“You bastard!” Her hand flashed out, catching his shoulder. She had never hit anyone. Had never even spanked Jeremy, choosing instead to send him to his room when he had misbehaved. And Brendon had never raised his hand to her. They were civilized people . . . if she could discount their subtle words that poked and gouged and took self-worth to its knees.
Brendon looked stunned but just as quickly slapped her back. Ringing echoed in her ears, but she still heard, “You’d better remember your place.”
His hand’s impact, much more forceful than the one she had inflicted, stung her face. Tears smarted in her eyes. She jackknifed to a sitting position and cried out. “What place is that? My family home? My role as a mother? As a wife? A daughter? I’ve been dismissed like a naughty girl from all that I was. You have left me with nothing!”
“I might remind you that I support you . . . quite lavishly. I just received and paid for the bills for all the remodeling and furnishing you did on this place. And let’s not forget your father . . . or your worthless brother. What kind of soldier’s pension . . . . ” He grimaced and grabbed her to him. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry! Let’s not fight like this. In two days, I’m leaving.”
“So soon?” she gasped. Only hours left with Jeremy before he would be torn from her. He needed her still! Without some soft maternal guidance, Brendon and her father would turn him into a caricature of a man. Would kill his innocence with their bigotry, their hate and rejection of all that was unlike themselves.
“I have to, but I’ll be back, honey I promise.” He smothered her face with kisses, all but her mouth. His voice was husky with renewed passion. “Do you want me to fuck you now?
* * * * *
In that year of 1923, mah-jongg invaded America, and, of course, Peg had ordered the ancient Chinese game, replete with proper Oriental accessories. “It’s the cat’s meow!”
As a farewell for Jeremy and Brendon, she staged the mah-jongg party with Chinese robes provided for each guest. Jeremy’s robe dragged the floor, but he was delighted with the getup. “This is spiffy!” he crowed.
No one knew how to play with the set of 144 tiles, so Peg read out the instructions, “. . . sort of like dice and dominoes. Everything jake?”
By now, Alessandra knew that some in Taos regarded Peg as a controlling, egotistic elitist. But in the woman’s search for a spiritual dimension among the Indians, other, better qualities had been exposed. Alessandra knew that few people in town were aware of the money, food, clothing, and personal help Peg constantly gave to those in need. Peg’s reticence was somehow reserved for her virtues.
As her hostess continued with her explanation of the game, Alessandra checked out the expressions of Frieda and D.H., Lady Brett and Henri, Brendon, and Jeremy . . . and was comforted to see they looked as perplexed as she felt.
Soon, however, shouts of “Pung!” and “Chow!” and laughter rang around the room along with intermittent chitchat.
“The Vanderbilt ladies are buying their gowns in Paris this year,” Lady Brett shouted at Alessandra.
“Do you think Bobby Jones will win the British Open?” Henri inquired of D.H.
“The way Bernard Baruch plays the stock market is enough to make your hair stand on end,” Peg said.
“Did you hear that Queen Marie of Romania is paying a visit to Washington?” Frieda asked.
Alessandra peeked at Jeremy, playing very much a grown-up at the party and loving it, if his dancing eyes were any criteria. He didn’t always play the right pieces, but everyone else was too busy having fun to notice.
Everyone but Tony, who preferred his game of solitaire, and Brendon, who played the Chinese game with a remote, faintly bored expression. That altered when Peg left the table to greet a visitor and returned with Man, shrouded in his white blanket.
As he let it fall back around his extraordinarily broad shoulders, Man’s gaze searched the room. At the sight of him, a tremulous anticipation ran through Alessandra. A deep buzzing of desire hummed through her, and muscles deep within her groin knotted with need that Brendon’s routine, mindless sex would never fulfill.
“Hi, Man,” Jeremy piped up.
“Well, look whom we have here,” Brendon murmured. “If it isn’t Chief Crazy Horse.”
Peg’s mouth pressed flat.
