Fingernail Moon

FINGERNAIL MOON. A WHITE man name for the nights mother moon hid all but a slice of her face. The boy allowed himself one more moment under the night sky and then he squatted, worked his way under the building, careful not to bump the new wounds that crisscrossed his shoulders against the underside of the sleeping quarters.

Tears ran hot on his cheeks. He could not remember the true name of this thin crescent of pale light, the Osage name for the moon that hid hunters and warriors alike, the moon under which braves rode to steal the horses of the intruder Cheyenne and the women of the enemy Kiowa. In this sterile place where he was taught to hate his Osage ways, trained to walk and talk and read like a white, for almost seven years now in this place of death and pain, the words of his people had been beaten from his mind.

“You will be a prophet to your people,” Brother James insisted when he grew tired of the endless memorizations from the white man’s book.

“Because of your intelligence and strength you have been chosen by God to bring the salvation of Our Savior to the Indian.” Brother James’s face would shine when he said these lies, lit as though from within, his hand like a talon on the shoulder of the boy he called John.

The boy tilted his head upward so that his face pressed against the underside of the wood plank floor. The stink of lye sent his heart racing and his hands to shaking.

“I am Montega.” His voice soft as the night’s sweet breath through buffalo grass. “New Arrow. Like my spirit animal the bear, I am sharp clawed and fierce. I give ground to no man or animal.”

He squeezed shut his eyes, did his best to connect with the spirit of his people. The Osage hid from the Blue Coats, eked out an existence and died in the canyons and hills that were once their own and now belonged to farmers who tore at mother earth and destroyed the land they stole. His people had fought and lost, were all but destroyed. The boy did not fear the rod or the box or any of the inventive punishments Brother James claimed he concocted to raise the Indian boys in his care above their savage origins. What Montega feared was that the admiration of whites, even false admiration, grew more enticing with each year he spent with the brothers. Each season, he surrendered a little more of his soul to the teachings of the naked white god who hung helpless upon a tree. Each year his Osage spirit grew smaller until his true self was no more than a hard pit scraping, tearing at his heart.

Now was the time to run. Now, before another winter covered the ground in snow and glittering ice snapped the limbs of once-strong oak trees. Now, before another lashing with the rod robbed him of the strength he would need to find the remnants of his people. Now, while the fingernail moon hid its meager light behind rushing clouds. Now, while he still knew himself to be an Osage warrior.

He swiped at tears.

When, at four, he had missed a shot at a strutting turkey and an older boy’s arrow killed the bird, Grandfather found him weeping beside the river. The old warrior sat beside him in the dancing green light of a maple tree, touched the tears that shamed him. “It is better for pain to flow free than to become a dam, like that of the beaver that blocks and kills the spirit of the water.”

He wished he had known that would be his last day with Grandfather. Montega and his twin sister, Niabi, were up early that fall morning, gathering hickory nuts with mother under the last of a full moon. His child’s arrow had pierced a waddling porcupine, a fat creature whose quills would decorate Mother’s dress and whose flesh would make a fine stew. The dead porcupine swung on a short branch between him and his twin sister, both of them struggling with the weight of the animal. At the first shots, he dropped his end of the stick. Niabi stood a moment longer, as though struck with the knowledge of what was to come, and then she too followed Mother back into the woods.

Hunkered in the dark, under the boys who slept above him, Montega licked his lips, tasted salt, saw again the wasted porcupine lying crumbled on the ground as he and his sister were led away that day. He remembered other crumpled bodies, but shut his eyes tight and forced himself back to the night, back to his plan to rescue Niabi and finally make good their escape.

Under the slatted floor of the windowless room the black robes called the sleeping quarters, he shifted his position slightly. Bare knees knocked against his chest. The last flies of summer tickled the raw stripes newly laid across his shoulders. He would not survive another winter in this cold and unforgiving place. From above him came the soft snores and farts and murmurs of sixteen young Indian boys, a tiny remnant of the once mighty Cheyenne and Kiowa tribes.

Over the seven cold and barren winters of his imprisonment, there had been six Osage brought to the Society of Jesus School for the Education and Salvation of Indian Boys. Like him, they were stolen from small groups of his tribe who hid in the mountains, evading the blue-coats who shot them or forced them into packs like animals at Fort Smith, promised them a new life and then marched them away, never to be seen again in this life. Like him, each Osage boy arrived dirty and frightened, with ribs like that of a starving dog.

