He found her in the dark kitchen, sitting in front of the window, a cup of tea at her elbow. “You could turn on the light if you want to,” he said.
She jumped, then shook her head. “I’m just trying to figure things out.”
“You can stay here for as long as you need to, Sunny. I’m serious.”
She nodded, turned her face away. “I appreciate the offer.” The unspoken part of it was, but I can’t accept it.
His heart, which had felt so light, turned thick and heavy. “It’s pretty lonely out here, I guess.”
“Have you always lived here?”
“Since I was six.”
“Where did you live before?”
“South Dakota. My family is Indian. My mom took me back there every year for a couple of weeks, but this is home.”
She inclined her head. “Do you ever go now?”
“Not for a long time. My ex used to want to go. She was sort of into all the stuff, you know, that Indian thing. I’m not.”
“She was Indian?”
He shook his head, looked at his hands. “White. Not blond like you, though—black Irish, though she always said she had some Indian blood. Who knows, maybe she did.” He shrugged. “Not like it matters.”
“Doesn’t it? Don’t you ever miss being a part of something bigger than you, a whole culture that knows your name, your people, your cousins and uncles and all the stories going back into history about your family?”
There was a lot of feeling in the question and he took it seriously. “You want that for yourself?”
“I’m just so alone, you know?” Her voice was very quiet. “If I had any family at all to turn to, I could have gone to them for help. I could have had a place to land. I never understand how people who have it let it go.”
“It wasn’t me who did it,” he said. “It was my father.” He stood up. “Want to see something?”
“Sure.”
He’d carried in his parents’ things from the barn and settled them in a corner of the dining room in two boxes. He brought one back in. “I need to turn on the light. Brace yourself.”
The box was filled with a wide assortment of things, and Sunny bent over to look at them. “Who did the beadwork?” she asked, drawing out a clear plastic box with a rainbow of beads sorted into tiny compartments.
“My mom.” He took out another box, this one a small cedar one, stamped Manitou Springs, Colo. in fading gold, and opened it. Within were beaded earrings and bracelets, a leather pouch with a geometric design beaded into it. “She made these things.”
“Beautiful,” Sunny said, fingering them like an expert. She turned the bracelet over. “Loom?”
“I don’t know,” he said with a grin.
“Yeah, it is.”
“You’ve done this kind of work, too?”
“Not exactly like this, but I do—did—a lot of hand beading on some of the costumes. It’s precise, but very satisfying.” She put the bracelet down, picked up a sheaf of pictures. As she bent over, he glimpsed the swell of a naked breast beneath his oversize shirt and wanted her again instantly. An impulse he put aside. “Who are these people?”
“Relatives.” He pointed to an old man with a white streak in his long, loose hair, looking at the camera with suspicion. “That’s my grandpa on my mom’s side.”
“You look like him,” she said, smiling for the first time.
There were others, cousins he could name and some he couldn’t. Uncles and aunts, Chasing Horse side and Red Willow side, his mother. “And you never talk to any of them?”
“Well, not never. Sometimes one of the cousins will come visit, and I’ve had letters from some of the aunts, usually at special seasons, like Christmas.”
She nodded, peering at the photos as if they had some magic in them, a clue to some urgent question she was asking of life. “Hey!” she said, and gave him the picture. “Isn’t that your cradleboard?”
Michael nodded. It was an old photograph, taken maybe in the thirties, or even the twenties. “Wow, this is old.” A pretty young woman had the cradleboard on her back, and a baby slept inside. “Yeah, this is it. This is probably my grandfather,” he said with a sense of wonder, and then he saw something that made him frown. “Wow.”
“What is it?”
He put the picture on the table, then went to get the cradleboard. “See the difference?”
Sunny looked from one to the other. “The turtle? What is it?”
Michael braced the cradle board between his legs, and picked up the picture. “It’s an amulet with a special blessing inside, a baby’s umbilical cord. My mother always said there was a curse on my father’s family because the two things were separated somehow. Nobody knows where it went, and there was this feeling that if it came back, maybe the family would be healed.”
