"You must not leave, even after I am gone. You must stay here as my heir."
Auguste gasped as the enormity of what Pierre was saying hit him. Heir!
He tried to stand up, but Pierre"s grip held him fast. Just as this huge house and all the land around it would hold him captive, forever parted from his people.
"No!"
"Listen, please, Auguste. I cannot will the land to Raoul."
Auguste lifted his free hand pleadingly.
"You can"t will it to _me_. I know nothing about managing farms and raising livestock. Nothing about business. Raoul has been trained from childhood to do all the work of this estate. I can"t do it, and I don"t want it."
He looked around the room, hoping the others would help him persuade Pierre that what he wanted was impossible. Nicole and Marchette were both wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Elysee leaned forward in his chair, his eyes intent on Auguste.
Pierre said, "Once the land is your responsibility, you will do what is right with it. I know you will. I want to turn the estate over to you now, as Papa did with me, while I am still alive. I would be here to help you, for a little while. Your grandfather will advise you, as he has advised me all these years. There will be others to help you.
Nicole, her husband, Marchette, Guichard."
Auguste said, "Grandpapa, tell him I can"t do it."
Elysee, who had been sitting slumped and miserable in his fragile-looking armchair, roused himself and said, "I knew your father was going to propose this to you today, Auguste. This is what he wants.
It is no mere whim. He has been thinking about it for a long time. And it is not impossible. You have shown yourself capable of learning quickly. I can only promise you that if you take up the burden your father offers you, I will be at your side to help you every way that I can."
For a moment Elysee"s words made Auguste"s resolve waver. Thirty thousand acres, he thought. And the United States stole fifty million acres from my people. Should not one Sauk get some of it back?
But he had some idea of the crushing responsibility a huge estate would entail. It was absurd to think of himself occupying such a place.
"But Raoul is also your son, Grandpapa," he said. "Don"t you want him to inherit your land?"
Elysee shook his head. "Raoul is a murderer many times over, who has escaped punishment only because Smith County is on the frontier, where there is no law. He hates Indians with a pa.s.sion that is close to madness. He is a crude, violent, greedy man. He shames our family. He is far less worthy than you."
Auguste felt anger boiling up under his dismay. Father and Sun Woman and Owl Carver and Black Hawk had promised him he would live among whites only for a time and then go back to the Sauk. They had all smoked the calumet, making that agreement sacred. He had lived for that homecoming, through these six years. He freed his wrist from Pierre"s grip and held out his hands, pleading for understanding.
"But I can"t stay here with white people for the rest of my life."
Pierre said, "You are not the same person you were when I took you out of the forest. You have been educated. You may yet become a doctor."
"Yes, and I want to be a doctor for my people."
"You can do more for them if you stay here, my son. The Sauk will need friends among the whites who have knowledge and wealth and power."
Auguste shook his head violently, as if to drive out Pierre"s words. "I will never be happy, living as a white man. I must go back to my people.
I beg you to let me go."
But even as he spoke he realized with a sudden pang that these loved ones, Pierre, Grandpapa, Nicole, were his people too.
Pierre"s sunken eyes blazed at Auguste. "I have already written my new will, Auguste. There is one copy with the town clerk, Burke Russell, and one copy in your grandfather"s keeping. It names you my sole heir. To all that I possess, the entire de Marion estate. If you accept what I am offering you, you will have to fight Raoul. It will all be upon your shoulders. I can only beg you with these last breaths to take what I would give you. You must decide."
A voice inside Auguste screamed, _You must not do this to me, Father.
You will destroy me._
He stood looking down at his father with his arms hanging at his sides, his shoulders straight, his head bowed. He could not say no so finally, so bluntly, to his dying father. He needed time to work his way free of this trap.
"Father, you know we Sauk never decide quickly. When it is a very important decision, we think, we go on with our work, we walk the sunwise circle, we wait in silence for the answer to come. You must give me time."
Pierre closed his eyes and his head fell back to the white pillows. "You have as much time as I do," he whispered. "But only that much."
Auguste turned away from the bed. His eyes met Nicole"s. He saw sympathy for him in her face, but only another shaman could know the pain he was feeling inside.
