Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (3 page)

"Sit," Uncle Gabe said cheerfully.  He pulled a chair out at the island and nudged me into it.  He rooted around in the pantry.  "Everything go alright?"

"Guess so," I mumbled.  Only the shaman was supposed to know what you saw on your vision quest.

Uncle Gabriel tossed a bag of homemade maple candy down on the island in front of me.  I attacked the bag like a shark in high water.  Uncle Gabe raised his eyebrows and looked at me from under them, pleasant but questioning.  I stuffed a wad of candy in my mouth and sucked the life out of it, mostly because I was hungry, but partly because I didn't want to talk.  I knew what Uncle Gabriel wanted to talk about.  He always wanted to talk about something.

"So have you decided to stop punching people?" Uncle Gabe asked casually.

I swallowed my candy, my teeth sticking together.  "No," I said sourly.

Uncle Gabe sat at the island with me.  He rubbed his face in his big, square hands.  Told you he does that when he's disappointed in me.

"I want to know what we're getting at," Uncle Gabriel said.  "You've already been left back once for brawling in school--"

"Sleeping Fox started it," I said wildly.  "He kept talking shit about Dad--"

About me, I didn't add.

"You have to understand something," Uncle Gabriel said, his voice strained.  "William Sleeping Fox has every right to disparage your dad.  I know you don't like it, kiddo; I understand that.  He's your father.  But Eli murdered seven women.  On a reservation this size--"  About three hundred people lived in Nettlebush.  "--he left enough of an impact to hurt everyone in some way."

I knew he had.  He'd hurt my sister and my mother, too.  Mary wouldn't even live on the reservation anymore.  And Mom--

"Rafael, I'm sorry," Uncle Gabriel said.

"Mom was your sister, too," I said.

Uncle Gabriel's face tightened with pain.  He cleared his throat.  He said, "It's late.  You'd better get ready for bed."

"Uncle Gabe," I said.  "Where's Dad now?"

A shadow fell over Uncle Gabriel's brow.  I didn't know who I was kidding.  Blood law says when one person seriously harms another, the victim's clan is allowed to avenge him or her by harming the attacker the same way.  Dad had to be dead by now.  He gave seven different clans the incentive to kill him.  Maybe Uncle Gabriel was right.  Maybe they were justified in coping however they could.

"You should take a bath first," Uncle Gabe said.  "Before you go to sleep."

In our culture you're never going to meet anyone who speaks his mind outright.  If he can get away with telling you half the story, he won't bother telling you the whole story.  Even Uncle Gabriel, friendly and pleasant and allergic to commitment, was like a book you couldn't finish because some jackass taped the last few pages shut.  Pry the pages apart and they'll rip.

"Night," I mumbled.  I stood up.

I went outside our house and washed myself in the basin out back.  I scrubbed my arms and face until the sand flaked off and the skin bruised red.  When I went back inside the house I trailed water behind me.  I didn't notice until it was too late.  My room was down the thin hallway beside the kitchen.  I pushed open my bedroom door and the whale-shaped lamp was already lit on the writing table, spewing blue light over the unpainted walls.  Charcoal sketches on lined papers hung on the walls, most of them depicting animals, snapping turtles and herons and damselflies.  A photo of Mary and me stuck to the closet door, Mary's arms around me, Mary's cheek against mine.  I waded through the giant pile of library books on the floor.  Uncle Gabriel must have made the bed for me.  The sheets were starched and white with blue lining, folded neatly, or as neatly as a guy could actually fold.  My favorite color was purple.  I only pretended it was blue so people would get off my case.

Being indoors for an extended amount of time grates on my nerves.  I don't think any animal belongs walled in; and we forget that humans are animals, too.  I stared at the radio under the desk, and the small display case next to the bed, handmade dyes and ink sticks sitting behind the glass door.  My imagination turned on me.  The walls closed in on me, the air thinning in my chest.  Shadows crawled up from under the floorboards, wrapping around my ankles, climbing the length of my legs.

I closed my eyes.  I opened them.  The shadows were gone.  Caliban from
The Tempest
squatted in one corner of my room, flayed arms wrapped around woody, vine-encrusted knees.  I didn't know whether he was my favorite fictional character, but I knew he was the one I understood best.  He opened his mouth and bared two sets of rotted teeth, spitting with yellow acid.  I felt safe.  We were monsters, he and I, and couldn't fight our nature, and didn't bother trying.

