After the Thunder (7 page)

“Where did you come from?” she asked breathlessly. “All of a sudden you were right there.”

“I was crossing the street when Basak the mountain lion told me you were in danger.”

Her mind reeled. Mountain lion? It had brought him to save her? Basak meant “snap” in Choctaw, she thought wildly. Had it snapped out the words to him?

“Me? Or Sophia?”

“Basak said ‘babies.’ ‘Silly babies.’ Why were you under that framework, anyway?”

Now he sounded irritated. Disapproving of her, as usual. She felt a stirring of disappointment.

He glanced toward the scaffold and so did she: the fallen board lay crazily at an angle, one end resting head high against the leg of the structure and the other end on the ground. Bricks, some whole and some broken, lay everywhere, with their hard edges gleaming red in the sunlight. An instant more, and they could have been red with blood. Sophia’s bonnet had vanished, probably carried away by the wind.

“I was chasing the baby, who was chasing her bonnet.”

“But why were you here at all?” he demanded, as sternly as Cade would have done. “Don’t you know that a building under construction can be a dangerous place? That a scaffolding full of bricks is for workmen? What were you doing?”

I came here to flirt with Jacob. I brought Emily and Sophia and Ancie and Jumper here so I could start a real flirtation with Jacob Charley
.

Now that seemed the stupidest reason in the world. Quick frustration surged through her.

“How could I know that the workmen were so sloppy they couldn’t even build a scaffolding right? The store will probably fall down next.”

Walks-With-Spirits gave her a reproving look as if she were a child making excuses. Then Emily threw herself at them.

“Oh, dear God, thank you! Thank you!”

She was pulling at Walks-With-Spirits’s shoulder, and then at Cotannah’s, clawing at them, trying to get her hands on Sophia, who suddenly let out a spine-chilling wail and began to scream. Walks-With-Spirits turned Cotannah loose, and, freeing the baby from her still-clutching arms, he gave Sophia to Emily. Only then did Cotannah hear the commotion that was growing louder and more frenzied and closer and closer.

Disembodied voices sounded from every direction.

“Are they all right? Was anybody hurt?”

“No. Walks-With-Spirits saved them.”

Cotannah turned to see that two men, both wearing carpenter’s aprons with hand tools hanging from them, stood near her and Walks-With-Spirits. They were staring at the wrecked scaffolding and the scattered bricks.

“That baby and the young lady could’ve been
killed,” the short, older one said. “I was on the roof, and I nearly fell off it when I looked down to see what the screaming was all about.”

Somebody else, farther away, called to a friend.

“It was a near thing! I was scared to watch, but I couldn’t look away.”

“What happened?” another man shouted as he hurried toward the workmen.

“The bricks fell off the scaffolding, Mr. Sowers—they were all stacked on one end,” the younger one called back.

“No! That’s impossible!”

The one called Mr. Sowers shouted the denial so loudly that the other voices quieted. Everyone turned to look at him. Even Sophia’s screaming dropped to a moaning wail.

“I was returning to work on that scaffolding when Mr. Charley called me to the front of the building,” Sowers said clearly, his quick, dark eyes searching out Jacob. “Those bricks were properly stacked on both ends of the board then. I’ve been up there on the platform with them all morning, finishing the window trims.”

When that soaked in, all the people turned to look at Jacob Charley. They were quiet, as if waiting for him to give another explanation for the near disaster, since it was his store.

He glanced quickly around, in all directions. A trace of color began to return to his abnormally pale face.

“Well, no one would’ve moved the bricks while you were gone, William,” he said nastily. “They fell. I saw them with my own eyes.”

Uncle Jumper’s aged, light voice called out.

“Jacob Charley, you were behind this store when we drove up here.”

“So?” Jacob said defensively. “Are you suggesting that I climbed up onto William’s scaffolding and started moving my own workmen’s bricks all around?”

Dozens of eyes continued to stare at Jacob.

Sophia’s wails began to grow louder again.

Uncle Jumper, also, continued to look at Jacob Charley.

“Did you see anyone else back here?” he asked, in his dry way.

