Wind Song

by Bonds, Parris Afton

Occasionally she slid covert glances at the man who handled the vehicle with such assured control. She knew so little about him. She would have liked to ask him a hundred questions about himself. She wanted to know all the things that had happened to make him the man he was, but she sensed that in many ways he was as closed as Robert was.

  Cody pointed out Wild Cat Camp, which consisted of a line cabin that was little more than a shack, a shed and two staked corrals. A mile or so further on he began to parallel a stretch of fence and followed the line for several more miles before a lone horse came into view. Near the roan gelding a young man, his shoulders hunched against the cold, waited. Cody got out and greeted the cowpoke with a tip of his hat and said something Abbie didn’t catch; then the two men hefted the bale of barbed wire out of the pickup bed.

  She and Robert slid out of the pickup into the arctic cold. Their breath crystalized in the air. The pickup’s cab shielded them from the frigid wind while they stood and watched Cody help the rail-thin ranch hand repair a section of fence. After a while Cody came over to them. Hunkering down next to Robert, he slid his big leather gloves onto the boy’s smaller hands and explained in Navajo how to tack the wire tautly to the fence post.

  Robert hunched down next to the young hand and began tacking. The boy’s hair had begun to grow and no longer looked so much like peach fuzz. Watching with Cody, Abbie could see that the boy’s face lost some of its sullenness. “You’re good with Robert,” she told Cody.

  The cold wind whipped her hair across her face, and his hand caught the wayward strands to push them back. “He’s learning to give of himself, Abbie. Will you?”

  Beneath the Stetson’s brim Cody’s eyes were inscrutable. She looked away, turning her gaze back to Robert. “That depends on what you’re asking.”

  Cody made no reply; instead he moved away to help Robert and the ranch hand finish up the section of fence.

  That night, lying on the old-fashioned mattress stuffed with fluffy wool, she reflected on Cody’s question. What exactly was he asking of her? More than she was prepared to give?

  Yet again, her thoughts returned to the previous afternoon and their wild abandoned lovemaking. How strange it was that her union with Brad, legalized by a marriage license, should have seemed so often like debasement. But with Cody . . . he was right, it had been profoundly soul stirring.

  Just as she reached out to flick the bed lamp off, the door opened. He stood there. He wore only his jeans and boots—and the bandana that made him look so untamed. He seemed to be beyond the dictates of civilization that decreed a man’s dress, a man’s code.

  Slowly he shut the door behind him. She didn’t try to shield her scanty satin and lace nightgown with the sheet as she would have done at one time, but neither could she meet the directness of his gaze. Her eyes lowered to the expanse of broad, coppery chest and followed the shift and play of his flesh and muscle as he crossed the room to her with that graceful stride.

  He leaned over her, one fist planted on the mattress at either side of her hips. “Abbie? Look at me.”

  She dragged her gaze up to meet his.

  “Do you still have”—he paused, as if searching for the right word—“an isnati?” He hesitated again, then found the word. “Your monthly flow?”

  Crimson flooded her face. “Yes,” she breathed.

  His eyes had that disconcerting habit of watching her lips. “And are you protected?”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “I—after the twins—we wanted more children. But I never became pregnant. It seems that I must not be . . . fertile.”

  “And if you are?”

  “Why are you asking all this?”

  “I’m telling you, Abbie, that I want to see your toothbrush next to mine, to find you at my side when I awake in the morning, to argue with you over the brand of coffee you bought . . . silly, mundane things that make up a relationship.” Automatically her hand reached for a packet of cigarettes on the nightstand. Of course, there were none. Whatever had possessed her to give up smoking? “The marriage blanket again,” she said dully.

  “Yes.” It was a flat, harsh sound. “I’m asking for a commitment, not necessarily one made legal by paper, but certainly one of the soul.”

  She looked off into the room’s shadowy corners, where the lamp’s light did not reach. “Cody . . . you don’t know how much you ask. For twenty years I struggled to be what Brad wanted me to be, and I couldn’t do it. I can’t make that kind of suffocating commitment to a man again, not for a long time, not until I know me again, maybe not forever.”

