Free Only the Gallant by Kerry Newcomb Page B

blue-clad soldiers drawn up into ranks, two solemn-faced drummer boys standing at attention, the cooling wind stirring the dust in front of the schoolhouse, the rhetoric and excoriation, everything seemed to blur into a disquieting haze as his sight turned inward. Suddenly he stood once again in the shadow of the bur oak on the McQueen farm and heard the sighing wind that carried the distant song of a meadowlark.
    It was sunset, autumn, in the time of the harvest moon, and Jesse was fifteen years old. He had finished his chores, fed and watered the livestock, and secured the barn. He’d just started back to the house and the promise of a hearty supper by a warm fire when he chanced to glance up toward the hill that provided a windbreak north of the house. He spied the figure of his grandmother, Raven McQueen, standing at the summit. She seemed transfixed by the setting sun that painted the clouds gold and pink and bright vermilion against the rapidly darkening sky.
    Jesse climbed the hill. Tired as he was from his chores, he felt drawn to his grandmother and could not deny the call. Coyotes had begun their mournful chorus. As a child he had thought the wild dogs were responsible for night, that they sang the sun down with their howling.
    It was a fair-sized hill for this part of the country, a mound of earth rising a hundred feet from the rolling prairie floor. The short-stem grasses crunched beneath the fifteen-year-old’s boots as he followed that quiet summons spoken in the stillness of his young soul. When he reached the hilltop, he found not only Grandmother Raven but his younger brother, Pacer.
    At thirteen, Pacer Wolf McQueen was already showing the growth that had left him a head taller and a few inches broader than brother Jesse. And yet, in their roughhousing, Jesse had always managed to hold his own. Pacer Wolf had a long face with high cheekbones and straight red hair that hung to his shoulders. Though fair-skinned as Jesse McQueen, Pacer Wolf affected the ways of the Civilized Tribes. A one-eighth Choctaw was no different than a full-blood as far as young Pacer Wolf was concerned.
    Even at fifteen, Jesse knew better. He loved his grandmother and his spirit was one with her people, but it was in the white man’s world that he would make his home.
    In the fading light Pacer Wolf could see his brother’s accusing glare. Jesse McQueen had handled the chores for two because his brother had not arrived in the barn to share in the work.
    “He has been with me,” Raven told Jesse, reading his unspoken question. She smiled and placed her hand on the older brother’s shoulder. “It was more important. Time is the swiftest rabbit, darting away through the grass. My days grow shorter. And when I am gone … ” She shrugged. “There will still be stalls to clean, livestock to feed. There will still be rabbits.”
    Jesse’s anger softened and he became alarmed at her words. Was she ill? “Raven?”
    “Shh,” she said, placing her fingers on his lips. In her fifties, with her black hair streaked with silver and windblown at dusk, she was still beautiful, still the same figure of kindness and love who had taken her two motherless grandchildren to her heart and shown them the world through different eyes, shown them wonderment and mystery.
    “Give me your hand,” she said, and placed it on Pacer’s, until brother clasped brother.
    Jesse and Pacer Wolf looked sheepishly at one another.
    “The blood of the McQueens runs hot, pride is deep. But fire comes to divide, to tear apart the bond. If it is weak, the bond will break.” She shook her head. Pity in her voice gradually turned to determination, and as the red sunset bathed her in its glow, she raised her arms to the horizon.
    “I see a time of fire and sword. It will test you, yet you must remain strong. And the bond must not be broken though you walk different paths.”
    Pacer Wolf, already a strapping lad at thirteen, tightened his grip. He and Jesse had had