“I was only walking around … looking to see what trees we’d have to trim,” Jacob said. “I had my back to that scaffolding. Besides, I would never have looked up at it, anyhow—I hire men to take care of such as that for me.”

Everyone continued to stare a him for a long moment more.

“This whole discussion is ridiculous!” he cried. “It was the wind.”

Sophia gave a sudden, completely heart-rending scream, and Emily collapsed to the ground, doubled over as if she were the one in agony, carefully bending over the baby to set her down.

“Look,” Walks-With-Spirits said, his fingers brushing Cotannah’s arm in a touch that went right through her, “again we must help our little one.”

Our little one. Again we must help
.

Those intimately murmured words also went right through her as she dropped to her knees beside Emily. Lord! It was like he thought now they were connected or something. A strange, warm feeling spread across the back of her neck and down her spine.

People fell back from around them because Sophia’s wails were growing more earsplitting with every breath. Someone let out a soft cry of horror, and then Cotannah saw why.

The small plump arm, her left one, that the child had held clutched against her, hung free now, dangling from her shoulder, bent at a sickeningly unnatural angle.

“Oh, dear goodness, it’s broken,” Emily cried, tears pouring down her face. “Oh, Precious! Mama didn’t know your little arm was broken!”

Emily’s hands hovered helplessly over the hurt while Sophie, screaming, leaned away from her.

Walks-With-Spirits reached past her.

“Now, now, Sophia,” he soothed, in that voice of his that was like sweet, running water. “Listen, now. Hear your bones go back into their places again. They will be grown back together. Shhh, shhh! Listen to them, now.”

His tone was so full of love you might think this was his own child.

It calmed her screams and he gazed steadily into her eyes, he sang a low, rhythmic chant in the Choctaw tongue, cupped both his huge hands around her little arm, stroking above and below the break for just a moment and then, in an instant that Cotannah didn’t quite capture, he slipped her bones back into alignment. The baby gave a single, shaky sob, then, miraculously, she was quiet.

Who wouldn’t be? The gentleness, the pure goodness emanating from him was enough to warm the world, and Cotannah felt it all over again, that deep, elemental knowing she was safe that had come to her when she’d found herself in his arms.

“Cotannah, untie my belt and give me one end of it,” he murmured.

She did as he asked, but when she encircled his slender waist and her whole body came so close to his that her breasts brushed against his side, she was almost paralyzed by the urge simply to draw him to her and rest against him. No. Sophie. She must think of little Sophie
and not of herself and Walks-With-Spirits.

But little Sophie was feeling it, too. She was watching Walks-With-Spirits’s face with her heart in her eyes, tears drying on her round baby cheeks.

Cotannah’s fingers trembled, but she managed to undo the knot in the cloth belt, woven in one of the old symbolic patterns, and unwind it from around him. She found one end of it and slipped it beneath his fingers which he lifted from Sophie carefully so as not to let the broken bones slip again.

Her skin burned where her hands brushed his.

He wrapped the tiny arm carefully, firmly, then glanced up at Aunt Ancie, who had stood watching him, reaching time and again to touch Sophie’s hair over Emily’s shoulder.

“You will add the bark supports to this arm at Tall Pine?” he asked. “You have done such many times, have you not, Auntie?”

She nodded.

“I have. I will do it.”

“And I will come tomorrow to see her.”

With a last, feathery touch on Sophie’s cheek, he stood up to applause from the people gathered around. He nodded his thanks.

Then he turned to Cotannah and took both her shoulders in his big, warm hands.

“And you?” he said softly. “Are you sure that you were not hurt also?”

“I’m fine,” she murmured, although she had never felt more unlike herself than she did at that moment.

Jacob Charley’s voice struck at them like a weapon.

“Turn her loose, you false medicine man! Get your hands off her. You’re not fit to touch Cotannah, and you’d better not do it again.”

Immediately, Walks-With-Spirits was facing him, his
back straight and his feet set apart, his big, hard body planted firmly between Jacob and her. She couldn’t see past him without leaning around, which she did.

“You are not fit to touch her.”

“Ha!” Jacob shouted. “Who are you to say such a thing to me? Keep your mouth shut and get out of the Nation now. Don’t come back. After this, all the People will know you for the witch you are.”

