Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (4 page)

"The Lord be with you," Reverend Silver Wolf said meekly.

I couldn't stand it anymore.  I got up before Uncle Gabe came back down the aisle.  I bolted out the open doors, into the fresh sun.

Sunlight wasn't enough to assuage the ghosts in my head.  I stared at the sky; and my imagination opted for overkill.  The clouds churned black, crackling with howling winds.  The sun went smaller and smaller; I didn't want it to; I couldn't stop it.  Faint, yellow, it disappeared in a puff of smoke.  The ground shook underneath my feet.  I felt like it was trying to buck me off.

Caliban crawled out of the shadows, oozing slime on the green-brown grass.  After him came Chrestomanci, a wizard in a bathrobe with curly brown hair.  When I was ten I'd told Uncle Gabe I wanted to marry Chrestomanci.  Uncle Gabe's response had been something like, "Make sure you get a dowry."  The shadows receded a little, but the sun didn't return.  Nettlebush was splashed in stretches of darkness like gaping holes.  The water well north of the crossroads looked infected, scabbed over.  The dirt road under my shoes ran muddy with black blood.  When I breathed the air it tasted like formaldehyde; but at least I could breathe.  I had heroes and villains with me, Christopher Chant smoothing his hair back, Bottom dancing with winged Titania.  I could pretend I was fictional, too.  I could pretend I stopped existing when I closed the pages of my favorite books.

I skulked around the side of the little white church.  I knelt beside the water pump out back and lifted the loose wood panel on the wall above it.  A lined notebook and a piece of charcoal toppled out, both mine.  I scooped them up in my arms, my fingers stinging with the memories of hornets.  I shouldered open the peeling gate to the cemetery, slouching through.

Rows of crumbling gray headstones rolled from the back of the church all the way into the oak woods.  Everyone who had ever lived and died in Nettlebush was buried here.  I followed the familiar names on the graves until I came to the end of the second row.  I knelt on the ground, squinting at the words carved into the stone.

"Dolores Black Day," the headstone read.  "1967 - 1989.  You've gone dancing; we'll see you again."

We don't have a word for death in Shoshone.  Instead we call death "nekkamaiku"--going dancing.  Death is not something that happens to the dead.  It's the people who are left behind who have to navigate the loss, and sometimes fail.

I sat on the brittle, barren ground.  I flipped open a lined page in my notebook and sketched Dolores Black Day from memory.  I'd seen her face in Uncle Gabe's photo albums, grainy pictures of pauwaus past.  I drew her with long hair and round eyes, a big chin.  I drew her wearing a fancy shawl, the polka-dotted kind that dancers used to wear during the Depression.  In my drawings Dad's victims were still alive.  They came and surrounded me sometimes, filmy ghosts that didn't interact with me, but looked on, expressions unreadable.  Those were the occasions when I wondered whether I really could raise the dead.  I mean, I knew the ghosts were my imagination; I'm not crazy or anything.  But imagination is at least half of what living is all about.

Finished with my sketch, I wiped my dirty hands on my trousers.  I dug a wad of spirit gum out of my pocket and spat on it until it ran sticky and wet.  I walked around Dolores Black Day's grave, ripped her portrait from my notebook, and stuck it on the back of her headstone, on top of twelve other charcoal sketches.

My dad was the one who taught me how to draw.  He used to say that drawings were better at preserving moments than photographs were.  A photograph showed you everything as it was on the outside; but a drawing showed you the feelings behind the person holding the pencil.

"Like this, kiddo," Dad had said.

I was five years old and he'd taken me on his lap.  We sat at the window of our old lake house, a bronze sun painting our faces the same shade of brown.  He made me wrap my stubby fingers around his so I could feel the pencil gliding under our joined hands.  He sketched my mom in a sunhat, black hair tumbling around the soft lines of her face.

My dad's drawings had been soft drawings.  If you could see them right now, you'd know what I mean.  The lines blurred together, hazy and dreamlike.  Every eyelash, every fingernail was reverent, full of care.  My dad's hands had been gentle hands.  His hands had tucked me into bed at night.  His hands had covered my eyes when I was six years old, when he'd surprised me with the complete set of Narnia books.

