After the Thunder Read online

  A shadow crossed Jacob’s face, and he bristled as if that remark had hit a nerve.

  “The truth I see is that you’re causing a lot of backward thinking around here with your talk of spirits and herbs and the old ways and the People arguing whether you’re a witch or a shaman. This Nation has to forget all that nonsense and go to the white man’s ways if it’s going to survive.” Jacob’s color had risen and his voice had gone sharp but Walks-With-Spirits remained admirably calm.

  “Survival is the spirit.”

  That reply agitated Jacob even more.

  “Survival is getting people with money to come in here and start businesses. It’s teaching our full-blood children to speak English. It’s getting rid of superstition. It’s cooperating with the U. S. government so they won’t take us over …”

  “Jacob, Jacob,” Phillips said, smiling broadly and shaking his head in mock despair as he interrupted the tirade. “Now you’re getting off onto topics that will be boring to the ladies.” He picked up a basket of bread and passed it to Jacob. “Why don’t you eat your supper now and let me entertain the company with stories of my many travels?”

  It served Jacob right, Cotannah thought, and Walks-With-Spirits, too, with one of them making mysterious remarks that didn’t make sense and the other preaching politics like he was running for Principal Chief. Good heavens! She deliberately gave Mr. Phillips her most flirtatious smile.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, “for being such a gallant gentleman. I’m thinking that your company would never prove tiresome, no matter what Mr. Charley …” She paused to tilt her head and flash her eyes in coquettish reproval at Jacob Charley, then smiled at Phillips again. “… would try to lead us to believe.”

  She smiled at Jacob, too, then, and he smiled back at her as everyone laughed and began talking again.

  There. Maybe that would strike a spark of jealousy in Walks-With-Spirits. Jealousy, she had found, was a wondrous force for driving a man.

  Chapter 3

  Walks-With-Spirits felt her glance touch his face, lightly, like the brush of a bird’s wing, time and again, as it had done since she walked into the room. It brought that new tightening once more to his gut. Beneath the banter and the renewed conversations, her attention was still fixed on him, and she was still determined to make him take notice of her. How could he not notice her when she prattled on all the time, raising a fuss like a mother bird trying to distract a weasel from finding her nest?

  And how could he not notice her, even when she was not looking at him, when her dark lashes brushed her creamy skin and the blackness of her hair shone through the openwork in the silver combs like a midnight sky in winter?

  What a travesty, though, that she was wearing those combs cut out in the sunburst enclosing a star pattern! Chito Humma always said it was a mark of honor for a woman to wear that design, and here was this silly, shallow girl sporting it as if she had earned the right.

  She was unbelievably beautiful on the outside but she had no center, no balance, no harmony, no purpose in her spirit. So how could she have done a deed that would bring her that privilege? She wouldn’t know how to begin, for all she did, as far as he could see, was try to attract the attention and admiration of men.

  His breath came faster, and his heart thumped once, hard, against his ribs. He closed his ears to the talk at the table and listened for the Great Spirit’s voice to speak to the center of him, waited for his inner harmony to deepen again. Taloa’s pain was enough to deal with now. Later, when his balance steadied, he would consider Cotannah Chisk-Ko.

  He tried to force it, but his mind refused to leave her, just as his eyes couldn’t stay away from her face. She was still full of the pulsing energy and eagerness for life that had drawn him to her that night two years ago during Tay’s election dance, but that fervor in her was different now. It had turned inward and it had gone brittle—she was so plagued by awareness of herself that she didn’t recognize him, didn’t even remember that they had ever met.

  Yet she was drawn to him as he had been to her then. What could be the meaning of this strange affinity between them?

  Jacob Charley’s arrogant voice broke into his thoughts.

  “Hey, Ridge Runner, you might want to visit the mercantile, too,” he said, “as soon as we’re open, come in and look over the gentlemen’s clothing. Nobody’s worn braids and buckskins since the Civil War. We wear citizens’ dress now—did you know that, or has the news not traveled that deep into the woods?”

