“I think I know,” she offered, standing and moving from behind the easel to the room’s center. “Potts’s son, Clyde, is a friend of my son Jeremy’s. Jeremy tells me that Potts is infuriated with the Indian Defense Association. That he stands to lose land he had homesteaded if the Indian Defense Association succeeds in stirring up an investigation into the Department of Interior and its Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
“Well, isn’t an investigation what this is about?” Blumy thundered. “What else are we here for tonight?”
In this matter, at least, Alessandra was better informed. Like the others, she knew that the Hispanics and Anglos had lived upon some of the Pueblo land for two or more generations – non-Indians who had acquired it in good faith. Spanish land grants centuries before and Squatters Rights had so obscured original titles that close to anyone could lay justifiable claim. But she also knew what went on behind closed doors.
“The fly in the ointment,” she explained to the group, “is the Department of Interior’s policy of interposing ‘quiet’ titles and delays that prevent the Supreme Court from recovering Pueblo farmlands and water rights.”
“Quiet Titles?” someone asked.
“But isn’t the Bureau of Indian Affairs supposed to protect the Indians?” Mary demanded.
“The BIA,” she said bluntly, “is part of the Interior Department. And it works behind the scenes to discredit the culture and religion of the Indians because the Bureau feels it is in the Indians’ best interest to bring about their speedy assimilation into our noble society. No land or water means no home base . . . and the Indians are forced to leave, to separate the tribes and the families to make a living.”
At this, several voices rang out, but Doc Martin’s prevailed. “Bull-hockey! Then we take our campaign to the nation. Let people know what’s going on and how the government’s hurting a good way of life!”
“Hell,” Andrew said, “we’ll beat the drum until all our friends and colleagues know what’s going on. It’ll be the drum that’s heard ’round the world.”
“What’s that?” Lady Brett shouted, whipping the hearing trumpet to her ear, causing Frieda’s cigarette ashes to flutter over the room like cremated last remains.
“Alessandra,” Peg asked, “do you think your husband would introduce some kind of bill in Congress to help?”
How not to dishonor her husband and still do this thing Man demanded of her, speak her truth? “Look, you can get all the bills introduced in Congress that you’ve got ink enough to write, but the trick is to get them passed. You’ll have to get public indignation behind you, and that will mean a long, hard fight.”
Peg’s shoulders slumped. “That means we’re back to square one. Letter writing.”
Glancing around the studio, Alessandra saw their enthusiasm drop quicker than a thermometer’s mercury during an arctic norther’. They were good, decent people; artists, not politicians. What chance did they have? Brendon would certainly not risk his career in backing such an unpopular bill. Was she willing to risk his wrath in siding with the Indians? Besides, what could she, one person, do?
She’d figure out something. Hadn’t she chained herself to the White House fence to protest for suffrage? But that had been when she had been young, resolved, determined . . . and idealistic. That had been also when she had felt most alive, when she had been striving to better circumstances despite overwhelming odds.
Goddamnit, I’m not going to let that pipsqueak Potts have the last say!
Across the room, in its shadowed recesses, her gaze met Man’s concerned one and seismic shock waves crashed through her. Could he read her thoughts? Worse, could he smell the wet warmth that suddenly slicked her thighs? Eyeing him over her the rim of her glass, she tossed down the remainder of her sherry. With the last drop sweetening her tongue came the realization she was casting her lot and forfeiting my chance to return to her old life.
Chapter Six
After Jeremy left for school that morning, Alessandra forced herself to confront the leftover pudding of cornmeal. As enticement, she garnished it with sugar and ground cinnamon, added fresh cream, then plopped a little currant jelly on top. If she were to tackle the problem with Potts, she would need energy and stamina. Unfortunately her mind might have resolve, but her body lacked resiliency.
She had thought by now to have some response from her letter to Brendon, asking him to find out what he could about the commissioner of the BIA, Burke. Information was always the best defense.
