“That makes nine of ’em,” Levi announced in a harsh whisper as he stood beside Bass, watching the others dance and twirl, hearing them sing and shout their utter joy. “Let the devil do as he pleases with ’em now!”
Sensing that corona of warmth washing over him from the rising flames, Scratch turned to gaze at the eastern walls of Fort Union, thankful he did not find his wife’s face among those watching this funeral pyre.
But despite those waves of heat, Bass shuddered with the subzero chill, staring at the charred bodies as they were consumed.
“Revenge,” he told Levi, “be the cup a man best drinks cold.”
18
It brought some rest to a place inside her heart to return to her people. Two summers had passed while Waits-by-the-Water had been away, and a winter spent in that southern land of the Arapaho.
Days ago she and her husband had turned south from the white man’s fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. It had not been a happy time for her there. So many half-breeds and Assiniboine, she never felt welcome. Better that a Crow woman stay safe inside the walls of that fort until Ti-tuzz could take them back across the Missouri and ride for Absaroka.
As they began their journey south, the weather turned mild for many days, but winter had resumed its fury by the time they found the village sprawled among the cottonwoods towering on a neck of land along the southern bank of the Yellowstone.
“It was near this place where we first talked,” she said as they halted to gaze at the welcome sight of those brown lodges.
Drawing in a long breath of the cold air scented with wood smoke and the fresh dung of hundreds of ponies, he looked about at the surrounding river bluffs—then gazed at her and smiled. “Yes. I remember. Now I want us to be even happier this winter than we were when we realized we needed each other.”
Over their seasons together Waits had grown even more patient with how slow he sometimes was to put his thoughts together in her tongue. She knew Magpie would have it easier than either of her parents, growing up with both languages spoken to her as they were.
Looking up, she found him staring at her still, his eyes twinkling. Then she realized he was watching her hand. She had been rubbing her huge belly unconsciously, thinking of this child to come.
“It will be born this winter, yes?” he asked.
With a nod she answered, “I think sometime in the next moon, perhaps.”
Urging his pony over beside hers, Bass tore off a blanket mitten and stuffed his bare hand beneath her buffalo robe, laying it upon that swollen belly beneath her capote. “You are so big—how many little calves do you have in there?”
She giggled. “I think there is only one, but it will be a big child.”
“A boy?” and his eyes sparkled.
“Perhaps,” she said. “If it is a boy, you will not forget your daughter?”
Bass twisted round to gaze back at the girl who sat behind him, clinging to his elk-hide coat. Patting the child’s leg beneath that half robe he had wrapped securely around her, he said, “This little one? I could never forget what she means to me! Tell me, daughter: by spring when the snows melt, will you be ready to learn to ride on your own?”
“Ride a pony by myself?” she asked in Crow.
“Yes,” he answered her in English, the way many of their conversations took place: mixing the two tongues together while they conversed, as if it were as natural as could be. “I think you will be old enough to learn, Magpie.”
“How old was my mother?” she asked in Crow.
Bass turned to look at Waits. “When did you have your first lesson on a pony by yourself?”
“My father …” Then Waits suddenly felt the sharp ball of sadness spring to life again in the middle of her chest. Of an instant her eyes were welling up. Waits barely got the words out of her mouth. “He taught me when I was almost f-five summers.”
“Should we come here to be with your people, to see your family?”
She nodded and wiped the tears from her cheek, trying bravely to smile. “It hurt when I remembered my father.” And she looked at Magpie sitting behind her father. “Remembered how he held me on his lap, how he smelled when he hugged me … I never want Magpie to forget anything about her father.”
“What?” he protested in English with a grin. “I’m not going anywhere! I don’t plan to die for a long, long time!”
But she knew a man never did.
It always came suddenly, unexpectedly—as it had with her father’s death in Blackfoot country. And Ti-tuzz could have died last spring when those Arapaho attacked him. Waits had learned about that when she’d discovered the two scalps and the weapons hidden among some green pelts he’d brought back to their camp one cold spring day. And he could easily have been killed when the Frenchmen and half-breeds had fought outside the big fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone.
How many times would she say good-bye to him before she could finally accept that he might not return one day?
Waits looked into his face as he laid his hand on her arm.
He said, “It is good to come back to your people.”
“I am happy to see my mother.”
“My heart is glad to bring you back here,” he said, looping his arm around Magpie to pull the small girl over his hip and into his lap where she quickly gripped on to the round pommel with her tiny blanket mittens.
“Let me have the reins, popo?”
“Here,” and he laid them inside those tiny mittens. Then he turned to Waits, saying, “My family is very far away. It has been a long, long time since I saw them—when I was a very young man and ran away from them. I do not think my father and mother are still alive. Maybe my brothers, or sister, still live. But that family did not want me to belong to them very much, so I left them long ago. Now you have become my family.”
“Me too, popo?” the girl asked in his tongue, pushing back against him.
“Yes, Magpie. You, and even your little brother too.”
“My little brother? Where is little brother?” she asked as she peered on one side of the horse, then the other.
“Perhaps your little brother who is hiding in your mother’s belly will come out soon so you can play,” he told Magpie.
