Cautiously, I sat on the top step.
"Look," Officer Hargrove said. "I'm here on an 'anonymous tip.' Okay, that's bull. Your social worker complained about possible neglect toward a ward of the state and I'm here to check it out. You know it's not true.
I
know it's not true. I don't know what you did to piss her off, but you need to cut it out. The next cop who comes out here might not be me."
"If I may," Dad began, deliberating. Dad had a difficult time talking to women he didn't know. "My mother's been very cooperative. I think the real problem is that the state has no other way to...punish us, so to speak. We're trying to get that woman deposed. But..."
"I'll back you up on that one. She's crossing a professional line." Officer Hargrove pulled a harsh face. "I always hated that witch," she confided. "She's the same social worker Tyrone sicced on me during the divorce..."
"You're divorced, are you?" Granny piped up.
"Got two kids out of the deal. Want to see a picture?"
I thought about that picture tucked away in Dad's photo album. I thought about Dad with his arm around Mom's murderer.
I gave him a meaningful look and rose from the staircase. He followed me inside the house.
"Is everything alright...? Is Martin's condition any better?"
I delved into Granny's linen closet, where I'd stashed the photo album behind a stack of willow baskets. I retrieved the album, flipped open to the offending page, and showed it to Dad.
His eyes went from winter water to dead steel in record time.
With more patience than I really had, I waited for him to speak. Come on, Dad, I thought. It's up to you. You know what I want to ask you. You know I can't ask it.
"Yes," Dad said quietly. "We were very good friends."
Soundly, I closed the book. I tucked it under my arm, feeling, all the while, like my arm belonged to another boy's body.
My poor Dad, I thought. I touched the back of his hand.
"I'm so sorry," he said. The apology poured out of him like winter water through cracks in a dam. "I'm so sorry; I... I don't know when Eli became a murderer. Until the moment the hospital called me... Even then, I didn't know; I never suspected... Not him. Never him..."
I stirred. The hospital had called Dad? Hadn't he taken me to the hospital himself?
Dad shook his head. "I wasn't living on the reservation at the time. I suppose you don't remember how it happened. Somehow you got up and dragged yourself out of the house. I don't know where you thought you were going... Thomas Little Hawk found you wandering around. He brought you to the hospital, where they stitched you up."
My hand closed around my throat. I felt the rigid scars tighten beneath my palm.
Wait, I thought. Dad wasn't living on the reservation. Why wasn't Dad--
"Let's go back outside," Dad said. "I think it's a bit cruel to leave Miss Hargrove alone with your grandmother."
I took him by the wrist and shook my head. Not until he told me the truth.
Dad looked at me for one long moment, and his eyes were opaque, focused in instead of out. I didn't know whether he really saw me.
"We were separated," he said finally. "Your mother and I."
Oh.
The photo album lay on the floor. I don't remember dropping it.
Dad smiled without any sincerity. "Didn't I tell you?" he said. "It hurts too much to remember."
We went back outside to say goodbye to Officer Hargrove. I barely remember the conversation, except that Granny invited her to the solstice party in December. I was in a weird sort of limbo, wherein everything I'd always thought about my parents wasn't true. Once, Granny had told me that Mom and Dad were happy together. Not happy enough, I guess.
It was late in the afternoon when I went out to the woods. I clapped my hands and Balto loped at my side, his tail high in the air. We paid a visit to the grotto and I considered jumping into the creek, if only to get the feeling back in my legs. I decided against it. A light was glowing in the mouth of Annie's cave. Balto and I went inside.
The only person in the cave was Rafael, reading
Paradise Lost
by candlelight for the millionth time. He liked the part where his namesake, the archangel Rafael, came down from Heaven to teach Adam and Eve all about the cosmos. He said it was proof that he was a smart guy and that we should all shut up about his less than stellar grades.
He adjusted his glasses and looked up at me.
"Wanna talk about it?"
I shook my head. I sat heavily, listlessly, next to a bowl of clay beads. Balto stuck his nose in a basket full of sand. He sneezed.
Rafael closed his book.
"Uncle Gabe's not talking to me," he said. He tried to make it sound casual, but I could tell he was upset. "I thought he knew I was gay. I guess that time when I was ten and I told him I wanted to marry Chrestomanci never tipped him off."
I looked at Rafael sharply.
"Book character," Rafael said sheepishly.
Of course it was a book character.
"Seriously, you look pissed. I've never seen you this pissed. You sure you don't wanna talk about it? Or...uh, not talk. You know what I mean."
I started to calm down. Anger was an emotion I didn't wear very well. On principle, I thought it was a waste of energy. Besides, I didn't even know who I was supposed to be angry with.
I looked sideways at Rafael. I never would have expected there to be a rift between him and his uncle. Gabriel was one of the nicest people I'd ever met.
Rafael shrugged through his embarrassment. "I don't know that it's about us being gay," he said. "We were taught to revere the two-spirit. And Uncle Gabe's a hunter. He knows about the sheep and the buffalo and the dragonflies, the males that mate with males and the females that mate with females. I think it's more like... He raised me, so he should know everything about me. But then he finds out he doesn't. But I thought he did, so there's no way I'm taking the rap for that."
I smiled wryly.
Birds and bees
, I signed. I wondered how Gabriel had missed the clues during the sex talk.
Rafael snorted. "I don't know what you're thinking. The shaman's the one who explains that stuff to you. Except for girls. They build an isolation tent. Only women can go inside. I don't know what goes on in there. Always wanted to find out, though."
I tried to imagine the elderly and eccentric Shaman Quick counseling a twelve-year-old Rafael about his body. I immediately felt sorry for Rafael.
