“I have cones for you,” Fallen Arrow said.
That small speech seemed to exhaust her.
“She asked those of us who went sugaring to bring some back for her to save for you,” Snowbird said. “She told us that you had loved those as a child, and that if you came back, she wanted to have some for you.”
If Moon Song had thought that finding Fallen Arrow so weak and ill was heartbreaking, it was nothing compared to discovering that her grandmother in her illness had still been thinking of her. Moon Song could not allow her to escape from this earth—not yet. She was the only person left who loved her that much.
“My grandmother was strong and healthy when I left last summer. Did she have sufficient food to eat over the winter?”
“None of us did.” Snowbird looked at the ground as though afraid to meet Moon Song’s eyes. “The government payment for our land did not arrive on time. Our braves were without ammunition. Our chief gathered all the food together and divided it up to get us through the winter. Your grandmother made the same choice that many of our old ones have made in the past. She gave up her own food so that the children could survive. It weakened her body. She has not been able to get rid of her cough, no matter how carefully we prepare the herbs we gather.”
“Thank you for taking care of her,” Moon Song said. “I will take over her care now.”
“You are back to stay?”
“I am back to stay.”
Snowbird gave a small sigh of relief, set the bowl down, and left. Moon Song looked around her grandmother’s cabin. She was grateful that she had not allowed Skypilot to accompany her here. This was not his world. These were not his people. He would not understand an old woman who had starved herself so that food could be put into the mouth of a child. And yet that had been her way and her ancestors’ way forever. The survival of the tribe was always more important than the life of the individual.
She knew that Fallen Arrow had not sat idly by, though. Her grandmother would have set out snares and dug roots until there was no more small game to capture and the snow was too deep. If she knew her grandmother, even if the old woman had been able to capture enough rabbits to fill her own belly, she would have taken only a few bites to remain strong enough to continue to hunt for food until she knew for certain that it was futile.
Oh how grateful she was to Skypilot for the wealth of food he had sent with her. She found herself almost wishing that the big timberman was beside her now just for the sheer strength of his great heart to encourage her. The responsibility for her grandmother as well as for her child was now on her shoulders. This was not a good time to be an elderly Chippewa, nor was it a good time to be a little Chippewa brave.
She knelt beside Fallen Arrow with the wooden bowl in her hand. “You must sit up and drink this broth that Snowbird made,” she said in Chippewa. “You must get stronger.”
Her grandmother turned her head and answered in their precious native tongue. “Have you and the child eaten? Have all the children of the village eaten?”
“Yes, Grandmother.” Tears stung her eyes. “Everybody’s bellies are full except your own. It is your turn now. You must regain your strength.”
“I am no longer hungry,” Fallen Arrow said.
“You must eat anyway.” She smoothed back her grandmother’s gray hair. “You must regain your strength so that you can teach my son the way of the old fathers. I need you here to teach him how to be strong and brave and proud of his people.”
“He will be a leader of our people.”
“What do you mean, Grandmother?” Moon Song asked. “Have you seen a vision?”
“A vision is not needed.” Fallen Arrow roused herself and grasped her arm. “Fight for your son. When I am no longer with you, fight for him. Do not let him become one of the young men who give up their manhood for empty promises from the government.”
“I won’t, Grandmother. But Ayasha is still very small, and right now I’m more concerned about getting you to eat something. Please take a sip of this good broth that Fighting Sparrow and Snowbird made.”
Her grandmother did as she asked, taking a small sip, then she laid back down. “His name will no longer be Ayasha—Little One. He must be called Standing Bear.”
Moon Song gasped. Fallen Arrow was bestowing the name of Ayasha’s great-grandfather upon him. This was an enormous and rare honor. She had known of it happening only once before, many years ago, when a chief had proudly given his own name to his son after a great feat of courage had been executed by the young man.
She wasn’t entirely sure her grandmother had the right to do this thing.
“Are not the elders supposed to choose his name?” Moon Song asked.
“Too many have died this winter. I am now the oldest of my people. Your little son needs a strong name. Standing Bear was a strong man. In the days ahead, our people will need for your son to be as strong.”
Moon Song did not like all this talk of her baby son fighting. She wanted to be able to enjoy his laughter and chubby cheeks and sweet smiles. “If my son fights, I will stand beside him.”
“Oh, Granddaughter.” Fallen Arrow turned sad eyes upon her. “Don’t you realize? You will have to fight long before little Standing Bear eats his first mouthful of solid food.”
18
Bay City held no attraction to him anymore, but he didn’t know where else to go. His heart was walking around someplace on the Keweenaw Peninsula while he was stuck here, at loose ends until the lumber camp started back up in October.
The only bright spot in his life was Robert and Katie’s happiness. Sarah and her husband had found their own little place nearby, and Katie was busy keeping track of the three children. From what he could see, it wasn’t easy, given all the freedom the children had enjoyed at the lumber camp. Robert’s son and daughter and Katie’s little brother were like wild Indians after spending the winter among the roughshod shanty boys.
