Ride the Moon Down

18

It brought some rest to a place inside her heart to return to her people. Two summers had passed while Waits-by-the-Water had been away, and a winter spent in that southern land of the Arapaho.

Days ago she and her husband had turned south from the white man’s fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. It had not been a happy time for her there. So many half-breeds and Assiniboine, she never felt welcome. Better that a Crow woman stay safe inside the walls of that fort until Ti-tuzz could take them back across the Missouri and ride for Absaroka.

As they began their journey south, the weather turned mild for many days, but winter had resumed its fury by the time they found the village sprawled among the cottonwoods towering on a neck of land along the southern bank of the Yellowstone.

“It was near this place where we first talked,” she said as they halted to gaze at the welcome sight of those brown lodges.

Drawing in a long breath of the cold air scented with wood smoke and the fresh dung of hundreds of ponies, he looked about at the surrounding river bluffs—then gazed at her and smiled. “Yes. I remember. Now I want us to be even happier this winter than we were when we realized we needed each other.”

Over their seasons together Waits had grown even more patient with how slow he sometimes was to put his thoughts together in her tongue. She knew Magpie would have it easier than either of her parents, growing up with both languages spoken to her as they were.

Looking up, she found him staring at her still, his eyes twinkling. Then she realized he was watching her hand. She had been rubbing her huge belly unconsciously, thinking of this child to come.

“It will be born this winter, yes?” he asked.

With a nod she answered, “I think sometime in the next moon, perhaps.”

Urging his pony over beside hers, Bass tore off a blanket mitten and stuffed his bare hand beneath her buffalo robe, laying it upon that swollen belly beneath her capote. “You are so big—how many little calves do you have in there?”

She giggled. “I think there is only one, but it will be a big child.”

“A boy?” and his eyes sparkled.

“Perhaps,” she said. “If it is a boy, you will not forget your daughter?”

Bass twisted round to gaze back at the girl who sat behind him, clinging to his elk-hide coat. Patting the child’s leg beneath that half robe he had wrapped securely around her, he said, “This little one? I could never forget what she means to me! Tell me, daughter: by spring when the snows melt, will you be ready to learn to ride on your own?”

“Ride a pony by myself?” she asked in Crow.

“Yes,” he answered her in English, the way many of their conversations took place: mixing the two tongues together while they conversed, as if it were as natural as could be. “I think you will be old enough to learn, Magpie.”

“How old was my mother?” she asked in Crow.

Bass turned to look at Waits. “When did you have your first lesson on a pony by yourself?”

“My father …” Then Waits suddenly felt the sharp ball of sadness spring to life again in the middle of her chest. Of an instant her eyes were welling up. Waits barely got the words out of her mouth. “He taught me when I was almost f-five summers.”

“Should we come here to be with your people, to see your family?”

She nodded and wiped the tears from her cheek, trying bravely to smile. “It hurt when I remembered my father.” And she looked at Magpie sitting behind her father. “Remembered how he held me on his lap, how he smelled when he hugged me … I never want Magpie to forget anything about her father.”

“What?” he protested in English with a grin. “I’m not going anywhere! I don’t plan to die for a long, long time!”

But she knew a man never did.

It always came suddenly, unexpectedly—as it had with her father’s death in Blackfoot country. And Ti-tuzz could have died last spring when those Arapaho attacked him. Waits had learned about that when she’d discovered the two scalps and the weapons hidden among some green pelts he’d brought back to their camp one cold spring day. And he could easily have been killed when the Frenchmen and half-breeds had fought outside the big fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone.

How many times would she say good-bye to him before she could finally accept that he might not return one day?

Waits looked into his face as he laid his hand on her arm.

He said, “It is good to come back to your people.”

“I am happy to see my mother.”

“My heart is glad to bring you back here,” he said, looping his arm around Magpie to pull the small girl over his hip and into his lap where she quickly gripped on to the round pommel with her tiny blanket mittens.

“Let me have the reins, popo?”

“Here,” and he laid them inside those tiny mittens. Then he turned to Waits, saying, “My family is very far away. It has been a long, long time since I saw them—when I was a very young man and ran away from them. I do not think my father and mother are still alive. Maybe my brothers, or sister, still live. But that family did not want me to belong to them very much, so I left them long ago. Now you have become my family.”

“Me too, popo?” the girl asked in his tongue, pushing back against him.

“Yes, Magpie. You, and even your little brother too.”