Shame suffused Alessandra’s skin, but Man appeared unaware of Brendon’s ridicule. Instead, he crossed directly to her and Jeremy. His big hands held up a red willow prayer stick dressed in feathers and a pair of beautifully crafted moccasins. “For you,” he told Jeremy. “For when you go back.”
“Gee willakers, they’re swell, Man!” Jeremy said, jumping to his feet. He struggled with the folds of Peg’s Chinese robe in an effort to unlace and tug off one of his brogues.
“Son!” Brendon ordered. “Not here.”
Jeremy’s flying fingers abruptly dropped the brogue’s laces. Bewildered, he glanced up at his father, who nodded curtly. Jeremy ducked his head, the ends of his mouth drooping. He began re-lacing his brogues.
Peg tried to cover the awkward silence. “Man, won’t you stay and play mah-jongg with us?”
Man shook his head, his eyes flickering over the bone tiles. “No.” He returned his gaze to Alessandra, first, and then Brendon, and she recognized the darkness that fleeted across his expression as jealousy. It disappeared as quickly as it had presented itself, but, nevertheless, stupid pleasure double-timed her heartbeat. Man had to care about her!
He turned back to Jeremy. “You will be here.” He touched his fingers to his heart.
Jeremy gulped. “Will I see you again?”
With the eyes of a mystic, Man studied her son. Watching her Indian lover, she couldn’t help but be aware how his invisible spiritual realm interlocked, influenced, and responded to Jeremy. “When the heart is ready, when the heart is right.”
Still clutching the prayer feathers in one hand, Jeremy solemnly touched his fingers to his heart.
Man nodded at the others, but before this man who held her heart left, his deep-lidded gaze found her. She felt his magnetism, pulling her spirit up out of its depths. She would survive.
At that moment nothing else mattered.
* * * * *
Saying goodbye to Jeremy proved as agonizing as Alessandra imagined a massive heart attack would feel. As she tried hard to stave off the pain, she and Jeremy stood once more on the Lamy platform. Uncertainty flickered the boy’s long lashes. Pain streaked like the lash of a whip across her heart.
“Write me. I am here for you. Whenever you need me.”
“I know, Mama.”
In the revealing sunlight, she surveyed this child of hers, her creation with all his unpurchaseable and very precious memories . . . and tried not to cry. Brendon was right, of course. She had to believe him. If she truly loved Jeremy, she would want the best for their son. The best schools. The best minds. The best society.
The questions echoed back . . . Were Eastern schools best? Were Anglo minds brightest? Was affluent society superlative?
Obviously, Brendon thought so . . . to the point of insisting that Jeremy leave his drum, prayer feathers, and moccasins in Taos. “Besides,” he had pointed out, “they’re just that much more souvenir crap we would have to lug back to Washington.”
Her words of goodbye to her son broke up in soul-deep fissures. “It won’t be long, kiddo. I’ll be well and – ” She hugged him fiercely to her, whispering, “Goodnight, sleep tight . . . don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
His larges eyes glistened. His little arms wrapped tightly around her waist, his dark head pressed against her rib cage.
Her heart constricted. Tears she thought never to shed again streamed down her cheeks.
“We’ve got to go, Ali,” Brendon said, clapping his Panama on his head. “The train’ll be pulling out.”
Quickly wiping her face with her gloved hands, she bestowed a brief kiss on her husband’s unyielding cheek.
“Goodbye, darling.” She stoope
d again and gave Jeremy a tight embrace, holding him against her heart and whispering in his ear, “I’ll love you forever and ever after.”
Then, she stood tall, straight, and still, watching the two board the coach. At the top of its steps, Jeremy turned around for one last look, his bottom lip held between his teeth. Hissing locomotive steam performed a magician’s trick, vanishing her son before her burning eyes. She clapped her gloved hands over her face.
“Jeremy will do fine,” Henri said. He stood behind her, as if to support her should she collapse. His hands lightly squeezed her shoulders. “Your son has had the benefit of your love and guidance for the most formative part of his life. You could have done no better.”
Once the train was beyond her straining gaze, she took her lace handkerchief from the pocket of her linen duster, dried her eyes, and blew her nose noisily. Henri led her back to his truck.
