“They were white. I don’t think Ruth ever really wanted me. When she got angry with me, she would hit me or pinch me and call me a dirty Indian brat. I grew up thinking there was something wrong with me.”
Chaska had heard stories like this from old-timers who’d been taken from their parents and forced into government schools. His grandfather had repeatedly had his mouth washed out with soap for daring to speak Lakota.
But Naomi went on. “I asked her once why God would make a whole race of people who were beyond redemption. Could it be that God had made a mistake?”
“That seems like a fair question. What did she say?”
“She slapped me.”
Chaska bit back a stream of profanity. “Did no one stand up to them?”
She shook her head, a faraway look in her eyes. “Anyone who questioned them was verbally berated in front of the others, told to repent, and banished from the church if they refused.”
Chaska had to know. “Is that what happened to you?”
Chaska’s mind filled with all kinds of ideas—about what might have happened to an innocent sixteen-year-old girl in a place like that, about the hardships she must have faced on her own at such a young age, about the loneliness she must have felt.
“Not exactly. I ran away when I was sixteen after Peter told me he’d found a husband for me. The man was old—older than Peter. I just couldn’t. When I refused, he beat me. So the next night, I took my medicine wheel out from beneath the floorboard where I’d hidden it and ran away.”
“How did you survive?”
She’d been so young and inexperienced.
“I was walking along the highway in the dark when a big truck pulled up. A woman named Gloria offered to give me a ride. ‘You better come with me, or the wolves will eat you up,’ she said. I was so naïve that I thought she meant real wolves. She drove me to Sioux Falls, helped me get a job waiting tables at a truck stop, and rounded up some normal clothes for me so that I didn’t have to walk around looking like an extra fromLittle House on the Prairie. That night, she let me sleep in her truck.”
Thank you,Tunkasila,for Gloria.
“Things got better after that, though it wasn’t easy. It was a truck stop, so I had access to showers. I tried getting into a women’s shelter, but they didn’t take girls under eighteen. I slept on the floor in the restaurant storeroom until I could afford to get a little apartment. I had so much to learn—my job, how to use a microwave, how to use a computer, how to drive, how to use a TV remote and cell phone, how to deal with men who thought that any waitress within reach was fair game. I didn’t know anything about technology or how normal people lived. It was like waking up and finding myself in another world. Everything I’d been raised to believe had been a lie.”
“You are incredibly strong, Naomi.” He reached over, ran his thumb over her cheek, sorry that his questions had erased her smile and brought her fears to the surface again. “You know what I say?”
“What?”
“To hell with Peter and Ruth. You are free of them. Let’s go enjoy the afternoon.”
Naomi satin the front seat of Chaska’s pickup truck, looking out the window at the astonishing beauty that surrounded them. He took her first to Caribou, the site of the old mine that Joe owned, showed her the ghost town where many of the mine’s workers had once lived, and helped her out of the truck so that she could photograph the little cemetery with its touching grave markers.
“So many children.”
“Life in the mountains was hard back then.”
When she’d taken all the photos she wanted, they climbed back into the truck and drove to a place called Moose Lake.
“Are there moose here?” she asked.
She’d never seen a moose before.
“I’ve seen a few moose here. Maybe we’ll get lucky. The trail is fairly level, so you ought to be okay.”
He carried her camera bag, going slowly so that she could make her way around rocks and exposed tree roots. “Let me know if you need to rest.”
Soon, she was stopping every few feet, not to rest, but to take photos. A plant that Chaska called kinnikinnick. Delicate blue and white columbine. Purple wild iris.
It wasn’t easy taking photos without being able to stand on both feet, and more than once Chaska steadied her so that she could operate her camera with both hands.
They sat on a log bench on one side of the lake in the shade of an aspen grove, reeds and cattails at the water’s edge offering red-winged blackbirds and dragonflies a perch. A light breeze blew across the water, making small ripples.
“It’s so peaceful here.”