Watching Eagles Soar

by Margaret Coel

  “I thought you loved him.”

  “And we were going to live happily ever after?” My sister made a noise that sounded like she was choking. Her voice was so faint I had to press the phone hard against my ear to catch what she was saying. “I admit I had second thoughts for a while, until I caught him with his girlfriend. The bastard brought her into our bedroom. Some tramp with black, stringy hair, and the way she acted, like she owned the place, I got the feeling that she’s been around for a long time. Of course Peter insisted he still loved me, but I started thinking that the girlfriend was going to make it a lot easier.”

  Girlfriend. I felt my chest tighten, as if something had gotten caught in my windpipe. My heart was pounding against my ribs. It was a moment before I caught my breath. “Listen to me, Maddie,” I shouted. “You’ve got to get out of Santorini.”

  “I told Peter I was going back to the room for my sunscreen.” Her voice had started going in and out. Peter. Room. Sunscreen. I had to fill in the rest. Maddie’s new husband did not like being kept waiting.

  “Peter killed his wife, Maddie. He had his girlfriend drive the car.”

  “What? Jules, what . . .?”

  “Don’t hike up over the caldera, Maddie!” I was screaming, the pieces of the puzzle falling together in my head. It was so clear. Why hadn’t we seen it before? “Can you hear me? Peter’s wife probably inherited a fortune, and he killed her for it. But he didn’t get it, Maddie. You hear me?” I felt like I was screaming into the wind. “He didn’t get the money. That’s why he went on the cruise. He was looking for another rich woman.”

  “Jules? Jules? You’re breaking up. Everything’s . . . fine. Okay? Okay? Don’t worry.” She sounded like she was in the middle of the sea, and I had the terrible feeling that my sister was fading away from me. “I’ve got to go.”

  “No, Maddie! Peter thinks you’ve got Norton’s money. He’s gonna push you off the cliff. You won’t have a chance . . .”

  I was shouting into a dead phone. I pushed the redial key and closed my eyes, listening to the buzz of a phone ringing in an empty hotel room somewhere in Santorini. God, they could be staying in any one of dozens of little hotels. It could be a short hike to the caldera overlook.

  I hit the end button and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to connect with the Santorini police, not taking my eyes off the clock. Maddie and Peter were on their way to the overlook.

  Finally, a man’s voice on the line, and me shouting about how an American named Peter Hainsworth was going to an overlook on the caldera to kill his wife, how he planned to push her over the edge, and the voice saying, “Eh? Eh?”

  “English!” I shouted. “Get me someone that speaks English.”

  And the voice saying, “No Inglish,” and me continuing to shout even after I knew the line had gone dead. Twenty-five minutes had passed. They would be at the overlook by now. Maddie waving toward the edge of the cliff that dropped into the Aegean and saying, Stand over there, Peter, and Peter saying, Let me get your picture first, sweetheart. I insist. And no one would be able to prove that it wasn’t an accident.

  I threw the phone hard against the wall and watched the black metal break into pieces, as if it had been dropped off a cliff.

  Essays

  The Birth of Stories

  She was beautiful, just as I imagined Sacajawea must have been. The sculptured bronze face and dress and moccasins shimmered in the August sun. She stood in the cemetery named for her—the Sacajawea Cemetery—looking out over the rolling brown plains. The wind was blowing hard, I remember, the way it often blows on the Wind River Reservation. In a cradle strapped to her back was the figure of her child, Jean Baptiste, born a few weeks before the Lewis and Clark expedition left the Mandan village in North Dakota. She had gone with the expedition, the only woman among thirty-two men, an infant on her back. By the time she returned to her village, Jean Baptiste was eighteen months old, a dancing child, Clark called him. Something about the sculpture gripped me, tugged at my heart. A woman—a girl, really; she was sixteen years old—departing on a 5,000-mile journey with a baby. These were the facts, and I knew the facts would never let me go until I had worked them into a story.

