The Spirit Woman Page 7

  And yet—he felt a stab of disappointment. Vicky had asked him to help a friend. A last favor, and he’d failed. Theresa had agreed to see Laura, it was true, but he doubted the old woman would help her. Whatever she knew about Toussaint or the memoirs, she would tell her granddaughter. Which meant that Charlotte Allen’s biography would remain unfinished.

  He slowed for the turn in to the mission grounds, waiting until an oncoming pickup had shot past. So many things unfinished, he thought. The programs he’d hoped to start: a social club for teenagers, a day-care center, cultural classes. And who would coach the Eagles baseball team next spring? The days had always stretched ahead into some indeterminate time when, he’d known, he would have to leave. But not yet. He needed more time. Most priests would be glad to get out of there. The provincial’s voice again.

  Well, he wasn’t most priests. His replacement was already here, settled in, making the rounds, getting to know the people. But he was also here. He hadn’t even started to pack. He resolved to have another talk with the provincial.

  Father John saw the Harley leaning on the kickstand, chrome glinting under the streetlamp in front of the residence. He parked in front of the administration building, took the steps two at a time, and pulled open the heavy door. Light from outdoors slanted off the portraits lining the corridor: past pastors at St. Francis Mission, staring out of wire-rimmed glasses, obedient and nonquestioning, solemn in their rectitude. Had it been easier in the past, he wondered, to keep the vows?

  His desk looked as if he’d just walked away. Folders and papers, stacks of messages, unopened envelopes spilling over the surface. So many things unfinished. He tossed his jacket and hat onto a side chair, sank into the cracked leather of his own chair, and drew the phone past a pile of papers. He called Vicky’s office. The secretary’s taped voice: “Vicky Holden’s office. Please leave a message.” He hit the disconnect button and tapped out her home number, surprised that he remembered it. He seldom used it.

  Another answering machine, Vicky’s voice this time. “Leave your name and number . . .”

  “John,” he said. “I’ve seen Theresa. Call me.” As he replaced the receiver, he heard a shuffling noise on the stoop, the sound of the door opening, then the clack of footsteps in the corridor. He looked up.

  Elena stood in the doorway, crushing a black purse against the front of her blue coat, anger flashing in the round face. “I quit,” she said. Then she turned back into the shadowy corridor.

  Father John was on his feet. He caught the housekeeper at the front door. “Wait a minute, Elena.” He had a sense of what was going on. “Come in and sit down.” He took her arm and led her back into the office to a side chair. Tossing his jacket and hat onto the floor, he sat down beside her. “Talk to me,” he said.

  The woman threw both hands into the air. The black purse slipped off her lap and sank onto his jacket. “How’s he expect me to get my work done? Grocery shopping, cleaning, the laundry. And all the cooking, and you know I gotta fry some good-tasting Indian bread once in a while. How am I s’pose to get it done with his asking questions all the time? ‘Sit down, Elena,’ he says. ‘Tell me about today’s Arapaho courtship practices.’ Courtship practices! What’s the man goin’ on about?”

  “I’ll talk to Father Kevin,” Father John said.

  “Well, you’re leavin’, so I’m leavin’.” She gave him a look weighted with determination.

  “You can’t leave. The mission will fall apart without you.”

  “You got that right, Father.” The old woman swallowed back a smile.

  “Look, Elena, go home and think about it.” He reached out and took one of her hands in his. “And please come back.”

  She started out of the chair, and he picked up her purse and handed it to her. “There isn’t any dinner. I didn’t get time.”

  “We won’t starve to death.”

  “There’s some hamburger in the fridge,” she said.

  He walked her to the door and returned to his desk. This wasn’t right. Nothing was going the way he’d assumed it would. Everything was changing, rearranging itself in ways he hadn’t imagined. Only the thirst was the same, coming on him when he least expected it, when it was the last thing he needed. He wanted a drink, that was the whole of the matter. He could taste the whiskey sliding down his throat, sense the initial control and clarity it would bring, and the joy. One drink was all he needed—

  He laughed out loud at the notion, and the sound of his own voice came back to him in the quiet of the old building. He needed the entire bottle. There had never been enough whiskey to quench the thirst and ease the loneliness. Lord, give me courage. Let me not start drinking today. Let this not be the day.