Like him, they had been instructed by their elders on how to escape the white man’s influence. One by one, there came a moment when, after a particularly vicious blow of the Black Robe’s stick or the last day they could endure in the box, the final Osage word beaten from their minds, they simply hid their spirits. Oh, they did not die right away and the brothers continued to beat and starve and imprison them while pouring white falsities into their ears, but there came a moment when the eyes of each Osage boy went dark, and it was then they began their return to the ancestors.

If it were not for his sister, he too would be gone, sitting again at the feet of Grandfather, killing his first elk, sleeping each night with the smell of the forest, the sound of wind in the oak and maple. Did he remember this life truly, or did he only imagine that he had once slept beside a fire of sweet hickory? Was the feel of a horse moving freely between his knees under a warrior’s moon no more than a dream? The smell of bear grease and acorn mush waking him from sleep no more than a trick of his mind to escape his trapped body?

He would be gone already, returned one way or the other to his people, but the Blue Coats who killed Grandfather and herded Grandmother and Mother away with ropes around their necks, had been careless. Niabi had been mistaken for a young boy, and she too had been brought to the Jesuits. The Black Robes had no interest in educating a girl, and when her sex became known, his twin had been put to work in the kitchen. To prevent her from running and, as Brother James explained, to save her soul from temptation, they had sliced through the backs of her heels so that the sister who once beat him at every race through the woods, now shuffled from place-toplace, head down, back bent in submission.

This cutting away of freedom was rarely done to the boys at the school who the Jesuits taught were closer to God than girls could ever be. Still, the only reason Montega had so far escaped this safeguard from temptation himself was that early on, Brother James, the chief Black Robe, had singled him out for training, believed him destined to be a prophet to his people. Besides, Montega had a gift with horses and the chief Jesuit had use of that talent.

Each spring the cavalry at the Fort Smith held a horse race. Brother James traveled to this race, told everyone who would listen that it was his only vice. With no desire to care for the horse himself, he assigned Montega the job of feeding, grooming, and exercising his personal mount, a dark, leggy gelding that had bitten, kicked, or thrown every other boy assigned to his care.

The horse was guarded at all times, of course, especially when Montega exercised the animal by riding in a senseless circle. Jethro, a hired hand with a quick trigger finger, stood in the center of the endless loop swirling one of his Navy Colts. Jethro liked to call out to Montega as he rode around and around.

“Go on,run, you sumbitch. Ain’t one ah you little Osage bastards possessed ah the spirit of a damn rabbit. I’m so tired ah that blank face ah your sister looking up at me, I done took to flipping her over ‘fore I get down to it.”

Montega’s gift with horses, as well as brother James’s belief that he would one day bring the lies of the slaughtered god to the tribes, had spared him from being hobbled for the Lord. But after his last attempt at escape, the head Jesuit promised that his next run would be his last.

This night would bring either freedom for both he and Niabi or it would end in their passing into the world of their ancestors. Either way, tonight, before the falsehoods of the whites became any more enticing, before he forgot even his true Osage name, they would escape.

Above him, a door creaked open, and hard-soled shoes tapped from bed to bed. They would find him missing now. He had run before, and he had been educated with each slice of the rod, each endless day in the box. Last week, he volunteered to help move the outhouse, a place of filth where whites hid behind a door and shat, not onto the good earth, but into a growing pile of the waste of others.

The building was not much bigger than The Box and sickened him each time he was forced to enter, but the work was just to the south of the school and had allowed him the freedom of movement he needed. Every chance he got, he sneaked away from the crowd of boys digging the new hole and moving the old, stinking building. He had opened his pants and pissed along the path that ran to the creek, even squatted and left a strong scent for the dogs in the shade of a beautiful hickory whose leaves rattled like laughter in the afternoon breeze.

Yesterday at lunch, he stole a small box of pepper from the kitchen and he wandered from the group of working boys long enough to plant one of his hated shoes along the creek to the south. Whites loved to put a hardness, a barrier, between themselves and the spirits of the world. They hammered iron onto the hooves of their horses, tied their own feet into thick, hard coverings that bit and pinched and separated the spirit that flows from sole of foot to earth and back.

The dogs would lead the Black Robes south, while he gathered Niabi and the two of them ran north sprinkling pepper at every crossroads in order to confuse the noses of the dogs. In spring, when last he tried to escape, he found signs of Osage living in the deep canyons and hills the whites called the Boston Mountains. Under a yellow slice of moon, he found a broken arrow, an abandoned campsite whose smell of burnt acorn mush and deer hide tanned with urine and ash had brought him to a stop, tears streaming down his face.

