Nakoa's Woman (28 page)

Chapter Twenty Five

The first thing that Maria felt when she had fully awakened was the gold locket at her throat. She touched its cold metal, and knew that Anatsa was dead.

She did not want to face this. Here then was one more death. She was a tree, and all of her loved ones leaves, and in the coming winter she was to be stripped of all of them and left barren and naked. Sunlight moved to her face and was warm and comforting. Still she would not open her eyes. Maybe she could drift back to long quiet sleep, and in a new awakening, Anatsa would be alive. She touched the locket again, and opened her eyes. Natosin sat near her.

“Anatsa is dead,” Maria said painfully.

“Yes.”

“How? How?” Maria cried, trembling with grief.

“She was killed by the Crow that had killed Kominakus and Siyeh.”

“When?”

“When she returned from Atsitsi’s the night you were attacked.”

“She had been caring for me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, dear God!” Maria moaned. If she hadn’t been caring for me…”

“She would have met the Crow upon another path.”

Maria began to weep. “Where is Nakoa?”

“He was always beside you until it was known that you would live. He slept by you. He, and not Atsitsi, has cared for you. You are his wife, my daughter.”

“I need him now!” She struggled to sit up. The old man restrained her.

“It is only eleven days since you almost bled to death again. Do not sit up now.”

“I want Nakoa!” she said helplessly.

“He is gone. He rode into Crow land with Apikunni. He will come to you as soon as he returns.”

“Everyone—I—love dies!” she choked. “Everyone!”

“My son will not. My son will live more suns than I have.”

“Where is Nitanna?” Maria asked suddenly. “Where is your other daughter?”

“She is back with the Kainah. She has returned with her father to her own people. My son sent her away.”

“Why?”

“In your sickness you talked of many things, and one of them was of the white horse that waited for you at the burial grounds. He asked Nitanna of this, and she said that she had meant you to be killed. My son said their marriage was ended. He could not have a woman for a wife that would kill another who was innocent.”

“What about you—and her father?”

“It was agreed upon. Nitanna did not want to stay.”

Maria looked searchingly into the kind eyes watching her. “Natosin,” she said, “I am proud to call you ‘father.'”

“I am glad for this. You are my son’s woman.”

Maria turned away. “How can I be any man’s woman?”

“You are young. You will heal.”

“Will I?” Maria asked with sudden bitterness. She saw Nakoa walking past her with Nitanna. She saw Nakoa rejecting her outside of his lodge, and she began to shake. “He did not want me enough,” she said.

“Should he have wanted you with the passion of Siksikai?”

“Atsitsi says all men rape!”

“Siksikai was not a man. He was killed by my son and dumped out on the prairie for the wolves, because he was not a man. Live with my son, Maria, and know a man!”

Time passed, slow days and long nights, and before she rose to walk again, he returned. One dusk his tall form shadowed the doorway, and he came to her. She called his name, and he sat upon her couch and gently touched her face.

“You are the most beautiful of women,” he said. “You are the softness of all women!”

Maria smiled and touched his hands.

“I did not let you go,” he said seriously. “You wanted to leave me, Maria, but I did not let you go!”

“You are a stubborn man,” Maria said.

“I had the strength of the sun behind me.”

He tenderly kissed her face. “Culentet, my culentet, my little culentet—”

Maria began to sob, and he held her in his arms and kissed the tears on her lashes.

“We can never have a marriage,” she wept. “Never!”

“Never,” he pretended to agree.

“Now you mock me!” she wailed. “How can you be so cruel? The pain …”

He kissed her lips. “Pain is not lasting. Life is. Pain, culentet, is always the introduction to life. Life without pain is a toy for children.”

“You sound like your father.”

“Do you like my father?”

“Very much. I have love for him. He has given me much comfort.”

“I am glad.”

“Did you find Anatsa’s murderer?”

“Yes.”

“Did Apikunni kill him?”

“Yes.”

“How can I bear it without Anatsa? How can I bear to think that she is dead when she had Apikunni?”

“I had no words for Apikunni. There are not words for everything.”

“Nakoa, we cannot have a marriage. It is not just my body and what Siksikai did—”

“No, it is not so. The woman in the river that you feared so much—she will come to me again. I know it. And then we will have our marriage.” He kissed her again, gently, but lingeringly. “I will prepare our food, or have it prepared.”

“Please, not by Atsitsi!”

He smiled. “Sleep, my wife. I will bring the food to you when it is done.”

She lay back, and sat partway up again, thinking of something. “Nakoa, did you lose the chieftainship of the Mutsik?”

“Yes,” he answered.

Tears came to her eyes again. “And you did this—for me.”

He looked almost angry. “No, Maria. For myself,” he said, and went outside.

The day after Nakoa’s return, the village moved to the mountains. Nakoa carried Maria outside, and she watched the dismantling of the lodges, Natosin’s first, and then all of the other tipis, like giant mushrooms swept away in the wind. Most of the morning, the horses stood patiently during the loading of the travois. The old and the young who could not ride a horse sat atop the loads, and the Pikuni moved out, scouts in the lead, then the high chiefs, the societies of the Ikunuhkahtsi, and last, the women and children.

Natosin came and said good-bye to his son and Maria. Sikapischis, more gaunt than ever, called on Maria for the first time since her sickness, and neither of them mentioned Anatsa or Siyeh in their brief farewell. Atsitsi, even dirtier than Maria had remembered her, halted at Nakoa’s lodge as the camp was leaving. “She woman again soon,” she said cheerfully to Nakoa. “Maybe Siksikai get rid of silly bird song!”

