When you feel afraid, think good thoughts for him.
Then she looked into his eyes and saw that he was nervous, too.
Chaska helpedNaomi finish with the hummingbirds, taking a moment to be alone with her before joining Old Man and Doug in the kitchen. He took her hands, kissed her fingertips. “No matter what happens, I’m here. It’s going to be okay.”
He texted Winona, who turned the clinic over to volunteers and came home. She gave Old Man a big hug then got everyone settled with something cold to drink. They talked for a while about the drive, how hot it was in South Dakota, Grandfather’s powwow friends in Cheyenne.
“How did they get so old?” Grandfather chuckled at his own joke.
Then he set his medicine bundle on the table, took out his sage and his eagle feather, a feather that had belonged to his grandfather. “We’re talking about some important things today, so it’s right for us to pray first.”
That’s how life was when your grandfather was a spiritual leader. No one did anything important without getting right with the spirit world first.
When the feather had been stowed away, Old Man looked over at Naomi. “My grandson has told me about your recent difficulty with these men in the mountains. He told me how you escaped from them. You are very courageous to have come through that as you did. I am glad to see that you are healing.”
“Aho,” Doug and Chaska said almost in unison.
“Thank you,” Naomi said.
“Now, we would like to hear about the medicine wheel you wear.”
Chaska reached under the table to hold her hand.
Naomi told them the whole story—how she’d been found by the dumpster with the medicine wheel tucked inside her blanket, how she’d been adopted by Peter and Ruth, how she hadn’t known about the medicine wheel until Peter had shown it to his congregation during a sermon about the evils of heathenism, how she’d wanted nothing more than to hold it with her own hands.
Chaska could tell she was nervous by the tight grip she had on his fingers, but she spoke clearly and without hesitation or bitterness or tears.
“I found it in his room, and I took it. It was the only connection I had to the person who had given birth to me. It seemed important that I should have it, and yet I hadn’t known it existed until that day. When no one was looking, I hid it beneath a floorboard in my room.”
She told them how Peter suspected her of taking it and how he’d tried to beat the truth out of her with his belt. She told them how she’d taken it with her when she’d run away and how learning about it—what it meant, how it was made—had instilled in her an interest in making jewelry. “I bought a leather cord for it, and I’ve worn it every moment since—except for when Chaska took it to work and sent a photo of it to you.”
The two men nodded, both of them considering what she’d told him.
Then Old Man turned to Doug. “You, too, have ties to this medicine wheel.”
Doug nodded. “May I see it?”
Naomi lifted the cord over her head and handed it across the table to him.
He held it between his finger and thumb, running the pad of his thumb over the quillwork. “Granny Otter Tail gave this to me at my naming ceremony. She made these for all of her grandchildren, always with the two little Xs on the back, right here.”
Doug told them how he’d gotten a scholarship to a summer youth camp and how he’d met a girl there, awasicugirl, who caught his eye. “We became friends. She had blond hair and bright blue eyes. I’d never met anyone like her before. We became close. She was my first, and I was hers. I wanted to keep in touch with her. She said she wanted to stay in touch, too. We traded phone numbers, and I gave her this.”
He told them how he’d tried to get in touch with her in the weeks that followed, only to have her mother call him and tell him to leave her daughter alone. “She told me that no daughter of hers was going to date an Indian boy.”
He handed the medicine wheel back to Naomi. “That’s the last I saw of that medicine wheel until Tina showed me the photo on her cell phone. If I got that girl pregnant, no one told me. If I had known, if she had only told me …” Doug’s voice broke. He swallowed, took a breath. “I would never have left any child of mine in an alley to die, not even when I was fifteen.”
Chapter 20
They talkedfor the rest of the morning. Naomi answered Doug’s questions about her life as best she could, while Winona put lunch together.
“Ruth taught us all at home. As a girl, I was taught sewing, canning, cooking, and some basic math for recipes. She also taught us to read because we needed to be able to read the Bible. I didn’t graduate from high school. I had to get my GED later.”
It was mortifying to admit all of this when the man she loved, the man who sat beside her holding her hand, was a rocket scientist and a genius.
Chaska gave her hand another squeeze, as if sensing her embarrassment.
“Degrees don’t make a person intelligent.” Grandpa hadn’t said much until now. “A degree is a piece of paper. I don’t have any degrees, but people still call me wise.”