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.
