Huupirikúsu’s Daughter

“Are you my Mommy?”

Barefoot and messy-haired, the girl was no more than six years old. She caught my skirt (cotton, gray, with a stain at the left hip, nothing like what I was supposed to wear tomorrow) as I swept out of the general store. Heavy bags with loads of I didn’t-know-what pulled my arms down; I couldn’t tear her tiny hand off my dress, so I dashed forward, and she had to let me go. I ran past Lynch’s Billiards and Dr. Malcolm’s office, both empty in this late afternoon. I was detouring around straw-yellow, glistening chairs at the carpenter’s shop when the girl’s words sank into my mind.

I froze. The bags with my wedding stuff collapsed into the dust. I turned back slowly. The girl was still there, and I heard her high-pitched voice as she asked another woman exiting the store:

“Are you my Mommy?”

The heat of this June day flushed away. I shivered. All the stories old Inayat told me in her smoky tepee raised fresh in my mind.

I checked my pockets. Where was it, where was my talisman? The wind, if it was the wind, could hit me any moment! It’d blow my mind out, just like this girl’s, just like in old Inayat’s stories. I took my talisman this morning, didn’t I? I did it every day, today couldn’t be any different, so where…

I yanked a creased piece of fabric out of my breast pocket. Blue forget-me-nots on an oblivion-black background, I embroidered every one of them, and old Inayat shook her tar-colored braids when I made a mistake. She showed me this pattern, the only defense one can have against the wind of change, Huupirikúsu’s daughter.

I placed the cloth on my face, covered my nose and mouth, tied it behind my ears, and hid the ends under my bonnet.

“Is it what they wear in Wichita?” A soft female voice giggled.

I stared at Mrs. Malcolm, her round face and blush cheeks. Her glossy brown peepers made me wonder if she persuaded the town seamstress to sew buttons on top of her natural eyes. Her voice was kind and sympathetic, her button-eyes enquiring and piercing. She would never let me get away with that cloth on my face, never. What had I to answer?

The wind blew.

They went all buff and opaque, her eyes. Her eyelids slid down, her small, tense, pink mouth relaxed, and a broom fell from her hands. She turned away. I watched her disappear — in a saloon, no less. I squatted to get my bags. I picked my skirt up instead and ran towards my father’s home, my heart throbbing in my throat. Cliché.

The wind ran by my side. My bonnet fell and hung behind my back, the afternoon sun baking my head. The heat and running made me sick; I stood, hands on my knees, breathing heavily. Such a shame. My mother made it all the way from Dumfries in a wagon with my toddler brother in her hands, she dragged her cart out of swamps, she cooked on a campfire, and she shot her first Pawnee at twenty-four. What would she say if she knew her only surviving child was unable to run half a mile without being out of breath?

“Criminy, isn’t it my Rosemary! Why are you be cuttin’ dirt like this? Our wedding is only tomorrow!”

Butch! And four of his beef-headed friends, bursting into laughter and stinking worse than their horses. What did they forget out of the saloon on this day?

“Wait, wait,” he squeezed my bare forearm with his sticky hand. “I’m your husband, or as well as one, and I wanna know why are ya in a feeze, d’ya get it gal? And what’s that? Why d’ya cover your pretty face?”

His fingers almost touched my mask when I kicked him under his knee and dashed away.

“What’s gone into her? In all my born days I never saw her like that!” I heard Butch’s voice behind my back.

“Buck up, pal,” his friend answered. “Tomorrow, she’ll be all yours, and ya’ll teach her how to behave!”

I didn’t hear the rest. Two houses and the sheriff’s office separated us when I dared look back. The five finest town cowboys chatted at the saloon doors, smoking and spitting and laughing, but the wind blew, and they froze. Their faces went blank, babyish, defenseless. They gazed at each other.

“Who’re ya, partner?” Butch asked.

“California,” his friend answered. “I hafta go there.”

They each went their own way, slowly, like in drunken delirium.

Huupirikúsu, the Whirlwind Woman, sends her daughter when she wants people to change their life. Old Inayat’s voice was fresh in my memory, I could see her smooth copper-colored face, her deft hands, never idle, always sewing, knitting, molding, cooking. “She doesn’t do it often, and if it happens in your lifetime, you’re blessed. Huupirikúsu tears the threads, like this,” and Inayat tore an ugly pattern in my embroidery, “allowing a person to weave new ones, better ones, so that their life is mended.”

How would it work? I asked. How would I know this was happening?

“People will be all odd, out of the blue, won’t recognize their family and friends. They will be lost. Then, their minds will surrender, and their hearts will show the way.”

