The Spirit Woman Read online

  Vicky held a gulp of warm tea in her mouth a moment, then swallowed. She’d grown up with stories about the old Shoshone woman who had claimed to be Sacajawea. Stories about the medal Meriwether Lewis had given her, which was buried with her son, Baptiste. The important papers she always carried to prove that she was somebody, which were buried with her adopted son, Bazil. And stories about how Bazil’s grave had been exhumed in the 1920s. The papers were found, but they had turned to dust. She had never heard any stories about Sacajawea’s memoirs.

  Laura dug into the folder again and pulled out a red leather notebook. “Charlotte Allen was a meticulous researcher,” she said, waving the notebook over the table. “She kept a journal of her research, a record of her sources and where she located them, the names of Sacajawea’s descendants she’d interviewed. Her mother found the journal wedged in the spare well in the trunk of Charlotte’s car after she disappeared.”

  Laura opened the notebook at the place where a bookmark protruded and began to read out loud, with the precise diction of a lecturer: “Sarah Trumbull Irwin, wife of the agent, Dr. James Irwin, spent many hours with Sacajawea. She recorded in a notebook everything Sacajawea said about the part she had played in the expedition. Mrs. Irwin placed the notebook at the agency in Fort Washakie, which was destroyed by fire in 1885. It has always been assumed that Sacajawea’s memoirs were lost.”

  She closed the journal. “The memoirs survived, Vicky,” Laura said, her voice rising in excitement. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

  “I can imagine.” A piece of the past, Vicky thought, something that would explain what had really happened.

  Laura was shaking her head, as if the meaning was too important, too precious, for anyone to grasp fully. “It will settle a hundred years of arguments about what happened to Sacajawea after the expedition. It will prove that she lived out her life with her people and told her stories when she was a very old woman.”

  Vicky pushed her own plate aside. Another shout, like a hurrah, went up from the cowboys, mingling with the clatter of plates, the swish of the door opening and closing. She took a sip of the tea, lukewarm now. “I’ve never heard that the memoirs survived, Laura. Where do you think they are?”

  Laura studied the red notebook in her hands. “The Shoshones have kept the memoirs a secret. A man Charlotte called Toussaint knows where they are,” she said. “Can you help me find him?”

  The name had a familiar ring, Vicky thought. Something she’d read? Some story she’d heard? “Toussaint,” she said, trying the sound of it. “Wasn’t he . . .”

  “The French trader Sacajawea was married to,” Laura said quickly. “Toussaint Charbonneau. The man Charlotte met must be a descendant.”

  Vicky remembered now. Once in a while the elders had mentioned the name. He was a hard, brutal man. He beat her. Captain Clark had to interfere. And after they got back from the Pacific, Toussaint whipped her in front of his Ute wife.

  “I’ve never heard of anyone on the res by that name,” Vicky said.

  Laura pressed back against the seat and began lifting and closing the cover of the journal. Open, shut. Open, shut. “Charlotte did some research in the Shoshone cultural center. Maybe she found a document that led her to Toussaint. Or maybe one of the elders she interviewed . . .” She leaned forward again, allowing the white coat to drop behind her. The pale light filtering past the window burnished the mauve silk blouse. “Would you introduce me to them? Assure them that I intend to write the truth? Sacajawea was a great woman, Vicky. Her story must be told.”

  “The Shoshones may not agree.”

  “That Sacajawea was a great woman?” Laura’s head snapped forward, gray eyes wide in bewilderment.

  “That her story should be told.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Vicky took another sip of tea, pulling from her memory the voices of the elders. The white people came and fastened themselves to our land. She said, “Lewis and Clark thought they were exploring the wilderness, where no one had gone before, but everywhere they went, they found Indian trails. After the expedition, everything changed for Indian people.”

  Laura beckoned the waitress. She waited until the woman had refilled the mugs with boiling water, fished a couple more tea bags from her apron pocket, and turned way. Then she said, “Okay, a hundred years ago Shoshones thought Sacajawea betrayed her people. But for Godsakes, Vicky, this is now.”