He stopped himself. Wild Indians? What a foolish thought when thrown up against the reality of Moon Song and her concerns about her people’s very survival!
Strange how once you loved someone, you began to perceive the world through their senses. The native men and women he saw living at the edges of Bay City now took on a whole new significance in his eyes. The lives of the women, especially. He saw Moon Song in each one. Less than a month earlier, he would have barely noticed them.
He couldn’t stop wondering how she was doing. If she had enough to eat. If she was warm. If she was safe. If Ayasha had cut those teeth yet, or if he was still gumming that little fist. He found himself noticing every baby he saw who was close to his age, and each time he felt as though someone had wrenched his family away from him.
What did you do when you loved someone and couldn’t be with them? Shouldn’t be with them.
He missed her so badly, if he thought there was half a chance Moon Song would take him, he would go to the reservation and begin combing the woods for her, but would she accept him if he came back? He didn’t think so. He had given her a choice, and she had made it.
October couldn’t come soon enough. He needed something to throw his weight into that would make him tired enough to fall into bed every night and lose consciousness. He needed something that would take the memory of watching her walk away from him out of his mind.
“Another letter came for you today,” the boardinghouse mistress, Mrs. Wilcox, said. “It’s the same curlicued handwriting from Virginia you got before. Frankly, if I were a man, I wouldn’t trust a grown woman who has the time on her hands to fool around with all that fancy nonsense. I got too much work to do to mess with something like that. Just write it out plain is what I say.”
“It would be considered odd to most of her friends if she didn’t write with that sort of penmanship.”
“Humph.” Mrs. Wilcox washed her hands, dried them on her apron, and set to work punching some bread dough down. “If you have a mind to get tangled up with someone, I have a perfectly good
granddaughter of marrying age who can’t write fancy, but she’d make a good wife.”
Skypilot had met the boardinghouse mistress’s granddaughter, and she was lovely. The girl was also every bit as opinionated and forceful as her grandmother. A man who had someone like her in his life would lose all control of it.
“She’s a lovely girl, but I’m not looking for a wife right now.”
“You ever gonna preach again?” the mistress asked.
The question took him by surprise. “Why?”
“I heard the Methodist church is looking for a preacher.” She stopped her kneading and looked him over head to toe. “You’d probably clean up good enough to get the job, and my granddaughter would make a real good preacher’s wife. That girl is like me,” she said proudly. “She could run the church for you and all you’d have to do is stand up in the pulpit once a week and spout off a few big-sounding words and bury or marry someone every now and then. It’d be a nice soft job. You wouldn’t have to get your hands dirty again.”
He put his hands in his pockets, leaned back against the dry sink, and stared at the woman’s back while she continued kneading.
Stand up in the pulpit. Spout off a few big words. Show up and marry or bury someone every now and then.
He supposed some ministers could get by with living like that, but he could not. He had found that feeling a responsibility for people’s souls, minds, marriages, broken hopes, guilt, and doubts was much harder than the clean, sweeping feel of swinging an axe into a pine tree.
The pressure of being a woodsman wasn’t even a close second to being a preacher. Soft job, indeed!
“No thanks,” he said. “I think I’ll just head back into the woods when summer ends.”
“I could put in a good word for you with the hiring committee.”
“The problem is, Mrs. Wilcox, I was never all that good at spouting big words.” He pushed away from the sink and headed up the stairs to his room. “I’ll leave that to someone else.”
She had a good heart and meant no disrespect, but his mind flew to Father Slovic and his snowshoes and his mastery of Indian dialects and his seven-hundred-mile treks through the northwoods every year. Not exactly a soft job.
He wondered if the Jesuit had heard any news about Moon Song. He wished it was a letter from Slovic he had received instead of one from Penelope.
He went upstairs to his room, laid down on his bed, and read Penelope’s letter. It was basically a repeat of what she had already written. She said she was sending it because she feared that he had not received her earlier one. The woman must indeed be desperate.
He ran a hand back through his hair so roughly that he nearly yanked some strands out. The slight twinge of pain felt good. It helped mitigate the pain he was feeling inside.
He missed Moon Song! How was he going to live without her? He was so tired. He was tired of trying to do the right thing. He was tired of praying. He was tired of reading his Bible. He was tired of worrying about other people.
For the first time in a long time, he felt the need to go out and get roaring drunk, and there wasn’t a reason in the world for him not to do so. He was no one’s preacher anymore. He was just another shanty boy. He could get drunk if he wanted to, and so help him, he was going to!
The sound of piano music spilled out onto the infamous section of Water Street that the lumbermen referred to as “Hell’s Half Mile.” On the main floor of the three-story Catacombs, where nearly every vice known to man was rumored to exist, inside the Steamboat Saloon there was raucous laughter.
The female laughter was brassy and contrived. The male laughter was coarse and drunken, but at least inside that establishment there was the illusion of enjoyment. One thing for certain, there would be enough liquid refreshment to help a man forget his loneliness and confusion.
