After the Thunder (24 page)

The old man turned on her as quickly as his creaking bones would permit.

“You needn’t tell everything you know, Mama.”

“I needn’t but I will,” she said, mimicking his sharp tone. “William made a gambling debt against our home, so he is the one who must pay it. He went to Arkansas to find work in the timber.”

She glared at them, as the old man was doing.

“William has gone and left us because of you.” And she pointed a crooked, bony finger straight at Walks-With-Spirits. “You killed Jacob Charley, and now William has no work for the cold months.”

“No! He didn’t kill Jacob!” Cotannah cried.

The old man gave her a long, straight look.

“He put a curse on him, a death curse, was the way I heard it.”

Cotannah stared at the old man and then at the woman on the porch. Her stomach was churning.

“He didn’t mean it. The curse isn’t what killed Jacob.”

It was the old woman who answered.

“Yes, it is. He said the incantation and it killed Jacob Charley and William was out of work and that’s why he had to go leave us.”

Cotannah stared into the old woman’s button eyes.

“William was already out of work and Jacob Charley’s death had nothing to do with it. The carpenter work on the mercantile building has been done for a while now.”

The old woman’s bright eyes gleamed with triumph.

“That’s what you think, Missy!” she said. “Jacob Charley had promised William barns to build—work enough to last him all winter and next spring, too. Now that Jacob’s dead, Olmun said he don’t want no more barns. And since William left us the well has gone dry,” the woman’s relentlessly accusing voice went on. “I think he put a curse on William and the well, too.”

“No, he didn’t!”

Cotannah looked to Walks-With-Spirits, but he was looking sorrowfully at the old woman’s face.

“Papa ain’t able to haul water from the creek all winter,” she said. “We must have a new well.”

“Are you preparing to dowse for water?”

Walks-With-Spirits asked the question in a voice filled with … guilt? Was he feeling truly guilty for the plight of these people who were accusing him?

He was. Even though he was innocent.

Cotannah’s heart twisted with pity and anger. Now he’d be thinking again that the curse might’ve killed Jacob, all because of this old woman’s ramblings.

The forked stick trembled in the old man’s hands. He shakily nodded his head.

“Yes, I am dowsing. I am too crippled up to haul it from the creek.”

“Let me,” Walks-With-Spirits said, and Cotannah’s heart stopped.

Had she actually heard tears in his voice? Yes. One glance at him as he dropped the reins and stepped off his horse confirmed it. Dumbfounded, she stared at him.

“No,” the old woman said. “You can find the water because you’re a witch, but it’ll be bitter if you do. Go away.”

Walks-With-Spirits ignored her and walked toward the man with his hand outstretched.

“Usually, the stick will move for me,” he said. “Is this green limb from a peach tree?”

“Yes. But somebody told me any green limb will work.”

“I don’t think so,” Walks-With-Spirits said. “It needs to be peach.”

“It is, but it will not move for me. I can do no good.”

“Give it here,” Walks-With-Spirits said, and took it into his lean, brown hands. “It will move for me.”

The old man held on to it for a moment, obviously torn between hope for water, fear and resentment against Walks-With-Spirits, and dread of the old woman’s tongue. His bright eyes flicked to her face.

“It’ll be bitter,” she said again.

But she spoke in a weaker tone this time. She, too, had been about to give up hope for finding water.

Hardly able to believe her eyes, Cotannah whirled Pretty Feather around in a swirl of dust and watched the torture in Walks-With-Spirits’s face as he moved along with the forked stick held out in front of him. Her heart pounded fiercely, the blood roared in her head. Dear God in Heaven, how could he feel so sad and guilty about something he didn’t do?

Even so, he was walking the earth with the same air of being one with it as he had with his mount when he rode horseback. The long muscles of his thighs bulged beneath the buckskin of his breeches with each light step he took, each of his feet reached out with an unfaltering motion to caress the next spot of ground through the thin soles of his moccasins, lingering for a moment each time as if he could feel a message the Earth Mother was sending to him through the bent, short grass, as if his feet could feel the water flowing below it.

