Where the Broken Heart Still Beats (2 page)

The first time, when she was still a young girl, she had been too frightened to speak to the white men, or even to know what she should do. Speckled Eagle, the man she called Father, refused the gifts and sent the white men away.

The second time she was much older. When someone explained to her what the men wanted, Naduah, herself, refused to go with them. They had nothing to do with her, these men with their pale skins and strange way of talking. She had a husband and young sons. She would stay with the People, where she belonged. She knew the white men were angry, but they could do nothing and they, too, went away. She did not see any white men again until her sons were older and she had borne a daughter.

At the time of the last new moon, many white men on horseback rode into the camp, taking the People by surprise. They began shooting at the women and children, perhaps mistaking them for men in the noise and confusion and swirling dust, perhaps not. Naduah and the other women leapt on their ponies and tried to flee. Topsannah, hidden beneath Naduah's buffalo robe, clung to her.

The only young man in the camp that day was her husband's Mexican slave. Naduah saw him shot dead as he rushed to help her. She managed to elude two of her pursuers, but a third took aim and fired at her horse. She jumped from the pony as it fell, certain that they would shoot her as well.

Her robe dropped from her shoulders, and when the men realized that this was a woman with a child, they held their fire. She started to run, but the men were on horseback and quickly caught her. One of them seized her roughly by the shoulders. When he turned her around and saw that her eyes were light like his own, he called the others to come and look.

They put her and the child on one of their horses, and while the other white men took what they wanted from the camp and set fire to what was left, led them away—away from her husband and sons who would return from the hunt and find only desolation.

They traveled for four days and well into the nights. At first Naduah recognized the land over which they rode, land the People knew well, and she watched for a chance to escape. But there was never an opportunity. Guards were always posted around the horses, and she knew they would quickly recapture her if she tried to flee on foot.

On the fifth day they arrived at a soldiers' camp and took her to the wife of the chief of the soldiers. Naduah assumed that she would be beaten and made a slave; this is what the People would have done with a captive. But that did not happen.

With little cries and gestures the wife and another woman took away Naduah's buckskin dress and leggings and winter moccasins. They dragged a tub in front of a fire blazing in the wall of the cabin and emptied kettles of steaming water into the tub. Then they coaxed her to climb into the water. She did not understand this; it was not something the People did. But as she obeyed and sat in the tub, a memory of her own small white body immersed in warm water and the face of a smiling, pale-eyed woman hovering over her flitted through her mind.
Her mother? Had her mother in the time before the People done this?

The white women poured more warm water over her head and rubbed something into her hair. The juice ran down over her face and stung her eyes. They took away the baby's rabbit skin and breechcloth and handed her to Naduah, showing with gestures that she was to wash the baby. And when they allowed her to climb out, the women dried them both with blankets and gave them clothes to put on. Not her own buckskin but a dress made of cloth.

The dress was too small. Naduah was a tall woman, broad-shouldered and wide-hipped, muscular from hard work. The women made her understand she would have to wear the bad-fitting dress anyway. Their leather foot-covers pinched her feet, but her moccasins were gone, along with her clothes. They would not let her have the buffalo robe. Instead they brought her a woolen blanket, like those the People sometimes got from the traders. It was not as heavy as the buffalo robe, and not as warm.

They did the same for the baby: her rabbit skin disappeared and a dress was put on her. The little girl whimpered in protest and clutched at her mother.

Then the women combed Naduah's light brown hair, fastening it back away from her face. She reached up to touch it. It felt odd without the bear grease she used to rub on it.

They offered her food, but it looked and smelled strange—tasted strange, too. She ate only because she needed strength to nurse Topsannah.

After she had been at the soldiers' camp for many days, kept in a small, bare room and brought food from time to time, White Hair came. He made them let her out of the small room and looked her over carefully. Then he spoke her old name, Sinty-ann. It startled her to hear that name. When he saw that she recognized the sounds, he became very agitated, and tears came to his eyes.

