In the end, it wasn’t his dark eyes, his dimpled smile, or the way she melted when he held her in his arms, like she was something quite fragile and very precious, that captivated her.
No, it was the tousled, dark-haired boy that stood behind the beaded curtains in his living room and looked on so anxiously as he proposed to her that made her answer clear. Any doubts about why a person such as her, a teller of stories, a woman of many words, would find happiness being married to him, a sheriff and a man of few words, fled in that instant. The worried face of that little boy said it all.
Would she be another like his father who drank himself into another personality, coming after the boy and his mother with fists, and then with a knife, spilling her life blood slowly till she was no longer flesh and bone, but a ghost that haunted his dreams at night? His father had left for good after that, swallowed by the big concrete prison walls that then stole his life because he still used his fists to solve his problems. In prison, there were others - bigger, stronger men - and he never stood a chance.
The boy would have been taken away because there was no other family, but tribal bonds ran deep - no outsider would raise him if someone of his tribe could take him in -and so her soon-to-be husband had done just that. The depth of pain and of wisdom in the boy’s big eyes had stolen his heart, just as they had stolen hers.
So she said yes, and reached out her hand to the child, but he had shaken his head and cowered back. It would take a while, her man had told her, and she knew that to be true.
It was an all-too-common story where she lived. She knew the streets and houses to avoid in the dark of the night. If the evening cashier at the gas station came in late for his shift and she had to return after eight, she would skip the Boyce’s place and take the longer circuit to her home. Marcus Boyce would have started drinking at 5. She knew this because he would be in the store replenishing his supply at 4:30 each evening, and by 8:30 he would be far gone. She had often heard the screaming and the cursing from Laverne and she was grateful that theirs was a family not blessed with children.
The Elke’s were not so fortunate though, and she stayed far away from them. The one time she tried to intervene on behalf of the youngest, she received a black eye and a cut lip for her trouble. It could have been worse, really, if Jackson hadn’t come by.
That was her first introduction to him, the calm soft-spoken man who she now couldn't see hurting a fly. He had caught Jace by the collar and shaken all 250 pounds of him like a dog worrying a bone. Jackson had then taken her home and, with gentle hands, wiped the blood off her lip, iced her black eye and held her hand ‘til her body had stopped shaking from the fear. He had come to her home the next day, bearing flowers and a shy smile, and asked her out.
Their wedding was simple; a quick signing of names in the book, and then a short blessing by the tribal elders. Jackson promised that they would have a larger one someday. She would wear a gown and dance the night away, after a big feast attended by the entire tribe.
“All thirty thousand of them?” she’d teased.
“All thirty thousand," he’d insisted, before dropping a quick kiss on her soft mouth and running out the door in response to the emergency call he had gotten earlier. He was one of ten police officers in an area of land that spanned several counties and almost ten thousand square miles, and it left him with precious little free time. But he took his work seriously, and his people depended on him. She loved him all the more for that.
Their honeymoon was dinner at the local watering hole. They ate ribs, spicy and messy. She wiped off a smear on his shirt with a napkin, and he kissed off a drop of sauce from the corner of her mouth, making her belly clench. They toasted their future with a mug of beer (her) and Mountain Dew (him) because he was not sure if he would be called out in an emergency. He wasn’t; his crew made sure of that. They danced to Achy Breaky Heart and Should Have been a Cowboy to which she commented that there was something so wrong in Indians dancing to a song that had a line, “I might have had a sidekick with a funny name.”
“That would have been us,” she’d whispered, “the sidekicks with the funny name.” He’d laughed and gathered her up right there on the dance floor and kissed her till her knees went weak. He carried her off then, to hoots and hollers from the others in the bar, back home to their house. But instead of heading to the bedroom as she thought they would, he dragged a blanket outside and shook it out on the dusty ground, still warm from the hot sun. And that was where they spent their honeymoon night, under a night sky hung with a million stars. She slept in the crook of his arm till the early dawn, safe and secure that the decision that she’d made was the right one.
Merging her life with his was not so hard, but bringing the boy into their newly formed family was. In the morning, he would be up and dressed for school so she never had to enter his room and wake him. He would leave with them, and they would drop him off at the bus stop. Other than answering their questions with one word or two, he never talked. The counselor that was assigned to him said he was making good progress, and to give him time.
Time! It was something she always agonized over. She longed to fold him into her arms and whisper words of comfort and understanding into his ears, but she held back, worried that he would push her away and retreat even further into that shell that he had built around himself. He was like a tortoise, she told her husband one evening; so hesitant, and the slightest motion made him hide away. They watched as he stepped outside the house once dinner was done, as he did every night, and sit himself down on the porch to look up towards the stars.
She’d asked him once what he was looking at. She thought maybe he was looking for the spirit of his mother in amongst the brightness of the stars of the Milky Way.