“My little brother? Where is little brother?” she asked as she peered on one side of the horse, then the other.

“Perhaps your little brother who is hiding in your mother’s belly will come out soon so you can play,” he told Magpie.

“When, Mother?”

Waits-by-the-Water looked at him with mock disapproval and scolded, “See what you have started, husband? Now she thinks I am carrying her playmate inside me!”

“It will be good to give Magpie a little brother,” he told her as they put their animals in motion once more. “To have a family that loves one another is a good thing. I cannot remember having much of that. My mother worked hard, cooked for us and sewed our clothes. And my father worked very hard too, brought us food, kept us warm and dry—but I do not remember being touched by them, do not remember being held.” He squeezed Magpie there at the end of his words as his voice cracked.

“It is important that a child is held and touched, especially by its father,” Waits declared.

His eyes brimmed with moisture. “I know you must miss He-Who-Is-Gone very much. I can never take his place in your heart, nor will I try, but—I never want you to forget that I will protect you, provide for you, watch over you till the end of my days, woman. That is my promise.”

She felt stunned, sensing how his words made her heart pound faster in surprise as she turned to look at him. “Ti-tuzz, those are words I never knew a man would say to a woman.”

“Are you silly, wife? Surely when a man falls in love with a woman, he tells her … no, he tells her family and all her people that he promises to care for her until he can no longer watch over her.”

Wagging her head, Waits said, “No, there is no promise like that made between a man and woman who marry among my people.”

“What do they promise each other?” he asked.

For a moment she thought, then finally shrugged. “I have never known anyone to make a vow to another when they want to live with that person. A man may buy a bride, or a man can kidnap another man’s wife and make her his own, but most times among my people, a man and woman just decide they will start living together.”

“Is that what we did?” he asked. “When you came with Josiah to look for me after I left your village with a very sad heart?”

“Yes. When Josiah came to find you, I knew what I wanted. And I believed you wanted me. You never had to say any words to make me want to search for you after you ran away from my village. When I saw how glad you were that I had come to find you—I knew I had found my husband.”

“Waits-by-the-Water?”

“Yes?”

“Would it be better for a man who wants a wife to give presents to that woman’s family?”

She looked at him in the cold wind, studied the frost that formed an icy ring that clung to the graying hair around his mouth. Softly she said, “Some bring gifts to the woman’s father.”

He stared ahead, not looking at her for some moments, then asked, “What if that woman’s father is no longer alive?”

She swallowed hard. “I am not sure, but I believe the man would give presents to the eldest son in the family—asking to marry the woman.”

Waits’s breath came hard in her chest, her heart was beating so fast as she studied his face.

Finally Bass looked at her again. “I have decided something, bu’a. It is time that your people hear me make my vow to you. I think your family should hear me promise myself to you.”

She could barely whisper, “Husband.”

“You are my family, Waits-by-the-Water.” His eyes softened, brimming again. “I will go to your brother. I will take him gifts. And I will ask his permission to be your husband … to take you as my wife.”

Titus couldn’t remember the last time he felt his knees rattle this bad. He was sure the others would know, that they would laugh behind their hands at this white man shaking with fear to get married.

Bass glanced to his left. At his elbow stood Pretty On Top. To his right stood Windy Boy. He was relieved when the young warriors offered to stand with him outside the lodge where Waits-by-the-Water was among her mother and friends, preparing for this ceremony.

Surrounding the three of them were more than fifteen hundred Crow, talking and laughing, come here to witness what Waits had described to everyone as a promising. Women waited patiently, having donned their very best, men stood stoic and expectant in their ceremonial dress, while the children darted between legs, chasing after dogs, throwing clumps of icy snow at one another, giggling, diving, sliding at the feet of their elders.

In less than a month he would reach his forty-third birthday. Which meant that Christmas was almost upon them. Titus fondly remembered his first Christmas with her down in Taos—the warmth of all those flickering candles, the fragrant smells drifting from Rosa Kinkead’s kitchen, such soft music from the Mexican’s cathedral and their nativity procession through the small village … then came the new year and his tearing himself away from her to travel far and long in hopes of putting old ghosts to rest.

But these people did not celebrate such annual events, nor did they have any similar religious festivals to mark the progress of each year beyond the tobacco ceremony of their women. Instead, these Crow celebrated war, perhaps the birth or naming of a child, maybe even the success of a war party or pony raid, nothing but that tobacco planting ceremony to track the march of the seasons the way the white man did.

