It never got that far. Later that evening, right after the men returned from panning and took down the cross that read "Miss Mathilda Hardwicke, The Sweetheart of Paradise Bar," the formerly deceased, a little weathered, but pretty as you please, waltzed into camp with Noa.
Of course, she was overjoyed to see him and the boys alive and sad to hear tell of Dash and Bobby. She was laughing one moment and weeping the next. Swede had grinned and told her it’d take more than buckshot and a Bowie knife to do him in. But there had been a tear in his eye when he said it, because for a while there, nobody had been sure he’d recover from the nasty gash in his belly that had drained him almost dry of blood.
They moved Miss Mattie into Bobby’s cabin right away and gave her provisions to fatten up her scrawny bones. But though she seemed glad enough to see the miners, the light in her eyes never made it much above the flicker of a short-wicked candle.
Of course, they’d been doled their share of misery, too, thanks to Doc Jim’s brother. Hell, they’d buried a couple of good men, and it was only by a pure miracle that young Ben Cooper was still breathing. That bullet had come damn close to his heart. The rest of the boys were pretty cut up, too. Harley had lost a couple of fingers, and Jeremy had come within inches of getting himself gelded.
The door to Tom’s cabin swung open with a leathery creak, letting in a blinding flood of sunlight along with the miners who’d come to hear what Swede had to say.
"Howdy, Doc." Jeremy leaned on his homemade cane as he limped in. He’d taken to calling Tom "Doc" on account of him sewing up his family heirlooms so nice and neat.
Harley waggled his fingers in greeting, all three of them.
"How is the patient, eh?" If Zeke didn’t know better, he’d swear Frenchy had positioned himself just right for that rakish knife scar he now sported proudly just under his cheekbone.
"Good as new," Tom declared, lifting Zeke’s shirt up so the whole world could take a gander.
"Damnation!" Zeke groused. "I ain’t on exhibition!"
Close to two dozen miners milled in, crowding into the tiny room which was really only fit for three. Still, being the biggest cabin in Paradise Bar, it was the most fitting place to convene.
They all agreed something had to be done. Mattie wasn’t well, hadn’t been for days now. And it wasn’t just the trauma she’d been through. Swede was afraid it might be some disease she’d contracted from the Injuns.
She wasn’t eating. Even when Amos made her a mince pie, she took a few bites and pushed it aside. When Tom brought her Hangtown stew made with his last tin of oysters, she turned a singular shade of green and puked her little heart out on the front porch. The next day, she fainted in the middle of the road and would have hit the dirt if Frenchy hadn’t been there to catch her.
"Did ye take her breakfast?" Tom asked Amos.
"Made her my best sourdough rolls and peach puddin’. Didn’t touch a thing."
"She’s still feelin’ poorly?" Tom asked Ben, whose turn it was to keep a secret watch on her.
"All mornin’ long, every half-hour or so, she come runnin’ out of the house to retch into the bushes."
"If she keeps this up, she’s like to die," Jeremy announced, and Ben whacked his brother for stating the obvious.
Jasper scratched his stubbled chin. "Maybe we ought to get ourselves a doc, a real doc, to take a look at her."
"Pah! It is her heart, I tell you," Frenchy insisted, as he’d been insisting for days. "She is in love. She cannot bear the thought of—“
"Oh, for Pete’s sake!" Granny elbowed her way to the front of the crowd, shaking her head. "Don’t you fools know nothin’? The dang filly’s a-breedin’!"
Silence hit so sudden and complete you could have heard the crack of dawn. Swede thought the boys looked the way deer did at night when you came upon them unawares with a lamp—all stiff and fascinated and confused.
Finally Tom whispered, "Do ye think?"
"Of course!" Granny answered, irritated at the ignorance of menfolk. "I’d say, by the look of things, the timin’ and whatnot, it was some Injun planted his papoose in her."
Everyone gasped, but Swede knew just who that Injun was.
"The savage!" Frenchy hissed in outrage.
The cussing flew loose and long and loud then, so loud that Swede could hardly make himself heard.