  He used that friendly, teasing tone that he had used when he spoke to him earlier. He spoke in a charming way that said he didn’t mean to give offense—just a bit of laughter. But he did offend. For some reason, Charley had a core of hate in him.

  Jacob chuckled at his own wit and a ripple of low laughter came from some of the others. Walks-With-Spirits wanted so much to ignore the remark, but silence would only challenge such a person. No use pushing Jacob to make unpleasantness at Tay and Emily’s table.

  He glanced up and fixed his gaze on Jacob’s small, black eyes.

  “Fashion is nothing but vanity.”

  “Listen to that—you sound like a preacher,” Jacob said. “You been preaching to the squirrels and the bears out there in the woods?”

  “They already know that truth.”

  Jacob Charley laughed at that.

  “Oh, they do, do they? So then what do you do wandering around out there by yourself? You making a little Choctaw beer or maybe some white mule?”

  “That kind of spirits I have no need of.”

  The man was such a stupid one. He was smart in some ways and he had a clever streak, but when it came to truth, he was stupid and deliberately blind.

  “Better watch your mouth, Charley,” said the man called Phillips, “Walks-With-Spirits is a shaman.”

  Jacob Charley dropped his fork onto his plate with a little clatter.

  “That’s what he and all the old folks want us to believe,” he said, “but I, for one, say not. That coyote of his is no spirit—it was bleeding this afternoon just like it was made out of flesh.”

  He flashed Walks-With-Spirits a challenging look.

  “Am I right?”

  His tone held an edge of satisfaction. Walks-With-Spirits stared intently at his face. Had he had something to do with the rifle shot that had struck Taloa? Had the wound been deliberate and not an accident caused by a hunter’s bad aim?

  “Am I right, Coyote-Man? Your pet coyote and your pet panther aren’t spirits, at all, now are they?”

  “We are all spirits.”

  “Oh, yeah, here we go again. How could I forget that already?”

  Jacob Charley looked at Cotannah Chisk-ko, then, with an abrupt nod of satisfaction. So. Perhaps he wasn’t so very stupid, after all. He, too, had sensed that her real attention was fixed on Walks-With-Spirits, and he was jealous.

  “Now what kind of a notion is that?” he asked her. “ ‘We are all spirits.’ How do you like being lumped right in with a bunch of wild animals, Miss Cotannah?”

  Emily, ever the perfect hostess, spared her guest from having to answer.

  “Perhaps you’re simplifying things a bit, Jacob,” she said gently. “We all need to look deeper in both what we hear and what we say.”

  “That’s true,” Tay said firmly.

  “We all need to see the difference between a primitive throwback and a progressive member of the Nation,” Jacob said pleasantly, looking straight at his host.

  “We all have to make our own judgments,” Tay retorted.

  “Yes,” Walks-With-Spirits said, “that is one of the ancient traditions of the Choctaw Nation—making our own judgments.”

  Jacob Charley sent him a fast, hard glance full of undisguised hatred.

  “I tell it to you because you have probably forgotten most of our people’s ancient traditions,” Walks-With-Spirits told him, staring him straight in the eye. “You have lost your Choctaw spirit. You have become a white man.” />
  The words made Charley’s sallow complexion grow ruddy and bright.

  “You’re the white man, Shaman,” he said, snarling the words from between his clenched teeth. “You’re the one who’s come into the Nation for the one and only purpose of dividing the people and turning them against each other.”

  His small eyes glinted dangerously as he warmed to his subject.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “some faction of whites are most likely paying you to weaken the will of the Nation, to set our people at each other’s throats, one side yelling that you’re a witch and the other crying that you’re a shaman and a medicine man.”

  A shocked silence fell over the room.

  “I’d wager a good deal of money that I’m right about this,” Jacob Charley said. “Why didn’t I think of this before? You’re being paid to raise up all the old superstitions and beliefs among the People so that the United States will declare us hopeless savages and take our land without any compensation at all!”

  Tay leapt to his feet. “Charley, I can’t have you insulting a guest at my table,” he said. “No matter how much I respect your father, I won’t stand for that.”

