Standing on the asphalt, with a cool breeze sighing through the evergreens at the edge of the parking lot and the sun climbing in the clear blue morning sky, Father John heard Homer pledge not to take a drink for thirty days. Taking the pledge was solemn and serious to Arapahos, almost a sacrament. Homer wouldn’t take it unless he felt he had the spirit to honor it.
“I’m gonna do it this time,” Homer said.
“You bet you are,” Father John said as the Arapaho disappeared through the hospital’s front door. He started up the Toyota and backed it out of the parking place. “Dear Lord,” he prayed silently, “give Homer the grace he needs. Give us all the grace we need.”
“Got a minute, John?” Father Brad poked his head around the door to the superior’s office in the white brick administration building at St. Francis Mission. He looked as if he didn’t know whether to come in or disappear down the hallway.
“Help yourself,” Father John said, nodding to the small metal table cluttered with a coffee pot, foam cups, creamer, and a box of sugar cubes.
Father John had just poured himself a cup of coffee and was about to tackle the papers on his desk: bills, letters, phone messages. The message on top read: “Lou Ann Red Cloud called. Can you find a family in Denver for her son to live with while he goes to Regis High School?” That wasn’t going to be easy, he thought, shuffling through the stack. Many more requests for favors from Father Dave and he would tell him to get lost for sure.
“The Provincial called this morning. You just missed him,” the younger priest said as he poured a cup of coffee and settled himself into the chair on the other side of the desk. He was methodically stirring a plastic spoon around the Styrofoam cup as if to create a design of some kind. “We had a chance to chat ...”
“The Provincial?” Father John felt as if a yawning pit had opened beneath him. Ned Cooley had clout, but he hadn’t expected him to exercise it this fast. Just then the phone rang, and Father John reached for the receiver. His hand was shaking. His assistant wouldn’t miss it.
“We might have gotten us a break.” It was Art Banner on the line. The chief sounded excited, his words spilling over one another. “I’m gonna need your help again. Can you get right over here?”
“Where are you?”
“Tribal headquarters. Harvey’s office.”
Father John was on his feet even before he’d replaced the receiver. Whatever Father Brad and the Provincial had talked about would have to wait. He didn’t want to know anyway. He grabbed his cowboy hat from the rack behind the desk and was on his way out the door before he said, “Sorry, something’s come up.”
The young priest had turned partway around in his chair, disbelief on his face. “Hey, no problem.” he said. Father John could feel the wave of sarcasm at his back as be hurried down the hallway and out of the building.
He parked the Toyota outside the red-brick tribal offices at Ethete. The pickup had made good time on Seventeen-Mile Road, although after being pulled over yesterday, he had kept an eye on the speedometer. La Bohème poured from the tape player.
Banner was grinding a cigarette butt onto the sidewalk as Father John got out of the Toyota. Inside, the building was arranged in a V-shape with the lobby at the base and tribal offices down two hallways. The receptionist at the front desk, intent on a telephone conversation, was staring off into space. Two Arapaho women sat on metal chairs beneath a long window that captured a stretch of flat. open plains. They flipped through magazines, bored and impatient.
Banner led the way down the hall on the right. By the time they reached Harvey’s office, the chief had pulled a small key ring out of his shirt pocket. It held two keys. “Wait ’til you see this,” he said, jamming one key in the lock and pushing open the door.
Papers, file folders, and photographs spilled across one side of the tiled floor. Against the far wall was a metal file cabinet, its three drawers empty and tilting downward. Next to the cabinet sat a large oak desk with a swivel chair pushed against it. Nothing seemed out of place on the other side of the office where two file cabinets stood against the wall, drawers closed. Books were arranged on shelves in neat rows. Except for the filmy orange powder glazing everything in the room, half the office looked as if Harvey had just stepped away for a cup of coffee.