  “Traditions live on,” Vicky said. “Sacajawea stepped ahead of the men; she did something outstanding. She acted like a chief and made her husband look like a fool.” You goin’ off to Denver to make yourself into a ho:xyu’wu:ne’n. The grandmothers’ voices in her head now. You think you’re better’n Ben?

  “Toussaint Charbonneau was a fool.” Laura swished a new tea bag into her cup. Steam wrapped around her thin fingers like a glove. “The Lewis and Clark journals make that very clear. Sacajawea was smarter and cleverer. She knew what to do in emergencies. She was the one who saved the expedition’s scientific instruments when they washed into the Missouri River, not Toussaint.” She hesitated, as if a new idea had overtaken her. “Maybe that’s why he beat her,” she said, almost to herself.

  Vicky closed her eyes against the image. The young Indian woman, an infant on her back, the husband’s raised fists. Did nothing change? Was the past always part of the present? She looked at the woman on the other side of the table. “What makes you so certain someone named Toussaint has the memoirs?”

  Laura opened the journal again and flipped rapidly through the pages. “Here’s what Charlotte wrote on November sixteenth, the day she disappeared. ‘Toussaint called this morning. The elders have agreed to allow me to use Sacajawea’s memoirs. He’ll bring them this evening. We’re going to dinner to celebrate. This is the most important day of my life.’ ”

  A glance up. “The day I hold the memoirs in my hand will be the most important in my life,” Laura said, then began paging backward through the journal. “Here are the names of the elders Charlotte interviewed. One of them may know Toussaint. Mary Whiteman.”

  “She’s been dead almost twenty years.”

  A stricken look came into the other woman’s expression. The bruise seemed to darken. “James Silver.”

  Vicky shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Florence Rain.”

  “She was buried a month ago.”

  Laura dropped back against the booth, the journal limp in her hand. “I should’ve come to the reservation last summer when I got the manuscript. I should’ve finished the biography by now. What am I going to do?”

  “Perhaps you could talk to Florence’s daughter—Theresa Redwing.”

  “Her daughter.” Laura repeated the words and stared blankly across the café. “I could have talked to Florence herself last summer. So much is lost with each generation.” After a moment she brought her eyes back. “Could you arrange an interview?”

  Vicky tipped her mug back and forth, watching the thin brown liquid roll up the sides. She regretted making the suggestion, and yet—Laura was so determined, so desperate. “Sacajawea was Shoshone,” she began, searching for a way to explain how the past had melded into the present. “I’m Arapaho. Our people were enemies in the Old Time. We share the reservation because the government thought it was a good idea. We try to make it work, but that doesn’t mean we love each other. I very much doubt I could arrange anything with a Shoshone grandmother.”

  Pinpricks of panic flared in the other woman’s eyes, and Vicky hurried on: “There’s someone who can help you. John O’Malley, the pastor at St. Francis Mission.”

  “A priest?”

  “And an historian, Laura. You’ll speak the same language. All the elders trust him. I was planning to stop by the mission this afternoon to talk to him about something else. Why don’t you come along? I’ll introduce you.”

  Laura’s shoulders relaxed. “I feel a lot better,” she said.

  “Do you?” Vicky held the other
woman’s gaze. “Why didn’t you come here in the summer? What’s going on?”

  “You know, lectures, meetings, the usual . . .” Laura shrugged.

  “Is this usual?” Vicky gestured toward the other woman’s cheekbone.

  A thin hand flew to the bruise and covered it. “I walked into a door some time ago.”

  “I’m on the board of the Eagle Shelter for victims of domestic abuse,” Vicky said. “We see a lot of women who walk into doors.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” Laura gathered her coat, plunging both arms into the sleeves. A cuff brushed against her mug, sending it wobbling across the table. “Let’s go see that mission priest.”

  “I used to walk into doors myself.” Vicky reached out to steady the mug.

  Laura froze, coat bunched around her shoulders, collar tucked inside. “You never told me that’s the reason you left your husband.”