Or maybe he should go back to Virginia after all. Just give up and go the direction that would seem the most . . . normal? Would it be that hard to accept the carefully couched offer he’d been handed by a beautiful woman? Penelope was exquisite in a drawing room or dance. She could converse with anyone without saying anything that mattered. She, who was always aware of how she looked, and dressed, and appeared to others, was a master at flirting and making a man feel like a man. She and he would, as someone had once remarked, make very pretty children.
Even though they would be impoverished, compared to sleeping in a lice-infested bunkhouse, it would be a relatively comfortable life. He couldn’t be a shanty boy forever. There would come a time when he could no longer swing an axe. More than one old shanty boy had lived out his days in total poverty, sweeping out saloons for a pittance and a drink. Compared to the specter of that sort of end to one’s life, the alternative of going back to Virginia didn’t seem so bad.
Going home to Penelope and letting bygones be bygones would make sense in so many ways.
A smart man would go back. A beautiful, willing, contrite woman. A graceful, comfortable home. A few loyal servants who had nowhere else to go to help keep it that way. The lovely, lush countryside. Ragged now, perhaps, but beautiful in his mind. It had been a sort of paradise to him when he’d moved there with dreams of having his first church. With dreams of making a difference.
His head and common sense told him to follow that second letter back to where it originated and make a life for himself.
His heart said otherwise.
His heart longed for the sweep and majesty of Kitchigami, that brooding lake that had nearly swallowed him whole. He longed for the wild, whistling, mourning sound of loons at dawn. He longed for a campfire made from sparks knocked off a flint in the hands of a serious young woman so intent upon her work that she was not even aware that his admiring gaze was trained upon her. He would never forget the look of joy he’d seen on her face when that first flame had caught and leaped into life, nor her look of triumph when she smiled at him over her accomplishment.
Longing for her made no sense at all. The whole time they had traveled together, she had bested him over and over in everything they needed to do to survive, and she had done so with no apology or attempt to cover up her cleverness. He smiled and shook his head at the memory of her allowing him to show his ignorance of handling a canoe before she calmly got in and showed him how well a canoe could slice through the water when an expert was wielding the paddle.
Moon Song’s hair had never known the touch of a curling iron. Her skin was not the peaches and cream that Penelope had always kept in perfect whiteness with various lotions and potions and parasols. Moon Song did not shy away from the sun or apparently give it much thought.
Penelope was completely feminine in the way she walked. It was something carefully studied and practiced. Tiny, elegant shoes peeking out from beneath layers of fabric and petticoats.
Moon Song walked with toes deliberately turned slightly in, wearing worn moccasins, head down, always scanning the forest floor or lakeshore for food or signs of small game.
Penelope smelled of lilac and smelling salts.
Moon Song smelled of campfire smoke and fish and sometimes of a soiled baby.
Penelope had worn watered silk.
Moon Song wore stained doeskin and probably had no idea what watered silk was.
Penelope’s eyelashes fluttered demurely when she talked to him.
Moon Song looked him square in the face, openly, as though she were taking his measure the entire time.
Marrying Penelope would open up polite society to him. A society that he might not always agree with but that he at least understood.
Marrying Moon Song would plunge him into a world that he did not understand and probably never would. Marrying her could quite possibly mean becoming a castaway from his own people for life.
Going back to Penelope would be familiar.
Going back to Moon Song would be like deliberately stepping off a cliff into the dark thin air.
Being with Penelope would mean sharing a hymnal at church and Sunday dinner with frie
nds.
Being with Moon Song would eventually mean discussions where his religious beliefs would be called into question and so would her own.
Penelope wanted him.
Moon Song did not. She had made it clear that she did not want him to follow her.
A sound of broken glass, a shout, and then tinkling laughter bled out onto the street. He had not been an angel in his younger years. Everything within him wanted to go in. He knew the illusion of comfort that he could find inside that saloon. It would be so easy to bury himself there tonight.
“You ain’t trying to make up your mind whether or not to go in there, are you?” Delia strolled up and gazed into the dimly lit saloon window beside him.
“You shouldn’t be out walking around here at night, Delia,” he said. “These sidewalks aren’t safe for a woman alone.”
Delia looked up at him in surprise and then spluttered with laughter. “Honey, you are just too good to be true. You act like a gentleman even to someone like me. You realize I’ve spent the bigger part of my life working around these Catacombs. Don’t you think I know how to take care of myself?”
He gave her his full attention. “I think if you knew how to take care of yourself, you wouldn’t have had to spend all those years working on Water Street.”
Delia was reputed to be in her midfifties, but devoid of makeup and finery, she looked much older. The woman had “hard life” written all over her, including the scowl she gave him now.
“That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “Men have choices. Most women don’t. In case you ain’t looked recently, there’s not a whole lot of help-wanted ads for women in the Bay City Journal.”
“At least you have a different life now.”
“I do, don’t I?” she said brightly. “Thanks to your employer. Robert Foster is one of four truly good men I’ve ever known.”
“Who are the others?”
“Two are men you never heard of, but they gave me hope that mankind wasn’t quite as bad as I had grown to think. The fourth is you, Skypilot. That’s why I’m here.”
Under a Blackberry Moon Page 18