Victor glared at Billie and asked, How could he be a loser if he’s prince of the world?
He’s only prince of the underworld. Of evil. Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’? You don’t want to be tempting everyone to do bad things, do you?
Billie grabbed his whetstone and sharpened his knife.
Victor screwed up his forehead, thinking, before he said, It depends. Sometimes you have to do bad things to make things right again. He looked at his chain. Victor had planned to use it to tie up Billie. But now that he was there, he realized how foolish he’d been. Billie was a man. Victor could never overpower him. He was just a boy trying to be a man. Trying to be scary. It wasn’t working.
Victor dropped the chain and faced Billie. It’s about Curva. Me and Dad don’t like her hanging around you or your kind.
Billie dropped the knife on the bench he was sitting on and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands dangling. You don’t, eh. What about Curva? Doesn’t she have a say?
Victor stared at the knife, wishing he had one like it. Billie’s initials were carved into the handle. Victor said, We have first claim on her.
Billie hooted. Have you told her that?
She doesn’t listen to me.
Billie picked up the knife and started whittling again. He glanced up and said, Well, she doesn’t listen to me either. Billie hated the anguished look that crossed Victor’s face. No wonder the boy wanted to be known as Satan. Victor hadn’t been victorious after all. Here Victor had gone on a mission to rescue the woman who had been like a mother to him and he’d failed.
Billie didn’t have the heart to tell Victor that neither Billie nor Henry nor Victor had any claim on Curva. She had her own way of doing things, and there wasn’t a man around who could keep her under wraps for long. Billie had figured that out soon enough. As an Indian, he’d become used to leftovers, so he didn’t feel so bad knowing he’d never have her to himself completely. But Sabina spent more time hanging out with him than she did with Curva, eager to learn all she could about the Blackfoot and his art. He had her daughter’s heart, and that counted for something.
Curva & Sabina
On a warm summer day, Curva rode one of her horses to town, arriving breathless. Hair windblown, face flushed, a few drops of sweat on her forehead, she called out Hola and waved at Billie, reining in the horse and swinging one gaucho-clad leg over the saddle before jumping to the ground. I brought lunch, Curva said. She took a large pot from the saddlebag and opened it: Tamales. The real thing!
She carried it to where Billie was working, and the pungent scent of corn and pork and green chilies followed her. The food still warm, the mouthwatering smell of spicy sauce floated on a breeze, finding its way into the pores and nostrils of each person there. It caused Billie and the other men to almost levitate in anticipation. Even the bones quivered, sounding like castanets. Shouting Olé, Curva responded to their rhythms and rotated her hips, practicing a belly-dance move.
Before long she was leading a conga line of workers around the perimeter of the burial ground, tamales temporarily forgotten. Some of the skeletons followed, kicking up dust clouds that swirled behind them like miniature cyclones. The other bones kept up their rhythmic beat. Sabina watched, intrigued by Curva’s ability to enliven the usual routine with her cooking, wine, and high spirits. She could make a party out of any occasion and draw people to herself.
Busy taking photographs, Sabina didn’t join the dancers. But later, after the workers had devoured the tamales and they were all lounging on the ground, soaking up the mid-day sun, Sabina crept close to Curva, wanting to inhale some of her vitality and warmth. She leaned against her mother, who unconsciously embraced the girl, idly stroking her bare arm. Curva said, Bee-lee, you haven’t told me exactly what you’re doing here with the bones!
Sabina stood up and stretched. Billie removed a tobacco pouch and cigarette papers from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette, one eyebrow raised, carefully tucking in all of the loose threads of tobacco. After lighting it, he took a few puffs and said, We do rituals. Re-consecrate the burial ground.
Curva sat with her legs spread out in front of her and asked, What rituals?
Billie said, We make a fire. Spread smoke over the remains. Sing songs in Siksika. He sucked on the cigarette and blew a series of smoke rings that hovered over them before dissolving. Then he chuckled and said, The bones don’t talk back.