"Calm down, boys! Calm down!" He finally resorted to grabbing Jeremy’s cane and banging it on the floor to get their attention. "All this whoopin’ and hollerin’ ain’t gonna fix nothin’. We gotta take action. Seems to me it’s high time we scared up a man for Miss Mattie."
Sakote watched the trout circle again and tried to focus his thoughts. The fish’s dull gold scales caught only a small shimmer of sunlight. It swam against the current, hovering for a moment in the swirling water. Sakote drew the spear slowly back, waiting, waiting. Then he hurled it forward. It hit the stream with a sloppy splash, and the fish swam away, unperturbed.
Behind him, Hintsuli giggled. Sakote managed a rueful smile for his little brother, but the expression didn’t come easily to his face. A man shouldn’t hunt or fish when his heart was troubled, and Wonomi was showing him the folly of this. He’d fished all afternoon with Hintsuli, who sprang from rock to rock, talking to salamanders, making pictures in the mud with a stick, laughing at Sakote every time he missed another fish with his spear, and still he had no catch.
It was amusing for Hintsuli to see his big brother, whom the headman had praised as the village’s greatest hunter at the Kaminehaitsen, fail so completely. But the boy didn’t understand how unhappiness weakened a man’s arm, how grief made his aim unsteady. He also couldn’t envision the cold times that would come at the end of se-meni, autumn. He’d never seen what happened to a people when there weren’t enough fish harvested from the stream, not enough deer hunted, when the oak trees slept and the snows of ko-meni came, killing the plants that kept the bellies of the Konkows full.
Sakote had been such a boy once, before the sickness stole his people, before the white man stole his food. He’d grown out of his innocence, and he’d thought there was nothing left for the willa to steal. He was wrong. One of them had stolen his heart.
He hauled the fishing spear back in by its fiber line, letting his gaze drift along the sun-flecked ridges of the water, remembering the pain of Mati’s betrayal and the brave mask he’d worn at the Kaminehaitsen.
A vision had come to him in the dream world on the night that he decided to challenge the headman’s sons. The white eagle with two eggs had flown over him, but this time she didn’t come to his hand. Instead, she flew away until she was a speck in the sky. And though he understood the vision, he didn’t understand how to change it. By the time he awoke on the morning of the challenge, the eagle had fled. Mati was gone.
His heart had cracked like an obsidian point into many pieces, so many he feared it couldn’t be repaired. He’d snapped and snarled at Noa like the wolf at an enemy, but his harsh words mended nothing. And so, for the sake of his people and his pride, like the strong warrior he was, he bound his heart up again with sinew and didn’t speak of its weakness.
The next day, the first day of the Kaminehaitsen, Sakote danced with the long feather ropes to the beat of the kilemi. He sang songs to the music of the yalulu, flute, and he rattled the shokote with his Konkow brothers. Since Mati was no longer in the village, no mention was made of the Nemsewis’ challenge, and the tribes made peace.
Sakote played the hand game with the men from Tatampanta. He even stood patiently while his mother’s husband presented him to three giggling Nemsawa girls of marrying age. But on the ending day of the celebration, when the elders made the ritual marks of acorn paste on the entrances of the hubos, Sakote turned his face away in anguish, for painted on his hubo was the symbol of an eagle with two eggs.
After Mati left, the elders would not speak of her, and so, to the rest of the village, she didn’t exist.
Hintsuli was too busy chatterin
g about the initiation rites of yeponi his Konkow brothers had boasted of to notice her absence. Only his mother knew of Sakote’s pain, and though she looked upon him with the sad and wise eyes of the owl, out of respect she didn’t speak of Mati.
But for Sakote, Mati lived in his heart. She’d left her sketches, all save the one of him, and though he knew he’d be wise to bury or burn them, he couldn’t bear to part with the memories they stirred in his soul.
He looked at them often—the baby quail trailing after their mother, the eagle tethered outside his uncle’s hubo, Hintsuli sharpening his stone knife, the flowers growing beside the stream. But his favorite was the drawing of the waterfall. In it, Sakote crouched by the far edge of the pool, and his face looked back at him in ripples made by the cascading water. A hawk soared overhead, and its twin flew across the surface of the pool. The picture was filled with life and light, and it reminded him of the joy and peace he had found there with his kulem, his Mati.
