Life at the Speed of Us

by Heather Sappenfield

  I forced my mouth closed and accepted it and the quiver of arrows. I studied it in wonder, and its shape felt so natural in my hands that I sighed. “Towéiyak,” I said, meaning it.

  Súmáí taught me to hunt—how to track, move soundlessly, make low signal whistles to a partner, and shoot. At first drawing a bow’s string made my ribs, arm, and fingers ache, but one day that ache was gone. The heft and shape of the bow and aiming down an arrow became second nature. Sometimes, after I’d pierce a flower petal Súmáí had pressed against a tree’s trunk, he’d tackle me right there in the grass and kiss me. The two younger guys with Chief Úwápaa that day I’d arrived were Súmáí’s cousins—Panákwas and Mú’ú’nap—and on the days they joined us, they’d just shake their heads and walk away.

  I never let things go farther than that, though. Out there, or in our tepee. Nights, we’d lie in those willow beds, craving strong between us, but I just couldn’t give myself like that.

  I ate meat every day—deer, elk, buffalo, rabbit, squirrel, beaver, badger, marmot—and I got used to hunting with Súmáí, yet I could not bring myself to kill. I sensed that this bugged him, but he didn’t say anything.

  All around me, people spoke Ute. Súmáí started teaching me words. I’d hear them sprinkled through conversations, and I started to detect patterns. One day, those patterns focused. I still spoke it like a three-year-old, but I understood it well enough to get by, and it was crazy how just understanding what people were saying changed them from seeming like characters in a movie to real people. Súmáí’s mom seemed not to mind me so much. His grandmother got a kick out of me, and she walked around laughing this low he-he-he and shaking her head at the dorky things I did. Panákwas and Mú’ú’nap’s wives grew chummy with me as the guys played gambling games with the hulls of yucca seeds. Chief Úwápaa, though, always kept his distance.

  As they got used to me, I’d hear people singing to themselves or humming as they worked. I’d see their voices in soothing waves. I started singing too. “Blackbird” mostly, the tune Mom always sang when I was little. It would remind me that I’d thought there was a way to bring her back, and I needed to find it. A good reminder, because with Súmáí and his people, I was starting to forget. At first I notched each sunrise on a stick, but each day stretched long, and joined to the next in a contented blur. As I started to make my eighth notch, I couldn’t see the point of tracking time in this world like I did in mine, especially if I was going to return at the same moment I’d left. So I stopped. Before I knew it, one full moon had passed. Then another. Light, dark, and the moon were the only clocks.

  Practically every night, they told stories around the fire, or sang, or danced. The dancing and singing were better than any movie. They had these rattles that would light up in the dark. Súmáí said they were made from buffalo hide with pieces of sacred quartz inside, and that this quartz called the spirits. I reasoned that the rock chips sparked off one another, but, honestly, around that campfire, with the singing and the starscape, those rattles were magic. His family also played flutes made from yucca stalks, which raised the hair on my arms and neck. And drums that echoed in my bones.

  Everyone told stories around the campfire. Even kids got up a few times, and I liked that because I could understand their sentences without Súmáí’s help. My eyes would seek Túwámúpǘch, wherever she sat, and I’d watch her rock her son and think how my presence was blocking her happiness. It was like pressing on a splinter beneath my skin, and this, too, reminded me to keep gathering information. That sometime soon I should return home.

  But then I’d start a new day with Súmáí and I’d forget. Some nights, I’d watch the campfire’s smoke waver and spiral up, and that Sovern back home seemed like another person. Like looking at one of those other Soverns in the universes through the spruce.

  One night, Panákwas told a story about a bear, and I peered between the gaps in the tepees, looking for Mom. I hadn’t seen her since that first day, and I was starting to wonder if maybe I’d had things wrong. Then Súmáí squeezed my hand, and my worries faded in the warmth of his arm pressing mine.

  Halfway between the first and second full moons, when it came time to decide who would tell the next story, Chief Úwápaa said, “Bear Necklace,” and all eyes veered to me.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I’m bad at your language.”

