Nakoa's Woman

by Gayle Rogers

  The quiet night was a night of full summer in the Indian moon of the homecoming days. A heat spell clung to the prairie; that night all of the silent tipis had their sides raised for ventilation. But there was no wind from the mountains; none of the little bells upon the tipis moved. The horse herds beyond the village grazed in peace; the warhorses of the high chiefs and of the Mutsik stood picketed by their masters’ lodges and were tranquil.

  The only sound allowed in the village was the music from Mequesapa’s deer skin flute that rose plaintively from the inner circle; drawn to it, Maria left Atsitsi’s lodge. Others were drawn by the sad little notes, and more and more silent shadows gathered to their source. Mequesapa was far from his daughter’s lodge. Accompanied as usual by his grandson, he had come to play for the high chiefs:

  What alone can I call my own?

  What alone belongs to me?

  What is here I can never lose?

  What is here for me to choose?

  Maria sat upon the warm earth and listened for the singing of the next verse:

  All things go to ashes and dust,

  All things go the way they must;

  What alone is there for me?

  What is mine for eternity?

  The music stopped, and then Mequesapa played another tune, and this time no voices followed the music. The last words left Maria shaken, but all things could not go to ashes and dust. Love did not die. She felt a stab of terror in her heart, and she was beginning to live a nightmare of loss again when a hand clasped hers, and she knew without turning that it was Nakoa. Relief flooded through her. When she looked into his face, she saw that his black eyes were liquid with feeling. Their gaze was drawn to each other’s lips, for they wanted to kiss, but instead they sat motionless and listened to the deer skin flute. Mequesapa’s last note drifted to the stars, a benediction, and then all who had shared the earth with them began to leave. Old Mequesapa was the last to walk by them, and he paused by Maria, sensing her presence. “I did not play your song,” he said softly.

  “What you played was beautiful,” Maria answered.

  “Acceptance is the Indian gift to you,” he said.

  “I take it with deep thanks in my heart,” Maria replied.

  The old man looked sadly down at her. His hollow eye socket made him appear fierce, but to Maria he seemed the most gentle of men. “I will play for you again,” he said. “Will you listen?”

  “Yes. Yes!” Maria said.

  The old man nodded and walked away with Siyeh.

  “Did you know his words?” Nakoa asked Maria gently.

  “I believe so.”

  “Do you accept?”

  “I accept you. I have said it many times.”

  “There is more than accepting me, Maria.”

  They were alone now, and he had made no move to caress her. Impulsively, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed the side of his face. “Why have you stayed away from me?” she asked. “It has been seven days and six nights since we were together.”

  “Now I am free,” he replied. “During the Sun Dance there are no Mutsik ceremonies.”

  Except the ceremony of your first marriage, Maria thought, and then in panic pushed the thought from her mind.

  “Ride with me tonight,” he said to her. “Ride with me around the camp circle and past the horse herds.”

  “I would love to,” she said. When he brought his horse to her, she asked his name.

  “He is called Kutenai,” Nakoa told her. “He is my war horse.”

  “And is always kept picketed at your lodge so he cannot be stolen in coups,” Maria added.

  “Yes,” Nakoa smiled, looking down at her tenderly.

  “See!” she said, stroking the animal who was nuzzling his master’s shoulder. “I know the way of the Indian. And I approach an Indian horse and he does not shy away from me.”

  “He is accustomed to your presence,” Nakoa said. “As I am.” His face suddenly became agonized and he held her fiercely, as if he were about to lose her forever.

  Maria drew back in alarm. “Nakoa, what is it?” she asked him.

  She felt a trembling in him. “Maria,” he whispered. “I will give up everything for you.” Their lips met and held, and in the ecstasy of their touch there was no room for Nitanna, the girl from a distant village.

  Together they rode Kutenai out to the horse herds. With so many visitors the herd was vast, but neither the horses nor the young society riding guard around them paid any heed to their presence.

  “I have never seen a night so still!” Maria said as they dismounted.

  “It is sacred night,” Nakoa answered, and released Kutenai to wander away and graze in the darkness. They sat upon the grass already damp with the night dew. Maria stroked some blades. “I love the touch of water,” she said.

  “Because you are the woman of the river,” Nakoa said, smiling up at her as he rested his head upon her lap.

  The thought of Siksikai came suddenly to Maria’s mind. Pain and revulsion from the memory of his attack made her shudder.

  “You have grown cold,” Nakoa said.

  “The night is warm,” Maria replied.

  “It is. But you are cold!” He sat up and studied her face. “What is the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing. But I am not the woman of the river! I could not have what a whore accepts.”

  “Of course you are not a whore.”

  “At the river with you, when I begged like I did, I was shameful!”

  “No, you were the most beautiful and desirable of women. How can you call any part of what we shared shameful?”

  “I was! I wanted to expose my nakedness to you!”

  “Your flesh wanted to meet mine. It was the desire for our meeting. How can such a thing be shameful? Is it shameful to yearn to unite with the Great Spirit?”