From above him came the sound of running feet, hard soles on well-scrubbed planks, the spirit of the oak felled to make the floor long ago scrubbed away by the busy hands of young Indian captives. Montega relaxed the muscles in his thighs, rolled his shoulders, lifted his hands as far above his head as his hiding place would allow, and asked the spirit of the great bear, Wasape, to bless his escape. It was hard to crouch there in the dirt below his bed and breathe and pray and wait. But if the Jesuits had taught him nothing else, they had taught him patience.

Angry shouts came from the Black Robes quarters, men whose dreams, or self-flagellation, or the spilling of their seed into their own eager hands was disturbed once again by a runaway Indian boy. It had been his punishment after his last escape to clean with his hands only and on his knees, pellets of river gravel gathered from the creek’s bed and scattered over the stone floor of the chapel. He still bore the scars of the tiny pellets that ground like glass into his knees. But he had learned of an alcove that day, just big enough for a ten-year-old, half-starved Indian boy, to wiggle into, squat, and listen to the confessions of the men who held him prisoner. In this way he learned that those who were his masters where in no way his superiors.

In the darkness under the boy’s sleeping quarters he envisioned the Great Bear, Wasape, rising on her hind legs, teeth bared, great claws swiping the air. Still, he crouched and waited. He knew his sister’s pain, knew she must lie awake each night, praying for death or for salvation. This night he meant to give her one, or the other.

The shouting came now from the south and mixed with the baying of dogs on a trail. He smiled, squinted, shuffled out from under the floorboards and stared into the larger night. Legs numb after so long in his cramped hiding place, he waited for strength to return. At the first step he stumbled, could not afford to waste a moment, recovered and edged along the wall of the quarters. A short burst, an all-out run, carried him to the edge of the woods beside the corral. Another quick trot and he slid along the side of the barn, peeked between the wide doors.

The smart course was to run, simply run. But he would not leave the man who raped his sister to see another dawn.

In the thin light of a lantern, Jethro sat propped against a stall about twenty feet inside, bottle in hand, holstered Colts hanging on a rail a few feet to his right. Just as he hoped, Niabi’s tormenter had been left to guard the school, while the priests ran off into the woods in search of the fugitive. He did not give himself time to think, inched the door open enough to allow him to slip inside, feet already running hard toward the man who bragged of raping his sister.

“What? What. . .?” Jethro struggled to his feet, arms reaching for his pistols.

Montega got there first. He swung the heavy holster sideways with both hands aiming his blow at Jethro’s swaying head. One of the pistols caught the man across the face, knocked him onto his back. Blood ran from his nose. Montega leaped astraddle the fallen man, pulled a colt and slammed the pistol’s barrel, brutal and hard, into the hired man’s mouth. Teeth broke and more blood flowed.

He leaned his full weight onto the gun, ached to pull the trigger, knew that to do so would bring the Jesuits back, doom Niabi to a life of imprisonment. While he might kill this man, another, and another would follow as long as his twin’s fate was in the hands of those for whom she held no value.

Jethro choked, gagged, and fought to escape the hard intrusion of the Colt’s barrel. Montego jammed the gun deeper down the man’s throat. His hand, finger pressing the trigger, sliced by broken front teeth, the gun’s site tearing the roof of the man’s mouth—wounding, gagging. Jethro wrapped huge hands around Montego’s narrow wrists. Despite the strength of his hatred, the boy was no match for this grown man. Jethro bucked under him. Montego squeezed the trigger.

The shot exploded in the barn. The gelding screamed in the dark.

And Montega stared at what remained of his sister’s tormentor.

His carefully laid plans destroyed, he slung the holster over his shoulders, turned and ran. He must get to Niabi before the dogs and the Jesuits returned to investigate the shot. Fear and anger tightened his chest, closed his throat. An image of Grandfather came to him. Dark eyes crinkled at the corners, mouth cut deep with the grooves of wisdom.

“You are protected by the Great Bear. Go, Grandson, gather your twin and seek shelter in the hills of our people.”

The old man smell of tobacco and earth rose like smoke from his memory and he remembered squatting beside a morning fire, stirring ash with a stick to uncover the hidden embers below. He breathed deep, gulped back tears, ran hard.

At Niabi’s door he screamed her name. Surprised to find the bloody Colt still in his hand, he beat at latch with the butt of the pistol. The door broke open and he raced inside. Niabi stood beside the bed, eyes wide, shivering in a thin cotton nightgown.

“Come!”

His twin did not hesitate. She shuffled to him. He handed her the pistol, swept her up, cradled her in his arms, and ran. Her small body was light. He felt not burdened but completed.

The barking of the dogs grew stronger. Montega ran harder.