“When, Mother?”
Waits-by-the-Water looked at him with mock disapproval and scolded, “See what you have started, husband? Now she thinks I am carrying her playmate inside me!”
“It will be good to give Magpie a little brother,” he told her as they put their animals in motion once more. “To have a family that loves one another is a good thing. I cannot remember having much of that. My mother worked hard, cooked for us and sewed our clothes. And my father worked very hard too, brought us food, kept us warm and dry—but I do not remember being touched by them, do not remember being held.” He squeezed Magpie there at the end of his words as his voice cracked.
“It is important that a child is held and touched, especially by its father,” Waits declared.
His eyes brimmed with moisture. “I know you must miss He-Who-Is-Gone very much. I can never take his place in your heart, nor will I try, but—I never want you to forget that I will protect you, provide for you, watch over you till the end of my days, woman. That is my promise.”
She felt stunned, sensing how his words made her heart pound faster in surprise as she turned to look at him. “Ti-tuzz, those are words I never knew a man would say to a woman.”
“Are you silly, wife? Surely when a man falls in love with a woman, he tells her … no, he tells her family and all her people that he promises to care for her until he can no longer watch over her.”
Wagging her head, Waits said, “No, there is no promise like that made between a man and woman who marry among my people.”
“What do they promise each other?” he asked.
For a moment she thought, then finally shrugged. “I have never known anyone to make a vow to another when they want to live with that person. A man may buy a bride, or a man can
kidnap another man’s wife and make her his own, but most times among my people, a man and woman just decide they will start living together.”
“Is that what we did?” he asked. “When you came with Josiah to look for me after I left your village with a very sad heart?”
“Yes. When Josiah came to find you, I knew what I wanted. And I believed you wanted me. You never had to say any words to make me want to search for you after you ran away from my village. When I saw how glad you were that I had come to find you—I knew I had found my husband.”
“Waits-by-the-Water?”
“Yes?”
“Would it be better for a man who wants a wife to give presents to that woman’s family?”
She looked at him in the cold wind, studied the frost that formed an icy ring that clung to the graying hair around his mouth. Softly she said, “Some bring gifts to the woman’s father.”
He stared ahead, not looking at her for some moments, then asked, “What if that woman’s father is no longer alive?”
She swallowed hard. “I am not sure, but I believe the man would give presents to the eldest son in the family—asking to marry the woman.”
Waits’s breath came hard in her chest, her heart was beating so fast as she studied his face.
Finally Bass looked at her again. “I have decided something, bu’a. It is time that your people hear me make my vow to you. I think your family should hear me promise myself to you.”
She could barely whisper, “Husband.”
“You are my family, Waits-by-the-Water.” His eyes softened, brimming again. “I will go to your brother. I will take him gifts. And I will ask his permission to be your husband … to take you as my wife.”
Titus couldn’t remember the last time he felt his knees rattle this bad. He was sure the others would know, that they would laugh behind their hands at this white man shaking with fear to get married.
Bass glanced to his left. At his elbow stood Pretty On Top. To his right stood Windy Boy. He was relieved when the young warriors offered to stand with him outside the lodge where Waits-by-the-Water was among her mother and friends, preparing for this ceremony.
Surrounding the three of them were more than fifteen hundred Crow, talking and laughing, come here to witness what Waits had described to everyone as a promising. Women waited patiently, having donned their very best, men stood stoic and expectant in their ceremonial dress, while the children darted between legs, chasing after dogs, throwing clumps of icy snow at one another, giggling, diving, sliding at the feet of their elders.
In less than a month he would reach his forty-third birthday. Which meant that Christmas was almost upon them. Titus fondly remembered his first Christmas with her down in Taos—the warmth of all those flickering candles, the fragrant smells drifting from Rosa Kinkead’s kitchen, such soft music from the Mexican’s cathedral and their nativity procession through the small village … then came the new year and his tearing himself away from her to travel far and long in hopes of putting old ghosts to rest.
But these people did not celebrate such annual events, nor did they have any similar religious festivals to mark the progress of each year beyond the tobacco ceremony of their women. Instead, these Crow celebrated war, perhaps the birth or naming of a child, maybe even the success of a war party or pony raid, nothing but that tobacco planting ceremony to track the march of the seasons the way the white man did.
From beyond the far edge of the crowd came a growing murmur. He turned to watch the witnesses part for a group of men resplendent in their very finest war clothing.
“Sore Lips,” whispered Pretty On Top. “Strikes-in-Camp’s war clan.”
As more than twenty of them emerged onto the open ground that surrounded Scratch, he glanced at their faces, finding each man painted, feathers and stuffed birds tied in his hair, an animal head lashed onto his own with a rawhide whang tied under the chin. All but one of them carried a tall staff—some crooked, some straight—but each bearing feathers tied at right angles to the poles, wrapped in otter fur, arrayed with enemy scalps.
Only Strikes-in-Camp—who stood at their center—remained empty-handed. He crossed his arms, looked at the white man, and waited.
“Now,” Pretty On Top whispered.
Scratch looked over at the young warrior. “The presents?”
