Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (38 page)

What makes a person evil?  Are they born that way?  Do they grow into it over time?  I wasn't just thinking of my father now, but of every person in history who had ever committed a terrible crime.  Colonel P.E. Connor, who slaughtered the village of Bear
River.  Colonel Chivington, who steamrolled peaceful Cheyenne at Sand Creek.  Even Chief Spotted Tail, who stole so much of his own tribe's livelihood they wound up executing him.  What makes you want to do things like that?  To mutilate people, or starve them to death?  Why couldn't I understand it?

Maybe I didn't want to understand it.  Maybe understanding it meant you were in danger of succumbing to it.

The shaman banged his water drum with one hand, shaking his rattle with the other.  I hadn't seen him light the coals, but they roared with sudden flame.  I sweated instantly.  I sucked in as much breath as my lungs could hold.

"I have slain my own wife," Andrew began, in Shoshone.  We weren't our individual selves anymore, but the Coyote, confessing to all the wrong-doings of his past.  "I have murdered the sacred Bear."

"I have tormented the Whippoorwill," Paul said.  So Paul spoke Shoshone, but his own son didn't.  "I have stolen fire."

"I have harassed the Sun and Stars," I said.  "I have stolen flight from the Sky People."

Coyote was the reason we had death.  Everything ill about our world traced back to him.  All good things were Wolf.  All bad things were Coyote.  That didn't mean you ought to love the Wolf without question.  And it didn't mean you had to hate the Coyote for following his nature.  It was his nature.  Maybe it was a hateful nature; but don't stand staring at a prairie lily, waiting for its freckles to change.

The Coyote Ceremony felt like it lasted an eternity.  I sweated so badly my hair and clothes stuck to my skin, the white clay makeup bleeding all over my face.  At long last Shaman Quick opened his water drum and dumped it over the coals, extinguishing the fire.  I coughed at the last hiss of violent steam.  Andrew ducked out of the sweat lodge without parting words.  I crawled after him, gasping.  The badlands were bone-dry, but the moment I emerged from the lodge I felt like I was sitting in a freezer.  I thanked Creator for it, my limbs like melted plastic, tired and loose.  Tired was an understatement.  My heart was ready to climb out of my throat.  My eyes wouldn't stay open.  I could have curled up on the clay and gone to sleep for hours.  But it was merciful, in a way: those final few seconds before a caterpillar tears open its
chrysalis, only to discover its own wings.

Do you know what a caterpillar has to do to become a butterfly?  It eats itself.  It digests its own body from the inside out.  All its tissues, all its organs melt together in a messy green soup.  The nutrients from that soup are what weave together to make the brand new body.  Wings and antennas.  Eye buds and palps.  You can't even say it's the same creature anymore.  Sometimes destroying yourself only reveals a hidden second skin.

"Rafael?" Paul said.

He came outside the lodge to sit on a patch of blue clay, panting.  I didn't want to talk to him.  Not like I was ready to move, though.  More like I was ready to pass out.

"Skylar tells me the two of you are close friends," Paul began.

Did this guy get the memo, or what?  "Yessir."

"Well, I...I just wanted to thank you."

Paul looked like a giant marshmallow, his big face powdered in white.  Great.  Now I was hungry.

"Okay, sir," I said.

"Um," Paul said.  "I suppose...about all this..."

"Do you think people are born evil?" I asked.  "Sir?"

Paul wavered.  "What was that?"

"People," I said.  "The ones who turn out bad.  Were they like that in the womb?  Was there ever any hope for them?"

I could tell that Sky's dad was weighing his response carefully.  If he told me there'd never been any hope for my father, he practically invalidated all the good memories I had with him.  But if he told me my father could have turned out a different way, he gave me something new to mourn over.

"Let me just say this," Paul said softly.

It's a shame.  I might have liked this guy if he hadn't been the last person to see my father alive.

"Nobody is born evil," Paul said.  "Everyone comes into the world good."

I started to regain the strength in my limbs.  "Huh?"

"Everyone," Paul said.  "Everyone is born good, although it's true that they may forget as much over time."

Neutral, I could have believed.  Good took me by surprise.

"You can look at it from an evolutionary lens," Paul said.  "Humans are a pack animal.  It better benefits our society to produce children who are interested in helping one another thrive.  But I don't know all that much about science."

"Sir."  My ass he didn't.

"But also...well, haven't you ever picked up a child?  An infant, rather?"

I couldn't remember that I had.

"Watch a small child playing with his friends sometime," Paul said.  "Perhaps a five-year-old.  A child that young may behave roughly.  Children that young may even make each other cry.  That's not malice.  They don't know what malice is.  If you don't know what malice is, how can you be malicious?"

"But how does that make you good?" I asked.

"When you were that age," Paul said, "what did you used to spend your time thinking about?"

I stretched my memory as far back as it would go.

"Having fun," I said.  "Being happy."  Nothing else had even existed.

"On your own?" Paul asked.

"No," I said.  "That's not fun."

"Being happy with other people," Paul said.

"Well, yeah."

"Other people being happy."

I sat up, the bones in my back shifting and groaning.  If a prerequisite to humans' happiness was other humans' happiness, did that mean humans were good at their core?

Paul touched my shoulder before he heaved himself into a standing position.  I wished he hadn't.  I felt his emotions and they were as foreign as that starfish's from the aquarium.  He drew to mind calm winters, hard hunts, the uncompromising limbs of an ancient redwood suspended impassively over the fabric of history.  Carnage and victory were the same.  It scared the shit out of me.  Paul scared the shit out of me.

"Just think about it," Paul said, before he straggled off to talk to the shaman.  His aura scared me, too, crisp white marred with black.

