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“Leave me alone with my mama,” Brian Brave Walker said, his voice low and even and emotionless. “She will hear me if I talk long enough today. I know it. “
“Brian Brave Walker, darling, your mother can’t hear anyone now,” Lauralee said, knowing that he must be prepared for what would soon transpire.
Yet Lauralee also knew that Brian Brave Walker must not be denied these last moments with his mother.
“But stay and talk to her as long as you wish,” she quickly interjected. “I will leave you alone with her. You shan’t be disturbed.”
Lauralee pushed herself up from the chair, and when she placed her feet on the floor and she felt suddenly dizzy, she realized just that quickly how worn out and weary she was. She had not slept all that much. When she had, she and Dancing Cloud had laid on a pallet of furs before the fireplace, taking what little comfort they could in the lonely midnight hours by holding each other while they slept.
Lauralee sighed and walked toward the ladder that led from the loft. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. She wove her fingers through her tangled hair. She looked down at her drooping, wrinkled cotton dress.
While caring for Soft Wind so feverishly, she had neglected herself. In the end she had hoped that it would be worth it. She had hoped that she could help Soft Wind pull through this crisis.
Yet all along Lauralee had known the severity of Soft Wind’s wounds and had truly never thought that she would live.
Turning to back herself down the steep, narrow ladder, she gave Brian Brave Walker and Soft Wind one last, lingering look.
Then feeling empty and useless, she went on down the ladder.
She was glad to find Dancing Cloud sitting in the plush overstuffed chair beside the fire. As never before, she needed his arms around her now. She had not been able to win Brian Brave Walker’s friendship, much less his love.
Did he see his father when he looked at her?
She wondered now if he could ever see her in any other light.
The damn Yankee had harmed the child in so many ways without even having to touch him physically. It had all been inside the child’s head.
That was not the sort of illness that Lauralee knew anything about. She had just learned how to treat physical wounds. Not those inflicted on one’s soul by a mad, twisted father!
Lauralee moved listlessly over to the chair, then sank down and rested her head on Dancing Cloud’s knee. She became warmed through and through when he began lovingly stroking her hair.
“There is nothing more than I can do for Soft Wind,” she said, blinking tears from her eyes. She stared into the fire. “When she dies, Brian Brave Walker is going to blame me.”
Dancing Cloud bent low and placed his hands at Lauralee’s waist and drew her up to her knees, then lifted her onto his lap. “My o-ge-ye,” he said, cuddling her close. “No one could have put such heart in caring for someone as you cared for Soft Wind. I have stood back and observed Brian Brave Walker watching your gentleness toward his mother. Deep down inside himself he knows that you have gone way beyond what most would do for someone who is ill.”
“When your Shaman came and spoke over Soft Wind, Brian Brave Walker thanked him,” Lauralee said, her voice breaking. “Darling, he has not given me the courtesy of one thank you, even though I have spent countless hours at his mother’s bedside. I haven’t done this for his mother to receive thanks. But I deserve some sort of courtesy, don’t you think? I truly don’t believe he understands my feelings, nor me. He may hate me forever only because my skin is the same color as his father’s.”
“At present he cannot see past his fear of losing his mother, nor beyond his grief and despair,” Dancing Cloud said, brushing a soft kiss across Lauralee’s lips. “Give him time, my o-ge-ye. He will move into your arms for comfort.”
An involuntary shiver swam across Lauralee’s flesh. “She is going to die,” she murmured. “Before the night is over, she will be dead. The poor child. He will feel that he has lost everything in the world when he loses his mother.” She swallowed hard. “I know. I experienced it, myself.”
“It is different for Brian Brave Walker,” Dancing Cloud said. “He has someone who wishes to take him in as ‘family.’ He will never be an orphan.”
Lauralee gazed up at the loft. Candlelight wavered from a candle beside the bed, the soft light spreading. “Soft Wind was conscious enough, enough times, to tell me that she was originally from this village,” she said, shuddering when she caught the sound of Soft Wind’s death rattles as they became more pronounced. From her experience with seeing patients die, Lauralee knew that Soft Wind had hardly any time left at all.
“I questioned around,” Dancing Cloud said, releasing Lauralee as she eased from his lap and sat down on a chair beside him. “None of her relatives survived the massacre brought onto my people by Clint McCloud and his Yankees. She
escaped. She was found by some Confederate soldiers. She was too much in shock to make any sense when they questioned her. She was placed with other children who had been misplaced during the war and taken to an orphanage in Kentucky.”
“Had I been found by the same men as she, Soft Wind and I could have been raised in the same orphanage,” Lauralee said sullenly. “She perhaps thought that she was one of the lucky ones when Clint McCloud found her there and took her away, to be his wife.”
“Damn the railroads that were built through Cherokee country,” Dancing Cloud said, his teeth clenched. “If not for the railroads, Clint McCloud would never had cause to come to the land he had devastated when he was a Union officer. As it was, he traveled with the railroads, a railroad man even before the war broke out.”
“He had some nerve marrying a Cherokee after having massacred so many during the war,” Lauralee said, her voice filled with venom.
“I am sure Soft Wind was beautiful and entrancing before she married Clint McCloud. He was taken by her innocent loveliness. He was blinded too much by her sheer beauty to even think about her being Indian,” Dancing Cloud said, glancing up at the loft.
“Until Brian Brave Walker was born,” Lauralee hissed. “Then he realized just what it meant to marry someone with a different skin coloring. His wife bore him a son who he could never love because his skin was copper instead of white.”
