After the Thunder (5 page)

And now this feeling of connection with Cotannah Chisk-Ko. When he first saw her again—out in the road, sitting the horse he’d just calmed—he had seen the turmoil in her eyes and had thought he was meant to help her find peace. But now he didn’t know. How could he do that if she was bringing disquiet to him, instead?

On her first morning at Tall Pine, Cotannah woke with the restlessness raging in her veins like a fever. She had slept deeply, but fantastic dreams had plagued her, dreams that ran through her head over and over again, with every detail as vivid as in life. She was running a footrace with Jacob Charley through the woods while, a few feet away out in the middle of the road, Juan and the other vaqueros drove Aunt Ancie and Uncle Jumper’s carriage at top speed to try to beat them both to Tall Pine. She was riding a slow-moving wooden rocking horse on the veranda at Las Manzanitas while Peter Phillips and her five-year-old twin nephew and niece, Cole and Miranda, all rode matching ones beside her. She was walking across the night sky with Walks-With-Spirits, surrounded by dozens and dozens of animals and, incredibly, every step each of the animals took left a star behind for a footprint.

All that was enough to exhaust the most intrepid traveler, but she had no desire to stay in bed all morning as Emily had suggested last night at bedtime. Indeed, she couldn’t imagine sitting still for a minute.

She got up as Rosie came in just after dawn with fresh water for washing, dressed, and went for a walk across the dew-covered grounds before breakfast. Then she
reentered the house through the back door, found the kitchen and the cook, who introduced herself as Rosie’s mother, Daisy, and begged a hot biscuit straight from the pan.

She was buttering it and filling it with honey when a sleepy-eyed Emily came in with Sophia on her hip.

“Cotannah!” Emily exclaimed. “Are my eyes deceiving me? Is this the real Cotannah Chisk-Ko, in the kitchen so early in the morning that the roosters haven’t crowed yet?”

“Yes, they have,” Cotannah said smugly, reaching for the glass of cold milk Daisy was offering her. “You’re the lazy lie-abed, Emily Harrington Nashoba, and that’s why you didn’t hear them.”

“Oh, it’s like old times! Let’s have our breakfast here, just the two of us,” Emily cried, and then with a glance down at Sophia’s honey-colored head, “I mean the three of us. I don’t want to cope with everybody else this morning.”

Cotannah took a bite from her biscuit and a drink of the milk as Emily sat down across from her at the table by the backyard windows and settled the baby on her lap.

“And then let’s have Juan hitch up the carriage, and we’ll all go into town,” she said. “If Tuskahoma’s getting a brick building, it’ll soon grow as big as Corpus Christi, so I’d better go in and start learning my way around.”

Emily gave her a speculative glance and started crumbling a biscuit on the plate Daisy had placed in front of her.

“You’d rather go to town with me and Sophia than with your new admirer, Mr. Charley? He’ll be going in right after breakfast, himself.”

“Let him wait a few days,” Cotannah said, getting
up abruptly to go to the stove and pour coffee for each of them. “It’ll be good for him. I can tell he’s got a high opinion of himself.”

“He made me angry at supper last night,” Emily said, “deliberately taunting Walks-With-Spirits that way. Jacob is a boor sometimes, no matter how nice his father is.”

“I noticed Tay mentioned his father when he was trying nicely to shut him down,” Cotannah said, coming back to the table with the coffee. “Who is his father?”

“Olmun Charley. He’s a fine man and a great Choctaw patriot and Tay just loves him. He’s on the Council and he’s a staunch supporter of most of Tay’s policies.”

“I know that name. Isn’t Olmun an old friend of Ancie and Jumper?”

“Yes.”

“So are you advising me against letting Jacob call on me?”

Emily rolled her eyes and shrugged.

“Oh, not really, I guess. I don’t know. There’ve been rumors that Jacob’s not always really honest in his business dealings, or he’s too shrewd or something—I know he has a reputation of making enemies that way but I’ve never heard anything bad about him and the ladies he has escorted.”

Emily sipped her coffee while Sophia picked up pieces of the biscuit from the plate and ate them, one by one.

“You have to admit that Walks-With-Spirits provoked Jacob, too, though,” Cotannah said, smiling at Daisy as she set a bowl of scrambled eggs and a platter of fried ham in the middle of the table, then put plates and utensils beside them. “He might as well have been speaking a foreign language for all the sense he made every time he opened his mouth.”

