Minutes, hours later, she peered up into Man’s smoky gaze. Only gentleness there, despite the thunderous beat of his heart against hers. Incomprehensibly, he had performed this mystic feat with the ease and ecstasy of one who was a quintessential part of nature and earth.
When her breathing quieted, she lay replete in his arms. Humbled by his gift, she stole another glance up into his noble face. The illusory glow of firelight made it impossible to read the man. Perhaps he was more than mere man. His eyes were closed, as if he were re-gathering his vital energy.
She surrendered to deep, replenishing sleep. The wonderfully pungent aroma of coffee and sizzling bacon awoke her. The pinkish light of predawn cast its own magic, transforming the cedar and piñon and pine into sugarplum druid priests. Without moving, she slid her sleepy-eyed gaze around the camp. He sat there, at the fire, pouring a cup of coffee.
“I am here,” he reassured.
“I know.”
Shifting on his haunches, he held out the cup. His angularly planed features so vivid and illumined, his eyes dark, mysterious.
If only . . . ever . . . I could figure out what he’s thinking.
Perverse femininity wanted him to declare immediate and overwhelming love and passion for her, as Brendon had done. As all lovers in myths and romantic stories did. But what had Brendon’s continual declarations of desire contributed to their relationship? All the evidence pointed to an emptiness that words didn’t fill.
“You are better?”
“Why, yes.” In fact, she was surprised at how refreshed, how renewed, she felt. Not since she had been pregnant with Jeremy had she felt so full. Full with the blessed fullness of being. She took the cup and sat up. Her blanket fell away. Her naked flesh shone luminous. Her glance flew to Man.
“I make you a dark night prayer.” As if that was enough an explanation of her naked state. “How, when? My clothes . . . “
“While you were journeying.”
Any fear or distrust she entertained vanished at the sight of his kind eyes and comforting smile. “Thank you,” she said simply.
She had no idea, nor cared, what had transpired after she experienced the fullness of ecstasy. She only knew she trusted this man completely. Respected his unseen and unrevealed gods, arcane, dark, and inaccessible by the linear, limited person. Just so, Man was working his shaman’s magic upon her, seeing her into more than a limited person.
Isn’t that what love did? Search in the shadowed areas for the light of the beloved and bring that light to the surface?
He nodded toward the west. “We go now. Storm is coming.”
Indeed, bilious, black clouds swirled on the western horizon, contrasting with the golden glow in the east. She and Man breakfasted. The camp was packed quickly, the horses mounted and they headed for the shelter of Taos.
Where a storm of a different kind awaited them.
Chapter Twelve
Peg passed Alessandra a familiar, wrinkled yellow envelope containing a telegram addressed to her.
Ignoring the other people present, she scanned the matching yellow page with its brown staccato code: SENATOR HOLM. O. BURSUM VISITING SANTA FE STOP YOUR PRESENCE IS CORDIALLY REQUESTED FOR RECEPTION EVENING OF OCTOBER 29TH 8:00 PM PALACE OF GOVERNORS STOP GOVERNOR MERRITT MECHEM.
She looked up at the expectant Peg. “It’s a command performance, in the form of an invitation. Governor Mechem’s hosting a reception for Bursum.”
The older woman’s eyes danced, her gaze triumphantly sweeping her gathering of friends. “So, word has gotten back to Washington that we’re on the move.”
Members of the Indian Defense Association had been invited for a Sunday brunch to discuss the results of Alessandra’s campaign through the northern pueblos. They sat at the round dining table shoved near the fireplace, between the two, white-painted wooden posts supporting the beams of the alcove. Patterned after Peg’s Italian villa, the room had a Tuscany chandelier and silver wall sconces, but red and black floor tiles painted in earth pigments represented an Indian rug, a contrast of worlds just like their owner.
Above the sideboard, Peg had hung a map of the state on the whitewashed wall. Red pins designated reservations Alessandra had visited around the Taos area.
Andrew brandished his soup spoon. “So, it would appear the mountain is coming to Mohammed.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.” Alessandra murmured, dropping the telegram beside her plate.
