After the Thunder (21 page)

He couldn’t trust himself to speak, so he answered with a nod. He would go with her to protect her and help her all he could to make her happy, even if he did still think that there might be no information to find because he might’ve killed Jacob.

The main reason he would go was to protect her. That came first. And he would help because this search was something she had to do. He wasn’t going because he
couldn’t bear to be separated from her now.

No. It was not that at all.

The next morning, riding through the countryside with Walks-With-Spirits seemed like a dream to Cotannah. They left the cabin behind and turned the horses toward the dazzling, new sun, and when they did, he took her completely into that present world and left all the past behind. And the future, too. She didn’t even think about what they might find at Greentree’s Crossing.

From the moment she’d called him to breakfast from his bedroll which he had spread in the yard, he had showed her this familiar country she’d grown up in as if it were a brand-new place. He’d suggested that they sit on the cabin’s porch to eat so they could watch the squirrels gathering pecans in the yard and his talk about them, or maybe just the rich sound of his voice, had smoothed all the thoughts of the death sentence from her mind.

Or maybe it was the sight of him that had filled all her senses until she couldn’t worry anymore. Now, one glance at his strong brown hands on the reins made her think of how he caressed her face, one glimpse of his sensual mouth made his taste spring strong to her lips, and she was lost in the delicious awareness of being alone with him in a beautiful country where the breeze blew brisk and cool and morning had come.

The woods grew close to the path and then, in the open places, they could see out over the layers of purple mountains that rose and fell, higher and higher, until the color paled and faded away into the sky. They took a faint trail through the wooded hills that she remembered from her childhood, a shortcut to the road that led to Greentree’s Crossing.

“When I was growing up, the muscadines were thick over there in that little gully,” she said. “I never tasted anything so delicious in all my life as they were when we came out to pick them on a frosty morning.”

He nodded.

“Frosty muscadines are a gift from the Earth Mother. Like falling stars from the Great Father Spirit.”

She laughed.

“I’ve never thought of wild grapes and falling stars in the same breath,” she said.

“Frosty muscadines,” he said, “dusted with ice stars, they are the color of the sky at night.”

She sensed him shift in the saddle, felt his eyes on her.

“Aren’t they?”

His voice held an edge of humor, the teasing tone that never failed to draw her to him. She couldn’t have kept from looking at him then, not for all the grapes and stars in the world, not even if she’d been trying to ignore him, which she certainly wasn’t.

Yes. His lips were curved up at the corners in a trace of a smile and his topaz eyes twinkled with mischief like that of a small boy. She smiled back at him and clutched the horn of her saddle so she wouldn’t reach out to him with her hand. They had to keep going, truly they did.

Without warning, the path led abruptly up the side of a steep, densely wooded hill and he went ahead of her, holding back tree branches and finding the faint trail. When they were almost at the top, he reined in and raised one hand to her in a signal to halt.

It took a second for her to realize he’d stopped, that he was silent, and then the fear she’d been carrying in the pit of her stomach since his arrest leapt, full-blown, up into her throat.

“What?”

Instinctively, she kept her voice low and then said no more, but her hands were trembling and her thoughts were flying wild. Had someone followed them? Maybe the real killer had seen them leave Tall Pine together and surmised that they were looking for him!

Or maybe Millard Sheets knew that she wasn’t Spanish at all. Maybe he had sent some Indian haters to follow her to Folsom Greentree’s and find out what she was really about!

But Walks-With-Spirits didn’t seem afraid. He cocked his head and listened for a long moment more and then she heard it, too—low, panting groaning and clacking sounds of sticks struck together, almost like claves at a dance. Then some moaning and grunting and one furious bellowing made her know whatever it was that had stopped them wasn’t human at all.

Walks-With-Spirits signaled with his raised hand and they rode a little farther up the trail. From there they could see what it was: two buck deer, their antlers locked in combat, pushing and pulling to try to get themselves free. Only a moment of watching showed that they were hopelessly caught, their racks so snarled and twisted into each other that it was impossible to see where one stopped and the other began.

