“I had a visit from a demon named Findo Gask,” she said.
“An evil spirit of the sort I was talking about. One of the worst. But you already know that.”
She scuffed at the frozen ground impatiently. “John Ross is here as well. He brought a gypsy morph to me.”
“A houseful of trouble, as you claim, when you add in the young woman and her child.” He might have been talking about the weather. “What will you do?”
She made a face. “I was hoping you might tell me.” On her shoulder, Pick was muttering in irritation, but she couldn’t tell who or what he was upset with.
Two Bears stopped a dozen yards from the river bank in a stand of winter grasses and gray hickory. He looked at her quizzically. “It is not my place to tell you what to do, little bird’s Nest. You are a grown woman, one possessing uncommon strength of mind and heart and body. You have weathered difficult times and harsh truths. The answers you seek are yours to provide, not mine.”
She frowned, impatient with his evasiveness. “But you asked to speak to me, O’olish Amaneh.”
He shrugged. “Not about this. About something else.” He began walking again, and Nest followed. “A houseful of trouble,” he repeated, skirting a stand of hackberry and stalks of dried itch weed, moving toward the ravine below the deep woods, following a tiny stream of snowmelt upstream from the bayou. “A houseful of trouble can make a prisoner of you. To get free, you must empty your house of what is bad and fill it with what is good.”
“You mean I should throw everybody out and start over?” She arched one eyebrow at him. “Bring in some new guests?”
Still walking steadily ahead, as if he had a destination in mind and a firm intention of reaching it, he did not look at her. “Sometimes change is necessary. Sometimes we recognize the need for it, but we don’t know how to achieve it. We misread its nature. We think it is beyond us, failing to recognize that our inability to act is a problem of our own making. Change is the solution we require, but it is not a goal that is easily reached. Identifying and disposing of what is troubling to us requires caution and understanding.”
He was telling her something in that obscure, oblique way he employed when talking of problems and solutions, believing that everyone must resolve things on their own, and the best he could do was to offer a flashlight for use on a dark path. She struggled with the light he had provided, but it was too weak to be of help.
“Everyone in my house needs me,” she advised quietly. “I can’t ask them to leave, even if allowing them to stay places me in danger.”
He nodded. “I would expect nothing less of you.”
“So the trouble that fills my house, as you put it, will have to be dealt with right where it is, I guess.”
“You have dealt with trouble in your house before, little bird’s Nest.”
She thought about it a moment. He was speaking of Gran and Old Bob, fifteen years earlier, when John Ross had come to her for the first time, and she had learned the truth about her star-crossed family. But this was different. The secrets this time were not hers, but belonged to the gypsy morph. Or perhaps to John Ross.
Didn’t they?
She looked at him sharply, sensing suddenly that he was talking about her after all, that he was giving her an insight into her own life.
“Not all the troubles that plague us are ours to solve,” Two Bears advised, walking steadily on. “Life provides its own solutions to some, and we must accept those solutions as we would the changing of the seasons.” He glanced at her expectantly.
“Well, I’m not much good at sitting back and waiting for life to solve my problems for me.”
“No. And this is not what you should do. You should solve those problems you understand well, but leave the others alone. You should provide solutions where you are able and accept that this is enough.” He paused, then sighed. “In a houseful of trouble, not everything can be salvaged.”