Vote Then Read: Volume III

by Aleatha Romig

  She swayed on her feet.

  Who? Who had volunteered? Not Zeke. His heart belonged to Granny. Swede already had a wife and children. Frenchy stood with the congregation to the right of her. Beside him, Tom gave her a wink.

  She was just about to announce in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of being forced into marriage when she heard a ruckus from the very back of the crowd, and then the ominous click of a gun being cocked. Whispers spiraled forward like an ocean wave. Her stomach flipped over once as she slowly turned to see the groom.

  He was stunning in black. Or perhaps it was the way his teeth flashed fiercely in contrast as he fought off the four men restraining him, the way his ebony hair tumbled like a waterfall over his shoulders into the matching pool of the black coat. The white shirt, too tight to button all the way to the neck, looked like snow against his dark skin. They hadn’t managed to get him into boots, so his feet stuck out bare beneath the hem of the black trousers.

  Sakote was furious. That was clear. But there was something undeniably alluring about all that savagery contained in the confines of gentlemen’s clothing. For a moment, Mattie’s heart leaped, and she forgot he was here against his will.

  That fact was made very plain to her in the next moment as Swede raised the cocked pistol to Sakote’s jaw.

  CHAPTER 28

  Sakote sucked air in hard through his nose and stiffened. The barrel of the pistol felt cold under his chin. Soon death would leave him cold all over.

  He didn’t understand these whites. Why did they hold a gun to him? What had he done? Why did they dress him in their clothing when they only meant to kill him?

  He wasn’t afraid of death. He felt half dead already. But he feared for his people. Hintsuli had apparently alerted the tribe of his abduction, for even now, unbeknownst to the white men, Konkow warriors surrounded the camp, hiding in the bushes where the willa couldn’t see them. If the miners shot Sakote, they would start a bloody war.

  The white men hauled him forward toward a shady copse of trees where the miners gathered for some strange death ritual. At first, he struggled against them, but when they dragged him between the back row of seats, he froze.

  There at the end of the path stood his kulem, Mati, even more beautiful than his merciful memory recalled.

  "No," she said with her mouth, though no sound came out.

  "Now, Miss Mattie," the big yellow-haired man said, "there’s no call for panic. I’m sure the Injun’ll do the right thing, won’t you?"

  Sakote didn’t understand.

  "He doesn’t understand," Mati said. The blue dress made her look like a delicate lupine, and his heart ached when he noticed she still wore the moccasins he’d made for her.

  "Beggin’ your pardon, Miss Mattie," the big man said quietly, his skin reddening, "but if he understands how to put a papoose in your belly, he ought to understand well enough what he’s got to do about it."

  Sakote was confused. It was a strange word, "papoose."

  Mati walked slowly to him. Sakote held his breath. He could feel her magic, her power, even though she didn’t touch him, even though she didn’t even look at him, but instead approached the yellow-haired man beside him, placing her hand on his chest. Her scent stirred his nostrils. She smelled like the meadow, young and sweet.

  "He doesn’t understand, Mr. Swede. He thinks we’re already married, that I’m his kulem, his wife."

  "No," Sakote countered, gazing past her. That much he understood. Mati had left him, which meant they weren’t married anymore. "Not anymore."

  "Now, look, boy, I’m warnin’ you," the big man said. "Either you do the honorable thing, or I’ll have to plug you full of lead."

  He raised the pistol to Sakote’s temple, and at once, twelve Konkow warriors stepped out to surround the white men, legs braced wide, bows drawn.

  "Holy shit!" This came from the man with the big book.

  Sakote didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t let his brothers shoot the white men. It would only bring more willa to seek revenge upon his people. But neither could he force Mati to be his kulem if she didn’t want him.

  "Sakote, please!" Mati cried. "Tell them to put their bows away! Don’t let your people kill them!"

  Mati’s words tore at his heart. She cared more about the miners than she did the Konkows. He translated the message to his Konkow brothers, but they didn’t lower their bows.

  "Mr. Swede! You can’t force him to do this," Mati said. "You can’t. I left him of my own free will."

