The Spirit Woman Read online

  “Stuck? I don’t consider myself stuck.”

  “You’re an academic, an historian. Have you forgotten? It’s time you got back to teaching and finished your doctorate. A position has opened up in the history department at Marquette University. You’ll teach a couple classes in American history next semester and finish the last of your course work. Should only take another couple years to write your dissertation. Maybe you could do something on the history of the Arapahos. Make use of your experience on the reservation.”

  Father John had pressed the cold receiver hard against his ear and stared out the window at the clouds drifting over the Wind River mountains, gray in the distance, and the sweep of the snowy plains disappearing into the fog. This was home. He loved the place; he loved the people. He couldn’t imagine leaving. “Let me think about it,” he’d managed.

  “Think about it? There’s nothing to think about. This is in your own best interests, believe me. Take a little time and get Kevin up to speed. I’ll expect you in Milwaukee in two weeks.”

  Father John didn’t remember asking when the new pastor might put in an appearance, but the provincial had volunteered the information. “Kevin should arrive any day. He’s on his way.” The entire conversation reverberated in his mind, like the electrical charge of a lightning storm. He’d hung up, grabbed his cowboy hat and wool jacket, and set off for a long walk. Walks-On had come loping along, disk clenched in his jaw.

  Now Father John jammed his gloved hands into his jacket pockets against the cold and kicked at a stone, sending it skittering over the riverbank and pinging against the ice. The vow of obedience was the hardest to live by; he’d always known that would be the case. “How you gonna do it, lad?” His father’s voice. He could still see his father at the kitchen table, shaking his head in disbelief, pouring the whiskey into a tumbler with the fine, musician’s hands that spent the days adjusting the knobs of steam furnaces beneath Boston College. “An Irishman vowing to be obedient. Ha! We can’t even spell the word.”

  “Give me the grace to obey,” he prayed. “Please, Lord, the grace . . .”

  Suddenly he realized Walks-On hadn’t returned. He walked a little way farther on the path before turning in to the cottonwoods where he’d sailed the disk. The sound of his footsteps mingled with the hush of the wind in the trees and the in and out, in and out of his own breathing. “Here, boy!” he shouted. There was no sign of the dog, but he heard a faint scratching noise. He stood still a moment, listening, then started toward the noise.

  The dried bushes and undergrowth snapped under his boots as he ducked past a low-hanging branch, peering through the trees for the dog. Finally he spotted him, nose to the ground, front paws feverishly digging out a narrow trench in the earth. The red disk lay at his side. The dog had found some buried bones, he thought. Cow bones, perhaps. “Come here, boy,” he called.

  Walks-On kept pawing, shoulders hunched to the task. As Father John moved closer he saw something, light brown colored, partially submerged in the trench. He grabbed the dog’s collar and eased him back a few feet. The dog gave a little yelp of protest. “Stay,” he ordered.

  He moved closer. Wild animals had been here before Walks-On, judging by the snow and soil pushed into ridges here and there. Scattered in the freshly dug trench, like hard pieces of snow, were tiny bone chips. Stooping down, he brushed away some of the loose soil. What looked like a femur began to emerge. Brushing harder now. Another bone appeared, small and gnarled, like a joint. He reached across the trench and scraped at a ridge. His fingers found something hard and round, and he pulled it free. A human skull, wisps of brown hair still clinging to the bone. His heart thumped against his ribs.

  He laid the skull back in the earth and stood up, eyes fixed on the burial place. “Whoever you are,” he said, “may God have mercy on your soul.”

  Nearby he found two dead branches, which he pushed into the ground at each end of the grave site. Then he snapped a thin branch from a tree and jammed it between the others, bending the tops together in the form of a tripod, like the skeleton of a tipi. He set the red disk on the branches. The wind would probably blow the whole thing over, he knew, but it was the best he could do.

  He glanced about, trying to get his bearings. The fog was thick and icy, wrapping the trees, seeping around him and the dog and the bones. The muffled thrum of an engine sounded in the distance. Rendezvous Road was probably only a half mile away, which meant they’d come about two miles from the mission. He had to get back and call the police.

