Ride the Moon Down (40 page)

“Are you silly, wife? Surely when a man falls in love with a woman, he tells her … no, he tells her family and all her people that he promises to care for her until he can no longer watch over her.”

Wagging her head, Waits said, “No, there is no promise like that made between a man and woman who marry among my people.”

“What do they promise each other?” he asked.

For a moment she thought, then finally shrugged. “I have never known anyone to make a vow to another when they want to live with that person. A man may buy a bride, or a man can kidnap another man’s wife and make her his own, but most times among my people, a man and woman just decide they will start living together.”

“Is that what we did?” he asked. “When you came with Josiah to look for me after I left your village with a very sad heart?”

“Yes. When Josiah came to find you, I knew what I wanted. And I believed you wanted me. You never had to say any words to make me want to search for you after you ran away from my village. When I saw how glad you were that I had come to find you—I knew I had found my husband.”

“Waits-by-the-Water?”

“Yes?”

“Would it be better for a man who wants a wife to give presents to that woman’s family?”

She looked at him in the cold wind, studied the frost that formed an icy ring that clung to the graying hair around his mouth. Softly she said, “Some bring gifts to the woman’s father.”

He stared ahead, not looking at her for some moments, then asked, “What if that woman’s father is no longer alive?”

She swallowed hard. “I am not sure, but I believe the man would give presents to the eldest son in the family—asking to marry the woman.”

Waits’s breath came hard in her chest, her heart was beating so fast as she studied his face.

Finally Bass looked at her again. “I have decided
something, bu’a. It is time that your people hear me make my vow to you. I think your family should hear me promise myself to you.”

She could barely whisper, “Husband.”

“You are my family, Waits-by-the-Water.” His eyes softened, brimming again. “I will go to your brother. I will take him gifts. And I will ask his permission to be your husband … to take you as my wife.”

Titus couldn’t remember the last time he felt his knees rattle this bad. He was sure the others would know, that they would laugh behind their hands at this white man shaking with fear to get married.

Bass glanced to his left. At his elbow stood Pretty On Top. To his right stood Windy Boy. He was relieved when the young warriors offered to stand with him outside the lodge where Waits-by-the-Water was among her mother and friends, preparing for this ceremony.

Surrounding the three of them were more than fifteen hundred Crow, talking and laughing, come here to witness what Waits had described to everyone as a promising. Women waited patiently, having donned their very best, men stood stoic and expectant in their ceremonial dress, while the children darted between legs, chasing after dogs, throwing clumps of icy snow at one another, giggling, diving, sliding at the feet of their elders.

In less than a month he would reach his forty-third birthday. Which meant that Christmas was almost upon them. Titus fondly remembered his first Christmas with her down in Taos—the warmth of all those flickering candles, the fragrant smells drifting from Rosa Kinkead’s kitchen, such soft music from the Mexican’s cathedral and their nativity procession through the small village … then came the new year and his tearing himself away from her to travel far and long in hopes of putting old ghosts to rest.

But these people did not celebrate such annual events, nor did they have any similar religious festivals to mark the progress of each year beyond the tobacco ceremony of their women. Instead, these Crow celebrated war, perhaps
the birth or naming of a child, maybe even the success of a war party or pony raid, nothing but that tobacco planting ceremony to track the march of the seasons the way the white man did.

From beyond the far edge of the crowd came a growing murmur. He turned to watch the witnesses part for a group of men resplendent in their very finest war clothing.

“Sore Lips,” whispered Pretty On Top. “Strikes-in-Camp’s war clan.”

As more than twenty of them emerged onto the open ground that surrounded Scratch, he glanced at their faces, finding each man painted, feathers and stuffed birds tied in his hair, an animal head lashed onto his own with a rawhide whang tied under the chin. All but one of them carried a tall staff—some crooked, some straight—but each bearing feathers tied at right angles to the poles, wrapped in otter fur, arrayed with enemy scalps.

Only Strikes-in-Camp—who stood at their center—remained empty-handed. He crossed his arms, looked at the white man, and waited.

“Now,” Pretty On Top whispered.

Scratch looked over at the young warrior. “The presents?”

