Dreams Beneath Your Feet (5 page)

“I want that for you, too,” said Sam.

His daughter turned her jumpy eyes at him. Up she stood again, and out she went.

Julia called for Azul and Rojo to come in. She sat Paloma on her lap. When the older kids sat down, Julia spoke to them again about what was going to happen and answered their questions.

Sam thought,
My daughter acts like a young American or Californio woman, rebellious and strong willed. Azul and Rojo behave like Crows, quiet, eyes down in front of their elders.
Right now Sam could do without anyone's rebellion.

Later Sam lay in his robes and watched the lavender at the top of the tipi turn to dove gray and black. To him the simple ways of this land were magic. Occasionally, whispers of his daughter and her suitor reached Sam's ears, but he didn't pay attention to the words—he knew the meanings. He was still very much awake when Esperanza slipped into her blankets.

As Sam drifted off next to his daughter, he indulged in fantasies of training horses with her on the great grasslands of Monterey Bay. She was a first-class rider and worked well with horses. He would give his daughter a fine life—she would eventually be
the owner of a fine rancho. As soon as he got her away from Rides Twice's village.

Toward dawn something strange happened. For the first time since Sam was a kid, he dreamed of flying.

 

 

 

E
ARLY THE NEXT
morning, before Julia had the coffee ready, Flat Dog stood up and said, “I have things to arrange.”

“I need to sweat with Bell Rock,” Sam said.

“Damn,” said Flat Dog, “I wish you were more scared.”

“Rides Twice gave me until this evening,” said Sam.

“You trust too much.”

After a moment Hannibal asked, “Want me to come with you?”

Flat Dog shook his head no and left, his face set hard.

“Esperanza,” said Sam, “I want to talk to you about your future—”

She bolted out the door behind her Crow father.

Sam, Hannibal, and Julia looked at each other. “Flat Dog will figure out how to get you out of this village alive,” Hannibal said.

Since the alpine morning was crisp, Julia made a fire inside the
lodge. She put last night's stew on to reheat. It had frozen in the metal pot. Adults and children ate out of cups.

Though the boys said nothing, their body language was wretched.

“Go outside and play,” Julia instructed.

The adults talked idly of this and that, everyone's mind elsewhere. The lodge started feeling oppressive to Sam. The thick walls of buffalo hide kept the light out. One patch at the top where the poles stuck out let through a little sunlight and air, too little.

Hannibal said in a silly tone, “Is it safe for me to go out to pee?”

Julia said seriously, “You, yes, but not Sam.”

“I went out before first light,” said Sam.

Flat Dog came in about noon and got some food. “Bell Rock and some relatives will build a lodge by the river,” he told them. He nodded with his head toward the bank nearby. Too close to the village, but . . . “We'll wait for dark.”

Past the deadline.

Sam handed them the other gifts he'd brought, a hackamore ornamented with silver for Flat Dog and a bolt of bright red cotton for Julia. In civilization buffalo hides were an expensive rarity. Among the Crows simple cotton cloth was a luxury.

Esperanza popped in. She acted polite now, eyes averted modestly, and took her seat across the center fire from her two fathers.

When she spoke, it was in Crow, and that alone was a statement.

“By coming to this village you have risked your life for me,” she said to Sam. “I am stirred in my heart by that. You did it for my sake, or what you see as my sake. Still . . .

“You, Mother and Father.” Sam noticed the term being applied to Flat Dog. “You have raised me. You want the best for me. But . . .”

She took a big breath and let it out.

“I am old enough to marry.” She let those words sit in front of everyone.

It was true—Crow girls did marry as soon as they became women. Meadowlark had been older than most, sixteen. “I have made a decision. I will stay here and live with my grandparents. This is my home. These are my people.”

Sam burst out, “Esperanza—”

She interrupted her real father, looking straight into his eyes. “Soon I will have a Crow husband, and soon after that Crow children.”

Head carefully down, body language soft, she left as abruptly as she came in.

 

 

 

T
HE GROWN-UPS LOOKED
at each other with long faces.

Flat Dog changed the subject. “The sweat lodge will be ready in a couple of hours.”

