Wind Song

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  She wouldn’t. Robert had done this to himself. It was his fault. Her job didn’t include cliff- rappeling and search and rescue. She didn’t even have to work at Kaibeto anymore. No one would blame her if she couldn’t get to him. She had done her best, hadn’t she?

  She took off her heels. She had to be half an idiot.

  She thought about all the times when she had disdained the careless clothing styles of the other teachers, and wished now that she had on something half as serviceable. Oh, for one pants suit.

  Or a dirty pair of sneakers. She was learning a lot . . . but perhaps too late.

  Feet first, she edged over the side. With the icy stones serving as footholds, she inched her way downward. She kept her eyes tightly shut. At some points she found she could half stand where the incline jutted out, and then it was back to her knees. Once her foot lost its toehold and the rock gashed its way up her shinbone. All she could think about was the torn skirt . . . until she slipped the next time.

  “Robert!” she screamed as her hands grabbed wildly for anything to hold on to.

  She started tumbling. Something—her fingers clawed about the rock. Her feet thrashed futilely for a toehold. Nothing. She looked down. Through the trees—past the oddly tilted wagon— she could see, far below, a small stream, its line of blue glistening against the blanket of snow that looked gray with the approaching darkness.

  A wave of dizziness swept over her. She closed her eyes again. For a moment she wasn’t even certain which way was up, and the disorientation caused her fingers to weaken their hold. Oh, God, help. Help me, she prayed.

  Tears squeezed from her eyes. Her breath came in staccato bursts. Her hands were gradually losing their grip. Her nails—most were torn away. How much longer could she hold on?

  She saw a scruffy sapling three or four feet to her left and another couple of feet below her. She held little hope that it would bear her weight. If it didn’t . . . She risked a dizzy glance downward. If it didn’t, the fall would be a long one, with only the trees to break her plunge. But if the sapling held, larger rocks and trees zigzagged a path down the slight plateau where the wagon lay tilted against the pine.

  Despite the frigid temperature, perspiration broke out on her temples and upper lip. She really had no alternative. She had to leap those few feet quickly before the last of her strength ebbed. / can’t! Tears of frustration and helplessness trickled down her cheeks to mix with the snowflakes.

  Slowly she began to draw from a reservoir of unrealized, untapped strength. Forcing her mind to go as numb as her toes and fingers, she started swaying her feet and legs, like someone gathering speed on a swing to climb higher. One hand slipped. She lunged then. Her hands desperately and blindly flailed the air for that insignificant sapling. The rough, cylindrical trunk skimmed her palms. Her fingers locked around it. The trunk dipped and bowed—and she held her breath and prayed again.

  The pine’s swaying subsided. Stretching her legs and toes, Abbie could feel the solid ledge of stone just below her. If she released her grip on the pine, could she keep her balance on the ledge? There was no choice, was there?

  Her heart thudding like a cottonwood drum, she loosened her hold and dropped. Her numb feet, shocked by the jarring, gave way and she fell to her knees. Afraid to move for fear of toppling backward, she hugged the rocky wall. When she saw the tiny crimson trickling down the limestone wall, she realized that she must have scraped her forehead in the drop.

  No time to worry about that. The worst of the descent was over. Cautiously she worked her way down, using the tree trunks and outcroppings of rocks like rungs on a ladder. Finally she made it to the plateau. Twenty yards from the wagon she sank to her knees, weakened more by her fear than the effort. When she looked up, Robert was scooting toward her, dragging one leg behind him, as if it were broken.

  She was so relieved to see him that she snapped out, “If you dare spit at me, Robert Tsinnijinnie, I swear I’ll break your other leg.”

  Sitting, they faced each other. Robert’s eyes were like coals against the backdrop of snow. “I suppose it’s a truce?” she asked when he made no belligerent motion.

  No reply.

  She looked around them, assessing their situation. “The burros? Where are they?”

  He pointed to the chasm below. A brown lump stood out against the snow. She started shaking all over again. That could have been her. She couldn’t go to pieces now.

