Chapter 12
Her story came the way water comes up in a well you are lowering a bucket into β not poured, drawn, a little more each day, and only ever as much as the rope of the day would hold.
Some of it she told at the table. Some of it she told working, which Eli learned was when the truest of it came, because her hands gave her eyes somewhere to be. She told it while gutting fish from the creek, while braiding a new lead rope, while walking Duchess in the cold sun β the mare entirely sound now, and fattening in a way that made them both look at her sideways and count months on their fingers and exchange a look neither pursued. Yet.
"My father put me on a horse before I could walk steady," she said. "This is not a story-way of speaking. I mean the same week. He said the ground is a rumor but a horse is the truth. He was a quiet man β you would have liked him, and he would have taken three years to decide about you, which from him was a fast decision." She smiled, doing it. "He taught me to shoot from the saddle and to read sign and to mend a torn rein with my teeth if I had to. He said a woman who can do these things is never entirely in anyone's power. It was not the usual teaching. The other fathers thought him strange. He said: let them. Strange is a fence other people build around what they cannot use."
My mother knew the green world the way you know iron β what it will stand, where it will bend, where it is lying to you. She taught me the leaves that stop blood and the roots that pull fever down out of a head like water out of a cloth. She taught me that healing is mostly not stopping. Most people die of stopping, she said β the blood stops wrong, the breath stops, hope stops. A healer's work is to keep the world moving through a person until the person can move it themselves.
"My father died of a fever winter, when I was nineteen β a plain fever, no glory in it, the kind my mother could cure in anyone but the man she loved, because he hid it until it was in his chest like weather. My mother β" she wrung out the roots, methodically β "my mother died two winters later, when the soldiers moved our band in the hungry time. Not killed. Carried. There is a difference people like to blur. You carry old people and sick people in the snow often enough, without enough food to be carried on, and arithmetic does the killing and no one's hands are dirty. She gave her share to the children for eleven days. On the twelfth she lay down in the snow when we stopped and she was very peaceful about it, and would not be argued with, which was her way in all things."
"After that the band broke like ice in a thaw β some to the agency, some north, some just into families going separate ways to be smaller targets. Fear and hunger and men who wanted the land more than they wanted us alive on it. I do not hate the ones who went to the agency, Eli. A mother with three children and no horse does arithmetic too. I had a horse, and my father's teaching, and my mother's β so I had more choices than most. I have never confused having choices with being braver."
That night she brought out, for the first time, the small hide bundle she had kept in the cabin's corner since the first morning β her whole estate, carried God knew how far. From it she took a wristband of beadwork, white and blue and one line of red, intricate as frost on a window, and worked it onto her left wrist, over the scar, and sat looking at it a long time.
"My mother's," she said. "She made it the winter I was born, for when I was grown. I could not wear it whileβ" She turned the wrist so the beads caught the lamp. "While my wrists were an argument. Now they are mine again, and the band goes where it always belonged. Over. Not hiding. Over, the way a roof is over a house. The house is still there. You do not pretend the rain never came. You build the roof and you live in the house."
"Over," Eli repeated, and she nodded, and turned her wrist once more in the light so he could admire it properly, which he did, at length, in a silence that had stopped being the lonely kind a long time ago without either of them filing the paperwork.
Chapter 13