“Just me and Bell Rock,” said Sam.

“And a few of us to walk you there.”

“No one will strike at a man going to a sweat lodge.”

Flat Dog nodded, but he was always careful. He went on in a firm voice. “We have a plan.” He explained it.

“Seems reasonable,” said Sam.

“No other choice,” said Hannibal.

“Esperanza?” asked Sam.

“You kidnapped one member of our family,” said Flat Dog. “You can kidnap another.”

Sam had taken the longest chance of his life, it seemed at the
time. In the face of her entire family's refusal, he abducted Meadowlark. Luckily, a few days of married life convinced her.

Flat Dog looked at his wife. “We're going to take her if we have to tie her to a pack saddle.”

Julia nodded and said, “Tomorrow morning.”

Flat Dog stood up to get his daughter. When he opened the flap, he met Gray Hawk bending down.

 

F
LAT
D
OG'S FATHER
and mother, followed by Esperanza, circled the lodge clockwise behind the seated family. Hannibal and Sam scooted over to make room for them behind the dead fire.

It took Sam's breath away.
Gray Hawk and Needle, the parents of Meadowlark, are sitting down with me
.

“Would you like some coffee?” said Julia, extending a cup.

Gray Hawk and Needle took it in silence. They sipped in silence.

Gray Hawk sat for an extraordinarily long time without a word, staring into the fire. Then, stunningly, he looked straight into Sam's eyes. “Joins with Buffalo . . .”

Sam was shocked that Gray Hawk addressed him by his proper Crow name.

“Joins with Buffalo, Needle and I no longer blame you. Our son made a young man's mistake. Our daughter . . . She was headstrong, and chose her own fate.” He lowered his eyes, hesitated, and looked back at Sam. “We forgave you long ago.”

“Thank you,” Sam said.

Gray Hawk gazed off into the shadows of the lodge.

“I've come here to remind you of something. Others here need to hear it for the first time, especially Esperanza.”

He looked into Sam's eyes. “You remember, nearly twenty years ago, a medicine woman came to you and spoke of what she had seen beyond.”

Owl Woman, now dead, so that her name could not be spoken.

“Shall I repeat the message she brought, or do you want to?”

Sam closed his voice and remembered as though hypnotized. “She said she saw Crow people—all the Crow people—floating dead in a lake. It was where the waters divide between the great ocean to the east and the great ocean to the west. Past the ghostly corpses in the water rode white people, hundreds and thousands of white people. They rode and rode and never saw the dead human beings.”

Sam let a big breath out. His audience—Owl Woman's audience—was rapt, not only Gray Hawk and Needle, Flat Dog and Julia, and Hannibal, but Esperanza.

“She told me then, ‘Though you are a good man, the coming of the whites is the end of the Crow people. Our way will die. I cannot express my sorrow.' ”

They all looked at one another, wondering.

Gray Hawk broke the silence. “I have come to your lodge today to say what this medicine woman would say. I urge all of you to go on. You, Flat Dog, your wife, your children. Go with Joins with Buffalo and his friend. Go to the edge of the world to the west where the ocean is. Life is moving west. Here it is dying.

“My wife and I will stay here. But you are young, and must go—find a new way to live.”

He fixed his eyes on Esperanza. “Above all, you must go. Your parents are Crow, American, and Californio. You are the new way. To the west life opens to you. Here awaits death.”

 

 

 

E
SPERANZA HATED EVERYONE
looking at her, waiting. She took some time to think about her words. Finally, she said, “It is my life. And I will live it in this village.”

“Where will you live?” asked Gray Hawk.

Esperanza stared at her grandfather, shocked. Then she hid her gaze properly, and her panic. This was unbelievable.

“Grandfather,” she said, “Grandmother. Will you permit me to live with you?”

The wait for their answer was intolerable. Finally, it was Needle who said, “No, Granddaughter.”

“Then I'll live with Porcupine.”

“Granddaughter, I'm sorry,” said Needle. “I know she is your best friend. But we will ask her parents not to take you in.”

Esperanza's mind spun, looking for ways out. She thought of her uncle Little Bull, but he and his family lived in a village far to
the east, beside his wife's parents. And Little Bull would not go against Flat Dog, or against Gray Hawk and Needle. She saw no escape.

