Darkness at Morning Star

by Joyce C. Ware

  Sharo tensed as he wrestled with the question, trying to figure what right this hard man had to ask it.

  “Quanah Parker’s my uncle,” Quinn offered. “Sort of.” This mysterious comment, delivered with a smile and obviously meant to be encouraging, had the opposite effect.

  “I’m not Comanche! My father Pawnee.”

  Quinn Cooper grunted. “Pawnee, huh?” He edged a dried ball of manure out of the straw with the toe of his boot and sent it flying. “Cobby should’ve known better.”

  The manure thumped dully against the side of his heavily laden wagon. The handsome black Appaloosa tethered to the rear of the wagon bed shied and threw up its head, and from inside, from under a filthy blanket, something whimpered.

  A puppy, I thought. A frightened puppy.

  “How could you leave a creature smothered out there in the sun like that!” I turned away in disgust. “Sharo? Bring some water!” I commanded.

  As I strode toward the wagon a small thin hand groped up out of the enshrouding blanket, followed by a big-eyed, hollow-cheeked, very dirty, coppery-skinned face. It was a girl, not a puppy; a very young girl, from the look of her. Scrawny shoulders hunched as she peered at us fearfully over the splintered edge of the wagon bed, and as I neared her, she whimpered again and shrank back.

  “Sharo?” I called back over my shoulder, “hurry with that water!” I whirled on Quinn. “How could you!”

  As Sharo approached with a brimming bucket, I saw his eyes narrow as they registered the girl’s presence. His footsteps slowed. Quinn grabbed the bucket from his hand.

  “Keep your thieving Pawnee hands off her! She’s mine, and I intend to keep it that way.” He gestured toward the horse with his head. “Tend to my ‘Paloosa; I’ll see to this one.”

  Quinn waited until Sharo, realizing delay was not to the girl’s advantage, reluctantly led the horse away. He then lifted the bucket into the wagon bed, groped around inside and shortly came up with a wooden ladle. The girl snatched it from his hand, and as she thirstily drank, Quinn leaned close and spoke low to her in words I was unable to understand but which the girl, as indicated by her nods, did. Oddly, she did not seem to be frightened of him, but sometimes, as I well knew, a familiar unpleasantness is preferred to the unknown.

  “Serena?”

  I turned, seeking the source of the voice. It was Bazz, hailing me from the path down from the house. I ran to meet him.

  “We were worried about you. Belle had visions of Bingo stumbling into a prairie dog burrow and ...” His words trailed off as he took in the scene. “My God, is that—”

  “It’s your brother. He’s come back, and he has this poor little Indian girl in tow and...” I paused to take a deep breath. “Oh, Bazz, he’s everything you ever hinted at and more. The thought of him having Morning Star. ...” I shook my head, too distressed to continue.

  Bazz patted my shoulder. He started toward the wagon. “Well, Quinn. Didn’t expect you to turn up this soon.”

  Quinn spat in the dust, just missing Bazz’s toe. “Bad pennies have a way of turnin’ up, Bazz. Sometimes sooner; sometimes later. I guess I plumb forgot to ask which’d suit you better.”

  “Were you able to accomplish your .. . business?” Bazz’s jaw twitched from the effort of maintaining a calm demeanor.

  “Some ... mostly, I guess,” Quinn replied with maddening, deliberate vagueness. “Plenty of time to get to that. Right now I have a little human business to attend to.” He turned, snugged the blanket around the girl’s shoulders and hoisted her out of the wagon. “Upsy-daisy, Spotted Fawn.”

  His cheery tone contrasted shockingly with the appearance of the girl he set down on the dusty ground. She was barefoot; her hair was matted with dirt, and as she scuttled past us in the direction Quinn pointed out to her, the ragged blanket slipped from her torn dress, exposing a spine crisscrossed with inflamed welts. I gasped.

  “Unusual cargo, even for you, Quinn,” Bazz said. His expression was unreadable as he intently monitored the girl’s progress up toward the low stone building Quinn had commandeered for his temporary quarters after the reading of his father’s will. Something smoldered in the pale depths of his eyes, but whatever it was—horror? disgust?—I knew he was unlikely to reveal it in Quinn’s presence.

