Vote Then Read: Volume III

by Aleatha Romig

  It shamed her to realize she wasn’t honestly ready to settle down, despite the fact that marriage had brought her here in the first place. Now she considered Dr. Harrison’s passing a blessing in disguise. She might have found herself shackled to a man who gambled every afternoon and drank himself senseless every night. In fact, if the collection of empty bottles behind the house and the half-drained flask of spirits Mattie found tucked among the calomel pills and quinine powder in his black bag were any indication, the doctor had imbibed to excess.

  No, Mattie would take her chances first with the Harrison claim, a fertile plot of streamside land with treasure ripe for the picking.

  Today, however, she’d put her house in order and learn to cook.

  Now that the cabin was free of dust, she felt safer starting a fire for her midday meal. She tucked a couple of chunky logs inside the stove and used Amos’s trick for romancing the flame, cramming handfuls of dry pine needles between the pieces of wood. The fire caught on the first match, and ten minutes later, still burning, it chewed slowly away at the undersides of the logs.

  A victorious thrill coursed through her until she realized she had to fetch another bucket of water for the beans and coffee. Peering in anxiously at the blaze and adding one more log for good measure, Mattie prayed it wouldn’t extinguish itself. She dumped the dirty water next to a pine sapling off the porch and scurried off to refresh her supply.

  Thankfully, the fire was still burning when she returned. She distributed the water between the pots for coffee and beans, saving out a little to mix with the flour and the sourdough starter Amos had given her to make biscuits. A half hour later, her first home-cooked meal bubbled and baked atop the stove.

  Dusting the flour from her hands, Mattie decided to do a bit of drawing while the beans simmered. A pair of baby blue jays had recently hatched in a nearby nest lodged in the low crook of a sugar pine, and she wanted to capture the fuzzy-headed, greedy-beaked creatures in her sketchbook.

  She clamped a pair of pencils between her teeth and, sliding the finished drawings from her portfolio onto the table, tucked the sketchbook under her arm. There was just enough time before the biscuits baked to make a decent drawing.

  Of course, once she’d sketched the nest, complete with intertwined twigs, bits of eggshell, and scrawny chicks with gaping maws, Mattie spied a wild tiger lily hidden among the grass, begging to be rendered, its black spots stark against the bright orange hue of its petals. Mattie couldn’t resist. And after that, she spied a tiny lizard sunning itself on a rock in its mottled gray armor, flexing its elbows and winking its sleepy eyes. She’d wandered far from the cabin, putting the finishing touches on a study of lichen lace on rough oak, when she remembered the biscuits.

  PROUD MOTHER.

  Hintsuli’s heart fluttered as he held the thin white hide between his trembling fingers, staring at the...what did his friend Noa call them?.."letters" at the bottom.

  He should not be here in Coh-ah-nuya’s cabin. Sakote had warned him away. The child-eater might return and want to add him to her supper.

  But Hintsuli was transfixed by the quail on the strange hide, the quail that he could see, by the pale sunlight leaching through the cloth window, were real, but somehow not real. He ran his thumb over the feathers. He could feel nothing. The quail lived on the piece of hide. They looked like they might scurry off at any moment, but something kept them there. Magic. Coh-ah-nuya’s magic. The quail spirits were trapped on the hide. Coh-ah-nuya had trapped them.

  The bitter smoke of Coh-ah-nuya’s supper was beginning to fill the cabin when Hintsuli heard a noise from outside. His heart bounded against his ribs. Coh-ah-nuya returned! He must run! If she caught him...it was too terrible to think about.

  He glanced at the magic hide. Sakote had told him it was wrong to take the things of the white man. But he couldn’t leave the quail behind.

  Clutching it to his belly, he slipped out the gap in the window’s cloth covering and lit lightly on the grass outside.

  Wonomi, The Great Spirit, was with him, for the woman didn’t see him, even when he crept past the entrance of her hubo.

  When he reached the forest, he ran. And he kept running until his chest ached.

  He stopped not far from his village, but he wouldn’t go there yet. Sakote had told him yesterday to stay away from the white man’s camp, from Coh-ah-nuya, and he had disobeyed. If Sakote found out... Hintsuli let out a great sigh, imagining his brother’s fierce frown.