  “Tell it in Spanish,” he said, “and Súmáí will translate.”

  “We will help you,” Súmáí said and glanced at his father, who nodded.

  I wanted to run to the forest, but I sensed this was a matter of honor, and when I stood, the gleam in Súmáí’s eye confirmed it. I could also see worry: What would I tell his people? Would I bring ugliness from my own world?

  As I searched my mind for what to say, I realized he was right to worry. Then my gaze caught on the feathers adorning the tops of Chief Úwápaa’s braids. Mom began singing “Blackbird” in my head, and Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was right there, ready.

  “This is the story of a girl who was like a caged bird. A girl who whites did not like because of her dark skin. She lived halfway between my time and yours, when people with dark skin suffered many injustices at the hands of whites.”

  Chief Úwápaa nodded. “There was a great war in the East.”

  “The Civil War?” I said, and then corrected it to what

  people might call it in this time. “The War Between the States?”

  “I do not know this name,” Chief Úwápaa said. “Only that the whites had a great war that has made them too poor to pay our treaties.”

  “The black-skinned people,” I said, “came to this country as slaves. The great war was to free them. After the war, slavery was not allowed, but many whites still treated them cruelly.”

  The chief shook his head. “Buffalo soldiers.”

  “What?” I said.

  Súmáí said, “Black-skinned soldiers with the buffalo’s tight curly hair. Scouts say they came to avenge the killing of Meeker. But the Utes had already left.”

  People around the campfire nodded.

  “Two of our family have been stolen as slaves,” Súmáí said.

  “By whites?”

  “Arapaho, we think. We cannot find them,” he said.

  Everything, regardless of time, seemed a tangled web of wrongs, deceptions, and resentments. I remembered Lindholm saying the Utes had warred with the Arapaho, and suddenly my own world hovered close around me. I swallowed and continued. “The girl in my story was named Maya, and her brother was named Bailey. When Maya and Bailey were small, they were sent to live with their grandmother, who owned a … trading post and had much … religion.”

  Sniggers erupted from my audience.

  “We know religion,” Súmáí said. “It makes us laugh.”

  “Maya and Bailey were sad that their mother and father had sent them away, but they liked living with their grandmother. She was a strong woman, like Súmáí’s mother, and people looked to her for strength and wisdom.”

  Súmáí’s mother grinned and rocked on her log. I nodded to her, and she nodded back.

  “Always, Maya felt she was balancing on a blade’s edge. Her parents sending her away made her feel unworthy. She felt she was ugly, and she thought white girls were pretty and wanted to look like them.”

  A couple grunts carried across the fire.

  “But Maya’s grandmother taught her that she was smart.” I tapped my temple yet didn’t mention how much she loved to read. Súmáí’s people wouldn’t understand what reading meant. “From watching her grandmother endure white cruelty, Maya learned to be strong here.” I pressed my hand over my heart, felt my amulet bag beneath, and remembered standing like this on the day I’d retraced my steps in Shangri-La and found Súmáí. How did I appear to these people, a white telling this story? I didn’t belong here.

  I gl
anced at Súmáí, who nodded. I took a deep breath and said. “From watching her people’s strength—cotton pickers who came to her grandmother’s trading post, who worked day after long day with no hope of a better life—she learned pride. Though she was surrounded by white injustice, Maya grew strong with her grandmother.”

  “The Navajo grow this cotton,” Chief Úwápaa said.

  I thought of the blankets on our willow beds, had heard they’d come from the Navajo.

  “One day, Maya’s father came to her grandmother’s trading post, and he took Maya and Bailey to live with their mother in a city called St. Louis. In a state called Missouri.”

  Chief Úwápaa nodded. “This is near the Trail Where They Cried?”

  I blinked.

  “I heard a story of many Cherokee dead on that trail,” the chief said. “They tried white ways, and still they were forced from the land the Great Spirit gave their ancestors.”