Walks-With-Spirits stayed perfectly calm. He wasn’t even breathing hard, he was just standing between her and Jacob, balanced lightly on the balls of his feet.

People fell completely silent, as they always did when two men in a crowd got ready to fight.

“Get out of my way!” Jacob shouted. “Let me see if you’ve hurt Miss Cotannah with your bad medicine!”

Walks-With-Spirits gave a dry, sarcastic chuckle.

“Unlike you,” he said, “I pretend to nothing.”

“What’n’ hell do you mean by that? I’m not the one pretending to talk to animals and heal the sick and raise the dead!”

“Yet you only pretend to rescue babies and young ladies.”

Jacob’s face turned purple. “Listen to me,” he snarled, “and remember what I say. Get out of the Nation and go back where you came from. It’s not healthy for you here, and you are no good for the People.”

“That’s twice you have invoked the name of the People. Why is that? You have no respect for the People, nor for the Nation. You have no esteem for tradition.” Walks-With-Spirits spoke flatly, calmly.

Jacob made an incoherent, guttural noise filled with rage.

“You have no use for the old ways,” Walks-With-Spirits said, in that same implacable tone. “How can
this be? Your father is one of the best-loved of the Choctaw elders.”

“You leave my father out of this!” Jacob smiled, then, a terrible grimace of a grin. “Of course, I can’t say anything about your father, since no one knows who he is,” he said, in a savage voice, “and no one can tell us your clan because no one knows who is your mother.”

Walks-With-Spirits clamped his jaw tight, and Cotannah saw the muscle jump along the bone.

“But I know who I am,” he said, in a quiet tone that held so much cold it could freeze a man in his tracks. “And you cannot say the same. Is Jacob Charley a Choctaw or a white man? Who knows? Who can say?”

A shocked gasp ran through the crowd, which still was steadily growing larger. Every single soul who was within the bounds of Tuskahoma must have come running when they heard the screaming.

“Are you calling me some kind of a traitor?” Jacob roared.

Complete silence fell. Cotannah moved a step to the right so that she could see both men, and what she saw was a pistol gleaming in Jacob’s hand.

“I’m not calling you,” Walks-With-Spirits said. “I’m telling you. No one loyal to his people would show so much contempt for their old ways, for their traditions.”

“I’m telling you that you have eyes too pale to be a Choctaw,” Jacob said derisively, “so you must be the white man here.”

“Many Choctaws have white blood, but that doesn’t keep them from also having respect for the old traditions.”

Jacob advanced on Walks-With-Spirits, who didn’t so much as make a fist to defend himself but who didn’t yield an inch, either.

“Get out of the Nation,” he shouted, waving the pistol in the air, “or I’ll put you out. If you stay—you know what happens to witches.”

Walks-With-Spirits watched him without a flicker of fear.

Cotannah’s blood leapt. Who wouldn’t admire a person who could stay as cool as that in the face of such venom? Such danger? Walks-With-Spirits carried no weapon, she was sure of it.

“Just as I thought,” Walks-With-Spirits said. “You’d be too lacking in courage to try to kill me yourself; you would try to incite someone else to do it.”

“You calling me a coward?” Jacob asked with a roar. His eyes were burning, fixed on Walks-With-Spirits. His hand shook as he leveled the gun and pointed it at Walks-With-Spirits’s heart.

“The hate you love will kill you,” Walks-With-Spirits responded.

Then, without a word to her or even a glance to see whether she was still there, he stepped out, turned his back on Jacob and the gun, and walked away. Basak sat at the edge of the woods watching, and when Walks-With-Spirits reached him, the two of them disappeared into the trees.

A strange, bereft feeling swept through Cotannah.

“You’re a witch!” Jacob yelled after him. “But I’m not afraid of you. I’ll run you out of this Nation if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

How could she have felt so close to Walks-With-Spirits, there for that brief time? His real opinion of her—his and Basak’s—was that she was a silly baby. Why did she feel so empty without him when he had lectured her as if she were a child and refused to see that she was a woman?

The even more terrifying question that was pulling at
her consciousness tried to break through then, but she pushed it back. Too much had happened in the past few minutes for her to be strong enough to think about that now.

