Gianelli cleared his throat, a low, rumbling noise. “I don’t want to think so. I have to go wherever the evidence takes me.”
“The shadow dancers are on some kind of drugs,” Father John said, trying another tack. “Dean Little Horse was there a few days ago. Now he’s missing. Look, Ted . . .”
“No, you look, John. You think we aren’t keeping a close eye on Orlando and the rest of the nuts up there? We can’t go swooping down and close up the place without hard evidence. We find evidence they’re harboring two Lakotas we want to talk to about a homicide, we find evidence they’ve got illegal drugs, we’ll be all over them. Stick to your pastoring, John, and let me do my job.”
The line went dead. Father John set the receiver in the cradle. His muscles felt tense and cramped. He knew the pattern. Gianelli: proceeding in a rational, logical order. And all the time, Vicky, out there alone somewhere looking for two killers. Dear God, he thought. She could find the killers before Gianelli did.
It took a few minutes to get his thoughts back to the mission. He collected the stapled copies of the annual report, the notes he’d made this morning. Then he turned off the desk lamp and walked over to Eagle Hall.
Seated on straight-back chairs arranged in a semicircle were four members of the parish council: Elvira and Justice Burns, Dave Buck, Amos Walking Bear. Four out of ten, Father John thought. Not even a quorum.
“Just about to start the meeting without you.” Father George sat a few feet apart, facing the others, gripping a stack of papers.
Father John hooked a chair and pulled it over next to Amos, who turned stiffly and extended a bear-paw hand. “How ya doin’, Father?” he said. His other hand cupped the top of the walking stick. He was in his seventies, with wispy gray hair and a broad face with hooded black eyes and heavy jowls. Behind the man’s flat expression, Father John caught a look of reassurance. His assistant was wrong; the meeting wouldn’t have started without the pastor. Nothing started until the time was right and everyone was ready.
Father John handed the reports to Amos, who removed the top copy and passed the others. Father George had already started copies of the financial reports from the other end. Minutes passed. Eyes floated over the stapled pages. The hall was quiet, except for the occasional sound of rustling papers.
“I believe it’s clear”—Father George snapped his copies against one thigh—“the mission’s debts have risen steadily over the past year. Income is sporadic. Last quarter, donations fell by half.”
“Donations usually increase in the summer with tourists coming to Mass,” Father John began, but the other priest was shaking his head.
“The point is, we never know when the money might come in. We can’t rely on miracles.”
Father John stopped himself from saying that St. Francis Mission had operated on miracles for more than a hundred years. It was not the argument he needed for the board of directors this weekend.
“Excuse me, Father.” Amos placed both hands over the stick and hoisted his shoulders forward toward Father George. The others turned, watching the elder. “Could you tell us what you’re getting at?”
Father George cleared his throat. “The board of directors must consider the complete financial picture. It would be irresponsible to overlook the numbers. We may have to real-locate our resources.”
“You mean close the mission.” The old man sat back and glanced at Father John. “What do you say, Father?”
“I don’t want to close St. Francis.” Dear Lord, how could we close the mission? He glanced at the other council members: two men thumbing through the pages, as if they might discover better numbers; Elvira looking straight ahead, lips drawn into a tight line. “I won’t have the final say,” he managed.
Amos kept his gaze on him a moment, then turned back to the other priest. “Where the kids gonna get Catholic instruction? Where’s the AA gonna meet? Who’s gonna visit when we get sick? Where we gonna have Mass?”
“There are fine Catholic parishes in Lander and Riverton,” Father George said.
Silence. The Indians were staring at the other priest. Finally, Elvira said, “This is our mission, been here since the Old Time ’cause that’s the way the chiefs wanted it.”
“Look,” Father John began. He could almost smell the tension. “You’re welcome to come to the board meeting. You can tell them about the programs.”
“The directors know about the programs,” Father George said.
“We’re gonna be there.” Justice nodded toward the others. “Trouble is, rest of the council’s got a lot going on right now.”