“I’ll let you all wait on yourselves now, ma’am,” Daisy said briskly, “while I see to it that that Rosie’s taking care of the dining room.”

“Forget us, Daisy,” Emily said. “Just don’t even tell anyone in the dining room that we’re awake and up.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Walks-With-Spirits makes a lot of sense if a person listens and thinks about what he says,” Emily said defensively. “Jacob wasn’t trying.”

“Well, neither was Walks-With-Spirits,” Cotannah said lightly. “I wonder how his coyote’s doing this morning. When I went out for a walk a while ago, I glanced in that hay shed where he left him during supper, but there was no sign of them.”

“He told me when he left the house that he was going back to the cave for the night,” Emily said. “He only brought Taloa here when he was shot because it was the nearest place to find the herbs he needed. Normally, he eats with us about once a week or so but he has never spent the night here.”

Again the need to move, to do something, hit Cotannah, and she got up to refill their small china cups.

“Where’s his cave?”

The minute she asked the question she held her breath, wanting desperately to know. But why? What did she plan to do with the information—go out there and demand an explanation for all the mysterious remarks he made last night? Go out there and demand that he look at her and see that she was a woman, that he respond to her as a man and not some vague-talking philosopher?

“It’s over there in the east side of Buckthorn Ridge,” Emily said. “Tay says the People have always had summer gatherings and ball plays there because of the cold water springs.”

“All right,” Cotannah said, “I know where it is.”

She returned to the table with the coffee.

“If Walks-With-Spirits is living out there alone and coming in to see you all but once a week, then why was Jacob carrying on so about him causing division and strife in the Nation? I don’t see how that could be so.”

“He does things, and people hear about them,” Emily said. “Like stopping a disease that was making the deer sick by finding some kind of grass for them to eat and planting some seeds he brought from the Old Nation to revitalize some abandoned, worn-out fields.”

“I don’t see why that’d make anybody call him a witch.”

“Mostly that rumor comes from his association with so many wild animals,” Emily said. “When he does go into town—or any other time anyone sees him in the woods—he’s walking around with a coyote and a mountain lion. People have seen eagles and ravens fly down and sit on his shoulder and raccoons bring bright pebbles out of the creeks and drop them at his feet.”

“So then the other half of the People again say he’s a shaman.”

“Right. Especially when he knows ahead of time when a tornado will come and he can predict its path.”

“And again, the other faction cries witch.”

“Yes. And they say he should be run out of the Nation before he does something evil to someone. It’s a growing controversy,” Emily said, wiping Sophia’s plump hands and setting the wiggling child on the floor, “through no fault of his own.”

“Then he isn’t going around preaching a return to the old ways as Jacob claimed?”

“No. Other people are doing that because they see his powers and observe that he lives in the woods as the People did in the Old Nation long before the white men came.”

She sighed and got up to follow Sophia, who ran directly to the pie safe and jerked open its lower doors.

“Olmun is one of Walks-With-Spirits’s greatest admirers. He thinks he’s wise far beyond his age. He’s eager to talk with him every chance he gets, and personally, I think Jacob is jealous because he’s an only child and he has always been the light of his father’s life.”

“Ah,” Cotannah said. “That explains a lot about the tempest at the supper table last night.”

“Yes,” Emily said, laughing a little. “Doting father Olmun has always thought Jacob was wonderful, but even he would never call Jacob ‘wise.’”

“Miss Cotannah, Miss Cotannah,” Rosie cried, bursting in through the door to the hallway. “Here’s a message for you, and I’m to bring an answer right away.”

“I told her,” Daisy said, returning to the kitchen right behind her daughter and scowling mightily at her back. “I told her we was not to say that you ladies was yet up and about, but Miss Talking Tongue blurted that news right out.”

“It’s all right,” Emily soothed, as she picked Sophia up. “Don’t worry, Daisy. Our quiet breakfast is finished, anyway.”

Cotannah took the note Rosie brought her and unfolded it. At the top, a deeply embossed monogram in twining, fancy script shone in black against the cream color of the heavy paper. J. N. C.

She read the bold scrawl of the message beneath.

The signature covered half the page. Its large loops and flourishes, gleaming black against the expensive, slick paper, proclaimed that the writer was not a modest man in any sense of the word.

