Nakoa's Woman

by Gayle Rogers

  “Speak to Sokskinnie with smart tongue now,” Atsitsi said softly.

  Maria laughed at the old woman’s frightened face. She looked out into the night and called merrily, “I say there, old girl, aren’t you going to sing us another song?”

  A sudden wind came and shook the bells upon the ears of the tipi. In spite of the warm night, its touch was cold, and Maria shivered.

  Atsitsi grinned. “Laugh again, fat Maria,” she said.

  The bells were still, there was now no sign of a breeze anywhere. “What was that?” Maria asked.

  “Sweet Maria know. Little west wind.”

  “There hasn’t been any wind today.”

  “Then you feel touch from burial grounds. Sokskinnie kill you. Maybe she kill others first, but she kill you.”

  Maria lay down upon her couch. “The dead cannot hurt me,” she said.

  “Go to burial grounds and see,” Atsitsi answered. She sat by the fire and fed its flames with more wood. “One day, big Maria, go to burial grounds and see!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Maria went with Anatsa to the river the next day to bring back wood. The ceremonial drum was stilled. No one had been harmed the night before. Anatsa was strangely withdrawn, and Maria felt reluctant to intrude upon her thoughts. A Mutsik patrol rode behind them, and a group of women walked ahead. Maria was deeply thankful that they were not alone upon the prairie.

  “It is not finished,” Anatsa said suddenly.

  “Anatsa, why are you so certain that this call was made by Sokskinnie?”

  “Sokskinnie had a peculiar sound to her voice. This is what gave her her name.

  “Her name?”

  “An Indian is often renamed for a quality he has when he is older. Sokskinnie was renamed when she became a woman with a carrying tone to her voice. Sokskinnie—Loud Voice. We all know the sound of her voice.”

  “I mocked your belief in this last night,” Maria said seriously. “Atsitsi goaded me into it. I opened the doorflap and asked Sokskinnie to sing us another song.”

  Anatsa looked deeply troubled.

  “Anatsa! I frightened myself last night, but today, in the daylight, I can find no ghosts!”

  “In the daylight you find no stars, but at night you see them.”

  “The dead do not walk, or call, or …”

  “I do not know the barriers that are gone with the body. Look ahead of us, Maria. Do you see the women upon the trail?”

  “No. They have followed the bend to the river and are out of our sight.”

  “But they are still ahead of us. And they can come back to us if they want to, and if we have the sight and the sound to hear and see them.”

  “Anatsa, it is not the same!”

  “Do we all see and hear in the same way? What is at the end of the Wolf Trail? How long does the sleep of the body last?”

  “No dead person made that cry yesterday!”

  “I have heard of hot sands where there is no water and the sky is a furnace with the burning sun. I have heard that in these sands men see water and trees when they are not there. Are they water and trees that lie elsewhere? Was the call we heard one from a different place or time?”

  “Anatsa, you will go crazy talking like that. Even if this cry was an echo of Sokskinnie’s real voice, how can a faded echo do anyone harm?”

  “It is the cry of death before the death, mixed up in time.”

  “Now you are talking like I dream!”

  Anatsa smiled.

  They had reached the river, and Maria looked across it at the shadowed burial grounds. “Now it comes back to me that I dreamed of that place last night. I dreamed of black trees and long knives hanging from them.”

  Anatsa looked startled. “You saw the skinning knives which we bury with the dead?”

  “Then I saw a yellow river—much wider than this one, and across it I remember a black trunk. I crossed the river on a dead tree trunk.”

  “You crossed the river in your dreams? Why?”

  “I heard a song. It came from the graveyard—your burial grounds—with the knives moving from the trees—long, long knives—”

  Anatsa began hastily to gather scrubwood. “It is a hateful place, always in shadow and with the skinning knives always moving in the wind. I do not look there.”

  Helping Anatsa gather the wood, Maria noticed that the other women were leaving. The river rushed noisily beside them and from the trees of the burial grounds came the call of a gambel sparrow, three little notes, usually repeated once. Maria reached for some more wood and then noticed that the bird had not called again.

  “It is back,” Anatsa said softly. “The sky is yellow but without light, as when the sun is suffocated with thickening clouds.”