  “Both of the burros?”

  His brown finger aimed like an arrow to the north, where the plateau narrowed to little more than a ledge again. The other burro had apparently escaped. So much for hope of a burro ride back. With Robert hurt there was no way the two of them could climb back up that bluff. And she wasn’t certain that she had the courage to do it again, anyway. It almost seemed easier to let the blessing of the freezing cold hush them into painless, permanent sleep than to attempt that nightmare ascent.

  However . . . For the first time she smiled. If the burro had escaped by way of that narrow path, perhaps they could, too. She turned to Robert. “Look, Robert, the snow will soon cover our tracks.” Did he understand her? She doubted it, but it helped her retain her sanity to talk. “If we can make it back to the road, there’s hope that the school will send out a search party.”

  A futile hope, since they probably wouldn’t realize that she and Robert were missing until later that night. And how many canyons would have to be searched before they were found? They could freeze to death by then. But she couldn’t—she wouldn’t—sit there and wait for death’s wings to flap over the two of them.

  She pushed herself erect and staggered. Had her feet fallen off? A quick glance reassured her that they were still there. She started giggling and broke off sharply. “Let’s go, Robert.” She bent and slipped an arm under his shoulders. If he balked now, she would cry. He didn’t. He balanced on one leg and wrapped an arm about her waist.

  His questioning glance prompted her into movement, movement that sent jabs of needlelike pain into the soles of her feet. Leaning into each other, the two of them hobbled along the narrowing ledge. With a grim smile Abbie thought that they looked like contestants in a potato sack race.

  For a while she was galvanized by the hope of making it back to the top. Robert’s weight, her numb feet and hands, were forgotten in the struggle to put yard after yard behind them. But her hopes were shattered when they edged around a bend of the wall to find that the path had narrowed to a mere goat trail. There was little room to do more than place one foot in front of the other. It was an impossibility for Robert, with his injured leg.

  And for her? Her feet had no feeling in them. Even if she could manage to crawl, her sense of balance was decimated by fatigue. Her teeth were chattering, and she couldn’t stop shivering violently. With the certainty that comes hand in hand with desperation, she knew that she would never make it to the top, but would join the carcass of the unfortunate burro below.

  “And we were so close to reaching the top,” she murmured, too tired even to cry. She sank down with Robert and laid her head against the wall of rock. She wouldn’t look into the yawning abyss, but she did slide a glance at the boy beside her. His swarthy face had a pallor beneath it. His dark eyes were dull, his bowlike mouth pinched with the pain in his leg, but no fear etched his face; it held only a complacent acceptance of the situation.

  She slipped an arm around him and pulled his head into the crook of her shoulder. “You’re one hell of a kid, Robert Tsinnijinnie.”

  Watching the snow swirl about them, she thought of her own boys. How she loved them; how she missed those years of their childhood . . . and recalled again, with a faint smile, those precious moments of bedtime prayers. The thought of bedtime reminded her of just how sleepy she was. She knew that she wasn’t supposed to sleep, that the two of them should keep active, keep moving. But where? Retrace those tortured steps back down to the plateau? She shook her head and closed her eyes. It wasn’t worth it.

  T
houghts of Cody, and the child she carried, invaded her comfortable lethargy. She would never hold the child to her breast. And Cody . . . she knew now that she loved him beyond all else . . . beyond herself. Yet if she had given their love a chance, would that desperate need to discover herself have resurfaced one day to smother that love? She would never know now, would she? She really couldn’t think clearly with the drowsy lassitude that was settling over her like the snow.

  * * * * *

  Her head bobbled. Cement sacks bounced inside, just like the morning after she had drunk so much at Cody’s house.

  “You little idiot. You stupid fool. Damn you to hell.”

  Like an infant that preferred the womb to the cold, howling world without, Abbie closed her eyes all the more tightly. She was reluctant to face whatever it was that was intruding on her warm cocoon. But the stabbing ache in her feet and hands, the jarring of her head, were becoming more acute by the second. Her lids opened slightly. She was peering, head first, into the greedy mouth of the gorge far below.

