Sacred Is the Wind (11 page)

“Come to bed, my husband.”

Samuel did not appear to hear. He continued to watch as Panther Burn paused, a blanketed silhouette outlined in the smoldering glare of a dying campfire, as if unsure of his destination, a man lost among his own people.

“He will be difficult to reach. There is so little time. Maybe I should delay our departure,” the reverend softly suggested. He knew better, of course, for the letter he had received informing him of his father's demise had taken better than a month to reach him. Poor Father dead. And how amazing to discover the parent who had disowned Samuel on his decision to enter the ministry had recanted on his deathbed, in the process reinstating his only living heir to the Madison fortune. Wealth and influence were Samuel's for the accepting. Preaching the word and Christianizing the heathens were one thing, but it never hurt to have a little power to make yourself heard. “Well, we won't be gone long,” Samuel added with a sigh. The figure in the ebbing firelight continued on and vanished in the darkness. “What is he looking for?”

Samuel turned from the window, allowing the curtains to settle back into place. The cabin he had built to live among his flock was a single-room structure, its wood floors covered with bearskins, the walls draped with blankets. Half a dozen chairs hung from the walls, two others sat at either end of a broad hand-hewn table made regal by two silver candelabra. Elsewhere, iron cook pots, a rocking chair, clay cups and bowls, a rack for weaving, a war shield and a coup stick, crossed tomahawks and tanned hides, candles, a reading stand and leather-bound Bible transformed the interior into kitchen, dining room, and parlor. The bedroom was but an alcove hidden behind a curtain of blankets, behind which he and his wife shared another creature comfort Samuel had not been able to sacrifice, a thickly mattressed four-poster bed freighted to him from his father's home outside Philadelphia. Clad in a nightshirt that fell to his ankles, he padded across to the fireplace and stoked the fire a moment, added a log to the flames, straightened. His reflection filled the oval mirror he had placed over the hearth. Alongside the mirror were two tintypes, one of his mother, a severe-looking woman with her hair pulled tight in a bun at her neck. The other was of his father, fierce-looking and bearded, resembling more some wild-eyed John the Baptist than a shipping magnate whose business had prospered from the recently ended Civil War. Samuel had inherited his father's angular visage and his mother's stern, thin-lipped features; and his mother's nature as well, for she had been a kind and caring woman.

“Now what, my husband?” Esther left her bed and walked over to Samuel, her cotton bedclothes sweeping dangerously close to the fire. She dared the flames to be at his side, sensing his misgivings.

“I was wondering to myself how someone like me managed to find someone like you.” Samuel chuckled, putting his arm around her. Esther barely came up to his chest as they stood near the hearth.

“
Saaa
…” she exclaimed. “You see with your eyes. Not mine.” Esther tugged at him. He followed her lead, taking a step toward the bed. “Once my people rode the war trail. Many moons passed. It was always the same. With every season the women would mourn the loss of their husbands and sons. Never, it seemed, did we have enough to eat. In winter, the old died in the snow. Then we learned to trade with the white man for blankets and guns, tools and seeds, instead of raiding his forts and dying before his guns. You came among us and taught us the white man's ways. You came to my people by the Warbonnet and showed us how to bring food from the earth, how to plant, how to keep the white man's buffalo that we might not have to follow the vanishing herds. You told us of the one God. And you met a girl named Bird Hat and baptized her Esther and she saw in you the hope of her people, she saw in you a good heart—and she saw in you … peace. But what did you see in her,
ve-ho-e?”

Samuel took another step, then another, following her lead. He spied his ungainly reflection on the wall and gently replied, “In you, my beloved, I saw beauty.”

“Then you gave me another name,” Esther said, pulling with delicate strength. “And I am Esther Madison … your woman.”

“And soon I will be giving you another people. I wonder what Washington society will think of you.” Samuel laughed. Suddenly he gripped her tightly, his eyes boring into hers. “But we will return. I promise you. Our place is here, in this village by the Warbonnet … beneath the Morning Star.”

Esther nodded, allaying his fears with her innocence and her trust. She tugged again and this time he followed, without pause, to the bed where he might lie in warmth, holding beauty in his arms throughout the night.