  “Anatsa, what are you saying?” Maria whispered.

  “Something is choking the sun. Its light and the warmth are gone.”

  The expression on her face frightened Maria. “Anatsa! Anatsa! What is it?” she asked.

  “It was like this when I was with Apikunni, when we rode to the meadow. Now I know, and it is death. That is why Sokskinnie called!”

  “God help us!” Maria whispered in English, looking frantically around them. Where was the Pikuni rider? Where was the Mutsik patrol? She dropped her wood.

  “Do not move,” whispered Anatsa. “It does not know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Whether to kill us. Do not move!” The urgency and conviction of her voice held Maria still, though her heart hammered wildly in her throat. The forest seemed serene, but she believed with Anatsa that death stood near them.

  “It is gone,” Anatsa said finally. “It has moved away. Now we will gather the wood and leave.”

  They picked up the wood, and walked toward the open prairie. “Anatsa, why do you say ‘it’?” Maria asked.

  Anatsa turned back to her, and Maria saw sight in her eyes beyond her own. “Because it is not man and it is not animal.”

  “Why did it not kill us?”

  “I do not know.”

  They were upon the prairie now. Golden sunflowers and purple vetches nodded along the trail. Maria looked ahead of them in all of that lonely land and thought, “Dear God, where is that Pikuni rider?”

  Around the first bend of the trail and still very near the river, they came upon him at last. He was lying upon his back and looking up into the summer sky, his head almost decapitated by the violence with which his throat had been cut.

  Maria screamed. Death had swept silently from the hills again; the Snakes rode them down and Ana and her father and Anson would die horribly once more. Against a twilight sky Ana’s long yellow hair gleamed in its last life, and night would come and never end. Maria screamed and screamed, the same long cry that could never be shattered. She was in the pit, falling, falling—Anatsa shook her with violence.

  “Maria! Maria! Stop it!” she said. Apikunni and some of the riders of the Knatsomita stood over her. They looked at the dead man at their feet. Maria turned away from them all.

  “Did you see who did it?” Apikunni asked Anatsa.

  “No. We found him like this. But what killed him was with us first—at the river!”

  “How do you know this?” Apikunni asked.

  “It was the same as when we rode for the otsqueeina!” Anatsa replied. “It was the same! There was the sun, but no light! Yellow color like thick clouds were suffocating the day! It watched us—and then killed Kominakus!”

  Maria’s eyes were drawn to the body at her feet. So the thing still had a name, this inert form with its head askew and its eyes staring when sight was gone. Then she noticed what they had already seen. The corpse had not been scalped, and this was the strangeness that lay before them in final silence. No man—Blackfoot, Snake, Dahcotah, or Crow—would ever kill without scalping; only a woman would do this, and how could a woman slit a man’s throat with such violence?

  “Maria and I were watched from the burial grounds,” Anatsa said.

  �
��If we were watched from there,” Maria replied, “why wasn’t the sparrow disturbed? Why didn’t it fly away?”

  “You heard a bird call out from the burial grounds?” Apikunni asked her quickly.

  “Yes. Just before Anatsa felt we were being watched—a gambel sparrow called out three times.”

  “Yes,” Anatsa repeated. “It was the sparrow. It was not a man.”

  “Then why wasn’t the bird frightened at a strange presence?” Maria asked.

  Anatsa looked at Maria. “Because the presence was not a new one. Sokskinnie is no stranger to the burial grounds.”

  The men said nothing and followed Maria and Anatsa back to the village. Kominakus’s body was left where it was. A travois would be sent back for it later.

  In the village it was the same as it had been the night before, but now crowds gathered to meet them. The promise from the burial grounds had been kept; Kominakus would lie there before another sun. A pall lay over the village like a great shroud; these people, fearless before ordinary death, were numb before the unknown. Fear reached even to the camp dogs, who followed their masters anxiously, whining low in their throats. Maria fully felt the terror around her now. Nothing but a crazed animal would kill like that, and when she thought of the blood all around the severed head, she became ill.

  Apikunni and Anatsa left her at Atsitsi’s but the old woman was nowhere around. Maria lay upon her couch, still sick and completely drained of all energy. When she closed her eyes, she could see only Kominakus’s severed head; she opened them again and stared at the skins of the tipi. A black shadow approached noiselessly and stood motionless by the door.