  “I’m going,” Jacob Charley said, jumping up and throwing his napkin down. “Don’t worry, this won’t happen again. I don’t aim to sit down with the traitor anymore.”

  It was hard to believe that the hatred hadn’t eaten the man’s heart completely by now and caused his blood to stop flowing, Walks-With-Spirits thought, as Jacob Charley rushed from the room. It was more than just hatred for him. It was much bigger than one man or one thing.

  The dream came to him that night as he slept beside his fire at the cave where he lived with Taloa and Basak, the mountain lion.

  He was trapped, caught in a tangle of vines that swung from the limbs of a tall oak tree and trailed in a wide, dark river. He never knew how he got there, but his limbs were wrapped tight by tendrils that wouldn’t break, and cold water lapped at the nape of his neck. The vine held him helpless, with his head the only part of his body free to move.

  When he looked down, the river gleamed in the night, glistening with the silver of the moon and stars, reflecting in wavy patterns the sky he would see if lifted his eyes and looked up. A woman’s voice, one he didn’t recognize, was singing somewhere far in the distance, too far away for him to understand any of the words to her song. Closer to him, a night bird called.

  The river moved silently although it ran so strong he could barely keep his bare feet planted in the mud on its bottom. He tried to call out for help, but every time he opened his mouth the woman’s song changed into the wild turkey gobble, the traditional Choctaw call of defiance, the sound of warriors challenging the enemy to fight.

  After his fourth try, when the old war cry had finished echoing from the mountains and had finally died away through the woods, he no longer wanted to call for help. Instead, he was at peace, completely at peace, looking up into the night sky. Slowly, in the very center of his vision, a star began to form, a bright star surrounded by a sunburst of stars that reached out brilliantly in all of the four directions.

  He looked down, then, and saw them in perfect reflection on the slow, rippling river. He stared at them until they burst into flame on the water.

  He woke, bathed in sweat, to the fall night’s breeze and the sound of Taloa’s even breathing beside him. Basak’s yellow eyes glowed from the darkness of the woods across the little clearing from the cave.

  Walks-With-Spirits lay without moving, willing his racing heart to slow down, reaching deep inside himself for quietness of spirit. But he didn’t find it right away, for that had been Cotannah Chisk-Ko’s voice singing the ancient melody with its Choctaw words. He knew it, even during the dream somehow.

  He met Basak’s gleaming stare and let it comfort him as he thought about the dream. First, two years ago, he had seen Cotannah and had walked straight to her through a crowd of many people. They had danced, moving together as if they shared one spirit, and he had told her then that she would seek him out someday. He hadn’t known those words were in him until they had fallen off his tongue. And now they had come true.

  She had returned, and he did not know what it meant, this pull of a silent force between them. Oh, if only Chito Humma were still alive, and he could ask him!

  Or Sister Hambleton, the missionary woman come from the East to live among the Choctaw, the woman who had been Chito Humma’s unlikely best friend. Unlikely, his people said, and hers. Inappropriate. Ridiculous. Wrong.

  But to Walks-With-Spirits, who knew them both better than anyone else, who was raised by them, mostly, because he was an orphan, theirs was the most right, the most natural alliance on earth. Both were teachers and healers, both were loyal to their own spiritual directions, and both sensed the need of the people for the Choctaw ways and the white ways.

  When he was fifteen, a boy beginning to grow into a man in the Old Nation, in a community hidden deep in the wilds of the land the white men had taken from the People and named Mississippi, both had died from a terrible, quick-acting sickness that had moved through the land faster than the birds could fly. If only they could talk to him now about what he was meant to do with Cotannah Chisk-Ko.

  Why, why, had he been drawn to her like a bee flying straight to honey when he first saw her at the dance?

  He had come to that dance, to that great gathering of the People for the election of the Principal Chief, out of loneliness, for he had been younger then and not as accustomed to the company of the four-footed and winged ones, not as attuned then to the companionship of the wilds and the woods and the Great Spirit. Then he had still missed Chito Humma and Sister with a sharp, sad ache.

