Heartsong

by James Welch

  Charging Elk endured the girls teasing, which was not disagreeable, for she made him feel young again and more alive than he had ever been since he left the Stronghold fifteen years before, while he waited for her to become the young woman that he could excite into such passion. At first, Charging Elk had tried not to become aroused for fear that it might frighten Nathalie. But it was hopeless. And she was fascinated. Sometimes she would run her fingers along his pants, feeling the rigidity of his cock. The first time, she had asked if it hurt to stretch himself like this, and he had burst out in a laugh so loud she had clamped her hand on his mouth in alarm. “Do you want to wake up my father, you fool?” But the laugh had felt good to him and he hugged her in gratitude.

  Nathalie, in their quieter moments, wanted to know all about his life before he came to France. And so he told her about his childhood out on the plains, about living in a tipi, and galloping his horse, about the battle with the soldiers and coming in to Fort Robinson. His French was good enough now to even tell some of the details, although he left out the violent parts, like the time he and his friends had cut off the dead soldier’s finger to get his ring. He enjoyed talking about his life, for he really hadn’t had the opportunity since coming to France. He had told Causeret a little about his life at the Stronghold, but the juggler had become obsessed with the gold in Paha Sapa and only wanted to hear about that.

  Nathalie listened to the stories, and often she would look at him in disbelief. Part of that disbelief came from the fact that she had an Indian for a lover. Never in her wildest dreams could she have imagined this. And the more he told of his life, the more she realized that she knew nothing about this kind of a man and the kind of life he came from. She had seen illustrations of Indians in magazines, but they had feather headdresses and painted faces and carried hatchets or guns. More often than not, the faces were cruel, even inhuman. But Charging Elk was not cruel or inhuman. He didn’t carry a weapon or paint his face. He was gentle, even pliable. He never did anything until she let him. Sometimes when she was apart from him, Nathalie wondered what would happen if they walked along the promenade beside the Garonne in Agen. What would people think? What would Catherine think?

  Of course, the very idea was impossible. People would point at them, men and women would disapprove, young people would laugh behind their backs—even Catherine would tease her about not being able to do better than a savage. In her darker moments, Nathalie herself wondered if she couldn’t do better—find a young man of her own kind, perhaps a farmer or, what, a druggist, a carpenter?

  Nathalie had never seen a dark person until Charging Elk. She had never seen a black African, or a Musulman, or a Levantine. There were only French people in Agen and the countryside, and they were suspicious of, even hostile toward, anyone who was of a different color.

  Charging Elk was different. But he was good, strong and gentle at the same time. Shouldn’t that be enough for her? When she was with him in his little room, it was enough. But when they rode into town in the wagon with her father, she saw how the people looked at him and she became embarrassed, even ashamed of sitting next to him. She made it a point not to sit too close to him or talk with him while people were watching. Back at the farm she became ashamed of herself for her hateful actions and showered him with even more affection. She resolved that next time it would be different—she would laugh with him, look into his eyes, touch him, perhaps even walk along the promenade with him. Who cared what other people thought?

  One morning in mid-December, just after breakfast, Vincent asked Charging Elk to harness the horses and hook them up to the wagon. He and Nathalie were going to visit his younger brother, who lived on the other side of the Garonne, a few kilometers to the south of Agen.

  It had rained lightly but steadily for several days, and this morning, while not rainy, was damp, with large pockets of fog hiding the Garonne. The farmyard was muddy and quiet, with only the flock of geese waddling among the puddles, making their strange conversation. The pigs were already up in the orchards. Charging Elk held the horses as Vincent and Nathalie climbed up into the wagon. Nathalie wore her next-to-best dress under her cloak, and a real hat had replaced the usual white bonnet. She looked somber and sat stiffly on the seat beside her father.