Father John picked up some papers by the toe of his boot. They were manuscript pages, each numbered in the top right-hand corner. He glanced down the top page: That winter of 1878 was very hard. The children were crying with hunger. Warriors rode great distances looking for food and often returned to camp empty-handed. There was no place on the plains anymore for Arapahos, so the government told Chief Black Night to take the people to the Wind River Reservation and stay with the Shoshones. Chief Black Night went there first and said to Chief Washakie, “We want to come under your robe. ”
“This is Harvey’s history,” Father John said, glancing up.
The police chief stepped across the office and drove a fist against the top drawer of one of the undisturbed file cabinets. “Over here’s records on tribal business. Secretary says nothin’s been touched. You’d think anybody lookin’ for something important would go through these records, not some history files. Who cares what went on a hundred years ago? Nothin’ anybody can do about it now.”
“When did this happen?”
“Sometime between two and five Saturday afternoon, near as we can tell. Custodian says he was here Saturday ‘til two tightenin’ up some rattling windows. Before he left, he checked the offices to make sure lights were off and doors locked. A couple of my boys stopped in to check on Harvey’s office a little after five, and they found this mess. Only thing we know for sure is that whoever did it had keys. No sign of a break-in. Looks like he pulled out the files, went through ’em fast, then tossed all the pages instead of putting ’em back in the drawers. He was in one hell of a hurry. Must’ve suspected we’d be checkin’ on the office after Harvey was murdered.”
“He?” Father John asked. He’d heard enough confessions to know women were also capable of nefarious deeds.
“Whoever killed Harvey,” Banner said, leaning against the closed drawers of the file cabinet and crossing his arms. “Of course the fed thinks Anthony got released from Fremont County Jail and hightailed it over here with Harvey’s keys to get any evidence that might incriminate him.”
“I drove Anthony back to the ranch myself,” Father John said. “I’m sure Rita and Maria will vouch for the fact he stayed there.”
The police chief shook his head. “Everybody vouching for that boy is on his side—his girl, his family. That’s not gonna cut it with the fed. We had to notify Miller soon’s we found the office ransacked. I hated callin’ him in on my turf. My boys did the dustin‘, though. They went over this place lookin’ for fingerprints, fibers, hair. The lab report might tell us somethin’. But it won’t tell us what the burglar was lookin’ for. If we knew that, maybe we could figure out who killed Harvey and why.”
“You’d like me to put these files into some kind of order to see what’s missing?” Father John asked. He stooped over and scooped up another pile of papers.
“Weren’t you some kind of history professor?”
“I taught American history in high school.”
“Well, since you were helping Harvey with this history project of his, I figure who better to put it into some kind of order. It could give us another angle to work on.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” said Father John, flipping through the stack in his hands.
“What’s not going to be easy?” Charlie Taylor leaned through the doorway. He had on gray velour warm-up pants and a dark-blue knit shirt. One hand gripped a blue athletic bag that looked crammed full. His black hair was slicked back into a ponytail.
“Gettin’ this place back together,” said Banner.
“I saw the BIA police dusting in here this morning.” The councilman drew a long breath, coolly appraising the situation, as if Harvey’s murder and
ransacked office had happened on some other planet that had nothing to do with him.
“You got any ideas what the burglar was after?” Father John locked eyes with the tribal councilman.
“Not at the moment.” Charlie leaned back and looked down the hall, as if he were expecting someone. “I got some guys I’m gonna shoot baskets with over at the school gym right now. But I’ll give it some thought,” he said, shifting the athletic bag into the other hand and backing out of the doorway.
Banner handed the key ring with its two silver keys to Father John. “This here’s for the building, and this one’s for the office,” he said. “You can work here anytime’s convenient. Sooner you get some answers, the better. We’ll have the lab reports in a couple days, and the fed’s gonna have his tail on fire to get an indictment. Unless we come up with some motive that somebody had for seein’ Harvey dead, Anthony’s gonna take the fall.” There was concern that bordered on fear in the chief’s eyes.
