Two in the Field Read online

  Nodding as if having made a satisfactory diagnosis, he gathered up a bundle of my stuff, walked over to Mr. P., whose ears pricked up nervously as he approached but otherwise made no objection as he mounted with an upswing of his stubby leg. I had the grudging thought that he and Mr. P. looked in proper proportion. He said something to me—did he really think I understood a damn word of it?—and rode away.

  The sun was coming up and he’d left me to die.

  I drifted off into yellow, splashy fever dreams.

  When I woke again, I discovered that he was back. He’d constructed a sunshade by tying my bedroll and a burr-encrusted, horrible-smelling blue blanket between two willow saplings. The prairie was broiling in the midday heat and he had shaded me. Why?

  I heard what sounded like an infant’s cry nearby. Must be hallucinating. It came again. I turned my head and saw a tiny brown face poking up from an Indian traveling crib covered with elaborate beadwork. Seeing me, the baby stopped crying and stared at me with obsidian eyes, the little lips curling in a delighted smile. I stared back in wonderment.

  The Indian held out my tin cup to me. I thought he’d brought me water, but it was a greenish-tinged liquid that tasted vaguely like chicken liver. Crushed white flakes coated the cup and my lips. It left a pungent aftertaste.

  “What is this stuff?”

  Saying something that sounded like woka, he pressed the cup on me again. I shook my head. He brandished his knife and thrust the cup forward. I drank, gagged, tried to push it away, felt the blade at my throat, and drained the cup.

  Next time I awoke, it was late afternoon and I felt markedly better. The Indian had tied an amulet around my neck: dangling from a string were some feathers and what looked like a half-chewed bunch of grass and tobacco. He motioned for me to leave it alone and brought another cup of the green stuff. It went down easier this time. I sat up gingerly, gratified that my insides didn’t feel like they were in spin cycle.

  He pointed to the baby and slowly made a sign. Something about the motion of his hands seemed oddly familiar. To my amazement, I thought I got it. Once, writing a feature on adjustment problems faced by deaf kids, I’d picked up some ASL signs. I gestured for him to do it again. He brought his hands up on the left side of his chest, palms inward, then lowered them quickly, opening the fingers as he did so. Like throwing something away. The ASL signer had done it more frontward, but it was the same idea. He was saying that the baby was abandoned.

  Or maybe that he was abandoning it.

  I nodded that I understood. “So?”

  He beckoned for me to stand up, then pointed to the southeast. At first I thought he was giving me directions; O’Neill City did lie that way. Then I saw a burial scaffold limned darkly against the sky, a melancholy sight. Cupping a hand against his chest to suggest a breast, he pointed again to the scaffold.

  The baby’s mother was up there.

  As if cued, the infant stirred and began to cry.

  Christ, I thought, she must have just died. I pointed to the baby, and then to the Indian, eyebrows raised in a question: Yours?

  Whether he understood or not—I thought he did—he answered simply by pointing at me. Message painfully clear. The baby was now mine. With deft movements he demonstrated how to unwrap the cradle board, then he hung the baby’s swaddling cloth—I saw that she was a girl—on one of the willow poles to dry in the gathering evening breeze.

  “Hey.” I spread my palms wide to convey helplessness. “I can’t do this.”

  Grinning, he made the nature of our exchange clear by pointing first to Mr. P. and me. Then to the amulet and tea and blue blanket he’d provided. I was surprised to see one of the gold eagles he’d taken also sitting there. Finally he pointed to himself and the bundle of my former possessions. That it was a done deal became obvious as he picked up the bundle and walked toward the tall grasses. Having nursed me to health, he’d taken what he must have considered a fair price. He’d unloaded a baby on me but allowed me to keep my horse so that we’d have a chance at surviving.

  “Wait!” I pointed to the infant and cupped my hands to my mouth and then spread them, trying to indicate speech. “What’s her name?”

  He pointed at me again, and then with a few quick steps vanished into the grasses.

  Naming her, I gathered, was up to me.

  And, oh yes, keeping her alive.

