Charity

by Paulette Callen

  Gustie turned Biddie and the wagon bumped and clattered past the southwestern tip of the lake, past the irregular groves of cottonwoods, one of the few naturally occurring trees on a land where wheat grass was regent.

  A gust of wind brought her scents of fresh water, moss, and rushes mingled with a subtle fishiness. She was close enough now to hear the whispering of the trees and to see their seeds nestled in beds of cotton floating on the breeze. She did not have to rein Biddie to the right, away from the lake and up a slight incline, because the mare knew where to go and when to stop. Gustie climbed down from the wagon and let the reins brush the ground. She was in no hurry. The light always lasted longer over the lake than anywhere else. She walked to a mound of earth at the top of an incline marked only by a tender cottonwood that Gustie had transplanted there two years ago. She had been afraid that the first winter would kill it, but the sapling had survived.

  Gustie sank to the ground. Since the prairie grasses had overgrown it, the mound was hardly visible any longer as something separate from the hill.

  She sat with her legs tucked under her, closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the soil. The plants had formed a tight network of roots and fibers; getting through to black dirt was not as easy as it used to be. Gustie needed the dirt itself on her hands, and she dug through till she had it. She resisted the urge to spread it across her face as she used to do. She just sat quietly, her eyes remaining closed, and felt the release of tension that had been mounting inside her for weeks, culminating in the nightmare.

  Gustie sensed her presence and looked up over her shoulder. Dorcas stood there, arms crossed over her breasts, watching her patiently. The fringes of her shawl flapped in the wind. Wisps of iron gray hair flurried about a round, deeply lined face. She looked as she always did, except when she smiled which was seldom, very stern.

  “Come and eat.” Dorcas nodded her head slightly, turned and walked down the other side of the incline.

  Gustie hiked after her marveling that with all of the old woman’s girth and age, she could still walk faster and with more ease over this lumpy prairie ground than Gustie could, and Dorcas never got winded. Maybe it’s her moccasins, thought Gustie.

  Gustie stopped. My goodness. I forgot Biddie. “Dorcas, wait, we can ride.” She lifted her skirts, turned back at a run, and almost twisted her ankle.

  The mare greeted her with a snuffle of affront at being a second thought. Gustie snatched up the reins and hauled herself on to the wagon seat. Dorcas was nowhere in sight. A gentle shake of the reins and the horse moved leisurely up and over the rise and down the other side in an arc that took them back toward the lake, but farther east, along the southern shore.

  In front of Dorcas’s cabin a tripod stood over glowing sticks. The smell of beans drifted up from the black kettle hanging from its center, and coffee steamed from a pot that sat directly upon hot rocks.

  Gustie pulled Biddie up behind the cabin. Dorcas’s workbench—a board laid across two tree stumps—evidenced her recent fish cleaning. Scales stuck to the wood and scattered over the ground caught the light in prismatic specks. A few yards away black birds fought over fish heads and entrails. Gustie unhitched the mare and led her down to the lake. While the horse drank her fill, Gustie washed her hands and splashed the cold water on her face and neck.

  Even though Dorcas had told her more than once to just come in, she could never get used to walking into someone’s home without knocking. Gustie rapped softly on the door of the cabin before carrying in her bags of flour and vegetables. When she opened the door, she was greeted by the sharp scent of herbs and roots. The spotted calf skin still hung on the wall to her left over one bed, and the red cowhide, its edges crackling with age, still covered the opposite wall. Gustie felt like she had come home.

  She made a second trip out to her wagon for the eggs and coffee. As Dorcas took them from her, she tipped her head slightly, and peered at Gustie through squinty eyes. “Not so bad this time. Hmm?” There was nothing wrong with Dorcas’s vision, Gustie knew. Squinting helped her come to conclusions.

  “No, just last night. No school, so I came right away.”

  Dorcas took two plates and spoons outside. “Good. That’s good. Always good to come early and stay long.”

  Gustie followed her with two cups. “Not too long. I’ll wear out my welcome.”