  He got up and poured a mug of the thick, black coffee stagnating at the bottom of the glass pot—coffee he’d made this morning. It was still warm, but it had passed beyond bitter to something bland and tasteless.

  He sat back down and punched in the provincial’s number. A man’s voice, sharp and annoyed, picked up. He could picture the priest at the other end: a young Jesuit roused from a good book, a favorite television sitcom. He gave his name and asked to speak to the provincial. And then he was on hold, canned music playing in his ear.

  “We have office hours, John.” Bill Rutherford’s voice interrupted the music. They went back a long way, he and the provincial, to their days in the seminary together. “This better be an emergency.”

  “Look, Bill,” he began. “Things aren’t working out here. I’m not ready to leave.”

  “What do you mean, not working out? Kevin’s there, isn’t he?”

  “He’s here.”

  “Good. I’ve made all the arrangements for you at Marquette. Everything’s set. The history department’s looking forward to welcoming you. Your airline ticket’s in the mail.”

  “I want to finish my work here,” Father John began. And then, the same litany of reasons: new programs to start, the church to refurbish, finances to tend to—

  The provincial cut in. “We’ve already had this discussion. There’s no sense in going over it. I believe it’s time for you to leave for your own spiritual welfare. You’re in the way of temptation there.”

  The way of temptation. Father John stared at the shadows out in the corridor, trying to formulate the logical argument. There was no logic in his desire to stay. Logic was on the provincial’s side. It was time for him to return to his former life. He pushed the logic away. “I need more time here,” he said.

  A sigh of exasperation floated through the line. “You’re making this difficult, John. Change is in your own best interests. You’ll see it’s true when you’re back.”

  Father John slammed down the receiver. If I go back.

  The phone started ringing. He was about to answer, then decided against it. It was probably the provincial again. Still ringing as he walked around the desk and retrieved his jacket and hat from the floor. Still ringing. He reached over and picked up the receiver. “Father O’Malley,” he said. Still here at St. Francis. Still a priest.

  “John, I was afraid I’d missed you.” It was Vicky’s voice. He stepped around the desk and sat down, combing his fingers through his hair, forcing his mind onto what he’d called her about. Then he related what Theresa Redwing had said. She’d agreed to see Laura. He wasn’t sure it would do any good. He told her about Hope Stockwell.

  Vicky didn’t say anything for a moment. He could hear the disappointment in the sound of her breathing. Finally she said, “Laura wasn’t counting on anyone else looking for the same evidence, especially not a Shoshone doctoral student.” She took a long breath and thanked him. He waited for her to say good-bye. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.” He tightened his grip on the receiver. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just something in your voice.”

  “I’m fine.”

  In the background was the muffled whack of a door closing, the sound of a man’s voice. “I’d better
go,” she said quickly, and hung up.

  He found the new pastor in his room upstairs at the residence, hunched over his computer. “Elena just quit,” he said.

  Father Kevin tapped at the keys, his eyes locked on the black lines forming and re-forming across the white screen. “What’re you talking about?”

  “She doesn’t like being interviewed.”

  “Oh?” Kevin swung around. “That’s the reason she quit? Good heavens. This is serious, John.”

  “You’re right about that. She takes care of everything around here.”

  “I mean, the woman’s a walking file of incredible information. She remembers everything she’s ever heard. All the old stories. Imagine! Her great-grandparents lived on the plains, roaming about, pitching villages along the streams. They passed down a lot of valuable stuff that Elena’s carrying around in her head. She knows how her people adapted the old ways. It has to be recorded, John, or it’ll be lost.”

  “It won’t be lost. Elena’s told her own children. She’s probably told her grandchildren.”

