by Gayle Rogers
Maria started to eat again. He had made love to Nitanna before he had ever seen her. Most of the pain of his taking the Indian girl left, and Maria pushed the rest of it away. “Why did you have the door laced closed?” Maria asked, deliberately changing the subject.
Atsitsi’s expression changed. “Siyeh, little boy, killed by Sokskinnie. Sokskinnie kill anybody now! She friend to Sikapischis too!”
“Atsitsi, Sokskinnie is dead!”
“Moccasin right at where Siyeh found. Sokskinnie moccasin. Now I lace door closed every night, and if big damn fool walk around looking for more Siksikai, then she sleep all night with him! Tomorrow night big Maria in here before dark, or stay away!”
Maria yawned elaborately. “I am tired.” She took her knife belt off and moccasins and lay down and closed her eyes.
She heard Atsitsi lie down on her couch. For fifteen minutes, she feigned deep sleep before she looked furtively over at the old woman. Her eyes were wide open, and she was staring at the door. She saw Maria watching her. “Why not drums beat?” she whined. “If drums beat, Sokskinnie stay away!”
“She is only wandering around by the river!” Maria said flippantly, and turned her back to Atsitsi and the fire.
“When you go to river to meet her?”
In seconds the old woman began to snore. Maria waited for a while, and slipped noiselessly to the door. She unlaced the flap and left the lodge.
The small moon cast a faint light upon the silent tipis. The camp circle was mostly in shadow as Maria made her way to the inner circle. Dimly she recognized Nakoa’s lodge, south of his father’s. Kutenai turned to her and nickered softly, and she would have touched him, but an iron hand seized her, and jerked her backward. She gasped and struggled, and in her terror all she could think of was Siksikai. An arm brushed her breasts, and then the awful grip loosened, and she was spun around, and Nakoa looked into her face.
“Maria!” he breathed. “I could have killed you!”
“For touching your horse?”
“You know that Kutenai would be sought in coups!” He was shaking. Maria trembled too. Why hadn’t she thought of this? Why hadn’t she remembered that they not only walked like cats, but heard like them?
“It is so dark. I heard you walking and I thought—Maria, Maria, why are you so foolish? Did you want me to kill you?”
“No,” she moaned, touching his chest. “I want you to love me.” It had been so long since she had seen him, touched him. It had been a century of five days. “My darling! My dearest!” she whispered in English. “I love you! I love you!” she said in Pikuni.
“Maria, you cannot stay here.”
“I am not in your lodge!”
“I am to see no woman now.”
Maria looked around at the silent and dark lodges. “The high chiefs sleep. We can whisper.” She touched his beloved face, the tender lips. “Kiss me, Nakoa,” she begged.
Wordlessly, he bent and kissed her. Their bodies met and clung, and through her excitement she felt greater passion in him. “You want me, you want me!” she whispered.
“I always have,” he replied.
“But more—tonight!”
“Yes!” His face was wet. She moved against him, as close as she could press herself, and when he stepped away from her, she followed him and tortured him more with her closeness.
“Maria, why do you do this to me?”
She was wild. She was Meg. She was worse than Meg. Meg slept with her father on a bed, and she would sleep with Nakoa here, on the dirt, outside of his father’s lodge—before Nitanna if she cared to watch! She began to caress him, and she felt all of his resistance go.”
“I will take you—inside,” he whispered, strangling with the defeat of his will. He was caressing her now, his hands under her clothing. He started to move her toward his lodge.
“No!” she whispered. “Here! A harlot would take you here!” His hands stopped their wild begging. She caressed him again, with her body, her hands. “Nitanna will not do this! Never again will Nitanna touch you!”
Violently, he shook himself free from her. Maria stood before him stunned. “One trade for another,” he said to her in rage. “You would make yourself nothing—in trade.”
“What do you mean?”
“You set fire to my flesh, to blind my vision. And that which inflamed me beyond reason you call a harlot! I would rather have your hate.”