  Dorcas spooned beans onto each plate. “When you are not welcome, I’ll drown you in the lake. Feed the fish.” She pointed with her chin toward Crow Kills.

  Gustie lifted up her skirt to wrap around the hot handle of the coffee pot and filled their cups. As Lena and Will would have said, it was the kind of coffee you could stand your spoon in. Gustie loved it.

  They ate outside on the small porch that fronted the cabin. Dorcas settled on two wood boxes that were stacked against the outside wall, and Gustie sat down on the step and leaned against one of the poles that supported the small overhanging roof. She looked at the crates supporting the old woman and wished she could buy Dorcas a rocking chair. The beans, flavored with onion and bacon fat, had cooked down all day to a thick sauce. They ate slowly.

  “Fishing good?” Gustie asked.

  Dorcas nodded. “Yup. Pretty good.”

  “That’s good.”

  A bird called from the willow that bent over Crow Kills. Gustie swatted at a mosquito. She had gotten used to Dorcas’s long silences while she lay in bed, unable to speak, not being required to speak. The quiet that surrounded the old woman was a filled and comforting one which Gustie craved, even though she lived alone, in silence much of the time.

  They finished their supper and Gustie washed the dishes and the pot in the lake. Dorcas disappeared into the cottonwoods to the east.

  Crow Kills was now blue-gray, flecked with silver sparkles—tiny waves, rivulets on the surface ever reaching for the shore. As the pale sky deepened in hue, the green of the farther shore darkened, dissolving the trees and bushes into silhouette. A deer stepped down to the waters’ edge to drink, then vanished like a ghost. A few birds warbled their evening songs—a warm-up for the night insects that would take up the concert with frogs when the darkness was complete.

  Gustie needed these times when her mind emptied and she enlarged and entered into her surroundings. She felt herself blowing across the lake, felt the ripples in herself, reaching to herself the shore, and another part of herself, the birds singing, and again herself answering in the ratching sound of the crickets. She was the grass. She was the cottonwoods and the sound they made rustling softly in herself the breeze. This was losing the painful part of herself, her memories, her fears, her frustrations and limitations, and finding the best, that which existed in everything. This feeling lasted only a moment. Try as she might, she couldn’t recapture it or make it last. It came; it went; a visitation over which she had no control.

  A lone water bird floated on the lake in the thickening dusk. Gustie rose, stepped down off the porch and walked up the path out of the trees to where she stood in the open. On three sides there was nothing but rolling land, and behind her, Crow Kills with its cottonwood sentinels. Gustie looked up at the night sky. The stars! She could almost hear them, singing a siren song, a multitude of beautiful melodies, far as infinity, close as her heart, seducing her. She knew she could never again live without the open sky, just like this, any time she needed it. Even when she could not get to Crow Kills, even in the dead of winter, she could walk a few steps out away from her own little house and get this sky, fill herself with it, feel herself soar up into it. She drank it like nectar, like black sparkling wine.

  The scattered clouds hung low and heavy. The nearest cloud was dark at its belly where it appeared to touch the earth and lightened to piles of frothy white at its top.

  The birds twittered in contentment, but perhaps it was her own contentment Gustie heard. No doubt birds had squabbles and problems of their own. A small golde
n brown animal appeared from around a cluster of purple blossoms and disappeared again.

  The air was a delicious caress of warm and cool—the breath of the prairie poised between spring and summer. The sun drew out her scent and the wind tossed it back into her nostrils: her hair, fresh and rushy smelling from her morning bath in the lake, her skin smelling of the strong soap she always used.

  Gustie noticed how much cleaner she felt out here in the middle-west than how she used to feel back east, and how much cleaner still she felt here at the lake where most of the living was done outside. Air was cleansing, like water.

  The breeze fluttered around her bare legs, under her arms, through and beneath the loose fabric of her ankle-length shift. The rest of her clothing was drying on the branches of the willow. She longed to take even the shift off and run naked across the prairie.

