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Vicky stood at the window over the kitchen sink and marveled at how time always slipped into a slower rhythm at Aunt Rose’s house. In the brush shade outside, Susan was working her way around the table, arranging plates, knives, forks, napkins. Lucas sat across from Aunt Rose, giving the old woman his full attention. She was telling a story, her hands darting like birds between them, her face lit with pride, the same pride, Vicky thought, that the grandmothers in the Old Time took in the young warriors.
Aunt Rose must have finished the story, because Lucas threw back his head and laughed into the sky. Vicky felt a stab of pain. Everything about her son—the tall, muscular body; the handsome, golden-brown face and black agate eyes; even his laugh—was so like his father’s.
She turned back to the counter and began mixing the potato salad. Her arm was still stiff and sore, but the bullet had only grazed her shoulder. There was still a bluish-red mark that looked like a burn.
A warm fug of onion and pepper odors filled the air. Grease popped from the frying chicken. This would be their last dinner together, she was thinking. Lucas, Susan, Aunt Rose, almost everyone she loved. Tomorrow, the kids would leave.
They’d been with Aunt Rose almost a week. Susan and Lucas had canceled their plans to leave last Friday. She was grateful. She could never have asked them to stay, not when they had begged her to stay all those years ago—two black-haired children with large, sad eyes—and she had driven away, promising to make things right one day. A promise she had never kept.
It had been a hectic week. The phone had rung almost nonstop, until Aunt Rose had pulled the plug and created blissful silence. Reporters and TV crews had knocked on the door, but Aunt Rose had told them to go away. Vicky had made trip after trip—half a dozen-trips—to Fort Washakie and Lander for interviews with the police and Gianelli, going over the same details and dodging reporters in the hallways. When she finally fell into bed at night, her head spun with the details, and she found herself sitting upright, hugging her pillow and staring into the darkness, trying to wrap her mind around the fact that Ben was gone.
Tomorrow, after the kids left, she would return to her own apartment, her own office. Normal life. Norm Weedly had called. The JBC had agreed to hear her arguments for filing a federal lawsuit. She intended to do her best to convince them to go forward. The people deserved clean water.
Vicky finished the potato salad and started to arrange the fried chicken on a platter. The screen door opened. Susan stepped inside and leaned against the counter. Her face was flushed with the sun, her hair shone.
How she loved this girl that she had lost, Vicky thought. It was like an arrow lodged in her heart. A couple of nights ago, they’d sat on the bed and talked a little before Susan had darted away. But it was a start, Vicky felt certain. A small step toward finding her daughter again.
“It’s not the same here without Dad,” Susan said, so much sadness in her tone that Vicky dropped the tongs she’d been using, crossed the little kitchen, and took her daughter in her arms.
“I know you miss him,” Vicky said, running one hand along Susan’s silky hair. The faint smell of shampoo mingled with the humid, spicy odors that filled the kitchen. She didn’t know what else to say. That she also missed Ben? In a way, it would be the truth. He’d been endlessly patient, tolerant, and accepting with the kids, and she was grateful for that, even though he had never been that way with her. It was as if Susan and Lucas were always more than he felt he deserved, and she was never enough. He had stayed close to the kids. That was the memory of Ben she would hold on to. The other memories, she would let go.
The screen door banged open, punctuating Aunt Rose’s voice: “Got some company.” She stood on the stoop and held the door back. “Bring out another plate.”
Susan pulled away and started rummaging in the cabinets. “Just like Aunt Rose to find somebody in need of dinner,” she said. She was smiling.
John O’Malley, Vicky thought, aware of the pure, glad rush moving through her. She’d caught sight of him at the interviews, but he’d been questioned in one room, she in another. She’d wanted to thank him again for coming back to the apartment. If he hadn’t called her name and knocked when he did . . . All week, she’d been trying to block the thought of what would have happened.
