Reason To Believe (45 page)

She touched his cheek. "It's not the only question, Ben. Can you live with me?"

He lowered his head, burying his face in her hair, averring huskily, "I don't wanna live without you."

"But you
can.
You've lived without me for two years, and you've been sober all that time. I didn't do that for you or with you. You did it yourself." She put her arms around his shoulders and held him close. "We're not the same two kids we were when we first got married. We're older. You're a lot wiser than I realized, and I'm finally wising up."

"We still fit together."

"Yes, but you also fit other—"

"No." He rose above her again, taking her chin in his hand, begging her to see the honesty in his eyes. "I don't, Clara, I don't. God, please don't think like that." He tore his gaze from hers, feeling powerless. He could do no more than ask.

Gently. "Please don't. All I know is, I love you. I can't explain it or dress it up to make it any prettier." He risked it again, looking into her eyes. And he exposed that fragile part of himself that had always been good enough. "It is what it is, Clara. A poor man's love. And it's all I have left to give you."

Her small arms enfolded him, pulling his head down, nesting his face close to her woman's heart. "I love you, too, Ben. God help me, I do."

C
lara awoke to find herself alone in the pale light of early morning. The fire had been newly rekindled in the fire pit, and she wondered how she'd slept through it. Then she heard the pickup's approach. Quickly she pulled her long-sleeved undershirt on over her head and plunged her legs into the long, silky-cold bottoms.

Ben ducked under the tipi's door flap, frosty breath puffing through his smile. "I brought you some coffee." He lifted a Styrofoam cup in one hand, a small paper bag in the other. "And some breakfast. We had the morning circle already."

Clara yawned luxuriantly. "Why didn't you wake me up?"

"It's a day of rest, and you were resting beautifully." Squatting next to the pallet, he handed her his offerings, then pivoted and added several pieces of wood to his miniature tipi of a fire. "And this day is dedicated to the women. A good day all around."

She watched him while she snuggled into her warm nest and sipped her coffee. Indeed, it was. The sure way he moved his hands had always fascinated her, no matter what the task he'd set them to. Building a fire, changing spark plugs, saddling a horse. Touching her.

"You warm enough?" He'd taken his coat off, and now he was pulling off his boots.

"I put my underwear back on." The truth, it seemed, was that cold was easier to deal with once you got used to it, and warmth had become a truly valued pleasure. She smiled. "Without you cuddled up close t© me, it wasn't quite as cozy."

He unbuckled his belt. "I'm about to remedy that."

"People will be looking for us."

"Not before noon." He stepped over her, giving her the fire side, and slid behind her, becoming her backrest. "I just want to hold you while you drink your coffee." He nuzzled the side of her neck. "Mmm, you smell like a woman's sweetness."

"And that's a sweet thing for you to say. I suspect I smell like an old buffalo hide."

"Truth is, you smell like woodsmoke and sweet sex."

She laughed. "Truth is, I'm going to
have
to get up soon."

"Just say when. I'll stand lookout for you." He pulled the sack closer and crooned temptingly, "I brought you something sweet."

She tipped her head back and looked up at him. "You know, when I was growing up and thinking about what it would be like to be married, about sharing so much time and space with another person, I remember thinking, gosh, if you go in the bathroom, he'll know what you're doing in there." Again she laughed, all her innocent delight suddenly replenished. "Imagine that. And after a while he will have seen everything, all your private parts and personal property, and he'll know all the stuff you go through, and I couldn't see how that would ever be anything but a daily embarrassment."

"Some things were touchy at first," he recalled, smiling. "Like the first time I had to buy those things for you because you were too sick to go to the store. I had to go back to that same aisle three times because people I knew kept poppin' up every time I turned around, and I couldn't find the kind you wanted right away."

"As I remember, we were on a very tight budget, but you bought a bunch of paper towels and boxes of tissue -that we didn't need."

"Had to bury that box under something." He chuckled. "Doesn't bother me anymore, though. I can walk right up to a stock boy and ask where they keep the kind without the applicator. Had one poor kid turning as red as his apron once."

"It doesn't bother me, either. It did at first, automatically picking the stuff you like off the store shelves." She closed her eyes and laid her head back on his shoulder. She hadn't known this kind of contentment in such a long time. Funny. The stupidest, littlest things had been impossibly difficult to deal with sometimes, and he was the only person she wanted to talk with about it. She gave a small laugh. "I clean with pine soap because you always thought that was the smell of a truly clean house. I still buy the kind of toothpaste you like, I guess because it's grown on me. I even have an old toothbrush of yours still in the bathroom."

"I don't have much of you," he said, his voice dropping so low, it felt sad and heavy in her ear. "A few pictures. Some things you gave me as gifts. A vest you made for me." He chuckled softly. "Remember that leather vest that was a little too small?"

"You wore it anyway," she recalled, staring wistfully at the flickering flames a few feet away as she finished her coffee and set the cup aside.

"You broke your sewing machine on it. Thought it was the least I could do." He paused, then stroked her silk-clothed arm. "After I first got my phone there were a couple nights when someone called but didn't say anything, just hung up. Not too many people had my number. I've wondered..."

"I was..."

She looked up. He looked down.

"Seeing who'd answer?"

"Worse." She felt so foolish, she hardly found voice to confess. "I wanted to hear your voice."

"Oh, Jesus, Clara. I'd'a talked all night. I'd'a called you back and paid the bill." His arms enfolded her tightly, and he rubbed his cheek against her hair, put his mouth close to her ear. "When I'd call to talk to Annie, most times you wouldn't say two words to me. I never thought—"

"The sound of your voice over the phone, speaking into my ear... even that is an intimacy because you speak to me differently from the way you talk to other people. A little quieter tone, maybe."