  Stories arrive out of nowhere, out of a cemetery in the middle of an Indian reservation in the middle of Wyoming. It is always exciting for authors, the moment when a story arrives and we know we must write it. Stories come with their own urgency: they must be written now. We have to trust that it will all work out somehow, even if, in the grip of that initial idea, we’re never quite certain how the story will unfold.

  This was a phenomenon I had often experienced and never understood until I began writing about the Arapahos. They believe that the universe is filled with stories. From time to time, stories allow themselves to be told, and when they decide to be told, they choose the storytellers. When I first heard the explanation, I thought, of course. What else could explain authors working away sometimes for years writing stories that have nothing to do with them and that may not even be published? Look at the works of almost any author: Shakespeare writing about a Danish prince, or a Moorish general, or star-crossed lovers and doomed kings. Larry McMurtry writing about a nineteenth-century cattle drive. Evan S. Connell re-creating the life and death of General George Armstrong Custer. What explanation other than that a story had allowed itself to be told and had laid hold of an author’s heart and said: you are the one.

  What else could explain why, on that hot August day, I stood in front of a bronze sculpture of a girl who lived two hundred years ago and knew that it was incumbent upon me to write a story about her? It had to be done. I remember speaking to her out loud: What is your story? Tell me your story.

  For me, a story starts in the actual world, a piece of information or random fact—a small kernel that might grow and bear fruit. I had happened upon a kernel, the fact of a girl and a baby and a journey, and something so poignant about it, so terribly human. But where was the entrance into the story itself? What exactly was the story and how did it want to be told? I needed more facts, so I began reading about Sacajawea and the Lewis and Clark expedition, getting a sense of the young girl with the baby, drawing closer with each book and article. I spent a week in Montana floating the Missouri River, stopping along the way where the expedition had stopped, camping under a field of stars that blazed in a clear black sky, listening to the river lap at the banks and knowing—knowing—Sacajawea had been to this place. She had seen these stars; she had listened to this river.

  Then I found another fact, another kernel: a notebook had once existed. An old Shoshone woman had come onto the Wind River Reservation with her people in 1868. She had told wondrous stories, this old woman, about going with the soldiers on a long journey. And remember that the Lewis and Clark expedition was a military affair. She spoke French, and we also have to remember that Sacajawea’s husband, who was on the expedition, was Frenchman Toussaint Charbonneau. She told about walking over mountains and floating down rivers in pirogues the soldiers had carved out of trees. She told about eating horsemeat in blizzards, hunting for wild vegetables in the warm weather, locating familiar mountain peaks and streams when the expedition reached the territory of her people, the Shoshones.

  And when they reached the mouth of a great river and set up camp, she had gone to Captain Clark himself and demanded that she be allowed to go with the men to see the waters that wrapped around the world. To have come all that way and endured all the hardships, yet not see the great waters, she said, would be very hard. So she went to the Pacific Ocean. She saw the bones of a whale, which she called a fish as large as a house.

  All of the old woman’s stories are discounted by historians, who offer evidence that the Shoshone wife of Charbonneau died at Fort Manuel in present-day South Dakota in 1812, six years following the expedition. They cite a notation written by Clark in 1828 that Sacajawea was deceased. The problem with these pieces of
historical evidence is that Charbonneau was a much-marrying man. Even the historians admit that he had more than one Shoshone wife, and the wife who died in 1812 is unnamed. In any case, whatever the historians might believe makes no difference to the Shoshones and Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation. They have their own stories, they say, passed down by Sacajawea herself.

  The wife of the government agent at the time recognized that the stories the old woman told were important. They were history, eyewitness accounts of marvelous events. The agent’s wife started recording the stories in a notebook, eventually filling twenty-five pages, the notebook becoming more precious with each story, more laden with history. She had to keep it safe, she must have told herself, because she placed the notebook in the agency building. One night, the building burned down.