  Quinn had walked up beside us. He was watching Bazz. His dark eyes went suddenly dead, as if an iron shutter had slammed down. “Won her in a poker game,” he volunteered, his offhand tone at odds with the tension I sensed building beneath the surface. “Soap and water and a slathering of that salve of Belle’s’ll soon put her to rights.”

  “And then?” Bazz said.

  “I don’t rightly catch your meaning, Bazz.”

  “What will become of her, after she’s ‘put to rights’—”

  “Or near as can be,” Quinn amended with a careless smile.

  “For God’s sake, man!” Bazz exploded. “You don’t mean to keep her in your quarters, do you? Why, she’s only a child!”

  “Older’n she looks. Older’n those two you and Belle brought. Old enough.” His eyes, as he stared into Bazz’s, now held ah unmistakable challenge.

  This time, Bazz was unable to control a grimace of distaste. He turned his back on Quinn. “Serena? You coming?”

  I felt torn. I wanted to leave, but the girl...

  “She needs a woman,” I blurted.

  Quinn stood staring after Bazz. He blinked and slid his dark eyes toward me. “Hmm-mmm?”

  “The girl—Fawn, did you call her?—she needs a woman—”

  “I can manage.”

  “But—”

  His eyes narrowed to slits; his mouth thinned to a knife edge. “Spotted Fawn’s mine, bought and paid for. I don’t much care for folks interferin’ with my property, and that means you, that brassy-haired sister of yours and that highfalutin’ half-brother of mine.” He ticked us off on square-tipped fingers. “Is that plain enough for you, S’rena?”

  Shocked into speechlessness by his callousness, I turned to hurry after Basil. As I did so, I noticed Sharo out of the corner of my eye, standing in the shadows just inside the barn door. I could not see his face, but the fists dangling clenched by his sides betrayed his emotion concerning the scene he had witnessed. They seemed to symbolize the helpless rage Bazz and I, too, had felt, and I resolved I would do whatever I could to help delay the occupation of Morning Star by its unworthy inheritor.

  Belle’s reaction to the news of Quinn’s unexpected arrival was ... well, not odd exactly, but not quite, if I had thought about it beforehand, what I would have expected.

  She stiffened. Her lips drew back from her white teeth, and her long exhale was almost a hiss. “That means we don’t have much time.”

  “I think he was deliberately baiting Bazz,” I said. “I doubt he has your money yet, not all of it anyway ... isn’t that how it seemed to you, Bazz?”

  Bazz didn’t answer. I looked from one to the other. He and Belle were staring at each other in a way that completely excluded me; I felt like an urchin pressing her nose against a bakery shop window.

  “Bazz?”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Do you think Quinn’s ready to settle your claims?”

  “Oh. No, not quite. Shrewd of you to catch that, Serena,” he added. “Quinn’s a sly one.”

  So was Ernest Rogg, I thought. Not like Quinn Cooper, of course, but ... sly is sly.

  “I’ll help you pack. Belle,” I offered. “If we do a little bit each day ...”

  My earnest words faltered as Belle turned her head, very slowly, to look at me. Her eyes were as cold as pond ice, her expression sneering.

  “Always the good girl, aren’t you?” Her tone made me wince. “Helpful. Loyal. True. ...”

  All at once her lips began to tremble; the ice in her eyes melted into tears. She reached out for my hands and clutched them to her breast. “Oh, Reenie, here I am taking my worries out on you, as always. Say you’ll forgive me?”

 
; I did, of course. For reasons I had never quite understood, life had always been harder for Belle than for me. The track I followed ran relatively smooth and straight, and even though its destination was rarely of my choosing, I could usually anticipate and prepare for the effort it took to maintain a steady course. But Belle, whose ambitions swelled higher than mine, always seemed to seek out a rougher roadbed, which ended more often than not on abandoned sidings.

  Once, when called in to answer for the robbing of pennies from some of the other orphans’ meager hordes, Belle, afraid of being denied a place on the orphan train as a result of a series of such misdemeanors, had tried to place the blame on me. The director was not fooled. “It’s not Serena’s way,” he had calmly stated. And indeed, until my escape to Morning Star, it never had been. I had always circled risk with the wariness of a starving cat offered food by strangers, and although I had proved myself equal to the challenge of my adventurous flight, I doubted I could ever match Belle’s strength of purpose, misguided though it might sometimes be.