  “Come on,” he said, taking Walks-On by the collar again and leading him through the trees, counting the steps until they reached the river. The dog stared forlornly in the direction they had just come as Father John tied his handkerchief around a low branch. Then he started running along the path, Walks-On loping at his side and finally bursting ahead, breaking the way, as if this was some new game. For an instant the fog parted and Father John caught a glimpse of the white steeple of St. Francis church rising above the trees in the distance.

  He ran on.

  2

  Sacajawea: The Hidden Life

  by Charlotte Allen, Ph.D. Foreword by Laura Simmons, Ph.D.

  A Frenchman Squaw came to our camp who belongs

  to the Snake nation. She came with our Interpreter’s

  wife and brought with them 4 buffalow Robes and

  Gave them to our officers.

  —Sergeant John Ordway, the Corps of

  Discovery, Captains Meriwether

  Lewis and William Clark in command,

  Fort Mandan, November 4, 1804

  Thus Sacajawea walked into history.

  A Shoshone girl not more than sixteen years old, captured by the Minnetarees and sold to the French trader Toussaint Charbonneau. Or perhaps the wily old trader, already in his forties, had won the girl in a game of chance. The record is unclear. At any rate, when she appeared at Fort Mandan on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota, she was one of Charbonneau’s wives. She was six months pregnant with his child.

  She had accompanied her husband to the triangular-shaped fort built of cottonwood logs where Lewis and Clark were spending the winter before continuing the expedition to the Pacific Ocean. Charbonneau hoped to hire on as an interpreter, but the captains quickly took the trader’s measure: an arrogant man, unreliable and brutal. They declined his services. Yet they hoped to purchase horses from the Shoshones, and the trader’s young wife could speak Shoshone. Finally they agreed to hire the man on the condition that Sacajawea accompany the expedition.

  On February 11, 1805, after an extremely difficult labor, Sacajawea gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste. Scarcely two months later, April 7, the thirty-three members of the Corps of Discovery set out on a journey through the wilderness to the Pacific Ocean about 2500 miles to the west. They would traverse rocky canyons and almost impenetrable forests and navigate the rushing rivers in canoes and perogues. They would encounter Indian tribes that had never seen white people. They would endure torrential rainfalls, freezing temperatures, and snow as high as a horse’s neck. They would know hunger and thirst and, at times, despair, but they would go forward.

  Sacajawea would go with them, the only woman on the expedition, her infant son strapped to a rawhide cradle on her back.

  “So here you are.”

  Laura Simmons stared at the tall granite marker, a silent sentinel looming over the grave. SACAJAWEA was carved into the smooth section of stone. Beneath the name: Died April 9, 1884. A guide with the Lewis and Clark expedition. 1805-1806. Scattered about the grave, intermingling with bouquets of plastic flowers, were tiny packets wrapped in fabric—prayer bundles, she knew, offered for the spirit of Sacajawea.

  On either side of the granite marker were two shorter markers. The one on the left, a memorial with the inscription BAPTISTE CHARBONNEAU, papoose of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, buried in the Wind River Mountains. The stone on the right marked the grave of Bazil, Sacajawea’s adopted son.

/>   The wind was cold and unyielding. Laura hugged the fronts of her white coat close and stamped her boots to restore the circulation in her legs. She realized she was the only one in the Shoshone cemetery. Sloping away were rows of graves with small wooden crosses and red and yellow plastic flowers that poked out of the bare dirt and patches of snow. The Wind River Reservation crawled eastward along the valley of the Little Wind River. In the near distance, the framed houses and tribal buildings of Fort Washakie seemed to shimmer in the wind. Fort Washakie was where Sacajawea had spent her last years.

  The mountains rose on the west, peaks upon peaks floating into the clouds: Bold Mountain, Mount Windy, Knife Point Mountain, Mount Sacajawea. Stretching north and south along the horizon were the farther ranges of the Rocky Mountains, which had been heaved out of the earth in some ancient cataclysm.