  His fingers nudged her chin back toward him, forcing her to meet the ferocity in his gaze. “And in the meantime? What about what happened yesterday?”

  “I don’t know what you’re implying.”

  “I’m implying that what happened yesterday between us—without a commitment—makes you little better than a whore, my love.”

  Without thinking, she slapped him. At once she regretted the action. She was appalled at what she had done. Violence had never been part of her nature, but this made the second time she had resorted to violence with Cody. Her eyes widened at the reddened imprint on Cody’s jaw—and the fury that burned in his eyes that were now smoke black. His grip tightened brutally on her chin; then abruptly he dropped his hand.

  “I think the holidays are over. I’ll fly you home tomorrow.”

  * * * * *

  “It was nice of you to run Robert and me into Albuquerque.”

  Deborah took her eyes off the busy interstate highway long enough to cast Abbie a sympathetic glance. “You’re probably right about catching a commercial flight. It will give Cody a chance to cool off.”

  She returned her attention to maneuvering the car around the curves of the Sangria Mountains. “You know, Abbie, I’ve found that Cody’s passions, like my husband’s, run deeper than those of ordinary men.”

  Abbie stared below them to the undulating foothills that embraced Albuquerque. “I know,” she replied in a small, miserable voice. He hadn’t even bothered to see her and Robert off that morning. Chase had diplomatically explained that his son had instead ridden out to one of the camps to deliver salt licks and bales of hay for the winter feeding.

  “You see,” Deborah was saying, “Cody didn’t have a normal child’s life.” She flicked a glance at Robert, who sat taciturnly in the back seat and lowered her voice. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I think it’s important that you understand.”

  Abbie didn’t bother to temper her sarcasm. “I must say, Cody Strawhand is certainly an enigma.”

  “As the son of New Mexico’s governor, Cody had unique opportunities,” Deborah explained. “He attended the very best schools; he often sat at dinner tables where there were as many nationalities represented as there were guests; he spoke three languages fluently; he played with the children of diplomats and celebrities and entrepreneurs. All this when he was still just a child.

  “Unfortunately, the demands on a governor’s social life kept Chase and Christina, my husband’s first wife, from establishing a normal home routine. Rather than run again for office, my husband chose to serve on the Navajo Tribal Council at Window Rock. That’s the Navajo Nation’s capital—like Washington, D.C. I think that by returning to reservation life, my husband hoped to give Cody the kind of close family relationship every child needs. In that way, the decision was a good one. Cody learned to exist with the necessities of life alone. You might say my husband was trying to strengthen his son, to teach him survival on the most basic level.”

  “But? . . .” Abbie asked, hearing the reservation in Deborah’s voice.

  “But the deprivations that Christina faced . . . well, you can imagine the culture shock she underwent, leaving the governor’s mansion to live in a hogan. Dirt floors, no electricity, no running water. Within the year she left Chase and Cody, who was ten or so, for another politician, a man of her own race that time.”

  “I see,” Abbie said slowly, hu
rting for the child Cody had been. That explained why Cody demanded all—or nothing.

  “Now you can understand why Cody harbors such a deep resentment for the pretentiousness of social roles, why he harkens to the call of the wild places and avoids the upper echelons of society like the plague. He wouldn’t even accept his inheritance of Cambria, so his father and I must return periodically to oversee its operation.”

  Deborah bit her lip to still its trembling, and Abbie said, “You love Cody very much, don’t you?”

  “Like my own son. He’s so very much like his father.” She ran slender fingers through her sophisticated short-cut hair. “I wish I had a cigarette.”

  For the first time Abbie laughed. “You gave up smoking too?”

  Deborah grimaced. “Chase never let me get started. I remember the first time I pulled out a package of cigarettes I had found. . . She gave a small laugh. “I think I’ve been rattling on, Abbie. But I like you very much—and I wanted you to understand Cody, if that’s possible for anyone.”