“I do not understand,” Maria whispered, almost sobbing.
“You would have taken me here—in the dirt!”
“Yes! Yes!”
“To keep me from Nitanna you have to become to yourself the white man’s word for a dog in heat?”
“I would do anything to keep you from her!”
“You can do nothing to keep me from her. Nothing.”
Maria gasped, unbelieving. “Nakoa, you said you loved me, that you would deprive yourself of everything for me.”
“Deprive myself. But not my people. Not my father. Not the Pikuni. Not the Kainah. If the Blackfoot tribes are not a nation, the white man will come and the buffalo will go, and if the buffalo go, the Indian goes with him.”
“The Kainah would not make war if you didn’t marry Nitanna.”
“There would be neither war nor peace.”
“You are not that important!”
“My father’s word is that important. My word is that important.”
“Nakoa, you want me.”
“And I shall have you.”
“No! I will never become your wife it you come to me—after her!”
He gripped her shoulders, tenderness for her gone. “You do not remember. You are my property as much as the horses I brought back from Snake land. I can do as I will with you.”
“You are an animal!” Maria began to cry. “You do not love! You cannot love!” She was crying bitterly, and she sank to the ground, clutched at his leggings. “Nakoa my love, my heart, my soul.”
Tender with her again, he picked her up and brushed her hair back from her forehead. “I am part of your love,” he said gently, “but not your heart, and never your soul. This is my girl-woman talking; she will grow and know that she will not find me until she has found herself. I know what you will be Maria, fierce of spirit—do not keep what you are away from our marriage!”
“What am I?” Maria asked sorrowfully, looking up at him with trembling lips. “Do not speak of what I will be—or can be—what am I now? Do you love me?”
He took her hands and held them strongly within his own. He studied her pale fingers, and then he took each hand to his lips and kissed its open palm.
“Do you love me?” Maria persisted.
“Yes,” he said, and a tremor of emotion swept over him. “Yes,” he repeated, his voice deep with feeling.
Maria freed her right hand and slapped his face. “Marry Nitanna,” she panted, “and what I am or will be—both of us—will spit upon you!” She turned and fled from him, running toward the outer tipis. Staying behind her, Nakoa saw that she reached Atsitsi’s lodge safely. When they had both gone, Kutenai shifted restlessly. A shadowed form of a woman stood at the door of Natosin’s lodge, and for a long time, looked after them.
Chapter Twenty
Early the next morning, Maria went to Natosin. Before she had eaten she walked to the circle of high chiefs, and walking boldly past Nakoa’s silent lodge, approached Natosin’s and called his name softly. He came to her immediately.
“I have come to speak to you,” Maria said. “In pain, I have come to speak to you. Are you alone?”
“I am alone.”
“May I enter your lodge?”
“Yes.” He led Maria inside of the tipi, and motioned her to be seated on one of the three couches in the room. A lodge fire burned slowly. Maria could see that he had already eaten.
“Why is it, my daughter, you speak to me in pain?”
Maria laughed sorrowfully. “You call me daughter again, this woman whose marriage to your son wo
uld kill you.”
“Your marriage with my son would not cause my death.”
“It would mine!” Maria said. “Natosin, I cannot marry your son.”
“Cannot?”
“I do not want your son—now.”
“Now? Your feelings for him have changed?”
“I cannot become his second wife!”
“You are in pain because of his marriage to Nitanna?”
“Yes. I did not think that he would marry her. I cannot. Live with him now—after her. It is not my way. I cannot accept it. I cannot! Will you help me, Natosin?”
“My daughter, how can I help you?”
“You are head chief. You can give me my freedom. You can have some of your warriors take me south to the trails of the white man.”
Natosin studied her face. She met his eyes directly.
“My son has said that you are a woman of courage,” he said. “He has told me also that you are a woman of honesty. I will speak to you with a straight tongue. When my son first brought you here I thought he would sleep with you, and give you your freedom. But he came to love you and did not want to give you up. So he has kept himself from you, and now in less than ten days he has said that he will make you his second wife.”