  “You crossed the mountains, you went to the Pacific, and you returned to your people,” Laura said out loud, as if Sacajawea were beside her. The idea made her laugh, a thin, brittle sound in the wind. That would rattle her colleagues, shake them to the very roots of their academic complacency, were she to announce at a Western history conference that she had visited the grave site of Sacajawea and had felt the truth. The real Sacajawea was buried here, not in some unmarked grave in South Dakota.

  “And how do you explain the documentary evidence, Dr. Simmons?” her colleagues would demand. “ ‘This evening the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake squaw, died of a putrid fever. She was good and the best woman in the fort . . .’ John C. Luttig, clerk, Fort Manuel Lisa, 1812.” To counter this evidence, she would smile and present her colleagues with irrefutable evidence—Sacajawea’s memoirs, recorded on the reservation in the 1870s and 1880s by the wife of the Indian agent. The crowning glory of the unfinished biography that Charlotte Allen had left when she died. Laura had already edited the manuscript and written the foreword. She had only to locate the memoirs to complete the biography.

  The wind caught at her coat again, wrapping it around her legs. She shivered and, raising a gloved hand, dabbed at her cheek—an automatic motion now, like an old habit. She’d been checking the bruise for two weeks. Still tender, but the color had begun to fade. It had seemed hardly noticeable in the mirror this morning, after she’d applied a second coat of makeup. She badly wanted a cigarette. She made herself take a deep breath—two, three breaths—gradually feeling confident again, like her old self. Professor Toby Becker was a nightmare that had finally ended, and she was free. She had her work: the classes to teach in the history of the American West at the University of Colorado, the Sacajawea biography to complete.

  She threaded her way among the graves to the blue SAAB parked in a narrow dirt path. A trace of warmth still hugged the inside of the car, even though she’d left the windows down a little to clear out the cigarette smoke. The wind squealed over the window tops as she found the pack in her purse on the seat next to the large, brown folder. She lit another cigarette, inhaled slowly, gratefully, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine burst into life. The clock on the dashboard showed 11:30.

  She threw the gear into drive and headed out of the cemetery and onto the road, taking another long drag from the cigarette. She’d arranged to meet an old college friend, Vicky Holden, for lunch in Lander. Just the person to help her find Sacajawea’s memoirs, which were somewhere on the reservation. She pushed down the accelerator. She didn’t want to be late.

  3

  Vicky Holden watched the small woman lifting herself out of the blue SAAB on the other side of Main Street. The long, straight blond hair parted in the middle, blowing in the wind, the pinched, anxious face, the way she gripped some kind of brown package as she crossed the street, shoulders hunched inside the white coat, a tan bag swinging at her side. She wondered if she would have recognized Laura Simmons had they passed in a crowd.

  The call had come yesterday—a call out of the blue—and at the sound of Laura’s voice, the memories had flashed through her mind, like an old, grainy movie in fast forward. She and Laura struggling through statistics class together, meeting for lunch in the glass-brick CU-Denver cafeteria, crying through commencement. They’d stayed in touch after Laura went back east to work on her doctorate in history and she’d entered law school. Phone calls now and then, a few quick lunches whenever Laura was in town. But after Vicky had moved to Lander, close to the reservation, to open a one-woman law office, the calls had become less frequent. She’d heard Laura had taken a position in the history department at CU in Boulder.

  Vicky slid out of the booth and was halfway to the door when it flew open. A gust of cold air swept over the café, rippling the red-checkered tablecloths and paper napkins. Laura closed the door and smoothed back her hair with one hand, the other still gripping what Vicky could see was a large folder.

  “Laura,” Vicky said, walking over. And then she saw it—a large, purple bruise traveling like a shadow over Laura Simmons’s right cheekbone. She tried not to stare as she held out her hand. Laura’s hand felt as cold as an ingot inside the smoothness of the leather glove. “We have a table over here.” Vicky nodded toward the booths along the plate-glass windows.

  “God, I’m glad I found you,” Laura said when they were seated across from each other. She had left the white coat draped over her shoulders, which made her seem even smaller, like a child lost in a tent of fabric. She wore a silky mauve blouse that folded loosely around her pale throat.

