Beauty for Ashes

by Win Blevins

  What to do?

  He hurried to the path and from there walked openly toward the river. If it was Meadowlark, well and good. If not, he would give a casual greeting and keep going like nothing was…

  Meadowlark, almost in his face. In the last of the light he saw several emotions on her face, pleasure in meeting him, sadness, pain, and more.

  He smiled at her and stepped aside to let her pass.

  She squelched a smile and walked forward.

  He acted swiftly. From behind he flung the deer hide around her mouth and between her teeth, threw a quick knot, and pulled her back tight against him.

  Her body felt so good along his. It had been so long…

  She flailed.

  Go!

  He seized her behind the knees and shoulders, lifted her, and trotted through the cottonwood trees. Paladin and Pinto were tied about a hundred yards away, and he could carry her that far on the run.

  He lifted her and seated her on Pinto. The pony was tied on a lead to Paladin, in case she might try to bolt.

  He took both her hands, looked directly into her eyes, and said, “I’m kidnapping you. I want you for my wife.”

  Coy mewled in a way that sounded like, “Ple-e-e-ease,” and Sam couldn’t help smiling.

  He tied Meadowlark’s hands behind her. “Are you going to scream?”

  Hesitation. Wild eyes. Thought. At last she shook her head no.

  Good. Safer this way. He took the deer hide off her mouth. A sentry would pay no attention to two Crows riding on a trail in the darkness. No one would miss Meadowlark for a while, and then it would be too late.

  He mounted Paladin and started off at a walk. A quarter mile on, he kicked the horses up to a lope. The trail was easy going, and Coy kept up comfortably.

  Before too long, they left trail and turned up Black Creek. Riding at night was slow, but they were headed for a good place. The best place, he thought—a wide, well-watered valley on Black Creek within sight of the great Absaroka peaks to the north. The mountains would be snowy, but the valley floor, mostly free of snow, would be full of elk. In a week or two the grass would come green. When he and Flat Dog had first come here, they watched a hawk hunting in the open meadows. As they watched, the sun set, and the hawk’s broad wings caught its evening colors gloriously. They named it Ruby Hawk Valley.

  The travel lodge was already set up there, and it would do for a while. He had chopped, split, and broken up plenty of firewood. He had brought pemmican enough for a couple of weeks. He had traded for a blanket to sleep under, in addition to the buffalo and elk robes. He had made a household, one of poverty, but his. Theirs.

  AT THEIR CAMP he gritted his teeth until his molars ached.

  She didn’t say a word. She hadn’t spoken since he abducted her, and she didn’t speak while she got water from the creek and watched him build the fire. He spread their bed robes near the flames so they could sit a while. Coy snuggled up next to her leg, but she ignored him.

  Sam didn’t know what she might need to say, or hear. What he needed to say, he’d said by bringing her here.

  She looked at him funny. It was odd, in the Crow way of things, for a man to be arranging the inside of the lodge. He assumed they would get used to each other, if…. A big if.

  He sat behind the fire, took his white clay pipe from the gage d’amour she had given him, packed it, and lit it. This gesture, at least, she would be familiar with. Now she petted Coy’s head, and he accepted that.

  She looked at Sam, just looked. He couldn’t tell what was in her face. Nothing, it seemed. Or maybe it was everything, held very still.

  He looked back at her. And smoked. And looked.

  His bowl of tobacco was gone, burned. He tapped the ashes onto the edge of the fire. He looked around the lodge. The glow of the fire made the lodge skins rise. In the light Meadowlark’s face glowed.

  He reached for his woman, put his arms around her, and kissed her. He kissed her passionately, and in a moment both of them were kissing passionately. Their embrace lifted him up, and time spun away.

  After a while he stroked and caressed her in various places. Later still he slipped her moccasins off, and then her dress, gently. He looked at her, all of her, and noticed that she enjoyed his look.

  He took off his own clothes, lay down beside her, and folded her into his arms.