  Looking up at the scaffold, I posed the silent questions, What would you like me to do with her? I tried to think it through. If the infant was the Indian’s daughter, as I suspected, why was he giving her away? Didn’t the Sioux single-parent? I’d heard that in some tribes girls were valued far less than boys, and couples who produced no boys were stigmatized. Had that happened in this case? Would he be keeping the baby if it were a boy?

  A wail came from beneath the little tent.

  Only a few hours of daylight remained, and she would need milk very soon.

  I had only one idea where to get it.

  FOURTEEN

  We made a most unlikely threesome as we entered O’Neill City. I rode in the lead, legs dangling down Mr. P.’s sides, and behind me, on a dappled mare, came Kaija Tihönen, the baby in its traveling crib strapped to her.

  They were still in their own world.

  For three days Kaija had talked nonstop to the infant. Talked in Yankton and talked during the whole trip. Every once in a while I asked what she said. She replied that she was telling of the midnight sun and reindeer and Laplanders and gypsies, of planting seeds according to the moon and watching the sky for portents. The baby looked up at her with her shiny black eyes and seemed to listen.

  I’d advanced Kaija five dollars, leaving myself only that much, and offered her the job of wet nurse for two months, figuring in that time I’d be able to find a replacement. Newspapers everywhere carried ads for wet nurses, since “genteel” women as a rule didn’t relish nursing.

  Kaija asked what I planned to do with the infant.

  When I said I had no clue, she looked like she was about to cry.

  Which worried me. “Well, what do you think?”

  “Kyllä,” she whispered.

  “What does that mean?”

  She looked at me from the corners of her eyes. “It means yes.”

  The baby suckled for the first time then, her hair a spiky dark mass against Kaija’s snowy breast. Looking on, I felt a glow of semi-paternal pride. Or maybe a matchmaker’s satisfaction. The dreamily absorbed expression on Kaija’s face told me we were off to a good start.

  Now, after three days, I was letting myself entertain hopes that she would keep the baby for good. Thus solving a big problem for me—and coincidentally producing America’s first Finnish-speaking Sioux child.

  I’d been gone from the Irish Colony only a week, but things were different. The biggest change was the presence of John O’Neill, who had returned with affidavits proving that Seamus Devlin had pocketed a healthy portion of the colony’s subscription money. Devlin had fled within minutes of the General’s return, taking with him revenue from the exorbitant rents he’d levied. And so, by way of restitution, O’Neill had temporarily suspended further rents. Which definitely helped me, since Mr. P., the clothes on my back, and ten dollars represented all my worldly goods—plus one Indian baby.

  Kaija moved aggressively into the colony, going around to shake hands, saying, “I am Kaija Tihönen.” A dramatic moment came when Cait opened her door to the towering blonde Finn with a dark-skinned infant in one arm, the other outstretched for vigorous shaking. After her introductory declaration, Kaija added, for reasons known only to herself, “I come with Mr. Sam.”

  Cait’s eyes swept to me, positioned discreetly at a distance. I offered a polite nod. Cait’s puzzlement and surprise morphed to something unreadable—I’d have sworn it contained an unguarded instant of jealousy—before she recovered and bent over the baby with a smile. Probably just wishful thinking on my part. Still, it was the first halfway satisfying moment I’d had sin
ce finding Cait.

  Linc laughed when he found me sharing his soddy again that night. He’d cleaned it up almost to military standards since I last saw it. I’d ensconced Kaija and the baby nextdoor in a small structure that was half sod dugout and half frame lean-two. It was drafty, but Kaija didn’t seem to mind. She informed me that flowing air was healthy. She also said that Finns were the world’s cleanest people, and set to work immediately, brushing the dirt walls and scouring the few pieces of crude furniture.

  I took Linc over to meet them. Shaking Kaija’s hand shyly, almost reluctantly, he mumbled a hello and seemed to look everywhere but at her. Kaija kept smiling and talking in Finglish and gazing around at the settlement as if the soddies were luxury condos. After Yankton, maybe they were.

