Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [154]
But Sundance was paying no attention, because she had seen the bag hanging from the oak tree by her door, swaying gently in the breeze. “Oh, Dad!” she cried in a voice choked with happiness.
By the time Kam Shan walked out of the door with his cowhide bag hung from a stick over his shoulder, he could already hear the beating of the powwow drum. He had seen the elkskin-covered drum before; it was housed in the big teepee where the ancestors were worshipped. It was huge, bigger than the banqueting table they dined on when his father was home in Spur-On Village, big enough for twelve drummers to sit around it. He felt, rather than heard, its thunderous reverberations beneath the soles of his feet.
He could hear singing too. Sundance called it singing but he thought of it more as the sounds of wild beasts—the roar of a tiger or the howl of a wolf. He did not know what the singing meant; it may have been a war chant, a song of jubilation, an invocation of the spirits of heaven and earth, or an expression of anger. When he was not with Sundance, they were just ear-piercing shrieks or earth-shattering growls.
He wondered if Sundance had started to dance. At the powwow, the men sang and drummed. The women danced, although they were only allowed outside the circle. The men sang, drummed and danced in the middle.
Sundance and her mother had been eagerly waiting for the powwow. Her mother had been sewing Sundance’s dance cape for ten years, beginning the work when Sundance was just five. On her birthday every year, her mother sewed on another ten bells, making one hundred bells this year. Sundance had tried it on for the first time the evening before, filling the house with a tinkling of bells clearer than the sound of gems falling into a jade dish. Once she had her cape on, Sundance did not stop smiling all evening. Kam Shan had not slept well that night, and he knew that she had not either. He kept hearing her reed mattress creaking as she tossed and turned. When he got up to go out and piss, he found her sitting on the ground with her back against the wall, her teeth glinting in the darkness. She was still smiling.
She was happy because the cape was so beautifully made it put all the other mothers in the tribe to shame—and because this was her coming-ofage powwow. But Kam Shan knew that there was another reason why she was happy.
Yesterday evening at dinner, Sundance’s father had told her mother that he would ask the Chief to preside over Sundance’s wedding. Kam Shan started so violently in astonishment that the rice leapt out of his bowl.
“Sundance … getting married?!”
He tried to catch her eye, but she bent her head to her food, and bore his gaze silently.
“When Sundance marries, she’ll carry on living with us so she can help me with her younger brothers and sister,” said her mother.
“You won’t need to chop wood and make charcoal,” said her father. “You can keep Sundance with what you earn from taking pictures.”
It was some minutes before Kam Shan realized this remark was directed at him, and even more before he realized their import. His lips began to tremble: “M-me?” he stammered.
“Sundance accepted the belt you gave her, so of course it’s you,” laughed her mother with a glance at Silent Wolf.
Kam Shan’s head seemed to explode into tiny fragments. He could not put all the bits together though he tried all evening, and all night when he was in bed. Only with the first glimmer of light in the sky did he feel that he had got his head around this whole complicated business.
Sundance was out of bed before the cock crowed a second time. She woke the little ones. Soon afterwards, her father got up. He was not normally up this early but today he had to wear his ceremonial dress as the lead dancer