  They began as in a slow waltz. First they explored one possibility, then another. Hour revolved upon hour, embrace upon embrace, body upon body. Through the night they did everything they wanted to do. Coy slept like nothing was happening. An hour or so after sunrise, they dozed off and slept until midday.

  Then Meadowlark pounced on Sam.

  THEIR FIRST FULL day was different, what was left of it. When they woke, Meadowlark went to the creek for water, and Sam built a low fire in the lodge. They nibbled on pemmican, and fed Coy more than they ate. They made love. This time they played melodies like yesterday’s, and the harmony was the same, but the tempo was slow, relaxed, indolent. The feel shifted from fiery to languid, from stormy to sweet. Again, toward dawn, they slept.

  When they woke, they stood, somehow, on a shore where they had never been.

  They took care of tasks without speaking or looking at each other—water, fire, food.

  When they finished, now stretched out naked on their robes and close to the flames, they looked long, each at the other, and saw the same friend, lover, spouse. The eye-holding looks grew longer. Though they couldn’t have said what these looks meant exactly, they held something new, something more than lust, more than play, more than laughter, more even than love.

  Light drained out of the tipi. In the smoke hole, the sky turned the color of a dove’s breast. The air they breathed was melancholy.

  Sam breached it. “The one who is not here?”

  Meadowlark nodded. “My brother, Blue Medicine Horse.” In the use of his name, somehow, coiled defiance.

  “I miss him.”

  “And I miss him.”

  “Feels like he’s here.” Sam felt the risk in his words, sharp as razors.

  “He is as real to me as the warmth of the fire.”

  “I’ll never stop missing him.”

  She just nodded.

  Sam felt the guilt seep into his heart like chill water into a cellar. “I’ll never stop feeling…”

  She saw it and put a finger to his lips. “You were not to blame. Flat Dog said…”

  “Flat Dog forgave me. I don’t know if your parents did.” Then he said the hard part. “I don’t know about you.”

  She cocked her head like a doe, half-startled.

  He made himself speak directly into her eyes. “I brought agony into your life.” Nothing abject in the words, only honesty and pain.

  She shifted into a sitting position and looked down into his face. After a few moments, she asked him to put his head in her lap. He did.

  “Did you ever have a big grief before?”

  He looked like she’d slapped him. “I did. When I was a kid, my brother died. His name was Coy.”

  She smiled in recognition of the name. She stroked his hair. “Tell me about Coy.”

  As though misunderstanding, Coy the coyote slid up onto his haunches and began to howl softly. His cry took the shape of the word “ho-o-o-wl.”

  Sam spoke as though content with the coyote’s accompaniment. He remembered ramblings in the Pennsylvania forest. Turtles found and brought home. Rides on the family mule. Swims in the river. Fights. Watching the stars and giving them names, special names, names to be held only between two brothers. His words sounded childish as he spoke them, commonplaces, things all siblings shared, pennies without polish. But it felt good to say them.

  Sam stopped. The coyote renewed his call, louder, more echoing. Sam pictured the sounds wandering in all the lonely places of the planet. Then, for whatever reason, the song ended.

  “When he died, what did you…do with him?”

  “We put him in the groun
d.” He thought that probably sounded barbarous to her. It felt barbarous to him.

  “Did you sing?”

  “Yes, hymns.” He took thought and added, “Songs to wish him well, songs to say good-bye. Dad got a preacher man—medicine man—out from Pittsburgh, first preacher I ever met, to say some words. Big words about the big things, living and dying.”

  She stroked his face. “Do you remember any of the words?”

  “Bible words, words from our…sacred stories. I wish I could bring them back clear. Maybe some day I’ll learn to read and find them.”

  She bent down and kissed his face lightly. Her long hair caressed him.

  He flinched at the sudden memory. “‘Beauty for ashes’—that’s what the preacher said. He said he’d come to comfort those of us that grieved, to give us beauty for ashes, and the oil of joy for our mourning.”

  He looked up between her small breasts into her face. There he witnessed, in the soft light of the fire, a radiance that was beyond all eloquence. He saw love. He saw the gift that passes understanding, peace.

