The Savage Heart

As she turned away, he suddenly caught her arm and swung her back to him. The unexpected movement made her lose her balance. She fell heavily against him. His hand at her back steadied her, and she rested against him, breathing in soap and cologne and a faint scent of tobacco from the occasional cigar he smoked.

His eyes were turbulent, and the hold he had on her was new and exciting.

A little startled, she asked huskily, “What is it?”

His gaze roamed over her face, then stopped on her mouth. Her lips were full and soft and he wondered not for the first time in their long relationship how they would feel under his. The hunger he felt made his heart race.

“Matt, you’re scaring me,” she said all in one breath.

“Nothing scares you,” he returned. “You walked right into the thick of the wounded, even before the soldiers had stopped hunting the people who escaped the Hotchkiss guns. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her, completely blameless. You and your father were kind…and so courageous.”

The contact with his hard chest was making her knees weak. She bit her lower lip, trying to regain some sort of control over her wandering senses. Her hands pressed gently into the silky stuff of his vest.

“This is…unconventional.”

“Working as a nurse isn’t?”

She punched him in the ribs. “Don’t you start. I get enough guff from those old ladies in there.” She scanned the dark windows of the boardinghouse. Did a curtain move?

“They’re probably clutching the windowsills, dying to see what happens next.”

“What happens next is that you let go of me so that I can get in out of the cold,” Tess said with far more confidence than she felt. Her reaction to Matt’s closeness was surprising and a little frightening. She hadn’t thought herself vulnerable to any man’s touch.

His lean, strong hands moved down to her tiny waist and rested there while he continued to look intently at her.

“You aren’t like any other women I’ve ever known,” he said after a long, breathless silence.

“Do you know a lot of women in Chicago who shoot bows and speak Sioux?”

He shook her gently. “Be serious.”

“I don’t dare.” She laughed. “I have…I have my life planned. I intend to devote it to the women’s movement.”

“Totally?”

She fidgeted in his grasp. “Yes.”

“Have they convinced you that men are superfluous? Or, perhaps, suitable only for the purpose of breeding?”

“Matt!”

“Don’t look so outraged. I’ve heard members of the women’s rights groups say such things. Like the mythical Amazons, they feel that men are good for only one purpose, and that marriage is the first step to feminine slavery.”

“It is,” she said vehemently. “Look around you. Most married women have a child a year. They’re considered loose if they work outside the home. They must bend to the husband’s will without thought of their own comfort or safety. There is nothing to stop a man from beating his wife and children, from gambling away all they own, from drinking from dawn till dusk.... Oh, Matt, can’t you see the terror of this from a woman’s point of view, even a little?”

“Of course I can,” he replied honestly. “But you speak of exceptions, not the rule. Remember, Tess, change is a slow thing in a large society.”

“It won’t happen by itself.”

“I agree. But I also feel that it can’t be forced in any drastic fashion. Such as,” he continued coldly, “taking children away from their parents on the reservations and sending them away to government schools, making it illegal for them to speak their own language—” he paused, smiling now “—even making it illegal to wear their hair long.”

Her hands itched to touch his hair, as she had only once, in the early days of their relationship, when he was teaching her the bow. She searched his dark eyes, a question in her own. “Do you miss the old days?”

He laughed shortly and let her go. “How can I miss something so primitive? Can you really see me in buckskins speaking pidgin English?”

She shook her head. “No, not you,” she said. “You’d be in a warbonnet, painted, on horseback, a bow in hand.”

He averted his head. “I’ll be late. I have to go.”

“Matt, for heaven’s sake, you aren’t ashamed of your heritage?”

“Good night, Tess. Don’t go out alone. It’s dangerous.”

He strode away without a single look over his shoulder. Tess stood and watched him for a moment, shivering in the cold wind. He was ashamed of being Sioux. She hadn’t realized the depth of it until tonight. Perhaps that explained why he rarely went home to South Dakota, why he didn’t speak of his cousins there, why he dressed so deliberately as a rich white man. He hadn’t cut his hair, though, so he might retain a vestige of pride in his background, even if he kept it hidden. She shook her head. So many of his people had been unable to do what he had, to resign themselves to living like whites, and the policies forbidding them their most sacred ceremonies and the comfort of their shamans were slowly killing their souls. It must have been easier for Matt to live in Chicago and fan the fires of gossip about his true background, than to go to the reservation and deal with it.

She recalled the way soldiers and other white men had spoken to him when he lived with her and her father, and she bristled now as she had then at the blows to his enormous pride. Prejudice ran rampant these days. Nativism, they called it. Nobody wanted “foreigners” in this country, to hear white people talk. Tess’s lip curled. The very thought of calling a native American a foreigner made her furious. Out west, one still could hear discussion about eradicating the small remnant of the Indian people by taking away all their remaining lands and forcefully absorbing them into white society, absorbing them and wiping out their own culture in the process.

Did no one realize that it was one hairbreadth from genocide? It turned Tess’s stomach. She’d always felt that the government’s approach to assimilating the Indians was responsible for the high rates of alcoholism, suicide and infant mortality on the reservations.

She turned away from the cold wind and went inside the boardinghouse, her mind ablaze with indignation for Indians and women. Both were downtrodden by white men, both forbidden the vote.

The two old ladies who lived upstairs, Miss Barkley and Miss Dean, gave her a cold stare as she tried to pass quickly by the open door to the parlor where they sat.

“Decent young ladies should not stand in the street with men,” Miss Dean said icily. “Nor should they attend radical meetings or work in hospitals.”

“Someone must tend the sick,” Tess said. “I daresay it might do you both good to come to one of our meetings and hear what your sisters in life are bearing because society refuses to accept women as equals!”

Miss Barkley went pale. “Miss…Meredith,” she gasped, a hand at her throat, “I do not consider myself the equal of a man, nor should I want to!”

“Filthy, sweating brutes,” Miss Dean agreed. “They should all be shot.”

Tess grinned. “There, you see, Miss Dean, you and I have much in common! You simply must come to a meeting with me.”

“Among those radicals?” asked Miss Dean, scandalized.

“They aren’t,” Tess returned. “They’re honest, hardworking girls who want to live life as full citizens of this country. We are a new type of woman. We will never settle back and accept second-class citizenship.”

Miss Barkley was red in the face. “Well, I never!”

Miss Dean held up a hand. “A moment, Clara,” she told her companion. “Miss Meredith presents some interesting arguments. These meetings are open to anyone?”

“Certainly,” Tess said. “You may go with me next Tuesday, if you like, and see what they are about.”

“Ida, don’t you dare!” Miss Barkley fumed.

“I should have gone, were I twenty years younger,” came the reply, and a smile. “But I am too old and set in my ways, Miss Meredith.”

“Tess,” she corrected.