Why use smoke? Curva asked.
He shrugged, glanced at her, and said, The smoke from the fire brought people together for meals. Warmth. Storytelling. Their bones remember that. We believe it purifies them.
Curva nodded, remembering the many campfires she had stoked on the trail and how much pleasure they had given her, the smoke a living presence. The fires had stirred something primitive in her. Flames stabbed the dark and constantly changed shape. Mesmerizing. And the fire was alive. It spoke—snapping and crackling and spitting.
Si, I understand, she said.
As for Sabina, her experience with quicksand didn’t slow her down or stop her explorations, though she was now more aware of the emotion fear. The experience of being sucked up by the earth hovered, a ghostly presence waiting to pounce. Occasionally, Sabina thought about the bog that had almost swallowed her. When she did, it held both fear and fascination. She took her camera one day and photographed the area, being careful not to get sucked in again. Still, the possibility of entering the earth stirred her imagination: there could be a whole world under there. She vowed one day to learn more about it.
Sabina also hung out with Billie at the burial ground, photographing the bones. Being the official photographer made her feel important. It also gave her a chance to examine skeletons up close and take pictures of them. Previously, all the skeletons she’d encountered remained clothed in flesh: the farm animals she and Curva had buried were still recognizable as the creatures they had been while alive.
Bones stripped of covering were different. Sabina had to imagine what the person they had supported might have been like. Bones alone were just bones. They didn’t vary all that much. Of course, some were bigger and shaped differently, and the colors weren’t all the same, varying from stark to muddy white, a few having a yellowish tinge. Yet overall, they had the same structure—ribs were ribs no matter what species. The same with hands or feet. Oddly, they didn’t give her nightmares. They seemed natural somehow.
It did amaze her that all of the skeletons held different positions, reminding her of the alphabet. The letters seemed alive to her, twisting themselves into various shapes. So did the bones and the positions they took. It was as if they were trying to say something. She thought her photos might help them to speak.
Sabina’s Mentors
There was much to see and do within Weed’s radius and beyond, especially in the summer when long days free of school constraints presented infinite opportunities for adventure, and the horizon seemed to blend into the sky, offering endless vistas.
Sabina and Victor wondered what lurked past that horizon, to the west in British Columbia, past the distant mountains, longing to visit there one day. They had heard the siblings Ian and Edna MacGregor tell stories, describing a lush landscape that existed on the other side of the Rockies. It was unlike the umber and burnt sierra prairie grasses surrounding Weed. Ian had said oranges hung from trees there, and everything was greener, increasing its appeal to the youngsters.
Books flooded Ian and Edna’s house, piled haphazardly on tables, shelves, bookcases, chairs, beds, the floor. Sabina had never seen so many. All those pages covered with text seemed a little forbidding. Words she hadn’t seen before. Still, she liked looking at the colorful book jackets.
Sabina also liked hearing how Ian and Edna had moved to Weed from Scotland. Their parents had died of a fever that had killed countless Highlanders. A rainbow appeared at their p
arents’ burial. Edna and Ian had thought it was a sign. Look, Edna had said. The other end of the rainbow is pointing to Canada. So they used their inheritance to migrate to Alberta. They had been eligible for a homestead, and the Weed school hired Edna as a teacher.
Ian intrigued Sabina. Tufts of hair fringed his bald spot, and he had a long white beard he stroked as if it were a pet. She liked the way he spoke, the burrs at the edge of his words—their chewy quality. She asked him why he had so many books.
He paused and thought for a minute. I love words, he said. I’m a writer, you know. Children’s books. Like Lewis Carroll. Have you ever heard of him?
She shook her head.
Well, you have now. Every lass should read his book—Alice in Wonderland. I’ll give you a copy to take home with you.