From beyond the far edge of the crowd came a growing murmur. He turned to watch the witnesses part for a group of men resplendent in their very finest war clothing.

“Sore Lips,” whispered Pretty On Top. “Strikes-in-Camp’s war clan.”

As more than twenty of them emerged onto the open ground that surrounded Scratch, he glanced at their faces, finding each man painted, feathers and stuffed birds tied in his hair, an animal head lashed onto his own with a rawhide whang tied under the chin. All but one of them carried a tall staff—some crooked, some straight—but each bearing feathers tied at right angles to the poles, wrapped in otter fur, arrayed with enemy scalps.

Only Strikes-in-Camp—who stood at their center—remained empty-handed. He crossed his arms, looked at the white man, and waited.

“Now,” Pretty On Top whispered.

Scratch looked over at the young warrior. “The presents?”

Pretty On Top nodded.

Wanting to ask that handsome young warrior to wish him luck, Titus suddenly realized the Crow had no concept of luck, much less the crazy notion of one person passing on that luck to another. Instead, he turned to his right and stepped up to Turns Plenty who held the halters of two ponies. The old man handed the white man those halters, then stepped over to join Pretty On Top.

With his heart beginning to pound, Bass started for the far side of the open ground at the center of that huge crowd suddenly growing breathlessly quiet, so quiet Scratch could hear the whine of his winter moccasins on the old, icy snow, hear the slow plodding of each one of the eight hooves with that pair of ponies behind him. Somehow he made it across the arena at the center of the village and stopped a few feet from Strikes-in-Camp.

“These horses are for you,” he said as confidently as he could muster it, having practiced and rehearsed the words over and over the past two weeks, to get them just right for this day.

Pointing to the scalp hanging from the halter beneath the jaw of each pony, Bass continued. “And these scalps—they belonged to the Arapaho warriors who rode these ponies against me last spring. The horses and the scalps of two brave warriors I now give to the mighty warrior I ask to become my brother-in-law.”

Strikes-in-Camp took a few steps forward, moving around one of the ponies, then came back between the pair, lifting a leg here, touching a flank there, staring into the eyes of these gifts. When he turned and walked back to where he stood in the midst of his Sore Lip warrior society, Strikes-in-Camp recrossed his arms.

Anxious, Bass flicked a glance at Pretty On Top. The young warrior made a quick gesture with his hand.

Scratch turned back to Turns Plenty, then stepped up to Waits-by-the-Water’s brother and held out the halters to those two ponies.

For a long moment the man stared at Bass, then looked over the white man’s shoulder at Pretty On Top, Windy Boy, and Turns Plenty behind the trapper. Finally Strikes-in-Camp took the halters, held them a heartbeat, and passed them to one of the painted warriors who stood beside him. The man started away with the two Arapaho ponies.

By the time Strikes-in-Camp recrossed his arms and stared again at him, Bass realized he could barely hear—his heart pounded so loudly in his ears while he started to turn slowly around on those shaky legs of his, reminding himself he must not stumble, must not fall there in front of her people.

Less than three steps brought him back to Windy Boy, who held out his left hand. In it he clutched the halters to another two ponies. Quietly clucking for the pair to follow, Bass slowly started back to Strikes-in-Camp, stopping again a few feet from the warrior and his Sore Lip comrades.

“I bring more gifts to Strikes-in-Camp,” he said in a studied cadence with the Crow words. “Two more horses.”

“Two more horses,” Strikes-in-Camp repeated, not budging, moving only his eyes as he looked from the white man to stare at one of the ponies.

Turning, Bass pulled the oxblood blanket from its back and held it before Strikes-in-Camp as a soft murmur came from the crowd. “This will keep your wife warm on those nights when you take the warpath against our enemies.”

Strikes-in-Camp brushed the blanket with his fingers, lifted a corner, inspecting it as if to ascertain that it truly was new.

“Two moons ago I traded for it,” Titus explained, scrambling for these words not in his planned script. “From the Crow trader—Tullock—at the mouth of the Tongue River.”

Eventually Strikes-in-Camp took the red blanket from Bass’s arm and passed it back to one of his warrior society. “Yes, it will keep my wife warm when I am not with her.”

