Creek Mary's Blood by Dee Brown

Author:Dee Brown [Brown, Dee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-7427-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-09-27T22:19:00+00:00

30

AT THAT POINT IN his life, Dane left me to go to bed. I had no difficulty in falling asleep, but was soon awakened by coyote harmonies, not a quartet or an octet, but what seemed to be a mighty choir of all the prairie wolves of Montana. I’m sure that I heard Dane’s voice from time to time joining in the performance as interlocutor. Eventually the singers departed, the sound of their melodies gradually receding as if they were members of an opera company departing into the wings.

After that I must have fallen into a deep sleep. When I awoke, Dane was bathing in the icy stream of melted snow that ran below my window. Just as I finished dressing in the shivering chill of the Montana spring morning, he came bounding in to warm his backside at the fireplace. He had already cooked breakfast for us.

“Saviah Manning pushed you out into the wet dawn,” I reminded him.

“Yes, I stopped telling you about that last night because I did not want to go to sleep with bad memories of my return to the Cherokee Nation. I suppose everyone who leaves his kin for a long time and then returns must suffer the same shock of discovering that everything changes, and that he is not the center of the world as he had thought, but only a grain of dust in other people’s lives. It was especially painful and grievous to me.

“Must’ve been past midnight when my tired pinto brought me to the double cabin Uncle Opothle built and that we had abandoned so hastily to flee to Arkansas. The house was dark, and I did not know for certain they had returned to it. I knew that if I awakened Grandmother Mary she would never go back to bed; she would want to know everything I had done.

“And so I rolled up in my serape on the porch and went to sleep. Aunt Suna-lee awoke me to the smell of woodsmoke and frying pork. She had seen the pinto from the window, and came out to investigate. When I rose up, she rushed to embrace me, weeping so freely that I felt her warm tears on my face. I had never known her to behave in such a manner. Still sobbing, she led me into the house and back to the kitchen, where Prissie stared at me in disbelief until tears came to her eyes.

“ ‘Where’s Grandmother Mary?’ I asked, knowing that she was always the first to arise, the guardian of all my childhood mornings.

“ ‘She still sleeps,’ Prissie said. ‘Each day she whispers to one of us that she will not go to the Darkening Land until you return.’ Prissie led the way to the open doorway of Grandmother Mary’s room. I could see the shape of her frail form under the blanket. Her face was only a skull with dark withered skin stretched across it. Her eyes opened slowly and she tried to rise, her trembling bony hands reaching out to me.

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