  “Tell me about you and Chase. Please.”

  “There’s not that much to tell. I met him at the Santa Fe Indian Boarding School . . . and fell wildly in love with him, although I was just six or seven at the time and he was already a senior. Years later, when he was going to the university, he met Christina, and after the war—World War II . . . .

  “And?” Abbie prompted. “When did Chase finally come back into your life?”

  Deborah hesitated. “During the war when Chase and I had been marooned on a Philippine island briefly and following the war we were engaged – also briefly. But after Chase was elected governor Christina decided she wanted him back. When I learned later that they had divorced, I knew I might never have another chance.” She shrugged and smiled self-deprecatingly. “So I stalked him like a lioness.”

  Once more, Deborah glanced in the rearview mirror at Robert, and, Abbie, turning her head silently, followed the woman’s saddened glance. The boy sat as dispassionately as Cody had at breakfast. “Abbie, it will be difficult to reach below the child’s self-imposed barrier—and Cody’s—but love could do it. I suspect you are capable of giving great love.”

  She sighed. “But the question is, Deborah, would I want to give it to outcasts such as those two?

  “The way Chase loves me now—the force of his passion and the strength of his love—it was worth those first few years of self-doubt. Of wondering if he would take Christina back if she came to him again.”

  Abbie looked out the window, but she didn’t see the outskirts of Albuquerque slip by, the modern malls and stuccoed condominiums. Passion. The force of Cody’s passion threatened to overpower her, catch her up in one of those blinding, stinging dust devils, and just possibly whirl away, leaving her for a woman of his own kind. Had she met Cody when she was younger, perhaps she would have been equal to it. But now . . . now she had been conditioned by too many years of repression, had acquired the debilitating quality of self-containment. She could no longer give so easily of herself. She didn’t even know if there was any of her left to give. And that was what was of supreme importance to her now—to find herself.

  She couldn’t handle both—the passion she harbored for Cody . . . and the passion, the desperate need, to prove that Abbie Dennis still existed.

  Yet she could not so easily put Cody from her. His image was engraved on her mind ... his touch and voice on her soul.

  Chapter 8

  “Swinging by the airport was no problem, Abbie. I had to come down Flagstaff way anyhow. Where did you and Robert go?”

  “New Mexico,” she answered noncommittally. Marshall flashed her a glance. As if sensing her unspoken wish, he respectfully refrained from questioning her further.

  Politeness compelled her to say something. “I was surprised when the agency told me that you had cancelled your holiday vacation leave.”

  “An emergency at the Leupp Boarding School came up. That’s where I just came from.”

  Only then did Abbie notice that Marshall’s healthy tanned face had a gray cast. “What happened?”

  He swung the Interagency Motor Pool’s Jeep off Highway 89 onto 160. “Suicide. A ten-year- old hanged herself from a bath stall showerhead.”

  “Oh, God, no.” She thought of Robert sitting stonily in the back seat and was for once glad he didn’t understand English very well.

  “I don’t think the BIA will ever learn that taking an Indian kid to a white boarding school comes as a terrific shock. Like being pushed out of a cozy kitchen into a howling blizzard. Oh, our schools are modern and expensive. And our teachers, the ones like you, really try. But the kids are lonely. They enter confused and bewildered, and they leave the same way. When they enter at least they know that they’re Indians. They come out half-red and half-white, not knowing what they are.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat. Chase and Cody had fenced on the very issue that Marshall was discussing. The horror of the suicide—it made her feel so helpless, the situation seem so hopeless.

  “Is there anything that can be done?” she asked without opening her eyes. She didn’t want to see the desolation of the country that was inexorably swallowing up the car. In Albuquerque it would have been so easy to catch a plane to anywhere. Houston, Kansas City, San Francisco. But she wasn’t going to run.

  “Something has to be done,” he said hollowly.

  “Where would you start, Marshall?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You know, Abbie, we talk about the Indians being culturally deprived.” He laughed angrily. “They aren’t. You might say that they’re the only people in this melting pot who have kept their culture. What have we, the urban white Americans, got? A culture of the mass media that’s fed to us.”

