Paint the Wind

by Cathy Cash Spellman

  She could build a fire almost as competently as Atticus—and she didn't need his help any longer to mend what needed mending. She could catch fish with a sharpened stick or cook it over a campfire till it tasted almost like a home-cooked meal. She could follow a trail and keep from getting lost, and she knew the names of half a hundred plants and trees and roots by heart. She even knew the medical properties of most of them. Iris or snake lily for skin rash or deafness. The back of the butternut for griping of the intestines, scabwart for sore throat, angelica for asthma. Horse-weed for diarrhea, mistletoe for afflictions of the kidney. In the beginning she'd thought she'd never be able to remember it all without books to learn from or a tablet to write it down, but Atticus had told her that in his tribe, no written records were kept; it was a thing of pride to store great knowledge inside you, in the place where you kept your wisdom. The very fact that she had point letting her think otherwise. But this . . . this one time perhaps it wasn't so much a lie as a hope. Everybody needed something to hope for. And besides, Californy was far away and much could happen on the trip. The gold mine would give her something to hope for in the months or years ahead, and by the time they got to Californy she'd be older, better able to understand the need for the fib.

  " 'Spect us wealthy gold miners could stand a mite of rabbit stew?" he asked, cheered by her excitement.

  "Oh, yes," she said. "We've got to keep up our strength. It's a real long way to Californy." Fancy laughed out loud and Atticus joined in. no copy books as a crutch had sharpened her memory and made it hold more than she'd ever dreamed it could. Her inside place was growing fuller every day, she thought with a giggle.

  Fancy dashed the cold water from the river onto her face to clear the last vestiges of sleep. As she did so she hummed the lilty song Atticus had played for her the night before on his banjo, as all alone by the side of the stream, they had sung together, laughing and dancing. Soon she, too, would be able to play real tunes on the instrument; Atticus said she had a talent for music. She reached down one last time to scoop a cooling sip of water into her cupped hand.

  Fancy felt the fangs of the water moccasin pierce her hand near the wrist, felt the acid shock of poison pumping into her flesh. She shrieked in terror and grabbed her wrist with viselike fingers to keep the evil poison contained in her hand, as the glistening body slithered from its hiding place and continued its unhurried passage downstream. Her face contorted with fear as Atticus tore across the clearing toward the scream; she'd seen more than one slave die from snakebite. He caught her as she sagged precariously on the mossy bank.

  "What kind was it, Fancy?" Atticus demanded as he scooped her up into his arms.

  "Moccasin," she whispered, terror constricting her throat so she could hardly say the awful word.

  The Bowie knife was in his hand so swiftly, she barely saw the move; he scored deep gashes into the soft flesh above the indentations of the fangs. Fancy screamed again, but Atticus held her hand so tightly, she couldn't have escaped if she tried.

  Fancy felt the blood and poison sucked from the wound as the world around her ceased to have its proper shape. She was hot and cold; a creeping nausea rose inside her and she ached where Atticus was tying his belt around her arm. Could she be thirsty, too? she wondered dazedly; so many sinking feelings were suffusing her that her sluggish mind couldn't seem to catch hold of them all at once.

  Atticus laid her gently on the ground and covered her with his coat. "I got to git my medicines, child," he murmured close to her ear. "You hold on now, you hear me? I git back here 'fore you know it."

  Fancy tried to nod her acknowledgment, but the muscles of her neck ached strangely and her body didn't seem to want to do as she told it. "I'm dying, aren't I, Atticus?" she tried to say, but by the time she could make her mouth form the words he was gone.

  Atticus held the feverish child in his arms and tortured his brain for something more he could do. He had scarified the wound within minutes of the puncture; he had cut and drawn the venom and packed the gash with chewed tobacco. He had boiled wood betony and valerian for the nerve pains, and root of the ground squirrel pea to ease the muscle spasms, and forced the mixture drop by drop between her tightly clenched lips. Now he must wait.