Bass thought he saw a little softening in the man’s eyes. His heart leaped. For days now since he and Waits-by-the-Water had discussed this ceremony with her mother, Titus had steadily grown more apprehensive. From the beginning Strikes-in-Camp had frostily objected. He had even refused to talk to his mother about the white man’s wanting to ask for his sister in marriage.

Three more times Waits had prevailed upon her mother to ask Strikes-in-Camp, hoping to wear him down. But each time he had grown a little more insolent. Then, yesterday, both of them had gone together to speak to him.

Waits had returned alone to pull back the flap to their shelter and clumsily squatted on the bedrobes. “Strikes-in-Camp says he will take your gifts.”

Titus hadn’t been sure he’d heard the words correctly at first. So he asked, hesitantly, “Your brother said he would give you away to be my wife?”

Then she was smiling not just with her mouth, but with her whole face, flinging her body against his as the tears gushed down her cheeks. He wasn’t sure which of them cried more at that moment, but yesterday had lifted much of the gray pall that had settled about him since their arrival in Absaroka.

“But I don’t understand—he refused three times before,” Bass said, wagging his head, happy and confused all at once. “What made him—”

“I reminded him that you and I were already married in the way of our people, that we didn’t need any ceremony,” she told him, gripping one of his hands in both of hers while Magpie snuggled up next to them both. “Then I reminded him that you had no responsibility to ask anyone for me when I had no father.”

“What did he say?”

“He scolded me again that I should not have given myself to a white man.”

Bass gazed down at her belly, touched it, and said, “It’s a little late for that now.”

She grinned radiantly. “Then I told him you wanted to do your promising before my family, before all my people—whether or not he gave me to you.”

“You told him I was going to promise myself to you before all your people no matter if he was there or not?”

“Yes, I said those words to him.”

“That’s when he agreed?”

But she wagged her head. “No.”

“What made him decide?”

“Not until I told my brother that you were honoring him before all our people. You, the man he hated almost as much as any Blackfoot or Lakota warrior. You, the man he had no good words for. You were honoring him by coming before our whole village to offer him presents, to show our people that my brother was a man worthy of his respect. I told him that you would be showing our people that he was a man of true stature now, not just a young warrior trying to make a name for himself.”

“And?”

“I told him how important that would be in front of our village—to see you, a white warrior with many scars and many, many coups, honoring him by asking for me in marriage.”

“That’s what changed his mind?”

Nodding, Waits-by-the-Water said, “I think he finally realized that it would be an honor to have you in his family, a man who would offer him presents despite all the bad that he has spoken of you, all the bad he has wished on you.”

And now, before this hushed crowd, Bass stepped back to the second horse, carefully raising the rolled-up blanket of a brilliant medium blue he had tied across its back. He carefully unknotted two rawhide straps that secured the blanket to a single braided-horsehair surcingle lashed around the horse’s middle.

Stopping before Strikes-in-Camp, the white man said, “And this blanket is for your mother. I hope that it will keep Crane warm when you are away to fight the enemies who killed her husband, the enemies who killed your father.”

The warrior touched the blue blanket, laying his palm on it where it rested across Bass’s forearms. “It is a good color. My mother will like this blanket.”

As Strikes-in-Camp pulled the blanket roll from the white man’s arms, a rifle emerged from the tube of blue wool. The stunned warrior froze with the blanket draped over his forearm, staring at the rifle.

“What is this you hide in the giveaway blanket?” Strikes-in-Camp asked. “Another present for my mother?”

Bass smiled, swallowed, his mind scratching to recall those words he had practiced. “This rifle is for the brother of the woman I want to take for my wife. A rifle for the man who is the head of her family now. May it kill many of our enemies, Strikes-in-Camp. This rifle …” And he stopped, dragging a long-barreled pistol from the wide, worn belt he had buckled around his elkhide coat. “And this short gun too.”

“It … it too?” the warrior asked in surprise.

Nodding, Titus continued. “Both are gifts for a brother-in-law I honor today as a brave and fearless warrior who stands between his people and their enemies.”

Like Strikes-in-Camp, the crowd was stunned into silence.

Quickly passing the blanket back to a comrade, the young warrior first took the pistol, giving it a cursory inspection before he stuffed it into the wide, colorful finger-woven wool sash knotted around his blanket capote.

Then with both hands Strikes-in-Camp took the smoothbore fusil from Bass’s arms with something resembling reverence. Those more-than-twenty other members of the Sore Lip Society crowded in on both sides, murmuring in admiration, touching the musket’s freshly oiled barrel, its gleaming stock, the graceful curve of the goose-necked hammer that clutched a newly knapped sliver of amber flint.

