Indian Affairs (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Perfectly-creased hat shading his face against the hot August sun, hands tucked into his trouser pockets, Albert Fall leaned against the forty-four foot high New Jersey column. A former wealthy New Mexico attorney, the once handsome man had gone to heftiness with his political success. He had worked his way from attorney to U. S. Senator and now Secretary of the Interior.

  His gaze lingered on Jeremy, playing on the Memorial’s steps. He wasted no time with pleasantries. “This is about the effort you’ve spearheaded to discredit the B.I.A., Mrs. O’Quinn. The Department of Interior doesn’t take kindly to that.”

  “The Women’s Club doesn’t take kindly to the B.I.A.’s policy forcing Indians to assimilate into its prescribed culture.”

  His gaze shifted to her now. His glasses magnified the awful calm in his eyes. “I don’t bluff as does your husband.” He nodded toward Jeremy. “Nice kid. You know, Mrs. O’Quinn, the public doesn’t look too favorably on an adulterous mother.”

  He paused, glanced at a tourist wandering by with a box camera, then went on, “A little hanky-panky is titillating, but shacking up with one of those sub humans . . . well, I know your men folk won’t like something like that getting out. Your kid could be taken away from you – or something worse. You wouldn’t want that, would you?” He tipped his hat. “Good day.”

  * * * * *

  She couldn’t take a deep enough breath as she paced the library, back and forth before the expanse of windows. Chilled clear through, she rubbed her arms, more from habit than in an attempt to warm herself. She’d never be warm again.

  Brendon and her father weren’t due back for several hours from a dinner with some foreign representatives to the League of Nations. Her inclination was to bolt with Jeremy. Stella had offered her a transfer to the Women’s Club San Francisco chapter. “With your proven success, the job’s open anytime you want, dearie.”

  Alessandra could take Jeremy, fade from public life, and make a new start in the city that was making a new start. She could escape to the freedom offered by the West. The San Francisco Art Association was making a reputation for itself. She and Jeremy could be happy there. And after all . . I’ve done everything possible to get the Bursum Bill killed, haven’t I? That was all I promised the Indian Defense Association.

  Bogged down in the ramifications of what she faced, her pacing plodded to a halt. She rubbed her temples then pushed her fingers through her spiraling hair. What is the issue? Is life with Jeremy more important than the fate of a tribe? For me . . . yes. A million times yes, but . . .

  She resumed pacing. There were things that went beyond even the demands and needs of the individual, things like principles, principles that made life worth living in the first place. Somewhere, someone had to draw the line. Someone had to be willing to sacrifice for the sake of a larger issue.

  Dare I take the chance that I could beat back Fall?

  If she turned to her husband for help, his support could cost him in terms of his professional career. Ultimately, that would cost her in terms of her marriage.

  What kind of groveling compromises would I have to make for the rest of my life?

  The image chilled her through to the bone this time. She broke out in a sweat. Man had showed her that her options were always more than only two, always more than “either this”—“or that.” She merely had to step aside and take a look at the situation from a different point of view.

  The next morning, while brushing her teeth, a third alternative occurred to her. Rinsing her mouth, she hurried to the telephone, put her long distance call through to the operator, and left her message. Nine agonizingly long days later, she received a response to her request.

  She listened to the high school reporter’s triumphant voice. “Mrs. O’Quinn, this is Ned McCafferty. I think at last I’ve got something you could use.”

  Hope and excitement warred for supremacy within her. “Yes?”

  “It seems news of possibly illegal activities has leaked out to Senator John Kendrick of Wyoming. Last April, he called upon Senator Fall to explain information received from Wyoming’s Teapot Dome Oil Fields. Before the War, they were transferred to the Department of Interior for naval use. But it appears that now they may have been leased to Harry F. Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Company. Looks as if Fall may have used his office for personal gain.”

  “Thanks, kiddo. You’ve made me a happy woman. We’re even.”

  * * * * *

  Brendon mixed himself another martini and hoisted his glass: “To my lovely wife, the State of Virginia’s first female Under Secretary of State.”