  Her fingers stroked his forehead and cheeks. “Sam,” she said, “the man known as Joins with Buffalo, my husband. For this death I forgive you. Accept my forgiveness. Beyond that, I offer you my heart. Find in my love beauty for the ashes of your grief, and the oil of joy for the pain in your heart.”

  During that long night, their loving explored a universe far from the previous night’s. Where there was play, now came tenderness. Where eagerness, deliberation. Where excitement, unity and completeness. Near dawn they slept as on a boat upon the great and mothering sea. They were lifted, eased, lifted, eased, and infinitely at rest.

  SAM LAY BACK on his robes, beneath his blanket, Meadowlark sleeping next to him. Usually, when he was single, he woke up at first light, well before the sun rose. Maybe she liked to sleep in. Coy nestled by her head, choosing her way, not Sam’s, which tickled him.

  He knew damned well he’d never felt this good.

  Three days, living in a new world. A life of discoveries ahead.

  And a life of lovemaking ahead. He didn’t want even to think any of those other words, not about what he and Meadowlark did. He’d had some experience of sex before, and for him it always had a flicker of aggression in it, sometimes of anger.

  With Meadowlark it was…Even if he could read books, and quote Shakespeare like James Clyman, even then he wouldn’t have the words for it.

  For once he’d done the right thing. Finding the woman for his life and attaching her to him, that was the most momentous thing a man could accomplish. Doing the right thing, when you’ve done a lot of wrong ones, felt incredible.

  Meadowlark was open about not being so sure they were doing the right thing. Maybe Rides Twice’s village still wouldn’t accept them. Maybe they’d have to live in another Crow village. Her mother’s original village wintered well to the east, on the edge of the Wolf Mountains. Needle only saw her parents and brothers and sisters once a year, at the big fall hunt.

  Or maybe, Sam said, we’ll spend some of our time with a fur brigade, hunting.

  “Maybe,” Meadowlark said.

  What each of them knew was simple and clear. They would always be together, as close as back and belly when they slept, as close as mingled breath when they made love.

  He cricked his neck and rolled his shoulders. He always felt energetic first thing in the morning. Two of the three days he’d made the morning trip to the creek to get water. Meadowlark protested sweetly—he mustn’t do women’s work, that was unseemly. He thought she’d get used to it.

  He slipped from under the robes, looked at his sleeping wife, and at the pup asleep by her head. They loved each other, which was damn good. Sam looked at the fire, long since out. He would start it when he got back from the creek. Right now he was thirsty.

  He slipped the pegs out of the lodge door, bent, and duck-walked outside. This time of year, near the equinox, the sun rose straight to the east, and lodge doors always faced that way. Just as he looked, the red-orange sun gathered itself from a sheet of light along the ridge top into a bright ball. It blinded Sam a little, and he laughed with pleasure at the light and warmth.

  Yi-ii-ay!

  Sam got slammed hard to the ground on his side, a body on top of him and pinning his arms to his ribs.

  He screwed his head back and saw…

  Flat Dog’s face.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Sam yelled nose to nose with his friend.

  “Saving your life,” said Flat Dog mildly.

  Half a dozen men stepped up, led by Red Roan. Several had arrows pulled back and pointed at Sam. Two had war clubs raised. Yellow Horn was holding a lance and growling.

  “If you raped Meadowlark,” Red Roan told Sam, “I’ll kill you.” Anger coiled in his voice like a rattler.

  Meadowlark rose out of the doorway, protecting her modesty with their blanket. She bristled at Red Roan, and her eyes turned to fire. “Everything that was done, we did together. I wanted what he wanted.”

  Red Roan slowly, very slowly, turned his eyes back to Sam. “What you’ve done is wrong,” the chief’s son said, “and you will pay.”

  SAM RODE INTO the village as he’d led Meadowlark away, his horse on a lead tied to another man’s mount, hands lashed behind his back. He felt like Coy, who was slinking instead of trotting.

