Gives Light(Gives Light Series) (20 page)

Annie's mouth quivered.  She buried her face in her arm.  "They couldn't find enough of her for a funeral," I heard her rasp, voice muffled with new tears.

I pressed my hand to her back and rubbed soothing circles against her skin.

"The ghost dance is soon," Rafael said.

I hadn't expected that to make any difference to Annie's demeanor; but she stilled, sitting up straight; she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.  "That's right," she said.  She sounded oddly calm.

Calamity has an odd way of bringing people together unexpectedly.  Rafael had more or less loathed Annie and Aubrey before that evening; and Aubrey had feared Rafael while Annie had politely considered him a sort of minor plague.  From then on, the dynamic was different.  Rafael came to the Little Hawk house in the afternoons instead of waiting for me in the cupola.  If there was something around the house that needed to be fixed--sagging eaves or a draft--he took up the task without being asked.  Aubrey invariably stayed a while to chat with him about books or the day's hunt, the former topic guaranteed to lead to a heated debate.  And when Annie cut off her long, burnished brown hair at the chin, a Plains mourning tradition, all three of us were quick to tell her how lovely she looked.

19

Ghost Dance

Maybe Gabriel Gives Light really did know every Plains person south of Wyoming--because within the very week that Annie and her siblings learned about their mother's death, their grandpa moved to Nettlebush.

Grandpa Little Hawk was an outspoken, opinionated old man with a ruddy face and a stomach as round as Santa's.  He wasn't afraid to boss around total strangers, and in that respect he reminded me a little of my own grandmother.  But for all his brashness, his coarse disposition, he was always smiling--like this one time when Annie had me sauteing tomatoes, and Grandpa Little Hawk walked into the kitchen and said, "A cooking Nancy Boy!" and I couldn't find it in me to feel annoyed with him because he'd said it with such a friendly grin.  Sometimes I wondered whether he was under the impression that Nancy was my actual name, because he never called me anything else.  At least Aubrey and Rafael, whenever they visited, weren't exempt; Grandpa Little Hawk called Aubrey "Hopskotch" and Rafael "Mopey Kid."

Monikers aside, I was really glad that Grandpa Little Hawk had come to live in Nettlebush.  He was diligent with Mr. Little Hawk, half peer and half parent; and when it came to his grandchildren, he took charge right away, acquiring their school records and accompanying them to doctors' appointments and, most importantly, making sure none of them tried to run away and live with the coyotes.  I wish I could say that Annie consequently found time to relax, but with her mother's death so freshly imprinted on her memory, she was more prone to bouts of pensive silence than ever before.

Very shortly after Grandpa Little Hawk's arrival was the date of the annual ghost dance.

The date was a Sunday, which meant no work, no group dinner--and oddly, no church.  Reverend Silver Wolf stopped by with his Bible to bless the house, but I didn't understand what for, and Granny didn't feel the need to explain.  I was so nervous, I couldn't eat for fear of throwing up.  Granny, annoyed, force-fed me several cups of sagebrush tea in compensation.  I spent most of the evening in the outhouse.

Granny sat by the window and watched the sky until it filled with stars.  She stood up, beckoning for me to follow.

We left the house at the same time as countless families around us were leaving theirs.  I didn't know where we were going; the nightly bonfire wasn't lit.  I wrapped my arm around Granny's and she leaned against me.

We followed the families north, to the badlands.

Crossing the rough terrain without fear was somehow more feasible when everyone else was doing it.  Whoever was at the front of the group must have known a more trustworthy route than the ones Rafael and I had taken on our afternoon trips to the promontory, because Granny and I seldom experienced any of the sliding rocks and crumbling clay I had grown accustomed to.  Before long, the promontory was behind us.  We were in a part of the badlands that I had never been to before.  The ground between the canyons was smooth, a small grove of southern oaks standing in the distance.

A bonfire raged high in a stone firepit.  A member of the tribal council tossed pitch into the flames and they burned taller, brighter.