“No,” Maria said bitterly.
“When he marries you, he will take you to his lodge for the rest of your days. You will be under his protection and his provision for as long as you and he live. You are a white woman. If you grow to dislike the life of an Indian woman, you will be unhappy, and this will bring my son unhappiness. Then there is what you could do to our people, to this Blackfoot village. A white woman among us could be a thing of great danger. The news of your captivity has already traveled on many tongues. White man’s wagons have been destroyed in Snake and Dahcotah land, and those destroyed have more people who might hear of you, and think you might be one of them! White men would come to find you, and then my son and his society of warriors would fight to keep you here. This land would be fire; the prairie would be fire, for the rest of the Ikunuhkahtsi would join the Mutsik. All this could be because my son has not shown wisdom in whom he would choose for a wife!
“No, my daughter, I do not approve of this marriage my son says must be. Nothing can warm one man’s blood enough to suffer the bleeding of others! I have told this to Nakoa in strong words, and because of his heat for you, the air has grown cold between us. But my son has brought you here. By our law, what he takes in coups is his, and you belong to him to do with as he will. He intends to marry you five days after he has married Nitanna. This is insult to her, to take another wife so soon, and to take a white woman; this is insult to the Kainah and to my otakayi, as close to me as blood brother—this is insult to Inneocose! But Nakoa will not heed my words. No one can make my son do what he does not feel in his heart. He knows the price he will pay when he marries you, but if he pays, you are more strongly attached to him than ever.”
“What will—he pay?”
“He will walk alone in his foolishness.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he does not lead, the Mutsik will not follow him if the white man comes for you.”
“Natosin, set me free!”
“You know now that I cannot!”
Maria bowed her head and began to weep. “What then, can I do? You were my last hope. I cannot marry him now. I cannot.”
“You cannot.” Natosin’s face became saddened beyond description. “The poor young. The poor wretched suffering young. It is better to suffer the torments of an old body than the anguish of a young mind. The young say they cannot when they can. The old say they can when they cannot. Why can’t body and mind meet in this life? Why do they meet in just the last moments, the golden moments of dying?”
“Is death beckoned with golden moments?”
“Death is beckoned with golden moments and a kiss beyond sweetness, beyond tender flowing of a loving mother’s milk! There is for every man two kisses. The first kiss is of the mother—the kiss of the new world with its food and light and warmth for growing. But it is the second kiss that is the golden kiss, for it is the kiss of the self, and its fire and its warmth is greater than all of the suns in the sky!”
“Why does it come with death?” Maria whispered.
“Because the world is needed no longer. Because the world is a child’s toy, to be played with by the children yet crawling upon its surface!”
“What good is a kiss that comes with dying? In dying, how could you even feel it?”
“You have passed beyond feeling with fingers of clay. You do not feel. You know. In the last shimmering moments—you are!”
“Have you died, Natosin? Are you a ghost, who eats and sleeps, and talks in a voice from the human throat?” Maria was serious, her face just as sober as his.
“Yes, my daughter,” Natosin said quietly. “I have died.”
“But you are alive, Natosin!” Maria was scolding.
“I have yet another death to go through. But I have died once, and, in dying, I have felt the second kiss. My daughter, there is a different death for each man, and for some men, there are many deaths. Lucky is the man who can die, for it is the living who are the most dead!”
“I know that so many of us move blindly,” Maria said.
“Blindness can have great sight. It is moving and not knowing what we are that is so sad. It is worse than not knowing our path—this not knowing what walks upon it!”
“What was your death like? What did this second kiss make you feel?”