I took a set of inks out of the display case on the floor.  I took a wooden needle out of the tin box beneath my bed and ground the inks into the needle until they ran watery and blue.  I shucked my dirty shirt off, balling it up, tossing it on the floor.  A blue tattoo twisted around my right arm, thirty-six chain links winding from wrist to elbow.

I turned my arm over.  I threaded the needle through the underside and stenciled in the thirty-seventh chain link, hot pain spreading through my veins.  It felt good.  It felt good because I wasn't hurting anybody else, just me.  Sometimes I thought I was going to hurt everyone I ever met.  Sometimes I thought it wasn't just Dad the tribal council ought to have killed.

2

Going Dancing

Nobody in Nettlebush works on Sundays.  You can thank Christian missionaries for that.  When I woke up Sunday morning I spent twenty minutes digging in my cluttered closet for my hunting spear before I realized I had my days mixed up.  I stomped into the kitchen, angry.  I calmed down when Uncle Gabriel gave me a chocolate bar.

"You're coming to church with me today," Uncle Gabriel said.

I jammed the chocolate in my mouth.  "Since when do you go to church?" I asked, mouth full.

"Swallow," Uncle Gabriel advised.  I swallowed.  "Your mother liked church," he pointed out patiently.  "I thought it would be a good idea to try and get back into it."

Yeah, well, I didn't.  "She's dead," I returned.

Uncle Gabe looked into the bottom of his coffee cup.  "That doesn't mean anything," he posited, far away.  "The dead don't disappear.  They return to the soil."

We all come from the soil.  Every last one of us.  In the beginning of days we were unripe seeds that Wolf carried around in his mouth, protecting us.  But when Coyote came along, and knocked the seeds out of Wolf's mouth, we took root in the dirt and grew as human beings.  You'll hear a lot of old folks debate about that.  Would it have been better for us to stay in the Wolf's maw, immature, but safe?  We gained our individuality, but what did we give up?

"M'gonna get dressed," I mumbled.

"Did you sleep in those filthy jeans?" Uncle Gabriel asked, dubious.  "Wear a shirt next time, okay?"

I dragged myself into my room.  I found a gray shirt on the floor.  I grabbed an earring from the box on my desk, dagger shaped, the one I'd made back in '97.  I fastened it in my ear.  I didn't want to go to church, mostly because it meant spending long hours cooped up indoors, but after the crap I'd given Uncle Gabriel these past few months, I figured I owed him.  When Dad had vanished, and Mom had died, Uncle Gabriel was the one to raise Mary and me, no questions asked.  He could have turned us over to our grandma out on Fort Hall.  He could have told us to take a hike.

The dove's feather from the vision quest caught my eye.  It was sitting on top of my writing table, glossy and gray and unblemished.  I strode over and picked it up.  Between my hard fingers it felt soft as cotton, powdery as snow.  On a vision quest, the first animal that comes to you is your spirit guide.  The Great Spirit has to take a form that won't overwhelm you; because if you saw it for what it really was, you wouldn't be able to understand it.  You'd probably lose your mind trying.

I grabbed a rubber band off my desk and worked a strand of my hair into a side braid.  I knotted the feather in by the stiff quill.  The shaman had said that doves were mothers.  I wanted my mother more than I wanted a spirit guide.

"Raf, let's go!"

Uncle Gabe and I left the house at seven-thirty.  Uncle Gabe locked the front door, sunny goldfinches singing on the southern oak's lowest branches.  The sun stood tall and strong in the sky, so bright it sapped the light from the clouds, bleaching them blue-gray.  I shielded my eyes.  Pockets of imagined darkness crawled across the grassy ground.  They covered the water well northeast of the crossroads; they sloshed up the bull pines, rotting the bark.  I blinked twice and the shadows disappeared.  I could feel them lingering behind my eyes.  I didn't know how to make them disappear for good.