Father John slipped the keys into his jeans pocket. He couldn’t stop thinking about Charlie Taylor. After years of counseling people, he knew when somebody was lying. Not just from what the person said or did, but from his own reactions, from the way the hair stood up on his arms like tiny antenna picking up invisible messages. The councilman knew something that might cast light on Harvey’s murder, but he was covering it up, playing the role of the unaffected observer. Yet out at the ranch he’d warned Father John away. Away from what?
It didn’t take long to figure out the system the burglar had used to rifle through Harvey’s files. Whoever had done it had started at the front of the top drawer, pulled out the first file folder and probably looked through it before tossing it across the floor. Then he—or she—had pulled out the next folder and the next, tossing each one in turn so that they covered the floor in a haphazard yet obvious order.
Father John was on his hands and knees, sifting through the papers and pulling together bunches that looked as if they might have fallen out of the same folder. Since the pages were numbered, it was easy enough to order them within each folder, or shift them into other folders if it seemed that’s where they belonged.
A definite pattern emerged. Harvey had gone about his work in a logical, organized fashion. Each folder contained a handwritten outline of the material in the chapter and notes on sources, a typed manuscript, and several photographs. The first chapter had landed clear across the room, almost at the door, while the last chapters lay in heaps at the foot of the file cabinet. Judging by the number of folders, Father John guessed there were about thirty or forty chapters. Pulling them together would be easy. Determining what was missing, if anything, would be hard.
It was past noon before he finished gathering all the pages and photos into folders and stacked them on top of Harvey’s desk. He had just sat down in Harvey’s chair and opened the folder containing the first chapter when the receptionist knocked at the opened door and crossed the tiled floor to deliver a sandwich, bag of chips, and can of Coke. “Chief Banner said to bring you this,” she said, setting the lunch on the desk next to the folders.
“Thanks,” he said. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he saw the sandwich and chips. And how thirsty. He opened the Coke and took a long drink. The receptionist waited a moment, an expectant look about her as if she thought he’d talk about the burglary. Pretending he hadn’t picked up the message, Father John bent over the page titled “Chapter One Outline.” She turned abruptly and marched out.
Harvey’s handwriting was familiar and easy to read, the way he looped the i’s and e’s,. cut off the last letters in words, as if he’d changed his mind, made little squiggly lines for “of” and “the.” Father John ran one finger along the outline while simultaneously flipping through the manuscript, checking that every subject had been included, managing a bite of sandwich here and there as he worked.
He was struck by the wholeness of Harvey’s work. Chapter One covered the earliest history of Arapahos, the oldest of times, when they left their mother tribe, the Algonquins, and moved west across the continent. It told how they settled in the Red River valley in Minnesota where they had lived as farmers for a thousand years, and how eastern tribes had eventually pushed them out of the valley and onto the Great Plains. There was nothing missing here that Father John could see.
The next several chapters covered the life of Arapahos on the Great Plains. He flipped through the photographs: warriors in deerskin shirts, beaded and fringed, with eagle-feathered headdresses; warriors astride ponies with buckskin saddles painted in geometric figures; warriors and ponies staring into the camera, stopped forever in time.
Harvey had titled Chapter Six “How Arapahos Earned Their Living.” Glancing through it, Father John saw that it told how Arapahos had followed the buffalo, pitched villages in the lee of the mountains, ridden out like itinerant shop-keepers to trade buffalo robes and blankets with other Indian tribes. Intelligent, logical, peaceful, that was the Arapahos. “The businessmen of the plains,” the first white traders had called them.
So far, everything in the chapters on the Old Time seemed intact. Father John knew he’d have to go back and give each one a closer reading, but first he wanted to move through as quickly as possible. He opened the next folder: “The War Years.”
It was longer than the earlier chapters, and he made himself flip through it quickly, not wanting to get caught up in it. He knew the story. He and Harvey had often talked about how the chiefs had tried to make peace with white settlers on the plains, how the young warriors, impatient and angry, had attacked the wagon trains and ranches, how the soldiers had come and hunted the people across the plains, boxed them in until there was no place to go. Father John closed the folder, feeling the same sadness that came over him whenever he read about the struggles of his own people in Ireland and when they first came to America.