Panther Burn slowed, glanced over his shoulder at the night-shrouded village surrounding him. Just on the border of a patch of light streaming through an unshuttered window he glimpsed movement. Panther Burn lowered the flute from his lips, stooped down and picked up a small stone, started forward a step, then spun and hurled the missile. It skimmed across shadow and light to shadow again and struck home. A gasp, a startled cry, and Zachariah Scalpcane limped into the lamplight.

“
Saaa,
you've crippled me,” he moaned as he ruefully approached the one he had been following.

“It was a little stone.” Panther Burn grinned.

“It felt big.” Zachariah rubbed his shin.

“Tell me, lame warrior, why you follow me. What mischief are you about? Your mother will see your empty bed and worry.”

“I think she will be glad it is empty,” Zachariah said. He straightened and looked back toward the darkened mass of his mother's house, a patch of black against the star-filled night. “Peter Old Mouse has come to see her. Only he does not bother to stand on his blanket. My mother already has invited him to lie beneath hers.”

“So you have decided to follow me,” said Panther Burn. The Northerner tugged his blanket around his shoulders and stared down at the boy, finally reached a decision. “Will you help me if I ask it?” Zachariah brightened and nodded.

“My uncle is asleep behind his cabin,” Panther Burn explained. “Wake him, gently, and bring him inside, to bed. Stay with him until I return. I place him in your care. Will you do this for me?”

“As you ask it,” Zachariah said. “But what if he will not come inside?” A breeze pushed the boy's hair in his face; he brushed it back from his eyes.

“That is why I am sending you,” Panther Burn explained. “Because you are a man of great resource.” Zachariah seemed to swell with importance at the compliment. “But you have much to learn about stalking.” Panther Burn ruffled the hair back from Zachariah's eyes. The youth backed away, then laughed with the man. He trotted off toward Joshua Beartusk's cabin, hesitated a moment to face Panther Burn. The boy clasped his hands over his ears.

“And you have much to learn about playing a flute.”

“
Saaa!
” Panther Burn hissed and scooped up another stone, but by the time he cocked his arm for the throw, Zachariah had vanished in the shadows.

Rebecca was sitting at the table, across from Star. The lamp between them washed their faces in its pallid glow. Mother and daughter were beading the hem and sleeves of a buckskin smock. The soft brushed garment lay between them.

“Perhaps I should stitch some around the neck,” Rebecca said, searching a tin cup for the appropriate color of bead. Star glanced up from the hem. She had finished one row of white beads and had begun another.

“You could use the white as I have done,” she said, glancing up at her daughter. The older woman's heart filled with love and pride as she watched her daughter work. There was sadness too, but it must be hidden. The visions Star had seen must remain unspoken, if Rebecca were to survive.

“I will do it,” Rebecca said. “But such a dress as this will be, a girl might wear it at the two-called-together ceremony.” The girl smiled and looked up at Star and almost glimpsed the medicine woman's hidden sorrow. “Mother?”

“It is such a dress,” Star said, her expression cheery, “as you will have it to be.”

Rebecca wasn't completely fooled. Her eyes narrowed as she studied her mother. Star's silent thoughts were a barrier that Rebecca was determined to breach. If not tonight, then soon.

“Mother?” she began. The quiet strains of a flute filtered in through the closed door, rescuing Star from her daughter's inquisition.

•   •   • 

Panther Burn blew a trilling series of notes, his fingers opening and closing the holes in the flute. He watched the door and played and when at last the door opened and Rebecca Blue Thrush stepped outside, the Northerner offered a special prayer of thanks for the craftsmanship of Joshua Beartusk.

She stepped forward, hesitated, then came toward him.

“Why do you play your flute outside my door?” Rebecca asked, baiting him. Panther Burn stared down at the flute as if he were seeing it for the first time.

