Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 55

The hut needed finishing, and they had to hurry up. Pretty soon Ellen’s Man’s wife would have to go in it, from the looks of things. You could see the baby was having a hard time waiting. At least that was what her mother told her, pointing to the woman’s belly. It sagged so she had to hold it up. It forced her to arch her back and spraddle her legs out for balance when she stretched to lash the willow branches into the domed roof. When the others chattered at her to watch out she didn’t start things happening, Ellen’s Man’s wife scolded them for wasting strength talking. They all should hurry up and get this done.

“We’re coming!” someone said. “We’re coming! How come you didn’t do this long time ago, when you first knew it? You laid around long enough to get this way. How come you didn’t get up and get this hut going? You knew you’d be wanting it.”

Ellen’s Man’s wife threw down the branch she was stripping and glared hard at them until they all laughed. They knew she couldn’t do any hut building till they got back down here to Keintpoos’ old camp.

“Don’t worry!” they said. “We won’t let you down.”

The girl thought to herself: It was nice to watch them work, to see the little house take shape. It was good, when she tried to join in, that they didn’t run her off the way they used to when she was little. Good, too, to go off alone to the riverbank and slide down to the willows, take the knife to them and toss the sticks up the hill to where she could bundle them to carry back to the women. “Come with me, Willow,” she said. “Make us a place to be a woman in.” The women nodded to her where to put down her load of greening branches. It made her feel good to watch their brown hands weave the withes together, like it was their hands weaving not just the hut but the day.

As they worked, the gossip flew about among them.

Whose husband had cut up a deer in the wood? someone wanted to know, and by that spoiled the snares.

“Whose?” they agreed.

Hadn’t they heard about it?

“Not Kéis this time!” someone joked. “Not Rattlesnake! Can’t blame him!” The one who said it laughed at the idea.

“No!” another exclaimed. “I think it was Whim done it.”

“Then we’ll know it! He’ll be down to only two teeth!” The woman let go of the willow branch she was weaving into the roof ribbing and held out two fingers, like fangs, in front of her lips.

They laughed together then, everyone, including her mother.

“Tomorrow, when his wife shows up here, we’ll ask her! Maybe this time he’ll admit it!”

“She should have been here today, working, like us. Then we wouldn’t have to wonder.”

This would be her own hut, too, the girl figured, in the time that lay ahead. With pride she checked each day now to see how her breasts were coming along. At first she had not believed it was happening to her, the twin swellings. She had wondered whether anyone else would even notice that she was changing. But her mother had put away her doubts about that when she came up behind her, folded her arms around her with her crossed hands sheltering each one a budding breast.

“Time soon,” her mother had whispered so no one else could hear.

So this was the hut she would stay in for those days, this new one the women were calling forth from the willows she was bringing. They had found the old one torn down when they came back into the Lost River camp and dumped the stuff they were carrying. All the willow and reed houses had gone down -- under the hands of the settlers, the men had said. Her uncle prodded them to get at the rebuilding. But this little house came first, the women insisted. Ellen’s Man’s wife’s baby wasn’t going to wait much longer. And practically every other woman in the camp, except the old grandmothers, would need it every month for her time apart.

The matting was handed up and secured in place for the roofing.

“Who told old woman Koalákaka she could say whether the betrothal gifts were enough? Isn’t that up to her son and daughter-in-law?”

“Since when did grandmothers get chosen to decide these things?”

“Since Koalákaka’s daughter had a baby!” someone said, and again the laughter spurted.

The girl felt her face flush when she thought that for her this was going to be the place, and they had let her help build it. When she stayed here alone that first time, she would not be afraid. She would be able to see the marks of her knife on the butt-ends of the willows where she had been allowed to cut them for the women. She would feel the same pride then that she felt this morning at the woman that was swelling within her.