Weary beyond words, she knew the battle was just beginning. She missed Man’s supportive presence, his inextinguishable essence. In the twenty-four hours since he had left her at her adobe and returned to his people, she had restlessly wandered her empty house when she should have been recuperating from the exhausting trip. But without Man . . . .
Mary scooted back her chair and rose, crossing to the map. “I’d think this reception dinner would be the perfect opportunity to carry the warning down the Rio Grande . . . to the remaining Pueblos in the south.” She pointed to the western part of the state. “After that, there would be only these pueblos,” and she pointed to each, “Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, and the Hopi in Arizona, to get the message to.”
“Hhump!” Doc Martin grumbled. “We can write all the letters, send out all the pamphlets, mount all the publicity campaigns we want . . . but direct confrontation will best serve.”
Alessandra laid her soupspoon on the platter. The pozole was savory, but she had no appetite. “Politicians are skilled at avoiding direct responses, Doc.”
Blumy’s little eyes widened as much as possible for their size. “You’re not going to the reception then?”
“Are you kidding? Remember, I’m a politician’s wife. This is my arena of expertise.” She directed an inquiring glance at Peg. “This crazy Woman of La Mancha needs a Sancho Panza. What do you think?”
Dimples of delight softened Peg’s square face. “Tony can motor us down to Santa Fe a couple of days before the reception and translate for you at the pueblos. I have friends there who could put us up.”
* * * * *
Peg’s friends were the Hendersons. Mrs. Henderson was the editor of Poetry Magazine. Living in Santa Fe for seventeen years, the high desert sun had leached her fair skin and blue eyes.
That same high desert sun had leached Mr. Henderson of personality. A bland, rail-thin man who bumbled, he was the least likely to be counted among Peg’s friends. She demanded her coterie of colorful cronies be entertaining, if nothing else. The one thing the high desert sun could not take from Mr. Henderson, a retired Methodist missionary, was his kind heart. That he opened to Alessandra and her cause.
While Mrs. Henderson squired Peg to art exhibits on Agua Fria Road, Mr. Henderson shuttled Alessandra and Tony to the surrounding Pueblos: San Ildefonso, Santa Domingo, Pecos, Cochiti, Sandia, and Isleta. The Indians listened in horror as Tony translated her message. Yet, he lacked the intensity woven into Man’s melodic speech. Perhaps because of his more lackadaisical personality, perhaps because his place was secure alongside Peg.
The afternoon of the reception, Mr. Henderson showed Alessandra his collection of arrowheads. “I admire your courage in tackling the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Mrs. O’Quinn.” His voice sounded high-pitched, almost feminine. “The Pueblo Indians have always been a peaceful people — until pushed.”
“I think my efforts have less to do with the entire word, courage, Mr. Henderson, and more to do with its last syllable . . . rage.”
That singular emotion, rage, sustained her that evening at the Palace of the Governors.
The Palace was an adobe walled compound. Since 1610 it had contained the governor’s residence, government offices, and council chambers, making it the nation’s oldest capitol. A fact about which Governor Mechem bragged. Inadvertently, in front of Alessandra and Peg, the governor also bragged that Indian ears, paid for by government bounty money, had once festooned the Palace’s portal.
A slow burn crawled through Alessandra, enough to heat the wine glass she
held, despite the sophisticated long, white glove. “Why that pompous asshole,” she muttered.
“Losing your temper,” Peg whispered, “isn’t going to help our cause.”
“This isn’t a cause, Peg. It’s an all-out battle.” She arched an eyebrow.
The two women had dressed for battle that evening: Peg in a pink ruffled taffeta over a gold lace underskirt; she in a red chiffon, velvet-and-silk fringed evening dress that barely skimmed knees she had assiduously powdered.
Strange, five years earlier, before the Great War and the women winning the right to vote, the female had been constrained by the floor length, tight, tubular Hobble Skirts. Hems rose along with male tempers. She hoped she could make Bursum’s shoot through the roof.
Tony had elected not to attend the gala event. “Much talk. All buzzing like pesky flies.”
By the time she and Peg were presented to Senator Bursum, a portly, self-aggrandizing man, Alessandra’s rage had mounted to magma eruption point.