Granny tromped away and left me standing alone on the edge of the congregation.  I toyed nervously with the flute hanging from my throat.  I watched the Plains men and Plains women gather around the fire.

A little boy about Lila's age trundled over to me, an ornamental flute in his hands.

"Hello, Mr. St. Clair," he said.  He had big, soulful eyes and auburn hair.  "I want to play Offerings for an Empty Sky and Native Nocturne.  Is that okay?  You can play the other two, but I think you should go first."

I grinned at the kid and ruffled his hair.  His ears turned pink around around the edges; he ducked his head sheepishly and shuffled to the opposite end of the crowd.

The tribe formed two circles around the bonfire, one within the other.  The Titan-sized tribal representative, the one with the bushy hair, started talking, his voice like gravel.

"Thousands of years ago," he said, "we Shoshone left the mountains and settled on the Great Plains.  There we met the Paiute, who taught us this sacred dance."

I don't like to break promises, and that was the only thing keeping me from turning and running away.  Because I was having those thoughts again, that I didn't belong here, that I was rubbing salt in an open wound.  This same dance had been performed centuries ago and had ended in spilled blood and tears.  The Natives had danced and the whites had slain them for it.  And really--can you think of anything more ridiculous to fight over?  A dance?

The eyes on me were patient and expectant.  I could feel myself split in two, the two halves of my own history.  I was the fallen Plains children and I was the usurpers who had taken their lives and their land.  That didn't make sense to me.  I didn't make sense.

I knew if I didn't do something soon, it was going to look weird.  So I raised the flute to my lips and played.

It felt like magic when the right notes tumbled from beneath my fingertips.  More magical, still, was when the men and women--the boys and the girls--began to dance.  The two circles moved counter to one another, the men with their hand drums, the women with their turtleshell rattles, the flames spitting and curling against the night sky.  I had never felt so much a part of something as I felt that night.  Learning that I could make music, music people would dance to, awakened a dormant part of me, a stranger with my face and my heart.

And I thought:  This dance wasn't about me.  It was about the dancers.  Knowing that, I couldn't possibly have run away.  Knowing that was an honor.  It imbued me, I think, until I couldn't remember my earlier fear.

I finished Land of Enchantment and segued into Place of Great Mystery.  Rafael had said that the ghost dance united the souls of the still-living with the souls of the dead.  On a cold, bright night like this, the constellations stark in the dark sky, friends and strangers dancing to the same rhythm, the same songs, the songs their ancestors had danced to and died for, I thought I could believe him.  I could see why Mom had fallen in love with these people--and by proxy, with Dad.  For a moment, I had to wonder whether she was with us.  Maybe she was dancing, too.

The little boy with the auburn hair picked up where I had left off.  He was definitely the better flautist, and I enjoyed the chance to sit down and listen to him play.  He started with a song so slow, so sad, I felt like a black cloud was hanging over the badlands.  It was one of those soul-reaching pieces that tricked you into believing you'd never had a happy thought in your life.  It was profoundly beautiful, but I couldn't help feeling relieved once it had ended.  The next song, in contrast, was calming and serene.  I wouldn't have called it cheerful, but it was hypnotic, in a way.  I thought it would have made a really good lullaby.

I saw a flash of Granny's long white braid, and something suddenly occurred to me.  Granny was forcing me to grow.  She had signed me up for the ghost dance because she knew--she knew I felt like an outsider.  Had felt like an outsider.  She had sent Annie Little Hawk to me months ago so I'd have a friend.

She had never given back my jacket.

I couldn't possibly put into words what that meant to me.  Nor had I realized until that moment how much of a group project it was to grow up.  Each of us is just an imprint of the many people who have crossed paths with us over the years, some more times than others.  Most of us never think to say thank you.  I know I never had.

It was late at night when the ghost dance reached its conclusion.  Annie caught my gaze and waved to me, distant and resolved; she gathered Joseph into her arms; she followed Grandpa Little Hawk across the crags, her eyes straight ahead.  I saw the Owns Forty boy trailing after his father and the At Dawn girls holding hands with the bushy-haired Titan.