“Complete stillness. Complete quiet. For the first time in all of my life, I was completely within my body. I looked through it and not at it. I saw with no eyes but my own and thought with no mind but my own. I wasn’t what I was thought to be, or what I should be, I was myself. I had the second kiss, and I have known its fire ever since. There is no cold, no darkness, no struggling with strangers to myself. With my fire I meet the darkness and bring it light. With my fire I meet the snows and they melt. I meet any stranger and know that he cannot test me and try me as did the strangers within that I banished by accepting. My daughter, you have wept for those you loved who were taken from you by the Snakes. Weep not for the dead, for blessed are the dead, and they are not as dead as the living! If they were yet untouched by the second kiss they would wail for us, and their voices would be heard even from the Wolf Trail!”
“Yet we lament so for the dead.”
“Daughter, you know that we grieve for ourselves. We know only that we are deprived and do not know where they have gone. We weep for what we see our empty hands and not theirs, which could be filled with new riches!”
“Natosin, in your stillness of death, did you leave? Did you travel from this world to another?”
“Maria, the Wolf Trail is not a world, another earth; I do not believe it so. I do not believe that travel is being. I think stillness is being. In the stillness, the long stillness when I searched for just myself, I found shimmering wonderful things—new worlds, new stars, new fires, and they were all within myself. In stillness I saw them, and when my stillness comes again, I will reach them. Men who have fattened and become rich from the kiss of the mother, shrink in terror before themselves, for that is what their death is, the kiss from the self. They came to the mother unknown to her, and she unknown to them, and they accepted and grew, but what they have known all of their lives and created themselves, they reject violently until the second kiss. Man is the real strangeness of the universe!”
“Merely, thou art death’s fool,” said Maria. “For him thou laborest by thy flight to shun, yet runnest toward him still.” She had spoken in English, and now she translated in Pikuni.
“The man who said that is a wise man.”
“He is dead. He was a great writer who lived far across the seas. He said many wise things.”
“There are Indians with the written tongue. I have heard of this, and I am sad that we save our richness only in song and talk. Song and talk
are too fast, and some words have to be accepted slowly, and they should be written down and seen and touched and caressed like the white man’s gold. This shall be the Indian gold, and when he finds it he shall know new riches, and become a new people.”
“Will he die as he is?”
“Of course. This is good. When he sees from his own eyes and not the eyes of the white man who will come among him once more he will have new life, and new fire.”
“Natosin, you speak like a prophet. There is such a mystic quality to you.”
“I have died, my daughter, and I have seen that time is not as we see it. Time is a whole, not cut up and portioned off into useless little pieces. That is why there is the last quiet, the last stillness, so we can put back into one piece all the little pieces of time we have mutilated. With our tiny hands, with our antlike bodies, we gnaw at the present and chip away at the past, and the busyness of our own reflection cuts us off from the future. We are our own mirror, and past it we blind ourselves.”
“Natosin, how did you die?”
“My daughter, I have never spoken of this to any man. My own death involved the deaths of my wives and of all of my children but Nakoa. I died my own death but not theirs, and so theirs still causes me pain, for I lived and am human again. Talk of this draws fresh blood even now, but I look into your face, and I see your trembling suffering youth, and in my age I pity you. I cannot give you your freedom, but you will not leave my lodge this morning with your hands empty. Hear my words, Maria. I give them to you, in fresh blood of old wounds that brought death, as a new path to this freedom you seek. Hear me, daughter, and you will have your freedom, but not by the trails to white man’s land.”
“I hear,” Maria said softly.
“I had five sons beside Nakoa, and three little daughters, and I loved them all, the fruit of my heart. I had three wives, and I loved them, each in her own way. The sun was warm on the strength of my manhood. I gained many coups, and I begot my children, and because my people were their people, a fierce pride and a fierce love for them seized me, and easily I rose to lead the Mutsik, and from there I became head chief to the Pikuni. The stories of my coups were riches to my people, and thus more so to my children, and my deeds were pictured upon the council lodge. I walked among the laughter of my children, the love of my wives; I soared above the Morning Eagle, my sign, my name, my Nitsokan, and my protection. Humble in my thanks, the scars of the Sun Dance on my breast were not enough, and I was dumb that I should be so many times blessed.