  I realized he meant the Trail of Tears and felt embarrassed not to know more. “It’s near there, I think. Missouri isn’t so bad in my time, but for Maya it wasn’t good. In Missouri, she suffered at the hands of her own people. Her mother was very beautiful. She worked in a gambling house.” My audience’s interest was sharp. I thought of Súmáí, Panákwas, and Mú’ú’nap playing shell games, and how often I saw the other men playing similar games and betting on them. “She was gone often, and she had a boyfriend who lived with them.”

  “Boyfriend? ” Súmáí said.

  “Man who lived with them but was not her husband.”

  He nodded seriously and several hisses rose from the faces around the fire.

  I looked across the children and realized I needed to curb my words. I hadn’t seen a single Ute kid spanked. I had seen an adult say a simple harsh word, and that kid shaped right up. Mostly, I’d noticed the softening of people’s expressions when they looked at the kids.

  “He was bad to Maya,” I said. “He … shamed her.” That seemed to work; the kid’s eyes turned to saucers, their imaginations stampeding, and the adults sat at attention with appalled expressions.

  “When Maya finally found courage to speak about it, the boyfriend was killed.” The adults nodded. The kids grinned. “Maya never knew who did it, but she was sure it was someone in her family. She felt her words had killed the man. For many moons she did not speak because she did not want to harm anyone else.” I swallowed hard on those words.

  Chief Úwápaa’s bottom lip pushed out. I could tell he didn’t like this turn or the adults in the story. I wondered what he’d think of my silence after Mom died.

  I hadn’t finished listening to the book. How should I end it? With Maya not talking and regretting what the Utes saw as justice?

  “Finally, Maya understood that … ” My voice cracked and I looked down. I’d become that desperate Sovern again, and it felt like saying the next part would change my own equation. Shangri-La’s cold surrounded me, and I heard myself yell Coward! I felt anger’s heat and Handler say, She’s gone. My skin turned clammy, and my pulse was faint and fast. All those gazes were fixed on me. Chief Úwápaa nodded, encouraging.

  I looked up at these people, snared in a rebellion they could not win. My gaze landed on Túwámúpǘch, who held her baby and watched me intently. I straightened.

  “She understood she could not control the lives of other people. She understood that her words had not killed the man. She saw that her silence hurt her family. She began to speak again.”

  Nobody reacted.

  Finally, Chief Úwápaa grunted. He slapped his thigh, rose, and strode to my side. “It is a good story. But there are no animals. Where is the bird?”

  “Maya is like a caged bird,” I said.

  “A bird that is freed?” he said.

  “No. A bird that still sings though her life is a prison.”

  He looked out across the faces cast in firelight, and they looked back.

  38

  After that evening I told the story, the tribe seemed less awed by Bear Necklace. They seemed to welcome me more. Maybe actually like me.

  One afternoon, when Súmáí and I returned from hunting, unsuccessful, his mother sat, as she often did, on a log, legs crossed, stitching beads onto a lap-sized piece of elk skin. She eyed the cloudless sky. “The Great Spirit is angry. No game. No rain.”

  I realized then that it hadn’t rained but for a sprinkle since I’d arrived. I remembered the yellow snap of the grass beneath my slippers as Súmáí and I had descended the mountainside.

  “You should travel through the trees to hunt again.”

  Súmáí shot her a look.

  His mom eyed me. “She will be fine here without you.”

  He shook his head. “I do not know the way of the trees about this. We are here, now. I will not gamble.”

  She sighed and said to me, “I will teach you to bead?”

  I must have looked stunned, because Súmáí nodded like It’ll be okay. Not wanting to add to his mother’s resentment, I settled beside her on the log and crossed my legs. She eyed the cloudless sky once more and handed me a piece of fine thread and a needle made from a porcupine quill. She passed me a hand-sized scrap of elk skin with a grid traced in charcoal.

  She took a chunk of wax and said, “Do this.” She held a piece of thread down against the wax with her thumb and pulled the thread across it. “It makes the thread strong.”