Granny found me and linked our arms.  She didn't say anything to me, but she nodded, stiff and proper, in a way I took to mean her approval.

Arm-in-arm, we traversed the badlands and found our way home.  I lit the hearth, the same as every night, while Granny dressed for bed.

"Good night," Granny said curtly.

Before she could retreat to her bedroom, I took her into a hug. 

Granny wasn't a very warm person; I didn't expect her to reciprocate, and I didn't mind that she probably wouldn't.  But she wrapped her arms around me, solid and firm, her hand at the back of my head.

"You're welcome," she said.

20

Home

That August was probably the hottest cumulative month in the history of Arizona--unless you count the part that's strictly desert, anyway.  One morning I was shocked, and a little disgusted, when the thermometer outside the front room window gave me a reading of 110.

The August heat wave seized Nettlebush in sweltering, sweaty hands and wouldn't let go.  All around the reservation I saw houses with unusually dark windows and realized they were covered to combat the sun.  Ms. Siomme and the Takes Flight boys started worrying about the state of their pastures.  I didn't see many barn animals outdoors during that time; it was too hot even for the horses.  It was too hot even for Rafael to gallivant around the wilderness the way he would have liked.  But he quickly came up with an inventive solution to our meteorological qualms.

In the afternoons we went straight back to my house and holed ourselves up in the kitchen cellar, protected from the heat wave by frozen produce, mounds of ice, and insulated walls.  My breath left my lips in a hazy mist.  It was heaven.

"You missed the raft race in June.  You're staying in Nettlebush, right?  So you'll be around for the next one.  I've got a beech raft, but it sucks.  Maybe we could hijack Aubrey's."

The cellar was pitch black, as we'd learned during our first couple of forays, so Rafael had taken to bringing a small flashlight with him.  It was the only light by which we saw each other's faces.

Raft race?
I asked.  I'd given up on trying to teach Rafael the alphabet--he made for a very difficult student--but I'd learned that repeating whatever he said in ASL sometimes helped him correlate the words with the signs.

Not this time, though.  "The hell did you just do with your hands?" he asked.  "Do it again, that looks so weird."

I nudged him in the ribs instead.  He nudged back.  I pushed him.  He thumped back against a frosty cardboard box, swore, and laughed loudly.  The standing flashlight toppled over as we wrestled in the snow.

The cellar door swung open above us.

"You boys get out of there this instant!" Granny bellowed.

Rafael and I exchanged sour looks.  He scooped up the flashlight and we climbed out of the cellar.  I tried my best to look angelic; Rafael just looked guilty.

"I should have known," Granny said.  She closed the cellar door and batted at Rafael with her hand.  "Go hide in your own cellar!"

"Ow!  I don't have one, we've got a refrigerator."

"Shoo!"

Dejected, we left the house on a long walk.

"This sucks," Rafael said.  "Why'd we have to leave the Plains for Arizona, of all places?  Why couldn't we have gone north to Alaska?"

Alaska was south, but I didn't want to tell him that.  I bit the inside of my mouth to keep from laughing.  Rafael noticed anyway.

"What?" he asked darkly.

I seized the sides of his scowling face and forced his mouth into a bizarre smile.  He swatted at me, but swung an arm around my shoulders.  Unwelcome as the additive body warmth was, I couldn't complain.  I loved it when he put his arm around me, the sweeping affection and security that came with the gesture; a heat wave wasn't about to change that.

"Wanna go to the lake?" Rafael asked.  "I hate it when other kids are there, but I'm too hot to complain."

I smiled, sleepy and accepting.  Rafael surveyed me thoughtfully.  He tousled his fingers through my hair and smiled back.  Another personal victory.

We followed the lane through the woods and stopped at the edge of the lake.  A crowd of teenagers were wading in the shallow water.  Lila Little Hawk sat on the bank with the little red-haired boy from the ghost dance.  They looked like they were reading schoolbooks, albeit not with very much enthusiasm.