"Shut up," Rafael said, and tried to hide his grin.
I pushed his shoulder.
Rafael peered at me shyly. I gave him an inquisitive smile.
"When did you know you were...I mean, how did you figure out you were..."
Mr. Red Clay
, I signed. I hadn't taught Rafael the signs for colors yet. I fingerspelled it for him.
Rafael had the good graces about him to look scandalized. "The hell?"
I grinned roguishly. I shoved his shoulder a second time.
November brought with it a unique kind of frenzy--the religious kind. On the walk to school every morning, I saw men and women in formal regalia marching in and out of the church.
"They're all getting married," Annie explained after school.
I gave her a weird look.
Annie returned it seamlessly. "We wait until autumn to marry, so the wedding coincides with a bountiful harvest. It's more auspicious that way."
Unless Mom had married Dad while she was still in college, I realized, I must have been born out of wedlock. Go Dad.
As the official Month of Weddings, I'm sure November was supposed to be a happy occasion for most of Nettlebush's residents. But there was one man who took great offense to the sacrament of holy matrimony.
In Shoshone, a man or woman who professes intimate knowledge of the spirit world is called a
natsugant
. In English, the best translation is "shaman."
Shaman Quick was the smallest, oldest living thing in Nettlebush, and as old people will do, he clung hard to the old ways. He dressed in breechclouts and moccasins and nothing else, no matter the weather. A real recluse, he lived in the heart of the badlands and came into the community so rarely that children had made a game out of spotting him. They called it "Shaman Sighting." He spoke Shoshone and sign language both beautifully, but alas, no English. So actually, while we all knew him as "Shaman Quick," he called himself "Natsugant Kitah."
Natsugant Kitah--or Shaman Quick--stood outside the church doors and wildly waved his arms. With his head tipped back, he yelled at the top of his lungs. I didn't know enough Shoshone to figure out what he was saying. His granddaughter stood at his side, her cunning eyes bulging with excitement. Immaculata was the sort of girl who smiled at mayhem. Instantly, I knew they were up to no good.
Reverend Silver Wolf ran out of the church, his silver braids flying, his Panama hat sliding off of his head. His face was splotched with a bashful blush. In Shoshone, he spoke back to the shaman; hushed and peaceful at first, but louder and louder, louder still, until finally, both old men were yelling at one another. The couple who had just married stood together in consternation, the lovely bride in carnation pink huddling behind her husband.
"Hahaha, they're really going at it!" said Zeke Owns Forty. He was kind enough to explain for me: "The shaman thinks he should perform weddings, not the preacher. He's calling it 'a betrayal to the true way.' "
A sizable crowd had amassed around the church. I saw Reuben Takes Flight with his daughter in his arms, staring blankly; and the identical spook fish eyes of my grandmother's friends that meant nothing short of disapproval.
"He should punch him," said William Sleeping Fox, in a vague, half-conscious kind of voice. "Either one of them. It would be fun."
Small wonder that he and Rafael had been left back for brawling.
The daily feuds continued well into the month. "Don't worry," Stuart Stout told me. "They go through this routine every year." Without fail, the shaman stood outside the church everyday and accosted the couples passing through its doors. Some of them, skittish, ran away. Others, won over by his arguments, followed him out to the badlands for a more traditional wedding. Others still argued right back, providing some seriously impressive cacophony. I'd never known church to be such a place of chaos.
I left the church with Granny on Sunday morning, and sure enough, Shaman Quick was still standing outside. He squinted his eyes at me in a shrewd glare. He was the sort of guy a rattlesnake had reason to fear.
I'd barely taken a step down the dirt road when the shaman stopped me with a raised hand.
Who do you know who is ill?
he signed.
Granny looked on, baffled. To be honest, I felt just as confused.
Do you mean Mr. Takes Flight?
I signed back. I'd thought everyone on the reservation knew about that. On the other hand, Shaman Quick spent most of his time in the canyons.
"What is going on here?" Granny asked impatiently.
The shaman said something to Granny in Shoshone. Granny tutted with dissatisfaction.
"Well, then," Granny told me, "you had better lead the way."
Lead the way to what? I looked between the two of them and hoped my bewilderment was apparent. Both Granny and the shaman stared at me unhelpfully. I assumed the shaman wanted to see Mr. Takes Flight. Feeling a bit silly, I started the walk to the hospital.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Takes Flight were bemused at our unannounced visit. We exchanged brief pleasantries before the shaman interrupted abruptly. The shaman held his hands above Mr. Takes Flight's bed and spoke to him in Shoshone. I didn't know what he was saying, but it sounded almost like a rebuke. Aubrey showed up in the middle of the visit and gaped. I wanted badly to ask him what was going on, but didn't think it proper to interrupt.
"He said, 'Go home,' " Aubrey told me later. " 'This hospital won't help you, and you'll die with the same wretched heart you were born with.' "
I couldn't believe the shaman would say something so cruel.
Aubrey was withdrawn and morose at dinner that night. The At Dawn twins played the double-skin drum, but he didn't dance. I sat with him and rubbed his back while he glumly sipped orange juice through a straw. Rafael came over and tried to make light conversation. He probably shouldn't have. Small talk was far from his area of expertise.
The music stopped. I looked around to see what was the matter.
Shaman Quick carried a large, square mirror over to the bonfire. Several men rose from their seats to help him. He yelled at them and they hastily sat down.
He smashed the mirror on the ground next to the firepit.
The whole of the reservation was dead silent.
Wavering, Aubrey got up from his seat. He walked over to the shining shards of glass and knelt among them.