“Look at this,” she said, smiling, and handed it to Emily.

“Shall I write back that I already have plans for the day?” she asked. “Then we’ll drive into Tuskahoma together, and I’ll surprise him by appearing at his precious store on my own. But with you and Sophia and maybe even Ancie and Jumper.”

“Yes, why not?” Emily said. “We don’t want to let him think he’s got the upper hand if he’s beginning to court you.”

“I like to be unpredictable,” Cotannah said, smiling even more broadly now as she realized the full effect she had had on Jacob Charley. “But if there’s any quality I do like in a man, it’s confidence.”

Somehow that remark made her think of Walks-With-Spirits, on whom she had had no effect whatsoever. He was a challenge to end all challenges.

Cold fingers of despair closed around her heart. Jacob Charley might amuse her for a short time, he might keep her mind busy for a little while. But he was going to be too easy. He couldn’t keep her devils at bay for long.

J
acob Charley stepped out into the street and walked backward, with his eye fixed on his new building until he could see the split-shingled roof clear against the sky instead of all mixed up with the overhanging tree limbs. A powerful wave of pride swept through him. Not only would his new mercantile be the first brick building in Tuskahoma; at three stories high, it would be the tallest building, too!

He smiled and gave a nod and an approving wave to William Sowers, the head carpenter, who had stopped listening to Phillips for a minute so he could look and see Jacob’s reaction to how the roofing was going, to see if he wanted anything. It didn’t matter what Phillips was saying, really—it was only natural that William would look to him rather than to Phillips for orders—Jacob was a natural leader, everyone always said so.

“It looks good!” he shouted over the noise of the saws and hammers.

And it did. It looked great. He stood still and ran his eye over the whole structure while the breeze rose and rattled the leaves on the trees. It carried the slight scent of rain from somewhere, rain and the cool air of fall.
Yes, fall was fast approaching, and sometimes it brought fierce storms.

No matter. The roof would be finished before this day was over, and the mason’s crew would come tomorrow. Soon the bricks would protect the walls, and he wouldn’t care how much it rained—except to hope that it didn’t raise the creeks and muddy the roads until the customers couldn’t get to town.

He smiled broadly. Yes, this was a building good enough to impress a St. Louis drummer or a Philadelphia lawyer. It was almost finished, and, when the brick was on, it would look like the home of a prosperous business, the property of a smart, successful, progressive, forward-looking man.

Which it would be as soon as he accumulated enough in his secret Texas bank account to buy out Phillips. He didn’t worry about buying his father, Olmun, out of his third—all he had to do was wait and drop a few hints and the old man would give it to him. That was the good thing about being an only son, especially the only son of a soft old man like Olmun.

Slowly, reveling in the sight of his new dream taking shape in reality, he strolled back to Phillips, who was standing in the spot where the double front door was open wide. He would order brass plates and hinges for it and have it painted white, Jacob decided. That would show up the red bricks very well.

“We’ll have to cut those tree limbs way back,” he said to Phillips and William Sowers as he reached them. “They’ll rot out the eaves eventually, and, what’s more important, they’ll cover up part of our sign if we don’t.”

“I don’t reckon you’ll much need a sign, Mr. Charley,” William said. “This here will be such a fine place that there won’t be nobody in the Nation nor out of it who don’t know Charley and Phillips Mercantile, soon
as you all are in business for six months or so.”

Yes. But in that six months or so the name would have changed to Jacob Charley Mercantile and Phillips would be gone.

He couldn’t say that, of course, so he acknowledged the remark with a nod and a friendly clap on the shoulder. The young man had good judgment—he had to admit that.

“William, I’ve got some barns to build out on my place in Buffalo Valley,” Jacob said, pretending for a moment that the huge farm was his instead of his father’s, “two large hay barns and a horse barn, as a matter of fact, and I’d like you and your crew to put them up for me, since you’ve done such a good job here on the mercantile.”

“It’d be a pleasure, sir,” William said, his face lighting with interest. “Would you want us to start right away, since we’re all but done here?”

“Yes. I can keep you busy all fall and winter, depending on the weather being good, of course, and all of next spring into the bargain.”

“That’d be welcome work for sure,” William said, in a grateful tone. “Thank you, Mr. Charley.”

Mr. Charley. He loved the sound of that address. Usually it was his father who was called Mr. Charley. Well, the old man would just have to face the fact that he was sliding on toward the end of his days, and Jacob would be taking over everything pretty soon.