Scratch grew anxious, standing there before the warrior, waiting for some words to be spoken, something to be done. Had he gotten all the words right? Oh, how he had practiced and practiced them—

Suddenly Strikes-in-Camp leveled his eyes at the white man. “These gifts … they are truly fit for the daughter of a chief.”

“He-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here was not a chief,” Bass struggled with the words, tongue-tied and nervous as a field mouse cornered by the barn cat, “but she is the sister of a man who will be a chief someday.”

The warrior’s dark eyes actually smiled at the white man. “You came here to honor me, Pote Ani. But in many ways you have honored my whole family. And you have brought honor to our people. The Absaroka are known not only by the strength of our enemies—the Blackfoot, the Blood, Gros Ventre, and Lakota … but we are known by the strength of our friends: the white men who stand with us to fight our enemies.”

Laying the new rifle in the crook of his left elbow, Strikes-in-Camp reached out and seized Bass’s forearm with his right hand, clutching it fiercely.

“Now I go to bring my mother to this place. Together we will bring my sister to you. So that there can be what you call the promising. So that she becomes your wife before all our people.”

Before Bass could respond, Strikes-in-Camp had turned and was moving back through the crowd that parted for him.

It truly felt as if it took forever, more than an hour—although he realized it was but a matter of minutes before he heard the admiring rustle washing his way through the crowd. Yard by yard he watched the hundreds move aside, every one of them falling silent but for their hushed whispers. Finally those members of the Sore Lips stepped aside. Through their ranks emerged Strikes-in-Camp. Behind him stood Crane. Beside her, Waits-by-the-Water.

Titus gasped at her beauty.

Both wore their very best. His wife wore a blue wool dress he did not recognize, something big enough to fit over her swollen belly. Front and back across its heavy yoke were sewn the milk teeth of the elk. Red strips of ribbon were tied across its skirt, each tassel blowing gently with the winter breeze. And Waits had smeared the deep-purple vermilion not only in the part of her gleaming hair, but in a wide band that ran from her hairline down her forehead, continued down the bridge of her nose, and ended at the bottom of her chin. Two more purple lines started at the bottom of her eyes, dropped across the high cheekbones, then ended at the jawbones.

Scratch found her radiance so stunning that he had to remind himself to breathe.

Strikes-in-Camp moved aside; then Crane brought her daughter forward. Now Strikes-in-Camp’s wife, Bright Wings, stepped up behind him, the brilliant oxblood blanket around her shoulders. From her arm she took the new blue blanket, handing it to her husband. Strikes-in-Camp passed it on to the white man. Together they unfurled it, and the two of them laid it across Crane’s shoulders as the old woman gazed up into the white man’s face and smiled, her eyes misting.

Scratch could not remember the last time he had seen her smile. It had been so long ago, before Whistler had led the revenge raid on the Blackfoot. Then he realized that until today Crane had had no reason to smile.

With her new blue blanket wrapped about her shoulders, Crane reached out, took hold of her daughter’s hand, and raised it waist level, presenting the hand to the white man.

Without any urging Bass seized Waits’s hand—not sure of a sudden if he would remember all that he wanted to tell her, all that he had rehearsed saying before her family and her people.

“Among the white man, when two people want to share their lives together, they stand before their families, stand before their friends, stand before a holy man in the sight of the First Maker … and they give promises to the one they love.

“These promises are not a simple thing the two can easily ignore or leave behind, because their promising is a bond that the friends and family hear them make.”

He felt his eyes starting to sting with tears.

“I do not have any family to join me today. You and our children are my only family. But I have friends among your people—friends I trust to stand at my back when we fight our enemies. From this day on I hope to have many more friends among the Crow.”

“Before your family, here before your people—I make this promise: that I will protect you, provide for you, shelter you from storm and cold and hunger until I am no more. This promise I will keep all of my days, even unto my final day. Our children will not know want, nor will they know fear. Instead, they will know the love of their family until they are grown and leave us to walk a road of their own making.”

He reached up with a roughened fingertip and gently wiped that first, lone tear spilling from one of her eyes. Bass wasn’t sure how to read the look in them—so filled with love were they at one moment, filled with surprise at his words the next.

“I promise myself to you all the rest of my days,” he concluded. “I will be your husband. Will you be my wife, the mother of my children?”

