Chapter Nineteen Osage Nation—January 2, 1894
Chapter Nineteen
a week later
And so the fog stretched from one tree to another.
” Niabi adjusted her satchel on her shoulder as we wandered to the creek bottoms, harvesting the woodland for tonics and salves.
“It was pitch-black but for moonglow,” she continued her story, “and that disturbing noise kept echoing through the blackjacks, like the scream of a barn owl but more haunting.”
A labyrinth of willow roots grasped ahold of the slope.
Niabi’s hound Drowsy darted through the canopy of frail brown boughs, and we climbed the crumbling dirt.
After Stot and I had galloped over this morning, he’d gone off with Wa-ah-zho, handing him a farmer’s almanac and seed catalog, flipping to a woodcut illustration of sweet peas.
They would chat for hours about how to mark seasons and cycles, both intrigued by how the other approached crops.
Niabi and I climbed to a bald on a high bluff, and I showed her how I breathed through a shot.
Don’t shoot with your lungs dancing, I told her.
With her horse, I taught her a few simple commands that built trust with her mare.
I was still reconciling all that she’d shown me.
Unsure what to do—what I could do. The past haunted, messy and full of violence.
I didn’t like the history, or my part in it.
We wandered the forest, Niabi sharing how she foraged for willow bark. “What happened?” I asked, about the haunting sounds.
Niabi crouched. “I suppose I’m about to stumble upon some mystical doorway to my future or past.” She shook her head, her beaded earrings swaying. “And guess what I found? Right here, under this tree.”
I lowered beside her. “Please tell me you found a doorway to someplace else?”
“I did not.” She took a dagger from her satchel. “My nephews, the ones I’d tucked into bed hours before, slunk through the shadows and haze, blowing reeds, pretending to be ghosts.”
I laughed. “No.”
“Oh, for sure.”
She ran her palm up the trunk, the fan of lines of her tattoo centered on her hand. “Right here,” she said, “the willow is alive. See if you can feel her heart.”
I rubbed my palms over the bark, the hollow caverns and bristly hairs scratching my skin.
“We do not take from the heart of the tree. You must honor the tree and do no harm.” Niabi brushed the wispy twigs, daylight seeping in to glow on her raspberry-red blouse. “In the spring, scrape the branch here to the green.”
Niabi told that the willow symbolized everlasting life, and the bark healed headaches, stomach pains, and the rambling pound of a wayward mind.
I grazed the backs of my fingers along the wispy branches.
I found rejuvenation in their swaying limbs.
And hysteria, which had plagued women for ages past, could be eased by its bark.
Niabi tucked her chin into her blanket cloak and shivered dramatically. “Let’s warm by the fire. You must update me on all the homesteader gossip.”
Back inside her lodge, I scooped out a palmful of chopped willow from Niabi’s turquoise and flax woven pouch, then tipped the bark in a mug. She poured hot water over the tea, the smell acrid in the winter air.
“You’re quiet today,” Niabi said.
“I’m mostly quiet.”
A meadow of dried wildflowers hung from the hickory rafters. The once-vivid overtones now muted to the calmer hues of winter’s rest.
“Nothing about you is quiet.” Niabi untied a sprig and handed it to me, a bushy stem with a flat moon of white flowers. “Your essence is bold.”
“Yours too.”
“I know.” She hopped onto a stool. “You do not speak of your sister. You quarreled?”
Niabi often bantered with her sisters, their teasing full of verve and laughter and that familiarity of a lifetime of loving each other.
My relationship with Magnolia had none of that vitality now—it was something abandoned, something that haunted.
Magnolia continued on back in Kansas, comfortable in her little safe haven, our betrayals forever mounting and hovering, dense shadows that just wouldn’t flee.
“There’s no possibility for reconciliation,” I said.
“So now you’re creating something new, here on the frontier.”
I nodded and pressed a tiny petal in the cluster of many blooms. It was coarse and springy. “Oh.” I tucked the stem in the crook of my arm and dug a package from my pocket. “I have a Yuletide present for you.”
I laid the tile in Niabi’s hands, the painting wrapped in an Irish linen handkerchief. Her thumb rubbed across the needlepoint: a field of violets embroidered by my grandmother.
I held my elbows against my side. “It’s just our custom.”
“What are we but our customs?” Niabi said.
She untied the bundle to reveal a ceramic square, the slippery material blasting with a multihued sunrise streaking above the soft curves of the earth. Niabi studied the tile, her fingers shivering over the wayward pigments.
I adjusted my hatpin. “It’s just a splash of color on stone.”
“Don’t make it less.” Niabi looked up, the tile held to her chest. “This painting seems to contain whispers.”
I’d splattered flecks of golden paint throughout the grass. As if lightning bugs lit the prairie. It was as if the glow of sunshine had fallen onto my land and yet—was I now painting voices?
The afternoon smelt of distance and butter, of fry bread and black coffee. Niabi held out a hand. “Do you hear the voice of Earth Mother?”
I shook my head, felt as if all the blood within me drained out. Well, certainly not. That was absurd. “No, of course not.”
I swallowed and gestured with the stem. “Yarrow?” I’d woven yarrow into crowns before, laid the circlets under pillows, a wish for health and happiness.
Niabi flicked her gaze back and forth between my eyes, then turned.
