Read Having Everything Right for Free Online Page B

family toward the story of Five Wounds. His promise to Rainbow, sworn brother, to die the same day in battle. If one died, the other would die before day ended. And Rainbow had died. The ribbons were a part of Five Wounds’ promise. He was a hundred years dead and they were new.
    From wooden hats staked to the ground I could see where soldiers lay flat to earth in knots of two and three across the slope. The thin grass of pine shade moved, and wind made the trees glisten as sunlight shifted in them, but the hats held still as skulls, each where a soldier lived out his one day’s bright terror or luck. But then Five Wounds came sprinting out from the willows into the slot of a shallow ravine, dashing his death-alley straight into the guns of these little hats in crossfire. He knew they had him before the one long breath of his run turned to blood in his mouth, but he lurched to the brow of the ravine to fall at my feet beneath these ribbons, beneath the bullets scattered later by night to heal his name, and now beneath the low voice of this girl practicing the ceremony of literate culture with a paper in her hands:
    â€œFive Wounds charged up the gulch and was killed without a doubt. . . .”
    â€œWhat are the ribbons for?” her little sister asked, interrupting. Leaning on each other, the parents stepped back, gentled by fatigue. The girl stopped reading and looked up.
    â€œWhat ribbons?” Her eyes squinted for distance, then focused on the paper again. “It doesn’t say.”
    Driving on, I was tipsy with gratitude. Fenceposts passing fast out the open window were pine with the bark left on, and they chirred like insects—whisp, whisp, whisp, whisp—down the long straight road heat blurred. The mountains stood up in a blue ring distant around the valley. Sage entered me, then a hint of cut hay, then the wind-twisted fragrance of smoke and manure from a little clutter of ranch buildings at the long, tapered end of its drive. After a few miles, Wisdom itself was a truck filled with horses saddled and stamping fitfully, a wall of deer antlers below a TV satellite dish, country music aching from loudspeakers nailed to the trading post façade, and a poster at the bar advertising a rodeo memorial for two teenagers killed in a car wreck: “Only working cowboys within a hundred-mile radius of Wisdom will be eligible for the purse.”
    Then Wisdom was behind, and I was sailing out the highway banked on the long curves the river led east, past fields where ponies put their ears forward to the passing snap of my fingers in the wind, and on into the open country that somehow forgot to get changed from plain gray sage and rocky bluffs, from ravines dark with willow shade and stone litter glittering down a hillside where hard rain scattered it, and the trees getting scarce for the long dry of days like this.
    I was changed. The ribbons had pulled the sky right down to the ground, and tethered my soul to a story. If I was not changed, not wise, I had a way to become so. I possessed a vision-book of one moment, a story small as the pitchy pith of juniper seed to nibble for the rest of my life.
    Then I saw the bear, and stopped the car. It was a young bear, about my size and black as lightning’s footprint, rambling northeast along the south-facing slope of the river gully, in the direction the Nez Perce survivors of the battle had taken toward Canada, toward the place called Bear Paws where they were finally stopped. When I climbed out and the car door made a sound, the bear didn’t shy suddenly off to the side like I’ve seen bear do, or coyotes feeling the bullet-blast of human sight graze their shoulders. Wind riffled the bear’s fur, and it turned slowly to look over its shoulder from about a hundred yards off. Even at that distance, I could see the close squint of eyes, the nostril-flare of pertinent curiosity. She lifted her nose to know me by the thin ribbon of scent