9
Bequest
White Bear crouched over the brown blanket he had brought down from his room and unrolled it. Bare-chested and barefoot in white sailcloth workman"s trousers he had bought in New York, he took from the blanket roll his powerful necklace of megis sh.e.l.ls and hung it around his neck.
Next he opened his soft leather medicine bag.
Propped up against the big old maple tree on the south side of Victoire, Pierre lay on his mattress with his head and shoulders resting on pillows. His cotton blanket, all he needed on this warm September day, was tucked around his chest, leaving his arms free. He had begged to be taken outside; the weather was so fine. As soon as the servants had carried him out and left him and White Bear alone, he had fallen asleep.
These days, Pierre slept most of the time, as a baby would. But a baby slept to build up its strength, Pierre because he was losing strength.
White Bear--he did not think of himself as Auguste now--laid out the objects from his medicine bag on the unrolled blanket and contemplated them. They represented the seven sacred directions. First, East. He picked up a sparkling white rock and placed it on the east side of the tree. The color of East was white and therefore was White Bear"s own color. Next was South. He took up the green stone on which the mound builders had long ago carved the figure of a winged man. This he laid on the earth next to the mattress on Pierre"s left side. The ground under the maple tree was bare, and an early morning rain had left it damp and soft.
Now West. The spirits of men and women went West when they died, and the color of West was red. He set the red stone, with dark honeycomb markings that looked as if they had been painted on its highly polished surface, on the ground at Pierre"s feet. By the north side of the mattress he placed a black stone, itself from the North, that Owl Carver had engraved with an owl image. The fifth direction, Up, was blue, and he put a blue stone, the color of Nancy Hale"s eyes, on the pillow beside Pierre"s head. He set a piece of brown sandstone for the sixth direction, Down, beside Pierre"s blanket-covered feet.
Now for the seventh sacred direction--Here. He picked up the last and largest item from his medicine bag--the claw of a grizzly bear that had been killed by Black Hawk himself many years ago. After White Bear had come back from his first spirit quest with the prediction that Black Hawk would do deeds of courage and that his name would never be forgotten, the war chief had made him a gift of the grizzly claw. White Bear laid the saber-shaped claw on Pierre"s chest, over his heart, with the brown tip toward the cancerous lump in Pierre"s belly that was killing him.
He went back to his blanket and took out a dried gourd painted black and white. Slapping the gourd against the palm of his hand to make it rattle, he danced in a circle around Pierre and the maple tree, sunwise from east to south to west to north and back to east again, keeping Pierre on his right, singing softly, almost to himself:
"Earthmaker, you made this man, Now we ask your help for him.
He is a chief whose people need him.
He still has far to walk.
Lift him up, Earthmaker.
Give him back his life."
When White Bear had danced the circle nine times, he put down the gourd.
He had brought out from the chateau a kettle of freshly brewed willow-bark tea and a porcelain cup. It would ease the pain in Pierre"s stomach and give him strength. Whenever Pierre ate solid food, blood would come trickling out of every opening in his body and he would grow weaker and paler. He was slowly bleeding and starving to death.
Smelling the tea as he poured it into the cup, White Bear remembered how he"d met Nancy Hale when he was collecting the bark yesterday along the bank of Red Creek. She"d been blueberrying. It was the fourth or fifth time he"d encountered her over the summer on the prairie near Victoire.
The meetings weren"t accidents; not for either of them. But he felt so uncertain about what he would do when Pierre died that he could only talk with Nancy about things of no importance.
He looked up to see his father"s eyes open. They had sunk so far back in the skull-like face that they seemed like embers glowing in caves.
White Bear blew on the steaming cup and held it to Pierre"s lips. He drank the tea down in small sips.
Pierre smiled faintly as his eyes traveled over his land. The nearby ground, covered with gra.s.s cropped short by sheep and goats, sloped down to the split-rail fence that surrounded the chateau"s inner yard. To the west White Bear could see the two flags flying over Raoul"s trading post on the bluff overlooking the river, and beyond that part of the river and the dark west bank, the Ioway country. In the other directions were orchards, farmlands, pastures, and the prairie, yellowing with fall, rolling on to the edge of the sky.
When Pierre had drunk most of the tea, White Bear put down the cup. He gathered up his sacred stones and put them back in his medicine bag.