  Alessandra’s head jerked up. No, she must have been mistaken about his acerbic tone. Just the liquor in him talking. She raised her glass and murmured, “Thank you.”

  After a polite sip, she set the glass aside. When she regained her soul’s power, alcohol and cigarettes totally lost their appeal. She removed first one pearl earring, then the other. Why Brendon celebrated her appointment to the vacated seat puzzled her, given his innate opposition to her being in the public eye.

  She had returned home late, after meeting with Secretary of State Wilson that evening. Brendon was the only one still up. It was obvious he had begun celebrating since early evening.

  “Fall called just before you walked in.”

  Brendon’s voice was too casual. She dallied by plucking the olive from her drink and ate it. Fall’s ship was sinking quickly. He was too busy defending himself to pursue his threat against her. Congress had filed a suit against him for accepting $300,000 in bribes from Harry Sinclair. People like Ned McCafferty proved, indeed, the pen is mightier than the sword.

  “Yes?”

  “The Bursum Bill has been killed.”

  She wanted to yell with joy, to give a war-whoop and dance around the desk. After nine long months, sweet victory. “Oh? Well, that’s over then.” She rose to her feet. “I’ll be back . . . I want to tuck Jeremy in.”

  “Good God, Alessandra, he’s too big for that.”

  She tried inflecting a pleasant note. “No one’s ever too old to be told good night.”

  Sitting in the overstuffed chair, he rolled his eyes and falsettoed, “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  “That’s uncalled for, Brendon. What’s this really all about? The Bursum Bill being killed?”

  “Of course, it was no surprise,” he said dryly. “Your Indian simpletons won the sympathy vote.”

  “Then what is it? My appointment? You can’t be . . . no, you can’t be jealous of that.”

  She half turned to leave the room when the cold alcohol sloshed across the back of one shoulder and down the left arm of her magenta suit. Gasping, she whirled. “What are you—”

  He bolted from the chair to confront her. The veins stood out in his temples like river systems. “Jealous? My wife fucks her way back and forth across an Indian reservation and then proceeds to fuck her way into a governmental position?”

  So, Fall was taking his revenge.

  She smiled icily. “That you think I’d have to fuck somebody in order to merit a governmental position infuriates me the most. Could it be possible that your wife is more intelligent than you, Senator?”

  “Or could it be,” he mimicked nastily, “that you’ve been fucking him behind my back all this time? For the life of me, I don’t understand what you see in him.”

  Alessandra didn’t have to ask who ‘he’ was. She prayed for patience and replied quietly, firmly, “That’s because he never lets you see what he lets me see.”

  “Oh, I bet he let’s you see a lot,” came the acid retort. “Does he have a bigger cock?” He backhanded her, and she staggered.

  Her fingers went to her temple and came away with blood. Brendon’s ring had gashed her. Stunned, she looked from the blood to him. “I’m leaving here. For good.” Hearing her voice as a measured, raspy whisper when rage rocketed through her brain’s pathways surprised her. “And I’m taking Jeremy with me. If you try to sto
p me, I’ll ruin you. Graft and whoring may be permissible among your political good ol’ boys, but wife-beating isn’t. At least, not if it draws publicity. And, by God, I have enough newspaper contacts now to publicize this from Los Angeles to New York. Do you understand me?”

  His voice thundered in the cavernous library. “You won’t get away with it!”

  She headed out the door and up the stairs. Quickly, she wiped what blood was left from her temple. Her fury was ebbing with each step her fear-weakened knees ascended to Jeremy’s bedroom. When she whispered his name, he stirred sleepily and opened his eyes. “Mom,” he muttered, “I thought you’d forgotten.”

  She smiled through tear-blurred eyes. “Never. But I’m tucking you in somewhere else. Get dressed, son.”

  He sat up, wide-eyed now. “Where? We’re going back to Taos?!”

  Hastily, she tugged down his trunk from the closet shelf and began throwing clothes in it while Jeremy struggled into some pants she tossed him.

  “No. The boarding house where I stayed for a while.” She was anxious to get out of the mansion. Outrage had galvanized her courage, but her hands were shaking by the time she finished cramming clothes into the suitcase.