  Charging Elk watched the wagon creak slowly out of the compound and down the road toward Agen. He watched until the road curved behind an abandoned outbuilding and the wagon disappeared. Something was going on. He could see it in Nathalie’s eyes, in the tense slump of Vincent’s shoulders. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew that things were not good. He felt empty and alone as he stood in the damp courtyard, watching for another glimpse of the wagon, of Nathalie, but he didn’t see her again, and his thoughts became as gloomy as the fog-shrouded river bottom. Something was happening.

  He spent most of the day in the orchards above the farm buildings. He pruned trees, stacked the prunings into neat piles among the trees. When the earth dried, he would come up in the wagon and haul the limbs and shoots to the pile behind the hog pen to season for firewood and fencing.

  Around four o’clock he came back down, wet and cold, and made a fire in the kitchen stove. He sat at the table, drinking a cup of warmed-over coffee, until it began to get dark. He lit an oil lamp, put more wood in the firebox, damped it down, then walked outside to his room. He lit his lamp, looked down at the belt, which was just about finished, then lay down on his bed. He tried not to think of the many things that could be wrong, but his mind ran through every possibility, from Nathalie’s not coming back to another death in Vincent’s family that would change everything. When he ran out of possibilities, he dozed off. He slept fitfully for the next three hours, waking often to rain ticking off the tile roof or the touch of a draft on his face.

  Around eight o’clock, he heard a light rapping on his door and sat up, head clear and his heart suddenly high. He crossed the room and opened the door, ready to pull Nathalie into the room and hug her to him. But it was Vincent.

  “Good evening, Charging Elk. We have returned.” In the dim light of the small lamp, his face looked thin and rough-edged, his large, round eyes deep-set and glittering in their sockets. “Will you put the horses away—give them some grain—then come up to the house. Nathalie is putting something together, nothing much, but you must be starved.”

  Twenty minutes later, Charging Elk walked into the kitchen. He had been so anxious to see Nathalie that he had forgotten to change out of his muddy work clothes. Vincent sat at the table, a glass of wine before him.

  “Come in. Take off your coat and have a glass with me.”

  Charging Elk hung his coat on a peg beside the door and glanced around the room. A pot of soup simmered on the stove, its warm smell making his empty stomach growl. A loaf of bread, a crock of butter, a bowl of olives, and a sausage lay untouched in the middle of the table. One of Vincent’s long, thin cigars burned in an ashtray. He watched Vincent pour the wine, then said as calmly as he could manage: “But where is Nathalie? Didn’t she come home?”

  “Went to bed. She’s not too happy, I think.” Vincent handed him the wine, and they clicked glasses without a word, as was their habit. “It’s been a long, troubling day for her. It’s easy to understand.”

  Charging Elk wanted to ask a hundred questions but he knew that Vincent would talk only when he was ready. So they sat across from each other and sipped their wine. Charging Elk was very hungry, but he couldn’t have eaten the best cut of beef just then. He sat and looked everywhere in the room but at the haggard man across the table.

  He heard a long sigh and he waited for something, but when it came, it was not one of the possibilities he had considered.

  “You might as well know, Charging Elk—I’ve decided to sell out to my younger brother, Raymond. He doesn’t really have anything but a good wife and six children, one just born. He grows artichokes and a few grapes and he works in an abattoir on the other side of Agen. But the work is unsteady and artichokes brought
a poor price this year.” Vincent paused and looked down into his wineglass. “I just can’t think of those children going without.”

  “But what about you? What about Nathalie? This is her home.”

  “It will be hard on her. It already has been. But she is a strong girl, a good girl. She will find her happiness. You know how young people are—one minute the roof is falling in, the next they’re on to something else like nothing happened. It will take a while. Vincent leaned forward and smiled wearily. “Besides, she is of an age when she should start thinking of marriage. She will turn seventeen next month. Her mother was only fifteen when we got married.”

