Free The Truth About Love and Lightning by Susan McBride Page B

to peruse even more after that.
    Oh dear, she thought.
    Every rendering was some version of Sam Winston. Not just the gangly boy in the photograph, but clearly Abby’s own ideas of what he could have looked like as he aged. There was Sam with short hair, long hair, in a baseball cap, and balding; his face both unlined and with sharp creases at the mouth and nose; bespectacled and bearded.
    Indeed, it was the bearded drawing that made Gretchen’s breath catch. The sketch of an older Sam with gaunt cheeks and facial hair looked very much like the man lying on the parlor sofa. No wonder Abby had gotten as carried away as she had. She doubtless felt like she’d seen a dream come to life.
    Or a ghost turned to flesh.
    Gretchen pressed the sketchbook to her chest and sighed deeply. She felt completely responsible for fostering Abby’s obsession, for causing her daughter to wish for something that she’d never really had to begin with.
    Because what Abby didn’t know was that the lanky teen sitting on the steps in her treasured photograph—and the subject of all her fanciful drawings—was not the man who’d fathered her that summer night so long ago. That story was one Gretchen had never told to Annika or Sam’s folks, not even her sisters. At the time, it had seemed far, far easier to lie about what had happened than to confess what a fool she’d been. Only suddenly it was beginning to feel an awful lot like that lie was coming back to bite her squarely in the ass.

The Gift
We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
    —MARIE CURIE

Six
    1930s
    Henry “Hank” Littlefoot was a bona fide descendant of the Otoe-Missouria tribes—a full-blooded Native American and the grandson of a shaman. He was also Sam Winston’s maternal grandfather. Born in 1915, Hank was one of a few hundred Otoe-Missourias still in existence; the tribes had been pushed out of land they’d once called home, resettled into the Oklahoma Territory.
    A handsome boy who learned to read by age four, Hank began making up tales of his own once he’d read his way through the meager stack of books on the shelves of the reservation’s one-room schoolhouse. By the time he had turned twelve, he’d become enraptured by the art of storytelling and regularly entertained the younger children, mixing ancestral folklore and yarns spun from his own imagination.
    By his teens, he knew that he wanted to be on the stage, not exactly an aspiration that either of his parents seemed to understand. “You belong here. This is your world,” his father had told him and looked him sternly in the face. “On the day you were born, the sky filled with lightning. A bolt struck the roof and nearly set the house on fire. It’s the sign of a shaman,” he’d insisted. “You have the gift, my son.” With that, he’d gripped his son’s shoulder, where Hank’s skin bore a birthmark the shape of a teardrop. “My father had the mark as well. You’re meant to heal, not to play roles on a stage.” His pa had grunted unhappily, shaking his head. He was a mechanic on the reservation, which involved a different type of healing entirely. “You will be a voice to the spirits someday, whether you like it or not.”
    A voice to the spirits, eh?
    Hank wasn’t convinced. For much of his life, he’d watched his grandfather mix healing potions and pastes and perform rituals meant to cleanse evil spirits, draw the soul to peace, or cajole the forces of nature to aid in hunts or harvests. The more his grandfather gave, the more he suffered, and Hank wanted none of that, particularly when he realized the risks involved—when he understood that to cure sometimes meant great sacrifice, as when his grandfather contracted influenza from a family he’d tried to heal and the disease had killed him, taking Hank’s grandmother as well.
    But even those fears didn’t lessen Hank’s respect for the powerful acts he had witnessed.