  What if Brendon wouldn’t let us out the door? “Let’s go, Jeremy.”

  It wasn’t her husband but her father who awaited them below. She halted on the bottom step, Jeremy’s hand firmly in hers. Fear chilled her. Sitting in the wheelchair, his housecoat flapping over the wheels, her father growled, “What’s going on here?”

  “Jeremy and I are leaving,” she managed to get out. From the library came the sound of weeping.

  “You can’t do that. Why . . . what will people say?”

  “What will people say?” Her voice amplified. “What will people say? That’s all you care about, General?” She pushed past him. “You pathetic old man.”

  With Jeremy in tow, she stepped outside and breathed deeply. Probably for the first time in her life she really breathed. She was stunned once again – this time by how simple the act of regaining her power had been. Never again would she let her fear keep her from living. Really living. Whatever lay before her, she would respond on her terms.

  But now what?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The heartbeat of Mother Earth, a slow, muffled thud, it echoed upward from a kiva below the Taos Pueblo. The drumbeat summoned the men to prayer and council. As the Pueblo’s heredity cacique, Bear Heart had unlimited power.

  Cloud Eagle, holding the office of War Chief, also sat in the kiva with his lieutenants and the tribal elders. Smoke spiraled from its center upward through the hole from which the Indians had measured the march of time across the night skies since time immemorial.

  Their palms raised outward, breathing deeply, they united in the power of prayer. Then, after a few moments, Bear Heart’s friend Calf Man spoke saddened words. “Land Board pays non-Indians market value of land they lost . . . and only pays us about one-tenth of market value.”

  Silence spoke next. Spoke to each man. And each man listened with his heart, listened to what was in the heart of the other.

  After a long time, Grandfather Turtle said, “There is more to consider. True, our governor no longer countersigns the visitor permits to Blue Lake. But tourists still lead packhorses up to Blue Lake to fish. They leave rubbish and campfires, tin cans, junk. The goats and sheep befoul the stream. We need to speak to Great White Father again. This time about this treaty with Forest Service.”

  “That takes much time,” Cloud Eagle said. As War Chief, his task was to protect the physical well-being of his people. “Could take a year or more. The miners’ tailings are polluting our sacred water now. We can’t wait for Great White Father to listen this time. At some point, we must act. Must drive these people from our land given to us by the Great Spirit, acknowledged by the Spaniards, Mexicans, and now even the Americans.”

  “If we kill a deer out of season on our own land,” another elder put forward with a bitter tone, “we are taken to the white man’s court.”

  “What say you?” Grandfather Turtle asked of Bear Heart.

  Bear Heart listened to the words and took them inside him. As the Taos Indians’ religious leader, he must look after their souls while here on earth. After a long moment, he replied, “My spirit speaks. It says we do not act. We wait for the Great Spirit to show us the way.”

  With lumbering steps, Bear Heart returned to his adobe. Nursing their daughter, Mud Woman did not move but looked up expectantly when he entered. The childbearing had put weight on Mud Woman, yet he thought she looked even more beautiful. Fuller, more complete.

  Except, he wasn’t. Wouldn’t be as long as he and Alessandra were separated. Maybe in the next lifetime . . . .

  He kissed the infant on her downy head and smoothed his wife’s hair, as black and straight as that of their child’s. Mud Woman said nothing, simply waited until he was ready to tell her what had taken place at the council meeting.

  He hung his blanket on the wall peg, then added piñon to the fire. Only after he had measured coffee from an Arbuckle can into a battered tin coffee pot, did he speak. “Much trouble coming soon.”

  “Why so?”

  “The government in Washington is not protecting Blue Lake as promised when it put this area into a forest reserve for Indian use. Their promises are false. Grazing, timbering, fishing go on, and nothing is done.”

  “What will happen to our Blue Lake?”

  “We’ll lose the right to use it at all if we don’t walk carefully. Lose our church completely. Cloud Eagle would force the issue.” He sighed. “Force only results in force.”