  “No!” she groaned and tried to push herself away from that vast emptiness waiting below for her.

  The sharp slap against her buttocks brought her up short. “For God’s sake, Abbie, cut it out,” Cody’s voice growled, “or we’ll both be doing free falls.”

  “How . . . what? ...” She struggled to coalesce her scattered senses. After another moment of excruciating jarring, she realized that she was thrown over Cody’s shoulder, that he was negotiating that perilous path. An impossibility. She twisted her head to see, and he landed another blow across her rear. “I said don’t move.”

  She froze at his command. Incredibly, he was climbing the foot-wide path by hauling on a rope that stretched somewhere upward out of sight.

  She heard him chuckle and demanded, “How can you laugh at a time like this?”

  “I was thinking ... for the umpteenth time . . . what a delightful rear you have. The one opportunity ... I have to fondle it—” his breathing was labored, and he paused to inhale— “without you interfering . . . and I need both my hands for the task at hand.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Thank the burro that returned to the shed . . . that’s when we knew you were missing. Otherwise hours could have passed before we started looking.”

  “And I thought burros were dumb.” Her breath whooshed from her lungs as her body jolted with one of Cody’s rough strides. When her breath returned, she asked, “Robert?”

  “In the pickup. He’s broken a thighbone.”

  Her relief came out in an audible sigh. Then Cody’s foot slid, and she screamed, certain that the two of them were going over the edge.

  Cody’s hands slipped on the rope, then held. He started working his way back up the pebbled path, hauling the two of them ever upward. She was afraid even to draw a breath, much less open her eyes, until it seemed that Cody was walking upright. Then the hinges of a door squeaked, and a rush of toasted air swept over her. She opened her eyes to find Cody shoving her into his pickup. The motor was running, filling the cab with heat. Next to her, Robert, half unconscious from the combined effects of the cold and the pain itself, stirred on the seat, where he had slumped to one side. She looked around for Cody. He stood at the tailgate, unknotting the hemp rope that he had used in the rescue from the bumper.

  She and Robert were going to live after all! With the realization she started to shiver as feeling returned to her limbs again. Inexplicably she began to cry in silent little gasps.

  Cody opened the pickup door and swung into the cab. “What the hell are you doing?”

  She had no breath to answer him, only sobbing hiccoughs as she buried her face in her hands. The aftershock hit her and she cried copiously, uncontrollably.

  “You little idiot.” He began to curse again, quietly, unemotionally and steadily, as he shifted the engine into forward and drove back down the canyon. “You selfish little fool. Why couldn’t you have stayed in Pennsylvania where you belonged? But, no . . . you just had to prove what a woman you were, no matter how much it disrupted other lives.”

  “You have no right to say that!” She dropped her bloodied, ragged hands from her face and looked at him with a face ravaged by tears.

  He didn’t take his eyes from the dark road, lit only by the pickup’s headlights. “But it’s true, isn’t it?” he ground out between clenched teeth. “You came here looking for amusement— entertainment—any diversion from the boredom of your haute monde. ”

  Robert stirred, awakened by the virulent tension that vibrated in the cab. But Abbie was unaware of anything but the pain caused by Cody’s charge. “No, no!” she cried out. “I thought I would find real life here at Kaibeto. I thought I would find myself!”

  “And did you?” he grated. “Did you find real life at Kaibeto? Did you find the real you?”

  “No,” she sobbed bitterly. Her shoulders shook with her vehemence. “I was wrong, thinking I would find myself here. I’m leaving the reservation, do you hear! I’m going back to Pennsylvania, where I belong.”

  * * * * *

  Abbie laid the folded sweater in the suitcase with the rest of her meager belongings . . . and one of the beaded necklaces made by the children. Miss Halliburton had insisted that she take it after Abbie had informed the older woman that she was leaving the reservation.

