child burst into a hair-raising squall. With the child’s cry Sam suddenly released the pressure she had on his hand and let out a great sigh. Seamus looked down as she collapsed back against the pillows, panting openmouthed like never before, her eyes clenched shut, tears streaming from their corners. It seemed everything had suddenly gone out of her. He felt queasy in that moment, afraid like never before that she might not have the strength to see this through. All these hours of labor. And now it must surely be early morning … after all that work.
“It’s a boy!”
He jerked around, wide-eyed as a mule on a narrow trail, staring at what Elizabeth Burt cradled in her arms. Seeing that dark glob of hair plastered against the strange little creature’s head, its face all pinched and red, streaked with white lather and gobbed with blood. Mrs. Burt shifted the child in her forearms there between Sam’s knees as Nettie Capron came to the side of the bed with a small blanket draped over her arms to receive the child.
“A b-boy?” Sam asked, trying to lift herself up to see, then tearing her eyes from the child for but a moment as they flicked into Seamus’s—as if asking for his approval.
“Boy?” he repeated, his lips barely moving, practically no sound escaping from his lips.
“You’re a father, Mr. Donegan!” Elizabeth Burt congratulated as she laid the newborn across Mrs. Capron’s arms, then went back to work between Sam’s legs, milking the umbilical cord toward the child. That done, the women tied a wrap of sewing thread around and around the cord two inches from the infant’s body, then knotted it off.
In amazement at it all, Seamus watched Martha Luhn snip the purple cord with a pair of scissors.
Only then did Nettie Capron straighten, shuffle back the tiny blanket from the face, and scoot down the side of the bed to lay the bundle within Sam’s arms.
“Is he …,” Samantha started to ask.
“Is he all right?” Elizabeth Burt repeated, still at work there between the knees. “Of course he is, Sam. He’s just fine. Got all the right equipment, if that’s what you mean. All his fingers and toes. Everything else. Just one thing.”
“W-what?” Seamus asked in a gasp, twisting about suddenly, frightened at the sound of that.
The child began to squall, high-pitched and rhythmic, like nothing he had ever heard before. Now he was worried. Truly worried.
“Don’t know what his folks are going to do,” Elizabeth said gravely, but a smile betrayed her face, eyes twinkling, “seeing how he’s come out about as homely as his father.”
With a reassuring gush all three midwives chuckled at that and went back to their duties at the foot of the bed as Seamus bent low, helping Sam tug the blanket back from the child’s face all the more.
“Lemme have a look, Sam,” he whispered as he planted another kiss on her lips glistening with her tears.
He straightened slightly and began to slowly peel back the folds of the blanket. Beneath it lay the red, squealing, wriggling child—all arms and legs and mouth. The child clenched his eyes in that crimson face as he bellowed in protest.
“It’s a boy, Sam,” he cried, sensing his own tears begin to sting his eyes.
“Yes!” Elizabeth Burt exclaimed with genuine joy as she gathered more of the bloody sheets into her arms and passed them on to Nettie Capron. “Just listen to the set of lungs this’un has! My, my—never have I ever heard such caterwauling!”
Seamus repeated over and over, almost unbelieving how beautiful such a tiny creature could be, “A boy, Sam. A b-boy!”
Tears welled from his eyes now, his lower lip quivering as it never had before, even as it had in those last few minutes of bachelorhood before he stepped beneath that sheltering oak tree in Sharp Grover’s yard near the Texas panhandle country, prepared to take this woman to his side forevermore.
She asked him, “You approve, Seamus?”
“Oh, yes—yes! A girl, a boy,” he answered in a rush, leaning over to kiss the tiny infant’s wrinkled forehead, gently brushing that thick crop of hair with his lips. “Anything—long as you both made it through, Sam.”
“We made it through,” she whimpered wearily beneath him, her eyes thickly pooling with tears, her lips smiling as she cried in joy. “We both made it through just fine.”
“He’s beautiful,” Seamus explained as he glanced up at the three midwives. “Don’t you think he’s just about the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
“Yes, he certainly is at that, Mr. Donegan,” Elizabeth Burt said, still at work there at the foot of the bed. “And if I know anything about his father, Sam: I’ll bet that little one is going to be a real hellion before you know it!”
Chapter 2
Moon When the Leaves Fall
Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa called him “Big Leggings.”
Among the white man he carried the name Johnny Bruguier.
And ever since the last days of summer Johnny had been running from the whites. They wanted to hang him for murder.
In the crisp chill of autumn Bruguier stirred the fire before him at the center of the huge lodge he shared with Sitting Bull’s family. The old man and everyone else still slept this morning, exhausted from yesterday’s crossing of the Elk River.*
But Johnny could not sleep. It had been like this nearly every night since he’d fled the Standing Rock Agency,† Each time he closed his eyes the nightmares returned to haunt him. He awoke in a sweat. Afraid to close his eyes, afraid of those awful dreams, he instead sat up and tended the fire through much of the night, thinking. Brooding on all manner of things. Mostly on the white men who would hang him. And hating his mother for hooking up with a drunken white trader at the agency more than two decades ago.
Life had been tough for a half-breed at Standing Rock. So many times while he was growing up had he felt pushed outside the Hunkpapa band. At the same time the whites closed their arms and cloaked their hearts to him. He damned his mother for choosing to bed down with a white man, damned her for ever giving birth to him. Damned himself especially now, for the way things had turned out at Standing Rock.
Because of his two bloods, Johnny was brought up knowing both languages. His mother knew some English, more than enough to cuss like the agency employees and the white teamsters who came and went. Likewise, his French-Canadian father knew enough Lakota to sweet-talk the agency Sioux out of most everything they owned, in trade for a handful of blue glass beads or a tin cup of whiskey, which the man had buried among his stores of treasures.
Able to speak both tongues, but feeling at home in neither world, Bruguier had reluctantly attempted to make a home for himself there at Standing Rock for the last few winters. He was one of the agent’s three interpreters—at least that had been his life until he’d rubbed up against the wrong white man.
The one with the eyes so cold, he figured the man was already one of the “walking dead.” No emotion had shown in those icy eyes, until a young woman had walked into the trader’s store one late December afternoon. On such winter days most of the agency employees sat by the iron stove, whittling, telling stories, sharpening knives, drinking if they had pay coming on account.
This morning Johnny could feel the sweet tang of winter coming again to the high plains. The sharp teeth of winter were closing in upon them. His fire felt especially good this morning before the sun rose, as he remembered last winter. Remembered the woman. And the one with the walking dead eyes.
To the white men it would have been nothing more than an argument over a woman. Those things happened in that world. Among the Lakota, it had been a matter of the young woman’s honor. How the white man had shamed her and defiled her when she’d nervously walked into the trader’s store with her grandmother that cold winter afternoon almost a year gone now. No one else was going to tell the white man to take his hand off the