  “What does that have to do with my wanting you inside of me?”

  “The drive of our existence is a yearning for union. It is in the male and female as one, that we are closest to the touch of the Father! Love begets love, and it is as one that we must return to the first fire of our creation! Of what would the Father create us but of Himself? If His breath is eternal, is not mine eternal? If His breath is sacred, is not mine sacred? A man seeks woman; a woman seeks a mate; it is an endless circle of seeking, and in all of the lives of yearning the union must finally be accomplished. If we came from our Father as one, we must return as one, and so both the male and the female must be close to the sun to find this light of truth.”

  “If we are all part of God, where is my Heaven and my Hell?”

  “Within your heart and upon the path that you walk through your time.”

  “That would not be punishment enough. That would not be joy enough!”

  He looked at her curiously. “Does the white man have a means of measuring joy and pain? Does the white man send his dead either to a place of eternal joy or eternal agony?”

  “Yes. This would be the result of the manner in which he lived. He would go to Heaven with God, or to Hell.”

  Nakoa shook his head. “In Hell there is your great agony?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in Heaven there is your great joy?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your God would forsake those in agony and be with those only in great joy?”

  “Those in Hell don’t know God!”

  “Oh,” Nakoa said. “Then our beliefs are not different after all. Those in Hell have not found the sun, and do not know the light and the power that burns within themselves. They are in their own darkness and will have to live until they find their way to the sun. Our Heaven and our Hell, Maria, is our closeness to our Father, the fire that we know as light or as darkness!”

  “Then Heaven or Hell is being yourself.”

  “What else could it be? The finding of the self is the finding of the center of our creation. What power we must reach! Think that the smallest flame could destroy the entire prairie!�
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  “Then you believe that there is hope for every man.”

  “Don’t you? Is your Hell never-ending?”

  “In life, every man can be saved.”

  “God lives in us and we live in Him. God knows us but we have to know Him. If in your life every man can find Him, then our beliefs are not different.”

  “They are, Nakoa.”

  “From where every man stands a mountain might appear different, but this does not change the mountain, and each man sees it just as clearly.”

  They fell into silence. “It is a strange world,” Maria said, “and the only thing I really know is that I love you.”

  He took her hand. “And I love you,” he said quietly. “In twelve days you will be my wife. Do you want this, Maria?”

  “Of course! How could you ask me this?”

  “Will you burn with your own fire and not be a reflection of me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The moon is beautiful but gives light with no fire of its own. Don’t make yourself just a reflection of my love.”

  “Nakoa, I haven’t!”

  “You said that when you wanted me to enter you, you were a whore!”

  Maria turned her head, remembering how she had caressed him.

  “Do you look away from your memory of that day?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “The woman you were would take me anywhere, in the dirt—without marriage ceremony at all.”

  “I am not that woman! I am proud that you have wanted to keep me clean!”

  He grasped her shoulders. “I have kept you clean so I could marry you. But Maria, I want your body. I want this woman you called a harlot. I want to enjoy the passion of this flesh you disown. I want to enjoy it and not have to give you up!”

  “Your love is just sex?” Maria asked aghast.

  “Maria! See this in yourself! See what you were at the river—you begged for sex with me!”

  “Because I love you!”

  “Because you forgot any idea of love and wanted me to enter you then, even if it made you the village whore! Maria, be what you are!”

  “Why wouldn’t you be satisfied with Nitanna then?” she sobbed.

  “I want you more,” he said.

  “You talk so nicely about God and all of the noble things and sacred fires—and—and all of the time …”

  “From the first day I saw you. If your body hadn’t made me want you, I would not have saved you.”

  “God! God!” she moaned.

  He tried to touch her face tenderly, but she pushed his hand away from her. “Maria, you know of my feelings. I have told you of them. I have told you of a tenderness I feel with my rage to have you. I want to take you in the dirt and worship you with the sun, but still I will not deny the heat of my flesh, for I live and am of the earth. I am not the pure man of your Heaven. And you are not in your white man’s Heaven either. If my lips burn to seek your breasts, your breasts burn to be kissed, and if I ache to enter you, you crave my entrance just as much! As part of our Father’s earth, it is our flesh that gives us transport, and the desire to mate comes before mating and comes before the birth of new life. It is through the mud of a riverbank that the life to the prairie flows!”

  She did not answer him.

  “I will take you back,” he said shortly.

  But they did not ride back to camp. Angry with each other, they were still reluctant to part, so they rode out upon the prairie, circling the horse herd.

  “Tomorrow,” he said finally, “the Sun Dance ceremony begins.”

  “Where did your people get the idea of the Sun Dance?” Maria asked coldly.

  “In our legend the dance was brought to us from our Father, the Sun. But it was Morning Star who brought us the ceremonies and the dances, for Morning Star is half of the earth and half of the sun. His mother was an earth woman.”