  “It’s good to see you, Laura,” Vicky heard herself saying, trying not to let her eyes rest on the bruise. She’d forgotten how much she missed some of the friends she’d made at the university, after she’d left Ben and gone to Denver thirteen years ago—a lifetime ago. The women like Laura, whose eyes didn’t reflect “Indian” every time they’d looked at her. She didn’t have many friends on the reservation anymore. The girls who had gone to college hadn’t returned. And the others—girls like herself who’d gotten married out of high school—well, she no longer had much in common with them. She tried to push away the feeling nagging at her lately: she didn’t belong anywhere. Not among her people, not in Denver.

  A guffaw of laughter erupted from the cowboys in an adjoining booth, and Vicky forced her attention to the waitress who had wandered over and was scratching Laura’s order on a small pad: Caesar salad, hot tea. She ordered the same.

  The waitress moved away and Laura said, “I still can’t believe you came back here.” She gestured toward the squat, flat-faced buildings beyond the window, the two pickups and the twenty-year-old Chevy grinding down Main Street. “You had a great career at that Denver law firm.”

  Vicky laughed. Wes Nelson, the firm’s managing partner, had said almost the same thing when he’d called last week and offered her a new position. “Seventy-hour weeks making rich corporations a whole lot richer,” she said. “Is that your idea of a great career?”

  It will be different, Wes Nelson’s voice sounded in her head. Indian land issues, natural resources, artifacts. A chance to help the tribes. We need you, Vicky. She pushed the voice away. “What brings you here, Laura? You sounded anxious on the phone. Is there any trouble?”

  “Trouble?” Laura gave a tight, mirthless laugh. “I think I’m finally free of trouble.” She waited until the waitress had set down twin plates of Caesar salad, two mugs of steaming water, and a couple of tea bags. Then she unfolded her napkin, smoothed it in her lap, and began unwrapping one of the bags. “I’m working on the definitive biography of Sacajawea. Actually, it’s the work of another CU professor, who started it twenty years ago.”

  She swished the bag into the mug in front of her a moment before taking a long sip. Light glinted in her pale, gray eyes. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, Vicky, and it dropped into my lap. An old woman came to my office last summer and said she was Charlotte Allen’s mother. Well”—a glance at the ceiling—“I’d never heard of anyone named Charlotte Allen. And get this,” Laura went on, leaning closer, “I almost sent her away! I thought the
woman was looking for directions to somebody’s office, and I don’t consider myself a traffic cop. But for some reason, thanks to whatever spirits exist, I let her in.”

  Laura lifted the flap on the folder next to her and withdrew a thick stack of papers, which she laid on the table. “This is Charlotte Allen’s biography of Sacajawea,” she said. “Her mother asked me to finish it and see that it’s published.” She shrugged. “A memorial, I suppose.”

  “What happened to her daughter?” Vicky asked.

  “Charlotte Allen was a wilderness freak.” Laura took a bite of her salad and chewed thoughtfully a moment. “Well, that wasn’t exactly the way her mother put it, but she was one of those women who like to take long hikes in the mountains.” She pushed a piece of lettuce around her plate, her attention caught by an intervening thought. “Like Sacajawea, I suppose. Only Charlotte Allen set off on a long hike and didn’t come back. She got lost up around Sacajawea Ridge twenty years ago. They never found her body. Maybe you heard about it?”

  Vicky shook her head and took a bite of her own salad. Twenty years ago her life had revolved around Ben. A contortionist’s life, bending herself to Ben’s comings and goings, his moods. If a white woman had gotten lost in the mountains, she had no memory of it. People were always getting lost in the mountains.

  “Do you have any idea how many biographies have been written about Sacajawea?” Laura went on. “Why, I came very close to asking the woman to leave. I’m up for tenure next year, Vicky. I have to publish something significant or my career is finished. I told the woman I had no interest in trying to publish another biography of Sacajawea.”

  Suddenly Laura pushed her plate to one side. Most of the salad remained. She leaned across the table, the gray eyes darkening with intensity. A vein pulsed at the outer edge of the purple bruise. “That’s when the woman told me her daughter had discovered Sacajawea’s memoirs.”