The Truth About Love and Lightning (8 page)

She sounded like Annika, seeking the truth in cheekbones. Gretchen glanced at her sisters for help, knowing they could sense her need even if they couldn’t see it. But neither uttered a word.

He’s not your father,
she wanted to say to her child, but couldn’t bring herself to do it for so many reasons.

“You used to tell me he’d come home someday,” Abby went on, eyes filling with tears. “So why can’t this be real? Maybe he was on his way when the storm hit and got caught up in it. Or what if he made the rain? What if the twister was his way back? You used to say that was his gift. So what if that gift brought him home?” Her slender hand reached for Gretchen, grabbing hold of her sleeve. “You’re the one who made me believe all those things in the first place. Were they all lies or was any of it true?”

Any words caught fast in Gretchen’s throat. How exactly was she supposed to respond to that? Tell her vulnerable child that those stories were gross exaggerations?

“My sweet Abigail,” she said, deciding to take the path of reason. She grasped Abby’s arms, holding on tightly. “If this man is Sam, why didn’t he contact us sooner? Why would he wait until now when he’s had forty years to do it?”

“I don’t know.” The girl sighed, drawing away and shaking her head. “Whatever kept him away must’ve been something powerful, something beyond his control. Still, he must have heard me every time I wished for this. All those candles on every birthday cake.”

Wishes aren’t magic,
Gretchen wanted to remind her, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Because she had shared with Abby what Lily Winston had shared with her: larger-than-life tales of Sam’s lineage, of the men who’d come before him and the mysticism surrounding them. But if that magic were real—if it were true—was it strong enough to bring someone back from the dead, or wherever it was Sam had gone?

“We know nothing about this man, only that he needs our help,” she insisted, trying to calm Abby down, finding herself the voice of reason simply by default. “Sometimes even strangers can look like those we love and miss.”

“He must have an ID, a driver’s license, something,” Abby said and looked ready to pick the man’s pockets.

But Gretchen caught her arm. “Baby, there’s nothing there,” she told her. “We already checked.”

Abby backed off, heading over to a nearby wing chair. With a heavy sigh, she slumped into its arms, tilting her head against its high back. “Please don’t look at me like I’ve lost my mind,” she said, gazing up at her mother. “Because I haven’t, I promise.”

“I don’t think that at all,” Gretchen said.

“Goodness knows, you’re no crazier than the rest of us,” Trudy remarked and wandered over to the chair, standing beside it, showing her support for Abby.

“Maybe we’re due for a miracle,” Bennie added, not about to be left out of things.

Oh, boy.

Gretchen crossed her arms tightly, cursing the timing that had brought the injured man to the farm and Abby home on the same day. She was afraid of what such a deep-seated longing could do to Abby when she was already in such a churned-up state. The girl was fearful that she’d lost Nate, frightened about having a baby, and now she’d begun to convince herself that her long-lost daddy had come home to take his rightful place—a place that had been kept wide open and waiting for forty years.

“As lovely as miracles sound, we can’t jump to conclusions,” Gretchen said, picking her words carefully. “What if he awakens clearheaded and tells us he was merely passing through, that he’s someone with a family who’s missing him?”

“If he does, then I’ll stop wishing for things I can’t have,” Abby replied, the strain in her voice all too apparent. “But until then, there’s nothing wrong with hoping, is there?”

“No,” Gretchen said, her heart nearly breaking. “I guess there’s not.”

Abby sighed and patted the arms of the chair before pulling herself upright. “You’re right. I’m really tired. I think I’ll hit the sack.” She kissed her aunts on their cheeks before she gave Gretchen a hug. “How about I see you all in the morning?”

“Goodnight, lamb,” Trudy said, and Bennie added, “Sleep tight.”

Abby gave the unconscious man one final look before she left the room. A few seconds after, Gretchen heard the
thump-thump
of the suitcase as Abby pulled it slowly up the stairs.

“Good grief, aren’t you going to help the poor girl with that? We’ll stay with your patient,” Bennie chastised her, and Gretchen scurried out of the parlor, pausing at the base of the steps.

“Abs,” she called up, “you should let me do that!”

But her daughter had already ascended to the second-floor landing. “Can you get my bag?” she asked, peering down around the whitewashed balustrade. “I left it in the kitchen.”