The hot water kettle steamed, summoning her. As she removed it from the flame, her eye caught on the water-filled jelly jar with the mariposa lily she was trying to grow. So far, her only real success at creation had been her son . . . and he was splitting away from her.
Her fragmented self yearned for wholeness. For more creation, for the possibilities of abundant life, something that could root and thrive like the lily. Man certainly was not the answer. The arbitrary and capricious resolve behind his husky voice that there would be no further sex between them was as final and unchallengeable as Judgment Day. Her art work then would be the answer, fulfilling her enormously. Back East, she could even open her own gallery and, with all her influential friends and contacts, most likely become highly successful.
Unless, she was foolish enough to throw her support with the Indian Defense Association and alienate everyone she knew back East.
With her cup of hot chokecherry tea in hand, she went outside to stand beneath the portal. Early morning sunlight glistened golden on dew-damp sand. In the midst of her yearning, Taos Pueblo with its subdued joy, its flutes and drums of early morning, called to her. The magic of one of those drums, Man’s drum she was sure, called to her soul. With resolve, she left her tea and cornmeal unfinished, and at once began to dress.
Had Peg asked, Alessandra couldn’t say why she responded to the pressing urge to go to the Pueblo. She could attribute it to the need to research the pueblo affairs more thoroughly before she came up with some plan of action to thwart Potts. But truth be told, and she was about truth, wasn’t she? – she was compelled by some force outside herself to answer the fierce yearning that swelled thick inside her and pulsed like an orgasm that couldn’t be crested.
The impoverished Pueblo drew her onward, offering the humble security and comfort more than her husband’s illustrious Rock Creek estate ever had. Such illusions. Such fantasies. Here was reality. Here was Life.
Dew sparkled over pansies trimming the dirt road. Some of the pink and red phlox were already fading into magenta. Nearing the Pueblo, she passed fields of yellow corn, then a corral where a few sheep were being fattened to provide their owner with mutton. An Indian in a buckboard drove by, eyes hooded against the irrelevancies of the outer world.
At the entrance to the Pueblo, marked by the Saint Jerome Chapel, infinitely unfamiliar sounds, sights, and souls awaited her arrival. Her gaze feasted on the sumptuous vermilion of the drying chile peppers, the purple of fierce and uncompromising rug patterns, the turquoise that protected windows and doorways, the orange of the blazing cedar and piñon sticks in the outdoor domed hornos.
Standing atop the highest mud-brick apartment, a blanketed figure overlooked the pueblo. Tony had explained how the various male elders from the fifty members of the Tribal Council took turns at the post aloft. Each elder kept vigil over the sun and moon’s journeys through the sky and took turns signaling their people of the proper times for observing the tribe’s millennium-old spiritual rituals.
In the plaza, male singers, having bathed at dawn, were wrapped in their cotton blankets. They performed their occupation with serious intent, tapping lightly on drums and singing in a low, far-away murmur. Wives baked the day’s aromatic bread over their perfumed fires. Girls played Pick-up Sticks. Young women flirted surreptitiously with strutting young men. Horses, dogs, and children interflowed like the soft stream running through the village, joining with the Rio Grande River further down the valley.
These peopl
e gave her passing glances that acknowledged but did not question her presence. Tolerance, indulgence, courtesy were practiced in the pueblo as a recognition of the sanctity of life in others. Standing in the ochre shadows cast by the multi-storied adobes, she breathed in the deep peace and pine-scented contentment. This was what she had longed for.
Yet Potts and the BIA threatened to disintegrate that peace, that contentment, and crumble the Indian way of life into extinction.
She let her instinct, her intuition, guide her. In this place, that kind of knowing was easily accessed. She walked across the footbridge connecting the North and South Houses to the plaza’s far side. Politely avoiding the holy kivas, those circular adobe buildings descending several feet into Mother Earth, she continued past the crumbling wall that once fortified the pueblo and walked into the adjoining fields.
Here and there, homes like brown boxes squatted in those fields stretching up to the mountain. She stopped at one dwelling with a tin roof. Outside, a toothless old woman fashioned some kind of needle grass into a broom.
