Louise stood on the porch and watched as Dirty Swallow cleared the field and met the highway. She bit her nails and watched the dragonflies tip downward to touch the weeds. This is the modern age, Sister Simon had told the class, we can’t rattle bones to cure fevers. Hair clippings and toenails aren’t going to save you from blizzards. Louise wasn’t afraid of Dirty Swallow. She wasn’t afraid of snakes. She was afraid of herself, she thought, afraid of the feelings Baptiste called up in her. She didn’t want to live on the reservation her whole life. She wondered if there was something more, something beyond her grandmother’s small house, something beyond the same roads she walked every day, something beyond Baptiste Yellow Knife. She looked at the hills. The river was motionless. In the heat the sky was tired, drained of color; everything seemed to be sleeping in the afternoon sun. She could see Dirty Swallow still walking in the distance. She walked steadily, and sometimes the pitch of the road would sink her out of sight, and then she would appear again farther away, and when she passed over the last hill Louise could no longer see her. A scorched wind pulsed at the door.

Louise expected her grandmother to scold her but her grandmother came outside to help Florence get down from the lean-to. “Don’t be such a coward,” she heard her grandmother say, and for a moment Louise thought her grandmother was speaking to her. “You can’t run from the things you’re afraid of,” she was saying to Florence.

Louise looked far off to the Mission Mountains, so hot, dizzy beads of blood spun black in her vision. Even with her eyes closed she could see the red sun. Old thoughts returned. She remembered her mother as she was being carried from her room. Charlie Kicking Woman had lifted her up from the bed, and as he turned toward the door, Louise saw her mother’s face. Her face was swollen, the color of water-washed wood, pale, gray. She had looked so frail to Louise, almost holy, like St. Bernadette. She could see the delicate veins along her mother’s jawline, the veins the color of turquoise at her temples. Fever had frayed her beautiful hair, but as she passed Louise, her hair had brushed Louise’s face, and Louise had felt the sweet touch of her mother once more for the last time.