Drawings were a window into the artist's emotions.  My dad's drawings never told me he wanted to kill women, to cut them into pieces and dump them in the desert.

I might have hated the desert.  I might have hated it more than anything.

I didn't know why I kept leaving drawings at Dad's victims' graves.  I could have left gifts of a different nature, iron jewelry and bone jewelry, things I'd known how to make since I was three.  I think the reason I chose drawings was because they were Dad's medium.  I wanted to take something of his, something that belonged to an ugly person, and make it good again.  I wanted to take the pain he left behind and convert it to happiness.  The only problem was I didn't have the courage to hand the drawings to their rightful owners.  I left them on the graves, hoping they'd be seen, too cowardly to show my own face.

"--supposed to do about this?" someone was saying.

I scrambled at the unexpected voice.  Like the coward I was, I ducked behind Dolores' headstone, my notebook and my charcoal on my lap.  My head tucked into my chest, shadows swirled around me, Aslan roaring in the distance, Titania taking flight.

"I don't see what the big deal is," a reedy, elderly voice drawled.  Both voices, both female, drew closer to the cemetery gates.  "God forbid something happened to my daughter, of course I'd take in little Junebug."

My eyes narrowed.  I laid my hands flat on the ground.  My hands stung with hornets and shadows.  I folded them on my lap.

"Of course," said the first of the voices, also elderly, curt, "I have not forgotten Naneewi--"

Naneewi is your clan, your kinship system.  Shoshone clans pass down through the mother, not the father.  I'm Rafael Gives Light because my mom was Susan Gives Light.  Before he married her, Dad was Eli Maison.

"Right, right," said the second of the old women.  "Naneewi--well, the boy's clan certainly hasn't stayed in the picture."

"Hmph, he's probably been raised taipo'o, I don't know
what
Paul was thinking..."

The cemetery had two separate entrances, but even if I'd taken the back gate the women would have seen me.  I didn't like it when people saw me.  Irate, I glanced around the side of Dolores' headstone.  My eyes were shitty, but I saw two blurry elders standing by the side gate.  The one wore ridiculously gigantic sunflower earrings.  The other had a long white braid as stark as snow.  Great.  Hilde Threefold and Catherine Looks Over.

"You're not thinking about turning him away," Mrs. Threefold said skeptically.

"Of course not!" Mrs. Looks Over said, indignant.  "He may not be Naneewi, but what does that matter?  He's still my grandson.  Except--"

"Well, 'except.' "

"I suppose he's the sort of boy who's accustomed to telephones, and cinema, and all that rickety-rackety nonsense.  What am I supposed to do with a boy like
that
?"

Even my house didn't have a telephone.  Didn't have a TV, either, and we got on just fine.

"He doesn't speak," Mrs. Looks Over went on, sighing.  "Honestly, Hilde, how am I supposed to communicate with him?"

"
Sutummu tukummuinna," Mrs. Threefold said at once.  Don't know how to explain that term, except that it means to understand someone even when they talk in a different language.

"He doesn't
speak
!" Mrs. Looks Over repeated, very frustrated.  "Why did I expect you to be of help?"

"He's mute, is that so?" Mrs. Threefold said.  "Send the Little Hawk family his way, they all know sign language..."

At that point I'd stopped listening.  A cold, watery kind of dread flooded through my chest, my throat.  Catherine Looks Over had one son: Paul Looks Over, who lived outside the reserve.  There was a reason her son lived outside the reserve.  His wife had been my dad's last victim.

Except that wasn't true; not really.  Because after Dad killed Christine St. Clair, he tried to kill her kid, too.  It was unprecedented for Dad.  All the other bodies that turned up around the rez had belonged to women, aged sixteen to forty.  Rebecca, Mercy, Violet, Charity, Naomi, Dolores, Christine.  The way I figured, the kid had gotten in the way, seen something he shouldn't have.  He'd thrown a wrench in Dad's plans that night; and Dad had cut his throat open, and he'd survived.

He'd ID'd my father.  He'd sent my father away.