She handed Susan the bowl of potato salad, then picked up the platter of chicken and, backing through the screen door, followed her daughter outside. Halfway across the yard, she stopped. The man in the brush shade—hands jammed into the pockets of his khaki trousers, dark blue polo shirt outlining the muscles across his back—was Adam Lone Eagle. Chatting and laughing with Lucas, as if they were old friends. In a way, they were, she guessed. Lucas had gone to Lander with her for the interviews, and Adam had been there. They had seemed to hit it off.
“Vicky!” The lawyer looked around, then walked over. “Let me give you a hand,” he said, taking the chicken platter.
“You fry this chicken?” There was approval in the sideways glance he gave her as they stepped into the shade. He set the platter on the table.
“Nice to see you, Adam.” She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice. If John O’Malley hadn’t come to her, well, tomorrow, she resolved, she would go to him. There was so much that had been left unsaid between them.
“Sit down. Eat, eat.” Aunt Rose dropped into the webbed folding chair at the end of the table. “Give thanks to the Creator,” she said when everyone was seated. “We have good food to sustain our lives, a good house to shelter us. We been blessed with the good people the Creator sent us.” She paused. Lucas and Susan both bowed their heads, taking a moment, Vicky knew, to absorb again the reality of their father’s death.
“So now we eat,” Aunt Rose said. An order meant to be obeyed, just as her own grandmothers and great-grandmothers had been obeyed when they ordered their families and visitors to eat. No one left an Arapaho village hungry. She passed the chicken and motioned for Susan to start the potato salad.
The polite preliminaries took up most of the meal: the hot weather, the powwow next week, the new convenience store about to open. Adam Lone Eagle was observing the Arapaho tradition, Vicky knew. He understood it wasn’t yet the time to discuss what they all knew had brought him here.
After Lucas had delivered mugs of steaming coffee, and she and Susan had distributed the rhubarb pie that Susan had baked that afternoon, and the sky had softened with the sun edging below the mountains, the Lakota cleared his throat. Everyone else became quiet. The breeze clattered softly on the brush walls.
“I met with Gianelli and the U.S. attorney this afternoon. Janis Beaver has confessed to the murders of both Dean Little Horse and . . .” He hesitated. “Ben,” he said softly. “The grand jury has indicted her on two counts of first-degree homicide. He-Dog and Crow Elk are looking at twenty-six counts of attempting to assist a suicide; conspiracy to commit murder; conspiracy to destroy public property; theft of an explosive substance . . .” He threw up his hands, as if the list were too long to enumerate.
Aunt Rose shook her head. “The shadow dancers went wrong,” she said. “Lost their way. Wovoka never preached the stuff Orlando preached. Orlando got it all wrong. Too bad. He could’ve been good for the people, brought us closer together, given us back some of the old way.”
“Unfortunately, the followers believed in him,” Adam said. “They found his website on the Internet and came here to be saved. There’s no evidence they were coerced into taking drugs. They all told the same story. They had a final celebration, worked themselves into a frenzy, then took the drugs so they could join the ancestors coming after the flood. Orlando had the same intention. But he’d been taking the drugs so long, he knew he had to take more than usual. Before he swallowed the pills, he’d ordered He-Dog and Crow Elk to blow up the dam. Afterward, they were supposed to return to the shadow ranch, take the drugs themselves, and wait for the ancestors.”
Adam took a long sip from his mug, working out som
ething else in his mind. Finally he said, “Orlando could count on the two Lakotas to blow up the dam. He understood that . . .” He paused again and gazed out over the yard. “We have an old wound that still festers, an old grudge that was never settled.”
“Wounded Knee,” Vicky heard herself saying. In the man’s expression, she glimpsed the kind of sorrow that her own people carried through the years, like a bundle of broken arrows that had belonged to the ancestors.
Adam nodded. “Orlando knew how to use the massacre. He preached about how the soldiers had killed Big Foot’s band and stopped the Ghost Dance before the new world could arrive. He convinced the followers that no one could be allowed to stand in the way of the new world this time. Not Dean Little Horse or Ben Holden. He even sent He-Dog and Crow Elk to St. Francis Mission to warn away Father O’Malley. Those Indians would’ve killed him, if they’d seen him.”