One by one, the Indians rose to their feet, Justice and David retrieving cowboy hats from vacant chairs, tucking folded reports in jeans pockets; Elvira gathering up the floppy bag she’d set on the floor. Only four council members to speak up for the mission, and this, a number’s game.
Father John took Amos’s arm to help steady the old man and walked him to the door. The stick thumped on the hard floor. Behind them, he could hear Father George folding and stacking the chairs.
Outside, Father John said, “Do you have a few minutes?” The hooded eyes glanced sideways at him. The old man nodded, and they turned around the corner to the administration building.
Amos Walking Bear inhabited the side chair: thick legs spread apart, forearms covering the armrests, one hand curled over the top of the walking stick. “That white man”—he gestured with his large head toward the rear office—“ain’t the first thinks he’s gonna close this place down. Him and those directors coming here from other places don’t understand. Good things come down to us from the past, we gotta hold on to ’em.”
Father John hoped that would be the case. He moved the other chair around and sat down facing the old man. “Couple of things I’d like to talk to you about, grandfather.” He heard the suppliant tone in his voice. Here, in the office, he counseled other people; now he needed counseling.
The old man nodded. “I seen the worry following you around like a shadow. You thinking about Ben Holden’s murder.”
“Vicky could be indicted.”
“Holden clan turned against her long time ago.” The old man hunched over and shook his head. “They don’t like to admit Ben Holden might’ve made himself some enemies. Sure, he got respect ’cause he handed out a lot of jobs. But he got to strutting around like he owned the rez. Ordering folks about. Not our way.” He shook his head. “Somebody could’ve gotten fed up.”
Somebody else, Father John thought. Not Vicky. He said, “Vicky says he had trouble with a couple of Lakotas who stole something from the ranch. She thinks they could be involved, but the fed says they left the rez a week ago.”
Amos threw his head back and guffawed. “Only time the fed probably got it right. They stole from Ben Holden, most likely they lit out of here like lightning before he could get a hold of ’em.”
Father John glanced toward the doorway. A shaft of light from the desk lamp flowed into the corridor, pushing through the shadows. Vicky was so certain Ben had seen the Lakotas yesterday. And this afternoon, at the shadow ranch—so many Indians from other places. And yet, Gianelli had gone to the ranch. He hadn’t found the Lakotas.
Father John drew in a long breath. He was chasing shadows. He told Amos about his visit to the ranch and said he’d been trying to find Dean Little Horse.
“I hear he went missing.” The old man sat very still. “You think he’s following Sherwood?”
He said he didn’t think so. “Dean’s girlfriend is at the ranch. She called him an unbeliever because he refuses to accept Orlando as a prophet.”
Amos began tapping out a steady rhythm on the floor with his cane. He was quiet a moment, then he said, “Wovoka, now he was a prophet, and the Ghost Dance he brought to the people, that’s a good part of our tradition. Helped the people back in the Old Time when we didn’t have nothing. Gave people hope.”
Tap. Tap. Tap. “Wovoka came along and said if people do the Ghost Dance every six weeks
for four days, the old world will come back like it was. Now Sherwood comes along. Says he died, went into the shadow land, and become Wovoka’s spiritual son. Says Wovoka give him a new name, Orlando, and told him to go back to this world and preach the old religion.” He paused, and in the creases of the old man’s face, Father John saw the geography of pain passed down through the generations. “Maybe Indians up at the shadow ranch don’t have nothing else to hold on to. Maybe they need hope for a little while, just like the people in the Old Time.”
“They have armed guards at the ranch,” Father John said. “The woman are being used sexually.”
The cane knocked harder on the floor. “Indians won’t put up with it for long. Soon’s they see the new world ain’t gonna be in this world, they’re gonna find a way to get out of there.” The old man shifted toward Father John. “Ghost Dance religion ended soon’s people lost heart. They seen nothing was gonna change in this world, and they stopped dancing. Same thing’s gonna happen with the shadow dancers. Let ’em be, Father. Sometimes people need a little hope, even if they’re gonna be disappointed.”