  That night, the intimacy between Bear Heart and Mud Woman was strained by his preoccupation. She looked at him questioningly when he rose a few minutes later.

  “Coyotes are close,” he explained.

  Naked, he went outside to check on the horses. The air flowed crisp and cold around him, even though September heated the days to near eighty degrees. He crossed to the corral. Despite the coyote howling, the horses watched his approach calmly, their ears pricked in nervous attention on the wild creature calls.

  The plum colored piebald padded over to nudge him . . . and nudged memories as well. Memories of a very similar chilly, starry night on the shores of Blue Lake. Memories of her.

  Of all things that could happen, for her to return as a white woman and he an Indian . . . how the Mud Heads must laugh.

  * * * * *

  Bear Heart should have seen it coming. Seen that it was bound to happen when the Great White Father, Theodore Roosevelt, had taken fifty thousand acres in 1906 from the Taos Indians without paying for it, all to establish the white man’s Carson National Forest.

  The fact that the United States Congress had given the Taos Indians a fifty-year “use-permit” was a spur in his people’s skin, especially since the Forest Service had not been observing the terms itself. The Forest Service had pledged itself to continue road and trail construction, timbering, and manipulation of the vegetation for the Blue Lake area. The way the Forest Department saw it, the sacred watershed was their domain. The Indians had no rights to it and should be grateful for the Forest Service concessions.

  And now this latest outrage.

  The sound of sawing, the ring of axe, and the bang of hammering carried all the way down to the Pueblo. To the tribe’s profound horror, the forest rangers were clearing a wide road through the forest and constructing a cabin, an outhouse, garbage pits, and horse corrals within a stone’s throw of the scared Blue Lake.

  With thousands of acres of building plots available, the Forest Service proceeded to erect tangible evidence of their authority over the Blue Lake watershed.

  At the hastily called council meeting, Cloud Eagle spoke tersely. “The time to act has come. Now. We have a use-permit. I say we use the water. All of it.”

  Grandfather Turtle looked at Bear Heart. “Bear Heart speaks?”

  “You would cut off the water
to the acequias of our white and Hispanic friends in El Prado and Arroyo Hondo?”

  “You would counsel abandoning our land claim for the white man’s cash settlement of $300,000?” Cloud Eagle countered. “You would turn our religion into a cash register?”

  “I would counsel taking no further action on Blue Lake until all tempers have cooled.”

  But Cloud Eagle held sway. Within thirty-six hours, he and six men of the tribe took possession of the uncompleted cabin on the shores of Blue Lake without the council’s approval. A storm of protest swept the non-Indian communities in New Mexico.

  That afternoon, Bear Heart was paid two visits. The first was Grandfather Turtle. Hobbling over from the Pueblo, he sat under the ramada with Bear Heart and smoked. Nothing more. No conversation. Only the silent harmony of their Selves. After half an hour or so, Grandfather levered himself off the tree stump with, “It is time for you to assume the mantle of leadership.”

  Later, Tony and Peg drove out. Mud Woman put aside the metate and masa, but, still holding a clay bowl of corn she had ground, rose to greet the guests. Tony helped his wife out of the Ford and followed her inside.

  “Morning, Man — Mud Woman.” Peg glanced around. “Where is that precious little one?”

  “She sleeping,” Mud Woman said, flushing with the pride of a new mother. “I get her.”

  At the table, Peg smoothed down her flounced pink skirt, then unfolded one newspaper, then another.

  This reading of a person’s thoughts on paper both fascinated and repelled Bear Heart. He waited.

  “This is the New York Times, Man. And here is the Washington Post. The newspapers are saying in their words that the Tribe is trying to unlawfully seize a large area of federal property . . . by force.”

  “Seize?

  “Take.”

  He smiled dryly. “Cloud Eagle and the others took no large area of federal property. The rangers went off. Left the cabin on our land. We have a use permit, no?”

  Peg rolled her eyes. “This could be serious. You need to mediate here between Cloud Eagle and the rangers and the citizens of El Prado and Arroyo Hondo before it all escalates into a tempest. You know, gets out of hand.”