Every piece of it had walked, in its own time, all the way into the lodge: the
choosing, the confession, the gulch, the paper, the cold. Nothing of it was
still out on the road. A dream, she said, is a visitor who comes a long way on
foot. Hers had come in out of the weather at last, and was sitting by the fire,
and could be fed.
Waneka translated nothing. She did not need to. Micah kept his eyes on the
fire, in the way of a man who does not want an old woman to see what her
words have cost him and given him in the same breath, and Seeka — who
missed nothing that had ever happened within a mile of her fire — allowed
him the courtesy of pretending.
The ceremony was completed in the spring, when the cottonwoods along the
river put out their first leaves and the melt water ran cloudy and fast and full
of light.
The circle was formed again as it had been formed in the autumn, on the
same ground under the same trees, but everything in it had changed its
meaning. The allied camps had returned, and their fires made a second ring
beyond the first. The gift horses were led through the open ground with
ribbons in their manes. The agency's clerk sat at the edge of the circle with
his record book on his knees, invited and welcome, because this record too
would be kept in both worlds. And Micah stood in the circle not as an
accident this time, not as a dusty interruption with his empty hands raised
and a lost horse for his excuse, but as a question that had been asked in that
place and answered there, in full, before witnesses — almost. There was one
85
answer left, and it was not his to give.
Chief Tavio rose, and the circle settled the way deep water settles. He put the
bride's question to Waneka in the form her people kept for it, the form that
made it not a preference but a choosing, spoken where it could be
remembered: whose hands will hold her lodge through winter?
Waneka crossed the open ground as she had crossed it in the autumn,
unhurried, with the whole gathering watching and the children quiet against
their mothers. She stopped facing the circle — facing, Micah understood, not
him: the record. She answered first in the tongue of the valley, so that the
camps would hear it in the language it belonged to and carry it home
correctly. Then she turned a little, toward the clerk and the agency men, and
gave it again in English, clear as spring water, so that no paper anywhere
would ever get it wrong.
She named him by the name the band had made for him.
Empty Hands.
Seeka rose then, an old woman in the spring of the year, and spoke the
meaning of the name into the record the way it had been agreed the record
should have it, and the interpreter at the clerk's shoulder rendered it into
English line by line, and Micah heard his own name explained in two
languages and understood it in both. He came with nothing in his hands,
Seeka said. No boasts laid out like trade goods. No gifts to buy his welcome.
No hidden blood — what ran in him, he had stood in this circle and spoken
aloud, though it would have been easier, and safer, and more profitable to
bury it, and the circle remembered that he had not buried it. A man whose
hands are empty, she said, can be trusted to fill them with work. That was the
whole of the name. It was not a small name. It was a name with a winter in it,
86
and a lodge, and a lifetime's employment.
Micah stood in the first leaf shade with his hat in his hands and thought about
the question that had changed his life.
It had not been the choosing. It had not been the council's judgment, nor the
commissioner's paper, nor the captain's voice in the agency yard reading his
name back to him out of the Army's own book. It had been the first question
he had ever answered truthfully in front of witnesses — asked of him at this
fire, in the autumn, by an old chief who had known the answer before he
asked it and had only needed Micah to say it where it could be remembered.
Whose blood runs in you? And will you hide it? He had said whose. He had
said he would not hide it. Everything since had been that answer, arriving —
in council fires and hearing rooms, at a surveyor's chain and an agency fence,
in a confession spoken by another man who had learned the trick of it — the
way Seeka's dream had arrived: a long way on foot, in its own time, refusing
to be hurried and refusing to be stopped. He expected to go on answering it
every winter of his life. He found, standing in the green shade with the river
running loud behind the trees, that he was glad of the prospect. Beside this
fire. In both tongues. With his hands where everyone could see them.
The smoke of the ceremony fire went up straight into the still spring air, in a
column as plumb as a surveyor's line, above the cottonwoods in their first
leaf and the river keeping its name below.
And Micah's hands — scarred across the knuckles, emptied long since of
everything but a guilt that had been confessed and answered and set down in
three separate records — were full at last of the work of the lodge. Waneka's
hand was in one of them, warm and certain, her fingers closed around his like
a thing decided. And in the other, held out to Pahket so the boy could inspect
his own handiwork and be properly judged for it, was the sleeve of the
87
buckskin shirt the boy had dressed for him — and sewn onto it, crooked and
perfect, stitch by uneven stitch, were his old sergeant's chevrons: the stripes
he would have to earn again in some other service, already begun.
88