T
hat night, Cotannah couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned in the lavender-scented sheets, then got up and paced the floor. She hung her head upside down and brushed her hair until her arm was so tired she couldn’t hold the brush anymore. Finally she lit the lamp and looked severely at her face in the mirror. Nothing had changed that she could see, except that she looked tired. And who wouldn’t, after finishing an eight-hundred-mile ride into exile one day and then having a bunch of bricks rain right down at her head the next?

You’re brave as an eagle; you dived into a hard rain
.

Walks-With-Spirits. He was why she couldn’t sleep. And he was why she was worried about her face and her hair and whether she was still attractive to men. She had no power over him, none at all!

The restlessness came over her like a fire racing across a prairie. She turned away from the mirror and threw the hairbrush at the bed, then ripped off her nightgown and sent it flying, too, as she ran to the armoire where she and Rosie had hung her clothes. Her rose-colored silk had a neckline cut so low that she could never wear it when Cade was around—in fact, Cade had never seen
the dress—and even the unshockable Maggie had commented dryly that she’d better have a bodyguard if she was going to wear it in public.

She smiled as she flung open the armoire’s double doors. Tonio had loved this dress.

Quickly, she removed it from the hook and pulled it on over her head without bothering with underclothes, shivering softly as the silk came sliding down the length of her body to caress her skin. Looking at herself now would make her feel better—it’d help to remember it the next time her path crossed that of Walks-With-Spirits. He was different, yes, but he was still a man, and she could have power over him as she did over all men.

She closed the last fastener and settled her breasts barely halfway into the lace-trimmed bodice. As she picked up the lamp to throw more light on the mirror, somebody knocked at her door. What in the world! It had to be at least one in the morning.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Emily. I saw your light.”

Cotannah set the lamp on the dressing table and ran to open the door. Emily stood smiling, her nightgown and wrapper blowing in the breeze coming in through the window at the end of the hallway, both hands holding a tray filled with tea things. Her eyes widened when she saw Cotannah.

“Dear goodness! Cotannah! Are you expecting someone else?”

A quick, guilty resentment raced through Cotannah. Then a hurt shock. What had Cade written to Tay and Emily?

“Do I have that scarlet of a reputation now?”

“What in this world are you talking about?” Emily said, and entered the room as confidently as if she’d
been invited, forcing Cotannah to step back and let her pass. “I’m only teasing you, you silly goose, and you know it.”

It was true. Her tone had held no censure. Suddenly Cotannah was glad beyond belief to have her company.

She sighed and closed the door before she followed Emily toward the bed.

“Leave it open for the cool breeze, if you want—I don’t care if we wake the whole household,” Emily said. “I’m just so happy that you and Sophie weren’t hurt today that I intend to celebrate all night.”

“But if we wake the others, we’ll have to share the tea cakes,” Cotannah said, and ran to lift a napkin off a plate on the tray as Emily set it down on the rumpled sheet and threw the covers all the way back over the footboard. “We do have plain sugar tea cakes, don’t we?”

“Most certainly. And with extra sugar sprinkled on top just the way you like them.”

Emily had come home from their horrific afternoon and made tea cakes, just for her! And she was here, in the middle of this endless night, ready to resume their old friendship, ready to drive the loneliness away. Tears sprang to Cotannah’s eyes.

“Let me get out of this dress,” she said. “We’re going to sit in the middle of the bed and get crumbs all over us and talk all night just like old times!”

“No, let me see you in it first,” Emily demanded, stepping back to take her arm to turn her around, looking her up and down, front and back. “Where in the world did you get it, Cotannah?”

“In Corpus Christi. Isn’t it the most disgraceful dress you’ve ever seen?”

“I think so. And I can’t imagine where you’d wear it,” she said, laughing, “except here in your room—but
Cotannah, I have to say just what I’ve always told you. You are a stunningly beautiful, striking woman, and that dress makes no bones about it.”

“Maggie says I need a bodyguard to wear it in public.”

“Have you ever?”

“No. I only wore it … well, for Tonio. He was … a vaquero on the ranch. I used to wear it under my cloak when I met him at the line cabin on Saltillo Creek.”