  Vicky stopped herself from saying that she and Ben were trying to work things out again. She turned toward the window and stared at the passing traffic a moment, the two businessmen with down jackets pulled over their suits moving along the sidewalk, heads thrust into the wind. The loud clack of dishes, a laugh somewhere, filled the quiet.

  “I haven’t told anyone either,” Laura said finally. “I’m a professor, for Godsakes, and Toby’s on the English faculty. You’ve probably heard of him. Toby Becker? He wrote Time Gifts.”

  Vicky shook her head.

  “He’s a great writer, I give him that. At least his male characters are sensitive and rational and . . .” She hesitated. “Not brutal.”

  “How long did the beatings last?”

  Laura’s jaw was working silently. “I was in love with him,” she said finally, as if that fact answered the question. “He was the most brilliant, handsome, and charming man I’ve ever been involved with. Tall and muscular, with thick, curly brown hair and eyes as blue as the sky. He’s almost perfect.” She swallowed and glanced away. “After the last time—two weeks ago—I moved back into my old apartment. It was hard, Vicky. People can change. I kept hoping Toby would change.”

  Vicky nodded. How often had some woman sat in her office, rubbing a black eye, dabbing at a bruised face, saying, I don’t want a divorce, Vicky. He’s gonna change. Just this morning, Alva Running Bull had told her the same thing. Lester was gonna change. And she, herself, hoping Ben had changed, wondering . . .

  “He doesn’t want to let me go,” Laura said, her voice flat. “He’s been calling ever since I left, sometimes four and five times a night. I think he was following me before I came here.”

  “Did you get a restraining order?” Vicky heard the false note of confidence in her own voice, as if a restraining order ever stopped a batterer.

  “A restraining order?” Laura said, her tone sharp with incredulity. “I don’t want anyone to know. What would people think? I decided to take off for a couple weeks, come here and finish the biography. One of my colleagues is covering my classes. No one thought anything about my leaving now. They know I’ve been trying to work on the biography. I’ve taken a room at the Mountain House.”

  “Did you tell anyone where you’re staying?” Vicky asked, making an effort to conceal the uneasiness coming over her.

  “The department chair,” Laura said haltingly. “I had to tell him, in case he had to get ahold of me about next semester’s schedule. I asked him not to tell anyone else.” She shrugged, as if to brush away her own uneasiness. “By the time I get back to Boulder, Toby will have found someone else, I’m sure, probably one of the grad students who used to call the apartment all the time.”

  Laura stacked the manuscript and journal back into the folder, then closed the flap. “How did you do it?” she asked.

  “Do what?” Vicky had slid across the booth, her black bag in one hand, and was about to get to her feet.

  “Get away from the man who made you walk into doors.”

  Vicky didn’t say anything. She felt like a reluctant witness in the courtroom, composing some kind of acceptable explanation.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve gone back to him!” Laura said, incredulity edging her voice.

  “We have two grown kids, Lucas and Susan,” Vicky began, groping for the words, the logic behind the decision. The kids need a family, Vicky. “They’re in Los Angeles, but if Ben and I are together—if things are better—they’ll move back. We’re Arapaho, Laura. We want our family close by.” Explaining. Explaining. She sounded like the women in her office, the women at the Eagle Shelter. She was not one of them.

  “Well, we’re both like Sacajawea, aren’t we,” Laura said after a moment. It was a statement.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have our reasons for staying. Sacajawea stayed with Toussaint.”

  “She was an Indian woman who lived two hundred years ago. She didn’t have any choice.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong, Vicky. She could have left him when the expedition reached the Shoshones. Her own brother, Cameahwait, was the chief. He would have protected her. But she stayed until . . .” Laura paused. Suddenly she picked up her folder and bag and rose from the booth. “Shouldn’t we go over to the mission?”

  Vicky got to her feet and faced her friend. “Until what?”

  “Until Toussaint nearly killed her.”