  With the baby Linc was a different story, kneeling and taking her in his arms, making nonsense noises with his rumbly voice and chucking her under the chin. “What’s her name?”

  I’d been so wrapped up in devising fanciful strategies for dealing with Cait that I hadn’t considered it. I asked if they had any ideas.

  Kaija said something in Finnish that sounded like “stwish.” If it was a name suggestion, forget it.

  “Sioux get named more than once,” Linc said. “The first usually has to do with something around the time they’re born.”

  “How about, ‘Dumped On White Man?’ ” I joked.

  Kaija gave me a reproachful look.

  “Did the Injun say anything to you?” Linc asked.

  “ ‘Woka’ is all I remember,” I said. “That’s what he called the stuff he dosed me with.”

  “It means ‘lily.’ ”

  “What?” Kaija said.

  “In Lakota it means ‘lily,’ ” Linc repeated. “They boil the roots of pond lillies, make a tea of it to remedy diarrhea.”

  “It worked,” I said. “It cured me.”

  “Lily!” Kaija exclaimed. “It’s beautiful!”

  Which settled it: the baby was Lily.

  “How’d you know about that?” I asked Linc.

  “Fought ’em,” he said. “Worked with ’em, too.”

  It turned out that after losing his family he’d scouted for the Army and picked up a fair amount of Lakota.

  “You’re one hell of a quick worker,” he commented as we watched Kaija take Lily inside her lean-to.

  “It’s a business proposition,” I told him. “Nothing else.”

  I could tell he didn’t believe me.

  Now that John O’Neill was back, Linc expected to pick up a good outlying plot, build a house, and start farming. When I told him I was nearly broke, he said I could help him bring logs from Eagle Creek. No cash in it, but I could barter for necessities. I agreed. Unlike him, I had no long-range plans beyond winning back Cait.

  I didn’t see her the following week as I rose with Linc before dawn each day and returned at sundown. But I heard a bit more than I wanted to.

  “Yesterday Miz Cait helped with Lily again,” Kaija announced as she served coffee and biscuits before we rode off on our timbering chores, a task she had taken over despite Linc’s stated preference for his army cooking. “I like her—and Mr. Tip, too.”

  Mr. Tip? Give me a break.

  “She say anything about me coming back?” I asked.

  “Why, no,” Kaija replied cheerfully. “But I tell her how you get so drunk in Yankton.”

  Wonderful.

  Seeing my expression, she added, “I always say how nice you are, Mr. Sam.”

  “Tell Cait I have no intention of leaving.”

  Kaija’s eyes widened as she processed this new information. “I think,” she said slyly, tapping a finger against her temple, “Miz Cait don’t poke-poke with Mr. Tip.”

  Well, that was something.

  The work with Linc was back-breaking. Weak after my sickness, I barely made it through the first day, and on the second was so stiff I could barely hobble around. But then it began to get better. I felt myself healing in body and spirit as I worked in the clean prairie air, surrounded by plains that stretched to the horizons. My muscles hardened to the task of wielding a two-man saw, though I doubted I’d ever match Linc, whose endurance seemed limitless. He told me that we’d impressed John O’Neill with all the timber we’d brought in. That was gratifying to hear, since I’d worried that Cait might use her influence with O’Neill to get me banished from the colony.

  We worked mostly in silence. On the rare occasions when Linc initiated conversation, it usually concerned baby Lily. He absolutely doted on her. Each night he’d pester me to go and get her, then spend an hour holding her and telling her Lakota words and chucking her little chin and making her giggle. I tried to get him to deal with Kaija himself, but he insisted that I be his intermediary.

  So I was surprised when he said one day that she’d asked him to build something. “Wants me to make her a sweat lodge,” he complained. “Must’ve gotten the notion from Lily. Calls it a sow-na.”

  “Saunas are part of Finnish culture,” I told him, thinking it interesting that she’d asked Linc, not one of the flock of young Irishmen showing strong interest in her.

  “She won’t let Lily come over unless I do it.” He looked miserable. By now it was clear to both of us that Kaija no longer regarded her role as temporary; she was Lily’s mother.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t I help?”