  Hintsuli wasn’t to blame. He couldn’t resist adventure. Even his sister said he was cursed with the curiosity of the raccoon.

  He flopped down on a mossy mound and gazed up at the pine boughs overhead, woven together like a Konkow basket. Hintsuli wasn’t afraid of the white man. The willa were interesting. They had food that came in little cans and knives made of shiny metal. Their faces were full of hair, like the bear, and their skin was sometimes pale like moonlight and sometimes as red as sunset. They didn’t gather acorns or seeds or grasshoppers, but were given gifts of food by men who arrived every new moon on lyktakymsy—riding-dogs—which Noa called "horses." They didn’t hunt for fish in the streams, but instead searched for little yellow rocks that made them whoop with joy. And they had...toys.

  Noa had given him the white man’s spinning toy. It had power. Hintsuli would sit in one place while the sun walked across the sky, spinning and spinning it. He could keep it spinning by itself for as long as it took Sakote to eat a bowl of acorn mush. It was a magic toy, and Hintsuli wanted another one of the white man’s playthings.

  He rested his head against the lichen-covered oak trunk and looked at the quail on the hide again. This was surely a magic toy. Maybe he could learn its secret. If he discovered how to release the quail spirits, maybe he could use the magic hide himself. He glowered hard at the flat gray birds. If he set them free, if he made the hide empty, he could fill it again with whatever he wanted. He could trap bad spirits there. His eyes widened. He could trap Coh-ah-nuya there! How proud Sakote would be then. The tribe would sing victory songs for him, and the Konkow people would tell his story for many leaf-falls to come.

  For a long time he sat in the speckled sunlight, concentrating, frowning at the hide, pleading silently with Wonomi, but the quail stuck fast.

  With a sigh, he carefully folded the hide and tucked it into his breechcloth. He must return to the village now, before Sakote began to worry. Perhaps it wasn’t the right time. Perhaps the hide’s magic wouldn’t work now. He would carry it with him until the time was right, until Wonomi granted him the power to use it.

  By the time Mattie dashed in the door, the cottage was filled with noxious gray smoke and the biscuits were burned to charcoal. Upon closer inspection, she found the coffee a thick black tar that clung to the sides of the pot, and the handful of beans, still hard as pebbles, had swollen to proportions fit for an army.

  "Damn!" she shouted for the first time in her life, waving the blanket from her bed to shoo the smoke out the door.

  When the haze diminished, she sank dismally onto the stool in the middle of the room, which tipped back and forth on its mismatched legs—just for spite, she was sure. The day was getting on. There wasn’t time to cook another supper. Reluctantly, for she knew they were hard to come by, she took a tin of peaches down from the shelf and made a meal of the sweet fruit. At this rate, she thought, in another month she’d be able to fit two of her into the rich satin ball gowns she’d left in New York.

  It took Mattie the better part of an hour and the last of her strength to scrub the burnt residue from her pots. By then, so little daylight remained that she had to light several candles to see.

  She’d tossed her new sketches atop the old on the table, and she took a moment to study them now. The baby blue jays made her smile with their fuzzy, wrinkled necks and ugly, straining beaks. The lichen had been difficult to depict, with its curious texture and convoluted form, but she’d managed to recreate the contrast of the tiger lily’s s
pots without the use of color, which pleased her.

  Shuffling through the old sketches, she could see improvement. These newer illustrations possessed more detail, more life. The pencil strokes were surer, well-defined, bold. The animals looked as if they might leap off the...

  Mattie frowned and perused the drawings again. Something was missing.

  PROUD MOTHER—her sketch of the quail. It should be on top. She leafed through the pages. Nothing. One by one, she sorted through them again. There were drawings of monkeys and Panama natives, New York harbor and the Sacramento dock, renderings of old men and young squirrels, dozens of tiny studies of branches and hands and blossoms. But nowhere could she locate her family of quail. She glanced quickly around the room. Where had she left the drawing? It wasn’t as if there were many places for it to hide.