  Despite the hostility expressed so openly between the brothers that afternoon, Quinn Cooper joined us unannounced, well-scrubbed and freshly shaved, for supper. Belle looked unsurprised, and greeted my whispered expression of indignation with a shrug. “Just like him,” she whispered back. To my astonishment, her smiling welcome seemed utterly sincere. Knowing what she really thought of him, I wondered sourly if she would have smiled as sweetly it she had heard him refer to her as brassy-haired.

  If Quinn’s tidied appearance was intended to disarm us, any such effect was quickly soured. As I stood by my chair at the trestle-legged table set in front of one of the wide curved-top windows, I watched him thread his way through the parlor. His dark eyes flicked left and right at the piles of periodicals and other accumulations. “I swear, Belle,” he drawled as he drew our chairs in under us, “I’ve seen wildcat dens cleaner’n this house.”

  “I can’t quarrel with that, Quinn, your acquaintance with cathouses being a whole lot wider than mine.”

  I ducked my head to hide my amusement. Belle had flicked him on the raw for sure. But he let it pass, and his next remark was in praise of the beans.

  “Best I’ve et in many a day. My guess is Rita ain’t took off yet.”

  “Rita likes to cook. It’s about all she does like, far as I can tell. She’s so tight with words her joints squeak.”

  Quinn whooped. “That’s a good one. Belle; I’ll have to ‘member that. You always did have a smart way with words, but how come your sister here talks prettier than you?”

  Belle’s eyes narrowed. “How do you mean, prettier?”

  “Educated. Like brother Bazz-eel here,” he added, pronouncing the name with exaggerated emphasis. “You been to college, too, S’rena?”

  “I’m an orphan, like Belle; how would I ever get to college?”

  “You stayed with rich folks back East, then?”

  I laughed. “No, they weren’t rich, and no, they weren’t educated ... not the way you mean, anyway.”

  They continued to look questioningly at me, Bazz and Belle as well as Quinn. “If you must know, it was a man I cleaned house for. Malcolm Wilcox. He was a college professor at Cornell University ... retired by the time I met him. He traveled a great deal, to England and France and Italy, and he could describe the places he’d been and the people he met so you could almost feel you’d been there yourself. ...” Remembering, the room faded away. “He used to read to me while I worked... he had the most wonderful library—why, it was like having a private college of my own!”

  Belle leaned forward. “I guess he had more’n a few pennies to rub together, to buy all those books and do all that traveling.”

  “I suppose so, Belle.”

  “And from the sound of it, you didn’t get much cleaning done.”

  I ducked my head; Belle sounded uncomfortably like Mother Rogg.

  “Sooo,” she continued, “he must have liked you, Reenie. Quite a lot’s my guess.”

  “Well, yes, I guess he did.”

  Belle’s eyes twinkled at me from under her lashes. “So how come you never got to be Mrs.—what was his name?”

  “He was my friend,” I protested hotly. “Malcolm wasn’t a well man—”

  Belle pounced triumphantly. “Malcolm, was he?”

  I stared at her. “For heaven’s sake, Belle, he was old enough to be my grandfather!”

  Quinn laughed. “That never would’ve gave your sister a lick of pause, would it, Belle?”

  He had hitched his chair back on its rear legs. His black leather, silver-buttoned vest fell open over a white linen shirt made whiter by contrast. Almost as white as his strong, even teeth. One tanned thumb was hitched in his belt; the other combed back a lock of the thick, dark glossy hair that fell shaggily over his ears and splayed out like a dark fringe across his collar. I was not deceived by his lazy sprawl. Bazz, seated across from him, was as neat and contained as a well-schooled thoroughbred under saddle, but I sensed that sufficiently prodded, Quinn would rear up with a wild stallion’s fury.

  I ignored his comment, and in an effort to stop the sharp retort I was sure Belle’s lips were forming, I added, “In any event, I was already promised.”

  “Already promised!” To judge from the way Belle’s blue eyes all but popped, my diversion was hugely successful.