  The big man frowned. "But I thought, we all thought..."

  "Mademoiselle, you are not in love with the savage?"

  "Oh, for the love o’ Saint Peter..."

  "I am," Mati said. "That is, I was, but..."

  "And that’s his papoose you’re carryin’, ain’t it?" Swede asked.

  Sakote clamped his jaw closed. What was this "papoose" they kept speaking of?

  Mati hung her head. "Yes, but I don’t...I can’t..."

  "Look, ma’am," the big man muttered nervously, "we can’t stand around jawin’ all day, not with all these Injuns breathin’ down our necks."

  Sakote shared the man’s anxiety and impatience.

  "I’m thinkin’ maybe you need to have a little powwow, just the two of you," the man whispered, glancing at Sakote. Sakote could see the glow of sweat beneath the man’s nose.

  "My warriors won’t lower their bows until you put away your guns," Sakote said.

  The big man licked his lips, and then nodded. "Nice and easy now. We don’t want nobody to get hurt."

  The white men slowly lowered their guns and released him. They backed away to leave him alone with Mati. Sakote called out to his brothers to disarm. This time they complied.

  When the miners were out of hearing, he asked her, "What do they want from me?"

  "They want you to marry me."

  He only stared at her for a moment, unable to comprehend her words. "They want... But why?"

  "They...” She bit her lip. “They’re afraid I’ll be lonely without you."

  Sakote frowned. Mati was hiding something. She wasn’t good at deception. When they played the hand game together, he always knew which hand held the marked bone, for she couldn’t keep the secret from her eyes.

  Sakote, however, could hide his emotions. Mati had no idea how her closeness tortured him now, how the sound of her voice made his heart quicken, how the scent of her made his man’s-knife swell with longing. "And what do you want?" he asked her, pretending he didn’t care how she answered.

  "I...nothing, Sakote. Nothing."

  She crushed him with her words. He flattened his eyes against the pain, and his words tasted as bitter as willow bark tea. "Tell your people to find you another husband, a white man to keep you company, so you won’t have to live among savages."

  Her eyes filled like a spring swollen with winter rain. "But I don’t want to marry anyone else." Her lips trembled. "I’ll never love...anyone else."

  Sakote blew out a long breath, utterly perplexed. Noa had often told him that a woman had wit and wiles to confound even Henno, Trickster Coyote. Sakote saw this now. He looked to the sky, hoping Wonomi would counsel him. He didn’t. "But you said you didn’t want to be my kulem." Maybe, Sakote thought, he could unravel the truth from Mati the same way he untangled his fishing line, a bit at a time.

  Her face crumpled like a dying flower, and it took all his willpower not to gather her to him and let her wilt against his chest.

  "I can’t, Sakote."

  What did she mean? She’d been his kulem once. She’d invited him to sleep with her in her hubo. They’d lived as husband and wife. And they’d made love—sweet, spirit-bonding love...

  "I can’t do that to you," she said.

  Sakote tried to understand. Mati could shatter his heart and torment his soul by leaving him in the middle of the night, but she couldn’t mend his wounds and return joy to his spirit by agreeing to be his kulem again. Noa was right. Women
were a riddle impossible to solve.

  "Why?"

  Mattie knew there were a dozen sound reasons she couldn’t marry Sakote. But at the moment, gazing into his midnight black eyes, catching his scent of smoke and mint and deerskin, remembering the warmth of his body shielding her from the evening air while they made love beneath the pines, she couldn’t think of a single one.

  She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed him. The sketch she’d nailed to her cabin wall to wake up to every morning, the one memento she’d taken from the village, the drawing of Sakote on that first day, she now realized looked nothing like the real Sakote. He was no longer the angry young savage she’d drawn. No, he was far more complicated. It was as if she’d rendered only the surface of a pool then, and now she knew what lay beneath.

  "Why, Mati?"

  "Because..." She owed him the truth. She swallowed hard. "Because I don’t belong with your people, Sakote. I’ve seen how they look at me. I’m kin to a killer, a...what do you call it?"

  "Hudesi."

