Bone Dance by Martha Brooks Page B

wishing they were, feeling her whole body shudder with tears.
    â€œThere isn’t anything you can dream that isn’t real. Close your eyes,” he instructs kindly.
    â€œBut I’m dreaming. You’re tricking me. This is just a dream. This is just a dream. This is just a dream.…”
    Grandpa wraps an arm around her. She smells the aftershave he always wore. “You have eyes to see the world with,” he explains, “and eyes to see your soul with.”
    â€œI’m afraid,” she says, “of… what I’ll find.”
    â€œYou are afraid of being powerless,” says Old Raven Man. She hears him stir the fire. “That’s why we’re here. We’re here to give you power.”
    She doesn’t feel powerful at all. She feels weak and raw. As if she is being pushed to the edge of the world. But she does as she is told. She closes her inner eyes.
    â€œWhat do you see?” Grandpa asks.
    â€œDarkness,” she says, terror rising.
    â€œLet your mind wander. Just let it go.” Old Raven Man’s soft voice, like clicks of rain.
    And so she lets go. She falls. Spiraling down to the unknown. Even as she rushes away, the fishermen appear above her. And she sees, with relief, that she is connected to them by thin strong lines. She turns and tumbles to the edge of the sea of her being. And then she drops even farther. To the deepest place. To where it’s no longer dark. A light surrounds her. Sheis at the warmest, farthest, brightest place within herself.
    â€œA very big light,” she says from this deep place. “That’s what I see.”
    â€œAh!” Old Raven Man utters a great echoing sigh. “She has found the Great Spirit.”
    She pulls up, with effort, from Divinity.
    Old Raven Man takes the fish from the fire. She can feel the drumming of his heart as he peels away the skin. He offers her a piece of the smoky flesh. She takes it from the rivers of lines on the palm of his hand. As he promised, spirit fish tastes like honey.

part two
T HE L EGACY

1
    This small blue car pulled into the yard. Pop looked up from his coffee, like a man who had just heard thunder. Lonny stood, still holding his mug, his heart racing.
    The girl got out of the car. She was not at all what he expected. A big girl. Big boned, big breasted, loose limbed. Tall as him. With the blackest eyes the color of chokecherries, her fine dark red hair backlit by the morning sun. Amazing and prideful. Queen Bee, he thought, and then felt weak, like someone had just come up behind him and thwacked him hard at the backs of his knees. He tottered unsteadily toward her. “Alexandra?”
    â€œYes,” said the girl, not smiling or flipping her hair or doing any of the cute things that girls he knew did when they flirted with him. “How did you know it was me?” She stared him down with her wild black eyes. She blasted through his veneer, through the walls that he’d so carefully built.
    The spirits rushed up from the mound. He could feel their old and powerful reel. They knew, like Pop, that she was coming.

2
    The girl sat there, staring out at the LaFrenière homestead. He thought, She’s never going to get out of this truck. She had the same expression as her father’s the day he took over the land. But with her, it was different. She was a hell of a lot prettier than Earl McKay. Scarier, too.
    And this wasn’t the way he’d thought it would happen. He’d been prepared to hate her. He’d played over in his mind her moment of arrival, circling back to one image: Pop, once again, in weighted despair over the reminder, thrown back in his face, that his only living heir had rejected this land.
    But Pop looked at her, sitting between them, as if she were a delicate package that had just been hand delivered. He then opened his door. He swung his bearlike body down and stood in the tall grasses, eyes lowered, waiting with a