  “How did a star come from an earth woman?”

  “In legend, the Great Spirit lay with her when she was asleep, and she awakened and loved him in return, and accepted him for her lover. When she found that she was to bear his son, he took her to the skies, and there their son, Morning Star, was born. But the earth woman did not love our Father enough and wanted to return to the way of her childhood; she would watch the earth, and weep for her ways of the past. Even her lover and her son were not strong enough to stop her grief, so she was released and allowed to go back to earth and to her grave.”

  “Why her grave?”

  “The past is dead.”

  “When she died, why didn’t she travel the Wolf Trail and rejoin her lover and son?”

  “Because she had been among the stars and did not want them. She had been with her lover and son and still had wanted the way of the past. She made her own darkness. She was a child. The wail of a child is so sad. How can one dream while crying? And how can one awaken without dreaming?”

  “Another woman living in reflected light,” Maria said. “That is why you told me this legend.”

  “You asked me to tell it,” he replied. “But I do not want you to be a reflection of my passion, my feeling. You burn with your own warmth, and putting it in the deepest of waters will not extinguish it. Do not reflect me, for you do not know what I am. I do not know the life we will lead or the depth of waters in this world, for the depth of all waters anywhere depends upon a man’s height. I do not know my height; I have not reached the center of myself, and neither have you. So how can I not say I desire but with my flesh? I would give all in the power of my hands and the power of my tongue to possess your body. But what can I pledge to you? I will bring you food; I will bring you our child; I will bring you shelter against the winters of our life, but I will also bring you pain, and anger, and sorrow. Yet how can I tell you that I will love you forever when I know that my flesh will turn to dust? When my spirit is freed I may not know what ‘forever’ is. Upon the Wolf Trail we may not even know the world! What sustains a small boy cannot nourish me; what sustains an old man cannot nourish me, so how can I speak with a straight tongue of forever? In what new ways will our hunger have to be met?”

  All tenderness for him returned and Maria said gently, “Let us be fed in new ways; let us know hunger we have never known before; but if we return in awareness to the Great Spirit, then everything accepted by us has been accepted by Him, and if He is eternal, so will be our love!”

  Kutenai picked his way noiselessly through the tall bunch grass, so still under the shining white stars. Maria looked up at them. “I do not like the idea of the Wolf Trail being up there,” she said. “I would not like to be lost—in all of that!”

  “Where is your Wolf Trail?”

  “We picture Heaven as a beautiful city where there are fountains in the streets and song, and where all of the people walk with God.”

  “Our Wolf Trail goes through many suns. We do not think of what is beyond. We do not know what would be in the change and the growth, or even in the dreams of long sleep.”

  “We can never be separated!” Maria said, feeling a sudden coldness. “I can never be separated from you!” For the first time since their argument, he embraced her, and she felt his lips lightly touch her long hair. He stopped Kutenai and helped her down from him. This time the horse did not wander away, but stayed near them. Nakoa looked at her soberly. “Maria,” he said. “Why haven’t you mentioned my marriage to Nitanna?”

  “You haven’t married her!” Maria said quickly.

  “You know I am going to. And very soon.”

  “I do not believe you will. I do not believe you can love me and marry her!”

  He studied her face carefully. “The white man takes only one wife?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Maria answered. “We even have laws to keep him from taking another wife.”

  “Then he takes other women outside of his laws.”

  “No!”

  “A white man never takes another woman?”

  “Well, yes, sometimes
—yes.”

  “So if another woman is in his bed, she is still outside of these laws.”

  “Nakoa, do not change my words. I could not accept your marriage to another woman! I could not!”

  “Maria,” he said sadly, “would you want me governed by what you cannot accept?”

  “Nakoa, hear my words,” she said, and couldn’t keep her voice from shaking. “I love you, but I will not share you with Nitanna. I could not stand for you to love another woman and then love me. How could you want to love her when you love me?”

  “I did not say I did,” he answered.

  Relief left her weak. She flung her arms around him, kissing him with trembling lips. “Then we are to marry?” she asked. “We are still to marry?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “No one can stop our marrying?”

  “No.”

  “Nakoa, you want this?”

  “Yes, I want this. In twelve days we will be man and wife. In twelve days you will come to my lodge.”

  His lips found hers; here was the wine of the night, the well of being. In twelve days there would be no restraint between them and she could excite him without the wall of his will stopping them. In the warmth that flooded her, Nitanna traveled wraithlike and sorrowful, back to her people. A wolf howled out across the prairie, lamenting.

  “The wolf song is our war song,” Nakoa said as they rode back to the village. “The wolf is like the Indian, for we both follow the buffalo. The Indian who kills a wolf will never shoot straight again.”

  At Atsitsi’s lodge they kissed goodnight. “Maria,” he said softly as she clung to him when he turned to go, “I did tell you the legend to speak to you beyond its words. The past is a child’s path, and can never be walked again. Your old ways are dead with your father and your sister with the yellow hair.”