But in the village of the Konkows, the sun rose each morning, and the stars traveled across the night sky. The world didn’t stop just because Sakote no longer felt a part of it. Life continued, even though it seemed like his soul had already deserted him, that his spirit wandered the bright belt of stars, trying to find the left fork, the path to Heaven Valley.
A trout jumped, and Sakote shook himself from his thoughts. He’d been staring blindly at the undulating stream for so long that he’d forgotten where he was. When he looked up at the far bank, sudden cold fear plunged like a knife into his heart.
He turned to Hintsuli, shouting, "Run!"
The boy squeaked once in panic, then scrambled down from his rocky perch and shot up the hill as fast as a rabbit.
When Sakote turned back, his breath froze in his throat, and the skin prickled at the base of his neck. He narrowed his eyes, not wanting to believe what he saw.
On the far side of the stream stood a group of kokoni, ghosts of the gold camp’s dead men, and at the fore was the big one with the yellow hair.
They were as bright and vivid as if they were alive, dressed in fine burial clothing. When they waved and shouted at him, they seemed as substantial as the trees or the rocks or the trout in the stream.
But that couldn’t be. He’d seen their blood. He’d seen their broken bodies. They were dead. What did their ghosts want with him?
The kokoni began crossing the rocks over the creek, and Sakote flexed his fingers around his fishing spear, even though he knew earthly weapons were useless against spirits.
Running was an option. He thought about it for one panicked heartbeat. But deep inside, he knew The Great Spirit was testing him. And though he felt as if his soul had left him, he still lived in this world. As long as he did, the kokoni couldn’t harm him. So he stood fast...
Until they came close enough to touch, close enough to smell. Then the big, yellow-haired man grabbed his arm in one solid fist and pointed a gun at his head. And Sakote knew then they were no kokoni.
Hintsuli was panting so hard when he ran up to his mother in a scramble of rocks that she could barely understand his jabbering. But the moment she heard the words "Sakote" and "willa," she knew the time of confrontation had come.
She’d foreseen it, just as she’d foreseen the coming of the white eagle who would steal her first son’s heart. Now it was time for the worlds of the Konkow and the white man to come together.
She dried Hintsuli’s tears with her thumbs, rocking him as she had when he was a baby.
It was like making a basket, she thought, weaving the two worlds together. If your heart was pure and happy, the sedge and the redbud would make a fine vessel to hold all the bounty of the seasons to come. But if your spirit was troubled, if there was hate in your soul...
After a moment, she nudged Hintsuli up off her lap. He was, after all, too big a boy to cry at his mother’s knee. She would speak to her husband now about Sakote, and he would speak to the elders. But before she did, she would go to the woman’s hubo and ask for Wonomi’s guidance. She would ask The Great Spirit to grant them wisdom and patience, both the Konkow and the willa.
Mattie wiped a sweaty palm across her damp forehead and sagged back down onto the lumpy straw mattress of her new abode. So far she’d kept down a few bites of the stale soda biscuits Amos had left her, but she didn’t dare try anything else. She cupped her head in her hands and waited for the nausea to pass.
She wondered if the miners suspected. Of course, she’d known from the first sign of sickness what ailed her. She’d seen a maid at Hardwicke House go through the same misery. Uncle Ambrose had eventually let the maid go because she didn’t have a proper husband.
Here, she supposed it made no difference. After all, in California, half the men were criminals of some kind, and most of the women were soiled doves. The miners were hardly qualified to turn their noses up at her, even if she informed them she had no plans to marry.
How could she marry? Her heart belonged to only one man. She knew that now. As long as she lived, she’d never feel the things she’d felt for Sakote with anyone else. She’d never love another. She’d never wed another. Even if it meant her child would grow up fatherless.
