Dreams Beneath Your Feet (6 page)

The only company Esperanza wanted tonight was his.

 

W
HEN
B
ELL
R
OCK
said, “ ‘Home,' ” Sam's skin shuddered. Before he could speak, Bell Rock called for the sweat lodge door to be closed.

Bell Rock poured this last round fiercely hot. Sometimes he spoke of pain as a sacrifice to the spirits.

He prayed fiercely but did not mention what Sam saw beyond or his ability to understand it. He sang fiercely. When he asked for the door to be flung open and then all the hides taken off, Sam was exhausted.

Bell Rock spoke almost as an attack. “Why does a snake shed its skin?”

Sam answered immediately, “I guess it's to start new, but that's not the way I feel.”

Bell Rock waited.

“I just feel confused.”

Bell Rock nodded. “What is the nameless thing you seek?”

“I don't know.”

“Where is your home?”

“I haven't had once since my dad died. I couldn't stay around my bossy brother. I thought I . . .”

“What?”

“I thought Meadowlark and I would make a home in this village, but . . .”

They both knew that story.

“I've never been able to make a home for Esperanza. I never made a home for Tomás.” In their dozen years together, when they weren't irked at each other, Sam and his adopted son had roamed the mountains with Hannibal.

“Where is your home?”

Sam surprised himself with the answer. “I sort of feel like this whole country is my home, the Yellowstone to Taos. I also feel like I'm losing it.”

“I was born to a home,” said Bell Rock. “So is every Crow. So were you, but you threw it away.” He gave a lighthearted smile. “You whites are funny people.”

Now Bell Rock turned serious again. “Maybe Flat Dog is a funny white man, too.”

Sam looked at him curiously.

“Flat Dog is losing his home, throwing it away. After more than thirty winters.”

 

S
TANDING BETWEEN HER
Crow father in the tipi and her real father in the sweat lodge, from time to time conscious of their voices, Esperanza kissed Prairie Chicken passionately. She had kissed him often enough and plenty of times told him to keep his hands to himself. Not that she didn't like the way his hands felt. Tonight she had a surprise for him.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw dark shapes moving from shadow to shadow. She flinched—men sneaking up on Sam?

Then she heard Bell Rock's voice, which always sounded like steel striking steel, and realized that her American father, the medicine man, and their helper were coming back from the river, wrapped in buffalo robes.

She buried her head in Prairie Chicken's neck.

Sam recognized Esperanza's blanket and eyed the young man she was embracing, a husky fellow. He asked himself,
What is her home?

Inside the tipi the three from the sweat lodge sat by the fire and accepted the bowls of food Julia had saved for them, the meal traditionally given to the man of medicine after a ceremony. They ate in courteous silence. When they'd finished, Flat Dog said, “We leave in the morning.”

Bell Rock rolled his eyes in the direction of Esperanza. “With her strapped onto her pony?”

They all smiled. That was how Sam took Meadowlark out of this village all those years ago.

Sam mulled on it. Damn rude to interrupt courting, but some things were more important than manners. “I'm going to go out and talk to her.”

Hannibal and Flat Dog spoke at once. “No.”

Julia and Needle made murmurs of agreement. “Too dangerous.”

“She's just saying good-bye to Prairie Chicken,” Flat Dog said.

“Well, hell,” said Sam.

They looked at each other across the small fire. The night was cool and the lodge half-lit by the low flames. These were men who liked to act. Waiting for a girl to make her decision galled them. Staying in this village was dangerous, and that galled them worse.

Hannibal got out a treat he'd brought all the way from Santa Fe—cigarillos. They all lit them. Bell Rock offered the smoke to the four directions—tobacco was sacred, no matter the form—
and Sam followed suit. Then Sam struck up a conversation. He didn't want to seem to be trying to overhear Esperanza and Prairie Chicken. Instead he trotted out some ideas.

“At rendezvous we can pick up some others going west, maybe.”

“Good to have a stronger party,” said Flat Dog.

Hannibal blew a couple of smoke rings. Azul and Rojo giggled.

“Same at Fort Hall,” said Sam. “I'll bet Joe Meek and Doc Newell will come along.”

“Do we have to take the missionaries, too?” asked Flat Dog.

“Maybe if they pay us a lot to keep them alive,” said Hannibal.

Protestant missionaries had turned up at the last several rendezvous, headed for Oregon to save red men's souls. The missionaries were such greenhorns that they put a traveling outfit at risk.

They were also part of the big problem. They kept sending messages back to the States: Send more people. Blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, coopers, women, children, people to settle a new country.

“Easier now to make a living as a guide than a trapper,” said Sam.

“This,” said Bell Rock, “is Owl Woman's vision come true.”

Sam and Hannibal looked at each other. They had never foreseen white people tramping all over Crow country.

“Which trail then?” said Hannibal. The route to California cut off from the trail to Oregon on the Snake River plains, crossed to the Humboldt River, and followed it to the Sierra Nevadas. It had been traveled seldom, and never by women and children.

“I think the Oregon road,” said Sam. “Here's why. The best horses in the world are Appaloosas. Riders love the way they look, too. So I have an idea. . . .”

 

W
HEN EVERYONE WAS
sleepy, Flat Dog said, “I guess we're not in favor with Esperanza right now.”

“I'm sure she went to her grandparents,” said Julia.

The fire was faintest embers. Azul, Rojo, and Paloma were sound asleep. Even Hannibal had rolled up earlier. Sam lay down and thought,
Things are going to work out after all.