“Aldebaran”
“What’s that, Solomon?” She never liked that name; she had heard how, when their lands were parceled out, the settlers had called it the Wisdom of Solomon, but it was fitting for the boy because he was so quiet and serious and yes, solemn.
He’d looked shyly up at her and pointed in the direction of the white buffalo. “There, look.”
She’d squinted up. “That’s the young hunter, the old woman’s grandson.” The night was particularly clear and the star shone bright.
“Aldebaran,” he insisted. She wondered if he was trying to dissociate himself from his roots.
She’d smiled at him encouragingly though. This was the most he had opened up to her in the six months that she had been married to Jackson.
“Did you know it is sixty-seven light years away and that it is almost twice as heavy as the sun?”
“No.” Truth be known, it wasn’t something that she would have cared to have learned. She dealt in myths and legends and tales of the creator.
“Where did you learn that?” He was only six and she doubted that he read that; maybe he’d heard it somewhere.
“Ámí.” She cringed, remembering belatedly that his mother had taught science at the local school. He’d turned away at that point and even though she'd stayed out with him a while longer, he ignored her presence. She had gone inside defeated.
That conversation had given her an idea, however, and so when dinner was done and the dishes washed and put away, she slipped out onto the porch. He was sitting in his usual spot on the stairs huddled against the heavy wooden post that held up the roof. He was hunched over, almost as if he wanted to fold into himself. Her heart went out to him, and she so longed to hold him close, but as always, not sure of her reception, she took a spot on the other side of the steps against the other wooden post.
She watched him awhile. He knew she was there, of course, but he looked pointedly away towards the stars.
She searched her thoughts and then asked, “Are you looking for Aldebaran again?”
He shook his head. “Jupiter.”
He had given her the perfect opening. “One day, people will travel to Jupiter.” He had gone back to staring fixedly at the stars, but when she said that she could see him begin to watch her from the corner of his eye.
Each time there had been a ceremony or a festival, she was called to tell her stories, legends of The Grandmother and her Grandson, of the Wolf and the Hyena and of the Tortoise and of the sacred Buffalo.
She talked of heroes and of leaders and of war. She wove a spell of magic around her audience until the wee hours of the morning when her voice was hoarse and the calls for just one more had faded away. All through those times though, the boy would never look interested; he would sit in a corner and look away into the distance until she was done, and then he would follow her and Jackson home.
This time though, she could see the spark of interest in his eyes, even though the language of his body still warned her away.
“All the spaceships will go there and to the station orbiting around earth.”
“You mean like the International space station? We talked about that in class when John Herrington went up there. He carried a Chickasaw flag and Sarah’s grandmother got to see the launch from Cape Canaveral.”
He sat up straight and moved closer. She smiled inwardly at his enthusiasm; somewhere, in the distant horizon, she saw a shooting star. She let her mind drift to a time when she was a child and her mother told the stories. She remembered the voice of the stranger who had offered his stories to her. His voice had woven a picture of things that had yet to happen, of travels into the past and into the future, of vast distances and worlds, and stories of her people that were yet to come about. Maybe they would inspire the same wonder in this little boy.
She spoke and he grew silent.
It was the night of harvest moon. The land was still, but the silence was broken by the howling of the night prowlers. The elder left the cottage of Kolopak and his wife and their newborn child.
Kolopak was worried. He did not like to hear what the elder had to say, that his child, his first born, would be not of the people; this child of his was a contrary, a child that would never be at home walking on the soil, but would belong among the stars. He would be a warrior and a wanderer. He would know the great sorrow that comes from separation, from bloodshed, from anger and hatred. He was destined to die young in battle, but if he survived, he would know great joy and love and peace.
The boy’s father did not want to hear this. He was a peaceful man. His heart belonged to his people, and felt the connection of the long line of his ancestors. He was rooted like his plants to the soil, to the planet where they lived. He worried what would become of the boy if he cut those roots and left his past behind. He worried that his boy would drift away. He swore to himself that he would do everything in his power to keep the boy grounded. He would teach him everything he knew about his past and his history, and that would be his link to his future. He was sure of it. For the elders always talked in riddles and parables, and didn’t they also say that there would come one day in the boy’s life a convergence and a divergence that would lead him away. Maybe he could keep that prophecy from happening.
Kolopak picked up a handful of dirt and let it slip through his fingers. He promised himself that he would do everything in his power to keep his son close to this land, close to the planet where he was born. He would keep his son from the horrors that the elder foretold, he would keep him safe.
In the distance he heard the wail of his new child and, dusting off his hands, he walked back to his home, to his wife, to his son.
She grew silent; Solomon had fallen asleep against the pillar. Picking him up, she carried him inside to his bed and laid him down. His eyes fluttered open momentarily.
“Finish the story?”
“Tomorrow.” She brushed his hair away from his eyes. This was the first time that he had not flinched from her contact.