  She overturned pots, searched under bedding, lifted the sack of flour, emptied her carpetbag, and even peered into the chipmunk’s escape hole, wondering if he’d decided to steal the drawing for his own parlor. But it was nowhere to be found.

  "Damn," she muttered again, vaguely wondering if she was picking up the language of the miners.

  Her stomach growled an ode to failure, and with a vexed puff of air, she blew out the last light, unlaced her shoes in the dark, and burrowed into her bed to hide from her disappointment.

  "Where’s my sister?" Sakote’s harsh demand and the fist he snagged in the rough fabric of Noa’s shirt clashed with the serene evening air of the Konkow village. "What have you done with her?"

  Sakote’s nerves were already stretched taut. His little brother had worried him, disappearing all day, and he’d given the boy a stern scolding. Now Noa had shown up without Towani.

  The last smoke of the cooking fire rose like a wisp of spider’s thread against the violet sky, and the stars shimmered silently. But Sakote felt far from peaceful.

  "She’s fine," Noa insisted. "She’s in my cabin. She’s got womenfolk all around her and every man in the valley ready to put a slug into the first fool who lays a hand on any of them. She’s safer there than here, and we both know it."

  Sakote caught the inside of his cheek between his teeth and stared hard at Noa. At long last, he sighed and nodded, letting him go. “She’s shared her body with you then?"

  Noa’s eyes widened, and he grabbed Sakote by the front of his deerskin cloak, hauling him forward until they stood nose to nose. “That’s none of your concern. Damn, Sakote!"

  Sakote reared his head back and looked haughtily down his nose. “It is my concern. She’s my sister.”

  Noa glared at him a long while. Finally he released Sakote, shaking his head. "No."

  "No?" Sakote frowned.

  "No." Noa crossed his arms over his chest.

  "This is not good," Sakote told him. "For your spirits to join, you must join your bodies. Until she goes to your bed,” he said, lowering his voice to whisper what they both knew, “my sister’s spirit is still joined with that hudesi, the one who raped her. His kokoni—“

  "Don’t chatter at me with all your kokoni nonsense. Towani isn’t ready. She needs time to...to recover. You don’t just grab a woman and go at her like that." He snapped his fingers, a trick Sakote had never quite been able to master.

  Sometimes Sakote didn’t understand Noa. If Towani wanted Noa, and Noa wanted Towani, it seemed foolish for them to sleep apart. He sighed again.

  "Anyway," Noa said with a sniff, "that’s not why I came. I think we’ve got big trouble. Amos came to visit me yesterday. They have a new resident in Paradise Bar. A woman."

  Sakote stiffened. The image of a sheer white gown and long tawny hair danced through his thoughts.

  "But not just any woman," Noa continued. "That doctor? The hudesi you’re talking about? This lady was going to be his missus."

  Sakote’s breath caught. Missus? The white woman with the gun was supposed to marry him—his sister’s defiler? What kind of woman would share her body with such a monster?

  “She got to Paradise Bar,” Noa continued, “and there was her husband-to-be, laid out in his Sunday best, dead as last year’s claim." He scratched the back of his neck. "Towani is upset. She says she’s got to take the woman in, going on about it being her fault that the woman is alone. But I don’t have room for an extra boarder, and I don’t think the lady would be keen on the idea anyway, what with—“

  "The tribe will take her in." Sakote said it without thought and accepted it without question. The Konkow always took in the defenseless families of warriors they’d slain. In his village lived members of the tribe who’d been born of their enemy, the Yana. They’d been adopted so long ago that few remembered they hadn’t always been Konkow. If the white healer had left behind a wife, it must be so with her as well.

  "Take her in?" Noa shook his head. "I don’t know. White women don’t take too kindly to being told what to do and where to go."

  "The way is clear," Sakote insisted. "The Konkow must care for her. It’s what my people have always done." Yet even as he said the words, doubt crept in to taunt him. What would the miners think about his bringing a white woman amongst his tribe?

  "But like I tried to tell Towani," Noa said, "there are plenty of white folks who’d be happy to take her off your hands. Every miner I know would give the shirt off his back just to have a woman to wash it. And just because Amos says she isn’t a miner, but a real lady from back East who wouldn’t know pepper from gunpowder and probably never touched a broom in her life doesn’t mean she can’t learn."