  “I was hopin’ for that.”

  We began digging into the low embankment beside her lean-to. Every night we worked an hour or two by lantern light. After we’d hollowed out a square in the earth, we pegged together a framework to support our roof. The side and rear walls were sod; the front was rough planks into which we set a hinged door. Inside, following Kaija’s specific directions, we fashioned a kiuas, or rounded stone-topped fireplace, and planed planks very smooth for a lauteet, or high bench, and more for a floor. It took several weeks to finish it all.

  “Where’s the chimney go?” I asked.

  Kaija looked shocked. “No use for chimney.”

  We watched her fire it up the first time, heating the stones and leaving the door open slightly for the smoke to escape. A slow process. Hours later she proclaimed the temperature hot enough, and set to wiping soot from the floor and bench. Finally she and Lily entered the hut and pulled the door shut. We heard a sharp sssssss as she sprinkled water on the white-hot fireplace to generate steam. As we moved away we heard her singing happily.

  “I think we could cut that sauna’s heat-up time—”

  “Sow-na,” he corrected.

  “—with a chimney and damper,” I said. “Then there wouldn’t be all that soot to clean up.”

  “She wants the soot,” he countered. “It makes the sow-na smell good and also protects the walls from winter mold.”

  I glanced at him. “You and Kaija have been having a seminar on the subject?”

  He clammed up.

  Later, ruddy and refreshed, Kaija appeared at our soddy and announced that it was our turn. I wasn’t too eager and Linc seemed even less so, but when she played her baby-visitation trump card, Linc gave me a sidelong look and I knew that he’d caved.

  “Naked,” she told us. “No clothes in sauna. Use vihta—” she handed me a bundle of cottonwood twigs that had been softened in water—“to make skin feel good.” She made a slapping motion toward her neck and back and told us that Finns preferred birchwood but this was all she could find. I deduced that we were supposed to whip ourselves with the bundles. She mimed splashing water on the rocks. “Be sure to make lots of löyly … steam.”

  Linc waited for her to leave, then told me that he would go in alone first to undress. Wondering at this unexpected modesty, I waited and then entered to find him on the near end of the bench with a blanket covering most of him. Was it something about whites? I wondered. The evasive behavior toward Kaija, now this. Did he have race issues? Intimacy issues? Either of which would be understandable, given what happened to his family. Still, for an army s
ergeant, he was acting damn prudish.

  “Open the door wider,” I said, short minutes later, enveloped in löyly. “She’s trying to kill us.”

  Linc widened the door aperture.

  Before long I felt my body relaxing. I still held the flaying twigs. “We gonna try this?”

  “Not by a goddamn sight.”

  The quiet vehemence of was startling. I glanced over to find him staring at me. He didn’t look friendly.

  “What is it?” I said. “What the hell’s the matter?”

  “No man’s gonna whip me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He looked like he was about to say something, then just shook his head and pointed at the twigs.

  “But they’re only—” I stopped short as he dropped the blanket and turned slowly to reveal slavery’s legacy. In the dim light from the glowing stones I saw a nightmare of raised welts the thickness of fingers, a chainwork of scars from his shoulders to buttocks.

  I tossed the vihta outside.

  He didn’t hide himself from me from then on—but neither of us ever mentioned those scars.

  When we’d had enough we ran down to the Elkhorn and splashed in. Skin tingling, muscles soothed, we floated on our backs and stared up at a blazing yellow nearly-full moon.

  Linc let out a contented sound, then said, “I could get used to this.”

  Several times I’d been introduced to John O’Neill, and we’d exchanged a cursory handshake. The General faced too many pressing issues to give me more attention than an occasional passing nod on Sundays, the only time Linc and I were around in daylight hours.

  So I was surprised one Sunday morning to find myself summoned to his quarters in Grand Central, where I waited nervously. Was I going to be kicked out?

  When he appeared he greeted me with a smile and said that he’d met my “family.” I nodded uncertainly. Was that all he knew about me? Hadn’t Cait said anything? Or Tim? Or Linc?