Emily didn’t bat an eye.

“Was? What happened to him?”

Cotannah twirled around again, then picked up her nightgown puddled in a white pool on the oak floor, and began unfastening the dress at the waist.

“Cade fired him,” she said. “He said it was my fault that Tonio wouldn’t leave me alone after I broke up with him.”

Sudden modesty overcame her, and she turned her back to pull the dress off over her head and don her nightgown.

“Quick,” she said, “prop up the pillows for us. I’ll be right there.”

“Did
you
think it was your fault? That Cade fired Tonio?”

Cotannah threw the dress over a chair.

“No! It was Tonio’s fault,” she said defensively. “I told him it was over between us, and he knew I meant it.”

“Why was it over?”

Cotannah shrugged and began buttoning her gown as she walked to the bed. “I was tired of him.” She sent Emily a defensive glance. “He didn’t amuse me anymore, he was getting so serious, so demanding. He forbade me to even look at any other man, he was talking about marrying me. Incessantly.”

Emily gave her a straight look. She was sitting cross-legged in the bed, now, holding the tea tray in front of her with both hands so Cotannah could climb up into the bed without spilling anything.

“And you didn’t want to marry him?”

“No. He didn’t mean that much to me.”

The words popped out before she knew she had thought them.

She hesitated, then laughed and reached out to help steady the teapot as she climbed in and sat opposite Emily.

“If Cade heard me say that, he’d say he told me so,” she said. “I don’t mean that Tonio meant nothing to me … I, well, I loved him, in a way, I truly did. But I’m not ever going to marry—I don’t think I’ll ever trust any one man to that extent.”

She caught Emily’s eye and smiled.

“I like lots of different men.”

“Like them or hate them?”

Stunned, Cotannah stared at her.

“What do you mean?”

Emily uncovered the cups, picked up the pot, and began to pour.

“Cotannah,” she said slowly, “in spite of what you said when I came in a minute ago, you do know that I would never judge you?”

Cotannah thought about that while she took a sugary tea cake from the plate and began to eat it, heedlessly brushing the crumbs from her lap into her bed.

“Yes,” she said, and knew it was true.

“For one thing, after what I did to you—marrying the man you had planned for ten years to marry—I have no right to judge anyone. For another, I know from watching my mother be miserable for all the years of my
childhood that rules and social conventions can do as much harm as good.”

Cotannah nodded impatiently.

“But why do you think I hate men?”

“It would be perfectly understandable if you did.”

Once more she was grateful for what was not in Emily’s voice. This time it held no pity.

“After enduring the hell of Headmaster Haynes and his whip when you were just becoming a woman and then, such a few years later, the terror of being kidnapped by those
bandidos
and almost carried off to Mexico—and, I must admit, after Tay came to Texas for you and ended up with me instead—it’d be pretty surprising if you could trust men easily.”

She spoke as matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing the weather.

“Trust you to get all the old boogermen out in the open,” Cotannah said, with an ironic chuckle.

“You need to talk about them,” Emily said. “It’s the only way to be rid of them forever.”

“I can’t. I push them all down so deep they never come out except in dreams.”

“If you only could get it all out, maybe to me … I’ll listen anytime, ’Tannah.”

“Then you would have terrible dreams, too,” Cotannah said gently. “Besides, Mimi, you’ve done your part. You helped bring me back from wanting to die after the
bandidos
, not to mention the fact that you and Tay rescued me from them.”

“Well, if you see that as a debt, you repaid it a thousand times over this morning when you rescued Sophia,” Emily said, her big brown eyes overflowing with tears. “If she’d been hurt, it would’ve killed us all. Oh, ’Tannah, thank you.”

Cotannah’s hand shook as she remembered the terror
of thinking Sophia would die in front of her very eyes. She forced herself to pick up her teacup.

“I didn’t do a thing,” she said. “It was Walks-With-Spirits who saved us both. He’s the one you should thank that you still have your baby.”

As she said his name the feeling of being in his arms flowed through her again, so strong she could smell the woods on his skin and hear the deep, sure sound of his voice. The question she had been trying to avoid ever since came crashing through the defenses she had built around her heart.