“This? Why, my uncle carved it. He said with this flute a hunter could charm the birds of the air into his trap. See, I have caught a thrush.” He eased his blanket around her shoulders that they might stand together in it. Her body was warm against his, a good warmth, like that of a summer day. Panther Burn led her out of the village and onto the plain, where moonlit shadows danced in cloaks of silver. Fireflies shimmered and swirled as if surrounding the couple in an ever-changing cosmos, stars and planets evolving and exploding, lapsing into silent blackness and bursting into light once more. Panther Burn and Rebecca walked in silence upon the buffalo grass. Bluebells and buffalo grass, fireflies and starlight, all pieces of a timeless puzzle, fragments of a life lived in beauty if only one has eyes to see, ears to hear, arms to embrace, a heart to give. They walked and lost all track of time. At last Rebecca Blue Thrush broke their common reverie.

“Why did you come to this village?”

“Am I not a Cheyenne?” asked the Northerner.

“That is no answer,” said Rebecca.

Panther Burn nodded in agreement. But it was the only answer he had for her. Then she took his hand in hers, touched the scar tissue where he had severed his finger in grief for his dead friends. He jerked his hand free as if her mere touch meant him harm. She looked at him, obviously stung by this sudden rejection, yet Rebecca did not have so much pride she could not be sympathetic. Given time, she was certain he would confide in her. Given time.

“My mother thinks the spirits guided you to us.”

“Only if the spirit is named Sabbath McKean.” Panther Burn chuckled. He looked back over his shoulder at the irregular cluster of lamplit cabins that made up the village. He did not want to talk of the past. Not when she was so close that he ached to hold her.

“My mother is a woman of power. I have seen her magic. At least, I think I have,” Rebecca said. “My mother says that you are a sign of great and terrible changes for my people.”

“My people too,” Panther Burn corrected. “But I am only one man. How can I change the whole village? Maybe Star means I bring change for
one
of the people by the Warbonnet. Maybe you, Rebecca Blue Thrush.”

His breath was soft upon her cheek. His hand strong, exciting, close. Yes, she could love this man, easily. For he was unlike any man she had known. Rebecca turned toward him.

“Why did you ask me to walk with you?”

“Because I want you,” Panther Burn said. “When I saw you in the river I thought to myself, here is a woman to walk the hills with, to bear sons; she has strength, and courage and great beauty.” Panther Burn glanced aside at her, amazed at this sudden act of courage on his part. Rebecca had not expected quite such a direct answer. She had asked almost in jest, out of a flirtatious whim, not really intending to confront him or her own feelings.

“Now tell me, Rebecca Blue Thrush, why did you leave your house and come with
me
?” Panther Burn asked, tilting her head so that she looked directly into his eyes. Rebecca tried to think of a light reply, anything to escape the intensity of the Northerner's gaze. Star's visions, her own misgivings—suddenly none of it seemed to matter. She had no words, only actions. Rebecca put her arms around his strong neck, her head upon his chest, her lithe body pressed against him, locked to him in an embrace.

Let this be my answer, she thought, trembling as they touched.

4

Friday, May 12, 1865

I
have pursued my elusive quarry from one valley to the next, delving deeper into the high country. I had thought to make contact and bring to an end these terrible atrocities long before now. But alas, our scout, Sabbath McKean, informs me that ours is a hopeless pursuit, the Ute raiding party has crossed back over the Divide, their murderous souls glutted in the wreckage of burned-out cabins and butchered families. We have paused three times today to bury the dead, the last stop involving the remains of a couple of prospectors. We did not sort out who went with what but covered both gents over in a common grave, assuming they were partners. Tom has been keen for action, and has handled himself well, though he emptied his stomach more than once today. There is no shame in it, for every man will have his day in the bush. The sight of these poor victims left me atremble as well. But what upsets me more is that the heathens responsible shall go unpunished, for tomorrow we start back to Castle Rock.…

“Is it true then?” Tom Bragg stood just inside the tent, the canvas flap settling in his wake. He stepped forward and sat opposite Jubal. Blond beginnings of a beard fringed his jawline. His pale blue eyes began to radiate some of the intensity of his older brother. Only some, though. “We are turning back?” As he leaned his dusty elbows on the table and peered at Jubal, the lamplight lent a sickly coloration to their faces, as if each man were wearing an amber mask. “We can't.” Tom shook his head, a note of incredulity in his voice. “It's wrong. Those men … today … the squatter family down in the valley … just poor dirt farmers … maybe their future held nothing but hardscrabble but at least it was something. Better than to end up … Goddammit, Jubal, there has to be a reckoning!”