He paused. “You’re lucky, Vicky, that they didn’t kill you.”
Susan gasped. “No more risks, Mom. Promise you won’t take any more risks.”
Lucas leaned toward her and thumped the table. “We don’t want to worry about you all the time.” He hesitated. “The way Dad did.”
A new kind of quiet, uncomfortable and heavy, gripped the brush shade a moment before Vicky said, “Believe me, I prefer a nice, quiet, normal life.” She glanced around the table, and beyond to the expanse of open land lying hot and quiet under the red-flamed sky. This was normal, she thought.
“I like the same kind of life,” Adam said, and she realized that, for the last several moments, he had not taken his eyes from her.
The phone rang again—at least the tenth call this morning, Father John guessed. He looked up from the notes he was making for tonight’s parish council meeting. The click-click sound of Father George’s computer keys down the hall punctuated an aria from Falstaff that emanated softly from the tape player on the bookshelf behind him. Yesterday, both he and Father George had said the funeral Mass for Dean Little Horse. They’d blessed the young man’s grave in the mission cemetery.
His assistant was a hard worker, he had to admit. The man had practically run the mission by himself all week.
Father John was tempted to let the phone ring. Gianelli or Banner wanting to talk to him again, another reporter wanting an interview.
Finally he reached over and lifted the receiver. There was always the chance the caller was someone in need of a priest.
“Father O’Malley,” he said.
An unfamiliar voice sounded on the other end, a reporter from a newspaper in the Midwest somewhere. Would he answer a few questions about the shadow dance cult? Did all those people intend to commit suicide?
No, they had not intended to commit suicide. Not exactly. It was complicated. They’d believed they were going to the ancestors and would return immediately to a new and better world. He said he’d already given a statement to the press that explained everything. Why couldn’t they get it? He had no other comment.
He hung up. It was the last thing he’d needed, after the board of directors meeting last weekend, for his name to be splashed across the national news: JESUIT PRIEST INTERVENES IN MASS SUICIDE. The Provincial was not pleased. Two minutes after CNN had broken the story, the phone had rung, and Father John had known, before he’d answered, who was on the other end.
“My God, John, what is going on out there?” Father Bill Rutherford, an old friend from seminary days, two young men full of promise, great things ahead, which had been true in Rutherford’s case.
Father John had started to explain, but the Provincial had interrupted.
“Am I clear on this? The board of directors is attempting to ascertain whether the society should continue to support St. Francis Mission, and you leave the meeting to go to a place called the shadow ranch, where there are one dead man and twenty-six unconscious people. Then you drive to a dam that’s about to be blown up?”
He was clear, Father John said. Then he said that he didn’t regret what he’d done. There was every chance several of the dancers would have died if the medics hadn’t gotten there when they did. Several were still at Riverton Memorial, although most of the dancers, according to the moccasin telegraph, had left the reservation and gone back to wherever they’d come from.
The line had gone quiet for a moment. “Yes, it was fortunate you arrived in time,” Father Rutherford said, a quieter tone, less agitated, the tone of the priest, not the administrator. Then, the administrator again: “CNN says you and that woman lawyer are heroes. You placed your own lives in danger. I’d hoped you wouldn’t continue making a practice of this kind of activity. Surely the police can handle such emergencies.”
Of course, Father John had said. No, he didn’t plan to make a practice of this kind of activity.
“Good. I’m glad to hear it.” The Provincial didn’t sound reassured. Then—a lighter tone—he said: “I don’t want to turn on the TV and see your Irish face on the national news again.”
His Irish face had been on the national news for six days, a burden, he imagined, that the Provincial was clenching his teeth and trying to bear, just as he was. Especially since his name was continually linked with Vicky’s.