“Manuel Mondragon?”
A gnarled finger pointed across the softly tilled soil, across a weathered, gray wooden bridge, to an adobe embraced in the half curve of a willow-shaded acequia.
Beneath a thatched cane and willow ramada adjacent to the small adobe, Man sat cross-legged on a buckskin robe. Dressed in a white cambric shirt and purple velveteen loin cloth, he was stitching rawhide lace through each of the holes punched in a wood shell. Hides hung from the rafters. Wooden shells, their cores cut from trees, banked the ramada’s rear wall of cane.
Continuing to ply his needle, he watched with narrowed eyes her approach. His black braids, tied with red strips of flannel, hung almost to his waist. Near his crossed, heavily muscled calves, an axe was propped against one of the ramada’s cedar posts. Around the post lay fragrant bark shavings from the shell of a beveled aspen. The needle he plied, symbol of female creation, was in sharp contrast to the axe, symbol of male destruction
“You kill a tree . . . kill a deer . . . to make your music,” she said when he did not address her.
“Your spirit wars today,” he said in greeting and sewed another stitch that stretched the wet rawhide tighter. He did not seem at all surprised to see her.
“Isn’t it true? You say you’re a healer, and yet you kill?”
““I use only dead wood. To use deer’s hide for music makes noble the animal’s death.”
Her eyes fastened on his smooth, bronzed chest where his white cambric shirt fell open. And lower, to the juncture of his granite-hard thighs. Her breath quickened. “You didn’t answer my question.” Her gaze slid to the darker brown of his muscle knotted thighs where they joined beneath the purple velveteen loin cloth. Oh God, if only I could but wrap my hands around him there. Taste again its life-giving juice. Suddenly the muscles deep, deep down in her belly clenched in painful spams of wanting.
He set the drum shell aside and rose fluidly to his feet. “You are afraid. We walk.”
“I don’t want to walk!”
In measured strides, he circumvented his furrowed fields. Hands clenched, she watched his imposing figure glide along a path that led over a bridge crossing the acequia. Quickening her steps, she caught up with him. Despite being breathless, she matched her stride alongside his.
“I don’t like following behind like a squaw,” she called after his broad back.
He halted, fixed her with his controlling gaze, then held out his hand. What a huge concession for him. Joyous, she slipped hers in his big palm.
They walked in silence. Deliriously happy in the moment, she felt like she floated more than walked. Once beyond the field, sand, sand, sand lay everywhere. The wind kicked up, blowing its hot dragon’s breath and the sand. She hadn’t realized how much Taos depended on the mountain streams for its sustenance, because the heavens certainly didn’t seem to provide rain that often. Ahead rose the piñon, pale gray, and the scrub cedar, burnt sienna. And in the distance the tortured mountains thrust up, bare and naked in the vibrant light. They shimmered, as if the very ground silently shivered with their weight . . . as if ever in prelude to an earthquake.
She couldn’t bear the silence. “Man, do you have a family. You know, parents? Sisters? Brothers?”
“My parents are dead. My sister is married. Lives with husband in the Pueblo.”
“And you?” she asked, although she already knew the answer. “Are you married?”
His callused hand fell to rest easily on the bone haft of the hunting knife stuck loosely in his belt. “I have spoken for a young woman of Turquoise Clan.”
Jealousy danced like a dust devil on her tongue. “You can’t feel that much passion for this woman if you still live alone.”
“I live alone because my sister’s singing bothers me.”
She saw his broad grin and chuckled at his humor.
“When I hear you laugh, I am pleased.”
“Man, I want to help your people fight this latest act by the BIA. It’s damned unfair!”
He paused and looked down at her. The hunger for her glowed in his dark eyes; she was sure of it. Her heart slammed against her ribcage, making it difficult to expand for precious air. Her body was impatient, wanting him. Let me love you, Man. Let me give my life to you.
After a moment, he merely said, “What you fight pursues you. We walk.”