  Charging Elk suddenly felt the weariness of the day in the orchards. His shoulders and upper arms ached from reaching for the high branches and his legs ached from standing on the ladder all day. He was hungry, but the act of eating now seemed inconsequential next to his hunger for Nathalie. He realized that he was tired not from his work in the orchards but from a life of almost constant disappointment. It seemed that just when something was in his grasp it slipped away like water between his fingers. He knew he didn’t deserve more than what was given him, but he thought that he and Nathalie would somehow become something; at least they would have the opportunity to be together here on her father’s farm. Maybe not forever, but who could think that far ahead?

  Vincent relit his cigar, which had gone out in the ashtray. He blew the smoke in the air above their heads and leaned back. “I am only forty-three and yet I feel like an old man. My leg is getting worse—you see me limp. In the wintertime, sometimes I can hardly stand on it. Since I was twelve, since I fell out of a tree right here, it hasn’t been right.” Vincent slapped his hand down on the table and muttered something but Charging Elk didn’t hear. “Anyway, this farm is too much for me now. With Lucienne gone, all I want is for Nathalie to have a good chance at a decent life.”

  “What will you do?”

  Vincent pulled a letter from his coat pocket. The envelope was crumpled around the edges and Charging Elk could see that the ink was smeared. “I have another brother in Bordeaux—Paul. We are nearly the same age, but he’s the smart one.” Vincent said this last with a hint of anger. “He has offered me a chance to come work for him. He owns a large cave—very successful. He even imports wine from Bourgogne, Cote d’Or, Alsace, you name it. Whatever the haute bourgeoisie asks for. Very successful.”

  “And what will Nathalie do?”

  Vincent looked at him with a quizzical expression, as though he didn’t understand Charging Elk’s interest in his daughter. “She’ll find something—or someone, the good Lord willing. Bordeaux is a big city.”

  Charging Elk remembered the first real conversation he had had with Nathalie that day in the garden. “... I prefer to live here where there are not so many people. Don’t you?” How could he tell Vincent that she was happy on the farm—with him? Why didn’t he already know that? As he thought about this, another memory came to him, this one from a long time ago, in another life—his dear kola, Strikes Plenty, saying, “What good is this life we now lead? One day we will be old men and we will have nothing but memories of bad winters and no meat and no woman. I do not want this.”

  Now Charging Elk’s chance to be happy had been dashed. He knew Vincent was right. She would find someone else. In a few moons she would have forgotten all about him and she would be a young woman with someone else, stroking his hair, feeling his hot hands on her body. And Charging Elk would grow old and have nothing but memories. He almost moaned with self-pity.

  “I will write to Madame Loiseau tomorrow and tell her you are ready to return to Marseille.” Vincent stood and walked over to the simmering soup. “You have been a good worker, Charging Elk. I don’t know how we would have gotten through this season without you.” He lifted the cover and sniffed. “But my brother has sons—unlike me. He has a strong wife. He will have all the help he needs.” “Vincent turned and looked at Charging Elk. “These orchards have been good to my family for generations. Now it is time for my brother’s sons. You understand, my friend.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Vincent Gazier stood beneath the tree Charging Elk was pruning. He had heard what Charging Elk had said, but now all he heard was the noise of his own blood pulsing through his head. This was not possible; yet he had heard it.

  Charging Elk climbed down from the ladder and examined the saw he had sharpened just that morning. Small bits of the sweet blond wood hung from its teeth. “I wish to take your daughter to be my wife,” he said, now looking up. “It would be an honor to me.”

  Vincent looked into Charging Elk’s face. He didn’t know where to begin. He wasn’t angry; he was too dumbfounded to be angry. He just saw the impossibility of such a request. There was no reason in the world to make such a request, much less grant it. Surely the savage would understand that. But in the back of his mind Vincent wondered if the Indians of America just decided to take a wife, no matter who or why.

  “You must see the impossibility of your request, my friend. It is not done so lightly in France. It is true that marriages are arranged sometimes, but it is done so within families.” Vincent smiled. He had regained his composure. “You and Nathalie have become friends, but that is all. And soon shell be gone and you will be back in Marseille. There are plenty of good women down there, I am sure.” But Vincent wasn’t sure. He had heard of the reputation of Marseille women from young men who had been on the ships.