  “Who is it?” Maria called out, frightened.

  “It is Natosin,” came the answer. “I have come to speak with you.”

  Maria went outside.

  “My son has sent for you,” the old man said simply. “You are to leave tomorrow for the buffalo camp.”

  The thought of being with Nakoa so soon made Maria’s heart leap with joy. Near him death would be gone, and all fears would be nothing.

  “You are glad for this?” Natosin asked.

  Maria turned away, embarrassed.

  “You are eager for my son,” he said.

  Maria felt her face redden.

  “Pleasure from mating should not bring shame,” Natosin said.

  Maria looked aghast. “I had not thought -” she said, and stopped. Dear God, why hadn’t she realized? He had changed his mind, and in sending for her to sleep with her, didn’t intend to keep her now! Maria’s eyes filled with tears. “He said he would not trade me! He said I was to be his second wife! Natosin—Natosin—” She stopped, not knowing what to say.

  “My son must walk in his own way. I cannot stop him from taking you or leaving you, my daughter.”

  “How could he want me this way?”

  “You want him in the same way.”

  “I could not bear the shame of it!”

  “You feel shame, because it can be harder to accept what we want than what we don’t want!”

  “No! No!” Maria said. “I will not be traded to every man in this village!”

  “I believe your words,” Natosin said.

  “Oh,” Maria said in despair. “Dear God, have I not suffered enough?”

  “Pain cannot be measured, and pain is the mother of joy. Let my son know you before Nitanna comes to be his wife.”

  “To you—and to Nakoa—I am nothing! I am nothing!”

  “I have called you daughter,” he said quietly, and left her alone.

  Stricken, Maria looked numbly around her. Riders were going toward the burial grounds, their women and children following to wait silently for them from the other side of the river. She did not care that the widow of Kominakus had begun her wailing, and was probably slashing herself and mutilating her flesh in her suffering. When the wounds of the flesh finally healed, the heart would still be left bleeding; once despair came it revisited boldly, no longer a stranger. They would burn Kominakus’s lodge, and bury him in the trees too. Then maybe he could take his skinning knife and scare off Sokskinnie! No, being a man, he would take her instead. Rage flamed within Maria; hatred for Nakoa possessed her. Going back into the lodge, she flung herself upon her couch. The world was depraved and provided food only for maggots. The sun warmed stench, and all moonlight was a deception. Waters purified nothing and just carried their own pollution around and around in endless circles.

  And, dear God, in her terror she thought she was going to Nakoa’s strength.

  Every sunrise ended in bloody sunset, and she would never know a spring rain again.

  Atsitsi came into the lodge. “It dark soon!” she screamed. “Why no by-damn fire?”

  “Build one yourself!” Maria said angrily.

  Atsitsi rapidly built a fire, and almost frantic, laced the doorflap closed. “Big Maria stay inside tonight,” she said. “Already talk to Sokskinnie!”

  Maria moaned.

  “Why you scream big head off when you find Kominakus? Why you want anyone to come and help big Maria? Why not sit on holy ass and hold Kominakus’s hand?”

  Maria didn’t answer.

  “’Cause full of four selves so damned scared! Scared now, too! Now big Maria think Sokskinnie death cry not so silly!”

  “I’m not going to talk to you.”

  “Who care? Who care what you do?” Atsitsi began to eat.

  The medicine drum began to beat again. Nervously, Maria ate too, finally casting her half-filled bowl down in agitation. “Why is that drum beating? There was no cry today!”

  “There was yours.”

  “No one is supposed to die!”

  “You mean you safe cause no new death cry? Ha! Where Sokskinnie, sweet Maria?”

  “In the burial grounds!”

  Atsitsi grinned evilly. “Mutsik and Knatsomita warriors search grounds—all over. Sokskinnie gone! Burial platform empty!”

  “That doesn’t mean?”

  “She leave tracks! Heel fringe and toe from her moccasins! She walk in grounds. Laugh at that, big Maria!”

  “I am not laughing,” Maria said. “But if she walks in the grounds, she is not dead!”

