Nightway Page 3

  He wasn’t aware of the arms that so gently picked him up, or of the gloved fingers that trembled over the vivid red mark covering almost half of his face; nor did he hear the begging to be forgiven. He floated in a black void that nothing penetrated.

  When his conscious mind finally surfaced, he was alone in the hogan. A fire was burning, radiating its heat to every corner. Pain throbbed in the right side of his face. Gingerly, he cupped his hand to the swollen flesh running from cheekbone to jaw. It hurt!

  As he propped himself up on his elbows, the door opened. Hawk cringed instinctively from the tall, hulking frame. The action was not dictated by a fear of his father, but a fear of the ghosts that had possessed him. As he came closer to the light, Hawk saw that the furious look had gone from his eyes. But so had the laughter. Now his eyes were filled with a tortured sadness, and they avoided looking directly at Hawk.

  “Are you hungry?” His father stood in front of the fire and warmed his hands, keeping his back to the boy. “Your cousin fixed some soup.”

  The gruff voice was abrupt, carrying a hint of self-consciousness. But the announcement awakened Hawk’s senses to the aroma of food and the gnawing emptiness of his stomach. In a laborious movement, he rolled to his feet and walked to the kettle of soup. The right side of his face felt peculiarly heavy. With a tin mug drawn from the shelf wall of the hogan, he dipped out a cup of soup and carried it to the fire to drink.

  His father was uneasy with him. Hawk could tell by the way his eyes kept sliding away without making contact with his. He tried sipping at the hot soup, but when he opened his mouth, the swollen skin on his cheek stretched and sent fiery splinters of pain through him. He winced, unable to conceal it.

  “I never meant to hurt you, boy.” The husky voice was bitter with regret and remorse.

  “You should not have looked on them. Bad things happen,” Hawk repeated. “If the right things are not done, their ghosts will come.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts. There are no such things,” his father insisted with fierce determination. “How can you believe your mother would come back to harm you? You know how much she loved you.”

  “A ghost is the bad part.” As he carefully took another sip of his soup, his downcast eyes watched his father’s hands clench into fists, a sign of anger and struggle for control.

  “What do you … what do The People believe happens to a person when he dies?” His father rephrased the terse question.

  “They go to a place in the black north.” Hawk didn’t like talking about the dead or what happened to them. Speaking about it was inviting ghosts to return. “To reach the place, the dead person must travel four days, and he is guided by a relative who died before. At the bottom of a tall cliff, there is an entrance that leads below the surface to the place. Before the dead can enter this place, those who guard the entrance will test him to be certain he is dead.”

  His father’s eyes were tightly shut and his mouth clenched hard, the point of his chin trembling. When Hawk had finished his explanation, he heard the whispered words of pain his father unconsciously uttered.

  “My God, what a terrible place!” His big chest heaved as he took a deep breath and slowly released it. His eyes opened to stare blankly at the fire. “That isn’t what the white man believes,” he said. “He believes that when a person like your mother dies, she goes to heaven. It’s a place in the sky where there is only beauty and happiness—no hunger, no cold, no pain. There, she will know a peace and contentment she could never find on this earth.”

  Hawk digested this information with a thoughtful frown. A teacher at the school had spoken of such a place, but he had not believed it existed. If his father believed it, perhaps…

  “If this … heaven is so wonderful, why did you not want her to go there? Why did you want her to come back from it?” he questioned.

  “Because I was selfish. I didn’t want to stay here on earth alone and never again see her warm smile or feel the gentle touch of her hand. I—” The words appeared to choke him. He moved away from the fire and Hawk’s watching eyes. “It’s late. It will be dark soon.” He changed the subject, speaking briskly. “We’ll stay here tonight and leave in the morning.”

  “Leave?” Hawk repeated. “But there are things that must be done. We have to gather the items she wanted buried with her. And there’s the four days of mourning and the sacrifices that have to be made on her grave to appease her ghost. We—” He would have continued the list, but his father spun around, interrupting him.

