow?" he whispered as their bodies touched.

  She savored the sensations as her breasts pressed against his chest. She traced the muscles of his back and felt him shudder. His hardened penis slipped along the curve of her hip as his hand slid over her buttock.

  "We've got to stop," he whispered, as if in pain.

  "Yes." But she held him for a moment, savoring his male hardness before she turned him loose. She climbed to her feet and splashed the sand from her skin. She raised her face to the sun, letting the sexual tension drain away like the water running down her skin.

  When he stood, he staggered like a wounded man, taut penis bobbing.

  "It would be very easy, Ritshard." She tilted her head, twisting her hair into a rope to wring the water out.

  Large-eyed, he nodded. "I guess now you know why men and women shouldn't take baths together."