Ruth. She was beautiful, with hair graying, with intention, the woman of water, of whales. Ruth watched the whales and never ended her wonder at them. Her love for them was ceaseless. When she saw them rise and return to the sea, when she saw them breathe spray, she was aware that there was at least one god.

“Why don’t you go out more?” her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn’t for herself. It was for what had happened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.

She also thought of her son when she was lonely.

Peeling potatoes, she looked at the beautiful brown peels. Eyes, they call them. They are what she would plant behind her mother’s house. Something grows from eyes, taking root as if a potato sends to earth what it can see, and yet the seeing part is what they say is poisonous about the potato. That first sprout is what can grow, planted, moving upward, seeing in the light.

At the edge of America was her boat, the Marco Polo. The man himself traveled a spice route, a silk route. People were always searching for something. Not just riches.

A pelican sat there, waiting for her to put out food, also at the end of America.

DARK RIVER: 1988

When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable.

No matters remain secret for long at Dark River. At one of the tribal council’s “secret” meetings, an old rose-scented woman named Wilma, her hair as unruly as Witka’s, and Wilma’s heavy granddaughter Delphine, who had a knack for gardening, walked with Ruth Small Just through the door of the room that smelled of coffee and stale tobacco. The room held only five men and a number of disordered empty folding chairs. Five men sat around a wooden table that had been carved over the years with initials, fish, and women’s naked bodies. The women intruded.

“To the women who entered the room of a private meeting,” said Dwight, heavy now and gray. “According to Robert’s Rules of Order, you are out of order.”

Wilma laughed at him. “Who is this Robert?”

Dwight was now the tribal chairman, his hair cut perfectly for the job, short and brushed back. He has fallen through a hole in the world, Ruth thought, looking at him.

“This is not order.” Wilma stood before them and swept her hand around their table. “There are other kinds of order than Robert’s.”

“It’s a private meeting.” Dwight was abrupt.