Where the Lost Wander_ A Novel - Amy Harmon Page 0,70

I have hurt her.

She’s been quiet. More than quiet. She’s avoided me altogether. I can’t blame her. She tells me she wants to lie with me, and I tell her no. She tells me she’s ready to be my wife, right now, wagon train and all, and I tell her not yet.

I am a fool, just like she said. I should swoop her up, claim her, bed her, and make sure no one can ever take her away from me. It’s what I want. But it isn’t what I want for her.

I didn’t explain myself very well. I insulted her intelligence and caused affront. Yet thinking back on my words, I don’t know how I could have said it any differently. I meant what I said. I just didn’t say all the things I could have.

I could have told her I want to lie with her and kiss her more than I want to breathe. That I want to make her smile and talk to her in the darkness. I could have said I want to be with her too. She’s the reason I’m here, the only reason I didn’t turn back at Fort Kearny and go home. But I didn’t tell her those things, and I have hurt her.

California is still so far away.

11

THE SWEETWATER

JOHN

I do not dream in English, and I do not dream in Pawnee. My dreams are like my childhood, garbled with sounds and gestures that belong to both of my worlds—or all of them. My mother worked among whites from the moment I was born. I heard English. I understood it. I heard Pawnee; I understood it. But sometimes what I understood I could not speak. When I went to live with my father, I hardly said anything at all. Not for a long time. Not because I did not understand, but because the words of my mother and the words of my father both danced in my head. Sometimes the words would fade and grow faint in my head. Then I would return to my mother’s village and sit at my grandmother’s feet, listening until the words were bold again. I started being less afraid when I realized that the Pawnee words always came back. Through the simmering soup of languages in my head, the words would sink like meat into my mouth, heavier than all the others. Then the world of my mother would open back up to me, if only for a while.

As I grew older, there were more sounds and more languages.

A man of the Omaha tribe worked with my father for a while. A Potawatomi village sat a mile from the farm my father sold. A Kaw woman did the wash for Jennie when we moved to St. Joe, and there was Otaktay, the half Sioux who taught me to fight. When Abbott came back from California, he traveled with some trappers from Fort Bridger. One had a young Shoshoni wife who made it all the way to Missouri only to be abandoned in an unknown world when the trapper died suddenly a day out of Independence. Abbott brought her to Jennie, who made her a little room in the cellar and put her to work. The Shoshoni woman reminded me a little of my mother, industrious and unassuming and completely lost. She knew a little sign talk and a few words in English, but Jennie was convinced I would be able to talk to her and dragged me around to interpret, though I’d never heard Shoshoni before.

“You have the gift of tongues, John Lowry,” Jennie told me. “You always have. It won’t take you long.”

There were sounds that were the same and sounds that weren’t, patterns that I recognized and those that I didn’t. But Jennie was right. It didn’t take me long. Abbott called her Ana, though I doubt it was her name. It must have been close enough to the right sound, for she accepted it and referred to herself that way. Ana’s voice became part of the soup in my head, and I could speak with her well enough—and understand her even better—by the time she left. She told me her Newe, her people, were called Snake by the whites, after the river that ran through their lands.

For three years she lived beneath Jennie’s wings, working and watching, until one day she was gone, and Jennie didn’t know where. Ana couldn’t write, but Jennie found a crude drawing on Ana’s cot in the cellar. It was