“Of course,” Gretchen said as Abby disappeared around the upstairs railing, suitcase wheels clacking as she rolled it toward her old room.

Abby’s heavy-looking satchel lay on the breakfast table, tipped on its side, spilling some of its contents. Gretchen righted it and began to stuff the loose objects back in: a black marker, several quarters, a tube of pale pink lipstick, and a paperback-size drawing tablet from which a photograph protruded.

Gretchen couldn’t help herself. She slid the photo from the pages, and her heart leaped into her throat when she realized its subject.

“Sam,” she breathed his name, seeing a sixteen-year-old version of the man who would eventually leave Walnut Ridge with his heart broken. It was a long time since Gretchen had glimpsed this image. She’d given the photo to Abby when the girl was in nursery school. Her daughter had constantly peppered her with questions about why all her classmates had a mommy and a daddy while she had a mommy and two aunts. “You do have a father, Abs, and this is him,” Gretchen had fibbed.

She ran a finger over the slender face, his features frozen in time. Sam sat on the porch steps in his overalls, his long legs extended, an unruly black cowlick curled upon his brow. His silver eyes were bright though the curve of his mouth was barely detectible. The photo was limp from handling, faded in spots around the edges.

“Oh, Abs,” Gretchen said and sighed gently. No wonder the girl was so taken with the thought of her father returning; she had never let the idea of him go.

Who was my daddy?
Abby had asked so many times.
What was he like? Why did he leave? How did he die?

“Sam was a lot like my own father, Hank,” she recalled Lily Winston saying not long before she’d passed away. “He needed to make his own destiny, even if that destiny was ill-fated.”

Lily was the one who’d first told her that Hank Littlefoot had been marked as a shaman, his own grandpa having been a tribal shaman before him. “He could have stayed and used his gift for the good of his people, but he didn’t want to remain on the rez. He felt no real connection to the government land or even his people.” Lily had then smiled one of her rare smiles. “Only when he settled here on the farm did he understand what having a home truly meant.”

From that point forth, Gretchen had imagined Hank Littlefoot as a medicine man, healing the sick, and she’d often wondered if he wasn’t the reason why Sam had wanted to go to Africa to help those less fortunate. Sam liked looking out for the underdog, maybe because he’d always felt like an underdog himself.

“Gretch? Are you still in here?” Bennie’s voice cracked her reverie, and Gretchen let the photograph slip from her hands.

“Just getting Abby’s bag,” she said, scrambling to pick up the picture from the floor near her feet. “A few things had fallen out.”

“Well, Abby hollered down and asked for a glass of warm milk.” Her sister began banging around, opening cabinets. “If you wait another few minutes, I’ll send it up with you.”

“Great,” Gretchen said, her heart thudding. As quietly as she could, she flipped open the sketchbook, prepared to quickly tuck the photograph inside and be done with it. Only something else caught her eye, the pencil drawings themselves. She looked at one and then another, turning pages to peruse even more after that.

Oh dear,
she thought.

Every rendering was some version of Sam Winston. Not just the gangly boy in the photograph, but clearly Abby’s own ideas of what he could have looked like as he aged. There was Sam with short hair, long hair, in a baseball cap, and balding; his face both unlined and with sharp creases at the mouth and nose; bespectacled and bearded.

Indeed, it was the bearded drawing that made Gretchen’s breath catch. The sketch of an older Sam with gaunt cheeks and facial hair looked very much like the man lying on the parlor sofa. No wonder Abby had gotten as carried away as she had. She doubtless felt like she’d seen a dream come to life.

Or a ghost turned to flesh.

Gretchen pressed the sketchbook to her chest and sighed deeply. She felt completely responsible for fostering Abby’s obsession, for causing her daughter to wish for something that she’d never really had to begin with.

Because what Abby didn’t know was that the lanky teen sitting on the steps in her treasured photograph—and the subject of all her fanciful drawings—was not the man who’d fathered her that summer night so long ago. That story was one Gretchen had never told to Annika or Sam’s folks, not even her sisters. At the time, it had seemed far, far easier to lie about what had happened than to confess what a fool she’d been. Only suddenly it was beginning to feel an awful lot like that lie was coming back to bite her squarely in the ass.