  The crisis would come tonight. The sweating and the nausea would pass and the heartbeat would be shallow and rapid. The headache, bloating, and thirst would reach a crescendo, and then . . . either the fever would break and she would live, or painful paralysis would follow the venom through every cranny of her small frame and she would die.

  Wordlessly, Atticus hugged the child's restless body to his own and rocked her like a baby. Fancy groaned softly and her eyes opened for a moment, but he knew she couldn't see him.

  There was no point in going over for the thousandth time the why of it. Or the countless ifs. If he hadn't sent her to the stream for water, if he had left her safe at Tremayne, if the Yankees hadn't come, if there'd been no war . . . the ifs were endless and self-defeating.

  The ancient secret rose in him inexorably—there was one more thing he could do for her if all else failed. Atticus let the forbidden knowledge once again seep from its burial place in his mind. Powerful forces he had learned of, in his boyhood; forces strong enough to keep even Death at bay. Forces far too powerful to be unleashed except in desperation.

  Such magic as could hold back Death was dearly paid for. He would not think the thoughts again unless there was no other way.

  With a decisive sigh Atticus laid the desperately ill child on the mossy bank and covered her with both their blankets. He must be quick now that he'd made up his mind; if he hadn't the courage to do what he must, she would die before sunrise. He'd feared the worst from the moment he'd seen the placement of the wound; on top of her hand where the vulnerable veins could carry the poison swiftly through her small body. Her flesh burned as he held her; there were no choices anymore.

  Swiftly, Atticus cut a lock of the child's hair and a snippet of her fingernails. He noted the bloodless pallor of the skin beneath the nails, and held her small hand a moment longer than necessary before he let it slip from his fingers.

  He rifled his medicine kit for precious herbs, dried and stored laboriously the summer before, against emergency. Stripping off his clothes, he tied a cloth around his loins. The task he was about should be performed naked, as it had been in the jungle. He put his shirt and trousers back on over the breechcloth and prepared to go.

  Atticus looked up at the sky and took his bearings. The crescent moon shone meager light. A full moon would have helped his purpose, but he must do what he could with the waxing one. At least they weren't in the moon's dark quarter when all magic was thwarted by nature's laws.

  It couldn't be more than a few miles back to the graveyard they'd passed the day before. He tied the packet of herbs to his makeshift wrap, bound his hunting knife with a thong around his waist, and set off at a lope along the riverbank, thanking the gods of his long-gone youth that they were far from town and prying eyes. It amused him in a grim sort of way that he had automatically shifted back to the old gods and abandoned the new one he'd grown so fond of in the white man's world. The old gods were those whose mercy he would beg this night, and in whose keeping he would leave his spirit as hostage for Fancy. The new god, Jesus, he'd learned of in Louisiana was more benevolent but less willing to be bargained with.

  When he reached the small churchyard, Atticus stripped off his clothes and cut a strip of turf from the top of one of the mounded graves. He added a handful of grave dirt to the herb bundle, then searched the area for a small flat rock.

  Atticus stared for a moment at the fingers of his hand—it seemed to him that he had never seen them clearly before this moment. He laid his left hand on the stone and took a long, deep breath to steady himself. Then, taking his knife from its sheath, he laid its razor edge to the second joint of his pinky, and hacked off his smallest finger.

  The unnatural sound of bone and sinew being sawed through
made the old man sway, but steeling himself, he let the blood from the wound run freely over the poultice he was concocting; then he packed the injury with chewed leaves, bandaged his hand as best he could, and continued the ritual, according to the old law.

  With intense concentration, Atticus pressed the severed finger, the lock of Fancy's hair, and the nail parings into the earth on the grave he'd altered, then replaced the turf above the fetish, pounding it into a semblance of its original form. It would not do to arouse suspicion with an obviously desecrated grave, lest some unsuspecting person dig up the buried fetish and disturb the magic.

  Atticus stood tall, held his arms aloft in an attitude more of salute than of supplication, and called on Death to hear the terms of his bargain: "Fancy's life for mine!" He cried the awesome Yoruba words aloud so fiercely that Death could not mistake his meaning. "I leave you a piece of my own body to seal the bargain," he shouted into the silence of the graveyard. "Come for me at your leisure, Snake God. I will go willingly, if you spare the child."