Pretty On Top nodded.
Wanting to ask that handsome young warrior to wish him luck, Titus suddenly realized the Crow had no concept of luck, much less the crazy notion of one person passing on that luck to another. Instead, he turned to his right and stepped up to Turns Plenty who held the halters of two ponies. The old man handed the white man those halters, then stepped over to join Pretty On Top.
With his heart beginning to pound, Bass started for the far side of the open ground at the center of that huge crowd suddenly growing breathlessly quiet, so quiet Scratch could hear the whine of his winter moccasins on the old, icy snow, hear the slow plodding of each one of the eight hooves with that pair of ponies behind him. Somehow he made it across the arena at the center of the village and stopped a few feet from Strikes-in-Camp.
“These horses are for you,” he said as confidently as he could muster it, having practiced and rehearsed the words over and over the past two weeks, to get them just right for this day.
Pointing to the scalp hanging from the halter beneath the jaw of each pony, Bass continued. “And these scalps—they belonged to the Arapaho warriors who rode these ponies against me last spring. The horses and the scalps of two brave warriors I now give to the mighty warrior I ask to become my brother-in-law.”
Strikes-in-Camp took a few steps forward, moving around one of the ponies, then came back between the pair, lifting a leg here, touching a flank there, staring into the eyes of these gifts. When he turned and walked back to where he stood in the midst of his Sore Lip warrior society, Strikes-in-Camp recrossed his arms.
Anxious, Bass flicked a glance at Pretty On Top. The young warrior made a quick gesture with his hand.
Scratch turned back to Turns Plenty, then stepped up to Waits-by-the-Water’s brother and held out the halters to those two ponies.
For a long moment the man stared at Bass, then looked over the white man’s shoulder at Pretty On Top, Windy Boy, and Turns Plenty behind the trapper. Finally Strikes-in-Camp took the halters, held them a heartbeat, and passed them to one of the painted warriors who stood beside him. The man started away with the two Arapaho ponies.
By the time Strikes-in-Camp recrossed his arms and stared again at him, Bass realized he could barely hear—his heart pounded so loudly in his ears while he started to turn slowly around on those shaky legs of his, reminding himself he must not stumble, must not fall there in front of her people.
Less than three steps brought him back to Windy Boy, who held out his left hand. In it he clutched the halters to another two ponies. Quietly clucking for the pair to follow, Bass slowly started back to Strikes-in-Camp, stopping again a few feet from the warrior and his Sore Lip comrades.
“I bring more gifts to Strikes-in-Camp,” he said in a studied cadence with the Crow words. “Two more horses.”
“Two more horses,” Strikes-in-Camp repeated, not budging, moving only his eyes as he looked from the white man to stare at one of the ponies.
Turning, Bass pulled the oxblood blanket from its back and held it before Strikes-in-Camp as a soft murmur came from the crowd. “This will keep your wife warm on those nights when you take the warpath against our enemies.”
Strikes-in-Camp brushed the blanket with his fingers, lifted a corner, inspecting it as if to ascertain that it truly was new.
“Two moons ago I traded for it,” Titus explained, scrambling for these words not in his planned script. “From the Crow trader—Tullock—at the mouth of the Tongue River.”
Eventually Strikes-in-Camp took the red blanket from Bass’s arm and passed it back to one of his warrior society. “Yes, it will keep my wife warm when I am not with her.”
Bass thought he saw a little softening in the man’s eyes. His heart leaped. For days now since he and Waits-by-the-Water had discussed this ceremony with her mother, Titus had steadily grown more apprehensive. From the beginning Strikes-in-Camp had frostily objected. He had even refused to talk to his mother about the white man’s wanting to ask for his sister in marriage.
Three more times Waits had prevailed upon her mother to ask Strikes-in-Camp, hoping to wear him down. But each time he had grown a little more insolent. Then, yesterday, both of them had gone together to speak to him.
Waits had returned alone to pull back the flap to their shelter and clumsily squatted on the bedrobes. “Strikes-in-Camp says he will take your gifts.”
Titus hadn’t been sure he’d heard the words correctly at first. So he asked, hesitantly, “Your brother said he would give you away to be my wife?”
Then she was smiling not just with her mouth, but with her whole face, flinging her body against his as the tears gushed down her cheeks. He wasn’t sure which of them cried more at that moment, but yesterday had lifted much of the gray pall that had settled about him since their arrival in Absaroka.
“But I don’t understand—he refused three times before,” Bass said, wagging his head, happy and confused all at once. “What made him—”
“I reminded him that you and I were already married in the way of our people, that we didn’t need any ceremony,” she told him, gripping one of his hands in both of hers while Magpie snuggled up next to them both. “Then I reminded him that you had no responsibility to ask anyone for me when I had no father.”
“What did he say?”
“He scolded me again that I should not have given myself to a white man.”
Bass gazed down at her belly, touched it, and said, “It’s a little late for that now.”
She grinned radiantly. “Then I told him you wanted to do your promising before my family, before all my people—whether or not he gave me to you.”
“You told him I was going to promise myself to you before all your people no matter if he was there or not?”
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