After the Thunder (18 page)

She chuckled.

“But the color of your skin and the bones of your face scream of many Choctaw ancestors born into the woods and hills of the old homeland.”

“All right. I’ll pretend not to know you, and I’ll wait on the street near the newspaper office like any Choctaw come to town for trading waits for his wife.”

Like any Choctaw waits for his wife
.

She tried to shut out the insane echo in her head, but she couldn’t help turning to look at him again.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be watching you and Millard Sheets through the window,” he said. “If he so much as touches you, I’m coming in.”

His jaw jutted out and he flashed her a fiercely protective glance that shot straight to her heart.

For the rest of the ride Cotannah tried either to keep them moving too fast for much talking or, when they slowed to rest the horses and stopped to eat a quick noon meal, to keep the conversation completely impersonal. Most of the time she didn’t have to worry—they were riding fast because covering thirty miles on horseback through the mountains would take all day long and the trails through the woods were narrow enough in most places that they had to take them single file.

They arrived on the outskirts of town as the day was sliding into late afternoon and immediately separated to ride in from different directions on the busy main street.
Cotannah tried not even to glance around her for Walks-With-Spirits, but he was in front of the office of the
Oklahoma Star
when she found it. He had found a vantage point leaning against a post not far from some loiterers on the street corner, and he blended into his surroundings very well.

She dared to look at him again as she rode Pretty Feather up to the hitching post. He was an
alikchi
, that was for sure, else how could he look like such a part of a town when always before he’d looked so like a natural part of the wild?

He was wearing the hat now, a brown, wide-brimmed sueded leather pulled low over his eyes, and his hair was tucked in beneath his coat collar at the back of his neck. It would seem to any passerby that he was completely absorbed in whittling at the stick he held propped against his thigh—he stood on one foot and placed the other behind him flat against the post, every line of his big body completely loose and at ease. The knife in his hand moved slowly, with a certain sureness that struck a longing deep at her core.

Looking at him standing there made her go weak all over.

Knowing, although he gave no sign, that he knew she was there made her ache to touch him.

Finally, she tore her gaze away and got down, tied Pretty Feather to the hitching rail, and crossed the board sidewalk to the door, glass across the top half, etched with the words in script,
Oklahoma Star
. When she opened the door, a tiny bell rang. Two men occupied the room, one seated across the room at a printing press with his back to her and the other at a desk facing her.

The one at the desk was a tall, thin man who immediately stood up and walked around to the counter that ran across the front of the office.

“Yes, miss,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“It’s Mrs.,” she said, tilting her head to smile up at him. “I’m Mrs. Maggie Harrington, owner of the Double H Ranch in South Texas.”

He offered the slightest suggestion of a bow but did not return her smile.

“They call me Millard Sheets,” he said abruptly.

“I’ve come to you for some advice,” she said, pasting the smile onto her face.

“About what?”

She walked up to the counter and put both hands on it, leaned toward him until he bent his head to listen.

“About who among the Choctaw might be willing to overlook that silly law they have against leasing grazing land to outsiders.”

He drew back and looked down at her sharply.

She gave him her best smile one more time.

“We’ve had a dry year at home,” she confided, softly enough that once again he had to tilt his head again to hear her, “and I’ve come all this way to find grass for my cattle that would be on the way to market—only to find out that they have this stupid law!”

She stepped back and glanced at the man working at the printing press, then used her prettiest, most indignant pout on Millard Sheets.

“You don’t have to worry about Ernest there overhearing us,” he said, in a flat, bored tone. “Everybody in this establishment is here to tell the world that the redskin savages have no business trying to run a country on their own. Any fool can see that they could make a lot of income leasing out all that good grazing land.”

“Good!” she cried enthusiastically. “So can you tell me the names of some of the more progressive Choctaw landowners who are also good businessmen?”

The man was a stick. A lump of unfeeling clay. He
still hadn’t smiled at her and now it seemed that he might not answer her question. He wasn’t going to. She could feel it.