He felt a slight twinge of apprehension. This was the first time he’d gone so far as to arrange to have major work done, so far as to contract for a truly major expenditure, without talking it over with Olmun first, but he felt certain his father wouldn’t contradict his orders. He had, most of the time, let Jacob do whatever he wanted, from the moment he was born.

William Sowers went back to work, and Jacob glanced past Phillips into the street again. His heart gave a great leap of anger.

“Damn his hide! Phillips, do you see what I see or have my eyes gone bad?”

Phillips turned to look.

“Yep. There’s your old friend and supper companion, Walks-With-Spirits,” he said, with a low, irritating chuckle. “If that’s who your eyes tell you it is, that’s right.”

“The very sight of that mangy woods rat turns my stomach,” Jacob said. “I don’t know how I ever managed to eat with him sitting at the same table.”

His pulse thundered, roared in his ears.

The so-called shaman was stalking down the middle of the street like he thought he owned the town, with that slinking panther right beside him. A little rush of satisfaction ran through Jacob. The coyote wasn’t here, though, was it?

People on foot, riders on horseback, coaches and carriages rolling behind teams, none of them slowed the shyster one whit nor made him move one inch out of his set path. The sneaky pretender did, in fact, think the Nation was his to rule.

And why wouldn’t he, when superstitious men like Olmun and Tay Nashoba and two dozen others plus a wagonload of silly women, too, believed that he was a shaman and a damned
alikchi
, into the bargain?

Jacob’s blood fairly boiled.

“I’d like to send him and that cat straight to hell,” he muttered.

“Where’s the coyote?” Phillips said.

“I hope it died. Then maybe everybody’ll come to their senses and stop saying that his stupid animals are spirits and that he’s got powers.”

“According to him, they’re not his animals, remember?” Phillips murmured sarcastically.

“I’ll make him wish he had admitted the truth,” Jacob muttered, “that he’s got no more powers than a bessie-bug. I aim to encourage the crowd saying he’s got evil powers, though, because I want him gone. If they kill him as a witch, so much the better.”

They watched in silence as the ignorant throwback to a red savage—his hair was tied in two braids this morning, for God’s sake!—and his mountain cat began to angle toward the board sidewalk and Brown’s General Store on the opposite side of the street.

“Looks like he’s headed to Brown’s for his monthly supplies,” Phillips said.

Jacob clenched his jaw.

“Let’s hope he keeps on trading with Brown after our mercantile opens. If he comes in our store, I can’t say what I might do. I’m liable to leap over the counter and strangle him.”

Phillips laughed, long and loud. The white bastard actually laughed at him, Jacob Charley!

“Don’t be attacking our customers, now. We need all of ‘em we can get if we’re gonna pay for this building, remember?”

“We’ll have this building paid for in no time,” Jacob said sharply, “remember?”

At least I will
.

How could Phillips make such a simpleminded remark when they both had the extra money coming from the Boomers? Phillips was stupid, that was the truth, and Jacob Charley and his business would be better off when the white turnip-head was gone.

But irritating as Phillips was, he couldn’t hold Jacob’s attention for long. His vision swam, he was staring so hard at the scene across the street. The woods rat and
his big cat stepped up onto the boardwalk and vanished into Brown’s Store. Imagine! Taking a dangerous animal into a business establishment! Brown ought to throw him out and not hesitate about it.

He ought to be wiped off the face of the earth. At the very least, he ought to be scared out of showing his ugly face in town, arrogant fake that he is
.

When that thought hit him, the plan began to form in Jacob’s mind almost faster than he could sort it out, and he spoke even before it was finished.

“William!” he shouted. “William Sowers!”

It took a moment, but then the man came bursting in through the open back door of the building and running toward Jacob with a deep look of concern on his face.

Jacob’s chest swelled. The builder certainly wanted to please him, and he liked that.

“Go into Brown’s and find that medicine man woods walker. Give him my invitation to come see our building—the first brick building in Tuskahoma—and to talk to me. I need to speak with him.”

Phillips stared at him, alarmed.

“Now, Jacob, what do you have in mind? What’re you planning?”

Jacob felt a great surge of anger. The arrogant white-eyes actually had the nerve to question him in front of an employee!

He clamped his lips together tightly and sent William on his way with a commanding gesture.