Their hides were darkened by sweat, their small hooves had dug great holes scrabbling desperately in the dirt.

“Stay mounted,” Walks-With-Spirits whispered.

He slid silently from his horse and walked toward the two, speaking to them softly. Not in English, not in Choctaw, but in grunts and snorts and growls. She held her breath. The deer seemed half-crazed, rolling their big brown eyes sideways at him, throwing dirt into the air and making awful noises. They moved back from him a
little bit, still struggling, but he walked steadily toward them.

She reached for the light rifle in the scabbard of her saddle. For the first time since arriving in the Nation she thought of it and was glad she was carrying it as she did on solitary rides at the ranch.

But she didn’t need it. The deer began to calm as Walks-With-Spirits raised his voice and made them hear him. He walked closer, never hesitating, still talking to them. By the time he was close enough to run a hand over each of their withers, they stood quiet beneath the big oak tree.

Walks-With-Spirits stroked each of them twice, talked to them some more and then reached for the tangled racks, pushing and pulling until the muscles of his shoulders bulged and color flooded into his face. He wrenched at them mightily and his arm muscles seemed on the very verge of bursting his shirtsleeves, stopped, took a deep breath, and wrenched at them again.

At last they came undone. Suddenly, the deer realized they were free.

They stood in place, breathing hard. Then they threw their heads up high and stood looking at him. Fiercely. For one endless moment they stood and stared at him, exhausted muscles quivering, sweaty hides shining in the streaks of sunlight while Cotannah wished she’d pulled the rifle, after all.

But then some snuffling sounds passed among the three of them, Walks-With-Spirits grunted some last message to them. The deer wheeled in their tracks and vanished into the woods, each in a different direction. Cotannah sat her horse, staring in wonder.

“They’re grateful,” Walks-With-Spirits said, as he walked toward her across the crackling leaves that had already fallen.

She gaped at him.

“How did you do that? How did you know their language?”

“Cotannah,” he said, smiling, “you need to learn to listen as well as to see. You could speak their language, too, if you wanted.”

He leapt onto his horse without pulling himself up with his hands, with only one light balancing touch on its neck.

“You should be a likely one to speak the deer’s language,” he said, teasing her, “since you were a girl baby wrapped in a deerskin at birth.”

She laughed.

“But even if you were a boy baby wrapped in a cougar skin, when you were separating those two deer you almost became a deer yourself. I thought you were a shape-changer there for a moment.”

“Or a shadow of a deer?” he asked, with a grin.

“Yes, Shadow,” she said, grinning back at him. “You became a shadow of a deer.”

They sat still, smiling into each other’s eyes, feeling close and safe. Her breath went short again, almost vanished. Looking into his eyes was like looking into a deep forest pool that stood still and quiet all the way to the bottom. Looking into his eyes made her see peace.

“One time in the Old Nation I came upon a deer who was dragging the rotting skeleton of his dead enemy around by his antlers,” he said. “I didn’t want that to happen again here.”

Cotannah couldn’t look away from him. She still could hardly breathe. Suddenly, every inch of her flesh, every pore of her skin, every part of her brain was desperate to know all about him. Longing to know. Trying to imagine where all he had been, what all he had done.

“What did you do with the one who was fastened to his dead enemy?”

“I shot him with an arrow and sent him to the next world,” he said, and a great shock ran through her to hear that he, the healer, had done such a thing.

He shook his head at the astonishment in her face.

“It was the only merciful thing to do,” he said. “The burden had driven him mad.”

He started them moving again at a brisk trot through the bright-colored trees.

“Think of that when you think of dragging your past around behind you, Cotannah,” he said. “It’s the source of many obstacles for you. Love yourself and look to the future instead.”

But I want you to love me!

She bit back the impulsive words as a great surge of anger washed over her. The way he’d sounded, he didn’t intend to be around when she was loving herself and looking to the future.

“Listen to yourself and take your own advice,” she said bitterly. “I’m not the one volunteering to strip to the waist and have a white cross painted over my heart!”

