Michael Blake - The Holy Road

The girl on the railing watched, spellbound, as Axel closed his eyes to all distraction and let his fingers search out the treasured cache. Stays Quiet didn't see the marbles when Axel first drew them out in a cupped hand. But when he opened his fingers and let the perfectly round, multi-colored stones dribble onto the dirt inside the circle, Stands With A Fist's daughter fell into a trance that pulled her along the porch and down the steps to Axel's side. There she stood, her light, hazel eyes drifting from one magical sphere to another as Axel tucked his shooter into the crook of his thumb and scanned the playing field for the most promising opportunity.

Settling on a nearby cat's-eye, Axel crouched low, bounced his eyes from target to shooter several times, and fired. The shooter sped across the pancaked ground, made a loud pop as it impacted, and sent the larger marble rolling out of the circle and into the nearby rough.

Axel cried out. Stays Quiet clapped her hands and, in a few bounds, located the marble. She lifted it gingerly out of the grass, stared at it in a brief spasm of awe, bounded track to Axel, and placed it in his yawning palm.

Stands With A Fist was now standing at the rail, and as she watched Axel ready himself for the next shot, the moron's concentration was suddenly broken. He lifted his eyes to the girl standing next to him. Then he glanced at the shooter wedged against his thumb, plucked it daintily away, and offered it to Stays Quiet.

For the first time since her capture, Stands With A Fist's soul was invaded by a good feeling as Axel positioned the girl next to him, tenderly fixed the marble against her thumb, and generously provided his expertise in the selection of the most likely target. Though Stays Quiet's first attempt skipped across the circle without hitting anything, Axel yelped happily and stroked the girl's shoulder as if she were a puppy.

The rest of the afternoon transpired without incident. Stands With A Fist sat stoically on the porch while the two competitors below her who proved to be quite evenly matched, played game after game, each contest conducted with a joy that made winning and losing irrelevant.

From then on, Axel didn't miss a day, often waking in the dark to walk the miles that separated him from Stands With A Fist and Stays Quiet. He was always at their side and one look at the contented three-some, whether at work or play, suggested a familiarity that might have spanned years rather than days.

The Gunthers watched all this with pleasure, for even the most careless observer could have detected a bond between the disabled man, the former captive, and her child. In a sense it was better than a marriage, the arrangement of which would have taxed the family's skimpy reserve of emotional energy.

Without the rigors of public sanction, a family unit had been created and the effect on Christine's kin was evident. The coming of Axel Strunk seemed to sedate the Gunthers' wild charge and the family dropped most of its efforts at rehabilitation to let her life follow its languid, routine course of eating and sleeping and work and play.

Everyone was happy except Stands With A Fist, but true to the form that made her captivity bearable, she kept her feelings hidden from all but Stays Quiet. When the key turned in the lock at twilight, they invariably sat together at the west-facing window, watching the sun make its fiery exit.

In the terrible days following their arrival in Jacksboro she had explained to her daughter the purpose of the ritual. The same sun was shining somewhere on her sister, brother and father, and it was important to wish them good dreaming each twilight. In that way their family could stay together.

Stays Quiet often asked her mother when Dances With Wolves would come and get them, and her response was always the same.

"He'll come, little girl," she would whisper.

"Tomorrow?"

"Maybe tomorrow."

Then she would stare out the window, wondering if her hopes were foolish. Sometimes she thought he might be dead or too badly wounded to ever come. But she never indulged despair for long, and as darkness descended at the wane of day, she would close her eyes and imagine her family whole once more.

The valley was long and flat, broken occasionally by oak trees in various stages of growth and a few stunted mesquites. It was covered with tawny grass a few inches high. Etched along its center were the twin depressions set close together that indicated a white man road. Scouts had crept down the night the main war party reached the area and, after close inspection, pronounced the road frequently and heavily used.

Hills rose like shoulders on each side of the valley and it was on the westernmost of these, on the upper slopes overgrown with ash and scrub oak and sumac, that the great party of Comanche and Kiowa warriors awaited their prey.

Just after sunrise, scouts had come in from the east to report that white men had taken the road and were coming their way. A council was immediately convened. The admonitions of Owl Prophet were remembered and it was decided that the,very small party of soldiers and one wagon would be allowed to pass unmolested, while a fresh group of scouts was sent east once again with orders to look for the next white people that might be coming along.

The whites who had been spotted, though they were to be granted life, would be passing very close, and this prospect of proximity to the enemy stirred the warriors. All of them, trained from birth to risk their lives in battle, were aware of the end of existence, and for some the moments they were living now would be their last.

Who might fall could not be known, but it was likely that some of the younger men would not come home. Young men were often foolish. They wanted honors and they wanted to impress young women. They weren't afraid of death, but few, if any, thought they would be killed. They were teenagers who had ridden on few raids and the finality of life was an abstract idea to them. Youth had ordained them bulletproof.

Yet in each there was a mysterious trembling that often led them into peril. The trembling made for an odd sort of giddiness that none was able to confront. They had to ignore the fear rattling up and down their bodies, because those who paid fear too much attention were sure to die. Every boy marshaled his fighting spirit in hope that he might survive.

For men like Wind In His Hair and Iron Jacket and White Bear, men who had fought the enemy a hundred times and survived, the emotions were much the same, though years of combat in every imaginable circumstance had reduced the mysterious trembling they felt before battle to a barely perceptible palpitation. Experience had taught them that the death they courted with every engagement was a thing so sudden and random that to fear it was an unaffordable indulgence.

The responsibilities of people like Left Hand and Whirlwind and Hears The Sunrise and Little Raven, distinguished warriors who had lived to see middle age, left no room for contemplating mortality. They would be charged with seeing to the execution of strategies, to rallying young men at decisive moments, and to fighting a delaying action in the event of a retreat.

At mid-morning the little covered wagon with a red cross first came into view. Half a dozen mounted soldiers were escorting the wagon and it was only through the repeated admonitions of leading warriors that the young men were held in check.

Still, it was something of a miracle that the temptation of the single wagon and its insignificant escort was avoided. All the white men would have died within minutes and in less time than it takes to skin a rabbit their scalps would have been waving from the coupsticks and lances of warriors. But the whites passed in full view, the creak of wheels, the snorting of horses and casual human utterances all clearly heard in the self imposed silence along the wooded slopes of the hill.