Chapter Ten was next: “Arapahos Find a Home.” The afternoon sunlight streamed through the narrow window over the file cabinet. It was all he had time for. Harvey’s wake was this evening, and he had to get ready. An eerie quiet engulfed the office—he was probably the only one left in the building.
He let himself out, locking both the office and front doors. The air was heavy with the day’s heat, and he squinted in the sunlight skimming off the pavement. He’d found nothing unusual in the files, but he didn’t feel discouraged. For no reason that he could explain, he had the kind of buoyant feeling of a gambler, sure this roll of the dice would pay off.
16
DARKNESS LAY OVER the reservation like a soft blanket, but orange traced the peaks of the Wind River Mountains, and the moon shone full in the eastern sky. A crowd was gathered on the pavement outside of Blue Sky Hall. The community center bore the name that other plains tribes had given to Arapahos—Blue Sky People. Vicky wound her way to the front door.
The inside of the hall resembled a gymnasium filled with rows of folding chairs. Most of the chairs were already taken, and people were staking out standing room along the back and side walls. Voices were hushed and respectful. There were more people here than she’d ever seen at a wake, even her mother’s two years ago. Spotting her mother’s sister in the middle row, Vicky walked down the center aisle to where the old woman was seated.
“You’re lookin’ tired,” Rose whispered, lifting a stuffed woven bag from the chair next to her so that Vicky could sit down.
It was about 9 o’clock, an hour after the wake was supposed to start. Vicky knew that Father John would start the services on Indian time, when everyone had arrived and was ready. Indian time had nothing to do with clocks. Most whites never understood that.
An hour ago Vicky had been eating dinner with Larry at a Chinese place in Lander. Larry had gone back to the office to catch up on some work—he had never gotten to know Harvey or his family and he said he wouldn’t feel right at the wake. She had taken Highway 789 to Hudson, then ridden Rendezvous Road across the reservation in the red-tinged dusk.
V
icky shifted in her chair, trying to see around the people in the rows ahead. The casket stood against the front wall. Harvey’s head was propped at an angle, the dark mass of hair clearly visible. Anthony, Rita, and Maria sat in the first row, next to Father John and the new assistant at St. Francis Mission. Will Standing Bear and other Arapaho elders were also in the front row, heads high. shoulders squared. Behind them sat Charlie Taylor, Harvey’s protégé, and four other tribal councilmen.
Harvey’s murderer could be here—sitting in one of the folding chairs or standing against a wall, normal, mournful. A shiver ran across Vicky’s shoulders, as if a cold wind had swept through the hall.
A group of women emerged through the door that opened onto the kitchen next to the hall. They walked down the aisle passing out plates of sandwiches and cookies. Vicky took a plate and handed it to the older woman, but she declined one for herself.
Rose took a bite of her sandwich. After a moment, she said, “You’re not involved with this ... this terrible thing, are you?”
Vicky knew that Rose worried about her defending people accused of crimes, as if they might commit some crime against her. “I want to see Anthony cleared, that’s all.”
“Can’t the police do that?”
“Anthony’s not guilty,” Vicky said softly.
Rose sighed. “Nobody knows for sure what somebody might do.”
Vicky moved her legs to one side to allow a young woman with a fussy baby to slip past toward a vacant chair at the far end of the row. What Rose said was true. She was seldom surprised anymore by the things people were capable of doing, but she didn’t believe Anthony could commit murder. She didn’t want to believe that.
Watching Father John step to the foot of the casket, she felt a prickly sense of surprise, as if the lens had gone out of focus just as she was about to snap the picture and she had to refocus. He wore black slacks and a black short-sleeved shirt with white Roman collar. She wasn’t used to seeing him in clericals. She reminded herself again that he was a priest
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