“Well now, I reckon that’s truth too.” A forlorn smile edged his mouth. “But you do realize man makes religion. What’s being worshipped is something altogether elsewhile. Course men are wicked, darling—but that’s precisely the point.”
Tell me the old, old story.Ma’s arm went round and round, scrubbing the pot, her wrist buried in the soapy water. If you would really be, in any time of trouble, a comforter to me.I nodded and walked away, my pa at the boundary of the revival, hands slipped into his pockets, in awe of the God of all things. I wonder what might have been if I’d stayed talking with my pa or had joined my ma cleaning, instead of joining the others in a game of chase.
In the stretched lantern light of the Yuletide celebration, the haunting tenor of the hymn lingered. As Stot and I roamed the prairie, youths chased each other round the hayricks in a game of scratch and gravel. The moon arose deep in the night, and then there was plenty of light to explore. We stood by the bonfire and warmed before drifting back out into the darkness. For a time Stot instructed Thad on dagger throwing, blades spiraling through shadow into a stump, Sophia, Poppy, and I huddled beneath saddle blankets. It was a night of watching one brutal, exhausting year slip into past and vanish away.
“Merry Christmas, Minnie,” Stot said, as the bonfire roared toward the heavens.
I gripped my woolen mittens, the wind pressing me toward flames. “Happy Christmas.”
At the end of the long dark, with smoke creeping up from the timberline to fog the inky-black expanse, the edges of the horizon turned purple and gray, like splotches of boysenberry jam smeared across the sky. Dawn had come, weightless and fragile.
I smelt daybreak as I walked the wood grove with Stot, the warmth of sausages and oatmeal. And across the meadow, the women sang, Tell me the old, old story. I stepped forward, ready to begin a new year.
Chapter Nineteen
Osage Nation—January 2, 1894
a week later
And so the fog stretched from one tree to another.” Niabi adjusted her satchel on her shoulder as we wandered to the creek bottoms, harvesting the woodland for tonics and salves. “It was pitch-black but for moonglow,” she continued her story, “and that disturbing noise kept echoing through the blackjacks, like the scream of a barn owl but more haunting.”
A labyrinth of willow roots grasped ahold of the slope. Niabi’s hound Drowsy darted through the canopy of frail brown boughs, and we climbed the crumbling dirt. After Stot and I had galloped over this morning, he’d gone off with Wa-ah-zho, handing him a farmer’s almanac and seed catalog, flipping to a woodcut illustration of sweet peas. They would chat for hours about how to mark seasons and cycles, both intrigued by how the other approached crops. Niabi and I climbed to a bald on a high bluff, and I showed her how I breathed through a shot.Don’t shoot with your lungs dancing,I told her. With her horse, I taught her a few simple commands that built trust with her mare. I was still reconciling all that she’d shown me.Unsure what to do—what I could do. The past haunted, messy and full of violence. I didn’t like the history, or my part in it.
We wandered the forest, Niabi sharing how she foraged for willow bark. “What happened?” I asked, about the haunting sounds.
Niabi crouched. “I suppose I’m about to stumble upon some mystical doorway to my future or past.” She shook her head, her beaded earrings swaying. “And guess what I found? Right here, under this tree.”
I lowered beside her. “Please tell me you found a doorway to someplace else?”
“I did not.” She took a dagger from her satchel. “My nephews, the ones I’d tucked into bedhoursbefore, slunk through the shadows and haze, blowing reeds, pretending to be ghosts.”
I laughed. “No.”
“Oh, for sure.”
She ran her palm up the trunk, the fan of lines of her tattoo centered on her hand. “Right here,” she said, “the willow is alive. See if you can feel her heart.”
I rubbed my palms over the bark, the hollow caverns and bristly hairs scratching my skin.
“We do not take from the heart of the tree. You must honor the tree and do no harm.” Niabi brushed the wispy twigs, daylight seeping in to glow on her raspberry-red blouse. “In the spring, scrape the branch here to the green.”
Niabi told that the willow symbolized everlasting life, and the bark healed headaches, stomach pains, and the rambling pound of a wayward mind. I grazed the backs of my fingers along the wispy branches. I found rejuvenation in their swaying limbs. And hysteria, which had plagued women for ages past, could be eased by its bark.
Niabi tucked her chin into her blanket cloak and shivered dramatically. “Let’s warm by the fire. You must update me on all the homesteader gossip.”
Back inside her lodge, I scooped out a palmful of chopped willow from Niabi’s turquoise and flax woven pouch, then tipped the bark in a mug. She poured hot water over the tea, the smell acrid in the winter air.
“You’re quiet today,” Niabi said.
“I’m mostly quiet.”
A meadow of dried wildflowers hung from the hickory rafters. The once-vivid overtones now muted to the calmer hues of winter’s rest.
“Nothing about you is quiet.” Niabi untied a sprig and handed it to me, a bushy stem with a flat moon of white flowers. “Your essence is bold.”
“Yours too.”
“I know.” She hopped onto a stool. “You do not speak of your sister. You quarreled?”