  “None for me but Nathalie, Monsieur Gazier. We are different, but everyone is different from me in your country. She is interested in my life, in the country of my ancestors, in who my parents are—she is the first woman who seeks to know me and I would like her to be with me. She is my first real woman.”

  “But don’t you see—this is the purest selfishness. She is only a girl. You are nearly as old as I am. You have nothing in common.” Vincent was beginning to be nervous. Charging Elk was a savage! The idea of the two of them together was absurd. She was only a girl. And a devout Catholic. Her life would be ruined—and so would his. “You must forget this, Charging Elk. Do you hear me? She is my little girl and I won’t give her away until she is ready.” Vincent’s large cavernous eyes narrowed until the sockets looked like dark plums with just a glitter of morning dew on the skin. “Until I determine she is ready. Now there’s the end of it.”

  Nathalie, in spite of her unhappiness at the prospect of leaving the farm and Agen, had hung dried fruit garlands in the windows and a bay leaf wreath over the doorway between the parlor and the kitchen. She had gotten the family crèche from the attic, and now it stood between the fireplace and the upholstered chair where her mother had sat during the cold winter nights when times were happier. Noël was only three days away and she was determined to make it seem normal. She had even remembered her mother’s plum pudding recipe and tonight she would ask Charging Elk to kill and hang a goose the next day—just as her mother would have done.

  As Nathalie prepared a white bean soup with chunks of pork fat and sausage, it occurred to her that Charging Elk had never been in the parlor. He had never been invited into any part of the house but the kitchen. It further occurred to her that she was now the mistress of the household, if for only a short time until her uncle and his family moved in and she and her father moved out. The thought made her heart sink as it always did, but tonight she was determined to be the mistress. She would invite Charging Elk into the parlor after dinner to sit beside a proper fire, to take his eau-devie and admire the crèche.

  But he didn’t come to dinner. When she asked her father where he was, he shrugged and said maybe he was tired from pruning all day. And when she started for the door to fetch Charging Elk, her father said, “Let him be.” That was all. But the tautness of those simple words made Nathalie catch her breath.

  After her father went to bed, she hurried down to Charging Elk’s room with a bowl of warm soup and a chunk of bread. It was a cold, clear night and the moon was nearly full, castin
g clean shadows from the buildings and the bare trees. When she was a small child, Nathalie used to thrill upon such a night with Noël drawing near. She would imagine that the Christ Child and the Virgin were up there, somewhere beyond the moon, looking down on her with great love and understanding for all her shortcomings. On such nights she would pray fervently that her family would always be whole and happy. But tonight she was anxious.

  And when she saw no light in the small window, she feared the worst. She knocked and waited for a few seconds. Then she tried the door and it swung inward.

  “Charging Elk? My dear?”

  The window cast a small square of moonlight on the bed. The covers were undisturbed. She looked at the table. The unfinished belt lay across it like the dark shadow of a rope.

  Nathalie walked slowly into the room and sat down on the bed, still holding the bowl and the bread. The soup steamed in the chill air. Now everything was gone from her, she thought, first her mother, then her home, now her lover. She had been so resolute and determined before dinner—the mistress who would welcome Charging Elk like a member of the family, perhaps even pretend for an evening that he was her husband sitting before the fire—and now she felt like a little girl again, the little girl who had not experienced the love of a man. She set the soup and the bread on the floor and sank back on the bed. Then she cried and she did become the little girl—and the woman in love she had always wanted to be.

  And when she awoke, the first thing she noticed was the light from the oil lamp, the soft glow that seemed to warm the cold room. And she saw Charging Elk sitting in his chair beside the bed, looking down at her. Without a thought, she held out her arms, almost like a child wanting to be picked up. Instead, he stretched out beside her and pulled her close into his open coat. They lay quietly for several moments, her chin tucked into his shoulder, his arms circling her in a warmth that made her almost cry again. Then he whispered in her ear and she said yes, yes.