  Sakote wondered if that was true. Was the woman that ignorant? Perhaps her speaking with the quail wasn’t a sign of magic after all, but of simple-mindedness. If she didn’t know how to pan for gold, she wouldn’t last a week in the camp, where the white man lived not on Wonomi’s gifts, but on what spoons full of yellow dust could buy. She needed a man to care for her, or she would die. But surely the odds of her finding a new husband were good. Not only was there a shortage of females in the mining camp, but the white woman was young and beautiful, the kind of wife any man would be proud to…

  He frowned at the disturbing direction of his thoughts, then came to a decision. "Tell my sister that I’ll watch over the white woman for the passing of one moon. If no willa offers to take her, then she will have a home with the tribe. Akina, it is so."

  "That’s real generous of you," Noa said. Both of them knew it wouldn’t come to that, but Noa seemed thankful to have good news to relay to Towani.

  Sakote knew he was doing the right thing. If the woman died, Towani would be stained not only by the doctor’s death, but by that of the white woman and the generations of offspring they might have had. Only if the woman lived could Towani’s spirit be redeemed. As long as Sakote kept an eye on the white woman, the doctor’s kokoni would not haunt the Konkow. And by the next moon, the woman would certainly find a husband among her own people.

  But before Sakote risked spying upon the white woman, he had to know one thing.

  "Tell me, my brother," he said, bending close and speaking softly, fearing the word might possess some mystical power. "What is a...sketchbook?"

  CHAPTER 7

  A good night’s sleep gave Mattie the determination to face another day. With the sunshine pouring across her sill like buttermilk and the sparrows and robins beckoning in sweet counterpoint, it was all she could do not to leap from her bed and rush outdoors. She dressed in her oldest chemise, hastily brushed and tied back her hair, and tugged on the oversized pair of knee-high boots the doctor had left behind. With the pan, the pickaxe, a stick of jerky, and a little canvas bag for gold, she set off for the Harrison claim.

  At first it was great fun. The claim consisted of a piece of staked creekbed about forty feet long and fifteen feet across, situated in a sunny spot along the sparkling water. Her neighbors were already hard at work when she arrived, but they gave her a nod and a friendly "good morning." The air was clear, the sky cloudless, and the water gurgled and swirled happily along banks lined wi
th reeds and tree roots and mosses. Insects stitched at the air, and birds sang a busy symphony over the percussive barks of chipmunks. The odor of pinesap mingled with bay, and the breeze brought a delicate perfume of mixed wildflowers across the stream.

  Mattie dawdled at the task of panning, observing her fellow miners a long while before she began to chip gingerly at the streambed herself. She carefully scooped up a modest amount of gravel, circled the pan gently so as not to splash her skirts, and allowed the water to lap just at the toes of her boots. Which she soon discovered was completely ineffective.

  No, if she wanted gold, she’d have to roll up her sleeves, hike up her skirts, and wade into the thick of things.

  Before long, Mattie stood knee-deep in the midst of the stream, her drenched skirt splayed atop the water’s surface like a spent blossom. Tendrils of her hair had come loose from their ribbon and curled down over her forehead. Her legs shivered with cold while her cheek blushed from the bold kiss of the sun. The swirl of the gravel in the gold pan was hypnotic, and Mattie soon found a comfortable rhythm of movement.

  But as time wore on, her feet grew numb, her face began to tingle with heat, and the pan became heavy. Her eyes were exhausted from hunting for the elusive yellow rock that she learned, to her utter humiliation, looked nothing like the shiny flakes she’d so enthusiastically displayed for her fellow miners, the metal the old-timers called "fool’s gold." To her dismay, despite panning all day, she didn’t find a single speck worth anything.

  Mattie trudged back toward her cabin as the sun set, trying to ignore the fact that her wet skirts and her spirits grew heavier with each step. There was no cause for concern, she reasoned, fighting to keep despondency at bay. After all, it was only her first try. Things would improve tomorrow. She’d get an earlier start. Tomorrow she’d "find the color." Surely there was gold to be had or the residents of Paradise Bar would go home, wouldn’t they?