She smiled at him again anyway.

“As you can imagine, I
don’t
want to get into trouble by approaching the wrong person,” she said, “and I’ve been assured by several citizens of McAlester that you have your finger on the pulse of every kind of business transaction that transpires for miles and miles around here.”

He favored her with the barest of nods.

So, flattery must be the best tactic to use on him, but at this rate she would be too old to ride horseback before he gave her the name of someone to see. It would be a true miracle if that name was Jacob Charley.

She took a deep breath to steady her breathing.

“Surely you know someone among the Choctaw who resents all those stupid laws they have?”

He almost smiled. But he didn’t speak.

“Now, I do have one name already,” she said, wasting another smile on him before she opened the bag hanging from her wrist and took out a small piece of paper, “the person who gave it to me said that this man is a very shrewd Choctaw businessman and that he has lots of grass.” She looked up with wide, innocent eyes. “Can you advise me whether I should mention leasing grazing lands to him …” she paused and touched her chest delicately, “leasing them to me, a white woman … or not? If I tell you the name, could you tell me if that proposal would offend him?”

Nothing. The stone of a man made no response whatsoever.

Cotannah glanced down at the paper, unfolded it and pretended to read.

“Jacob Charley,” she said, and looked up again,
hopefully, into Millard Sheets’s narrow eyes. “Have you, by any chance, heard anything about him?”

A slight flicker of … interest? Disgust? She couldn’t name it, she couldn’t even say whether it was positive or negative, but the first emotion she had seen in him flashed across his narrow face at the mention of Jacob’s name.

“I’ve heard he’s dead,” he said, in that same flat tone.

A true shock ran through her that he should know that fact, even though logic told her that, in spite of the storms and the floods, everyone in the boundaries of the Choctaw Nation and all the other Indian Nations had heard it by now, no doubt. But she pretended that she was surprised at the news.

“Don’t tell me that!” she cried, putting her hand over her heart.

He leaned toward her, this time.

“Fell dead in the street without a mark on him!” he thundered. “They tell me the whole Nation believes it was a curse of death that killed him—one of them Choctaw medicine men slapped the bad word on old Jacob Charley.”

“Oh?” she managed to say. “Is that so?”

“Now can you imagine the sane, white, God-fearing citizens of the United States letting such superstitious red savage riffraff control all that good grassland and coal and timber and water?”

She searched his reddening face.

“No-o-o.”

“Damn right you can’t,” he roared. “Read the
Star
. I’ve written the best editorial calling for the destruction of the Indian so-called Nations that ever saw print.”

Then, with no warning at all that he was about to change the subject of the conversation, he reached under the counter and pulled out a dog-eared ledger book,
threw it down in front of her with a resounding thump.

“Little lady, let’s find you a Choctaw with a shred of sense,” he said, throwing it open and starting to thumb through. “If there is such an animal. We need to get some more intruder cattle onto that Choctaw grass.”

He gave a loud snort of derision as he thumbed through the pages, then glanced up to glare at her again.

“Can you feature that they call them intruder cattle if they belong to a white person?” he demanded. “When, from the dawn of recorded time, it’s been the goddamned red Indians who’re intruding on a white man’s world?”

Stunned, Cotannah stared at him.

“Pardon my French, ma’am. But I can see you agree with me, and I’m gonna do all I can to help you.”

He wet his finger and went through some more pages.

“Here,” he said finally, “we’ve got one Choctaw who thinks he can read English, I reckon—he’s a bona fide subscriber to the
Star
. If he’s willing to pay real money for a Boomer newspaper, I’m thinking he’s smart enough to know the Nation’s days are numbered, and he’s trying to learn how to act like a white man.”

He turned the ledger around so she could read it and marked the name with his long, pale finger.

“Folsom Greentree.”

Cotannah looked at the name and the mailing address, Greentree Crossing, both listed in a clerk’s fine script.

