“The girl was ill,” Niabi said, as she flicked the red and yellow ribbons, “and very weak.” In her tale, the girl struggled up the hills and came upon the habitat of the flower. But it was dark, and the girl could not see. She searched and searched, but the girl couldn’t find the plant. She knelt and cried out in despair to Wah’Kon-Tah.
“Wah’Kon-Tah?”
“You don’t know Wah’Kon-Tah?” She lowered her weaving, her straight black brows pulled together. “Wah’Kon-Tah brings everythinginto existence. The sky above, the earth below, the cosmos beyond. There are many opposites.” Niabi gestured with her hands. “Earth, sky. Night, day. Sun, moon. Destruction, life. Birth, death. Woman, man. All things have meaning and purpose.”
“Even destruction and death?”
“Of course.” She cocked her head. “Your people find no meaning in destruction?”
“It just brings pain.”
From beyond her lodge, I heard women singing. “And there’s no purpose to pain?” Niabi laced a bead onto a ribbon.
I leaned against the pillows and sipped tea. Perhaps that was the question: Could someone grow stronger without having to endure trials?
“Life is but cycles and seasons,” Niabi said. “Birth in spring, death in winter. Nothing is forever.” She lifted the ribbon to her mouth, wet a fraying thread. “All will die. Survival depends on the blessing of Wah’Kon-Tah.”
“So everything is meaningless?”
She tucked a length of hair behind her ear. “No, everythinghasmeaning.”
“What about chaos? Does that have meaning—”
“Stop.” Niabi laughed, patted the air with her palms. “Just let me tell the story.”
“So the girl was in agony, lost and in despair, calling out to Wah’Kon-Tah?” Niabi slipped back into the story. “In the sky, the stars seemed brighter and brighter.” Niabi spread her hands. “Until the stars exploded.
“As the light fragments fell,” Niabi told, “they landed on the ferny-leaved plant the girl searched for. The medicine woman was pleased that her granddaughter had found the right plant, but she was amazed at the thousands of tiny lights clinging to the blossoms.”
“The tale of yarrow,” I realized. “Of a thousand petals dripping with starlight.”
Niabi leaned against a pillow, spun tea round in her mug. “From that time Thousand Starlight has had clusters of white blossoms.”
How beautiful, to find creation in chaos. I didn’t know what I thought of mystical, undefinable forces pulling and pulling on the world. The inexplicable voices on my land haunted me. Sometimes it was as if I’d stumbled into an old tale and chanced upon the sort of grand magic found in faerie stories. But then the sun rose, and I felt foolish. Unlike Niabi, I didn’t see balance and order. I only saw those many blooms hanging from her rafters, blurry and browned in death.
Chapter Twenty
The following week, Whistlejacket and I roamed the creek bed, her rope lead loose in my palm. Morning light cut through the canopy, rays falling in lines across the wooden planks I’d laid across the stream. At the bend in the rivulet, I rubbed her silvery blue withers. “How’s that, sweetie?” I motioned toward the planks, introducing her to bridge crossings. She drank some water, and then we wandered closer. I asked whether she wanted to sniff the bridge, and she nosed the wood with her muzzle, her velvetlike black ears tipped backward. “That’s brave, Whistlejacket,” I said and offered her an apple slice.
The stream hissed on by, sound an unbroken simmer, and impressions of days training horses alongside Pa crackled past. Once, while practicing backing exercises with a mare, I’d tugged her bridle, frustrated.Do not lose your temper around your mare,Pa said, grabbing the lead.Minnie, you’ve got a way with horses. He crinkled his face into a smile, mustache wrinkling.Just gotta learn a little control yourself, is all. Memories folded together, images looping, but woven throughout them all was Pa alongside me, encouraging me to be a little bit stronger than the day before. In the thicket, a painted turtle plopped into the water, his dive fragmenting the steady rhythm of the rustling stream. Those days with my pa were long ago.
I encouraged Whistlejacket a while more, until she was comfortable placing her front hooves on the plank. When we returned home, I chopped firewood. As I worked, a norther screeched along the timberline and chapped my knuckles. The sky above seemed veiled, an indistinct pressure in the atmosphere. I placed an ash log upright on a stump and swung my axe straight on through. Then I gathered the pieces and piled them on my makeshift cart.
From the north, my brothers and their skewbald Thoroughbreds exited the forest and trotted across my prairie. I lodged my axe in the stump, then wheeled my cart to the barn, meeting my brothers in the carriage room.
“Boy howdy, have you sighted that Sunday hat Mrs. Fieldstone’s taken to wearing, with the sharp black feathers like spikes,” Willie said. We had an ongoing conversation about ridiculous fashions we’d seen round the county. I led Willie’s white-and-sorrel horse into a stall, my palm rubbing the hitch in her hips. Willie followed, clapping his mittens together against the cold. Ezra unbuckled his saddlebag and drew out a canvas sack, the leather ties almost black in the gloom.
“That laundry?” I interrupted Willie’s rambling about some farmer’s hogs getting stuck in the wallows.
Ezra’s herringbone waistcoat strained across the barrel of his chest. “And some trouser hems to darn.”
“You reckon I wield a needle any better than you?” I said. “You know I can’t sew. And I’m not washing nothing until you help dig my well.”
Ezra kicked the stall door shut and shoved the sack against my chest, his ruddy complexion darkening to cherry.
“Ah now, calm your grumbling spells.” Willie leaned against a post and snacked on an apple, his mustache oiled into an upward curve.
Willie usually stepped back when we fought. But lately, without Pa to moderate, Ezra and I snarled at each other like starved and beaten hounds. Thunder shook the oak boards of my barn, and Willie nodded outside. “A downpour is a’coming within the hour. We’ll get mighty soaked.” He plucked at his waistcoat, a slick jade brocade more appropriate for a Topeka drawing room than the farm.
