Jane Bonander Read Online Free PDF

I can’t even pronounce? Come over here, boy.”
    With hesitant steps he’d made his way to her. When she cupped his groin, his turgid young root had nearly exploded.
    “Names is the last thing we think about in this place.” She then proceeded to give him his first taste of heaven.
    Before his trip to Rose—a gift from the bawdy Baptiste—his earliest memories had been of rejection. Even though he’d been literally yanked from the jaws of death, he felt abandoned by both of the worlds responsible for his life.
    Now, in his twenty-sixth year, not much had changed. Early on, it had been because of his color. He could have been a cherub, and he would have been rebuffed by the world around him. As he grew older, dismissal came because of his attitude. It still did.
    Deep inside, there were times when he wanted to change. But he usually sloughed them off, becoming whatever those he dealt with expected him to be. It was easier than proving himself to be something else.
    He wasn’t even sure to which tribe he belonged. He resembled none of the half-bloods he’d met in California; he’d never felt a part of their world. And even though he had no proof as to whether his mother was Indian or white, Angus had assured him that few squaws would abandon a child so savagely, no matter how it was conceived. He didn’t know whether or not it was true, but he’d clung to that statement all of his life.
    Armed with this pseudo truth, he imagined that the woman who bore him had been raped by a Pawnee or a Cheyenne on her trip across the prairie. Even so, anger pooled around his heart when he thought of her.
    In his mind, she was like a shape shifter. Because he never knew her, she could be Rose one day, or any number of other prostitutes who serviced the miners in Sacramento City the next. Or maybe the woman who cooked at the camp along the river, or the one who took in laundry. Whoever she was, to him she was always white, and his father was not. He’d never envisioned it being the other way around.
    He didn’t hate all white women because of what she’d done to him. He only hated her. No matter how many times he told himself it no longer mattered, he could not shrug off the intense feelings of hostility that continued to stir in his gut when he allowed himself to think about her. He desperately wanted resolution. It wouldn’t come.
    When he was young, he’d wanted memories of a nourishing mother, rocking him to sleep, holding him against her warm bosom, singing him sweet songs. Instead, to her his life had been worth no more than animal shit, kicked over with straw and buried in the dirt.
    Tossed in a grave to die, ye were. Angus had been honest with him, never coating the truth with honey-filled words. Yet Wolf had searched for her everywhere. He’d learned of a serving woman who had given birth while working for Sutter and mysteriously returned to her chores without the child. She’d led Wolf to the place where she’d buried the dead baby. The small grave was covered with grass and weeds, but the headstone was a crude cross and there was a name carved on it.
    Then there was the preacher’s wife, ostracized from the community because she’d been taken by the Indians, although released unharmed a few months later. Living in a shack on the edge of town with a tolerant sister, she told Wolf, in a droning monotone, she’d had a half-blood child, but it had been a girl. And her husband, a man of the cloth who supposedly worshiped a forgiving God, ordered the child killed and refused to take his wife back.
    And although Wolf didn’t feel he belonged to a California tribe, he found an Indian woman who had lived with a settler for a time and had given birth to his child. The young man was nearly Wolf’s age, but he was alive and well, living in the village with the rest of his people.
    Finding the woman who bore him had become an obsession Wolf couldn’t shrug off. An addiction he couldn’t kick. And after years of