Esperanza began to weep. She hoped that in the half-light of the lodge, with her head down and her hair in front of her face, no one could see her tears.

Gray Hawk said, “Owl Woman saw. The world is changing.”

Silence. Then Gray Hawk went on. “You must go with your father and mother to California. Your two fathers.”

Gray Hawk's face was composed, but Sam saw the agony in his eyes. The man produced four children. Within a few days, when Flat Dog left, he would have no child in this village and only one in the entire tribe.

Now Needle was weeping openly. “Granddaughter, this is painful for us. We will never see your children.”

Esperanza looked up into Needle's face. It was implacable.
This betrayal, my grandmother turning against me, it is the worst of all.

Esperanza jumped up and dashed out of the tipi, sobbing. She walked around the village, the circle of lodges that always faced into the rising sun, the world where she had grown up, the world of everyone she cared about.

She began to calm down. She turned outside the circle and walked along the path where the women came to the river for water. She sat on the bank and looked at the moving ripples, the dragonflies hovering above their surface, and the shadowy fish beneath. She watched the last of the day's light flicker up and down on the little waves. Now she knew what she had to do.

 

 

 

B
ETWEEN THE ROUNDS
of the sacred sweat lodge Sam told Bell Rock what he had seen beyond, all of it. His sense of searching for something nameless that he would never find. The appearance of the glistening, blue snake popping out of its skin. The writing in the skies. Sam held back only a few details, keeping them for himself alone, as was proper.

Without a word Bell Rock asked his assistant to close the lodge door, and they filled it with steam, prayers, and songs again.

When the door was flung open, Bell Rock waited for the cool evening air to ease in. Then he said in his metallic voice, “You've seen beyond before.”

Sam nodded. “You know both times.”

Twice before Sam had asked Bell Rock to help him comprehend his own vision.

The first time he hid from a prairie fire in the carcass of a
freshly butchered buffalo cow. The cow saved his life, and a few days later Sam had a dream of crawling back into that bloody darkness and feeling that he merged with the buffalo, that they shared the same blood and breath, that they were a new creature, a samalo.

Bell Rock explained to the young trapper that he had seen beyond and gave him the name Joins with Buffalo.

The second time was when Sam gave a sun dance. There he followed his oldest enemy, the serpent, down a tunnel. When the snake turned and threatened him, he seized its body and tied it into Celtic love knots. He still remembered the laughter inside when he realized what he'd done.

“What is your question here?” said Bell Rock.

“I want to know what the nameless thing is.”

“You are haunted by that?” Bell Rock's eyebrows arched in skepticism.

“Yes,” said Sam.

“What you saw the other two times, did it fit handily into words?” Bell Rock was backing up, reminding Sam what he knew.

“Not really,” he said. He corrected himself. “Not ever.”

“Summing it up in words would make it smaller in some way, leave some important parts out.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes, though, words point to the beginning of a path. So now I will give you one word. ‘Home.' ”

Sam opened his mouth to discuss that and—

Bell Rock held a hand. “You already know,” he said. Then he cried, “Close the door.”

The assistant covered them in darkness again, and immediately the steam burst from the hot rocks.

 

E
SPERANZA WENT INTO
her parents' lodge, her home until now. Eyes down and speaking to no one, she got her favorite blanket, the white one with the slender red stripes. Then she took
her place outside of her parents' door. For the last few months, she had done this every evening, as was the custom of Crow girls of an age to be courted. And every evening two or three young men came and stood with her. She let one of them, only one, wrap himself in the blanket with her, Prairie Chicken.

She'd known Prairie Chicken for only a year, since he came to live with his mother's brother, Axe. Right away she liked him because of his big, thick chest and arms, like a bear. At first some of the other kids teased Prairie Chicken because of his name. The prairie chicken cocks did a really funny mating ceremony where they stood around in a circle, spread their tails, and quivered. As she got to know him, though, she was attracted to him. He could copy the call of almost any animal, and he was always paying practical jokes on the other teenage boys—he was really funny. She liked his big body, too—to her it was manly.