With him was a man who knew some of the People's language, and Naduah tried to tell this man that she must go back to her People, that she must find her sons and her husband. But they both shook their heads no. After that she said nothing more. It was useless.

White Hair put her and the child in a wagon drawn by two mules. They were accompanied by several men on horseback. One was the man who knew the words of her People and tried to make her speak to him. Another she recognized as one of those who had attacked the camp and captured her, a young man with hair growing on his lip beneath his nose. Men of the People did not have hair on their faces. They plucked it all out, even the short hairs that sprouted on the brow above the eyes. They would have laughed at this Hair Beneath His Nose. He rode a chestnut mare, a fine horse, but they also would have laughed at a man riding a mare.

She had no idea where they were taking her. Instead of heading north, the direction from which the soldiers had brought her, they rode toward the rising sun. All day they traveled, a slow, bumpy journey along a rough trail that took her farther from her People. If she could not go to them, she thought, perhaps the People would find her. She clung to that hope as long as she could. But as White Hair and the others continued their eastward journey, hope began to fade.

The People had nothing like this wagon. Everyone rode horses, even young children, and they moved their goods with pack horses and mules, each dragging two long tipi poles tied to the saddle, their tipi skins and other belongings slung between the poles. She would have preferred riding one of the mules that pulled this wagon to being jolted on the rough wooden seat.

At night they camped, unrolling their blankets beneath the wagon. One of the men was always posted as a guard. To keep them from being attacked or to keep her from running away? She did not know. She half dreamed, half remembered:
Long ago in the other time, a wagon much bigger than this one with a cover over it, crossing rivers and plains for many days, going to the new place, Mother and Father and others, two brothers, then a sister. What were their names? Me—Sinty-ann. And the brothers—John, was that one of them?

After a few days, White Hair and the others brought her to a big log cabin. More strangers poured out to greet her. More noise, more talk in the strange tongue with its faintly familiar sounds:
Sinty-ann, Sinty-ann.
They led her inside, hovering close, smiling, staring, talking loudly.

Holding Topsannah tightly, she looked around, half-curious, half-frightened. The cabin had two large rooms joined by an open hallway with a steeply pitched roof that covered the broad gallery. The rooms were filled with strange objects, uncomfortable to sit on, she found, and worse to lie on. The first night they insisted that she sleep on a soft mattress of feathers laid on a web of ropes strung on a wooden frame, but she took the blankets from the bed and spread them on the wooden floor.

She missed her tipi of lodgepoles set in a circle and tied together at the top, covered with buffalo hides she had tanned and stitched herself. Thick buffalo robes on the inside kept cold drafts from coming in, and a small pit fire in the center warmed them better than this fire in a stone part of the wall. She missed her sleeping skins piled on a bed of dried grass.

The white women gave her more strange things to eat and drink, and all of them talked to her, asking her questions she did not understand, waiting for her answer, but never listening to
her
questions:
Where are my sons? Where is my husband? When can I go to them?

The girl called Loo-see lived in this cabin with White Hair and people Naduah thought must be her parents and brothers and sisters. When the others had finished with their questions, Loo-see gently led Naduah around the cabin, pointing to things and saying their names: table ... stool ... fire ... lamp ... kettle. Loo-see seemed kind, not loud-speaking like the others, but not even to please her would Naduah try to imitate the sounds Loo-see made.

Then Loo-see took her outside and showed her other, smaller buildings near the big cabin: a smokehouse with haunches of meat hanging inside, a corncrib half-filled with dried ears from the fall harvest, a springhouse where they got their water. In the distance at the edge of the fields was a small, crude cabin. "That's where Grandfather's Negroes live," Loo-see explained.

Naduah looked for the place where the horses were kept and easily found a long shed with a corral. As soon as she could, she would take two or three of the sleek, well-fed horses and go in search of the People.

She knew it was a long way. This place was not familiar, but she would ride toward the setting sun until she recognized where she was. She had no bow and arrow with which to shoot game along the way; she would have to take some of the white people's strange food, and, if necessary, kill one of the horses, as the men in her tribe did when they needed food as they traveled. She would watch carefully for her chance.