  Atticus felt the intense Power of the magic sucked into his veins from the earth beneath his feet. He heard the wind called up and eerie rustling sounds as the leaves around him began to shimmer and swirl in the darkness.

  "By the power of all the gods of the Yoruba people," he called out in the language of his young manhood, "my spirit calls upon you, Death!"

  The wild wind swirled around him, yet the trees above were frozen into silence as if they, too, were awed by the Power whose forbidden name he dared to speak.

  Atticus saw the vision boil up from the scattered leaves, an iridescence at first, that grew and pulsed and coiled like living flesh, brought forth from the putrifying remains of the dead who slept around him.

  A swaying serpent face emerged from the luminescence, its lips drawn back in a hideous grin of power.

  Alone, to look upon the face of the Snake God would be certain and immediate death; but Atticus was not alone. Spirits rose like phosphorescent mist around him, spirits of his ancestors, wizard beyond wizard back to the dawn of time.

  He felt his own soul fortified by their presence, ennobled, enhanced to a thousand times its own immensity by the ancestral spectres.

  "I face you, fearsome Snake God," he called out clearly. "I am not some pious beggar asking for a favor—I come here to enter into a bargain with my people's ancient adversary!"

  The Snake God's smile died upon its lips, the forked tongue nicked out, nearly touching Atticus' face. The venomous apparition coiled itself around the old slave's legs and rose to envelop the tall dark form, which neither flinched nor fled.

  Atticus felt the icy cold of death surge through him then, as the odious reptile curled around his body.

  I am dying! his brain shrieked to his pounding heart. This is what death is, this anguished cold, this horrifying aloneness, this eternity of dark . . . I'm dying, screamed each bone and muscle, each cell of blood and tissue. He felt his consciousness extinguish, memories blinking off like murdered fireflies. No! his soul shrieked madly. This is too much to ask!

  "Relent!" Death demanded. "Let the child go and all will be as it was before. Choose quickly, your life ebbs."

  Atticus felt the last of himself draining, and wanted to live with every fiber of his dying heart. . . .

  "No!" he gasped with his last breath. "I give myself for Fancy."

  A crooning filled his ears. The figures of the ancestors blended into a single iridescent Being that merged with Atticus, shattering and rebuilding; every cell pulsed with power, every memory returned and with it memories he'd never had . . . ancient knowledge from a thousand brains in a thousand generations suffused his own and he was one with all knowledge in all time. . . .

  The Snake God hissed at the unwelcome Light, uncoiled himself reluctantly, and Death withdrew. The soul of Atticus knew the bargain had been sealed.

  There would be no easy death for him now; no falling off to sleep in comfortable old age. But it would be an honorable death for he had stood his ground—and the price was not too high to pay.

  Atticus completed the ancient ritual with the meticulousness of one who understands only too well the Power he has invoked. He waited for the Ancient Ones to drain themselves from his being, to return to the Eternal Place where they resided. Their departure left him hollowed and bereft.

  As soon as he was able, the man who'd fought with Death and won from him reprieve, pulled on his abandoned clothes and hurried back to the child he loved more than his own life.

  Atticus removed the poultice from Fancy's wound and brushed the graveyard mixture from all the places on her sleeping body where he'd sprinkled it.

  The child stirred uneasily and tried to drag her mind to the surface, from the faraway place where it had wandered.

  "Atticus?"

  "I'm here, child," he responded gently, tucking the blanket in closer to her body. "You been real sick, sugah, so you best lie still 'til I git you some soup for nourishment."

  Gently, the old man spooned a few drops of the wanning liquid into Fancy's mouth. He could see that her eyes were clearer and she knew her surroundings.

  "You hurt your hand," she whispered sleepily.

  " 'T'ain't nothin', honey. Only important thing is you is feelin' better now."