Bursum’s pudgy hand swept the enormous council chambers, indicating its four-foot thick walls. “I find Santa Fe’s history fascinating, Mrs. O’Quinn. For instance, did you know the author Lew Wallace penned Ben Hur in this very building while governor?”
“How very interesting. If I remember the novel correctly, Ben Hur dealt with the racial intolerance of the Jews. I understand that the fifteenth century Jews, fleeing the Inquisition in old Mexico, found refuge here in northern New Mexico.”
“Quite right,” he said with an ingratiating smile. “Even here in New Mexico, on the outpost of civilization, our Lady of Liberty welcomes the huddled masses yearning to be free.”
He was grandstanding for the other guests clustered around him. She didn’t intend to let him succeed.
“What I don’t understand, Senator,” she said innocently, “is the current government’s perpetuating racial intolerance of the Indians. I find this prejudice one of the strangest and most terrifying phenomena in all our history.”
“Well, that’s conjecture — ”
“Why,” she interrupted, “even the hot-blooded Spanish and freebooters who conquered Mexico and Central and South America in the name of the crown and the cross,” she hurried on, not giving him a chance to interrupt, “for all their cruelties, these Spanish had no racial prejudice. From the start, they intermarried lawfully with subjected Indians. The French did likewise in Canada.”
“Now, Mrs. O’Quinn,” he blustered, his big, purple-veined nose growing redder by the moment, “this is not the place to — ”
“But we White Protestants are cold-blooded, deeply inhibited, and bound by Puritan traditions,” she continued, ignoring him. “No, instead of tolerance, we began a program of complete extermination of all Indians almost from the day we landed on Plymouth Rock. Even in this modern day and age, we are continuing the atrocities, if not in deed, then through political control of their lands.”
“In my humble opinion, Mrs. O’Quinn—”
“Senator Bursum,” it was too late to ignore Peg’s signaling elbow jab to desist, ”you never had an original opinion in your frivolous life, and your humble equates with supercilious!”
Peg rolled her eyes and drew her fingers sharply across her throat.
* * * * *
Motoring back the next day, Peg added, “It was as if you wanted to wave a red cape at that old goat, Alessandra.”
“Old bull, Peg. You’re mixing your metaphors.” Tired, she slumped down in the seat, her lids closed. The heedless way Tony took the mountain curves didn’t encourage contemplation of the beauty of the High Road back to Taos.
“Well, we want Washington on our side, don’t we?”
Tony took his eyes off the narrow, winding road to fix his wife with a grin. “The Great White Father in Washington, she on the side of the greenback.”
An excellent pun, Alessandra thought. The subtle humor of the Indians often went unrecognized in her people’s world of concrete thinking. “Well, I did what I volunteered to do and carried the warning to the southern pueblos. What I’m going to do next is go to bed for a week.”
She did sleep for a solid twenty-four hours. When she awoke, her first thought was of Man. Groggy, she sat on the edge of her bed and fixed unseeing eyes at the pool of opalescent sunlight splashing on the blue-painted floor. Despite the day’s span of interrupted sleep, she still felt lethargic. She needed Man with her on her upcoming excursion to the western Pueblos. Without him, she didn’t think she had the stamina to make it.
More than need him, she wanted him. Wanted him with a rabid, sickening pain. That she was a married woman was inconsequential. How much she had changed. Before Taos, before Man, she had judged people harshly for breaking their marriage vows, for committing adultery. But she had not asked for this all-consuming passion that stripped away the best societal intentions. How could God judge her?
Perhaps men and women were not meant to be married; perhaps they were meant to bring gifts of themselves to the relationship and when those gifts were given, to continue on, blessing the partner for the gifts given them as well.
After a tepid bath, she dressed quickly in woolen pants and a thigh-length pullover sweater. Quickly, she ran a brush through her stubborn ringlets and caught them atop her head with a pearl clip.
Then, she set out for the Pueblo.
Her heart grew lighter with each step. At the Pueblo, just beyond where an old woman sat stringing a scarlet necklace of chiles, Alessandra spotted Man. He sat on a lower step before the entrance to one of the apartments. The lovely young Mud Woman, occupied the step just above him. She brushed his long mass of raven hair with a bundle of fibers tied together like a whiskbroom. He smiled at something she was saying.