  “I take care of Sokskinnie when she die!” Atsitsi said in a rage. “I see her die! I with her when medicine drum stop beating! She die—and she alive—once more!”

  Maria felt a coldness again, and a prickling of her skin. Atsitsi stirred the fire. “Now no more talk of dead. When dark, no talk of dead.”

  They sat in silence, listening to the beating of the drum. The wailing of Kominakus’s widow could be heard at intervals, and Maria looked at the flickering shadows of herself and Atsitsi upon the tipi skins. How little of themselves their shadows were, what a dim reflection, an incomplete part of the whole. In another light could what she knew to be herself be just another distorted shadow?

  “Nakoa has sent for me,” Maria said bitterly.

  Atsitsi looked up in joy. “I know he never marry big Maria! Too much fool!”

  “Thank you.”

  “I know all time! He screw you when Nitanna not here to get mad!”

  “I wouldn’t want to upset Nitanna!”

  “You won’t. You be gone to Siksikai then. Ah, sweet Maria dance such nice dance for sweethearts of Mutsik! And when Siksikai all through nice Maria can tell old Indian whore why all Pikuni women stay away from him!”

  When Atsitsi finally fell to snoring, Maria lay upon her couch watching the fire. The wind stirred, shaking the little bells of the tipis; to Maria they tolled for the ending of human life. She saw Kominakus lying upon the prairie, and then she saw Ana, her father, and Anson, and she wondered how much of them was left. Was there a soul that the wolves could not reach? Was there anything that was not in the end devoured? Was the soul a last vanity, the Bible a dream?

  Oh, it was terrible to think this way! She wanted a real father separate and apart from herself to end her pain, and to make her good and then to reward her g
oodness! She wanted a father to punish her badness, so she would know what to do what to seek!

  Great walls had to be built against grief and loss and despair, and she was not old enough, nor strong enough, nor wise enough to do it herself! The floods came, the great tidal waves swept over the highest mountain, and her feet were upon sands! But her father’s feet stood over all, for he was the creator! But her father would never taste new fruit of Oregon, and her mother had died and had left her father the warm breasts of Meg Summers. Whore! Harlot! The autumn leaves grow sodden, and with their own weight they fall and drift nowhere in the wind. Who is to light the evening lamp to shine upon them?

  The wind was not quiet this night. It came down from the mountains, moving the little bells of the tipis. It crossed the Pikuni burial grounds and there it picked up the lament of the dead. It crossed the moving river and swept across the prairie grass, ruffling the manes of the nervous horse herds. It mingled its cry with that of the white wolf, both of them calling mournfully for the past.

  The wind sucked against the closed lodge skins. Don’t you know me now? Mine was the hand that touched your face tenderly, and cared for your wounds; my lips were those that returned the eagerness of your kiss. It was I who carried the seed of our new life. Could you want the river between us? How could you fear me when I have been gone for such a little while? Let me stay here, among the sights and sounds I knew so well. How could the medicine drum beat in prayer for my life and now beat in fear of the same life? Do not drive me away. I supplicate and if my hands are dust, is my soul only an idea that cannot last beyond tomorrow?

  Maria began to sob, turning on her bed and clutching at her ears. She couldn’t bear the mournful cry of the wind. “God, help me!” she prayed.

  Maria slept at last, and while she slept, she dreamed. She heard her mother singing a Spanish lullaby, but she was seeking Nakoa. She stood alone in deep mist, and she trembled at the unknown that lay hidden in the fog. She called to Nakoa in fear; she called to him in deeper need, but only her own voice came back to her. She pushed the fog away with her hands, seeking Nakoa in the center of the mist, but there she saw only a shrouded reflection of herself. She gazed forlornly at herself. Was this the purpose of her life—this veiled reflection? It was Nakoa she wanted, Nakoa she had to have. She wanted his strength, the freshly killed meat he would bring, the warmth and the shelter he would create. As she gazed at herself she changed into a little girl, a fat sticky little girl sucking upon sweets. Maria turned to go and the little girl followed her. “Go away!” Maria shouted at her. Furiously, she knocked the sugared candy from her hands. The little girl sat down in the mists and cried. “I want my mother!” she wailed.