His hands held the two branches of the forked peach tree limb, the single end sticking out straight and level
in front of him. He looked ahead, into the middle distance, with a tortured look on his face. Back and forth he walked, slowly. Very slowly. Concentrating as if he knew, really knew that the Earth Mother would give him water.

The old woman began a keening hum under her breath, the old man watched in silence, his shoulders slumped with weariness, shaking his head. He must’ve already tried that same route for water to no avail.

Walks-With-Spirits was opposite the south corner of the porch, a short stone’s throw from the cabin, when the stick moved. The tip wiggled, up and down, once, twice, and then the whole thing twisted so hard that it nearly tore free from Walks-With-Spirits’s hands. The end of it dived straight at the ground until it disappeared into the grass and stuck, quivering, into the earth.

The old woman cried out.

“Oh, it’ll be bitter water!”

She threw her apron over her head and began to wail.

The man hobbled to the shed out back of the cabin and came back in a moment with a spade and a mattock in one hand and a shovel in the other. Walks-With-Spirits took the spade from him and began to dig.

“The water is here,” he said.

He threw up his head and looked at the old woman.

“It won’t be bitter, Grandmother,” he called. “Don’t worry.”

It was then that Cotannah saw the tears pouring down his face.

“I’m sorry if I caused you to be left alone,” he said, looking from one of the old people to the other. “I didn’t mean the curse I said over Jacob, but then again, I did.”

Cotannah waited for what seemed an endless time with panic rising into her throat, watching him. A mad,
wild despair came crushing down on her, a black despair as absolute as his grief. He believed it. He believed that he was guilty, and he had to dig this well to try to make things right again.

His tears hadn’t slowed one bit, they were wetting the ground beneath his spade. They shone on his cheeks when he raised up to throw a spadeful of dirt out of the hole.

She stood in her stirrup, threw her reins to the ground, and stepped down. Walking straight to the old man, she took the shovel from his hands and went to the deepening hole for the well, bent her back and began to shovel the dirt away from the edge so Walks-With-Spirits could keep digging.

He turned to her, surprise in his liquid amber eyes, gratefulness in his face. It wasn’t until then that she realized that she, too, was weeping.

In the dark of the night, they rode back to Tall Pine with only the most desultory talk between them. Cotannah was almost too exhausted to speak, yet she couldn’t be quiet. She had to reach out to him with her voice because there was no other way. He hadn’t touched her or really looked into her eyes since the digging began.

“It’s a good thing the water wasn’t too far down,” she said, trying to make her tone light. “Otherwise, we’d have had to move in with the Sowerses, and I don’t think the old woman would have welcomed us as house-guests.”

For a long moment he didn’t respond.

Then, with his rich voice so full of feeling that it resonated right into her bones, he said, “Thank you for helping me, Cotannah. You certainly didn’t have to—it’s my job to do.”

“What do you mean is? We found the water!”

“But the lower shaft of the well must be walled with rock all around, and they’ll have to move the windlass from the old well to the new one. I’ll build a wooden curbing, too, to keep things from falling in.”

“Shadow! It’s not your fault that William Sowers risked his grandparents’ farm in a gambling debt! And it isn’t your fault that he’s gone, either!”

“It very well may be.”

That was all he would say.

And for the next two weeks, he went back to the Sowers place almost every day. He came and lived with Basak and Taloa at Tall Pine, although he never slept in the house, and during the days he did all he could to make up to the feeble old couple for the loss of their grandson. She spent her days working with Tay and Emily, riding for miles and questioning people, turning over every rock in the Choctaw Nation in a search for clues to the truth about Jacob’s death that proved over and over again to be totally fruitless.

In the evenings, though—ah, in the evenings—he was with her. They roamed the pastures and forests and creeks until the early dark fell and then sat in the yard or in the parlor for hours, sometimes talking and talking, sometimes in silence. The rest of the family thoughtfully stayed at a little distance to give them time alone, and finally Walks-With-Spirits had told her as many details of his three years in the New Nation and about growing up in the Old Nation under the tutelage of the medicine man and the missionary woman as she had told him of her own past. She began to understand how he could accept Jacob’s death as his responsibility, and she began to see how deeply he was disturbed from his impulsive use of black medicine. There was a terrible tension in him now that hadn’t been there before.