“I thought you were going to grab the medicine man and hit him at supper last night, abuse of the Chief’s and Miss Emily’s hospitality or not,” Phillips said worriedly. “I don’t hanker to be a party to trouble, and we don’t need trouble here at our store.”

Jacob forced his pulse to slow and his words to come out light and cool.

“That’s why I want to talk to him. I’d better smooth over that disagreement from last evening—it didn’t set too well with Miss Emily and with the Chief and they’re liable to mention something to my father.”

Phillips stared at him skeptically.

Fury, pure, pulsating fury that the man would dare to criticize him and then dare to doubt his word rushed through Jacob in a hot wave. He fought to keep it out of his voice.

“It’s true,” he said, trying to sound humble and concerned. “You know as well as I do that old Olmun is one of the true believers in that lumphead. He talks to the faker all the time, and you know how he drives me crazy preaching at me when he gets on a tear.”

He used his man-to-man, friendly grin.

“We don’t want any friction in this three-way partnership, now, do we, Phillips? Let’s head it off before anything gets started, or Olmun will nag us both to death. Besides, we might lose the business of all the folks who believe like Olmun if word gets around that I’ve had words with the charlatan.”

Phillips frowned.

“You may be right. We don’t want that. But I’m warning you now, Charley, this had better not be a trick—you’d better not be getting him over here so you can start up that argument again.”

“I’m not. Count on it.”

“Well, one of us has to tend to business,” Phillips said. “I’m going to check that shipment of harness. This store is basically done, and we’d do just as well to start stocking the shelves.”

“Go ahead.”

Jacob stepped out from under the doorframe as he spoke, heading for the back corner of the building where two huge sycamores grew. The scaffolding used in
working on the second and third floors still stood in an L-shape, higher than the arm’s reach of a tall man, its loose planks littered with pieces of boards and some of the bricks that had been brought in the day before. A stack of them balanced carefully in just the right way could come crashing down onto the head of somebody below.

He stepped into the dappled shade where he’d be less likely to be noticed and, with a quick look around to make sure that none of the workmen and none of the people in the street were watching, loosened one of the support braces. Then he upended a barrel and leapt up onto it. Faster than he had even hoped, the trap was set.

He jumped back down to the ground and thought quickly how to spring it. The so-called shaman was an animal lover wasn’t he? How about a hurt fox right back in there in the thickest part of the underbrush? The natural place to hunker down and try to see into the dimness of the foliage was at the end of the scaffolding, and, while all the pretender’s attention was taken up, Jacob could shake some bricks off on him or tip the other end of the board so they’d slide off down onto his prey.

He smiled grimly. Great. The idiot liked animals so much he could see what it was like to be hunted like one and caught in a trap.

Calmly, he walked back out into the sunshine. Phillips would stay in the store and leave them alone to talk, for Jacob to apologize—Ha!—and for them to make peace between them. Then, just like the snap of a finger, Olmun’s wise man would be gone.

A broad grin stretched his lips. What inspiration! This would most likely take care of the mountain lion, too, since it stayed so close beside the man at all times, but if not, if it didn’t run away from the clatter and the noise, if it tried to attack him, he had the pistol.

He patted the bulge in the pocket of his new dress coat. Yes. This was so perfect! An unfortunate accident was such a wonderful idea he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it earlier—say the very first time Olmun had come home singing the praises of the crazy “healer” who was nothing but a throwback to two hundred years ago in the Old Nation.

Why couldn’t Olmun and his old-fashioned friends have enough sense to see that progress was the only hope of salvation for all of them? The traditional ways were dead, and he, for one, intended to see to it that they were buried and forgotten.

He rounded the front corner of the store and saw a sight that stopped him short. An open carriage sat at the doorway of his building with two of those Mexican outriders dismounted beside it, a young woman accepting the hand of one of them as she stepped gracefully to the ground. Cotannah Chisk-Ko!

His pulse tripped and began beating faster. So. She hadn’t been able to wait, after all! She got to thinking about his invitation and changed her plans for the day! She had come to him on the very next morning after they had met!

Her skirts blew against her legs and showed the shape of her thighs as she stood beside the carriage, but it was her breasts, high and firm and generously large compared to her tiny waist, that held his gaze. What a handful for any man! He’d never seen a woman who carried herself so proudly and had so much reason to do so.