Singing Heart (36 page)

“
Did you miss me as much as I missed you?”

He snorted jealously. “You missed me enough to take a white man as your husband and build a house big enough to hold my whole village.”

She winced.

“
You’re the one that sent me away. I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”

He shrugged as if it didn’t matter moving away to stoke the fire.

“
Jaskarra…I want to go home. Back to England. I want to see my family.” she announced to his broad back quietly.

He kept his back to her. She saw his shoulders slump for a brief moment in resignation. His eyes were silver with emotion when he finally turned to look at her. He reached out to touch her slightly swelling belly.

“
You carry his seed. He has a right to know.”

She gasped in shock. Until that moment she hadn’t even known. There had been so much turmoil in the past few months she hadn’t even thought about the signs of pregnancy. She wasn’t nauseated either. That was odd. She looked in disbelief at his muscular hand scarred with so many battles lying on her abdomen.

“
How did you know?”

He shook his head.

“
I felt more than one soul when I was holding you on the horse.”

She was so stunned. But she felt even more resolute than before in her decision regarding Sean. She feared him. She wouldn’t risk losing her child in a fight if he chose to use her for a punching bag.

“
I won’t go back to him. He doesn’t love me. I can’t trust him. He might hurt me and my baby. I won’t stay with him to raise a child. I’ll go home to England. My family will take us in.”

Gray Wolf felt her inner turmoil. Even though she had obviously tuned him out Singing Heart had haunted him day and night since the moment he rode away. Since his confrontation with the grizzly bear his visions had grown stronger. He understood them better. Could decipher their meanings. He had seen her life. The love she had for the tall man with the corn colored hair. He had felt the man’s rage and knew that she must leave to protect her own sanity. But the child he felt stirring in her womb belonged to both of them. If she went across the sea that love would be lost forever. Just as his own love and the chance to capture it had been lost when he forced her to leave in order to protect her.

He didn’t know what to do. He could take her back to his village they way he had before. Give her time to heal. For her husband to miss her. The way he had. To give life to her child and let them meet again. Jaskarra didn’t know how he would keep her that close and never touch her. He did know that he loved her too much to let her make a mistake that would destroy the true happiness she and her child deserved.

She interrupted his revelry sensing his turmoil.

“
I must leave. Please help me.”

He closed his eyes. Threw back his head, meditating, praying to the grandfathers. Closing her out the way he had so many times in her dreams. She lay down as he chanted in that guttural language knowing that he wouldn’t give her an answer until he got the one he felt was right. She closed her eyes wearily. Today she had taken her life back into her own hands leaving the man she loved, only to discover that there was part of him inside of her that would never allow her to forget him. Ironically the man she had begged to hold on to her, sitting only a few feet away, confusing her heart all over a second time. She had never forgotten him. As long as she had been away from him, as intimate as she had been with Sean, Jaskarra was still part of her soul. She still loved him. Was it possible to love two men each just as deeply as the other? How could she? They were each so different.

It wasn’t fair to her or them. They each called to her fulfilling something that was empty inside. They had both rejected her in their own ways. She didn’t want to hurt anymore. She was fed up with illness, death, unrequited love and the hardships of living in a land that hated her. Of fighting even the weather and natural elements to survive. She longed to see her mother. All of her family. To belong. Xzan had enough money left to live independently if she were frugal. To raise her child without their help if she could just get home before either one of these men tried to stop her any further.

Chapter Fourteen

Jaskarra’s verdict hadn’t been the one she wanted to hear. Even though it made perfect sense Xzan didn’t particularly like hearing the truth. He told her she could go to town where her husband would make inquiries and find her and drag her back home. Or she could let him help her until the baby as was born and she was able to travel with the child. The odds were that if she left now it would be born in worse circumstances. The hardship of the long journey itself might cause them both to die.

She estimated that she was at most four months pregnant. If she waited until the spring it would be the perfect time to travel with her newborn. The last part of her arduous journey would be aboard ship during the winter months and this time they could be warm in the confines of a cabin with her quilts instead of sleeping on the snowy banks as she had coming west during the winter months. If Xzan left now she would still be on foot during the long winter months. Struggling not only with the harsh realities that faced a wagon train but heavy with child. She remembered Janice Cavendar’s early demise in childbirth and how little Cody had barely survived even with all the people who cared helping Frank with his little son.

This baby didn’t have anyone but her. She had to be strong and she had no intentions of dying on the trail and being another unmarked grave along the path forgotten or unknown. Jaskarra’s closing argument was a horror story about a pregnant white woman he had seen mutilated by another bloodthirsty tribe. She had been raped then tied to a wagon wheel with her belly slit open. Her unborn child fell out while she was alive still watching. It was a gruesome death. One that he hated the other Indians for. He knew how to torture a man as all the braves in his tribe did. Had done so without mercy. He believed no pregnant woman white or otherwise carrying life inside of her deserved that kind of disembowelment.

Women went where their men led them. With the exception of this one. She had come across the world alone to follow her dreams. Or maybe he had led her here somehow. It would be excruciating to let her go forever. Never to see her even at a distance if she chose to return home. In his own way he felt responsible for what she had suffered. Coming together had served no great purpose as he first believed it might. It had only broken both of their hearts. Still he could not allow her to leave unprepared simply because she was homesick. She had to act logically so that no further harm would come to her or her child.

They traveled for three days. His entire village had moved as they did periodically to follow the buffalo or seek more fertile soil. His teepee was set apart from the rest of the village because it was his calling to seek greater truths and he needed privacy. She didn’t have her copper tub to take a bath in now. When he went to swim in the creek she shed her clothing joining him to cleanse her body too. He was shocked by her display of immodesty knowing how shy she had been before. He couldn’t believe she had changed so much.

