Chapter 9
: Her True Name
She kept her word the way her people kept all words that mattered: at dawn, without preamble, and in the presence of the one witness whose presence made it law. Chief Nahlin sat in his lodge with his hands folded and his face like carved stone, and Siyane stood before the small fire unveiled and looked at her husband with her mother's blue eyes.
"My name," she said, "is Willa."
Jonas had prepared himself all night for revelations and found, as men do, that preparation is a house built for a different storm. He sat down slowly on the lodge's woven mat.
"Willa," he repeated.
"Willa Nahlin, my father calls me, when no ears are near that should not hear it. Siyane is the name the camp knows β a true name in its way, for it was my grandmother's. But the name my mother gave me at my birth, and wrote in her book with her own hand, is Willa." She folded her hands to keep them still, and Jonas saw that this cost her more than the river had. "My mother was Clara Hale."
The fire ticked in the silence.
"Clara Hale," Jonas said, "was my father's sister. She died in eighteen fifty-one, on the trail west, when her wagon train was attacked. I have known that since I could know anything. My father kept her likeness in a drawer. He lit no candle and said no prayers over it that I ever saw, but he kept it, and when he was dying he asked for it before he asked for water."
"She did not die," Nahlin said. It was the first time the chief had spoken, and his voice was gentler than Jonas had yet heard it, which in Nahlin was a measure of enormity. "The train was attacked, yes. The dead were dead. But a girl of sixteen with a cut arm and more courage than sense hid among the rocks, and my father's hunting party found her at evening, half a mile from the ashes, walking west because she would not walk back toward the graves. Our people took her in. I was nineteen, and already accounted a hard man." A ghost of his dry humor crossed his face and was gone. "She out-argued me for eleven years. Then she married me."
"She wrote letters," Willa said. "For years. To her father. To her brother Amos. There was no road for a letter to travel that did not pass through hands that would have sold her whereabouts. My father kept every one. She stopped writing the year I was born β she said a letter that cannot be sent becomes a kind of grief you feed, and she would not feed it with a child in the house."
Jonas put a hand over his face for a moment. Amos, on the porch in the long evenings, saying nothing about his youth. Amos, with a sister in a drawer.
"The locket," he said.
"My mother's." Willa drew it from her dress and laid it in her open palm. "Hers, and its twin was your father's. Their father Walter gave them the pair when Clara was fifteen and Amos seventeen β the two willow trees on the Hale place in Missouri, where they played as children. She kept hers through everything. It came to me when she died."
"When?" Jonas asked, though some part of him had already done the arithmetic of sorrow.
"Two winters ago. A fever that came with a trader's caravan and took nine of our people before it left. I held her hand. She was not afraid, Jonas. I would have you know that from someone who was there. At the end she spoke of the willow trees, and of her brother β she said, 'If Amos has sons, tell them their aunt kept faith.' I have carried that message like a stone in my pocket for two years, and now I have delivered it to the man I married without knowing his father's name was the name in her mouth."
Jonas rose, because sitting had become impossible, and walked the two steps the lodge allowed and back again.
"Then we are β " He stopped.
"Cousins," Nahlin said, with the steadiness of a man laying a beam in place. "So it would appear, by the white man's reckoning, and it is not a thing I hid from you lightly. The marriage was my command and my necessity, and the truth of it deserves more than this morning's grief. Tomorrow, husband of my daughter, I will show you a book and a letter, and you will judge with your eyes open. Tonight, let the dead be greeted. You have an aunt to mourn, who kept faith."
Willa closed her hand around the locket. "I am sorry for the manner of it," she said to Jonas. "Not for the marriage. For the manner."