An amateur photographer, Ian also developed photographs for the townspeople, and when he saw Sabina wearing her ever-present camera around her neck, he offered to print her pictures without charge. Once she saw the prints, she noticed that framing the skeletons with her camera gave them importance. The camera lens functioned as a kind of eye, and the way that eye framed the bones elevated them into another category. Instead of just being objects, they now took on a larger significance because they were isolated from their original setting. The photograph also gave them layers of meaning if she were only able to decipher their significance.
She asked Ian what he thought they were saying.
He said, Lass, you’ve got me. They just look like bones.
Disappointed, Sabina hoped Billie could help her get to the bottom of what she was sensing about them.
But Ian MacGregor was valuable in other ways.
On Sabina’s eighth birthday, he took her into his darkroom, a former storeroom, and taught her how to use it. She quickly learned the right way to handle the different chemical washes and got excited every time her images appeared on the negatives. At times, she liked the negatives better than the actual prints. Everything looked backwards, the original image turned inside out. It was like seeing the insides of whatever she’d shot. There also was something about the predominantly dark quality of the negative that attracted Sabina. Even the darkroom fascinated her, its safe light giving everything a weird orangey-red glow.
Excited, she climbed onto a stool and clipped more negatives to a clothesline that ran from one end of the room to the other. Ian patted her shoulder, nodding, Aye, lass, you’ve got it now. Good work!
Sabina liked poking about other rooms in the house after they finished developing prints. She followed Edna around the kitchen. When she wasn’t teaching in the tiny red schoolhouse, Edna canned preserves or made baked goods, her shoulder-length hair, threaded with gray, hooked behind her ears, face puckered in concentration. Sabina liked adding cinnamon and sugar to the rolls and biting into them when they were still warm.
Edna asked, Would you like some hot tea with that roll, lass?
Sabina nodded, watching Edna pour the amber liquid into a flowered china cup. Sabina added cream and three teaspoons of sugar, stirring until it turned the color of muddy water. Then she held the cup in both hands, sipping and listening with Edna to Amos and Andy on the radio. The two of them laughed together at Kingfish’s jokes.
After, she joined Edna in the living room. They both sat in deeply padded, floral-covered armchairs, reading. Edna helped Sabina with words she didn’t understand, something that Curva had trouble doing because of her limited English skills. Unlike Curva, whose lively personality overwhelmed Sabina at times, Edna offered a more settled maternal presence.
Sabina chose books that had some pictures, like the Book of Knowledge, though she was learning how to grasp words on her own. When she read about how long it would take to reach the moon, Sabina wanted to be the first woman to travel there.
At times, Ian joined Edna and Sabina, settling his bulky body in a rocker by the large bay window overlooking the main street, glasses parked on his nose. He chewed snuff, the wad making his cheeks balloon out, and spat it into a spittoon next to his chair. Then he returned to the book he was reading, a collection of Robert Burns’ poems. Lines of verse drifted from his mouth and seemed to hover in the air and change shape like clouds.
Periodically, he glanced up, gazing out at the townspeople mingling on the street. Billie One Eye stepped out of Smart’s General Store and climbed into his truck, carrying a grocery bag. It was the first time Ian had noticed that Billie and Sabina had similar hair color. He filed away the observation, not thinking too much about it. Ian had heard it said that Billie’s Scottish mother was a redhead. It bothered him to think that a fellow countrywoman had taken up with an Indian.
Ian was even more uncomfortable to be living in the same town as some Indian bones. He didn’t know why the government insisted on protecting the Indian remains. And he didn’t know why he was so down on them. Ian didn’t think of himself as racist—he certainly didn’t object to Curva’s presence. But the Blackfoot got under his skin, insisting the burial ground belonged to them. They acted as if they owned the land now, treating those who weren’t tribal members as trespassers. That idea upset him.
Ian had talked to Nathan Smart about taking up a petition to have the dead moved to the reservation where they belonged. Nathan had collected signatures from customers. But the plan fizzled out when Ian gave them to the Indian agent for the area. The government guy had said they couldn’t overturn a statute with a petition, and the law supported Billie and his tribe.