She didn’t plan to tell Sakote. Ever. It would serve no purpose. There was talk among the Konkows that Sakote might one day be the headman of his people. The last thing he needed was the added burden of a child, especially the half-breed kin to a hudesi.
Still, all she could think about between bouts of nausea and moments of melancholy was how she carried in her womb a piece of her beloved savage. The baby would have his hair or his eyes or his beautiful amber skin, and it would be as if Sakote were with her...always.
The scuffle of boots on the porch interrupted her thoughts. Someone knocked.
"Just a moment." She brushed her hair back from her face, took a few shallow breaths, and rose on shaky legs to open the sagging door.
Her mouth dropped open. A dozen miners stood on the porch. To a man, they were scrubbed clean, dressed in their Sunday best, as groomed and grim as undertakers. Even Granny Cooper wore a mauve muslin skirt over her miner’s boots. Zeke stood at the fore. His beard was trimmed into a neat point, and he carried his droopy hat formally upon his arm.
"Now, Miss Mattie, before you get all weepy on us," he said, "me and the boys want you to know we ain’t gonna take no for an answer." Before she could ask him what she might say no to, he produced from behind his back a garment fashioned out of pale blue satin. "Granny’s been savin’ this in a trunk for her boys."
Mattie raised a brow. It hardly looked like something fit for a boy.
"She said you could wear it for the weddin’ on account of the two of you bein’ friends and ladies and all."
And then Mattie realized. For days now, Zeke and Granny had been formally courting. They must have decided, in the slapdash manner of the Wild West, to tie the knot today. And knowing Mattie’s dearth of proper attire, they were loaning her a gown for the occasion. She was touched.
And she was happy for them, truly she was. But when she thought about the two of them joining hands and hearts in sweet wedded bliss, it made her remember her own unhappy plight. The smile she gave them was shaky, and she caught her lower lip in her teeth, biting back the well of tears that wanted to pour out.
"She don’t like it," Granny muttered.
"No, it’s lovely." Mattie blinked back the moisture from her eyes, cursing the condition that brought weeping on so readily and bruised her emotions as easily as an apple.
She took the garment graciously and held it up. The style was probably forty years out of date. It was a formal gown, straight and slim, with a low-dipping neckline, ribbon at the high waist, short puffed sleeves, and bows around the hem. It was hardly suitable attire for a gold camp and terribly out of fashion.
"I’d be honored to wear it," she said.
"You go on now and change," Zeke told her. "We’ll wait for you."
The gown was too long, and one or the ot
her of the shoulders kept slipping. Mattie managed to cinch the ribbon tightly enough under her bosom to keep the thing on, but there was little she could do about the hem trailing on the ground. She wished she’d had time to pin her hair up properly, but she could already hear impatient boots on the porch, so she smoothed the stray curls as best she could, and opened the door.
"Well, now," Zeke said, nodding in approval, "you look mighty fine, Miss Mattie, purty as a bluebell." He offered her his elbow.
She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, grateful at least that her stomach had decided to grant her a respite as he escorted her along the main avenue of Paradise Bar.
The rest of the men were gathered in the copse of trees they’d used for a church that first Sunday after Mattie had arrived. Rows of benches and stools split the congregation neatly in half. A stranger in a black suit with a preacher’s collar stood behind the makeshift pulpit, thumbing through a Bible. When she arrived, the miners set up a commotion, coming to their feet and doffing their hats. She straightened her spine a little more, wishing now that she’d taken the time to pin up those loose strands of her hair.
Zeke led her down the aisle, right up to the preacher, but then he left her standing there and seated himself in the front row. Mattie frowned. The preacher smiled broadly at her out of a face so shiny it looked like it had been scrubbed clean of sin.
"Dearly beloved," he began, "we’re gathered here today to join these two in the holy bonds of matrimony..."
Mattie blinked. There must be some mistake. Heavens, the groom was sitting down, and the bride was nowhere to be...
Her eyes grew wide. Suddenly everything fell into place. Zeke and Granny weren’t tying the knot. It was her wedding. The men must have discovered her delicate condition, and one of them had offered to make her a decent woman.
Vote Then Read: Volume III Page 125