  The doctor had recommended a few days of rest and recuperation, but Miss Halliburton had told her to take off the weeks remaining in the term. It was then that Abbie had announced that she was giving up her position at Kaibeto. “It was the mountains and the gorges that got to me finally,” Abbie finished with a smile that rang hollow with self-mockery.

  “And the baby you carry?” Miss Halliburton asked. “What will your husband—former husband—say?”

  Abbie shrugged. “I don’t really care. I’m not going back to him, only to the life that I’m familiar with. Like you said, I don’t belong out here, Miss Halliburton.”

  “I’d say you’re one gutsy lady.”

  It was the first compliment Abbie had received from the woman. Perhaps the principal wasn’t such a dragon after all. Why did she have to realize certain truths when it was too late? Abbie wondered.

  “Not too gutsy. I’m scared silly just thinking about trying to earn a living and raise a baby alone. But other women do it. Besides, in a way, I’m looking forward to the challenge.”

  It would take her mind off other things. Off her failure as a teacher. Off Cody. Off her love for him and her continued desire for him. Now that he had awakened the sleeping woman within her, what would she do with the rest of her life? Read romantic books to sublimate these new, unsettling feelings? Cody’s last words had killed all hope for anything else.

  They had been waiting outside Tuba City’s emergency clinic for the doctor to finish setting the cast on Robert’s leg. Cody, his hands jammed in his jeans, his back to her as he stood at the dust-filmed window, had said in a low, brusque voice, “Get out of my life, Abbie Dennis.” Only then had he turned to look at her. Really look at her. Below the bandana his eyes were hard and piercing. “Get out and don’t come back.”

  She had looked away. “There’s nothing to bring me back,” she had said in a toneless voice.

  And it was true, she thought as she clumsily closed the lid on the leather-bound suitcase with hands that were wrapped in gauze and tape. In the four days following the snowstorm she had had enough time to rethink her decision to leave, and the unpleasant facts she faced had not changed her mind. Cody’s contempt, Robert’s dislike, her teaching career that was nothing more than one fiasco after another—she had failed utterly, miserably at Kaibeto.

  She looked around the apartment for anything she might have missed. There was still time to say good-bye to her students. But that was another painful situation she couldn’t bring herself to face. Better to wait in the school office for Marshall to arrive. Carrying her suitcase in one hand, her coat thrown over her other arm, she walked across the school groun
ds. The snow had melted, leaving the greasewood and broomgrass glistening in the brilliant sunlight that had perversely decided to shine. Beneath the slide, about the corral, between the sidewalk’s gaping cracks— everywhere, it seemed—sunflowers suddenly unfolded their gloriously golden petals to usher in the spring.

  Yet Abbie’s heart was dormant with winter’s frost. She set her suitcase down on the school porch’s bottom step and turned to survey Kaibeto one last time. Her gaze went to Navajo Mountain. Against a turquoise sky it rose, one magnificent slab of stone. Powerful and enduring, like the Navajo people. She would miss them.

  She saw the telltale spiral of dust before she actually heard Marshall’s Jeep coming down the road. He pulled up beside her. His gray eyes looked appreciatively at her, standing in her white wool suit, her chin tipped defiantly. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  She nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. He got out of the Jeep and came around to the porch. His hand touched her elbow. “I can still write and tell headquarters to disregard your resignation.”

  She shook her head. “No.” It was all she could manage.

  He took her suitcase and opened the door of the Jeep for her. She sat with eyes that stared stonily ahead as they slowly rolled away.

  “Wait!” Marshall braked at Abbie’s sudden command.

  He turned his gaze in the direction she was looking. Robert stood on the steps, his crutches supporting the weight of his thin body. As Abbie watched, he maneuvered the crutches down the three steps, looking for all the world like some unwieldy robot. Frustration showed on his little brown face as he reached the bottom step. Then he dropped the crutches and came hobbling toward her.

  “Robert!” she whispered, her throat choked with tears. She flung open the door and ran toward him. She sank to her knees and wrapped her arms about his waist. His own arms encircled her shoulders.