Hesitating, Alessandra noted other Indians casting one another glances and sly grins at the couple’s intimate exchange. She intuited she had intruded on something much more than mere intimacy. This scene seemed more the enactment of a ritual. She backed away, then turned swiftly toward the dusty road out.
A haunting anxiety eclipsed the radium charged sunlight.
She hurried to Peg’s house. Ensconced in the Rainbow Room, the woman lounged on the banco at one of the room’s long, low windows. She held the latest murder mystery just arrived by general delivery.
“Alessandra!” Peg laid aside the book on the banco.” Why the worried face? What’s happened now?”
She dropped down in the red rocking chair, opposite Peg. Her hands twisted in her lap. At last, she found words. “I just returned from the Pueblo. I saw . . . I saw Man there, in the plaza.”
“And?”
“And Mud Woman was brushing his hair.”
“Oh, my God,” Peg whispered.
“Does it mean what I think? They’re married?”
“No.” Reluctance to explain showed in her boxy face. “But . . . they might as well be. Hair brushing is a service husbands and wives do for one another as a sign of affection. When single people are seen at it . . . it’s a like a public announcement of the engagement.”
“I . . . see.” She stiffly rose from the chair.
Peg walked alongside her into the Big Room. “Don’t go back home alone, Alessandra. Stay the evening.”
She leaned back against the massive, hand carved, scrolled columns and stared up at the vigas, painted in earth colors, sienna red, white earth, and lampblack so that it looked like an Indian blanket reflecting the floor beneath. A blanket above, a blanket beneath to warm what was between . . . .
“I had to go and fall in love with an Indian shaman,” she said bitterly. “I could have more easily loved a French artist, a Russian Cossack, or even a Filipino Moro. At least, they’re not so fatalistic they — ”
“We can sup,” Peg stopped her. “ . . . and play gin, Alessandra. Or go to the Tavern in the Plaza and order beer on draft and pretzels.”
“No . . . thank you, Peg.” She managed a wan smile. “I can’t say you didn’t warn me.”
The square-set
woman touched her shoulder. “I wish I had been wrong. I’ve been there. Known that to fall in love with Tony could result only in pain for everyone. For his wife . . . her shame and her loss. For me . . . being the cause of her pain and being the outsider. For Tony . . . that he would be forfeiting many of his Pueblo activities, his friends, by coming with me.”
Alessandra cornered Peg with a drilling stare. “If Tony had to do it over again . . . do you think he would make the same choice?”
Peg paused, stared out the small east windows toward the white cross painted by Georgia O’Keeffe during her last stay there. “I can’t speak for Tony. As for me . . . I find it a paradox . . . to realize that extreme sufferings undertaken by lovers for some cosmic purpose unknown to themselves . . . the intensity and the endurance of suffering, the pain they cause each other . . . becomes in the end the source of their happiness and satisfaction.”
Strange, Alessandra thought, that this woman who felt so inarticulate she sometimes spent whole evenings in silence among her assorted guests, could speak so eloquently, so profoundly, when alone with only one other.
Heading back home, Alessandra leaned into a fierce wind that carried the threat of another snow. The roads were still muddy from the last snow melted by the sun during the day and refrozen each night.
At her front yard well, she hesitated, thinking of the temporary pain relief suspended in its depths in a brown bottle. Her fingers rubbed the well’s coarse horsehide rope Man had fashioned.
Was I not strong enough, beautiful enough, good enough to be Man’s beloved? Or was it simply that I was not born an Indian . . . like the fortunate Mud Woman?
In the silence of her adobe, Alessandra screamed out her anguish. Hurled the jelly jar with its lovingly cultivated mariposa lily against the far wall, smashed Henri’s lucky fetish with a hammer, drove a knife through Man’s drum, and in a final frenzy set fire to the feathered prayer stick and moccasins before collapsing to her knees in tears.
After her tears dried, after she was spent, she was still left with her pain, with her confusion.
Indian Affairs (historical romance) Page 20