Pretty On Top nodded.

Wanting to ask that handsome young warrior to wish him luck, Titus suddenly realized the Crow had no concept of luck, much less the crazy notion of one person passing on that luck to another. Instead, he turned to his right and stepped up to Turns Plenty who held the halters of two ponies. The old man handed the white man those halters, then stepped over to join Pretty On Top.

With his heart beginning to pound, Bass started for the far side of the open ground at the center of that huge crowd suddenly growing breathlessly quiet, so quiet Scratch could hear the whine of his winter moccasins on the old, icy snow, hear the slow plodding of each one of the eight hooves with that pair of ponies behind him. Somehow he made it across the arena at the center of the village and stopped a few feet from Strikes-in-Camp.

“These horses are for you,” he said as confidently as
he could muster it, having practiced and rehearsed the words over and over the past two weeks, to get them just right for this day.

Pointing to the scalp hanging from the halter beneath the jaw of each pony, Bass continued. “And these scalps—they belonged to the Arapaho warriors who rode these ponies against me last spring. The horses and the scalps of two brave warriors I now give to the mighty warrior I ask to become my brother-in-law.”

Strikes-in-Camp took a few steps forward, moving around one of the ponies, then came back between the pair, lifting a leg here, touching a flank there, staring into the eyes of these gifts. When he turned and walked back to where he stood in the midst of his Sore Lip warrior society, Strikes-in-Camp recrossed his arms.

Anxious, Bass flicked a glance at Pretty On Top. The young warrior made a quick gesture with his hand.

Scratch turned back to Turns Plenty, then stepped up to Waits-by-the-Water’s brother and held out the halters to those two ponies.

For a long moment the man stared at Bass, then looked over the white man’s shoulder at Pretty On Top, Windy Boy, and Turns Plenty behind the trapper. Finally Strikes-in-Camp took the halters, held them a heartbeat, and passed them to one of the painted warriors who stood beside him. The man started away with the two Arapaho ponies.

By the time Strikes-in-Camp recrossed his arms and stared again at him, Bass realized he could barely hear—his heart pounded so loudly in his ears while he started to turn slowly around on those shaky legs of his, reminding himself he must not stumble, must not fall there in front of her people.

Less than three steps brought him back to Windy Boy, who held out his left hand. In it he clutched the halters to another two ponies. Quietly clucking for the pair to follow, Bass slowly started back to Strikes-in-Camp, stopping again a few feet from the warrior and his Sore Lip comrades.

“I bring more gifts to Strikes-in-Camp,” he said in a
studied cadence with the Crow words. “Two more horses.”

“Two more horses,” Strikes-in-Camp repeated, not budging, moving only his eyes as he looked from the white man to stare at one of the ponies.

Turning, Bass pulled the oxblood blanket from its back and held it before Strikes-in-Camp as a soft murmur came from the crowd. “This will keep your wife warm on those nights when you take the warpath against our enemies.”

Strikes-in-Camp brushed the blanket with his fingers, lifted a corner, inspecting it as if to ascertain that it truly was new.

“Two moons ago I traded for it,” Titus explained, scrambling for these words not in his planned script. “From the Crow trader—Tullock—at the mouth of the Tongue River.”

Eventually Strikes-in-Camp took the red blanket from Bass’s arm and passed it back to one of his warrior society. “Yes, it will keep my wife warm when I am not with her.”

Bass thought he saw a little softening in the man’s eyes. His heart leaped. For days now since he and Waits-by-the-Water had discussed this ceremony with her mother, Titus had steadily grown more apprehensive. From the beginning Strikes-in-Camp had frostily objected. He had even refused to talk to his mother about the white man’s wanting to ask for his sister in marriage.

Three more times Waits had prevailed upon her mother to ask Strikes-in-Camp, hoping to wear him down. But each time he had grown a little more insolent. Then, yesterday, both of them had gone together to speak to him.

Waits had returned alone to pull back the flap to their shelter and clumsily squatted on the bedrobes. “Strikes-in-Camp says he will take your gifts.”