  This was the salient fact—a notebook that once existed—that revealed the entrance into the story. I write mystery novels and short stories, all set in the West because I’m a westerner to the bone, a fourth-generation Coloradan. Stories about the West are part of my DNA. They forever capture my imagination, all those bigger-than-life western people and the western landscapes that go on forever and stun you with their beauty. I had been following Hemingway’s advice to “write what you know” before I had ever heard of it. Now another story of the West had found me. I would write a mystery novel based on a beautiful bronze girl with a baby and a notebook filled with her experiences on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

  I began by asking the what-if questions. What if the notebook hadn’t been destroyed in the fire after all? What if someone had rushed into the burning agency building and carried it to safety? What if the notebook had been passed down from generation to generation, a family’s precious treasure? What if someone outside the family discovered the notebook’s existence and recognized its value? What if someone was willing to kill for it?

  The answers eventually worked their way into the plot for The Spirit Woman, a mystery novel set in the present, yet intertwined with the story of a girl two hundred years ago, embarking on a journey with an infant on her back. But the story was also about the journey that my fictional characters embarked upon as they set out to locate a priceless notebook believed to have been destroyed, with a killer tracking their footsteps.

  The stories that find me—novels, short stories, nonfiction pieces alike—begin with that tiny bit of information that springs in front of me, blocking my way and drawing me into a conspiracy to bring forth a story. One morning a professor loomed out of a black-and-white photo in a newspaper. All white hair and beard flowing about his shoulders and chest, a little stooped over with wrists handcuffed over his belly, being led to a waiting car by three or four men in dark, serious suits. The headline blared something like: “Drug Lab Busted in Kansas Field.”

  A small article on an inside page, but it had taken hold of me. A professor of chemistry whose brilliance had gone unrecognized and who had been unfairly compensated at numerous universities and scientific laboratories. But a drug cartel had recognized that brilliance and built a state-of-the-art lab for the professor in the middle of a Kansas cornfield. Compensation was in line with talent: jets to Mexican beaches and Monte Carlo casinos. All he had to do was manufacture fentanyl, and he was very good at the task until the gloomy day the FBI knocked on the laboratory’s door.

  The idea of such a man—a small kernel—grew into a novel called The Ghost Walker. The character based on the professor turned out to be a minor character, yet the whole idea for the novel—a fentanyl lab on the Wind River Reservation run by an unappreciated genius—came about because, one morning, I happened to pour another cup of coffee and linger a little longer over the newspaper.

  I’ve learned over the years that when this happens—a kernel springs in front of me—there is nothing to be done except to surrender because there will be no peace until the story is written. The girl in bronze with a baby on her back and the genius professor with the flowing white beard will walk through my dreams, dance about on my dashboard as I drive down the road, and meet me at every corner. And always the urgency to write the story now. But now isn’t always the best time. Now is when I’m in the grips of writing another story, and for me there’s no breaking stride once a story is under way. So I make notes about this new kernel, jotting at a furious rate with the urgency of it all. I clip the newspaper articles, look up the books I will have to read, jot down the names of experts I must contact. All of which goes into a file folder that is now fat and overflowing, taking up half of a drawer by itself, a constant reminder of the stories demanding to be told.

  I’ve also learned that kernels can appear anywhere—in a newspaper, magazine, book, on a billboard. I suppose I am always expecting them, always on the lookout. They might jump out from the present or from the past; they aren’t particular about the century from which they emerge. But the kernels that come to me have one thing in common—they are connected to the West. The professor’s lab stood in a Kansas cornfield, but the idea translated easily westward, where the remote spaces of Indian reservations had long been hospitable to clandestine drug labs.