 

 

 

E
SPERANZA NOTICED THE
light through her eyelids but didn't open them. She drew the morning air into her nostrils, truly noticing it for the first time in her life. She felt fresh and frisky, deliciously new. She squirmed with pleasure.

She could hear the deep, slow breathing of the sleeping Prairie Chicken. She turned and put her head gently on his shoulder and stretched a leg over his. She didn't want to open her eyes yet. Why look at your old life when you are a leaf in the wind of a new world? She pictured the mist on the river and listened to the faint stir of the cottonwood leaves. Then, slowly, she let her mind run up and down the pictures of all she and Prairie Chicken did with each other during the night, feeling them with fingers of memory as though they were silk.

The loving, that was a whirlwind. It was strange at first, but fun when she began to catch on. She was eager to try it again—
she knew she could fly a lot higher. Prairie Chicken had known just what to do, and she wondered about that . . . Funny, she had intended to be the one who swept him away. That wasn't how it worked out.

She chuckled to herself. It felt so good. Her parents and grandparents—they thought they would manage her life! Amazing. Outrageous. And now she could say, “To hell with you. I am in charge.”

Certain things could be said with punch in English but not in Crow. That one felt good: “To hell with you.”

 

E
SPERANZA AND
P
RAIRIE
Chicken got their ponies from the herd and rode up into the mountains. The sentries saw them leave together, and it would cause talk, but she didn't care.

She wanted to ride to a little lake she knew. She'd only been there once, with her family. She and Prairie Chicken would splash and play in the water and then warm each other up on the sand. Or maybe they would heat each other up first, then jump in the cool water and go back to the fire of their bodies.

They would spend the day hungry. She couldn't get food without getting caught. The lake and her feelings were a lot more urgent than hunger.

Prairie Chicken didn't say much. She liked a man who would do and not talk. She thought of him again as a bear. Next month he would go on a vision quest, and perhaps the bear would become his spirit animal.

At the lake they went through the cycle of doing, then splashing in the water, then doing again. Prairie Chicken was fierce and playful by turns, and Esperanza could barely match his passion. She was happy.

Lounging on the bank in the glow of romance and the exhilaration of her daring, she said, “I want to tell you a story about my mother. She ran off with my American dad just like we're doing now. Well, they prepared more, took a travel lodge and food to
stay for a while. The point is, she ran off with him. A love match, like us.”

Prairie Chicken looked at her oddly.

“The main thing is, she did what she wanted, she took the man she wanted.”

Esperanza mused on it a little. Meadowlark, the mother she'd never known, had also run off to California because she wanted to see the ocean. That was the tale both her fathers told. She reminded herself, though, that it wasn't the ocean that killed Meadowlark, it was a fever.

Esperanza turned on one side toward Prairie Chicken. “Life can be short,” she said. “You have to do what you want to do.” She rolled over on top of him. “What I want is you.”

She began to demonstrate exactly how she wanted him.

Prairie Chicken said, “I want you, too.”

After a long while, when they were lounging back again, he gave her a big, dumb smile, tucked a few stray hairs behind her ear, and said, “Porcupine told you, didn't she, that she and I are getting married?”

 

F
LAT
D
OG
, H
ANNIBAL
, and Bell Rock went on a hunt for Esperanza. Sam stayed in the lodge and steamed. To calm him down, Julia let him help with the task of making moccasins. She was sewing several pairs for everyone—it would be a long trip.

Sam didn't mind doing women's work. He'd made or repaired moccasins plenty of times.

“They'll be able to track her,” said Julia.

Sam nodded and stitched.

“You can't help thinking about when you and Meadowlark did the same thing.”

“That was my doing alone.”

“You still think that?”

Julia and Meadowlark had been friends at Los Angeles Pueblo.
At the time, Meadowlark was with child, and Julia was arranging her own elopement with Flat Dog.

“I feel for Esperanza,” said Sam.

Julia looked at him across a sole she was cutting from deer hide. “And how about for Prairie Chicken?”

Sam wanted to muster a smile, but he couldn't. “It was awful. We had a short honeymoon there in Ruby Hawk Valley. It was lovely. Not just passion. We talked for the first time about her brother getting killed, and . . .

“The fourth morning I stepped out of the lodge at dawn to get water and looked straight into arrows, lances, and war clubs right close up. Some of her relatives had forced Flat Dog to lead them to us, said they'd let me live if he helped. Took me back to the village with a rope around my neck.

“After that they never let me see her. Before long I realized I had to get out of the village. It was a long time, weeks, before she and Flat Dog suddenly came riding into rendezvous.”

“A young girl's passions rage.” Julia's had carried her on a flood tide away from her wealthy family and into Flat Dog's arms.

“Yeah. Including Esperanza's, I guess. Are we doing the right thing?”

“I hope so.” Julia took a moment to finish a moccasin. “I think so.” She looked carefully at her work and then into Sam's eyes. “The whole world is changing.”

The door flap lifted, and Esperanza ducked into the lodge.

Sam and Julia stared at her. The look on her face made them hesitate to speak.

“I'm ready to go,” said Esperanza. “California. The sooner the better.”

Without another word she marched around the fire, lay down on her blankets, rolled up, and turned her back to everyone. Julia sat down behind her and put a hand on her shaking shoulders.

 

 

 

T
HIRTY OR FORTY
male voices sang, “
Iaxuxkekat
'e, bacbi'awak, c
'wak
.”