"And you have your special voice for me. For your husband. I am—" he paused, his voice slipping smoothly into a whisper "—still your husband."

"You are. And I guess I do." She curled her arms over his and pressed them to herself even tighter. "I can't think of letting another man come into my life that way, or of sharing myself. Not just in the sexual sense, but the intimate details of my life, the secret drawers, the...
personal
things."

She turned to him with a plaintive look, and he knew what was coming, knew it as surely as he knew he had no right to take such acute pleasure in the confidence she'd just shared.

"How did you... I mean..." She closed her eyes, gave her head a quick shake. "It's hard enough for me to think about you having sex with someone else, but the other things, sharing the same sheets, the cup in the bathroom, my hair mixed with yours in the hairbrush..." Her small, self-deprecating laugh pierced his heart. "It sounds really stupid when I say it out loud, but I begrudged her those pieces of you, too."

"Then don't bring her in here with us now, Clara, because I don't even remember the color of her..."

He caught her chin in his hand when she tried to turn away. "I wasn't interested. I never stayed with her. I don't—"

She was still unsure of him. He could see it in her eyes. He sighed and let her face slide over his open palm. "Clara, when I said the prayers this morning, I gave thanks for Toby Two Bear's restoration to us and to his mother after being lost yesterday. But I also gave thanks for my own restoration, because I was out there alone, too."

Her chin dipped to her chest, and she covered the back of his hand with hers.

He clutched her fingertips, acknowledging her gesture.

"I've been lost for a long time, Clara. You're my mooring. There were times when I used to think I didn't need a mooring. Sometimes I thought it was cool and breezy just to drift. Maybe it is, but only for an afternoon or so. I wanna put in at the same harbor every night."

"Some harbor," she said with a sigh. "I seem to be following you from pillar to post again, the way I used to when you were riding in rodeos. I'm really not the follower type, but I seem to be doing it again. Following you."

"Hey, this was our daughter's idea, and when you went along with it, no choice, I had to come along just to watch out for my..." She looked up at him, and he smiled. "For my girls."

"But there's more to it now. There's an added dimension to your journey, isn't there?" She glanced past the mound their knees made to the red coat at the foot of the bed, and to the buckskin bag on top of it. "One that's always been there in the corner of your mind, waiting for you to stop being afraid to touch it."

"Or take it from my father, who's as good a man as ever drew breath." He, too, studied the coat. "Treated like shit by a woman who wasn't fit to live in the same world with him."

"I've never heard you put it quite that way before."

"Pardon my French."

"No, I mean, you usually say something like, he should have known better than to let her make a fool of him. As though you were angry with him for not holding on to her or something."

He sighed. "He held on too long. She gave him nothing but heartache."

"And you."

"She didn't cause me any heartaches," he claimed a bit too lightly. "I thought I missed her 'cause the ol' man did, but—"

"I meant, she gave him more than heartaches. She gave him a son." She turned to him now, looking into his eyes, seeking to reassure him. "Whom he treasures."

"He never could be sure... I was really..."

"He has no doubt." She stroked his hair, watching him lose himself to some troublesome specter dancing in the fire. "It hurts him to know that you do."

"There was a lot of talk. People goin' back in their goddamn mental calendars, countin' the months and watchin' the way she—"

"You're very much like him, Ben, in ways you probably don't see. Gestures, facial expressions."

"I guess it doesn't matter." He shook his head, still staring. "We've spent a lot of time together over the years. He wouldn't let me go away to boarding school, said it was the government's way of stealin' Indian kids. So I went to the local schools, always figured I'd'a gotten more out of school if I'd'a gone someplace else. But I learned a lot from him, I know that. And I know I gave him a lot of grief."

"You look like him, too."

"Yeah?" He chuckled, allowing the notion to light a spark in his eyes. "Hell, we all look alike."

"No, no, no, this is me you're talking to. I know this face. Your eyes," she said, touching the spokes on an outside corner, then tracing the contour of his face with her fingertip. "Your chin. Ears, they're shaped a lot like your father's."

He laughed. "Who you been lookin' at? Him or me?"

"Both. But yours is the face I know so well." She smiled, watching her finger delineate the fullness of his lips. "Love so much."

He caught the fingertip in his teeth and flicked it with his tongue. She smiled slowly. He smiled, first with his eyes, then his mouth. And then they slid together under the buffalo covers, each drowning in the other's kiss.

Even after lunch was over, the community center was the place to hang out and take it easy. Somebody had brought a TV, and there were card games and checkers, a little guitar playing, and plenty of visiting. A beef supper was in the making in the kitchen, young children were chasing each other across the floor, and some of the older girls lingered near the long table where their mothers nursed cooling cups of coffee and a baby or two.

TJ had driven back to McLaughlin to pick up her younger daughter, Delia. They had stopped to check on Dewey and reported that he was "getting itchy feet." Pouty and irritable from the long drive, Delia whispered something to her mother.

"You have to wait, now," TJ told her. "If these little ones see you with it, they'll be wanting some, too. There will be food soon."

Clara thought of what Ben had said about Sitanka's camp and the mothers trying to comfort their children. This was different, of course. Delia had probably never known real hunger. Neither had Clara. But she knew that

TJ and Ben had known some lean and hungry times, even though he'd rarely spoken of it to her. Poverty had been a fact of life for most people in the world of his youth. Keeper of the Sacred Pipe had never been a paid position among the Lakota. Most of the ceremonies had been outlawed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continued to be illegal, even though they were practiced secretly, until the passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Consequently when Ben was growing up there had been less call for a Sioux holy man than there was now.