  “I told you there are no ghosts!” he declared impatiently. Hawk eyed him warily to see if he was possessed again. With an effort, his father unclenched his fists and rubbed a hand across his forehead. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have shouted at you. I’m … upset because I … can’t take the bodies of … your mother and sister back with me to bury. I have to leave them here—” A brutal look of grief swept over his face before his mouth closed on the unfinished sentence. “Your cousin has already collected the personal things your mother wished to have with her. I have agreed to let them bury her according to their belief.” The emphasis repeated that it wasn’t his belief, and that he wasn’t going to let it be Hawk’s.

  “Are you taking me to your other hogan to live with you?”

  Again, his father was uneasy. “I’m taking you with me, but … you won’t be able to live with me.”

  “Why?” Hawk didn’t understand. “Will not your other wife want me? I am strong. I can do much work, many things to help her.”

  “Dammit, Hawk! If I explained, you wouldn’t understand!” he declared in a burst of impatience, then released a long, weary sigh. “When you’re old enough to understand, you’ll have discovered the answer for yourself and I won’t have to explain. In the meantime, there’s a couple I know. I think they will take you in. You know him—Tom Rawlins. He works for me and lives on my ranch.”

  Some of his father’s uncertainty transferred itself to Hawk. The situation didn’t please his father; therefore, it didn’t please him. He had seen this man, Rawlins, half a dozen times that he could remember. Like The People, he viewed anyone not of his clan with distrust.

  “I can live with Crooked Leg. He needs help to watch his sheep.” He offered an alternative to his father’s suggestion, not wanting to be uprooted from all that was familiar to him.

  “No.” The denial was quick and decisive. “When your mother was alive, you lived with her people. Now you will live with mine. It’s a white world. It’s time you began walking its path, learning its values and beliefs. You are going to have to make your own place in it—all by yourself. I would help you if I could, but I’m tied … tied by a system you don’t understand yet.” He sounded tired, beaten. “Once I thought only of myself and what it would take to make me happy. I tried to hold onto too much. I’ve lost what I cared about the most. Now there are too many others who would be hurt. I didn’t think about them before, but I have to now.” He glanced at Hawk and saw the bewilderment in his narrowed blue eyes. His mouth twisted in a wry grimace. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  With a confused shake of his head, Hawk mutely admitted that he didn’t—not the last part. Walking the second path of the white world made sense, because he obviously needed to learn more. But the other part about hurting people was something he didn’t understand.

  “Let me explain it this way,” his father murmured. “If you had a flock of sheep and a lamb was separated from them and being attacked by wolves, you would want to save it—protect it. Yet, if you did, you knew the wolves would attack the whole flock and harm them. Would you save the lamb and lose the whole flock? Or would you stay with the flock and hope the lamb might somehow survive?”

  “I would stay with the flock,” Hawk stated.

  “That’s what I’m doing. You are my lamb,” he explained. “There are some things I can do for you, but I can’t stand beside you.” Even as he made the statement, he looked away, unconsciously re-enf
orcing his words by his action. “I’m going to check on my horse, get it bedded down for the night. We’ll have to sleep here. I wish we didn’t, but—”

  “You do not believe in ghosts,” Hawk reminded him, since it was the obvious reason for not wanting to sleep in the hogan.

  “Not ghosts, no,” he agreed. “The only thing haunting me will be my memories.”

  He walked out the door that traditionally faced east and Hawk was left inside—alone.

  With the first streak of dawn, two horses and riders trotted away from the hogan into the immense rumpled blanket of snow. The thin, wavering line of smoke from a dying fire drifted out of the chimney of the abandoned hogan. The pink dawn colored the gray smoke with a lilac flush.