  But stories come to different authors in different ways. I’ve heard authors talk about the characters that walked into their heads. Sitting at an intersection, waiting for a green light, listening to the motor idling, and here comes a character. Not anyone the author knows or has ever met in the actual world, the character is someone new, a new man or woman born fully grown. The author Mark Spragg has said that, out of the blue, the image of an old man came to him. But the kernel that caught Spragg’s attention, grabbed onto him, and tugged at his heart was this: the old man seemed so sad. Why was he so sad? The answer that came out of that question led to the novel An Unfinished Life.

  Any kernel or notion or idea, any image that appears out of nowhere, is only the beginning, the entrance into a story. And at this point the author’s imagination must take over. To paraphrase Wordsworth, imagination is the art of seeing what is there. Not everything that matters is apparent at first, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Imagination looks beyond the obvious and sees the connections and relationships that might go unnoticed. Imagination sees below the surface into the heart of things. Imagination is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. When people say to me, I don’t have any imagination, my response is always, Maybe you’re not using it.

  For a story with a mystery at its heart, I turn my imagination loose on the what-if questions, never censoring or blocking any ideas that come to me. At this point, everything is on the table; everything is possible. This is the time for ruminating, taking long walks and letting the story begin to play out in my head the way in which it wants to play out. This is the time to watch the story people going about their lives, like watching actors on a stage. Such surprising people step out of the wings and do such surprising things! Now, why would she do that? Why did he go there? What is she doing here? You keep watching. You can’t turn away because you are in the grip of the story. What is driving these interesting people? What will become of them? Gradually you begin to see beneath the surface into the hearts and minds of these story people. You build a relationship with them.

  Stories depend upon relationships and connections, all the invisible strings that bind human beings to one another. Pull on one string at the beginning of a story, and somewhere in a following chapter, a character will cry. E. M. Forster put it best when he differentiated between facts and stories. The king died and the queen died are facts, Forster said. But a story is this: The king died and the queen died of grief. An essential connection exists, an invisible thread that binds the events and characters, and it is the author’s imagination that sees beyond the obvious to that connection.

  As an author who has carried on a love affair with history my entire career—I’ve written books on history; I’ve woven the past into every novel—I sometimes think that I might die of grief over the way so many academic his
tory books are limited by facts. Lists and lists of dead, dry facts. No wonder kids think history is boring. Facts can be boring. The way in which the facts are connected is what brings history to life and allows Custer to ride again over the rolling hills to his death and the warriors to rise up and defeat the 7th Cavalry, knowing even as they do so that in the very victory they will lose the war, and with the war, an entire way of life. How could any of this be boring, pulsing with life as it is? What is boring is the list of facts bereft of the author’s imagination, bereft of connections and, consequently, bereft of meaning.

  I am not suggesting that any author writing a story about actual events jettison the facts. The facts must stand; they are what they are and what happened, happened. But I am suggesting that before writing any story based on actual events, authors must read widely and deeply and do the necessary research for the imagination to make the connections—to see—what the facts alone may obscure. Because Evan S. Connell allowed his imagination to see into the connections and relationships among the facts, a sense of the truth of what happened at the Battle of the Little Bighorn shines through the novel Son of the Morning Star. This is the author’s responsibility to the story itself—the responsibility to bear witness to what occurred in such a way that the reader understands what happened and why it matters.

  By the time I sat down to write the biography of an Arapaho leader, Chief Left Hand, I had spent four years on the research. I had surrounded myself with facts—boxes of filled notebooks and stacks of photocopies, hundreds of names and dates and events. But not until I began writing the story—which is when the imagination goes to work—did the connections and networks and relationships among all the seemingly disparate facts begin to show themselves. Take two events in particular: the Camp Weld Council, September 28, 1864, and the Sand Creek Massacre, November 29, 1864. The authorities in Colorado had met with Arapaho and Cheyenne leaders at Camp Weld and instructed them to take their people to an area in southeastern Colorado, near Sand Creek. The white authorities would then begin negotiations to make peace on the plains. But after the tribes had complied with the instructions, the Third Colorado Regiment had attacked the villages and massacred 160 people, mostly women, children, and old people.