  The rough grass under her bare feet made her feel real and grounded. Her hair was loose and blew around in the breeze. Gustie held her glasses folded up in her hand so nothing would obstruct the wind from her face. For a moment she forgot everything but her sense of freedom. She stood, her head thrown back, face to the sun, and let the wind blow through her.

  She could feel the wind blowing from as far back as the early 1800s, maybe even before—before this earth had been stuck by the plow, before Dorcas’s people had known the scourge of the white man—his diseases, his wrath, his greed. A purer, sweeter wind blew now, she thought, than would ever blow again. She felt it blowing straight into the future and she wondered what, if anything, of herself would be on that wind, except the scent of rushes from her hair. Tiny seeds born in tufts of white cotton filled the air around her as the cottonwoods let loose upon the wind their own hope of the future. Gustie raised her arms, closed her eyes, and began to turn. She could feel the wind billowing her shift, lifting her hair, buffeting her gently from all sides as she turned around and around. She felt light as a seed pod, transparent as a snail’s egg.

  Gustie stopped turning and opened her eyes. She was light headed, and the sun was suddenly so brilliant she thought she was seeing an apparition—the dark figure veiled in a steamy radiance astride a pale horse, poised like a flame on the grass. Gustie covered her eyes with her hand, took a moment to clear her head, then she put on her glasses, and shielding her vision from the direct rays of the sun, looked again. The figure was still there. An Indian woman. The horse, not of fire but very real horseflesh after all, was cream color, almost white. Her long mane blew about and looked like sea-froth. The woman rode without a saddle.

  Gustie remembered her manners. “Can I help you? Dorcas isn’t here.” As she moved in closer to the side of the horse and looked up into the woman’s face, she was met with large black eyes that held her in a studied gaze. The eyes looked out from a face that might have been carved by a consummate, bold hand in love with stone. Sharp cheek bones, high and wide, balanced a strong wide chin and a full, sharply chiseled mouth. Her large nose sloped straight down in line with her wide, sloping forehead. Her black hair was cropped short just above her ears. The woman was young—younger than Gustie, to be sure. When Gustie tore her eyes away from the face and looked down, she found herself level with a dark, sleek expanse of thigh where the woman’s skirt was hiked up and tucked under her allowing her freedom to ride. Her leg was well muscled, relaxed, but ready to meld into the sides of her horse. Gustie barely restrained herself from touching it the way she might have touched a piece of fine sculpture. The young woman said nothing. Just continued to study her.

  “Would you like something to drink? Some water? There’s coffee, I think.”

  The woman unfastened a bag that hung around her waist. Something moved inside it. She handed it down with a strong large hand and Gustie took it from her. Whatever was inside struggled harder. The bag was not heavy.

  The woman said, “I will be back.”

  The horse, responding to a command that Gustie could not discern, edged away from her, turned and trotted off. Gustie stood with a wiggling bag in one hand, her other hand once again shielding her eyes so she could watch the retreating figure. She sure knows how to sit a horse, thought Gustie. Remarkable eyes. Remarkable face. Could have been struck out of stone, it was so perfect, so defined. Gustie looked down and recalled how she was dressed—or, rather, undressed—bare feet, and her hair a mess down her back. She took a deep breath. Well, it can’t be helped.

  She opened the bag a crack and saw brown and white feathers. She released the two chickens who were delighted to run around in circles in the light and scrabble for tidbits on the ground. Gustie took a handful of cracked corn from a sack by the door and sprinkled it on the ground for them. The chickens pecked eagerly.

  Gustie retrieved her dry clothes from the tree limbs and put them on. Then she sat on the porch and combed the tangles out of her hair and pinned it up again. She missed the feeling of lightness and freshness she had without her clothes on. But I can’t run around here half naked all the time, she thought, and her mind went back to that chiseled brown face, the vision that had come on a shaft of sun light and blown off on the wind; except visions did not leave behind live chickens.

  The low cloud no longer touched the horizon, but hung suspended just above it with a thin patch of light between.

  Gustie watched a pelican float on the lake. He did not seem to move at all, and yet he made rapid progress back and forth. His mate appeared from around the bend and they floated together for awhile.