  4

  Flecks of moisture spattered the windshield as Father John drove the old Toyota pickup west across the reservation under a sky of satiny gray. Seventeen Mile Road stretched ahead, a ribbon of asphalt that ran into the hazy clouds falling down the slopes of the Wind River Mountains. It was trying to snow. The music of Idomeneo rose from the tape player beside him unds of loss and impossible vows and hopeful journeys. He pushed the off button, leaving only the sound of the tires crunching gravel as he turned into the parking lot in front of the senior citizens’ center. He passed the pickups angled at the curb, stopped a few feet from the front door, and checked his watch. Almost nine-thirty. Thirty minutes late.

  Howard Elkman, one of the Arapaho elders, had called yesterday. A gravelly voice: Could he come by for a talk? About nine tomorrow? Father John had been half expecting the call. The moccasin telegraph was probably loaded down with news of the skeleton buried by the river, and an article had run in yesterday’s Gazette . The elders would be concerned.

  He didn’t know any more about the skeleton than he had when he found it. He’d met two Wind River police officers at the site, and by the time he’d left, there had been a crowd milling about: a couple of other officers, Art Banner, the police chief, and Ted Gianelli, the local FBI agent. An unexplained death on the reservation fell under the agent’s jurisdiction. He’d called Gianelli yesterday, after Howard had called. Nothing yet, the agent had said. “Let you know soon’s we get the lab reports.”

  Now he hurried up the sidewalk and gave the front door a hard pull. There was a warm, moist fog of stale coffee and cigarette smoke inside the meeting hall. Elders and grandmothers were scattered about the tables, metal pitchers and mugs arrayed in front of them. A window on the far wall framed an expanse of snow-tipped plains and buttes and gray sky.

  “Hey, Father.” Howard Elkman rose from the table across the hall, waving both arms. He had the rough-edged voice of the outdoors. Roger Bancroft and Elton Knows-His-Horse were seated across from him. Father John started over.

  “Please sit down, Grandfather,” he said, taking Howard’s arm and easing him back onto the metal chair. Then he shook his hand. Howard’s grip was strong and confident. He was probably in his eighties, Father John guessed, with white hair that hung in two thick braids down the front of his red wool shirt and the hooded eyes of a man used to staring into the far distances.

  Father John reached across the table and shook hands with the other elders. Also in their eighties, most likely, but it was hard to tell. A lifetime spent outdoors could age a man, and at the same time make him seem fit and strong. Like Howard, they had the wiry build of cowboys who could mount a pony on
the run, and there was a nervous, contained energy in the way they sat, square-shouldered with heads tilted back. Steam curled from the mugs encircled by the rough, brown hands. Elton peered at him over the top of rimless glasses.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

  “You runnin’ on Indian time now, Father?” There was amusement in Howard’s tone.

  “When in Rome . . .” Father John tossed his cowboy hat and jacket on a vacant chair. He was thinking that Indian time made a lot of sense. Things didn’t take place until everyone was ready, and he hadn’t been ready for the meeting until now. His phone had started ringing at eight o’clock—at least ten calls: Was he leaving St. Francis? Why did he have to go? Yes, to the first question. He’d ignored the other. He hadn’t found the answer.

  He sat down next to Howard, who had picked up the metal pitcher and poured steaming coffee into a mug, which he shoved along the table toward him. “This’ll curl your toes,” he said.

  Father John took a sip. The coffee was bitter, but hot, and he still felt chilled by the November cold. The elder talked on—winter was coming, gonna be lotta snow and cold this year, bones already aching. The other men joined in—Roger saying he was gonna get the roof fixed so he could stay home, Elton telling him he’d better get his old truck fixed so he could go places. Preliminaries, Father John knew. A polite prelude to stating the reason they’d asked him here.

  After a few minutes—Father John had drained half of the mug—Howard fixed his gaze on the men across the table, as if he’d suddenly spotted a couple of warriors riding over the crest of a hill. “We wanted to ask you about that skeleton your dog dug up,” he said.

  Father John understood. If the skeleton was an ancestor, it shouldn’t have been disturbed. The elders were traditionals: ne’3ne:teyou’u:wut. They clung to the Indian religion and the old ways. Still, he often looked out over the congregation on Sunday mornings and found the three men in a back pew, heads bent in prayer. “You gotta pray all the time,” Howard told him once. “You can’t slack off.”