The Gift

We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

—MARIE CURIE

Six

1930s

Henry “Hank” Littlefoot was a bona fide descendant of the Otoe-Missouria tribes—a full-blooded Native American and the grandson of a shaman. He was also Sam Winston’s maternal grandfather. Born in 1915, Hank was one of a few hundred Otoe-Missourias still in existence; the tribes had been pushed out of land they’d once called home, resettled into the Oklahoma Territory.

A handsome boy who learned to read by age four, Hank began making up tales of his own once he’d read his way through the meager stack of books on the shelves of the reservation’s one-room schoolhouse. By the time he had turned twelve, he’d become enraptured by the art of storytelling and regularly entertained the younger children, mixing ancestral folklore and yarns spun from his own imagination.

By his teens, he knew that he wanted to be on the stage, not exactly an aspiration that either of his parents seemed to understand. “You belong here. This is your world,” his father had told him and looked him sternly in the face. “On the day you were born, the sky filled with lightning. A bolt struck the roof and nearly set the house on fire. It’s the sign of a shaman,” he’d insisted. “You have the gift, my son.” With that, he’d gripped his son’s shoulder, where Hank’s skin bore a birthmark the shape of a teardrop. “My father had the mark as well. You’re meant to heal, not to play roles on a stage.” His pa had grunted unhappily, shaking his head. He was a mechanic on the reservation, which involved a different type of healing entirely. “You will be a voice to the spirits someday, whether you like it or not.”

A voice to the spirits, eh?

Hank wasn’t convinced. For much of his life, he’d watched his grandfather mix healing potions and pastes and perform rituals meant to cleanse evil spirits, draw the soul to peace, or cajole the forces of nature to aid in hunts or harvests. The more his grandfather gave, the more he suffered, and Hank wanted none of that, particularly when he realized the risks involved—when he understood that to cure sometimes meant great sacrifice, as when his grandfather contracted influenza from a family he’d tried to heal and the disease had killed him, taking Hank’s grandmother as well.

But even those fears didn’t lessen Hank’s respect for the powerful acts he had witnessed. When his grandpa had performed his brand of “magic,” Hank had believed as much as anyone else.

“I’m no shaman,” Hank told his folks, because he didn’t feel anointed by any gift save for his physical ones: the chiseled jaw; the strong, straight nose; the width of his shoulders; and his formidable height. If there was anything especially spiritual about him, he figured he hadn’t grown into it yet. “I have to go,” he’d insisted. “I don’t feel like I belong here. I have to find my own way.”

Sad as they were to see him leave, his parents did not stop him.

Hank didn’t fancy living his life the Otoe-Missouria way any more than he wished to live the white man’s way. He just wanted to do things
his
way.

So that was precisely what he did.

Since opportunities in the theater for men like him—meaning, with colored skin—were virtually nonexistent, he made a conscious decision to get his foot in the door any way that he could. After fruitlessly following leads in local newspapers and countless auditions with often cruel rejections, he met a man in St. Louis who managed a vaudeville troupe that traveled from the upper Midwest down to Texas, performing “Incredibly Entertaining Feats of Daring, Comedy, and Burlesque.”
Wilbur Coonts’s Caravan of Wonders,
it was called, hardly lacking in hyperbole.

Coonts had advertised for a thespian whose skills extended to wearing greasepaint and a headdress, portraying an Indian chief with a daughter who dances her way into the heart of a lonesome cowboy. Yes, the plot was trite, demeaning even. But Hank would have done just about anything at that point to get a toe in the door.

He showed up in ceremonial buckskin and turquoise beads for the audition, his dark hair braided and embellished with a single eagle feather, although his attire paled in comparison to the costumes worn by dozens of others, all Caucasians in “war paint,” black wigs, and enormous headdresses. Hank watched from the wings as each actor took his place center stage, more than willing to spit out the “you, cowboy, me, Indian,” routine. When it was Hank’s turn, he realized he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t utter the offensive dialogue without getting sick to his stomach. So he shucked the script, instead telling a vivid tale of his shaman grandfather who could make it rain and heal the ill. Then he proceeded to dance in a small circle, chanting words he’d memorized from childhood, doing an abbreviated and exaggerated version of the tribal rain dance.