“Maybe you should make a new one. Have it blessed or something, like Catholics do for things.”
“I don’t know how.”
“How to bless it or how to make the amulet?”
He knew blessings, though they were in a rusty place in his memory. “The amulet.”
She nodded, took the picture back. “I could probably do it.”
For a moment, he wondered if that might be all it took. End the rift and the loneliness, bring the family back, or maybe even just his life back into balance. He looked at the woman before him, with her long hair and wary eyes and wanted it to be her who brought the balance back to him.
But he saw that she’d flown from here already, and he didn’t blame her. Sadly, he shook his head. “There’s some kind of special ritual you have to follow, a baby’s umbilical cord, all these things. It’s something women do.”
“Could you find out?”
He shrugged.
She put the picture down, nodded. “I think I’m going back to bed now. But I think I’ll sleep with Jessie, okay?”
He didn’t look at her. Nodded. She pressed her hand to his shoulder as she passed, and he wanted to capture it, hold it there, but he didn’t. Just let her go.
In the morning, everyone was quite polite, Sunny thought, and it was hard to be too stiff with the blazingly happy Jessica chattering and laughing and enjoying the attention of two adults so thoroughly. Sunny cooked omelettes and then they gathered some empty boxes and put them in the back of the truck to hold anything they might salvage. “It might have blown quite a ways, and we can just head out across the prairie as far as we need to,” Michael said. “You need a hat.” He found her one, a turquoise baseball hat with Las Vegas scrolled across the brim.
“You don’t seem like a Las Vegas kind of guy,” Sunny said.
“Naw. Went there once, just to see, but it’s too noisy.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“You’re not missing anything.”
She picked up Jessie, and was uncomfortably considering the car seat problem when she realized that she didn’t have her baby backpack anymore, either, and how could they do this work holding a baby? “Michael, we need to think of something to keep Jessie safe. She can’t get down in the prairie, especially when everything has been so stirred up.”
“No.” He frowned.
Sunny was trying to think of some way to create a playpen when Michael held up a hand and ducked into the house and came back with the cradleboard. From his hip pocket, he took a lethal-looking knife and braced the board on the truck, then prepared to cut the leather at the bottom. “Wait!” Sunny said. “What are you doing?”
“Look, this thing has been sitting in my barn for twenty years and never had a minute of use. If I cut the leather, Jessie can stick her legs through, and we can take turns putting her on our backs.”
“It’s a valuable antique, Michael, and not just on the market, but to your family.”
“Things are meant to be used,” he said, and plunged the knife into the leather. “It’s a way to keep her safe.” He cut the holes, then widened them enough to fit a toddler’s legs. “See? It’ll even be a way
to keep shade on her.”
Sunny resisted the swell of love—how could she even call it that?—that filled her chest. But she resolved to see about making the amulet, anyway. “Thank you.” There were straps to fit the cradleboard over a post or shoulders, and Michael put it on his back. “See if she’ll fit.”
Jessie protested a little, going in, but when her legs were dangling, and they found a way to stretch and bend the opening at the shoulders so that her arms were free, she settled into it fairly happily, swinging her feet. “Good idea, Michael,” Sunny said. “Very resourceful.”
“Well, yeah, I’m just a pretty resourceful kind of guy.” He winked, and she was relieved that he was more accepting now than he seemed to be last night of her need not to get too involved with him. “Let’s roll.”
The path of the tornado was vividly visible as they left the sheltering circle of trees around Michael’s house and outbuildings, then drove up the road. Michael whistled softly, and Sunny, holding Jessica on her lap, widened her eyes. The path was about a quarter-mile wide, and everything in that path had been pulverized. The storm had also picked up things and tossed them, willy-nilly, everywhere. Unidentified pieces of twisted metal, pieces of wood, tree branches. A road sign, pristine and perfectly upright, had been planted in the midst of some cactus, warning the coyotes that the speed limit was five miles an hour.