  Fancy smiled, or tried to, but sleep again pulled her away to another place. This time, Atticus knew with satisfaction, there need be no fear that she wouldn't return.

  Chapter 5

  "Now, Fancy honey," Atticus said cheerfully. "What kin you tell me about doctorin' wif tree bark?" He glanced at the girl out of the corner of his eye as they walked along a heavily forested roadway; her confident smile let him know she had an answer to the question that she wouldn't have had a few months before.

  "Slippery elm could make a gruel to soothe a stomach inflammation, or it could make a juice to cure a sore throat."

  He nodded and she continued.

  "Cherry bark could heal catarrh."

  "How's about black willow?"

  "That's an easy one, Atticus," she responded gaily. "It's a sedative and a tonic."

  "You is mighty smart today," he said, shaking his head as if trying to think up a means of stumping her. "You got your tree barks right down pat. But how 'bout roots, now? Dey's real powerful. Got to know what to do wif roots."

  He screwed up his face in concentration. "What you do wif comfrey root, if'n you had some?"

  "Make a poultice for a wound, I guess," she answered a little slower than before. "I think it's good for chest complaints too. But I'm not sure."

  "Right as rain, child! Soon you have so much doctorin' stuffed in your head, it git two sizes bigger."

  "You're a real good teacher, Atticus. I never could have learned so much from that old tutor I had at Beau Rivage."

  Atticus poked with his walking stick at a plant by the side of the road.

  "See dis here red clover? You kin cure whooping cough wif dis flower if you ain't got nothin' better handy."

  "How come you know so much?" Fancy asked, mimicking the cadence in Atticus' speech.

  He smiled at her. "Learnt some in Africa, long ago. Got to know plants if you plannin' to do magic. Learnt more from my wife, 'cause she was born in the bayous, so she knowed what grows in Loosiana real good."

  "What was she like, Atticus?"

  "She was purty as a picture," he said easily. "And real kind. Had a great big heart too. Big enough to love everybody."

  "But mostly you, right?"

  "Mostly me," he replied, pride in his voice. "Yes'm, Beckie love mostly me."

  They walked on silently, the only sounds the crunch of stones beneath their feet. Fancy thought she might have made him sad, so she broached another subject.

  "I wish I could teach you something, Atticus, something real good. But you know everything important, seems to me."

  Atticus cocked his head to the side to contemplate his small companion; it was nice that she wanted to give something back.

 
; "You could teach me to write my name," he said quietly. "Always thought if I ever git free, I learn to write my name. Case I ever git to own somethin' I could sign my name real good on de bill of sale."

  Fancy looked up at Atticus, realization dawning. He was an old man, yet never in his whole life had anything truly belonged to him. Something in the understanding made tears spring up behind her eyes.

  "Don't you worry none, Atticus," she said hastily. "When I get rich again I'm going to buy you lots of good things."

  "Thank you kindly, honey. But mebbe I jest inten' to buy some-thin' for my own self. Sign my own name on dat paper." He smiled down at her to show he wasn't offended. "If you teach me how, dat is."

  "I'll teach you to read and write everything, if you want me to," she said magnanimously.

  "Dat be right nice, child," he replied. "But I'd be obliged if we jest start wif Atticus."

  Chapter 6

  The open prairie west of St. Joseph, Missouri, stretched to the far horizon. It had taken them the better part of two years to reach the place where the pamphlets said the wagon trains began. At first they'd headed west almost to the Texican border, then, hearing talk in the towns west of Shreveport, they'd picked up a penny pamphlet that told how to go west with a wagon train and Atticus had decided, on the spot, that they must reach St. Joe.

  So they'd headed north through Arkansas, a dangerous place, still ravaged by border raiders and all the riffraff of ex-army men who hated to leave war behind when it ended. Fort Towson, Bogy Depot, Scullyville, Van Buren. Fort Wayne and Neosho, on the outskirts of the Seneca and Shawnee nations. Then on through Mound City and Olathe, where fear of Pawnee raiders still kept people in their cabins ... to Wyandotte, Atchison, and finally St. Joe.