The legends are always beginning again. Let’s restart.
This is my story. A handful of tales, from a single stitch of my robe. My stories are endless, endless.
Chapter Forty-Three
Osage Nation—March 21, 1894
a few weeks later
The drums pounded, the beat reverberating like a pulse beneath my rib cage. Smoke wandered through camp, shocks of color kaleidoscopic in the dark. Spring had come suddenly, with verdant colors and long-forgotten scents. We’d made it. We’d survived winter.
Sometimes the ancient voice of the earth rumbled from the underneath:A storm’s coming. And I’d watch my horizon. But the Wild Bunch hadn’t arrived for revenge. And so I began to hope that the outlaws would just let me be.
Stot came round regular now, and I let who I’d been this past winter fade away. After everything, with springtime’s renewal, I felt as if I was allowed to become. I waded through visions of my future, considered what relationships were to me now. I’d been by Olive’s homestead a few times these past weeks, helping with the remnants of their barn. Once, as I’d sorted through a pile of half-burnt shovels and pitchforks, Olive had wandered into the husk of her barn, the shadows long and gnarled. She wiped a hand across her forehead, her posture tight.Well,come on in for supper, I suppose.Her voice strong and clear, but without any stretchiness in her intonation for rapport. Olive had welcomed me. But the distance between us now was vast. I wasn’t sure how to repair what I’d broken, but I’d keep trying.
Stot kissed me some on our homesteads, but mostly he allowed me space to reconcile all that was tangled in my life. I was comfortable in sensuous moments with him but still unsure in vulnerable ones. I found I liked to watch Stot work. I liked to laugh with him. I liked him nearby, and I started letting him see my hidden layers. And so we’d shifted into someplace comfortable and expansive. Well, notcomfortable, as the man was too handsome, smelling of spices and adventure. Now I was aware of every accidental brush, every whisper of his skin against mine, and my body ached. We hadn’t discussed where he’d live once Clara journeyed down, and I was thankful he was patient as I became accustomed to such an idea—of forever sharing all my wide quiet with another.
Before the bonfire, the log’s bristles irritated my palm. I clapped debris from my skin. Niabi updated me on goings-on, occasionally taking a length of fabric and threading it into her finger weaving. Tomorrow we’d practice on a complicated mount with her horse—and challenge Stot and Wa-ah-zho to a sharpshooting contest. But tonight, we’d simply enjoy each other’s company. The night smelt of honeysuckle and fresh grass and burning. There was the rhythm of the kettle drums, the warm brush of fire, the thoughts churning inside me. I remembered what Niabi had once shared, of how everything came from Wah’Kon-Tah, of how we just rearranged elements into something new, of how I’d been one woman long ago, and now I felt continually shuffled, as if I was becoming altogether rebuilt.
I scratched mud off my boots, dirt stuck beneath my laces. A girl rushed over, and Niabi leaned forward, listened to the fits and starts of the girl’s story about a game of chase. Niabi wiggled her fingers and blew. “Now you’re the wind—catch them.” The girl ran off giggling, and I mulled over this idea of voices caught in the wind—of historycalling out to me, ancestors speaking through time. I couldn’t hold the stories inside much longer. The women wanted out.
“The story of the earth and Prairie Rose?” I asked Niabi.
Niabi peeked at me as she slid a red glass bead on a ribbon. I spoke in a low rush, telling her how I believed the earth, Prairie Rose, and other women throughout time were communicating with me. I tugged my legs in tight, my bootheels catching on the bark of the stump. “Sometimes I wonder if I suffer from hysteria.”
Drowsy, Niabi’s hound, sighed in his sleep, and she ran a hand along his back, firelight catching on the gentle curve of her shoulder. “And your people, they bind you inside an asylum if they think you’ve caught hysteria, if what you say doesn’t have an easy explanation?”
“Yes.”
“I know of white man’s philosophy of reformation.” Her brows pulled together, the weight of past horrors tight across her back.
“I’m so sorry.” I was ashamed of my people. Niabi had shared glimpses of her time away at school with her sisters; I’d heard atrocious tales of other mission schools. They ripped away Native history and culture. The children couldn’t speak their traditional languages, wear what honored their heritage, dance as they wanted. Asylums for women had that same cruelty, that same altering of minds.
Niabi set her weaving on her lap and tucked her hair behind her ears, her gold and red feather earrings reflecting the light’s glow.
“Minds are as water,” she said. “Full of ripples and waves, evolving, wavering. Rainstorms splatter the surface of your mind, your memories and passions and hopes. Winds whip and change the structure of the water as your opinions and beliefs change. Fires, always burning inside. So you see, like the body, sometimes minds need mending.”
Niabi looped a yellow ribbon beneath a piece of black, the geometric design quaking as she wove. “You can heal, Earth Mother can heal, but neither can heal alone.”
I nodded and scratched my nails into the fraying fibers of the log. I’d raced away from my past—had stubbornly tried to create an isolated life.But I couldn’t outrun the voices on my land. Earth called to me, connected me with the women who lived on my land before me, perhaps even lived on my land after me. All their voices braided into shared memory, a new sort of history arising. Women were never meant to live alone, to live quiet. I’d tried, but the voices of my ancestors broke through time and impossibility to speak to me.
“So you don’t think I’m afflicted with hysteria?” I asked Niabi.
“I don’t think I’m the one to answer that.” She looked toward the forest, then grabbed a stalk of sweetgrass from a basket. “My people have always spoken with the land. Earth, she wants to be known. She will speak. You can hear her, if you listen.”
Niabi braided the sweetgrass, layering the crisp lengths across each other, moss and olive-green pieces twining together. This land had a rich heritage of story. Beyond the Osage Hills, buried deep in the soil of my farm, were the histories of women past. Before, herds of buffalo roamed, these rolling hills and meadows the hunting grounds of the Cherokee. Perhaps beyond that history, lost deep in time, Prairie Rose had made her home among this same sweetgrass.
I brushed the sweetgrass stems, a texture women had known far back into the reaches of time. One of Niabi’s sisters sat beside us. Niabi lifted her sister’s hair and fixed a necklace’s barrel clasp. They were amused about something, Niabi grinning and her sister’s laugh full of hiccups, their ease with one another unsettling, my own sister long lost. I wasn’t the only woman who’d broken and re-formed again, everyone a heartbeat from dissolving away. Memories of my parents’ home faded and faded until my past seemed almost lost and my days on my homestead resurfaced as new memory. I decided to wander awhile and withdrew toward the edge of their camp, where starlight glimmered and the trees cast haunting shadows. I entered the forest, fireflies shimmering golden light among the understory, sound disappearing behind me. The Osage defined the spirit world as unknowable, as full of mystery and wonder. In the nebulous dark,with a blanket cloak around my shoulders, I supposed that I’d never suffered from hysteria.
I’d just been a woman, with questions. A woman enraged and aching and bursting with such smothered emotion that I cracked open to find past. Just a woman, desperately searching for home.
Faroff, a woman spoke, the timbre of her voice like the groan of wooden boards. I turned toward the voice, the cool of spring breezes rustling my braid. A veil of snowdrops bobbed, moonglow luminous through the translucent petals. After a time, I heard spurs dragging through the nettle. Stot stopped beside me, leaned against a blackjack. “You okay?”
I nodded. He jacked his boot back against a boulder behind him, and I felt his body like steam through air. The forest was too full, too loud, too hot with him near.
“Do you know I believe in faeries?” he asked.
I gusted out a surprised laugh. “What?”