I did think about it.  I thought about it on the walk home and afterward, when I went into the washroom and scrubbed myself clean.  I put on old jeans and a t-shirt I wasn't sure was mine and straggled into the kitchen, where Rosa adjusted the antenna on a small radio.  I thought about every evil figure throughout history, and how they might have turned out that way.  I couldn't solve that part.  But something else occurred to me.  Custer was a child once.  He didn't spend his childhood killing Indians and stealing their homeland.  Nero didn't spend his childhood burning Rome to the gro
und.  Everybody was a child once.  No child was born hating the world around him.  You had to learn that trait.  You had to pick it up from the worst pockets of the universe, the filthiest recesses of society, where the people who learned it before you deposited it when they were done.

I knew now what it felt like to break free from your own exoskeleton, to emerge with a pair of wings.  If we thought of people not just as people, but as a sum of every event in their lives--childhood and all--then it was obvious that there was no such thing as a bad person.  Just a person who did bad things.  I know I sound crazy now.  Hear me out.  Wasn't there something you did once that you wish you hadn't?  Maybe you said something hurtful to a loved one, or you told a pretty big lie, or you stole or cheated your way to an achievement you're not sure you really deserved.  When you told that lie, or cheated on that assignment, you weren't really thinking about lying or cheating, but about acquiring whatever it was you needed.  Students don't cheat on school tests because they know the answers.  Thieves don't steal what's already theirs.  So, alright, you did something bad once; but I think you'd probably object if I called you an unequivocally bad person.  And I'm not saying that lies are the same as murders.  I'm not.  I'm only saying that nobody is born anticipating all the bad things they'll accomplish in one lifetime.

When I was a little boy, I dreamt about becoming a marine biologist.  I didn't dream about punching William Sleeping Fox so hard he had to wear corrective eyeglasses.

This was the answer I'd been looking for since I was six.  This was how the father I'd loved had metamorphosed without my noticing.

Because he'd metamorphosed without his noticing, too.

18

Treasure

I woke up on the sofa in my sitting room.  I squinted at the clock on the mantel, but couldn't make out the digits.  Damn it, I didn't want eyeglasses.

Dawn light streamed through the giant windows.  It looked to me like a sound made tangible, maybe the kind you could only play with ancient instruments: soft reed flutes, the occasional plucking of a cornstalk fiddle, the quiet, understated lyrics of water rushing over soil.  The misty light soaked the hardwood floor a pale gold.  Even the clouds looked like hazy blankets for waterfowl, brief relief for the desert.

I didn't mind the desert itself.  It was pretty enough on its own.  All of Nettlebush was pretty, I realized.  I don't think I'd ever thought of Nettlebush as pretty before.  On the contrary, home used to be that ugly place I wanted to get away from, but couldn't.  That's the real reason they say you can never go home again: because it never leaves you to begin with.

I counted the past few days in my head.  I cursed out loud when I realized I'd slept through the start of the morning hunt.  Why hadn't Uncle Gabriel woken me?  What's more is I'd slept through the prior night's dinner.  No wonder my stomach wouldn't shut up.  I swung my legs over the side of the sofa.  I stood up, but felt the room spinning around me.  I heard a knock at the front door.

"C'min," I yelled.

The knob rattled, but the door didn't budge.  I cursed again.  I didn't know why Uncle Gabe kept locking up the house.  I strode across the sitting room, tripping, sliding open the lock above the brass doorknob.  I pulled the door open, blinking as the sunlight brightened.

Sky waited on the other side of the door, his smile soft, but careful.  It was sad how heavy my heart hammered, warmth flushing inside my veins.  If this was what he could do to me with a solitary glance, I'd never stood a chance.  His eyes weren't bright and spirited, but sad, drooping at the corners.  As well-rested as I felt, he looked like he hadn't had the same luck.

"C'min," I mumbled again, backing out of his way.  He stepped inside the house.  He shut the door with a delicate click.  Even that drove me crazy.

You haven't been out to the grotto lately
, Sky said.  He spelled "cave" with his fingers, slowly.

"I was busy," I said, rubbing the soreness out of my shoulder.  "I finally did the Coyote Ceremony."

His eyes dilated just slightly. 
You didn't do anything wrong.
  This time he didn't spell it.

"I know," I said.  "It made me feel better is all."

I didn't know that I'd done the ceremony just for myself.  Maybe I'd done it on Dad's behalf, the same way Uncle Gabriel apologized on my behalf when I destroyed that library book.

I felt embarrassed all of a sudden.  "D'you want anything to eat?"

I'll cook
, Sky said.

I recognized the sign when he flipped his right hand over on top of his left.  My stomach thanked him before I could.  We didn't go into the kitchen, but to the cooking pit Uncle  Gabriel had dug outside the house for parties.  It looked directly out on the badlands, open and endless, canyons a startling sky blue by early morning.

Sky took a pan off the pit's standing poles.  He knelt next to the water pump, filled the pan, and put it on the gridiron, his back to me.  I had no idea what he thought he was making, but stood watching him for a while, trying to think of something to say to him.  I watched the curve of his skinny back, his arching neck, his curls ready to dance on weak wind.

I came up on him from behind.  I put my arms around his waist, my chin on his shoulder.  After a moment of uncertainty, he leaned back against me, nestling into the shape of me, trembling.

I didn't know
, he said.

I'm tired of this
, he said.

I only wanted to be with you.

"It's okay," I said, even if I didn't know for sure.  It didn't matter that I knew for sure.  I would have said anything to make Sky feel better.

I'm so sorry
, Sky said.  My hands were bunched together at his stomach; he grasped them desperately.

"Me, too," I said.  It wasn't just my problem.  "I'm sorry Indian Country's so screwed up."

Do you miss him?
Sky asked, working his fingers between mine.

"Haven't seen him in eleven years," I said.  "You miss your mom?"

Can you miss someone you never knew?