  "You see? I can’t even speak your language properly. I can’t leach acorns or tan deerhide or even weave a basket. I’m just a useless white woman who brings menace to the tribe and steals the Konkow’s best hunter from them."

  "I would have fought for you," he said quietly.

  "I couldn’t let you." She raised her hand. She wanted to touch him, to take his hand, to stroke his cheek, but she didn’t dare or she’d dissolve into tears. "Don’t you see, Sakote? I can’t take you away from your village, from your people. You belong there. You belong to them. And I don’t."

  Sakote was silent a long while. He looked past her toward his warriors, and then let his breath out in a soft sigh. "I don’t belong to the Konkows. I belong to The Great Spirit. You belong to The Great Spirit. It is he who has chosen this path for us, this path between two worlds."

  His words hung in the air between them. How simple they were. It was one of the things Mattie particularly liked about him. And yet, though he spoke plainly, there was a wealth of meaning in what he said.

  Was it true? she wondered, her heart racing at the idea. All her life, she’d tried to belong. But what did that mean? For her, it had meant a lifetime of following someone else’s customs and rules and wishes. But that wasn’t what her parents had taught her, and it wasn’t what Sakote affirmed now.

  Maybe he was right. Maybe she didn’t need to belong. Maybe she, too, belonged to The Great Spirit, the one who’d made her who she was. Maybe that was what her parents had meant by being true to herself.

  The possibility left her lightheaded. She staggered, and Sakote caught her arm. Instantly, bows and rifles were leveled at their heads.

  "It’s all right," Mattie gasped, clutching to him while the dizziness passed. "I’m all right."

  When the bystanders had lowered their weapons again, she looked into his eyes, her beloved Sakote’s scowling eyes, and her heart filled with hope.

  "Where would we live?" she murmured.

  His countenance softened at once, and she saw again the man who’d carried her into the stream and told her stories of Oleli and taught her to hunt yellow-jackets.

  "We will live on the land, wherever the path leads," he told her. "Wonomi will guide us."

  Mattie compressed her lips, trying not to cry. "Oh, Sakote, I’ve missed you so much."

  "My heart, too, has been empty."

  Unmindful of the witnesses around them and unable to refrain from touching him any longer, she placed her hand along the crisp edge of his white shirt where it lay unbuttoned, resting her fingers over the place his heart resided. Before she could have second thoughts, before she could reason her way out of the decision, she had to ask him a question.

  "Sakote," she blurted out, "will you marry me?"

  One side of his mouth slowly curved up into a beguiling smile as his gaze moved first languidly over her form and then down at his own ill-fitting formal attire. "Yes, kulem, I will marry you."

  With a laugh of delight, she threw herself so hard at Sakote that she almost knocked the breath from him. But he didn’t seem to mind. He hugged her to him, and his deep chuckle resonated in the ear she pressed to his chest.

  A great whoop rang out from both factions of observers, the miners and the warriors, and when the men of Paradise Bar dignified their response with polite applause, the Konkows followed suit.

  Mattie giggled and pressed a swift kiss to Sakote’s cheek. Then she looped her arm through his and tugged him toward the makeshift church.

  It was an interesting ceremony, with miners in their Sunday best on one side and half-naked Konkows on the other. Sakote recited the vows with great solemnity and pride, and it was all Mattie could do, gazing up at his incredibly handsome face, his tawny skin and snowy teeth, his obsidian-dark eyes filled with adoration, not to stammer over her own words.

  He seemed particularly pleased with the custom of sharing a kiss once they were declared man and wife. As she dissolved into his embrace, the Konkows started up a chant, doubtless a victory song, which was almost drowned out by the gleeful hollering of the miners. Then Sakote grinned, and Mattie knew at last she was exactly where she belonged.

  Sakote licked his fingers, sticky with juice. His kulem was right. He loved peach pie. And so did his Konkow brothers, who enthusiastically scooped up bits of the sweet fruit and crunchy crust that the miners offered them.