She propped the tile on a shelf and grabbed an oval of paprika-hued dried flowers.
“Some call this plant Thousand Starlight. We find them in sunglow, their thousands of tiny flowers open to the day.” Niabi crushed the flower, the blooms like crumbled Yuletide velvet.
“They’re stronger fresh, in springtime.” She moved her shoulders in something like a shrug, her long black hair swaying.
“But dried, in winter, they’re still powerful. ”
I snapped off my bloom, the white clusters like a foam of nighttime clouds.
It smelt faintly of pepper and spice. Niabi told me to crush them.
I smashed the blooms in my palm, then tipped the blossoms into a red oak bowl.
She pulled a puff of eagle down from a rawhide container on the shelf.
Niabi stirred the airy gray whirl in with the crushed petals, then lifted the mixture onto her fingers.
“Smear this poultice onto a bleeding wound. The blood will stop.”
I rubbed the chalky, brittle mixture between my fingers. “And if I don’t have any eagle down?”
“Cotton. Sumac scrapings.” She fiddled with the ends of her hair. “Fur.”
I touched the blossom. To heal oneself, one needed flowers and trees, fragments of the earth. “But always Thousand Starlight?”
“You can also stab the stem into the gash.” She fluttered her fingers. “Light it on fire.”
“Light the flower. On fire.”
Niabi grinned.
I motioned packing a wound. “And then press on ground petals and eagle down.”
She nodded, and her smile turned wicked. “I like the fire.”
I laughed. “You would.”
She handed me the pot and pestle with the crushed white blossom, rubbed her nose. “Grind.”
I ground, and Niabi placed her hands atop mine, adjusting the angle of the pestle.
It was warm in her lodge, the sounds of others faraway.
I mixed a pull of down into my bowl and held out my poultice.
Niabi nodded and handed me my mug, the boiling water now frothy, lukewarm tea.
I sat on the braided rug and curled my feet beneath my thighs.
I stirred in some honeycomb and gulped the tea.
The willow bark tasted sharp and harsh. It felt brutal to hope—that the marigold-hued liquid swirling round the cup could soothe my chipped and broken pieces.
Niabi grabbed a reed basket with some beads and ribbons for her finger weaving, tom-toms rattling beyond the fabric of her lodge.
“Once there was a happy and peaceful tribe.” She told of a tribe falling under the spell of a strange illness.
Too weak to climb the hills, the medicine woman sent her granddaughter in search of a healing plant.
“Did the girl find the herb?” I asked.
She picked up a red bead, looked down at the weaving in her hands. This was the power of story: It broke through skin and bone. This story, like all stories, was alive.
“The girl was ill,” Niabi said, as she flicked the red and yellow ribbons, “and very weak.” In her tale, the girl struggled up the hills and came upon the habitat of the flower.
But it was dark, and the girl could not see.
She searched and searched, but the girl couldn’t find the plant.
She knelt and cried out in despair to Wah’Kon-Tah.
“Wah’Kon-Tah?”
“You don’t know Wah’Kon-Tah?” She lowered her weaving, her straight black brows pulled together.
“Wah’Kon-Tah brings everything into existence.
The sky above, the earth below, the cosmos beyond.
There are many opposites.” Niabi gestured with her hands.
“Earth, sky. Night, day. Sun, moon. Destruction, life. Birth, death. Woman, man. All things have meaning and purpose.”
“Even destruction and death?”
“Of course.” She cocked her head. “Your people find no meaning in destruction?”
“It just brings pain.”
From beyond her lodge, I heard women singing. “And there’s no purpose to pain?” Niabi laced a bead onto a ribbon.
I leaned against the pillows and sipped tea. Perhaps that was the question: Could someone grow stronger without having to endure trials?
“Life is but cycles and seasons,” Niabi said. “Birth in spring, death in winter. Nothing is forever.” She lifted the ribbon to her mouth, wet a fraying thread. “All will die. Survival depends on the blessing of Wah’Kon-Tah.”
“So everything is meaningless?”
She tucked a length of hair behind her ear. “No, everything has meaning.”
“What about chaos? Does that have meaning—”
“Stop.” Niabi laughed, patted the air with her palms. “Just let me tell the story.”
“So the girl was in agony, lost and in despair, calling out to Wah’Kon-Tah?” Niabi slipped back into the story. “In the sky, the stars seemed brighter and brighter.” Niabi spread her hands. “Until the stars exploded.
“As the light fragments fell,” Niabi told, “they landed on the ferny-leaved plant the girl searched for. The medicine woman was pleased that her granddaughter had found the right plant, but she was amazed at the thousands of tiny lights clinging to the blossoms.”
“The tale of yarrow,” I realized. “Of a thousand petals dripping with starlight.”
Niabi leaned against a pillow, spun tea round in her mug. “From that time Thousand Starlight has had clusters of white blossoms.”
How beautiful, to find creation in chaos.
I didn’t know what I thought of mystical, undefinable forces pulling and pulling on the world.
The inexplicable voices on my land haunted me.
Sometimes it was as if I’d stumbled into an old tale and chanced upon the sort of grand magic found in faerie stories.
But then the sun rose, and I felt foolish.
Unlike Niabi, I didn’t see balance and order.
I only saw those many blooms hanging from her rafters, blurry and browned in death.