  The other priest was shaking his head. “It’s not the same, John. You’re a historian. You know it’s not the same as written records.” He hesitated and glanced back at the computer screen. “I’ve been pushing too hard, haven’t I?”

  Father John didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll call her right away. What’s her number?” Father John gave him the number. Kevin jumped up and brushed past him, heading out into the hallway. Father John followed him downstairs, where the other priest picked up the phone on the table in the entry and started dialing.

  In the kitchen, Father John stared into the refrigerator, looking for a package of hamburger. It had been a while since he’d done any cooking. How hard could it be? The cajoling sound of Kevin’s voice drifted from the entry. Elena would be back tomorrow, he knew. He set the hamburger on the counter and began rummaging through one of the cabinets for a frying pan. He was a good man, this new pastor. St. Francis would be in good hands. The mission would go on without John O’Malley. That was what mattered, didn’t it? That was all that really mattered.

  11

  There is no fraud in the statement which I am making to you. Fraud is not with the Indians in matters of this kind. They do not put up a story just to have it startling and out of place. What the early Indians say relative to their old stories is true and can be accepted.

  —James McAdams, great-grandson of Sacajawea

  Laura stared at the statement a moment, then set the page on the table next to the gray carton with SACAJAWEA in bold black letters on one side. Somewhere in the depths of the old house that served as the Shoshone cultural center, a furnace cranked and rattled, sending a stream of hot air through the second-floor library. A pale afternoon sky shone through the oblong windows; the fluorescent light danced on the plank floors. Two doors led to other rooms, where the records themselves were shelved.

  With the exception of the director, a plump, middle-aged Shoshone woman who had introduced herself as Phyllis Manley (“And how may I help you?”), Laura was alone. The director sat at the small desk inside the door, stapling stacks of papers. Whoosh. Kerplunk. Whoosh. Kerplunk.

  Laura shuffled through the other pages spread in front of her, like cards in a game of solitaire. Oral histories given eighty, ninety years ago by Shoshones and pioneers who had sat with Sacajawea years before and listened to her stories. She picked up one of the pages:She said she was traveling with a large body of people in which army officers were in charge. The people became very hungry and killed some of their horses and even some of the dogs for food.—Grandma Her-ford

  On the trip to the big waters, there was a war party against the soldiers. Sacajawea drew out her blanket and by signs she made with the blanket, the Indians knew she was friendly, and the soldiers were not molested. —James McAdams

  She also mentioned many narrow escapes from drowning in making the trip through the rapids and falls of the Snake River and the Columbia.—Finn G. Burnett

  She said she had guided Clark to the Clark’s fork of the Yellowstone River, where they had great difficulty in finding timber large enough to build canoes. They decided at last to make two small canoes and connect them together. With this craft they voyaged down the river.—Finn G. Burnett

  Her first husband was a Frenchman. She called him Schab-a-no. He was pretty rough in his treatment of her, and she ran away after he whipped her.—James McAdams

  Laura closed her eyes a moment. The images of Sacajawea blazed in her mind: a young woman, the fringed, deerskin dress, the moccasins, the black hair clipped in back, the bundle on her back, disappearing ahead, always ahead, into the wilderness.

  The sound of the stapler biting into a stack of paper filled the quiet. Laura sighed. There was nothing new in the files. No sign of an old notebook—the kind in which the agent’s wife would have recorded Sacajawea’s memoirs. And the director had assured her she’d never heard that the memoirs had escaped the agency fire, and there was no one on the reservation named Toussaint. She was running into brick walls. Without the memoirs, she could never finish the biography.

  Laura picked up her bag and went outside for a cigarette. She huddled for warmth under the eaves at the front door, cursing herself for leaving her coat on the chair. Billows of clouds rolled overhead, forming and re-forming against a sky that was dull and flat in the fading daylight. The air was cold and the mixture of ice and smoke stung her throat. She let her gaze roam over the tribal compound at Fort Washakie—a collection of modern brick buildings and century-old, white-frame bungalows that housed the tribal offices, the Wind River Police Department, the BIA agency. Next to the agency was the vacant site where Sacajawea’s small log cabin had stood: one room above, one room below, a shed attached to the side. They had found her one morning, dead in her shakedown of buffalo robes.