  I watched Súmáí walk to our tepee, longing to follow. I took the wax from her and mirrored her movement. It released a fresh, sweet scent. She threaded her needle, so I threaded my needle.

  “Make a knot in the end.” She demonstrated how to twist and tie off the thread. “Begin at one corner, and then slide on the beads you desire.” She modeled this, pushing the needle through a piece of rawhide and then dipping it into a bowl of tiny orangey-red beads and loading it full. “Draw the needle back through.” She returned the needle through the rawhide. “Take a second needle and thread”—she waxed and threaded a second needle—“and stitch down the beads.” With the second needle, she moved horizontally, stitching down the string every two beads.

  “For a pattern, you must plan. You can draw it in the dirt first.”

  I repressed a laugh. Fully formed patterns and equations cluttered my head. I stared at the grid on the elk skin and it seemed like a gateway. What did I want to create? Alternating colors? A diamond shape? I surveyed the beads to choose from: white, blue, orangy-red, and purply-black. A robin swooped down and pecked at the dry ground. I pictured the cover of Angelou’s book, that blackbird flying straight up in silhouette.

  I loaded the needle with red beads for the border. Súmáí’s mom watched me, leaning in, the closest we’d ever been since she’d dressed me that first night. I bit my lip at how it conjured Mom leaning close to pat my leg.

  Súmáí’s mom nodded when I completed the first row. For the next row, I loaded one red, then filled the needle with blue beads for the sky. Nine beads in, I loaded a white one as outline and mirrored the rest back out to the other border. On the next row, the white beads moved out in a narrow triangle, two black beads between for the beak. When I started on the bird’s wings, Súmáí’s mom watched closer.

  My stitches were tight and the image clear. I felt proud, but my brain was also running full-tilt, happy to be turned loose in the task. I finished the spread wings and moved down the silhouette to the tail. I finished off a last row of all-red border along the bottom as the day’s light began to fade and Súmáí returned.

  “You have been working long.” He crouched beside me at the log’s end. “You like beadwork?” We still spoke Spanish since I was better at it.

  “Once I start a thing, I get into it.” I tied off the last bead, cut the thread with a knife, and smoothed the scrap on my knee.

  “I have sharpened your knife and arrows, and—” He ran his finger down t
he bird. “You made this?”

  I shrugged.

  “I have never seen its like.” He looked at his mother, who had long since gotten up and started cooking dinner.

  “Right,” I said, sarcastic.

  He eyed me with a puzzled expression. “You have not learned beadwork before?”

  “No. Why?”

  His mother came to stand behind me and looked down at the scrap resting on my leg. “She has a gift,” she said.

  “Gift? ” I said, sarcastic again. But I did have to admit that it had turned out cool. The relaxed way my brain felt was even better.

  “Thank you for teaching me. It is only good because you made the lines,” I said to her.

  She smiled then and touched my head. It’s hard to explain how that touch felt. The closest I can come is her touch + looking at that beaded bird = forgiveness for killing Mom.

  “It will become a tobacco pouch for your father,” she said.

  Dad doesn’t smoke, I thought, and then realized she meant Chief Úwápaa. I blurted a laugh, and they both looked at me. I pressed my lips tight to keep from making another noise I’d regret.

  Moving to the fire’s far side, Súmáí’s mom bent down to the pot and stirred it. “It is okay to accept a gift.” Her eyes were dark and sure, despite the wavering heat rising from the flames. “You must choose which battles are worth fighting.” Her gaze darted from Súmáí to me with an expression that held years of suffering and loss. But then she smiled, and I saw it held happiness too. “Tomorrow, daughter, I will teach you to make the pouch.”

  It took me forever to work up the courage to present the pouch to Chief Úwápaa.

  “He can be difficult, but it will be fine,” Súmáí said.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s not that. I’m out of practice at … this kind of thing.” Accepting a gift takes a certain strength, but to give one, I was realizing, was much harder. Each day I’d hunt with Súmáí and try to picture myself standing before his village, giving their chief that pouch, and I just couldn’t. Such a simple thing, yet it drove me crazy.