He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. He’d tried calling her at Aunt Rose’s, and finally given up. They must have unplugged the phone. Why wouldn’t they? He wished he could do the same. He’d passed her in the halls at the interviews, asked how her shoulder was. He’d been relieved when she waved her arm and assured him she was fine. But she’d looked fatigued and tense, with bluish scratches on her face and dark circles rimming her eyes, as if she hadn’t been sleeping. He probably looked the same, he thought. He hadn’t been sleeping either.
He’d gone back to his notes when he heard the sound of a vehicle turning onto Circle Drive, then the motor cutting off. His fingers tightened around the pen at the thought of another reporter poking his head through the door. He’d get rid of him as fast as possible.
A moment passed before he heard the footsteps on the concrete steps and the swoosh of the front door opening and closing. He recognized the footsteps crossing the corridor and got to his feet just as Vicky appeared in the doorway.
“How are you?” he said. She looked more rested, more the way she’d looked the first time she’d appeared in his doorway, except that now she wore jeans and a white shirt.
“That’s what I came to ask you.” She stepped inside and dropped into one of the side chairs.
“Your shoulder?” He walked around the desk and sat against the edge.
“The only part of me that isn’t brown,” she said. “It’s red and blue.”
He tried to push away the thought that had nagged him all week: The bullet that grazed her shoulder had come within inches of her head. Her head.
“I never got the chance to thank you again for coming back to the apartment,” she said. “You got there just in time.”
Thank God, he was thinking.
The clacking of computer keys floated from the rear office. Then Vicky smiled, as if a new thought had pushed to the forefront of her mind. “What about the mission?”
“Why do I get the idea you already know?”
She shrugged. “The moccasin telegraph is a wonder of technology. It continues to operate even with the phone unplugged. I heard how the pickups and cars were parked all the way out to Seventeen-Mile Road, how Eagle Hall was jam packed and people stood outside, chanting and praying, how speaker after speaker got up and told the board they had no business closing the mission. And Amos spoke for thirty minutes. In Arapaho!” She threw back her head and laughed. “I wish I could have seen the board members’ faces. They must have felt like the cavalry surrounded by Indians.”
He laughed with her. “The board left first thing the next morning.”
“I hear the mission stays,” she said.
“That was the consensus before the board left.”
“I’m glad, John.” She got up, walked past him t
o the window, and stared quietly outside a moment. “My family doesn’t want me taking any more risks.”
“Smart people, your family.” Father John paused. The Provincial didn’t want him taking risks either, and he had promised to try to refrain. But he would go, he knew. He would always go if someone needed him. And so would Vicky. They were alike, he thought.
She turned toward him. The sun glinted in her hair. “John,” she said, “there’s so much I want to say to you.”
He felt his heart knock against his ribs. “Don’t, Vicky,” he said. “Don’t say anything.”
She was shaking her head. “Ben and his family were right, you know. For a long time, I’d been hoping . . .”
He put up his hand to stop her, but she went on.
“But I understand now. This is your place. This is where you belong.” She lifted both arms toward the mission and beyond, and he knew that she was not referring only to the place, but to what he was, a priest. “But this is also where I belong. It’s my land, my place. I can’t keep going to Denver. I can’t run away from this place again, but the thing is, I don’t think I can stop loving you.”
“Oh, Vicky, don’t.” He shook his head. “Don’t love me.” He would never stop loving her. “There will be someone—”
She cut in and hurried on, as if she were delivering a speech she’d memorized. “The fact is, we’re both here, and I want us to be friends, John. I really need you to be my friend, but I have to make room in my life for something else.”
She pivoted around and looked out the window. He walked over and placed his arm around her. “You deserve to be happy,” he said. She seemed small next to him, and he could smell the faint odor of sage in her hair. Outside the sky was blue and clear as glass. A crow was circling above the cottonwoods. Walks-On lay on his side in the sun in front of the residence. All the buildings looked peaceful, rooted to the earth.
She was right. This was his place, this was where he could be the priest he wanted to be. Still, he felt as if something hard had been laid on his heart.
The Shadow Dancer (A Wind River Reservation Myste) Page 24