Father John walked the old man out to his truck, the last vehicle still parked in front of Eagle Hall. He waited until Amos had climbed behind the steering wheel and turned on the engine. Puffs of black smoke belched from the tailpipe as the truck made a U-turn, then lurched along Circle Drive. He started up the front stoop, the taillights blinking like red fireflies through the cottonwoods.
The building had settled into evening, shadows splayed over the corridor and across the office. In the silence, a dripping pipe, the creak of old wood. Father John searched the bookcase behind his desk, pulled out a large red-bound volume, with History of the Plains Indians printed in black across the top.
He sat down and opened the book. The pages were worn and dog-eared, marked with stick-ons and torn pieces of paper. There were checkmarks penciled in the margins alongside paragraphs that he’d wanted to be able to locate quickly. He flipped to the index, found “Ghost Dance,” and turned to the page indicated.
Across the page: the photograph of a middle-aged Indian, with a frowning, somber expression seated on a chair draped in a buffalo robe. The camera flash had laid down a strip of light, like an interrupted halo, across his black hair, which was parted to the side and cut straight below his ears, like Orlando’s. He wore a black vest buttoned over a white long-sleeved shirt. An arm band above his right elbow held an eagle feather that rose toward his shoulder. A white scarf was tied at his neck. Beneath the photo, in bold type: WOVOKA, 1889.
Father John skimmed through an excerpt from The Ghost Dance Religion, written more than a century before by James Mooney, an anthropologist:
Sitting or lying around the fire were half a dozen Paiute, including the messiah and his family, consisting of his young wife, a boy about four years of age, of whom he seemed very fond, and an infant. It was plain that he was a kind husband and father.
He had given the dance to his people after he received his great revelation. He fell asleep in the daytime and was taken up to the other world. Here he saw God, with all the people who had died long ago engaged in their oldtime sports and occupations, all happy and forever young. It was a pleasant land and full of game. After showing him all, God told him he must go back and tell his people they must be good and love one another, have no quarreling, and live in peace with the whites; that they must work, and not lie or steal; that if they faithfully obeyed his instructions they would at last be reunited with their friends in this other world, where there would be no more death.
Father John skimmed the following pages. The Ghost Dance religion had spread across the plains. Cheyenne, Lakota, Arapaho, all the tribes crowded onto reservations, a vast expanse of the prairies gone, the buffalo slaughtered, the warriors dying, the children hungry. For two years, the people danced in hope of the new world and then—as Amos had said—they had given up hope and stopped dancing.
Except for Big Foot’s band.
He thumbed through the pages until he came to the section on the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in the freezing December of 1890. The last of the Ghost Dancers, led by Chief Big Foot, trying to outrun the Seventh Cavalry—Custer’s regiment, bent on revenge, shouting, “Remember the Little Big Horn!” When the Hotchkiss guns were finally silent, more than two hundred people lay dying in the snow.
There were photos. He studied the grainy, black and white pictures for several minutes: brown humps of human bodies scattered across the frozen prairie, the narrow trench where the bodies were buried, stacked like cordwood. A priest, a Jesuit, had been with the band. He had gone among the dead and dying, blessing them, comforting them, until he had lost consciousness from his own wounds.
Father John closed the book and sat for a long time, staring into the shadows. The Ghost Dance religion had ended in catastrophe. And now, Orlando, calling himself the prophet, the son of Wovoka, was preaching his own version of the old religion.
He couldn’t shake off the feeling that it would end the same way.
15
The morning seemed unnaturally still, the sun burning yellow through the blue sky, the day’s heat already settling in. There were few vehicles on the highway, and Vicky eased up on the accelerator and leaned into the curves alongside the Wind River. Past Boysen Reservoir, north into the Wind River Canyon. Rock-strewn hills with thin stands of pines and sagebrush rolled past. The river dwindled to a narrow creek, stained brown by the muddy sludge beneath the surface.