Ian glanced at Sabina, wondering why she didn’t resemble her mother more. A handsome woman, she had taken the town by storm, and he didn’t know quite what to think of her. Friendly? Aye. Lively? Definitely. Mysterious? That, too. A puzzle overall. It surprised him how easily she had inserted herself into the community. She became indispensable in no time. And it wasn’t only her good wine and healing arts. She made people feel better just being around her. It affected everyone, even Ian. Of course, her ample hips and breasts made her popular with the men as well.
But Curva’s house didn’t have many books, so the MacGregor place opened up another world to Sabina. She found it amazing that these scratches on the page, letters that morphed into words, could have such an impact on her brain and be so filled with life. She had started reading Alice in Wonderland, and the world in those pages soon became Sabina’s as well. She was Alice falling down the rabbit hole and being transformed in that underground world, reminiscent of her own rabbit hole experience when the earth tried to swallow her. She felt Alice was showing what marvelous things might be lurking there, though it wasn’t just the words’ literal meaning that entranced her. Images of the Cheshire cat and the Hatter and the Queen of Hearts were as vivid as any she captured with her camera, and they lived within her now.
But Billie’s art also was gripping, and Sabina soon was a frequent visitor to his place as well. He took her with him to the reserve in his rattling old truck, held together with wire and rope, to pick up tools and supplies for his work at the burial ground. That’s when she saw the things he made that filled his spacious barn.
The first time Sabina entered it, she felt a little like Alice in Wonderland. She hadn’t fallen down a rabbit hole, but she had crossed into another world. Masks of various sizes covered one wall, some resembling birds, foxes, or wolves. Others had more human features, but the dramatic slashes of vivid colors and the boldly painted eyes frightened her. They seemed to watch everything she did, and she thought they were whispering to her. Sabina didn’t want to hear what they were saying and turned away.
Billie said, You know, some people think the animal’s spirit enters them when they wear the masks.
Sabina shivered. To her, the masks themselves seemed real. She moved away and stared instead at the whitewashed wall where Billie had started a mural. So far, he had only blocked in colors and a few shadowy figures.
Sabina asked him what the painting was about and
he grunted.
I wish I knew, he said. A history, I think, of the Blackfoot.
The impact of vivid images inside the barn finally drove Sabina outside. She approached the wooden totem poles planted there, but they also unnerved her. Some—the wolves and ravens and bears—had glaring eyes and fangs for teeth. Their gaping mouths seemed to be calling out something, all speaking at once. They looked animated and angry. Sabina covered her ears, afraid of what they might be saying
From the corner of her eye, Sabina thought she saw something move and spun around, hoping to catch the totems in motion. But they all were lined up, still as sentries, just as before. She couldn’t resist getting closer to them. One wolf looked partly human, its arms pressed close to its body and only four fingers showing. No thumb. Beneath it a bird-like being stared at her. She didn’t immediately recognize all of the animals carved into the many-layered totems because the images merged, though she thought she saw a deer, a wolf, and a raven. Another had a fish and a bear. Was that an eye twitching in fear? Some movement within the totems themselves? She could sense the animals’ desire to be freed and how frantic they must feel to be confined in the wood.
She ran back inside the barn and asked Billie if he could free them, but he just laughed. They don’t need me to free them, he said. Their spirits are everywhere, not just in the totem pole.
Sabina wasn’t convinced the animals weren’t somehow locked up in his designs. She wished Victor were there. He would have some ideas for setting the animals loose. She had asked him to go with her to Billie’s, but he had scrunched up his face and said no thanks, twisting his body into the shape of a pretzel. Then he stuck out his tongue and, pretending he was choking, said, I have better things to do than hang out with Indians.
Sabina knew some of the villagers shunned the Blackfoot, so she wasn’t surprised when her best friend acted this way. Still, she felt bad for Billie; she didn’t see what was wrong with having him for a friend. Except for having one eye, he didn’t seem any different from other people she knew. And Curva liked him. A lot.
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