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In turn, Brian Brave Walker had chosen Susan Sweet Bird with whom to ally himself while Dancing Cloud was elsewhere.
Each day, Lauralee had sat back and achingly watched Brian Brave Walker and Susan Sweet Bird laugh and talk beside the fire in Dancing Cloud’s cabin.
Yet there was one thing that she was at least thankful for. Susan Sweet Bird had grown close to her. She treated Lauralee like a daughter.
But Lauralee had to wonder if that was because Susan Sweet Bird could not see the color of her skin.
If she could, would that make a difference? Lauralee wondered.
She paused from her sewing to gaze once again at Susan Sweet Bird. Dancing Cloud’s aunt was telling Brian Brave Walker a story as they sat close to each other on the floor on a buffalo robe in front of the fireplace.
Her gaze moving slowly over Susan Sweet Bird, Lauralee admired her. She was a stately woman. Her face was long and narrow, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and slanting from her lips revealing that she was no longer young. Contrasting vividly against her copper face, her hair, from which she had clipped only the very tips during her mourning, was as white as snow.
Lauralee could tell that Susan Sweet Bird always took much pains with her hair. As today, it was combed smooth and close, then folded into a club at the back of the head. It was tied very tight with a piece of dried eel skin, which was said to make the hair grow long. She wore the traditional dress of fringed buckskin and an ancient collar of wampum, which were beads cut out of clam shells.
Still being left out of the conversation, Lauralee sighed heavily, her shoulders bending and giving in to her feelings. She had finally stopped trying to get Brian Brave Walker to include her in his conversations.
Even when Susan Sweet Bird tried to draw her into the happy times, Lauralee shook her head and resumed her sewing, for she could see in the boy’s eyes that he did not wish for her to.
As now. Lauralee tried to position herself more comfortably in the overstuffed chair as she pushed her needle through the deer leather, to make her moccasins more beautiful. Susan Sweet Bird had taught her how to make the moccasins. Lauralee had cut them from newly cured deer leather with a hook knife. When finished, she had soaked the moccasins in water, and while wet, she had put them on her feet.
As instructed by Susan Sweet Bird, Lauralee had walked the moccasins dry until they fitted her, soft and giving and light as air. She smiled at her accomplishment.
She paused again from her sewing and looked around the cabin. She had wanted to feel a part of Dancing Cloud’s life. She had wanted to be able to look at his cabin and everything in it and feel all warm inside by knowing that she shared it with him.
But because he had been in mourning these past two weeks and had not shared anything at all with her, she felt nothing but a keen loneliness.
She glanced over at Brian Brave Walker again. She had hoped that his presence would help lift her loneliness. But his ignoring her had made her feel even more alone, more sad.
She had hoped for more here, in Dancing Cloud’s world.
Lauralee turned her eyes from the boy. Her gaze took in everything around her. The cabin was brightened inside by rugs woven from hemp, then painted in gay colors with bird, animal, and flower motifs. There were buffalo hide chests and cane seats and baskets of every size and shape in the room.
She looked up at the small loft overhead. It had originally been built for storage, but had only recently been renovated to be used as Lauralee’s and Dancing Cloud’s private bedroom. Dancing Cloud had carried his bedstead to the loft along with blankets, warm animal pelts, and quilts, and a feather mattress in which she had sank deeply the first night she had slept on it.
One of Dancing Cloud’s friends had brought a bed to the cabin for Brian Brave Walker as a special gift for the young brave. It had been placed along a far wall beneath the loft. Comfortable blankets and pelts were spread atop it.
Her gaze shifted. On the end wall of the cabin opposite the wall where Brian Brave Walker’s bed sat, a massive stone fireplace was set into a wall of sweet smelling logs, firelight gilding all within.
The furniture in the room was simple and handmade except for the one overstuffed chair on which Lauralee sat this early afternoon. Dancing Cloud had told her that this had been bought for his mother long ago. Now that his mother and father had passed on to the other side, the chair was now Lauralee’s.
She moved her eyes more quickly over the rest of the belongings. An iron pot hung over the fire, in which bubbled a rabbit stew that she had prepared early in the morning.
A small wooden table and three chairs sat near one wall, where near it hung shelves that held a bake kettle, coffeepot and mill, a few cups, knives and spoons.
The door of the Cherokee log cabin was always open except at night and on colder days of winter. There were no windows, the open door furnishing the only means by which light was admitted to the interior.
Kerosene lamps sat on the kitchen table and on a small table beside the overstuffed chair. They emitted soft, warm light throughout the cabin.
Lauralee had learned that the Cherokee people were remarkably self-sufficient. What little they needed from the outside world, they traded for at the nearby trading post on the Soho River. The medicinal herbs found in the mountains, along with the ginseng and honey they gathered, were in demand at the trading post, allowing them to purchase what they needed.
Everything else, they grew themselves in the fields and orchards surrounding the village. And, of course, the woods and rivers provided meat and fish. While the men hunted, the women prepared beans or corn and baked bread. Susan Sweet Bird had told Lauralee that a favorite autumn dish was chestnut bread.
Lauralee was suddenly drawn from her reverie as Dancing Cloud came into the cabin, his chest wet from a swim in the river, his wet buckskin breeches hugging his legs like a second skin.
He slung his sleek, wet hair back from his shoulders as he knelt onto a knee before Lauralee. He took her hands within his, his dark eyes smiling into hers.
“It is over,” he said thickly. “My outward mourning is now behind me. Inside I shall forever mourn the parting of both my mother and father. But I am relieved of my burden of mourning on this earth now when I know that my father’s spirit path has led him at long last to join my mother, forever. Their spirits at this moment are standing hand in hand smiling down at us, my o-ge-ye. Let us now move forward with our own lives.”
