Where the Lost Wander_ A Novel - Amy Harmon Page 0,138

John to translate for him so I can paint his dream. He brings me a huge elk skin and sits in our wickiup, his legs crossed, his eyes sober.

“He doesn’t want to upset his mother or Hanabi. Or his people. So you will paint”—John waits for Washakie to finish—“but it is only for him.”

I nod, and John reassures him, but Washakie seems torn, and after a short pause he speaks again.

“He doesn’t understand the vision. Not all of it. It is strange to him. He can’t describe some things that he saw,” John says.

“My mother had dreams,” I say, and John tells Washakie. “I don’t think she understood them all. She dreamed about John before she ever met him. And she dreamed about another woman—an Indian woman—feeding Wolfe. My mother knew about this.” I raise my hands, indicating my surroundings. My journey. “She knew something was coming . . . something . . . hard.”

Washakie is listening to John, but he is watching me speak.

“She did not run from it,” Washakie says.

I shake my head slowly. “No. She always . . . kept her mind right. Always found . . . transcendence.”

John is struggling to translate. Transcendence is hard to explain. He and Washakie talk for several minutes, a flurry of discussion that I don’t understand.

“Washakie wants to know how she did that,” John says, turning to me.

Are you angry with the bird because he can fly, or angry with the horse for her beauty, or angry with the bear because he has fearsome teeth and claws? Because he’s bigger than you are? Stronger too? Destroying all the things you hate won’t change any of that. You still won’t be a bear or a bird or a horse. Hating men won’t make you a man. Hating your womb or your breasts or your own weakness won’t make those things go away. Hating never fixed anything.

It’s like Ma is right here, reciting all her simple wisdom in my head, and I tell Washakie what she told me.

“Ma said transcendence is when we rise above the things we can’t change,” I add.

“How do we know what we can’t change?” Washakie asks John, and John asks me.

I shake my head. I don’t know the answer to that.

“We can’t change what is. Or what was,” John says slowly. “Only what could be.”

Transcendence is a world, a place, beyond this one. It’s what could be.

Washakie mulls that over, and then he touches the elk skin and looks at me. He’s ready for me to paint.

“He had this dream—this vision—a few years ago. He was worried about the lands of the Shoshoni being overrun by other tribes who were pushed out by the white tide. He went away by himself and fasted and . . . prayed . . . for three days. These are the things he saw,” John says.

Washakie is quiet for a moment, his eyes closed and body still, like he’s trying to remember. When he begins to speak again, I don’t think. I just paint, using my fingers and a few horsehair brushes that John made me for finer details.

He talks of carriages that pull themselves and horses made of iron. He describes people flying on giant birds that aren’t birds, going to places he never knew existed. He says the world will be small and the land will be different, and the Indians will be gone. Red blood and blue blood will flow together, becoming one blood. One people. John’s voice cracks with emotion as he interprets, and tears drip down my nose, but I keep painting, listening, and Washakie keeps talking.

“I saw my life. My birth, my death, and the days between. The feathers on my head and a weapon in one hand, a pipe in the other. In the dream . . . I was told not to fight,” he says. “To choose the pipe. To choose peace with the white man whenever I can. So that is what I will do.”

JOHN

Washakie does not take his painting when he leaves. Naomi isn’t finished. She’s been at it for hours, hardly conscious of me at all. I keep the wick of my lantern burning, the coals hot, and she works, paint up to her wrists and dotting her doeskin dress. She doesn’t have any clothes that don’t have some paint somewhere. Her hair was tidy when the process began, but her braid has come undone, and she swipes at the loose strands absently, making a black streak across her face.