I’ll stop being bird song if you take a bath!” Maria said grimly.

Atsitsi laughed and leaned toward Maria. Her horse shifted unhappily. “Winter come soon and why wash in by-damn cold?”

Smiling to himself, Nakoa slapped Atsitsi’s horse, and the animal moved dispiritedly toward the other horses leaving the village. “Can Nakoa take big surprise if find wife a woman?” she shouted back at them.

“Do you suppose she ever was human?” Maria asked Nakoa.

He looked at her seriously. “She saved your life as much as did Anatsa and Isokinuhkin.”

Maria saw Apeecheken pass, dressed in mourning, her head bowed in grief. Maria remembered Anatsa’s words: “I shall rest on the burial platform, and it will not be my time. The sky is yellow, and voices from the grounds call to me, and I am afraid of the coldness there.” Maria waved to Apeecheken, but Anatsa’s sister did not wave back.

The scouts were already lost in the rank grass of the prairie. She and Nakoa watched them leave in silence. When they were gone from sight, they heard faint cries from the children, the barking of dogs, and then nothing but the wind moving through the desolate village site. Never again would Nakoa’s lodge stand in the circle of the high chiefs. It is such a waste! Maria thought bitterly.

In darkness that night when they had eaten and she lay quietly watching the fire, she missed the drums, the voices, the sounds of dancing and chanting.

“I am so lonely,” she said. “It is so lonely here, all alone.”

“You are still apart from yourself,” he said quietly. “That is why you are lonely. It is not because the village is gone.”

She smiled. “The two women again?”

“You are apart from them both.”

“Both? What am I?”

“The shock from Siksikai’s act. You are unknowing.”

“Nakoa, your words are so strange.”

“You will know them to be true. It will take time for you to change from numbness to feeling, to become a woman, to become my wife.”

Maria looked quickly away. If he talked of physical contact between them, she could not bear it. He had kissed her lips in sweet ness, but if he kissed her in hunger she would become sick. He saw her expression, and his face looked haunted. “I accept,” he said softly. “I was a glutton, so I will accept my hunger. Maria, Nitanna is gone, and Siksikai is gone. Let not their names be mentioned between us again. We build our lives without them.”

“Build our lives?”

“First in your healing. Your healing is first, so that you will live again—as two women—as one woman—and my wife.”

He was right; she was numb. Though her body grew in strength, though she could walk, she wanted to lie still upon her couch. She wanted to stay within the lodge. She wanted to turn her face to the wall, and look at nothing else. She relived her past. She suffered all of her old griefs, and even when moods of sadness left, she sought them, and was disappointed that they didn’t stay constantly. Nakoa brought her food. He built the fire, brought the wood, and the water for bathing and drinking. In her moods he did not speak to her, and absented himself from her in her self-inflicted pain.

Then came the evening he decided she was to remain numb no longer. He had returned to the tipi with freshly killed deer. He stood for a long moment at the door, looking inside at the shadowed lodge with its fire unlit. “Maria!” he said sharply. “Maria!”

Dozing, she sat up, surprised at the anger in his voice. “What is it?” she said weakly. “What is the matter, Nakoa?”

He put the deer down and strode to her, smelling of blood, of pines, of the outdoors, and he was so strong and powerful that his strength was sickening to her. “What do you seek in sleep? What do you see upon the walls of this lodge that, when you are awake, it takes all of your time to watch it? Maria, get up!”

“I can’t!”

“You can! Stand up, Maria!”

“I am sick.”

“I say you are not! You are sick no longer!”

“And who is saying this—God? Are you the voice of the Great Spirit, Nakoa?”

You are taking a life! Stand!” The violence in his voice drove her to her feet.

“All right,” she said bitterly in English. “Now what do you want me to do? Go butcher that awful deer?”

“You are my wife. You will speak in Pikuni.”

“Do you want me to butcher the deer?” she asked, still sarcastic.

“I will cut the meat. You cook it, and then you will have the hunger to eat it. The blood in it will make you strong.”

“I have no hunger. I will not eat.”

“I have hunger, and you will cook the meat for me.”

She glowered at him but cooked the meat he cut for her. When it was broiled, tender and juicy in the inside and crusty on the outside, she could not resist it, and ate with him. When she had finished she looked at him for approval.

“And now,” he said, “we will walk.”

“You are mad!”

“We will walk and then you will sleep tonight, and not lie awake and watch the lodge fire.”

“It will hurt me to walk!”

“It will hurt you not to. We will walk tonight, and then you will ride the bay. You will heal, Maria.”

“I will not!” she blazed.

He smiled. “You will not?”

“No!”

“How will you keep yourself sick? By lying on that couch?”

“You just want to climb on me and rape me!”

He was incredulous.

“You will not rape me!” she almost screamed.

“I would not rape you.”

“You tried once!”

“And so you did with me,” he said.

Angrily, she threw a robe over her shoulders and left the lodge. She walked in such fury that she forgot to be in pain.

He joined her. She walked far from their lodge, and would have walked farther but he restrained her. Without speaking to him she went to bed that night, and was so tired that she fell asleep. She woke up furious with herself and was so ravenous that she ate. “Dear God!” she said, when her stomach was satisfied, “now what do you have planned for me today? Do you want me to hunt a little deer?”

“We have meat,” he said seriously.

“Then we can take a nice long horseback ride!”

“All right,” he said simply.

“No! You fool! No!”

“It will not hurt you.”

“Of course not! Then tonight, you can climb all over me!”

“Maria,” he scolded, “can you think of nothing else?”