Then he noticed how she was clenching her bottom lip between her teeth.

When she finally spoke, Waits-by-the-Water whispered, “I will be your wife, Ti-tuzz. Mother of your children. For all of our days—”

And he felt her grip him with tremendous force as she quivered slightly.

, Concerned, he said, “Waits-by-the-Water?”

“I must go with my mother now—”

“Your mother?”

Reaching up to touch his face with her fingertips, Waits’s eyes softened, and she said, “The rush of warm water has come, bu^’a.” She looked down at her feet.

When he gazed at her moccasins below the edge of that blue wool dress, he saw the puddle softening the snow between her feet, how the moisture had soaked the bottom of her leggings and moccasins, how the pool of it steamed in the cold air.

“I promise you I will stand at your side for all the rest of your days,” she gasped, her face pinching as another cramp swept over her. Crane moved up to take her elbow, to steady her as Waits said, “But … your child will not wait any longer.”

“This one is so big!” the elderly Horse Woman announced as her bony fingers pushed, prodded, squeezed the belly.

Waits groaned from the ripping torment within, the stabbing of the fingers without.

“Sit up now, woman,” Horse Woman commanded.

Together Crane and the old midwife each pulled on an arm to bring Waits to a sitting position.

The old one asked, “Do you want to push?”

“Y-y-yes!” she gasped as the next fiery rush of pain crossed her belly. Crane pulled one arm, then the other, from the blue wool dress they had borrowed from a large family friend. It hung around her neck as she shuddered with the passing of that long tongue of fire coursing through the center of her.

She knew it would be soon. Her body shuddering with the easing of the contraction, Waits remembered when Magpie was born in that land far, far to the south. “Whwhere is Magpie?”

Crane explained, “She is with my sister’s family. I told her she will have a baby brother or sister to play with before the sun sets on another day.”

Growling with the flush of another fiery tensing, Waits blinked away some of the tears in her eyes and watched the old wrinkled woman crawl up close before her with a long stake in her hand, a hand-sized stone in the other. Horse Woman drove it into the bare ground inches from Waits’s knees, in front of the robe she had been sitting upon.

“Hold on to this,” the midwife demanded, taking both of the young woman’s wrists in her bony hands and yanking them away from the bare, swollen belly, pulling them toward the stake.

“Hold on—then you can push,” Crane added.

They pulled the blue dress up and off her head, then quickly draped an old, much-used blanket over her shoulders, stuffing part of it between her shaking legs, beneath her where spots of blood began to appear. Horse Woman and Crane both bent so low, their cheeks rubbed the floor of the lodge, peering between the young mother’s thighs.

“He comes!” Crane cried out in joy. “He comes now!”

Suddenly Waits was blowing like a horse after a long run as the pain rumbled through her like a swollen knot that grew bigger, ever bigger. Then she felt as if she were being torn in half and could not think of how she could save herself—

“Its head is here,” Horse Woman announced gruffly.

Waits was so faint, gasping with such shallow breaths, wondering how she could hold on to the stick any longer—

“You are almost done,” Crane cooed beside her daughter, her arm around her shoulders, whispering in her ear. “Remember Magpie. Remember that this will be over soon.”

“One more push,” Horse Woman demanded. She was hunched over between Waits-by-the-Water’s knees, crouching there with her hands supporting the newborn’s head. “One more—and this child will be here to see you.”

Starting to groan with the recognition of that next tensing, Waits felt the pain rise like a crack of far-off thunder within her, shoving its way into her throat like summer lightning before it pushed downward with a sudden clap. She was sure this huge child was ripping her apart as the fire became more than she could bear.

Shuddering, trembling, suddenly collapsing onto her bottom, Waits found she had no more strength left. This child would have to do the rest on its own—

The baby cried.

Blinking again, Waits swiped at her eyes swimming in tears, peering at the old midwife crouched between her knees. The gray head pulled back, the nearly toothless mouth grinned, the baggy eyes smiling anew. She held up the tiny squalling newborn, legs and arms pumping, its head thrashing side to side. Down its belly her eyes dropped quickly, finding that purplish white life cord attached to its belly.

Pushing the life cord aside, Horse Woman held the child up for the young mother’s close examination. “See, woman?”

Crane was sobbing, her face swimming into view through Waits’s tears. “You have a boy!”

Breathless, Waits whispered in a weary gush, “Ti-tuzz … has a boy.”