Nettlebush around me went red as blood, as the sun at sea.  My blood lit on fire.  The ground trembled loudly, like the lyrics from our old Switch Song:  "Annitain, annitain."  Hold onto your sagebrush, because too many evil people are standing on this planet, and one day it's going to tip over.

Dad was one of those evil people.  Dad was a murderer.  If Dad hadn't been caught, he would have gone on killing countless other women.  Maybe he would have even taken his enterprises off the reservation.  In my head I knew it was a good thing that he was gone now, that the St. Clair kid had lived to point the finger.  That didn't stop me from wondering what it would have been like to grow up with both parents.  Not long after Dad got caught, Mom fell ill and passed away.  Maybe Mom would have gotten sick anyway; nobody can predict the future.  But if Dad had never been caught--if the St. Clair kid hadn't lived--

"This is a strange hiding spot."

Mrs. Looks Over and Mrs. Threefold had walked away.  Sarah Two Eagles crouched down in front of me, her hands on her knees.

I didn't know where she had come from.  I didn't know how she had waded through my darkness, through my tremors, without getting hurt.  The hell business did she have looking so tiny?  Didn't she know tiny things were easy to break?

"Get lost," I snarled.

"Yes, you look lost," Sarah said.  "Would you like me to walk you home?"

I was afraid of an eleven-year-old.  I was afraid I'd hurt her, because it was in my blood; it was on my face.  She hadn't been alive when Dad committed those murders.  She didn't know she was staring at the shadow of a monster.

I gathered up my art supplies, my legs numb.  I climbed to my feet, burning, and ran away.

3

Skylar

In Nettlebush everyone has a role: farmer, hunter,
architect, whatever.  Unless you're sick or something, you're not allowed to sit around the whole day being unproductive.  It's part of a belief system called Nahii'wi.  If you give something to every single person you come across, and they do the same, eventually the gifts circle back to you.

Uncle Gabe and I were hunters.  Every day we staked the badlands for mule deer and big-horned sheep, the woods for red deer and quails.  Whatever yield we won, we brought it back to the house and cut it up and gave it to our neighbors.  There's no such thing as ownership when you're talking about the land and its offerings.  Creator gave the earth to everyone to subsist off of, not just a select few people.  Guess you can see why we clashed so much with the colonists.

On Monday morning Uncle Gabe and I waited outside our house for the other hunters to show up.  I jammed an iron spearhead on the end of my willow spear, tying it with milkweed.  The At Dawn family straggled along first, classmates of mine, identical twins Holly and Daisy with curly black hair and curved, birdlike noses.  Their dad followed them, a giant, cheerful man named Cyrus who belonged to the tribal council.  Andrew Nabako slinked up the road toward us, bow and arrows resting on his back.  If I hadn't gone to school with his brother Jack I would have thought Andrew was some hobo that strolled in off the streets.  He was about twenty years old, his hair long and unwashed and riddled with cowlicks.  Despite the climbing, eighty degree weather, he stood huddled under a mangy sweatshirt and a jacket and mittens.  Either he had a serious case of iron deficiency or he was hoarding clothes.

"Hello, ladies," said a tenth grade girl with hair pinned back, loping toward us on long legs.  Selena Long Way.  Way too full of herself.

"Looks like Luke's not coming today," Uncle Gabriel said, checking his wristwatch.

He was wrong.  Luke Owns Forty came at us from the windmill field, carrying his hunting knife.  He was a middle-aged man, haggard, his hair in loose ringlets.  He threw me a look of loathing, like he wanted to turn his knife on me.  His son Zeke practically skipped after him, bony and maniacal, a year younger than me.  Naomi Owns Forty had been Dad's fifth victim.  Luke Owns Forty was her bereft father.

"Ahahaha," Zeke burst out, oblivious.  "I'm King of the Badlands!"

"Should we get a move on, then?" said Stuart Stout, another kid our age.  Poor bastard always looked tired, his eyes bagged with circles, his waist-length, red hair clashing with his dark skin.

We put our weapons down, forming a prayer circle.  We always pray before the hunt, thanking the planet for its generosity.  The plants and animals give their lives to us so we can live instead.  There's nothing more sacred than that sacrifice.