Titus hadn’t been sure he’d heard the words correctly at first. So he asked, hesitantly, “Your brother said he would give you away to be my wife?”

Then she was smiling not just with her mouth, but with her whole face, flinging her body against his as the
tears gushed down her cheeks. He wasn’t sure which of them cried more at that moment, but yesterday had lifted much of the gray pall that had settled about him since their arrival in Absaroka.

“But I don’t understand—he refused three times before,” Bass said, wagging his head, happy and confused all at once. “What made him—”

“I reminded him that you and I were already married in the way of our people, that we didn’t need any ceremony,” she told him, gripping one of his hands in both of hers while Magpie snuggled up next to them both. “Then I reminded him that you had no responsibility to ask anyone for me when I had no father.”

“What did he say?”

“He scolded me again that I should not have given myself to a white man.”

Bass gazed down at her belly, touched it, and said, “It’s a little late for that now.”

She grinned radiantly. “Then I told him you wanted to do your promising before my family, before all my people—whether or not he gave me to you.”

“You told him I was going to promise myself to you before all your people no matter if he was there or not?”

“Yes, I said those words to him.”

“That’s when he agreed?”

But she wagged her head. “No.”

“What made him decide?”

“Not until I told my brother that you were honoring him before all our people. You, the man he hated almost as much as any Blackfoot or Lakota warrior. You, the man he had no good words for. You were honoring him by coming before our whole village to offer him presents, to show our people that my brother was a man worthy of his respect. I told him that you would be showing our people that he was a man of true stature now, not just a young warrior trying to make a name for himself.”

“And?”

“I told him how important that would be in front of our village—to see you, a white warrior with many scars
and many, many coups, honoring him by asking for me in marriage.”

“That’s what changed his mind?”

Nodding, Waits-by-the-Water said, “I think he finally realized that it would be an honor to have you in his family, a man who would offer him presents despite all the bad that he has spoken of you, all the bad he has wished on you.”

And now, before this hushed crowd, Bass stepped back to the second horse, carefully raising the rolled-up blanket of a brilliant medium blue he had tied across its back. He carefully unknotted two rawhide straps that secured the blanket to a single braided-horsehair surcingle lashed around the horse’s middle.

Stopping before Strikes-in-Camp, the white man said, “And this blanket is for your mother. I hope that it will keep Crane warm when you are away to fight the enemies who killed her husband, the enemies who killed your father.”

The warrior touched the blue blanket, laying his palm on it where it rested across Bass’s forearms. “It is a good color. My mother will like this blanket.”

As Strikes-in-Camp pulled the blanket roll from the white man’s arms, a rifle emerged from the tube of blue wool. The stunned warrior froze with the blanket draped over his forearm, staring at the rifle.

“What is this you hide in the giveaway blanket?” Strikes-in-Camp asked. “Another present for my mother?”

Bass smiled, swallowed, his mind scratching to recall those words he had practiced. “This rifle is for the brother of the woman I want to take for my wife. A rifle for the man who is the head of her family now. May it kill many of our enemies, Strikes-in-Camp. This rifle …” And he stopped, dragging a long-barreled pistol from the wide, worn belt he had buckled around his elkhide coat. “And this short gun too.”

“It … it too?” the warrior asked in surprise.

Nodding, Titus continued. “Both are gifts for a brother-in-law I honor today as a brave and fearless warrior who stands between his people and their enemies.”

Like Strikes-in-Camp, the crowd was stunned into silence.

Quickly passing the blanket back to a comrade, the young warrior first took the pistol, giving it a cursory inspection before he stuffed it into the wide, colorful finger-woven wool sash knotted around his blanket capote.

Then with both hands Strikes-in-Camp took the smoothbore fusil from Bass’s arms with something resembling reverence. Those more-than-twenty other members of the Sore Lip Society crowded in on both sides, murmuring in admiration, touching the musket’s freshly oiled barrel, its gleaming stock, the graceful curve of the goose-necked hammer that clutched a newly knapped sliver of amber flint.

Scratch grew anxious, standing there before the warrior, waiting for some words to be spoken, something to be done. Had he gotten all the words right? Oh, how he had practiced and practiced them—