A Mother's Journey
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 16: The Language Between
~ Emmie ~
Language, she was discovering, was not one thing.
There was the language of words — the Cayuse she was learning daily, the English she carried in her bones — and then there was everything underneath and around the words, the vast wordless territory that two people navigated when the words ran out or ran short or went in the wrong direction entirely. She had always known this second language existed. She had not known until now how much of the real work it did.
With Kanti she had spoken it from the beginning and never stopped. Their conversations were a braid of his language and hers and the language beneath both, and she no longer noticed the seams between them, no longer experienced the gap as a gap. It was simply how they talked — fluidly, completely, with Suki available for the occasional difficult crossing but needed less and less as the weeks went on.
With Five Crows it was different.
With Five Crows the words were part of the exchange but not always the primary part. He was a man who had learned, she suspected, that words were expensive — that they cost something when given and created obligation when received, and that the careful management of that economy was part of how you moved through the world without accruing debts you couldn’t pay. He used words precisely. He used them when they were the right tool and not otherwise.
She was learning to listen to what he said and what he didn’t say with equal attention.
The riding lessons had continued — every other morning, in the horse enclosure, Tashe growing accustomed to her and she to Tashe, the conversation between them becoming something smoother and more mutual. Five Crows taught in the same way each time — exact, patient, the correction offered at the moment it was most useful rather than afterward, better being his consistent measure and standard. She was getting better. She could feel herself getting better, not just in the horse’s response but in her own body’s understanding of the work.
He had begun to teach her the words for the riding. Not just how to do it but how to speak about it — the vocabulary of horses and horsemanship, the names for the movements and the names for the horse’s parts and the names for what the rider’s body needed to do. This had expanded, organically and without either of them planning it, into broader language exchange. She would ask for a word she needed. He would give it. Then he would ask for the English equivalent, not always but sometimes, and she would give that. They were building something together, word by word, in the cold air of the enclosure, that belonged to neither language exclusively.
Kanti, perched on his fence rail, monitored all of this with proprietary satisfaction.
On the morning of the fourth lesson she got the word for patience wrong — badly wrong, the sounds landing in entirely the wrong place — and Five Crows looked at her with an expression she had not seen on his face before. He repeated the word. She tried again. The same wrong sounds came out and she heard them and made a face at herself, and he said the word a third time, very slowly, and she heard the place she was missing and tried a fourth time.
Close, he said. Better.
“What does it mean exactly?” she asked. “Patience. Is it the same as in English?”
He thought about this with the seriousness he brought to questions about language, which she had noticed was considerable — he treated translation as a genuine intellectual problem, not a mechanical one. “In English,” he said, “patience is waiting. Holding still while time passes.”
“And in Cayuse?”
“It is also waiting,” he said. “But —” he paused, searching. “It is waiting that is doing something. Waiting that is — attending. The tree waits for spring. It is not empty while it waits. It is preparing.”
She sat with that on the horse’s back and felt it settle in her the way the right words settled — not just understood but received, taken in, changing the shape of something she had previously thought she knew.
“That’s better than the English version,” she said.
Something moved in his face. “Some things are,” he said. “Some things in English are better. It depends on the thing.”
“What’s better in English?”
He thought about it seriously, which she appreciated. He did not dismiss the question or answer it quickly. “The word home,” he said finally. “In Cayuse we say where I belong, where my people are. In English it is one word. Home. It is —” he looked for the description, “— more complete. It carries more in less.”
She looked at him. He was looking at the middle distance with the expression of a man genuinely engaged with an idea, and the morning light was on his face, and she thought about the word home and what it meant and where she was and who she was with, and she looked away before he could catch her looking.
“Home,” she said. In Cayuse, as best she could.
He corrected her gently. She said it again. He said better, and the lesson continued, and neither of them said anything about the conversation that had just happened, which was also a kind of language — the language of two people who understood that some things were better held for a while before being spoken.
The something that had happened at the dismount had not been spoken of. It existed between them the way the cord existed — felt, present, requiring no announcement. She was aware of it when he was near and aware of its absence when he was not, and both the presence and the absence had a texture she was learning.
She was learning him the way she was learning the hide and the language and the riding — through the accumulation of detail, through paying attention to what the thing told her about itself rather than imposing what she expected. She was learning that he had a precise and private sense of humor that appeared rarely and without warning, in the form of a single dry sentence that you could miss if you weren’t listening. She was learning that he was most himself with the horses — that the controlled economy he maintained in the camp relaxed slightly at the horse enclosure, his hands more expressive, his movements less managed. She was learning that he watched Kanti with a specific attention that was different from the way he watched other children, something particular in it, something that had arrived around the same time as the woodpile and had not left.
She was learning these things and filing them the way she filed everything now — carefully, without forcing them into meanings they weren’t ready to carry, allowing them to accumulate until their meaning became clear on its own.
On the evening of the sixteenth day she was sitting outside the lodge in the last of the afternoon light, Kanti beside her examining a series of interesting rocks he had been collecting for three days and presenting to her at intervals with the curatorial seriousness of a small museum director. She was receiving each rock with appropriate gravity, asking questions, holding them up to the light when he indicated this was the correct approach.
Five Crows came around the corner of the lodge and stopped.
He took in the scene — Emmie cross-legged in the snow, Kanti beside her with his collection arranged in a careful row, the two of them deep in a conversation about a piece of quartz that Kanti was explaining with extensive hand gestures.
He sat down.
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