Loo-see, her mother, and her sister Mar-ta, a tall, thin girl with yellow hair and blue eyes like Loo-see's, prepared a large meal. They set food in bowls on the wooden table. Loo-see's family took their places around the table on benches and stools with three legs, a little girl and a little boy and an older boy with one arm missing seated on one side with the mother, Loo-see and Mar-ta on the other side with the father. White Hair sat at one end, and Naduah and Topsannah were placed at the other in what she understood was a seat of honor. Hands together, heads bowed, they were silent while White Hair spoke, his eyes closed. She heard their name for her, "Sinty-ann."

Then Loo-see's mother, a stern-faced woman with a thin, pinched mouth, took meat and other food from the bowls and put it on plates, which she set in front of each one. "Beef," she said, pointing to the meat.

Naduah had eaten beef, often stolen in raids on farmers like these. She preferred buffalo, but she reached out and picked up a piece of meat in her hand.

"Sinty-ann," said Loo-see's mother, "use your fork. Like this." She held up a metal tool with sharp points.

Naduah was not accustomed to tables and plates and such tools. The People used knives to cut chunks of meat that had been speared on a green stick to cook over a fire or boiled in a pot. They sat on the ground to eat and held the food in their hands or on stiff pieces of hide or bark. Awkwardly, Naduah tried to use the tool.

White Hair sliced the large, soft lump in front of him and passed the pieces to Loo-see's sisters and brothers. "Bread," the little boy said, watching her with narrowed eyes.

This, too, was strange. She laid the slice on her plate and tried to eat it with the metal tool as they wanted her to eat the meat. The younger children laughed, covering their mouths with their hands. Then she saw that the bread was not eaten with the metal tool but held in the hand. It was soft, spread with some kind of fat—butter, they called it. Odd, but it tasted good. Yet as she chewed it, she remembered:
Mother—putting something in the oven, taking something out, puffed and brown. Did she call it bread?
This bread would be good to take with her, to eat on the journey. She knew there was more of it hidden in a cupboard.

The younger boy and girl ate without taking their eyes off her, ready to laugh, although the parents spoke to them sternly when they did. Topsannah laughed when the children laughed. She seemed to like them, and later, when they had finished eating and Loo-see was putting the dishes into water, they played with her. Not knowing what else to do, Naduah sat watching them. Then she heard them call her baby by a strange name: Tecks Ann.

"Tecks Ann?" Naduah repeated.

"We don't like that old Indian name," the little boy James, said. "We gave her a new name. We call her Tecks Ann."

"Name—is—Topsannah," Naduah said carefully.

They all looked at Naduah in surprise, and Loo-see wiped her hands and clapped them in pleasure. "Listen, she's learning, she's remembering English!"

They praised her and then went on with their work. Topsannah crawled up on her lap and whispered, "Tecks Ann."

She decided she would not tell anyone else her own name: Naduah. She would teach it to Topsannah, but that was all. And when they called her Sinty-ann, she would respond, but she would not say that name herself.

Toward sunset some nights and days after she had been brought here, she saw the chestnut mare again, not in the corral with the other horses but tied up outside the cabin. Maybe this was her chance to escape. Maybe she could simply grab the child and flee on that horse, taking the risk of finding food along the way. If she found nothing, she was used to going without food; the People had had many hard times in past winters. Hunger was nothing new to her.

Hair Beneath His Nose had come to visit Marta. "That's Jedediah," Loo-see told her. "He and Martha are engaged to be married."

Naduah did not understand all of Loo-see's words, but she understood the look that passed between the girl and the young man. That did not interest her. She and the man looked at each other warily. The horse that waited outside was the one he had been riding when he helped to capture her. That was the horse she would take, with pleasure.

That night when the cabin was dark and she was certain the others slept soundly, Naduah wrapped herself and her sleeping child in whatever blankets she could find. Moving silently, she gathered two loaves of bread and a knife from the cupboard and tied them in a bundle. Then she crept outside.