The name was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it at the moment.

“I’m thinking this redskin might lease you some land, or he’d know somebody who will,” Sheets said.

She took a deep breath to try to calm the sudden sickness in her stomach and accepted the pencil he offered. She noted the information on the piece of paper that supposedly carried Jacob’s name on the other side.

Dear God in Heaven, how had any Indian survived this long with people like Sheets stirring up the land-hungry white people?

“Thank you,” she finally managed to say, and stuffed the paper back into her bag.

“You’re welcome and good luck to you. The more white holdings and white settlers we can get in here, the quicker these Indians’ll have to become Americans and abide by the laws like the rest of us do.”

She turned around and walked out, sick now for another reason, too.

Finding any information about Jacob was going to be a lot harder than she’d thought.

Walks-With-Spirits saw Cotannah’s face clearly as she came out of the newspaper office. She looked stricken. And she let the door bang shut behind her as if she didn’t have the strength to reach back and close it.

His stomach tightened to a cold knot. Was this the meaning of that strange portent he’d felt the first time he ever saw a copy of this newspaper? Had she been harmed in there? But how?

The white man hadn’t touched her, he had watched him carefully. And if he had insulted her with words, surely her face would have had that fiery look of flashing fury or the quiet one of seething anger, the one where her fine-boned jaw went tight and set and she spoke in a slow, disdainful drawl.

He turned his head slightly so he could see her walk all the way to her horse and mount up. She moved with the same supple grace as usual, but it was as if she had drawn her body in onto itself, and she shivered once after she was in the saddle. The day had turned out to be one of those capricious ones that he’d found typical of the New Nation in the fall—a frosty morning followed
by a summerlike afternoon—so she couldn’t be physically cold.

The shudder made him wish he could go and put his arms around her to comfort her, but he folded the knife and put it in his pocket, stood away from the post, and walked toward his horse instead, resisting even a glance back. More and more, he wanted to touch her, and he had to gather all his strength to fight the desire. Comfort as it would be to him, it would only make her anguish worse one moon from now.

He set his jaw and looked in upon himself. The thing to do was to remember why he had come with her in the first place, the two reasons. One, the portent. He had come to protect her in case it had been a foreboding of danger to her. Two, because his honor demanded that he accompany a woman who was risking her own safety to try—impossible as it was—to save him from execution. Wanting to touch her, wanting to be with her were temptations he’d known in advance.

So. Now he must think about his purpose here. What could have hurt her so much in the newspaper office? Was it something she’d read in that book the man had put out on the counter? Or was it that she found nothing at all to help her in her quest? His heart went out to her, but maybe such a disappointment would make her give up the search before it brought her even more pain.

He reached his horse, threw himself onto it without putting his foot into the stirrup, and, as soon as he gained the extra height, turned his head to see her through the crowd moving in the street. Why couldn’t she know that she couldn’t change his fate when so many of the Nation had heard him put the curse on Jacob? Trying to explain that to her was the same as letting a leaf drift from his fingers to blow away on the wind. Now he must make
her believe it, or she would wear her body down and make herself sick.

Her horse was so brightly colored with bay and white spots that he picked it out immediately from among the other animals near the west end of the street. A mule-drawn wagon pulled to the side to let a horse and buggy pass it by and then he could see Cotannah on the paint horse. He gave a little sigh of relief. Already, she had recovered a little—she held her shoulders square and her head at that splendid angle that gave her such a proud air.

That air was what made men like Jacob so determined to conquer her, but her real pride wasn’t strong enough to keep her from needing their attentions. If only she would be able to keep her resolve to behave differently, to take responsibility for protecting herself!

For a moment he sat still and watched her moving away from him, wending her quick way in and out among the animals and vehicles and people, all of whom looked drab compared to Cotannah. Drab and hurried. How could they live in this crowded place, with its constant noises of squeaking wheels and human voices? Why people ever made towns, he did not understand.