He was leaving Cassius with twelve men, including the cook, and Andy. Four or five men, and either Cash or Andy, were going to be at the house all the time. The place would never be unguarded, regard-less of the moon.
He shouted from the door for somebody to catch the mule up.
Mama exclaimed, “But I thought you said tomorrow!”
“Oh, sure; only thing, if I happen to be twelve, fifteen miles in the right direction comes sundown, hardly any sense in riding it two ways. Pretty near amounts to a day. Though it’s hardly likely; I expect to be home, all right, if you want to set a plate—”
“Now, Ben, you can come home for dinner just this one last night,” Matthilda pleaded. “Please, now, won’t you?”
“I’ll sure try,” he promised. He was always shy, and embarrassed when it came time for any big build-up of goodbys. They knew he had maybe seized upon this way to get out of saying any at all. But Rachel could only take a chance on it, and bake him a birthday cake ahead of its time, in hopes he would come home, this last night he could.
When the cake was frosted, she made for Ben the creation she had invented. Summer had turned hot early this year, and as they neared the end of June the swampy sedge pockets along the Dancing Bird were green-scummed and still. This was the kind of summer that made a good firefly year. Some years they saw hardly any, but this time they were all along the creek, all through the trees, by the middle of June. And the ground cherries—the other thing she needed—were ready early, too. These were tiny plants that hid under the deep grass; they bore papery little lanterns the size of a strawberry, each with two small yellow berries inside. Experimenting, Rachel found she could get the twin berries out of the little lanterns and put a firefly in each, instead.
So she made a firefly tree—and if there had ever been one in the world before, she hadn’t heard of it. She cut a dried-out smoke bush, a skeleton of silvery twigs, about two and a half feet tall, and tied the ground-cherry lanterns all over it, dozens of them—though they looked like hundreds before she was through. After that she had to wait for dusk, when the fireflies came out. Half the time she worried for fear Ben wouldn’t come home, and the rest of the time for fear he would come early, before she was ready. If he came too soon she would have to wake him up to show his cake to him; he always went sound to sleep, as soon as he had eaten.
As soon as the first fireflies rose into the twilight she began lighting the firefly tree. On and off went the little lanterns, more and more of them lighting as she got fireflies into them, until by full dark the whole firefly tree was alive, working all the time. It showed up well; for, though they were about at the end of the current Kiowa Moon, they lighted no candles, preferring to leave the shutters open for air. Rachel stuck the contraption in the middle of the birthday cake, and waited for Ben to come and see.
She sat up for a long time, in the dark beside the firefly tree; until finally she put her head on her arms and went to sleep.
It was close to midnight when Ben got home. The ringing of his spurs waked her. She raised her head as he came clumping in, and heard his fingers slap his holster before he knew who was there, in the dark.
“I made you a cake,” she said stupidly. “It’s right here.”
“Seems like some kind of a tumble weed, or something, has grown up out of it,” he said, fumbling in the dark. “My God, am I as late as that?”
She started to say, “It’s supposed to—” Then she realized that the firefly tree was dark.
“There’s a lightning bug climbing on it,” Ben said. One little lantern had gleamed weakly, once, and then quit. She shook the tree, but nothing happened; the fireflies wouldn’t light any more. Maybe they were dead.
Chapter Twenty-nine
She tried to tell him how the firefly tree had been meant to work, and had worked, before she went to sleep. She wanted to make him see how pretty it had been, with the little lanterns lighting up all over it, on and off, on and off. But in a minute she knew it didn’t sound like anything, just told in words. And she began to cry.
He took her in his arms, tangled his fingers in her hair, and let her cry against his chest. He said, “I believe that was the very nicest thing I ever knew anybody to do.”
She realized then that she was actually close in his arms, there in the dim dark, and she forgot about the firefly tree; but she still pretended to cry a little, for a while more, so that he would keep on holding her. She thought, He knows I’m not his sister. Shall I tell him now? Shall I tell him I know it, too?
“Well, anyway,” he finally said, “we can eat the cake.”
They took it out on the stoop, in the faint light of the waning moon. He sat with his back against the house, and when Rachel had cut the cake she sat close by him, leaning against his shoulder, while they ate. Before they were through, they ate it all.
They talked about how dry it was. Ben had been up at the source of the Dancing Bird, and it was no more than a seep; though in the spring it was a little waterfall nearly two feet high, and they called it The Falls. Rachel admitted to Ben that whenever she was at the head of the creek she always looked for the bird Papa had seen there that had given the stream its name. Ben laughed a little, but as much at himself as her. He said, “I always do, too.”
“Papa was chasing Pawnees,” she said, knowing this was wrong. She had found she could always get him to tell her the old stories she liked by pretending she didn’t have the facts right.
Old Zack had been chasing a Comanche raiding party, in the early days of the War; it was that ever-lasting raiding and chasing that had kept snatching him back every time he set out to enlist. This time the chase had led them a long way through the dry, until finally their loose horses had lit out, thirst-blind and undrivable. And Zack himself had left the trail to recover them. They had smelled the live water, running freshly in the heat, a dozen miles away.
Downstream, the little creek disappeared in the sands; only four miles of it ran all year round. Zack had followed upcurrent to where the water came out from under a limestone ledge. And there on the flat rock just above the water was dancing the strangest bird, some kind of a crane. Zack knew sand-hill cranes, and whooping cranes, and every kind of shidepoke, whether it lived in Texas or just passed through; but this was none of them. It was bigger than a whooper, nearly five feet tall; blue and white, with yellow legs and a red beak. Nobody had ever heard of any such a thing. But there it was, reflected in the water as it bobbed and wheeled and pirouetted with halfspread wings, the way sand-hill cranes like to do, though only around their mates.
Papa sat neck-deep in the cool water under the ledge and watched the dance, and the bird seemed not to mind him. And as he sat there the notion came to him, he used to say, that this was no natural bird, but a spirit bird, sent to him for a sign. The Indians would have called it that. Papa told that part as if he didn’t mean for you to believe it—and yet as if he did more than half believe it, himself.
Or maybe he didn’t, Ben thought now, as a possibility occurred to him that had never come to his mind before. Might well be that Papa made all that up, to kind of sugarcoat this last, farthest move, into the very shadow of the Kiowas…. So maybe there never was a bird that danced. Just only a fairy story….
“I sure miss Papa,” he told Rachel. “He’s four years gone; and yet, this year, I miss him more than I ever did before. We needed him, Sis. We needed him bad.”
In some ways he sounded weary, and about a hundred years older than he was. But there was something else in the way he spoke that reminded her of a little boy. Now? she wondered. Should I tell him now? “Sis.” He knows I’m not that to him. He pretends it to please Mama. Because he thinks I believe it. Is this the time to tell him?