She Holds Up the Stars by Sandra Laronde

Author:Sandra Laronde
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Annick Press
Published: 2022-07-19T18:00:15+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The next day was rainy, and not city rain where you could still go out with an umbrella and stay dry darting under store awnings. This was pure country rain, pelting down hard from a granite gray sky, a sky not broken up into jigsaw pieces by tall buildings. It was the kind of rain that stung your face and swept your hair in all directions. And the fantastic boom, clap, and rumble of animikii, the thunder beings, was exhilarating.

Misko flipped through some paperbacks she found, well-thumbed and worn—Black Beauty, National Velvet, and The Black Stallion. She wondered if they were her mother’s. She loved how books had adventures inside waiting to be discovered. Restless indoors, with the rain thundering on, she asked Kokum more questions than usual, but her grandmother only ever answered the ones she wanted to answer. The only other question Kokum answered today was about the names carved in the wooden fence, but after talking about that, she didn’t answer any more questions.

That’s the way it was in Anishinaabe culture, not as much talking as in white culture. Elders say we have two eyes, two ears, and one mouth for a reason. One ear is for listening and the other one is for hearing. And respect means that before you start speaking, you listen to the other person first. But Misko wanted answers right now and she had to breathe into her impatience again and again and exhale the hurry-up part of herself.

The rain let up around suppertime, filling Misko with hope that it wouldn’t rain the following day. Everything smelled sweet, fresh, and alive. More birds chirped, more frogs croaked, and the bark of trees glistened. But sometime in the middle of the night, the rain had started up again. She was half asleep when she heard the pitter-patter of rain on the roof, drip drop, drip drop, drip drop. Snuggled and warm in her bed, Misko heard the rain’s watery melody whisper and shush, and she felt surrounded by everything that ever was. When the rain started coming down harder, she felt the excitement as the staggered uproarious beats came down faster, as if she had climbed inside a big, tight drum.

In the morning, she walked to the fence to see Mishtadim, wondering if he was cranky, missing her as much as she missed him. She hoped Thomas was letting him graze on the hill as he had promised. She guessed the horse wouldn’t venture as far as where she stood, the grass still wet and bright after the rain.

She heard a soft flutter of wings. She didn’t move or turn her head and stood very still. Soon, one after the other, two gray jays landed on the fence beside her. Their heads were tilted, puzzling out who she might be, and they weren’t afraid. Their feathers were all shades of charcoal—ash and smoke, silver and steel, salt and pepper—as if bred to blend into the fog and mist of the rain-soaked air.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.