She sighed and fell into step with him. As long as he held her hand, she was okay. Oh my God, just the touch is incinerating. “Why should I believe you can heal me . . . by this silly walking and such?”
“There is your science power. There is our magic power.”
“So, you can heal me?” she pressed.
“Your god says walk by faith, no? One step at a time.”
“Damn it, Man, just yes or no. Can you heal me?”
“Your husband, his spirit walks with yours?”
“His spirit? Walks with mine?”
“Does he hold your hand? Like this?” His gaze dropped to his thick brown fingers intertwined with her small, pale white ones.
Shyly, she lowered her head and shook it. “No, he just fucks me,” she whispered.
A rasping breath. “Does he love you?”
She shrugged. “I suppose Brendon loves me. Yes, of course, he does.”
“Because?”
“What?”
“This Brendon, he loves you because . . . ?”
“Because I am lovable, damn it!”
“And when you are not?” His smile was purely kind, accepting, comforting and purely mischievous.
She marched on beside him. “He loves me then, too.” Inexplicably she felt the sting of tears. Tears that, of course, would never spill. She sighed. “No, often he is impatient with my weaknesses.”
“Patience makes over wood into a beautiful vision. With eyes of love, wood becomes drum.”
She compressed her mouth to keep her lips from trembling. I’ll never know that kind of love. “You ever heard of marching to the beat of a different drum? My father is a soldier. His drum beat is the only beat one marches to.”
“Not always march. When you be still, when many people coming, going . . . when you be much alive in silence, in stillness, then you make your own beat. Here.” His fist tapped his chest.
“You don’t know my father. Powerful. Influential. Commanding energy even though he’s confined to a wheelchair. My brother and husband . . . and son . . . are following in his footsteps.”
“And not their own?”
“How do you know what your own footsteps are?”
“You dance.”
The unexpected reply caught her off guard. She peered up at him. At his classic profile. “Are you making fun of me?”
He stopped. Faced her. “Dance is powerful form of magic. Dance is outer showing of inner spirit.”
“I used to dance,” she mused. “As a debutante.” She had danced to the stately and conscious-demanding waltz. Now, young women danced
to the Ragtime Jazz, the torrid Tango, and the Two Step. Then she remembered . . . that liberating time in Paris.
What would it be like to give oneself up to the pure pleasure of abandoned dancing again?
“When dance, when lost in dance, you find own footsteps. And you find inner spirit. Here.” Lightly, he tapped just above her left breast. A quiver ran up from the base of her spine, right up to the base of her skull. Every pore in her skin swelled with desire.
“The Bible says David danced naked in joy,” she murmured, feeling against her will the sexual desire that dampened her inner thighs indecently.
“David?”
“David was a king. Of a kingdom called Israel, thousands of years ago.”
“Ahh, yes. That King David.” He turned and began walking again, back toward the ramada. “That King David, who killed another man for his wife.”
“How did you know about David and Bathsheba?”
“All government go-away schools make Indians give up our god for your god.”
Forgotten fury at the BIA momentarily cleared from her mind the hypnotic haze of insatiable hunger for Man, leaving only perturbed interest. “Who is your god?”
“Life.”
Such a simple yet profound answer. “How do you worship life?”
“Life is everything. Rock. Lizard. Cloud. Human. You. All one. All have awareness, my people believe.”
Worship myself as life? Confused images of that possibility skipped through her mind. “Sounds rather blasphemous – uh, strange.”
“Not so strange.” He pointed toward Taos Peak. “Just beyond there, my people come up out of Blue Lake. Like your people come up out of dust.” He smiled down at her. “But water is more filling than dust, no?”
She grinned. “Yes. I like your people’s accounting of creation better. Perhaps I’ll come to one of your dances.” She remembered that most of the dances were sacred and needed permission by the tribe’s governor to attend. “I mean, if it’s all right with you and your people.”
“Walk first. Then dance.” They were back at in the shade of the ramada. “We walk again,” he said dismissively.
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