She dropped the cup back into its saucer with a clatter, splashing hot tea onto her thigh through the thin fabric of her gown. It didn’t even make her flinch.

“Why did I feel the way I did when he held me?” she blurted. “Oh, Mimi, I wasn’t even scared!”

Emily stared at her.

“What do you mean, you weren’t scared?”

“Oh, I was
scared
, about Sophia getting hurt by the bricks—or me getting hurt, but what I’m talking about is when Walks-With-Spirits snatched us up. I didn’t even know anyone was near, I didn’t see him coming, the first thing I knew he had grabbed me and locked his arms around me and I didn’t even feel the panic.”

“What panic?”

Cotannah propped her elbows on her knees and leaned across the tea tray toward Emily, searching her eyes for the answer to the question she was so afraid to ask even herself.

“Ever since … Headmaster Haynes, well, since the
bandidos
… whenever a man puts his arms around me, even when I’m expecting it—even when I’ve tantalized and encouraged him to do it—I get this horrible feeling of a smothering panic until I can hardly bear it, until I can barely breathe.”

“Oh, ’Tannah!”

Now there was pity in Emily’s tone and in her eyes, but it was too late. Cotannah had already said too much, and now she aimed to find out all she could.

“It goes away after a little while, after my mind gets used to what’s happening to my body,” she said. “And after my instincts realize that the man I’m with isn’t going to hurt me.” She drew in a deep, ragged breath. “But, Mimi, with Walks-With-Spirits, even though he shocked me so, I never felt it at all. Not one tiny twinge of it. From the instant he slammed into me and Sophia like a runaway train and scooped us up completely helpless, I only felt safe. Completely, thankfully safe, and I don’t understand why.”

Emily just looked at her, holding her cup frozen at her lips.

Finally she answered.

“Because you were in danger and he saved you from it.”

“No!” Cotannah cried, her voice breaking with frustration. “That was an entirely separate thing, escaping the danger.”

She reached out and took the cup from Emily’s fingers and set it on the tray. Then she took her by the arms.

“Normal women don’t feel that panic, do they, Mimi? But I have felt it with every man every time one put his arms around me.”

She shook her a little, as if to shake the truth from her.

“So why not with Walks-With-Spirits? Tell me that!”

“Because he sees you as a person, not only as a woman, perhaps,” Emily said, frowning in concentration on the problem. “He looks at everyone as simply people. People who have souls precious to the Great
Spirit, people who have brothers in each other and in all the animals.”

Cotannah shook her head.

“Maybe. But my instincts knew he was a man.”

“Ye-es,” Emily said thoughtfully.

“Plus he judges me every time he sees me,” Cotannah said petulantly. “He told me I’m a silly baby, and he makes me feel like a brazen, clumsy hussy when I try to flirt with him.”

Emily laughed.

“I don’t think even your rose-colored dress is the way to make him notice you,” she said. “He’s just so … ethereal. I think he’d be more attracted to something wise you might say.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know, ’Tannah, why you felt safe in his arms. He’s just different from any other man, he truly is.”

Then she pulled her arms free and took both of Cotannah’s hands in hers.

“But you aren’t so different from other women that you should call them ‘normal’ and not feel ‘normal’ yourself,” she said. “You are a wonderful, incredibly beautiful woman, Cotannah, and some man is going to love you to distraction someday.”

“We’ll see,” Cotannah said. “And if that’s true, we’ll see if I can love him back. In the meantime, I’m just glad I still have a best friend who loves me.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Emily said, squeezing her fingers. “I was just thinking the same thing. How can I be so blessed as to have my baby and my best friend given back to me on the very same day?”

“I hope nothing ever comes between us again.”

“It won’t. It can’t. We won’t let it.”

They looked at each other for a long time, then sealed
that pledge with a long hug that rattled the tray and spilled more tea on the bed.

“Well, it certainly won’t be that I’m trying to chaperone you,” Emily said, when they pulled apart and pushed everything back onto the tray. “Tay and I just want you to be happy, and so does Cade. You know that. That’s why he insisted you leave the ranch.”