  So he had come to the gathering of the People at a farm near Tuskahoma and he had eaten pashofa and tanfula and fry bread and he had talked to some people and he had listened to the music. Then he had stepped into the line of men who were going to do the Wedding Dance.

  In the women’s line he had seen that slender body of Cotannah’s swaying to the music, fairly vibrating with life, and when she had turned his way he had glimpsed the line of her long, graceful neck that looked too fragile to hold up her proud head, with its mass of black hair; he had seen the flash of her white teeth when she smiled and the huge dark eyes in her pale face that made her a beauty bright enough to blind a man.

  He had asked her name of the man next to him, and he had hardly been able to wait until the music signaled for a man to step out of line and go claim a woman. Why had he been unable to look away from her? Why had they danced together like two feathers in the wind?

  Why, when she walked away from him, had he told her that someday she would seek him out and known in his heart that he was telling the truth?

  How could this be? How could the spirits pull him toward her and now why had he had this dream of her singing and of the sunburst and the star?

  She was silly and earthbound and in turmoil inside; she was foolishly squandering the strength of her spirit now as she had been doing back then two years ago. Maybe she had some connection to the reason he had come to the New Nation here in the West in his wanderings.

  There was much healing he needed to do here, he was beginning to feel that strongly. Somehow—how hadn’t yet been revealed to him—he was to help the People in the struggle to keep their land in severalty. He had known that since the coming of hashi loshuma, the old of the moon.

  He sat up and scooted a short way to lean back against a rock, took in several long breaths of the sweet night air while he thought about that moment again. He had gone into Tuskahoma for supplies with his friend, Tay, who had picked up a copy of the Boomer newspaper, Oklahoma Star, from the counter in Pushulata’s General Store.

  Tay and Billy Pushulata had agreed that it was best to read it regularly in order to know what the Indians’ enemies were saying in their drive to dissolve the Indian Nations. Tay had read over the headlines, then handed the paper to him. The instant it chilled W
alks-With-Spirits’s fingertips, he had known that it held some portent for him in that fight to keep the land for the Nation. But how? He had no alliance with anyone, no real communication with any human beings except for Tay and his wife, Emily.

  And now this feeling of connection with Cotannah Chisk-Ko. When he first saw her again—out in the road, sitting the horse he’d just calmed—he had seen the turmoil in her eyes and had thought he was meant to help her find peace. But now he didn’t know. How could he do that if she was bringing disquiet to him, instead?

  On her first morning at Tall Pine, Cotannah woke with the restlessness raging in her veins like a fever. She had slept deeply, but fantastic dreams had plagued her, dreams that ran through her head over and over again, with every detail as vivid as in life. She was running a footrace with Jacob Charley through the woods while, a few feet away out in the middle of the road, Juan and the other vaqueros drove Aunt Ancie and Uncle Jumper’s carriage at top speed to try to beat them both to Tall Pine. She was riding a slow-moving wooden rocking horse on the veranda at Las Manzanitas while Peter Phillips and her five-year-old twin nephew and niece, Cole and Miranda, all rode matching ones beside her. She was walking across the night sky with Walks-With-Spirits, surrounded by dozens and dozens of animals and, incredibly, every step each of the animals took left a star behind for a footprint.

  All that was enough to exhaust the most intrepid traveler, but she had no desire to stay in bed all morning as Emily had suggested last night at bedtime. Indeed, she couldn’t imagine sitting still for a minute.

  She got up as Rosie came in just after dawn with fresh water for washing, dressed, and went for a walk across the dew-covered grounds before breakfast. Then she reentered the house through the back door, found the kitchen and the cook, who introduced herself as Rosie’s mother, Daisy, and begged a hot biscuit straight from the pan.

  She was buttering it and filling it with honey when a sleepy-eyed Emily came in with Sophia on her hip.

  “Cotannah!” Emily exclaimed. “Are my eyes deceiving me? Is this the real Cotannah Chisk-Ko, in the kitchen so early in the morning that the roosters haven’t crowed yet?”