The reservation's church was southwest of the crossroads, a couple yards away from the colonial schoolhouse.  It was a small building, white, with a steeple and an empty cupola.  I wasn't sure why whoever built it never installed a bell.  The church doors were already propped open, the reverend standing outside, smiling at us in his black frock and his wide-brimmed Panama hat.  Reverend Silver Wolf was an old guy, his braids long and gray and his face perpetually blushing.  Every Christmas he put on a pageant for the reservation, and I usually got roped into it somehow, like the time when I was five and played the role of Black Bear.  The last time it happened I was thirteen.  We had a conversation that went like this:

"Oh, um.  These curtains, on the stage, they're very nice, aren't they?"

"Uh.  Uh, yeah, sir."

"And that's, um.  Well, are you looking forward to the Warm Dance?"

"I--yeah.  Uh."

"Well, um, have a good--have a nice Jesus."

I did have a nice Jesus.  He was sitting in my basement, one of those framed, painted portraits where he's holding his heart in his hands.

Uncle Gabriel led me inside the church.  It was really plain on the inside, the windows clear glass, the pews polished wood.  Only a couple of families attended service this early.  Catherine Looks Over sat toward the front of the nave, her stern, wrinkled face pinched up coldly.  I kind of worried about her sometimes; she lived alone.  A few seats behind her were the In Winter family, Autumn Rose giggling behind her hand, the boys thumb wrestling underneath a missal.  Uncle Gabriel slid into a seat in the back row, Rosa Gray Rain the only other occupant.  Rosa looked up at us, then away, chewing nervously on her lip.  I sat next to Uncle Gabriel and stared at the back of the head in front of me.  The hair was long and brown, really brown, like
cherry wood, and just as glossy.  I scowled.  I didn't need to see her face to know it was Annie Little Hawk.

"Stop growling, Rafael," Annie said calmly.  "They can hear you all the way out on the Navajo reservation."

Annie turned around to face me.  She was one of those annoyingly waifish girls, with a heart-shaped face and a tiny nose and a pointy little chin.  Everything she said got on my nerves, like she thought she was so much smarter and better than everyone else.

"Stop looking at me," I said through my teeth.

Annie's little sister whipped around in her seat.  Lila, I thought her name was.  She resembled Annie, but her hair was darker, in pigtails.  She shot me an unimpressed glance.

"Making friends, Rafael?" Uncle Gabriel asked.  He had been talking with Rosa when he looked at me, polite, but warning.

"Let us pray," said Reverend Silver Wolf, ascending the pulpit.

I hate church.  It's not our traditional religion, no matter how many peyote songs you sing during mass, no matter how much tobacco you burn during homily.  Reverend Silver Wolf asked the parishioners to turn to one another and offer a sign of peace.  That wasn't traditional, either.  Annie's dad shook hands with the In Winter girls, Autumn Rose practically toppling off her pew with excitement.  Uncle Gabriel got up and walked to the front of the church to kiss Mrs. Looks Over on her cheek.  Mrs. Looks Over preened.  Rosa bit her lip again and turned to me; she offered me her hand.

Rosa Gray Rain was a nurse at the reservation hospital, just off the turnpike.  She was short and pudgy, twenty-four or twenty-five, I didn't know which; we don't really count age by the birthday, but by the season.  Her hair was black as coal, her round face perpetually troubled.  My father had killed her mother eleven years ago.

I reached slowly, painfully, for Rosa's hand.  It actually hurt me, somewhere in my gut, somewhere in the hole that should have been my heart.  Rosa's hand was shaking long before I touched it.  Mine didn't shake, but only because it had gone numb.  Our fingers locked, her feelings pummeling me.  I kept my eyes on her chin, afraid to meet her eyes.  Someone I loved had killed someone she loved.  Why hadn't I been able to see him for what he was?  Why hadn't I been able to stop him?  Didn't that make me just as guilty as he was?  Maybe even more.  Last year I'd gone to the library in Yaqui Crossing to write a report on brain structure for school.  This one book had said that psychopaths' brains were wired incorrectly; it made sense to them that their feelings should come before everybody else's.  I didn't know that my dad was a psychopath.  If he was, then the murders weren't really his fault, right?  I could pretend they weren't his fault, right?

Rosa dropped my hand.  Her eyes snapped shut.  She wasn't fast enough to hide the tears pooling in their corners, the heavy, frightened way her chest moved under her scrub shirt.  She was scared of me.  She was scared of me because I had a monster's face.  Neither of us could say how much else I'd inherited from that monster.