“What a mess!”
Michael nodded grimly, and turned up the hill to the house. Sunny felt her stomach clench, hard, as they stopped in the driveway. The car the junkyard manager brought her—had that really only been yesterday afternoon?—had been untouched and was sitting with a single cactus arm on the windshield, without so much as a dent in it. “That is so weird,” Sunny commented.
The house was another story. There was nothing left but a pile of timbers and junk all tangled together, nothing immediately recognizable, except the bathtub, sitting out in the open. Sunny wondered if the couch cushions were still inside it. “Maybe we would have lived.”
He squeezed her shoulder. “Put Jessie in this thing and I’ll take the first round. Sooner we start, sooner we’re done.”
They picked around the yard first, collecting soaked, dirty clothing, and sorting through the debris for anything Sunny wanted to keep. There wasn’t much. They moved on to the house, carefully stepping over fallen timbers, through ground-up rubble and a single, cockeyed roof beam, which had protected a few things beneath it. Jessie’s dresser had been knocked sideways and one drawer had fallen out, spilling tiny socks into the world. Sunny imagined some housewife in Kansas weeding her garden and plucking an embroidered anklet out of her rhubarb, and it made her smile.
“Whoo-hoo,” Michael said from the other side of the mess. “Looky here!”
A pair of lacy white panties, Sunny’s, waved like a naughty flag from the top of a stick of wood that might once have been part of a wall. She flushed when he reached for them, felt heat move through her breasts as that dark hand captured the delicate scrap of cloth—
And for one minute, she was transported back to his bed last night, was the willing and pliant lover he had pleased so exquisitely with those hands, that mouth that was now smiling. To make it worse, he tucked the underwear into his shirt, next to that belly that had been her undoing. As if he knew her thoughts, he grinned wickedly and spread his hands. “You want ’em, you’ll have to come get ’em.”
She was painfully tempted. She imagined a little wrestling match, one that would bring their bodies into hot, close contact, imagined how the tussle would raise their arousal levels, how pleasing it would be to do it all again. Unconsciously, she rubbed her belly, then realized what she was doing, and darted a look at his face to see if he had noticed.
He was stepping over the rubble, evidently ignoring the little interplay, and Sunny, disappointed for some reason she couldn’t name, turned back to the task of wresting baby clothes out of drawers.
Michael knelt behind her, his hands falling on her shoulders. He leaned in close and kissed her ear. “It doesn’t have to be this way, Sunny. You don’t have to push me away so hard.”
“Yes I do,” she said and even to her own ears, the words were mournful.
His hands moved, and Sunny found herself leaning backward into his body. They were kneeling, his knees bracing her sides, and his hands slid from her shoulders into the neckline of her borrowed shirt. Fierce desire woke in her. “Michael,” she whispered, but she didn’t stop him. His hands slid beneath her bra, to the already-eager tips of her breasts, and touched them lightly. He suckled her ear a little, making Sunny shudder. “I want you to listen to me,” he said fiercely. “This isn’t about sex or power. I’m not trying to trap you into a scene where you have to be a victim again. You need a father for your daughter. You need a place to live. I need a wife because I’m dying of loneliness, and I think we’re pretty compatible.”
She caught his hands. “Stop it!” she said.
He caught her back, and pulled her around to face him. “No, you stop it,” he said, hands on her shoulders. “Look at me, damn it.”
She raised furious eyes to his face, and was stricken all over again by that elegant beauty, the high brow, the dark eyes with their fringe of lush lashes. It made her hurt everywhere to want anyone this much.
“Would it be so terrible?” he asked softly.
“I would love you,” she said, and set her jaw. “I couldn’t help it. And then I couldn’t protect myself, and you don’t understand, but I just can’t do that, okay? Don’t ask it. I’ll leave here in the morning.”
His brow blackened, and his jaw was set hard, but he let her go. “Whatever.”