  As Sam rode, he pondered something. Back there in Ruby Hawk Valley, he threw a lot of anger in Flat Dog’s face. And his friend answered gently, as though he didn’t notice the anger, or it flew by his face and didn’t touch him.

  Sam wanted to learn to do that.

  On the ride back he found out what happened. They let him talk to Flat Dog, but not to Meadowlark, who was forced to ride in front next to Red Roan.

  Flat Dog said they’d checked on one likely spot the first day, another the second, and on the late afternoon of the third, they saw the travel lodge in Ruby Hawk Valley. Flat Dog had told them places that were probable, areas he and Sam had hunted and Sam liked. Actually, this wide spot on Black Creek had been his first guess, but he misled them. They crept close in the middle of the night. Coy had gone into a barking fit, Sam remembered, but he assumed whatever noises the coyote heard were animals.

  “I didn’t lead the party there first because I hoped to give you enough time to be gone.”

  “Why did you come at all?” Sam knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it.

  “I thought they’d kill you if I wasn’t there.”

  Sam had never thought that warriors might come after him and Meadowlark. She hadn’t either. He asked Flat Dog why they came.

  “It’s unusual,” Flat Dog admitted.

  “Who got it started? Never mind, I know. Was Yellow Horn or Red Roan the loudest?”

  “Yellow Horn,” said Flat Dog. “I think Red Roan would have let it go.”

  “What happens now?”

  “She’ll be Red Roan’s wife.”

  Sam felt as though a lightning bolt cleaved him top to bottom. He’d meant, “What happens to me now?” But Flat Dog’s answer told him that, too.

  Part Seven

  Lost

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  GIDEON HAD THE only sensible suggestion. “Let’s find the brigade.”

  The four men looked at each other, Sam and Clyman the white men, Gideon the French-Canadian (which in his case meant Cree and Jew), and Flat Dog the Crow.

  “Crazy,” was Sam’s immediate response.

  “You no talk about crazy,” said Gideon, “considering.”

  It was the very evening Sam had been brought back in shame and separated forever from Meadowlark. They were sitting around their fire.

  “I don’t think it’s crazy,” said Clyman. “We sure got cause to get with ’em.”

  The reason was that Clyman had six traps, and no other man had any. You couldn’t make a spring hunt without traps. Also, four men might make a risky hunt, even if they stuck to the creeks here in Crow country. B
eing with a brigade would be safer, in any country.

  Sam didn’t feel a bit like talking about what they were going to do. His mind was strictly on how he’d been brought down. What an idiot I was, thinking I’d “finally” done the right thing. I made the biggest mess of my messy life.

  Gray Hawk had made that absolutely clear. First he and Needle went to Meadowlark and talked quietly with her. Then Needle led Meadowlark away. Gray Hawk walked up to Sam as he was leading his horses back to the lean-to, his head hanging. In a soft, lashing voice Gray Hawk said, “Get out of here. Get out of this village. I will never let you near my daughter again.”

  Now Gideon and Clyman worked out how they would get a fall hunt. Probably the brigade would be along the Siskadee somewhere. “The sign, she will be easy to pick up,” said Gideon.

  “If they’re not on the Siskadee,” said Clyman, “we know where else they hunt.”

  The conversation batted back and forth considerably. Flat Dog paid sharp attention, Sam none.

  The conclusion was that Gideon and Clyman intended to look for the brigade. “I have no possibles,” said Gideon. “I need a fine spring hunt.”

  “What you gonna do when you can’t find the brigade?” challenged Sam.

  “Meet up with all the coons at rendezvous,” said Clyman.

  It was set for the Bear River this summer, north of Salt Lake.

  “At ze worst,” Gideon said, “we will come together wit’ zem at rendezvous.”

  “Can’t miss rendezvous—see everybody, trade. Ashley will bring lots of whiskey, he promised.”

  “Diah and Fitzpatrick, they’re inviting lots of Indians. Come and trade, they’ll tell the Indians.” The bear man gave a huge grin. “Whiskey and Indian women…”

  “Count me out,” said Sam.

  “I want to go,” said Flat Dog.