Her arms were painfully empty. “I’m sorry, Henri.”
“Don’t be. Tears cleanse the spirit.”
Her effort to return his consoling smile proved weak. Only loneliness lay ahead of her. With each mile of the return trip, her certainty of the rightness of her decision crumbled into mounting doubt and sorrow.
She sat, saying nothing, head turned away from Henri, toward mountains she could not see, while tears streamed down her face. Tears again and more tears. And sniffling and nose blowing.
No, she had done the right thing. She couldn’t and wouldn’t change her decision. She had to set Jeremy free to become a man. But, oh God, such a difficult thing to do. She yearned for the way things had been and could never be again. Yearned for her child at her knees, his mischievous smile, his baby kisses, his energetic curiosity. . . .
Her unfocused stare fixed on the vast panorama, she asked, “Why, Henri? Why must my son be taken from me? Why must I . . . or anyone . . . die? Why?”
“You’ll make yourself crazy trying to figure out answers to questions that have no answers.” He cleared his throat. “Obviously, I haven’t lived what respectable society would deem a proper life . . . . God knows, I could have done so much better with my life than I have . . . but it seems to me that to live fully, we have to give up the need for understanding.”
She looked at him now, her pain and her dignity battling against one another. Her facial muscles grew taut and she knew her expression had to look like one of those tragi-comic theatrical masks: half humor, half pathos.
“Why?” she insisted.
“I don’t know, Alessandra. I sometimes wonder if . . . maybe life depends on mystery for its enhancement.” He reached across and squeezed the hand that held her tear-dampened handkerchief. “I’m sorry, that’s the best I can do. I wish I had a better answer.”
She squeezed his back. “I only wish I had the answer you’d like from me, Henri. You are such a good and reliable man.”
From behind his glasses, his eyes rolled in mock horror. “Good men are not in demand. And besides, you know words like ‘reliable’ and ‘responsible’ are anathema to me.”
The truck chugged, wheezed and, at last crested the highest plateau. In the distance, Taos’s ochre walls glittered a welcome warmth and security in the late afternoon sunlight. Towering above the citadel, Mystery Mountain embraced all its children.
“Home,” she murmured.
But home couldn’t assuage her loneliness. Nor could time . . . gauged in weeks and letters to Jeremy, who responded with one for her every two . . . lessen the frequency of her crying jags. Tears when she might be working in her garden or painting or washing her hair, would start to flow unbidden.
Neither did visits from Henri, the Lawrences, Peg and Tony, and Blumy and Mary alleviate the stabbing ache in her breast, an ache as much from her emotional pain as from the physical symptoms of the respiratory illness that had returned after her last bout with pneumonia.
“Listen to me, Alessandra,” Peg said on a visit, when she came alone, “you have to get out and do things. The emptiness of this land can literally drive a person crazy, especially someone living as solitary life as you.”
“But nothing interests me.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the potted geranium on her rickety dining table. A cough threatened, and she forced it back with a ragged inhalation.
“The Taos Indians Corn Dance for Saint Anthony is coming up on June 13th,” Peg pressed. “Come with us. The dancing lasts the entire day. We Anglos are allowed to watch. So, we can bring folding chairs for you to sit in – and picnic baskets. And have a great time. What do you say?”
“I’d say you should be a politician.”
Shielded from the sunlight by their parasols and broad brim hats, scores of Taos’s Anglo residents looked on from pueblo rooftops. Camped outside the pueblo were tepees of nearby Apaches who had come to watch the Corn Dance.
Tony’s uncle provided his rooftop for Peg and her coterie. Waiting for the dance to begin at sundown, they discussed the drought . . . “Everything is withering . . . cattle cant get down to the river and just drop, dying . . . the issue of water rights is causing friction among the landowners.”
At the mention of water rights, Alessandra remembered only then what Brendon had told her in passing about the Indians and the Bursum Bill. At the time, she had been too distraught by Jeremy’s leaving to give it further thought. Now weeks had passed. She had even forgotten her half-hearted vow to best Potts. She considered the possibility Brendon’s information might not be valid anymore. Yet, Peg and her Indian Defense Association should at least know about Bursum’s activity.