  He shook his head. “I’m going off on a tangent. I’d start, Abbie, by doing away with the restriction that forbids them to talk their language or sing their songs in the boarding schools. Hey, Abbie?”

  She opened her eyes. “I wasn’t sleeping. Just thinking, Marshall.”

  “How about thinking about going skiing with me before the holidays are over. The Snow Bowl reported more than seven inches of snow last week.”

  “Marshall, to be honest, I tried seeing another man this week. And it was no good. I don’t think I’m up to mixing with the opposite sex yet.” She smiled wryly and added, “To quote Garbo, ‘I vant to be alone.’ ”

  “It was that bad, eh?”

  She was relieved when he didn’t ask her the name of the man she had seen. “That bad.”

  “When you decide to make the circuit again, Abbie, I hope you’ll give me first chance at bat.”

  * * * * *

  Abbie and Dalah tacked the last deerhide Yei mask to the wall above the blackboard. They would have been more appropriate for Halloween, she thought.

  Dalah had obtained the masks and the kachina dolls from the Navajo Indian Culture Center in Tuba City the week before. Orville contributed the large, and costly, squash-blossom necklaces that she displayed on the velvet-draped table from his pawn room. Joey Kills the Soldier’s mother, after a request translated by Dalah, had supplied a rawhide bag with cedar dust, a gourd and a rattle. Joey’s mother had explained that the artifacts were full of religious and symbolic meaning and came from a peyote ceremony.

  Abbie stepped back to survey their handiwork with narrowed eyes. They had finished just in time, with the first day of school after the Christmas holidays set to begin in less than thirty minutes.

  “It should make the children feel almost like they’re in a hogan,” Dalah said proudly.

  “Maybe we’ll see some progress now. I won’t have to hold up a couple of fingers and say the word ‘two’ fifteen times when two eagle feathers explain the concept so much better.” Abbie didn’t add that maybe she would be able to prevent even one more Indian child from becoming another suicide statistic.

  “Your idea was marvelous,” Dalah said, shoving her long hair back over h
er shoulder. She smiled shyly. “I’m glad you asked my help.”

  Abbie’s gaze fell on the beautiful young Indian woman. She liked Dalah very much and yet the thought that perhaps Cody had made love to Dalah was a wrenching knot in the pit of her stomach. She knew that Cody had returned not long after she had, because Orville had happened —just happened—to mention that Cody had come by the trading post earlier that morning. Astute, perceptive Orville.

  What a miserable Christmas they had spent, she and Robert, the boy as miserable and glowering as she. Not even the comic strip wrapped box of candy had elicited a smile from the boy on Christmas morning.

  “Mrs. Dennis!”

  The name was a bellow. Abbie spun to face the classroom doorway. Miss Halliburton stood there, looking for all the world like a bull about to charge. Her severely tailored gray suit made her look more like a drill sergeant than a school principal. “I have just learned that you took an Indian child off the reservation over the holidays.”

  What a way to start off the new year! Abbie certainly hoped that this wasn’t an omen for the year to come. “I did. But I informed the dormitory.”

  “Don’t you realize, Mrs. Dennis, that any time an Indian child is to be taken off the reservation, it must be cleared with the BIA. That is a governmental offense!”

  Abbie drew a deep breath, willing away an angry reaction. “I was unaware of that rule,” she said calmly. “It won’t happen—”

  “What in Beelzebub’s name is all this—this paraphernalia?” The principal’s index finger jabbed in the direction of the displays.

  “Indian artifacts.” Abbie saw Dalah’s warning glance but continued smoothly. “I felt that the decorations would make the children feel more at home.”

  “More at home,” the principal purred, and Abbie felt a sudden queasiness in her stomach. “Do you realize the years and time and money we have spent trying to help these children adapt to our culture so that they can make their way in our world? And you—you, Mrs. Dennis—without even a by-your-leave from the office—are trying to set our efforts back by a hundred years!”