She’d left instructions with Esther to call Norm Weedly at the tribal offices and arrange for her to meet with the JBC later. Later. The idea stabbed at her like a needle. The Wind River could dry up in the hot weather. She should be in the office now, refining her arguments for the tribal council, carrying on as if nothing had changed, the way Adam had advised.
She slowed through Thermopolis, then turned west along the edge of the Owl Creek mountains. She could imagine the gossip buzzing over the moccasin telegraph, dredging up her past—hers and Ben’s. How could she talk to the business council about cleaning up the river? The council members, seated behind the curved desk on a platform—nodding, nodding—wondering if she was a murderer. As long as Gianelli and everybody else suspected her, Ben’s killer would be free. She swallowed back the knot of tears in her throat. Ben—the man she’d once loved, the father of her children—Ben deserved justice.
Through the filters of junipers, she glimpsed the log bunkhouse at the Arapaho Ranch, the peaked red roof burning in the sun. She let up on the accelerator, turned right, and thumped across the cattle guard, then followed a narrow road another half-mile. Dust rising from beneath the tires laid a thin gray film over the windshield.
She parked close to the bunkhouse. A cowboy—black cowboy hat pushed back—stood on the narrow porch that ran along the front, eyes squinting in the sunlight, one thumb hooked into the belt of his blue jeans. His other hand cupped a cigarette backward, so that the smoke curled along the sleeve of his blue shirt.
She got out and walked up the wood steps. “Where can I find Don Redman?” she said.
“He don’t wanna see you.” The man’s voice was raspy, smoke-filled. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her.
Vicky gestured toward the barns and ranch offices beyond the bunkhouse. “He in the office?”
The cowboy lifted the cigarette to his lips and took a long drag. Then he blew the smoke in her direction.
“Look,” Vicky said, “whoever you are . . .”
“Friend of Ben’s. He’s got a lotta friends here. You better not hang around.”
The screened door banged opened. Redman, Ben’s righthand man, stepped onto the porch and gave her a nod of recognition. He was big, middle-aged, with the slumped shoulders of a man who’d spent years in a saddle and permanent squint lines around his eyes from staring into the wind. A year ago, Ben had brought Don Redman to her office. She couldn’t remember the reason, only that Redman had sat in the waiting room while the Ben
she’d hated at times had railed at her in the private office about something she’d done or hadn’t done. And that—how ironic, she thought now—was when she had believed that she and Ben might get back together.
She asked if she could have a few words.
Redman hesitated, arms dangling at his sides, brown hands clenching and unclenching. Finally he opened the door. “Inside,” he said, the thin lips barely moving.
She crossed the porch, walking past the cowboy, and followed Redman into the spacious room that ran along the front. On the left, sofas and chairs draped with Indian blankets and a big-screen TV. On the right, kitchen cabinets that wrapped around a long table with scrub marks across the top and chairs pushed against the sides.
The manager nodded toward a chair and waited until she’d sat down. “Men are pretty torn up about Ben’s murder,” he said, taking the chair across from her. “Best foreman we ever had. Knew how to run the ranch, all right. Bought quality bulls, crossbred the stock, and produced calves with heavier wean weights. Not to mention, he grew the herd to the highest number ever. Put the Arapaho Ranch on the map, you might say. Got a reputation for being one of the best in Wyoming. Men are gonna miss Ben.”
He pulled his mouth into a disapproving line and shook his head. “Fed come around yesterday, asking a lot of questions. Lot of questions about you.”
Vicky felt a knot tighten in her stomach. She did not have to defend herself. She was not guilty. “I’m trying to find the ranch hands Ben fired last week,” she said.
“He-Dog, Crow Elk.” The man tapped a stained finger on the table top. “Only mistake Ben might’ve made, hiring those bastards, but we needed the extra hands. Ben had a lot of work lined up, what with you and him getting back together. Started building a couple rooms onto his cabin.” He tossed his head in the direction of the cabin tucked among the trees. “Blasted out a new road and was gonna blast out some more trees for a pond. Said you were gonna keep a pony up there. Said you were gonna have your choice of the best pony in the corral.”
The Shadow Dancer (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 12