  He was not, however, comfortable in the white man’s clothing. The coat restricted his bow arm, and the buttons on the shirt seemed ready to burst, especially as he filled himself up on the miners’ wedding feast. He felt like a lizard, in need of a new skin. In fact, the only reason he continued to wear the garments was because Mati, perched on his lap, kept looking at him with desire in her eyes, running her palm across the weave of the coat and slipping her fingers between the buttons to touch the skin of his chest.

  He swallowed another bite of pie, trying to distract himself from the other hunger raging through his body. How long, he wondered, did a wedding feast continue? He glanced at the sky. The sun was still well above the hills. Would the miners notice if the honored guests stole off into the woods?

  Beside him, Mati gasped. "Hintsuli!" she cried happily, jumping up from his knee.

  Out of the forest, they emerged—his little brother, his mother, his sister and Noa, and the women of the village. Sakote rose to greet them.

  The yellow-haired man—Swede, Mati called him—scratched his head. "Well, I’ll be damned."

  As always, Hintsuli, cautious as Bear charging into the stream, raced toward Mati, giggling and falling into her embrace, merrily burrowing his face in her skirts. Beyond Hintsuli, Sakote’s mother walked sedately in her finest deerskin cloak.

  All around him, the miners stood like rabbits frozen in the stare of a wolf. He lifted one corner of his mouth into a smile. Surely they’d seen Konkow women before. Perhaps it was only that they’d never seen so many in one place, or maybe it was that other thing Noa talked about—the way the Konkow women didn’t cover their breasts—that disturbed them.

  "My son’s spirit is at peace?" said his mother by way of greeting.

  Sakote smiled. "They’ve made Mati my kulem again in the white way."

  His mother studied the faces of the miners. "These are good willa?" she asked.

  "They are good willa."

  The other white woman of Paradise Bar, Granny, trudged up behind him, grumbling like an old she-bear. "Don’t you boys got any manners at all?" She nudged him aside and stretched her hand out toward Sakote’s mother. "How-de-do, ma’am. My name’s Beatrice Elizabeth Cooper, but most folks call me Granny."

  Sakote told his mother to give the woman her hand. Her eyes went wide as Granny pumped her arm vigorously up and down, but when the white woman finally let go, there was a twinkle in her gaze to match the stars.

  "Come on, boys," Granny brayed. "Introduce yourselves."

  His mother learned the hand-shaking ritual quickly, and some of the br
aver women of the village joined in as well. And though they couldn’t decipher the words of the miners, they understood well their hospitality when the white men offered them boiled ham with beans, oyster soup, and what was left of the peach pie.

  The Konkows had brought no food to contribute, but a few of the women gave strings of clamshells and feather ear ornaments to the miners.

  The Konkow warriors, swiftly learning the custom Noa called toasting, grew more and more companionable, and soon they started up a hand game. The man named Frenchy took a keen interest in the game, though he lost much to the warriors, gambling away a brown glass bottle, six matches, and a small nugget of gold.

  When the sun went to sleep, the miners built a huge fire. The man with the small black hat, Tom, began to make a song, blowing into a strange yalalu made of metal. Another miner joined him, making music upon a wooden box fitted with strings like a hunting bow. The sound was wondrous, and soon the people of his village started dancing and spinning before the fire. Noa and Towani joined their arms and began the skipping, turning dance of the whites, and before long, the white men and the Konkows danced together until they were breathless.

  Because no celebration was complete without storytelling, Domem began to tell a Konkow tale. Sakote translated for the miners. He told the story of the foolish Konkow woman who abandoned her baby to chase after a butterfly. The butterfly turned into a man who led her to a valley filled with butterflies, and she became dazzled chasing them. The man abandoned her there, and she was lost forever in the valley.

  Not to be outdone, Tom stood up and told a story filled with magical creatures—tiny bearded men with pots of gold and great lizards that breathed fire. Hintsuli had never sat so quietly for so long.

  Sakote stifled a yawn, and his mother, sitting across the dwindling fire, smiled at him. She leaned over and spoke to her husband. The headman nodded, then rose to speak.

  Sakote translated his message of thanks and peace to the white men. Then the Konkows left Paradise Bar as silently as they had come.