Emala squealed in delight and exclaimed, “Mr. King! The things that come out of your mouth. You are a caution.”
“He thinks he is,” Winona said. “But no, that is not it. We have decided to have a…what do you whites call it?” She puckered her brow. “Now I remember. A housewarming. All of us will bring food tomorrow afternoon to celebrate building the new cabin and to welcome the Worths to our valley. How does that sound?”
“I have ale I’ll bring,” Shakespeare offered.
“So long as you don’t drink too much,” Blue Water Woman said. “Remember how you become when you have had more than one.”
“Remind me.”
“You become frisky.”
“Me?”
“Very frisky.”
Emala squealed once more. “I swear. You folks talk as if you just fell in love.”
Shakespeare clasped Blue Water Woman’s hand and sank to one knee. “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, who is already sick and pale with grief, that thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.”
“Do you see what I must put up with?” Blue Water Woman said.
“O speak again, bright angel!”
“I think he’s adorable,” Emala gushed.
Blue Water Woman patted the top of McNair’s head. “You do not have to live with him day in and day out.”
“Ouch,” Shakespeare said.
Nate chuckled and walked toward the lake. Halfway there he acquired a shapely shadow.
“Leaving without your horse?” Winona asked.
Nate held up his encrusted hands. “I need to wash up and then we can go.”
“Any regrets about inviting the Worths to our valley?”
“Why would you ask a thing like that? They’re good people. They’ll make good neighbors.”
“I remember you saying once that this valley was ours and ours alone. Yet you allowed the Nansusequas to stay and now you have allowed the Worths to move here, too.” Winona rose onto the tips of her toes and kissed him on his chin. “You would make a fine
“I thought I already was. Your people adopted me into the tribe years ago.”
“I stand corrected,” Winona said, taking his arm. “You are right, though. They are good people. I hope the next family will be just as good.”
“Next?” Nate said, and stopped. “Whoa there, silly goose. The Worths are the last. There will be no more after them.” He’d never intended for anyone other than his family and Shakespeare and Blue Water Woman to settle there. It was to be their haven, their sanctuary, so far into the mountains that they would never be intruded upon.
“So you say,” Winona teased.
“Straight tongue,” Nate said. “From here on out, no one comes through that pass without my say-so.”
“What will you do? Put up a sign?”
Nate hadn’t thought of that but now that he did, he said, “I’ll have one up by the end of the week. A warning to trespassers to keep out, that this valley is spoken for.”
“It is a big valley.”
Indeed it was. Nate scanned the sun-washed lofty mountains, the ranks of emerald forest, the expanse of blue lake dotted by meandering waterfowl. “A hundred homesteaders could live here comfortably.”
“But you will not let them.”
“I will not.”
“I don’t know, husband,” Winona said uncertainly. “I foresee trouble for us down the road, as you whites would say.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, as us whites would say,” Nate retorted. Sliding his arms around her waist, he kissed her on the forehead. “We have a right to protect our own and this valley is ours. We found it. We claimed it. We settled it. If I could, I would register our claim with the government so that it was legal, but I can’t because there
“White ways have long puzzled me,” Winona confessed. “Your people think of land differently from my people. We do not own it in the way whites like to. In our eyes the land is for everyone to use.”
“Not to whites and not this valley,” Nate stressed. “I grant you we look at it differently. But I can’t let folks come waltzing in here as they please or pretty soon we’ll have a whole settlement and be up to our armpits in people and rules and laws and I won’t have that. Civilization ends at the Mississippi River. I, for one, am glad it does.”
Winona nodded. She had heard all this before. “How far are you willing to go to keep this valley ours?”
“As far as I need to.”
“You would kill to keep people out?”
Nate shrugged. “Like I said, dear heart, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“You are being evasive.”
“I’m being honest. No, I don’t want to kill. But I will keep this valley ours no matter what it takes.”
“There is much more wilderness, you know,” Winona mentioned. “Many thousands of your miles. Enough for everyone.”
Nate placed his chin on the top of her head and gazed at a pair of geese out on the lake. “I wish you were right. But you don’t know my people like I do. They are never happy with what they have. They always have to have more. They’ve pushed from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and have so overrun the land that it won’t be long before they push past it. It will be like a dam bursting. Whites will spill across the prairie and into these mountains until there will barely be breathing space.”
“You exaggerate, surely.”
Nate drew back and looked into her eyes. “I wish I did. I wish I could make you see. Trust me on this. A time will come, maybe in our lifetimes, when my people will want all this land for their own.”
“And what of my people? What of the other tribes?”
“My people will do to them as they did to the tribes back East. They’ll exterminate them or make them live where the tribes do not want to live.”
Winona did not hide how troubled she was. “You have rarely been wrong about anything, but I hope you are wrong about this. For if what you say is true, blood will be spilled.”
“There will be blood,” Nate agreed. He hugged her close and she clasped him tighter and they stood a while with the sun warm on their faces and the breeze in their hair and a robin warbling in the woods.
That night Nate lay on his back in their bed with Winona’s cheek on his chest and was unable to get to sleep. He was troubled by their talk. He had a feeling, a sense he could not account for, of trouble looming on their horizon. He tried to blame it on nerves, but he knew better. Life was what it was, at times peaceful and wonderful and at times violent and savage. They could ward off the ugly aspects but they couldn’t hold those aspects at bay indefinitely. Life wouldn’t let them. When people least expected, life slammed them to the ground and ripped at them with claws of strife and misery.
There was a passage in the Bible that Nate had always liked, about how God sent his rain on the just and the unjust. Which was as it should be, Nate supposed, but not much comfort to those being rained on. Because it wasn’t just rain. It was death and disease and hurt and slaughter and the many sorrows the human soul had to endure.
Nate stared at the ceiling. If he lived to be a hundred, he doubted he would savvy why people had to suffer. The best he could do was protect his family so they suffered as little as possible.
With that in mind, he dozed off.
The next morning dawned clear. The lake was a brilliant blue in a world of lush green. Nate dipped their