At the woods, he turned left, to the west. If he could make it across the creek there were caves on the other side in which to hide. The shouting of the Jesuits stabbed the night, rose above the excitement of the dogs. With luck the men would linger over the body in the barn.

Montega ran.

At the creek, he slipped, Niabi falling into the water, and rising on her own. He took the gun from her, slid it into the holster with its mate. Her hand tight in his, he shuffled across the slick rocks and pressing water. On the other side, he lifted her again into his arms, her wet body shivering against his chest. He fought his way up the rocky ground, fell, rose, kept climbing.

“Put me on my feet.” It had been over six years since he had heard her voice. The two of them kept apart, so that he saw her occasionally across a room, but had not spoken with her since they arrived at the school and it was discovered that she was doomed to a life of misery far worse than that of the boys.

“I cannot run, but I can climb as well as you.”

The sound of her voice blinded him with tears.

His hands and feet found rocks and roots to cling to, scramble up, push off from. He followed his sister up the rocky side of the creek. The barking of the dogs grew muted, men and dogs inside the barn. A rock crumbled in his hand and he slid, slammed into a tree trunk nearly losing the rifle, gripped a root and kept climbing.

Pebbles scattered down from Niabi’s efforts above him. Each flurry reassured that she was still there, still climbing. The barking grew louder. The hunters had left what remained of Jethro and were now headed north.

Montega kept climbing.

“There is a narrow ridge.” Her voice came from just above and to his right.

Fingers gripped a smooth edge and he pulled himself up beside his sister. Rifle balanced in the crook of his arm, he sidled sideways along the rock wall, the day’s stored-heat warming his back.

“Keep moving,” he whispered. “Do not stop until you find a cave or some other hiding spot. I’m going to slow them down.”

Men and dogs were close now. Very close. Almost at the creek.

She found and squeezed his hand. Then there was empty air beside him. Bereft and then, in the next breath, angry, he waited, let Niabi get a few yards further along the ridge. He exhaled into the night, slipped a revolver from the holster slung around his shoulder.

The heavy pistol extended in front of him in two shaking hands, he waited.

The yellow glow of a lantern stained the black night, the snuffling of dogs and scramble of men over river rock provided his target. The men stopped directly below him. Dogs milled in a confused knot at the edge of the creek. The voice of Brother James came like a stripe laid across his back. “Don’t forget he’s got Jethro’s . . .”

He squeezed the trigger again and again, until metallic clicks found his ringing ears and forced him to holster the empty Colt.

A man screamed. Dogs yelped. The yellow light of the lantern shattered.

“Montega, here!” His sister’s voice carried over the shouts from below, just a few yards away. “A cave.”

He edged along the rock, toes and half his feet in mid-air on the narrow ridge. His size, and Niabi’s, would work to their advantage, at least for now. The ledge wasn’t wide enough for a grown man, their pursuers would have to climb straight up the rock face, make easy targets for the second Colt. His hand found the entrance to the cave, and he entered a space instantly colder, damper.

Shouts and barking from below grew muted. He stood, waited for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness. There was a wild, familiar smell inside the cave. An odor he could not place but which called up in him both comfort and terror. “Niabi?”

“Here.” Her voice, like the cooing of a dove, brought a smile to his face.

He followed her deeper into the cave. “I think I hit one of them.”

The shouting from the creek ended. Even the dogs hushed. Montega found his sister’s small hand in the dark, squeezed once and turned back to the mouth of the cavern.

“They have not given up. Not yet. Stay there.” He pulled the second pistol from the holster.

At the entrance, loaded revolver dangling from his hand, he strained to hear what was happening below. Shoes scraped on rock, water splashed, murmurs and whispered instructions floated up to him. Behind him the familiar smell that he could not name grew stronger, quickened his heart and covered his arms in bumps of fear. There came a shout, a loud splash. Thin moonlight reflected on water rising from a man fallen and scrambling to rise. Shadows shifted, and a man cried out.

He fired into the darkness and some of the shapes retreated back across the creek. One kept coming toward him.

“Leave us,” he called out.

A rifle shot split the darkness. Fragments of rock flew like bats across his vision, exploded in the night. He lifted the pistol and fired toward the running forms. A scream came sharp from below him. The revolver’s hammer clicked on an empty chamber. He retreated deeper into the cave.

“Montega! This is Brother James. You cannot win, boy. You’ve killed Jethro and wounded Brother Ignacio. Come down, accept what the Lord decrees, and I’ll see that your sister does not suffer for your deeds.”

Niabi’s answer came from behind him and to the left. “I prefer death.”

