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TseeAhne. Don't leave me.
Orlena came out. Look what a mess you've made, she said, then softened at once. We'll have to clean her up before we can bury her. Let me take her in the house
and wash her.
No, said StillSheMourns gruffly. No take. My baby.
Orlena stood for a while, her hands on her hips, then left.
The little body was getting stiff. StillSheMourns molded it into a sitting position in the swing, and, when she released her grip, the body stayed. She looked like a
child, waiting to be entertained.
StillSheMourns clapped her hands and chanted:
I'm a little Teck Ann,
See me run&
But the child would not dance.
StillSheMourns laid her head in the child's lap and cried. The tears wet the little girl's legs and nightgown. What will I do without you? wailed StillSheMourns.
Whatever will become of me now? She wept until she could cry no more and the sun had moved halfway across the sky.
Look, Cynthia Ann, said Ruff O'Quinn through tight lips. T J. and I made a little casket.
Won't you let us wash her and lay her out? asked T. J.
She pulled the body closer and turned away. No, she said. No. Not bury. How could she make them understand? As long as her little body was not buried, Toh
TseeAh's soul would be walking around. StillSheMourns could at least be with that soul dur
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ing the long nights. She might not be able to see or talk with Toh TseeAh's soul, but she would know it was there, there in the dark, looking for her bones and
someone to bury them.
That's not very nice to her, said Ruff. You've got to lay her to rest.
StillSheMourns wailed and released the body. This quiet man with the tight lips was right. It was not love, but greed, to hold the baby's soul in torment. StillShe
Mourns would have nothing, nothing at all, to console herself, but TohTseeAh's spirit had to be set free to go on to the afterworld. StillSheMourns would have to
allow them to wash the body, clothe her in a ruffled party dress and the patentleather shoes, and arrange her in the coffin, as if she were sleeping.
Heartbroken friends carried the little casket to a buckboard, and several buggies and hacks that had assembled followed it to Asbury graveyard, eight miles to the
south.
At the graveside, StillSheMourns felt detached from her own body. Her mind stood over there, by a cypress tree, and watched her body. The poor body hurt so
much, it was numb, no more than a log. The body made motions, but they were baffling. She saw the men slide straps under the little coffin and lower it into the hole.
She felt herself lurch when the coffin lurched.
The grave was as large as Palo Duro Canyon, its sides straight up, like the cliffs at the Cap Rock. The sky whirled above it, tipping on its edge and flowing down the
sides of the grave to form a puddle at the bottom, like a river of tears as big as Prairie Dog Fork. A fever burned in her mind like a hundred campfires. StillShe
Mourns watched as her body collapsed in a faint. Too much. The heart surrenders. Unconsciousness became the only balm.
Her medicine bag had long since disappeared~ so StillShe Mourns assembled what substitutes she could find and went to a sandy place near the creek, alone she
thought, but T. J. Cates was watching.
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She smoothed off a place in the sand and drew a circle of the unirse with a crossroads of the four directions in it.
At the north end, she placed a dull fieldstone to represent the wisdom of the present time. The eye of the Great Spirit had been clouded over, like an aged man's eyes
by cataracts. He could no longer see into the world to guide the feet of people.
At the south end, the quadrant of personal nurture, she laid two twigs which she had tied in a cross to represent the Christopher medal Peta Nocona had once brought
her from Santa Fe. Its shiny metal had long since been lost. She encrusted the little stickcross with mud, in recognition of the impermanence of all things.
She stared long at the eastern fork of the diagram on the ground, the quadrant of beginnings, of creativity, of things becoming. She saw nothing in her future but tears
and sorrow. Peta Nocona had once filled her life with happy expectation, and Quanah, Pecos and TohTseeAh had fulfilled Nocona's promise. Where were they
now? Were Quanah and Pecos in a grave as bleak as TohTseeAh's? Or had they been slain on the prairie and their bodies left to rot, their souls doomed to wander
until their bones were buried? Was Peta Nocona still alive? Or had he pricked his finger with a thorn while gathering wild plums on the Canadian River and died of the
blood poisoning? There was nothing on the path ahead and woe on the road behind, where strangers chided her with failures. StillSheMourns felt the grief in her grow
as large as the thunder of a summer storm, and she cried in great sobs, huge tears the size of gumdrops. She caught the tears in her hands and sprinkled them on the
eastern fork of the universe. Tears are my becoming.
She had less trouble with the western fork, the fork of dark adversities, the gateway to the world hereafter. She took the butcher knife she had brought with her and
hacked off her hair, as short as she could cut it, and piled it in the west. Oh, if only her sad, sad life could melt as easily and be poured through that hole into the other
world. But she knew there was no illness to take her strong body, and her white relatives would not let her starve.
She looked around for some of the sky people to participate in
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her ceremony of sorrow. It was midDecember~ they had all gone somewhere. Or perhaps they were cozy in their nests and did not want to help StillSheMourns
take her tears up to the Great Spirit.
Nor did she see any of the surface people. No squirrels to carry messages, no bugs to bungle things, no snakes, no creepers. Nor were there any of the burrowing
people out. The universe was deserted. They had given it back to the emptiness from which it was created.
She doubted even the existence of the All Spirit, who was alive before the universe was made and who was to live after its destruction.
Still, she whittled shavings and lit a small fire in the center of the universe. She fed it with little sticks, then bigger ones, until she could feel its warmth.
She opened her dress, took the butcher knife and hacked at her chest. She caught the drops of blood in her hands and sprinkled them on the fire. They sputtered, as
blood always does. She hacked diagonal gashes among the scars on her forearms and held them over the fire so the blood would fall into the flames. It turned to smoke
and went up, up into the All Spirit.
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