“But what if I don’t want to lose my mind?” I asked, with despair only a twelve-year-old could feel.

“Then you’ll need this,” she nodded at the needlework in my hands and took a small piece of black fabric with blue flowers from under her tunic. “Put it on, and Huupirikúsu’s daughter won’t touch you. Don’t lose her for a moment, girl. She’s called the wind of change for a good reason.”

Old Inayat died soon after this talk. The tribe was forced to move to Wyoming, but she saw too many lands, she said. Couldn’t leave this one. She wouldn’t approve of my behavior either, my upcoming wedding and my being soft-handed and helpless, finding consolation in eleven books my father approved of. Maybe she would forgive me if she saw the kick at Butch’s knee. The look on his face!

I giggled and hurried on. The air was still again, and I could see a haze rising above the dusty road. My dress stuck to my back and chest, and for sure there were dark spots under my armpits. My father would be mad if he saw such untidiness… but the wind of change danced around my feet, played with my heavy skirt, and it would protect me from my parent. It had to.

It wouldn’t, I realized as I went up the porch of my father’s house. I lived there as well, but it wasn’t my place, or my mother’s. Ma would never live here. She loved the ranch. My father bought this house after her death; it was more convenient for business, he said, and all the big guns in Wichita had town homes to accommodate their ladies and daughters, so why was I so stubborn, all like my mother?

The door creaked as I opened it, so much for sneaking in! Well, he was upstairs, in his study, he wouldn’t hear me. I tiptoed to the kitchen. Mrs. B was in the ranch house, sweating and cursing in the preparations for my wedding dinner, and I was supposed to bring more stuff from the general store, not even knowing what was in those bags. Mister Dodge put everything from the list they wrote down in the quilting bee. The pantries were almost empty, but I found a piece of cheese, a loaf of bread, and some beer too, and I put them all in a basket old Inayat gave me on my tenth name day. It was heavy but small, and I carried it along when I sneaked into my brother’s bedroom.

It was fresh and clean, as though he left home only this morning, not five years ago, his clothes still hanging in his closet. Pa couldn’t believe he was gone, I know he couldn’t, although we read this telegram together. “Deeply regret to inform you… Colonel Richard O’Kelly… killed in action…” I blinked, it being no time for sobbing with my father was just behind the wall, and if he heard me…

I put on britches and a shirt and hid this curly mess of hair under a hat. I couldn’t change my shoes, though, and I made sure my mask, oblivion-black and blue-dotted, was fastened tight. I pushed the door open and tiptoed downstairs.

“Rosemary? What is the meaning of this?”

My father could chop a head off with his voice. This is what I always felt when he was mad at me. His words, heavy and sharp, hit my neck, and my head slid down and rolled away, jumping on every step.

“Rosemary?”

I turned back slowly, my face surely as red as my hair, a bottle sticking out of my basket, and my skinny legs in Rich’s breeches. My father didn’t fail to notice each of the details. He stood above me, the town’s biggest gun, the wealthiest rancher, the proud parent of Colonel Richard O’Kelly. I stumbled. My father looked as though he could break me with one hand.

I ran downstairs — his massive, angry steps following — pushed the heavy door, and burst out. The air was still.

“Rosemary, stop!” the porch creaked under his feet.

I scurried around the house to the lean-to where my father’s horse, Lacey, waited for its rider. I put my foot — I had to put on Richard’s boots, my slippers were too thin — in the stirrup and pulled up. Powerful arms hugged my waist and dragged me down.

“Rosemary, what are you doing?!” my father spat in my face as he shook my shoulders, red-faced and thunder-browed.

In a split second, his wrinkles vanished. His angry eyes blinked, and — I could swear it! — I saw the tears. His grip relaxed; he set me free and stepped back.

“What does it smell of?” I asked, the wind playing with Lacey’s mane.

“Marilyn,” my father’s lips barely moved.

Verbena, lemongrass, and vanilla? He hadn’t mentioned my mother’s name for years!

“Pa?”

He walked away, the load that dragged his broad shoulders to the ground finally gone.

I sat on the horse like a cowboy — thank you, Inayat, — and tied my basket to the saddle. Where would I go? To Boston? Or to Aparaho place in Wyoming? I didn’t think about it before. My father, stumbling, walked farther in the prairies. Our ranch was somewhere on that side, but was it where I wanted to go?

The wind pushed me in my chest.

When the mind surrenders its power, the heart will show the way…

I tore the mask off my face, and Huupirikúsu’s daughter kissed my lips. She smelled like a thunderstorm.