It made her wild to comfort him, but nothing she said seemed to help him much.

She was also wild with desire, as was he, she could tell, but through some unspoken, instinctive fear that they both felt, physically they stayed apart. Once in a while, they touched hands, once in a while, they dared to hug when they parted, but that was all. More than that would pull them in too deep, and both of them knew it. More than that would shatter the strength they needed to do what they had to do.

The fleeting days and nights continued to pass. Suddenly, and far too soon, there were only ten of them left. During that day, Cotannah and Emily and Tay all sat around together in near silence as if someone already had died. There was nothing else to try, nowhere else to turn.

“We mustn’t give up,” Emily said, reaching out to squeeze Cotannah’s hand. “We still have several days left.”

“But we don’t know what to do with them!” Cotannah said, her lips so stiff with the need to weep that she could barely form the words.

“Something will happen,” Emily said, trying her best to smile. “Something is bound to happen soon.”

“Yes,” Cotannah said bitterly. “They’re going to kill him if I can’t talk him into running away.”

At supper that evening, she thought for a moment that he had come to grips with his desire to live, that she wouldn’t have to try to talk him into it, after all. She had sensed, from the time he’d come into the house telling of seeing and hearing the first flock of geese going south, that he, too, recognized this day as some kind of watershed.

Sure enough, when the meal was done and the boarders had gone from the dining room, leaving only the
immediate family, he said that he wanted to tell them good-bye.

“At dawn tomorrow I’ll be leaving,” he said quietly, his calm eyes resting on Tay, then Emily. “But I want you to know I’ll hold both of you in my heart forever, and I’ll never forget what you’ve done on my behalf.”

Cotannah’s heart gave a quick, hard leap, and then began beating twice as fast. Thank God! He was going. He wouldn’t die, after all.

A great relief began to grow in her, a relief changing to pure happiness with every excited beat of her heart. And he hadn’t looked at her, yet, so he wasn’t including her in this good-bye.

She could go with him, or if he insisted, meet him somewhere. That would be best, perhaps, in case the Lighthorse went looking for him when he didn’t appear on the appointed day—alone, he could vanish into the mountains and leave no trace.

Yes. He could move deep into the wild mountains, cross them, cross Red River, and drift through Texas until he met her at the ranch!

“I’m relieved, very relieved,” Tay said. “I don’t think I could bear to see you executed for something you didn’t do.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Walk-With-Spirits said. “I
will
honor my word, but I won’t see you again before that dawn of the rifles. I’ll go straight to Tuskahoma the evening before.”

Tay’s gray eyes darkened to the color of slate, and he frowned, considering what to say. Cotannah watched him, her gaze clung to him, as if to see salvation in his eyes—it took that long until she could make her heart believe what her ears had heard. Then she whirled on Walks-With-Spirits.

“Why didn’t you say that to begin with? Why did
you get my hopes up?” she cried, her voice a scream of pain. “How could you?”

Her fingers scrabbled for purchase in the heavy tablecloth, knocking over glasses and cups as she leapt to her feet, pushed her chair over backwards, and fled the table, the dining room. And the house.

Blindly, she flung open the front door, left it swinging, threw herself across the porch and down the steps into the early dark. She ran as fast as she could without the slightest thought of what might lie ahead of her in the night, ran as if her hair was on fire, as Aunt Ancie would say, but it wasn’t her hair—it was her heart.

The moment Cotannah cried out, Walks-With-Spirits realized what he had done. He leapt up and ran after her, his blood roaring in his head. How thoughtless could he be? How could he have been so cruel?

He had meant to give her time to assimilate the idea before he took her aside for a private farewell, but he had made it all worse instead, and he would never forgive himself. He followed her into the early-autumn dark, lightened by the new-rising moon.

Was this to be the way they’d part? After all they’d been through? After the long talks and the love between them, the unforgettable kisses …

The taste of her sprang to his lips at the thought, and his jaw hardened. They loved each other too much to part like this, no matter how upset she was. He was going to tell her good-bye and she him—he would not let it end with her running away.