Her body was a beautiful as ever. She still had a young girl’s soft skin, unwrinkled despite the harsh elements she was forced to endure. She had cut her hair. The last time he’d seen her it was to her knees. Now it fell swaying to her hips in a dark mass of wet ringlets matching the curls between her thighs. Her skin was pale nipples blushing peaches atop creamy mounds. He felt his desire cut like a knife. Turning his face away he shared the water with her forcing himself to think about any thing except this luscious naked beauty swimming near him.

Xzan didn’t care what her lack of clothing was doing to Jaskarra. This was for her healing. She scrubbed off the old skin roughly with a leaf she found floating as if the pain would go with it and freed herself to go forward. Her first step was to end her own inhibitions and become one with the earth and also comfortable with Jaskarra. He might as well get used to it. They would be sharing quarters in close proximity for several months and she wouldn’t pretend they had never been lovers. She didn’t intend for them to tiptoe around each other miserably aware of the attraction between them. She would never go back to Sean and in her heart she was letting him go as her husband. After she left America she would never see Gray Wolf again in this lifetime. She intended to make the most of this time with him the way she should have before.

To learn all she could from him. To love and be loved so that no matter how lonely the years ahead might be she would have memories to sustain her. She wasn’t thinking about the physical. What they had was so much deeper. He didn’t hunger for her as a woman anymore. He’d made that clear. She carried another man’s brand. His child inside of her. What she wanted was spiritual. With nothing barring them from each other.

She had no idea what her innocent actions of bathing were doing to the man foremost in her thoughts. He had even scorned Bright Eyes all these years since he had sent the woman he loved away. Unable to bear to touch any one else. It had been too long since he had touched or been touched. He waited in the water for her to dress not trusting himself to come out at the same time. She smiled at him sweetly admiring his masculine body unabashedly when he finally emerged. He didn’t see her look because he had turned his back to put his breech-cloth back on. Things might have been different if they had both known the other’s thoughts. He hadn’t tuned her out deliberately. Her soul mingled with another now. She felt clouded. He couldn’t fathom her anymore.

*****

Sean felt nothing. Not even anger. Something had happened inside of him the day the Tornado wiped out their dreams. Xzan’s acceptance of it had infuriated him. Why hadn’t she felt as devastated as he had? He worked himself into the ground day after day with the men he had brought to help him with the farm. They had to make a go of the land. It was all they had left. Without his wife’s money to pay the men or feed them they had almost quit. He’d finally made them a deal to share the money from the crops and given each man his own portion of land. He felt badly about losing his temper with her. Hadn’t known what came over him. Or how to make it up to her. Things had gone from bad to worse. He didn’t blame her for leaving. He’d practically forced her out. Told her to go. But part of him was deeply wounded that she hadn’t loved him enough to stay and fight for him.

One good thing had come from all of this. Kerrie and Robert had found each other and married. She’d gotten pregnant immediately. Was starting to show a little now. He’d moved into the barn with the other men. They sat up late at night playing cards, talking and drinking. He didn’t get drunk only using the liquor help unwind after a long day. Kerrie made them one meal a day. Usually beans and cornbread or whatever they could hunt to put in the pot. A rabbit or squirrel. She’d made a stew tonight with homemade rolls dripping with freshly churned butter that had melted in their mouths.

He didn’t know how he felt about Xzan anymore. Part of him missed her so bad he felt like dying sometimes. The ache was unbearable. Especially when something would remind him of her. Like the birds coming out in the spring. She used to feed them every morning. Chirping to them. Imitating their distinct sounds. Another part of him was cold. Especially when he had those headaches that had plagued him since that door had hit him in the temple. He knew he had some kind of damage. The headaches were fierce. He felt like he was in a tunnel. Became a person strange even to himself when his head throbbed in agony. He said and did things he normally wouldn’t. Things he didn’t even recall that Robert informed him of later. It scared him that he might be going crazy like his Uncle Jeb.

It had been half a year since his wife disappeared. He’d stayed in town for two days trying to flush her out of hiding. Then another month leaving no stone unturned on the road into town searching for signs that she had passed that way or his worse fear that she had been attacked by a wild animal. There was no trace of her. It was as though she vanished from the face of the earth the same way Jed had, except there was no tornado to blame it on this time. Only himself. She had disappeared as if she’d never been there. On foot taking nothing with her except the clothes on her back. He had accepted in time that he would never see find her or know for sure what had become of her. He’d been to town to see Trudy and another saloon girl named Amy a few times. It hadn’t helped appease anything except his immediate male needs.

They weren’t the petite woman who smelled like roses with the stars in her eyes that incredible lavender shade when she looked out upon this vast wilderness exuberantly.

Sean didn’t have anywhere else to go. He had no family left except his cousin. No money stashed away for a rainy day. Either he made the farm profit of he died trying. So he persevered never dreaming that only a few miles away his wife was at that very moment giving birth to his child.

*****

Shining Face, Gray Wolf’s Aunt was urging Singing Heart to squat the way that all the Indian women of her tribe did. It eased the birth. Made it quicker. She had born 12 of her own children knew what she was talking about. The older woman frowned at the small woman with the sky colored eyes who was crying in pain. An Indian maiden would never show her pain. She grunted in disgust at the sight of a brave having to help with women’s work. Her nephew was the medicine man. Highly revered among their people. His word was law and he had insisted the white woman was too fragile to have the baby without him.