  In the bitter cold of morning, the two rode silently away from the canyon. The man had the collar of his heavy parka turned up to keep out the invading chill. His Stetson was pulled low on his head. The boy was bareheaded, his disheveled black hair gleaming in the first rays of sunlight. While the man’s shoulders were slumped, the boy sat erect, a natural wild nobility in his bearing.

  Traveling ever south, they entered land Hawk had never seen before. Its strangeness heightened his senses. His gaze moved restlessly, always looking, searching, identifying, noting any and all movement within the realm of his vision.

  His first sight of a cattle herd came near mid-morning. He had seen cattle before, but never in such numbers. And they hadn’t been as fat as these red-coated animals with curly white faces. His nose wrinkled at the smell that came from the warm bodies of the cattle. He glanced at his father, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  Hawk studied the man’s profile. Those lines that had once curved upward to make his eyes laugh were now straight, robbing the blue eyes of their happiness and vitality. They looked in his direction rarely, then held the contact only for mere seconds.

  Alone. Unconsciously Hawk had been conditioned to accept the fact. Just as his Indian way of life had conditioned him to accept the death of his mother and sister. He wasn’t without regret. He missed her. The hogan had seemed strangely silent without the crying of his temperamental sister. Yet it could not be changed; therefore, it must be accepted.

  Ride on and forget. The sun is shining on a new day.

  Chapter III

  When Hawk first saw the cluster of large buildings, he thought they were entering a town. Dirt roads linked each wood building to the next, brown lines crisscrossing the white snow. Yet his searching eyes could find no trading post. There were many corrals, made from smooth boards that were white. Sometimes there was only one or two horses inside them, although one held more. The horses were big, muscled animals like the one his father rode.

  Near the corrals, there were three buildings. It was toward one of these that his father was riding. Hawk guessed these buildings were the barns his father had once described to him, where animals were kept, sheltered from the winter storms. Hawk had never been off the Reservation until this day. All of his previous contact with whites had been through the strict teachers at the Reservation school, the Mormons who operated the trading post, and the man, Rawlins, on those few occasions he had come to the hogan with Hawk’s father. Hawk didn’t include his father in the list of white men he’d met. Yet he had learned much about the world of the whites from all these sources, especially his father. Now he was seeing things that had previously only been described to him, and he was all eyes.

  A man was standing on a flat wagon with no sides, pulled by a big machine with three wheels and stopped beside a corral. Hawk identified the big machine as a tractor from a picture he had seen in a schoolbook and felt proud that he knew of such things. With a long fork, the man was throwing dry, yellow grass—hay—into the corral for the horses to eat.

  When they rode by him toward the middle building, the man glanced up and waved to his father. He looked at Hawk, then looked again, and stopped his work to stare. Being watched so closely by a stranger made Hawk uneasy. He urged his horse closer to his father’s.

  The funny-looking, long building called a barn had a tall door at the end, tall enough to permit a horse and rider to enter it without the rider dismounting. His horse shied once at the opening, then nervously followed the horse his father rode inside.

  After being outside with the brilliance of the sun reflecting off the snow, it was dark inside. Hawk’s eyes quickly sought the darkest corner to make a swift adjustment to the absence of light. His nose was assailed by a dry, irritating dust and the smells of horses and leather and dung. There was a warmth inside the building despite the absence of the sun.

  A few yards inside the building, his father stopped his horse. Hawk followed his lead. Saddle leather creaked, a stirrup taking all his father’s weight as he dismounted. Hawk hesitated, then kicked his feet out of the stirrup and slipped soundlessly to the hard floor.

  Uncertain what to do next, he waited until he saw his father begin unsaddling his horse. Hawk untied the rolled blanket that contained his belongings from behind his saddle and set it on the floor. Laying the stirrup over the saddle seat, Hawk tugged at the cinch strap. He had grown taller in the year and a half since the saddle had been given to him and no longer needed to stand on his toes to reach any part of the saddle.