She leaned close to Peg. “Brendon told me Senator Bursum is presenting a bill that will put all internal affairs of the Pueblos under authority of the state court system.”
Peg’s parasol dipped perilously over the roof’s rim. “What? What exactly does that mean?”
“Well, essentially it means Pueblo water rights and farmland will be given to the jurisdiction of the state court.”
“Isn’t that what we want?” Peg asked. “To get the authority out of the hands of the corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs?”
“And the state court is any better?” Henri demanded, leaning closer to listen.
“Good God, Peg!” Blumy’s head swiveled toward them. “Don’t you see? That would mean all affairs of the Pueblos would be subject to New Mexico’s court system. That could be far more disastrous than the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”
“Blumy’s right,” Alessandra said. “Judges could force the shamans, the Pueblo governors, the elders, everyone, to provide information of the most secret aspects of Pueblo life.”
“And if the elders refuse?” D.H. asked.
“They will face contempt citations,” Alessandra said flatly.
Andrew flourished his cane. “This is preposterous!”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Mary said. “How can the Indians defend themselves against court decisions when they have no right to vote?”
Alessandra waited for a dust devil to spiral through the plaza, before replying dryly, “If it takes the Indians as long as it took us women to gain that right,” she said drily, “their people will soon be as extinct as dinosaurs.”
Peg was in a rage now. “What are we waiting for – a replica of a Native American mounted in Madame Toussaud’ Wax Museum?! Something has to be done!”
“Why hasn’t any report of this bill before Congress appeared in the local press?” Frieda asked. “Why haven’t public officials called it to the Pueblos’ attention?”
Tony spoke up. “Maybe your government, she and your BIA no want this known.”
“Yes,” Peg muttered furiously. “What we have here seems to be a deliberate conspiracy of silence to keep the measure quiet until it becomes law.”
Blumy stood up. “This ought to be explained to the elders of the Pueblo tribes. At least, give them a fighting chance.”
“Alessandra,” Mary squeezed her forearm. “You are the only one who knows the inner workings of Washington’s holy of holies.”
>
“Yes, and if I can convince the Pueblo people of the need to fight for their rights through legal – ,” She began to cough from the stirred up dust and fought to regain her breath.
“Look, damn’t,” Peg said, “Alessandra doesn’t have the stamina to traipse up and down the Rio Grande visiting all the pueblos.”
“No, it’s just this dust. I’ll be all right. I can . . . I want to do it.” She no longer cared if her activities drew an unflattering spotlight on the O’Quinns and their political aspirations. She couldn’t stand by and watch the government strip away the Indian culture and the sale off of tribal lands. She couldn’t let the harmonious way of living practiced by people like Tony and Mud Woman and Man vanish like the buffalo.
“Cancel that idea,” D.H. said flatly. “I have TB, and I’m telling you, to push your health at this point is to push yourself into a grave.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Henri volunteered.
Now all eyes swiveled toward the affable little man. A Canadian. Someone who proclaimed himself without moral fiber. A person whose code was never to involve himself in anyone else’s business.
“Who better?” Henri asked. “I have the truck that’ll take me just about anywhere . . . and I can camp out in it.”
The coughing spasm having passed, Alessandra considered this turn of events. A spark of enthusiasm took light. “From my home here, I can at least contact friends and acquaintances on Capitol Hill. Keep the Indian Defense Association abreast of committee activities in both chambers.”
“Capital idea!” Blumy said.
At that moment, four lines of masked dancers simultaneously entered the Pueblo from its four corners. Immediately, a magical hush claimed the plaza, its people, and Henri’s conclusion.
The crescendoing performance reclaimed the spectators’ attention. Simultaneously the young women and men streamed in from all four directions of the plaza. Since the Pueblo people counted time by movements of the sun and moon, they were not controlled by the annoying tick of watches and clocks. Alessandra had always been puzzled how the Indians could synchronize the timing of their rituals within seconds.
Indian Affairs (historical romance) Page 15