Even as he retreated clutching the empty pistol to his chest, he heard in his twin’s voice the acceptance, perhaps even the welcome of returning to her ancestors. “We are not yet dead, sister.” He breathed the cave’s musky, rank smell that both swelled his heart and weakened his knees in terror.

“Men with rifles before us, and behind us a Great Wasape. Brother we will not live to see dawn.”

Wasape! The remembered name like a lightning strike in the center of his chest. That was the rank stink that both terrified and comforted. They had found the home of The Great Bear.

Rocks skittered against one another in a small avalanche and he turned toward the cave’s mouth. A man-sized shape, darker than the night at its back, appeared, rising from below, pushing itself up and striding into the cavern. Wind fluttered the black robes at the figure’s ankles.

Montega cringed, felt again the stripes laid across his back, wounds still bloody and sticking to the coarse fabric of his shirt. He fondled the empty revolver, cursed his fear of this man who was both mentor and tormentor.

“It’s over, boy.” Brother James said. “You will not shoot me.”

Montega lifted the pistol, steadied the empty gun with both hands. “Go back. I have nothing more to lose.”

“Perhaps not. But if you kill me, your sister will be found and punished for your sins.”

A scream exploded the darkness, shook the ash from his soul. Niabi howled her answer to the black robes offer into the night. “Fire the gun, Montega. I will die with a smile on my face.” A great cry of pain and courage filled the cavern, tumbled out into the night, a prayer for salvation that awoke the gods. Montega fumbled the empty gun, turned to stare at Niabi. At their backs, from deeper in the cave, a rumbling erupted, like the growling of the mountain itself.

Brother James edged backward, closer to the mouth. His voice trembled. “Now, children. Do not force me to shoot you.”

Niabi’s laughter echoed. “Come, come! Bring your dead white god to meet Wasape, Protector of the Osage People.”

At the very lip of the cave, Brother James called out. “Daughter, you speak with the ignorance of your sex. Come now, you must trust me. Let us all return to the safety of the school where we may pray for your soul.”

The air filled with the stink of the Great Bear awakened from slumber and moving fast in their direction. The soles of Montega’s feet shivered with the shaking of the animal’s approach. He stepped back, found Niabi’s hand, the two of them shuffling, pressing against the cold rock wall.

There came a roar like thunder. The very ground shook, and the air itself sucked from the cave. A huge dark blur raced from the bowels of the earth and directly at the white priest. Montega pressed his back to the wall, feared his heart would explode in his chest.

The Great Wasape ran at the white man silhouetted in the thin light of the fingernail moon. Brother James cried out, lifted his rifle to his shoulder, and fired. The bear did not slow, was upon the priest while the shot still echoed. A swipe of one paw, and the Black Robe flew through the air, hit the rock wall, and bounced to the ground screaming the name of his god.

The back of Montega’s head tapped against stone in a drumming of terror. The growling, the crunching of teeth on bone and the screaming of the priest grew so loud that he knew he would hear it always in his dreams.

“Come, brother. Let us find our way from this darkness and back into the light.”

Niabi’s hand was warm in his. He squeezed his sister’s fingers, followed her deeper into mother earth, trusted her instincts at each twist and turn, his only contribution the sprinkling of black pepper onto the winding floor. No matter what happened, they would not return to the Black Robes. If there was no way out, he and his sister would die as Osage in the home of the Great Bear, and they would die happy. He slid one foot in front of the other and allowed Niabi to lead him deeper into the belly of the mountain.

“There, brother.”

Montega lifted his gaze, followed his sister’s pointing finger to freedom. Set in a field of bright stars shone a thin crescent. He did not hesitate, lifted his sister in his arms, and ran toward the fingernail moon.

Pamela Foster

Twenty-one years ago Pamela Foster married her hero. The author’s husband is a disabled Marine, Vietnam vet, and a man who would walk through fire for her without ever acknowledging that he ignited the flames. Accompanying her hero on his quest to escape the dull gray of life-after-combat, Foster has lived in the redwoods of the Pacific Northwest, on the side of a volcano in Hawaii, in the Yucatan beside the Caribbean Sea, the stark desert of southern Arizona, the jungles of Panama, and the Ozark Mountains.

Amidst these many adventures, Foster has found time to pen six novels, including Bigfoot Blues and Bigfoot Mamas, the literary Western Soldier’s Heart, and the Southern comic novel Noisy Creek She’s also published the hilarious travel memoir Clueless Gringoes in Paradise,

After over two decades of travel, Foster has finally returned to her hometown of Eureka, California, where she wakes each morning to fog draped redwoods, the ebb and flow of Humboldt Bay, and the comfort of finally being home.