Ride the Moon Down by Terry C. Johnston Read Free Book Online Page A

fought.
    “Here,” she said, taking his hand and turning him, starting toward their fire. Waits convinced him to settle upon their blanket-and-robe bedding. “Take our daughter,” and she passed the infant down to him. “I’ll see to the animals.”
    “Y-you’re a good woman,” he said to her back as she yanked free the first of the ropes and pulled off one of the beaver packs.
    It was a few moments before he grew aware of his daughter’s chatter. There on his lap she played with her fingers, popped them into her mouth, licked them, then pulled them out and played with them again as she babbled constantly. Struck dumb, he listened with rapt attention, concentrating on the infant as she played and talked, talked and played, her skin turned the color of copper by the fire there at twilight.
    Why had he never really listened to her until now? Was it the whiskey that had numbed most of his other senses, dulling them so that her chatter somehow pricked his attention? He laughed—and the baby stopped her babble, gazing up at him with widening eyes.
    In English he said, “For weeks now I been wondering what we was gonna name you, little one.”
    The moment he finished she gurgled happily again, which made him laugh once more, causing her in turn to stare at him in wonder.
    “You and me can have us a talk, cain’t we?” he asked, bouncing her on a thigh. “I talk and laugh, just like you, pretty one. So you understand me. And you’re gonna grow up talking your pap’s tongue, ’long with your mama’s tongue too. Gonna talk happy in both!”
    As soon as his voice drifted off, the infant set right in with her cheery babble. “So when your mama gets mad at me and don’t wanna talk, or when she don’t wanna havenothing to do with speaking the white man’s tongue I’m trying to teach her—why, you and me can have us all the talk we want!”
    “Talk?” Waits repeated the word in English as she stepped up, then knelt beside him on the blankets.
    “Yes,” he replied in English, and slowly continued in his own language, “we’re gonna see which one of you learns my tongue first. Mama, or daughter.”
    “You will teach her to talk the white man’s words the way you are teaching me?”
    He nodded, feeling the fuzziness creep across his forehead there by the warmth of the fire. “I’m hoping she’ll want to talk to me when you’re angry at something I’ve done or said.”
    “Do I hurt your feelings when I won’t talk to you?”
    The girl reached out for her mother, so he settled the baby in Waits-by-the-Water’s lap. “I don’t like letting things go,” he confessed. “I want to get things settled quick. Get shed of those bad feelings soon as we can. Only way to do that is to talk.”
    She brushed the babe’s short hair with a palm as she considered that. “Yes,” Waits agreed. “When you make me angry with you, I don’t want to hurt your feelings because I am so mad I don’t know what to say. Now I know that you want me to talk.”
    “That’s the only way to … to …” But he lost track of what he had wanted to say.
    “The white man’s real bad water made you forget, husband,” she said, then leaned in to kiss his hairy cheek.
    “No, the whiskey just makes me stupid,” he admitted in English. “Better I sleep now.”
    “Sleep,” she echoed the English word, and reached down to stuff a blanket under his head as he settled back onto the robes.
    “Like I said, you’re a good woman,” Bass whispered in English as he closed his eyes.
    “You … good man,” she said the words quietly, haltingly, in her husband’s tongue.
    He smiled and sighed, and listened to the baby softly chatter as he sank into sweet oblivion.

    It was late of the next morning when he awoke, his head tender as a raw wound, his temples thumping louder and louder still as he fought to sit up without his brain sloshing around inside his skull.
    But at the fire where she was carefully cutting pieces of winter