They retreated to separate sides of the house, and then searched outward into the fields, combing for anything that might be saved. Sunny nursed a sense of grief and wasn’t sure if it stemmed from her rejection of Michael’s proposal—or what had certainly sounded like one—or this new loss she had sustained. The sun beat down on her head, and she had to keep avoiding prickly pear cactus, but one bit her ankle anyway, and on the horizon a new storm built, a mockery of the drought.
In the shredded remains of a yucca plant, she found a picture of her wedding. The leaf of the plant had gone right through the center of the photo, the only one she had left from the day she’d married Paul, and now it was ruined, and for some reason, Sunny just let her arms drop and let the despair take her. She would never amount to anything. There was some evil force at work seeing to that. And with a furious growl, she raised her head and said, “You see me trying here. Could you just cut me a break once in blue moon?”
From behind her, Michael let out a shout. “Sunny!” he cried, and she turned. He held something over his head, but she couldn’t make it out. He ran toward her, as lightly and gracefully as one of his horses, the weight of the cradleboard and Jessica seeming not to weigh him down at all. There was a youthful exuberance on his face as he came forward, holding the object out to her. “Look what I found!”
It was a box with moons and stars all over it, and it was wet and muddy on the outside. “Oh, my gosh!” With trembling hands, she reached for it—her most precious, precious possession. “Did you look inside?”
He nodded, beaming. “They’re a little damp and you might lose a couple, but the rest are fine.”
Sunny tore off the lid and looked inside at dozens and dozens, no probably hundreds, of baby pictures, chronicling Jessie’s life from before she was born to now. Tears of gratitude sprung to her eyes. “This is the only thing that would have really killed me,” she said.
“I know.” He said over his shoulder, “Your mama got her pictures back.” He swung around and Sunny saw that Jessie was sound asleep, arms folded comfortably on the top of the leather, feet dangling bare from the bottom. Her cheeks were flushed.
“Maybe we ought to call it a day,” Sunny said. “She looks pretty hot.”
“Pretty much got it all anyway, anything worth saving.”
She nodded, clutching th
e box close to her body. “Michael, thank you.”
“Stop thanking me,” he said, a little of the glow going out of his face.
But Sunny knew what to do to thank him. She would take care of it this afternoon.
Chapter 9
They ate and Michael went outside to make some repairs the dual storms had caused. He put on his black hat, and Sunny knew he’d ride, too. “Do the horses get restless if they don’t get ridden?”
“Oh, yeah. You should let me teach you. I think you’d be a natural.”
She nodded noncommittally.
When he was gone, she went to the box containing his mother’s things and took out the picture of the turtle amulet and the beads. There was a special way of doing it, he’d said, and she wondered what it might be. If there was an umbilical cord contained in it, then it was likely a woman who was pregnant who did it, preparing it for her coming child. That would bring hope and faith to the task, and she thought back to her own pregnancy, to the things that had been in her mind. Joy, excitement, hope.
There was obviously no umbilical cord available, but maybe she could think of an appropriate substitute. She thought of the kittens and their mother, wondering if they might provide some idea, but drew a blank.
Then she had a most perfect idea. In her own things, she found the moon and stars box and took out a lock of Jessica’s hair, fine and blond, a thick curl tied with ribbon. It would do.
She set to work, using the picture as her guide, and was deeply engrossed when Jessica woke up from her nap. Sunny changed her, washed her face, and settled her on the kitchen floor with a collection of plastic glasses and spoons and lids, and kept working.
It was a pleasant space, she thought idly. The table was old and scarred, but well-cared for, and it sat in a bright corner, with a view of dark-blue mountains running an uneven finger over the horizon. Sunny started to hum as she wove beads into a circular pattern, pleased when Jessie started humming along with her, and pleased that the idea she’d had to make the amulet more three-dimensional than two was working out.
Lakota Legacy: Wolf DreamerCowboy Days and Indian NightsSeven Days Page 23