  Laura stubbed out the cigarette and flipped it into a tangle of scrub brush. The sense of desperation seemed less acute. She’d confirmed that the memoirs were not at the cultural center. That was valuable. And she knew where they were, had known from the moment she’d arrived. Wrapped in brown paper or in a parfleche, stashed in a trunk, forgotten in a closet in one of the little houses scattered about the reservation. She would find them. Lindy Meadows was checking the old letters at the Arapaho Museum. Who knew what information might be in them? And on Thursday, she’d talk to Theresa Redwing.

  She’d made the appointment last night, after Vicky had called to tell her that Theresa would see her. The woman’s granddaughter would be there. That could be a problem. Laura hadn’t counted on a Shoshone graduate student writing a dissertation on Sacajawea. Still, if Theresa knew who Toussaint was . . . That was all that mattered. She could convince the man that the memoirs should be in the hands of a professional historian, not a graduate student. They should be part of Sacajawea’s definitive biography.

  Hugging herself against the cold, Laura went back inside and climbed the stairs to the library. A man about six feet tall was leaning over the director’s desk, his voice low and confidential, as if he were telling an off-color story. He must have come in through the back door. His sheepskin coat hung open over a white shirt and blue jeans; a white Stetson dangled from one hand. He slapped the hat against his thigh and gave out a laugh that rumbled across the plank floor. Phyllis Manley tilted her face upward, eyes shining, a ripple of laughter joining his.

  Laura recognized the man: Robert Crow Wolf, Shoshone, historian at the University of Wyoming. She’d heard a paper he’d delivered two years ago at the Western History Association, something about the cultural impact of trading posts on the Plains Indians. She’d been impressed by the depth of his research, the new insights into old material. She walked over.

  “I’m going to need everything you have on the early agriculture on the res,” he told the director.

  Phyllis Manley started to lift herself out of her chair. “It’ll a take a while to pull out the files.”

  �
��Better get to it.” He waved the Stetson, as if he were shooing a stray calf into the corral. The director was smiling as she stepped backward, then disappeared through one of the doors to the archives.

  “Robert Crow Wolf,” Laura said.

  The man swung around. Everything about him spoke of a warrior’s strength and alertness, from the broad shoulders to the way he planted his boots on the floor, his dark eyes traveling over her. His hair was black, parted in the middle and combed back from a dark, sculptured face with a firmly set jaw and full lips that parted in a half smile of appreciation. She was suddenly conscious of being a woman in the presence of an assured and handsome man. “Laura Simmons, University of Colorado, I believe.” He stepped forward and gripped her palm against the roughness of his suede glove. The odor of coffee and aftershave floated between them. “What brings you here?”

  “I’m working on a biography of Sacajawea,” Laura explained.

  The Indian threw back his head and gave a snort of laughter. “Another one?” He ushered her over to the chair she’d left a few moments ago, one hand on her elbow. She had the sense that she had his full attention. “Tell me,” he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down beside her, “what could you possibly write that hasn’t already been written?”

  Laura flinched. She could expect Crow Wolf’s reaction from all her colleagues unless she found the memoirs. “I believe there’s evidence that has never been published,” she said, hearing the tenseness in her voice.

  The man shrugged. “You’re not the first historian to come here looking for new evidence.” He leaned close. The odor of coffee was strong on his breath. “You after the papers that were buried with Bazil? Fact is, they disintegrated. Poof!” The gloved hands clapped together. “Nothing but ashes in the wind. How about the Jefferson Medal Clark supposedly gave to Sacajawea?” He smiled; the white teeth gleamed in his brown face and flecks of light danced in the black eyes.