When they rode up the hill at Greentree’s Crossing and saw that the big house and the grounds were crowded with vehicles and horses and people, Cotannah looked at Walks-With-Spirits and pulled up her horse.

“You can wait for me out here if you want,” she said. “You don’t need to hear any more accusations that you’re a witch.”

He smiled at her and shook his head.

“I can’t bear to leave you right now,” he said simply. “You don’t need to bear this burden all by yourself, and I promised you I would help.”

Without another word, they began to ride closer.

“It’s a funeral cry,” he said, at the moment she saw the reason for such a gathering.

A brush arbor stood near the cemetery at the edge of the woods behind the house and long tables laden with food sat out in the open, where the relatives and friends, who were not presently wailing and crying over the grave, were sitting around visiting with each other and feasting. They rode toward them side by side.

A buzz of excitement swept across the grounds as soon as people began recognizing Walks-With-Spirits. A man got up to greet them, a man who walked slowly across the grass to meet them with the authority of the landowner and host. She remembered him clearly now that she saw him.

“I am called Folsom Greentree,” he said. “Have you come to mourn my wife’s mother?”

“I am called Walks-With-Spirits and this young lady is Cotannah Chisk-Ko, sister of Cade Chisk-Ko, niece of Jumper and Ancie.”

Cotannah tried to be unobtrusive as she looked the man over, searching for … what? He wasn’t going to wear a sign saying, “Boomers’ Friend,” was he? He looked much the same as when she was a little girl, except that he was a little more jowly and his paunch had grown larger.

“No, Mr. Greentree,” she said, “we weren’t invited to the cry. We’ve come because we need to ask you something.”

He turned without acknowledging the introduction and stared at her, waiting. She swallowed, hard, and tried not to notice the hard look in his eyes and the ungiving cast to his face.

“We would like to ask if you know of any connection between the newspaper called the
Oklahoma Star
and the man called Jacob Charley.”

Folsom Greentree only stared at her in silence.

She looked at Walks-With-Spirits, but he appeared not to have noticed the man’s rudeness nor her beseeching glance—he was looking over the crowd that was beginning to gather around them. Then Greentree spoke.

“Why has he brought you with him—to do his talking?”

Cotannah’s temper flared.

“I brought him with me is more like it,” she said, fighting to keep the irritation from her voice in hopes that he still would ask them to get down, that he would sit and visit with them.

Preferably, in some private place. More people were drifting from the tables toward them, standing around close, openly staring at her and Walks-With-Spirits.

She wanted to scream at them to go away instead of watching and eavesdropping and making quiet comments behind their hands. If she couldn’t get any information from Folsom Greentree, what in the world would she do? This was her only clue to follow.

Mournful wails floated toward them from near the mother-in-law’s grave, the muttering in the crowd grew louder. Cotannah caught the word “witch” and the word “
alikchi
” more than once. Evidently, Folsom Greentree did, too.

“And why have you brought him to my place?”

Her hopes for a chat in which she might learn something died. Greentree avoided looking at Walks-With-Spirits—he must be one of the contingent who thought he was a witch.

“Walks-With-Spirits did not kill Jacob Charley,” she said, raising her voice so that everyone there could hear her. “And we are thinking that perhaps the Boomers might know who did. You subscribe to the
Oklahoma
Star
, so perhaps you have read something in it that could help us.”

He glared at her for the longest time, incredulously, as if he could not believe her audacity.

“Are you deaf?” he said. “Didn’t you hear this witch put a death curse on Jacob Charley right in front of your face?”

She stiffened her backbone against the scorn in his voice. And the fear. He was afraid of Walks-With-Spirits.

“You think I am a friend to the Boomers,” he said roughly. “Well, Missy, did you ever think I might be their strongest enemy? I read that paper to see what trick they will use next to try to take our land.”

His triumphant tone as he finished talking and crossed his arms across his chest brought murmurs of agreement from the people surrounding them. Once more, his glance touched Walks-With-Spirits and slid quickly away.