  “To Mother and Father Rogg’s nephew, Ernest. He’s a pharmacist, like Father Rogg. I know what you’re going to say, Belle,” I added hastily, before she could, “but Ernest’s not a very ... easy sort ol person, and he talks like... like a Sunday school teacher. So when I got your letter ... well, suddenly I had two choices,” I said lightly, deciding my hours of soul-searching need not concern them. “I could either spend the rest of my life with Ernest or with Belle at Morning Star.”

  “You were thinking to live here at Morning Star?” Quinn asked curiously.

  I had his full attention, and it threw me on the defensive. “At first I did. I guess I misread Belle’s letter. ...” I looked at Belle, hoping she would back me up, or maybe that she would contradict me—I wasn’t quite sure which—but her eyes skated away. All at once, looking at her and at Bazz sitting tensely beside her, I realized they had written the letter together. Not that it mattered, but it accounted for the odd combination of graceful phrasing with an occasional awkwardness, and the scrawled postscript Belle hadn’t remembered.

  “Anyway,” I continued with forced lightness, “I thought the name so beautiful I just couldn’t resist—”

  A bark of laughter interrupted my justification. “Morning Star, beautiful?”

  I nodded, perplexed by Quinn’s amusement.

  “I guess nobody thought to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” I searched my sister’s face. Her eyes were downcast; her fingers aimlessly traced the engraving on her napkin ring’s silver oval. Whatever it was, she wasn’t happy about it. Neither was Bazz.

  “For God’s sake, Quinn,” he muttered, “let it be. Leave the girl her illusions.”

  “For God’s sake, Bazz,” Quinn mimicked, “‘pears to me S’rena’s got stomach enough for the truth of it.

  It ain’t every gal who’d bounce a pillar of the church for those stone pillars Paw ordered quarried for Morning Star.”

  “But I didn’t know about the pillars before—”

  “‘Pears to, me,” Quinn repeated, casting a dark look in my direction, “if she came out here with more on her mind than a pretty-soundin’ place name, she’d better know the truth of it afore she digs herself in any deeper.”

  Quinn leaned back in his chair, which creakingly protested his sudden shift in weight. He pulled a black cheroot put of his vest pocket, struck a match on the underside of his chair, set the end of the cigar alight and took a long pull. A moment later his lips puffed forth a circle of blue smoke which floated lazily up to the shadowed ceiling along with our mesmerized gazes.

  After carelessly tapping the ash onto the floor, he tur
ned his attention back to me. His face had cleared;

  the lights in his eyes began to dance again, flooding me with apprehension.

  “Did that professor feller have much to tell you about Indians, S’rena?”

  I shook my head.

  “Interestin’ folk, the Indians. ‘Course they ain’t really Indian, but you must of known that. They’re a whole lot of different people: some’re peaceable; some—like my mother’s people, the Comanche—get riled up easy. And they all got religion. Not your Ernest’s kind; but it suits the life they know best, and every tribe’s got ceremonies dependin’ on their particular kind of living: plantin’, huntin’, war, death.... Now, you’d think, wouldn’t you, S’rena, that the plantin’ ceremonies’d be the tamest of ‘em all, and maybe some is, but the Pawnee ... well, the Pawnee was some different, and the Skidi Pawnee even more.”

  He paused to take another long draw on his cheroot. “Just for a little while here, let’s us pretend I’m that professor feller, S’rena. So tell me, when do you s’pose is the most anxious time of year for farmers?”

  I eyed him warily; his bland tone didn’t fool me. “I only know about the dairy farms back East, but spring, I guess. Planting time.”

  “Same thing here. Plantin’ the corn; hoping for warm weather and enough rain to make a crop big enough to take ‘em through the long winters. Those Indians could’ve worried themselves sick about the soil being warm enough and wet enough and fertile enough. But they had a special sun god—Tirawa, they called him—who fathered a child on Mother Earth, a daughter you can see in the eastern sky each spring, just before dawn.

  “The morning star! I remember seeing it the morning I left Jericho ... did I tell you, Belle? It seemed like a heavenly omen.”

  Quinn grinned. “Mid-April that woulda been?”

  I nodded.

  “Pretty lady, our Miss Morning Star, shinin’ so bright by her lone; but like a lot of pretty ladies she purely likes to be indulged before grantin’ her favors, and those Pawnees, that Skidi branch anyways, took it in their heads that what she liked best was blood, ‘specially the blood of a girl as pretty as herself, not yet touched by any man.”