  The strangeness of his surroundings had all of his senses honed to sharpness. His acute hearing picked up the sound of human footsteps approaching before there was an audible crunch of snow outside the opening.

  “Someone comes,” he warned his father in a very low voice.

  The footsteps were close enough for a white man to hear when his father looked up. The smaller-built chestnut horse was on the other side of his father’s. The two animals effectively offered concealment to the wary boy, while permitting him to observe the man who entered through the tall door. Of average height and build, the man wore stiff blue Levi’s and a heavy jacket lined with sheepskin, buttoned to his throat, and the collar turned up to brush the brim of his hat. Hawk recognized the man, Rawlins, with his muddy-brown eyes and quiet face, a face that always reminded Hawk of a calm stretch of river where the strength and swiftness of the current was hidden from looking eyes.

  There was the briefest hesitation in the man’s stride as he entered. “You finally made it back. I was beginning to worry about you, J. B.”

  The man’s eyes, unadjusted to the dimness, did not immediately see the second, smaller horse. His father didn’t respond as he dragged the saddle off the horse’s back and carried it around the animal to set it upright next to an inner wall. When he straightened, Rawlins had stopped only a few feet away and was watching him closely.

  “How was … everything?” Rawlins hesitated in the phrasing of his question.

  A long silence followed in which his father stood motionless, looking at the man. Then Hawk saw the great shudder that vibrated through his father.

  “She’s dead, Tom. The little one, too. She’d been to her uncle’s and left just before the storm hit.” The words spilled from him in a soft, swift rush, like the force of running water that backs up behind a dam, then finally breaks free. “The buckboard broke an axle. She unhitched the horse and must have decided to ride it home. Evidently, she was thrown. There was blood … a gash on her forehead. Tom … they froze to death—her and the baby. I—” Something choked off the rest, because Hawk saw his father swallow and turn to his horse, lowering his head and spreading his hand across his eyes.

  The man, Rawlins, leaned toward his father, then shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket and looked away. “I … I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.” It was a rasped word that didn’t mean anything. His father brought his hand down, roughly wiping something from his cheek, then breathed through his nose. It made a noisy sound, the way it does when the cold makes the water run inside it.

  “What about the boy?”

  Halting in the act of pulling the saddle pad and blanket off the horse, his father glanced over his shoulder at Rawlins in faint surprise, then loo
ked across his horse’s back at Hawk, and quickly bounced away.

  “I brought him back with me,” he stated gruffly and took the saddle blanket and pad, draping them over the saddle on the floor. He must have seen Rawlins’ head jerk, because he added a terse, “I couldn’t leave him there.”

  Taking his horse’s reins, his father led it to the opposite side of the wide, long room, thereby exposing the chestnut horse Hawk was unsaddling. The instant Rawlins’ eyes focused on him, Hawk quickly bent his head to the task, staying behind the shield of his horse and keeping to the shadows. His father led his horse to a place on the other wall where there was half a door. Opening it, he unbridled his horse and slapped it on the rump to send it through the opening.

  “J. B.—” Rawlins’ voice sounded urgent, yet hesitant.

  “Dammit, I couldn’t leave him there, I tell you. He needs an education, more of a chance at life than he’d get on the Reservation. And … I want him near me.” The last declaration was tempered to a taut softness.

  “But—” Rawlins was frowning, troubled by his father’s words.

  “I know.” His father issued a long sigh and glanced at Hawk when he pulled the saddle from his chestnut and set it against the wall, staying behind the horse. “I can’t take him to the house. Katheryn would…” He appeared uncomfortable and didn’t finish that sentence. “I thought—that is, I hoped—you and Vera would take him in.” Rawlins said nothing, but his eyes widened. His father looked grim. “I’m sorry, but there isn’t anybody else I can trust.”

  It was so silent that Hawk heard the whisper of a piece of straw as it floated down to the iron-hard floor. His father broke it by half-turning.

  “Hawk, come here,” he ordered.