  The only thing real is the Moon against my flesh. She gallops and I rock with her. There is only coming and going and the pauses between are only waiting for the next going. It is no way to live but it is all there is for me. Moon is a good horse. She is my horse. I fought for her and I won her. Still, I am hers much more than she is mine. When I named her, some of the people laughed, “Jordis on her moon.” But it is her name. It suits her. Grandmother needs the chickens so I take them to her and find the white woman dressed in cotton that when the sun and wind play with it I can see through it to the body I know so well, that is still thin like a child’s though she is not young. She is not old either. She reminds me of the inside of a shell. That shining has its own light kind of smoothness. So delicate that a wave lifting and dropping it will shatter it. Her eyes are gray and there are lines around them, as around the eyes of all white people except the very young, and a red scarring on the cheeks by the sun. Grandmother told me she comes back when the dreams take her. Strange. A white woman comes to an old Indian for comfort when her mind is full of storms. Usually they go to their churches and their preachers. But this is no woman to go to a church or a preacher. I can see that. Perhaps the old woman is right. The spirits of the land have not all been driven off. Fly, Moon.

  To the west, the two pelicans slipped out of sight around a bend in Crow Kills. The afternoon was softening into evening and Dorcas was still not back. Gustie had spent most of the afternoon sitting on the porch, watching the lake. She felt more relaxed and at ease than she could remember.

  Certain that Dorcas would return before dark, Gustie went inside, lit the stove and started the coffee. From a jar on a shelf above the sink, she spooned lard into Dorcas’s deep iron pot.

  Dorcas had taught her how to mix up dough for frybread. For supper they would have frybread and fish. Early this morning, Dorcas had cleaned the fish and left them headless, tailless, and gutless in a pail of cold water waiting for the hot fat.

  The dough was almost ready, springy and not too sticky. She had just formed it into a smooth oval and was letting it rest in a bowl when she heard heavy footsteps on the porch. Dorcas swept through the door, the freshness of the prairie whirled in about her. Her bag, made from old blanket material, was full of plants, their leafy tops ruffled out from the draw-string opening.

  While Dorcas hung up her scarf and shawl, Gustie poured her a cup of coffee and placed it on the table alongside the can of sugar. “You had a visitor.”

/>   Dorcas sat down heavily and took her time stirring spoon after spoon of sugar into her coffee, and sipped it with satisfaction for a few moments before she asked, “Who?”

  “She didn’t say. She left a couple chickens.”

  “She ride a white horse?”

  “Yes. Quite a beautiful horse.”

  “Jordis.”

  Gustie observed the old woman squinting hard at her from behind her coffee cup and said, “What?”

  “Nothing.” Dorcas took another sip of the sugared coffee and wiped her mouth with her hand. “Missionaries name her.”

  The fat had melted down golden and hot. Gustie tore off pieces of the dough, flattened each one a little between her palms and slipped them into the fat. The hot grease sizzled on contact and the dough puffed out and browned. Just when the outsides were crisp and the insides fluffy and steaming, Gustie lifted them out with a pair of iron tongs and piled them on a tin platter. Then she rolled the fish in flour left from the bread making and dropped them into the fat. More sizzling and popping and the aroma of frying fish filled the cabin. The fish cooked quickly and Gustie piled them on the platter next to the frybread.

  Dorcas nodded her approval. She flourished an unusually happy mood all of a sudden. “You cook like a good Indian. Next I teach you how to do it over the fire.” Dorcas cocked her chin in the direction of the tripod outside. “No stove. Tastes better that way.”

  The first time Gustie had tried to make frybread, she had burned herself on spattering fat; some of the pieces had cooked to little brown bricks, and the rest remained doughy and sticky inside. She had to throw the whole batch out feeling utterly miserable as she wasted Dorcas’s precious flour. Dorcas had her small share of annuities. Like everyone else on the reservation, when it ran out, she had to buy what she needed until the next allotment, and money was very scarce on the Red Sand.