Free Where the Broken Heart Still Beats by Carolyn Meyer

times, away from the men. That made sense: a woman's blood could take away a man's power, his medicine. When she was in her period, she was not permitted to carry her husband's shield or to go anywhere near him until she had bathed. Here, no one seemed to pay attention to such matters.
    For instance, the boy, Ben, still lived in the house with the rest of the family. A boy like him would have moved into his own separate tipi long ago, to keep him away from the grease of the cooking pots, which everyone knew could contaminate him and was dangerous to his power. And this Ben spent far too much time around Martha and Lucy. No boy of the People would have been allowed anywhere near his sisters, would not have been permitted to touch them or even to speak to them. It seemed very odd to Sinty-ann—things that were important to the People had no importance to these white people, and the other way around.
    Now that the white people's speech was coming back to her, she sometimes talked about such things with Lucy. Lucy was curious; she seemed to want to know about the People. At first Sinty-ann did not want to talk to her, afraid she would be like the others, despising the ways of the People. She had heard Uncle and Lucy's parents and brother Ben talking about the People, about Sinty-ann's husband and sons and family and friends. Although she did not always understand their words, she certainly understood their tone when they spoke with voices that rung with hatred, harsh laughter, and lack of respect.
    But Lucy, although young, was different from the others in her family. She was of an age to be Sinty-ann's daughter, yet she seemed truly interested in Sinty-ann's life, her experiences. One day the women built a big fire in the yard and set over it a huge iron kettle of cooking grease and lard they had been saving up in buckets. When the fat had been melted and strained until it was clear, they stirred in liquid, water that had been allowed to drip through a trough full of wood ashes. Lye, Lucy called it.
    For hours they took turns cooking and stirring the mess, until it turned white and creamy. Then they poured this into a box to cool and harden, and later they cut it into chunks. They called it soap and used it to wash their clothes and their own bodies. Such a lot of work to make this useless thing!
    "And you had nothing like this?" Lucy asked, her blue eyes wide.
    "No. Nothing."
    "But how did you wash?"
    "No washing. Not important to wash."
    "But how did you get yourself clean?"
    "Clean? What is clean?"
    "It means not dirty."
    Sinty-ann thought about it. "Clean, dirty, no difference. Not important."
    After a while Lucy stopped asking about washing and cleanliness and turned to a new subject. "What about cooking? How did you cook?"
    "Put meat close to fire and it cooks. Sometimes we put meat in a pot. When I was young like you, no pot. Traders did not bring pots, so we cook in skins, in buffalo's belly. But if skins are too close to fire, they burn up! So we put meat and water in buffalo's belly and drop hot stones from fire into meat and water. Stones make water hot and cook meat. Simple."
    Lucy always smiled and shook her head when Sinty-ann explained things that way:
simple.
    "And was that all you ate? Just buffalo?"
    "Mostly buffalo. We kill him and dry meat, make jerky. We dry fruit and pound it, and pound jerky, mix with other things. Pemmican, we call it. All winter, when nothing else comes, we eat jerky and pemmican. Also eat antelope and deer, not as good as buffalo. When animals go someplace else, we look for other things to eat. That is work of women, to gather food."
    "What kinds of things did you gather?"
    She shrugged. She did not know the names of the nuts they collected or the wild fruits they picked and dried, using the seeds of some of them to form a paste that could be stored for the hungry times. "Nothing like you eat," she said. "I dig things from earth, I grind seeds and mix with what comes from bones of