Wild Splendor

In this dream there was no sadness. Leonida experienced only pure happiness, to a degree that she had never known before. Sage rode into view on a snow-white stallion, stopping only long enough to whisk her up onto the horse with him. Sitting on his lap, facing him, Leonida clung to him and tossed her head back. Her hair billowed in the wind behind her.

Sage’s mouth went to the hollow of her throat and he kissed her. He held the reins with one hand and with the other opened her blouse to him. His mouth covered her breast, sucking the nipple to tautness. As his horse galloped onward, seemingly of its own volition, Sage and Leonida began making love. Then Leonida was wrenched awake by someone speaking Sage’s name outside the wigwam.

Her husband awakened with a start.

“Someone is calling for you outside the wigwam,” Leonida said, scurrying into her skirt and blouse. “Oh, Sage, what if they have come about Pure Blossom?”

Sage gave her an uncertain look, then hurried to the door and went outside. The afternoon was waning into evening. He found a middle-aged Navaho maiden there, looking up at him with troubled eyes.

“What is it?” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Why have you awakened your chief?”

The maiden’s eyes wavered as she stared up at him, clasping and unclasping her hands nervously. “It is your sister,” she finally said, her voice breaking. “She is making death rattles in her throat.”

Sage broke into a mad run and rushed breathlessly into Pure Blossom’s makeshift wigwam.

Leonida followed, just as breathless. She watched Sage kneel over his sister and peer down at her, his hands at her face.

Leonida gasped when she heard the strange, gurgling sounds coming from Pure Blossom’s lungs as she struggled for every breath. She had heard those sounds before—

—just before her mother had died.

She swallowed the urge to cry out when she saw Pure Blossom’s eyes open wide, fixed in a stare, one eye looking in one direction, the other looking in another.

Sage’s heart seemed to stop as he looked down at his sister, his whole body filled with a great choking sensation as he listened to the sounds coming from the depths of her lungs.

And her eyes.

They were open, yet surely not seeing.

If she could see, she would look at him.

And she didn’t.

Her eyes were strangely unblinking and fixed.

In a momentary trance, not moving or touching, only feeling a devastation more deadly than ever before in his life, Sage had done nothing but stare at his sister. Without even yet thinking, he picked her up into his arms and laid his cheek against hers, finding it cold to the touch.

Then suddenly he realized that she was no longer breathing.

She had just died in his arms.

“A-i-i-i-,” he cried, holding her near and dear to his heart as he rocked her slowly back and forth.

Leonida went to him, but did not extend a hand toward him, knowing that at this moment he knew nothing but sorrow and that she could not lift it from him—not until he accepted what had just happened.

Sage rocked Pure Blossom for a while longer, then gently placed her back onto the pallet of furs. With trembling fingers he closed her eyes and covered her with a blanket.

Leonida knelt beside him and took one of his hands in hers as he began a soft chant. Outside, where no one yet knew of Pure Blossom’s death, there were the normal sounds of a day’s end. Someone had set up a loom. She could hear the thump thump thump of the weaver pounding down the thread in the loom.

A child laughed in the distance.

Someone was chopping wood.

A faraway turtledove seemed to be mocking the death inside this makeshift hogan.

Chapter 27

A little while in the shine of the sun, we were