The Savage Heart

by Diana Palmer

  What a horrible way to have to live, Tess thought. She wondered, not for the first time, what sort of home life poorNanhad. Men could be such brutes! She was still fuming about Dennis's treatment ofNanwhen she got home. Matt was on his way out, and she met him on the front steps. He looked gloriously handsome in his expensive vested suit. She remembered how his hair used to look hanging straight and clean almost to his waist, and wondered if it was still that long. Since he hid his braid these days, she couldn't judge the length.

  "You work all the time," she accused gently, smiling.

  "I'm addicted to fancy gear," he teased. "I have to make enough to support my expensive tastes." His large black eyes went over her, in her neat skirt and blouse under a long overcoat. "Another meeting?"

  "Yes."

  "Where's the friend who goes with you?" he asked, frowning when he noted that she was on the Street alone.

  "On her way home in the carriage I hired," she explained. "It lets me off first."

  He nodded. "You be careful," he cautioned. "You're a daisy back east."

  "I can still shoot a bow and arrow." She winked. "Skin a deer. Track a cougar." She leaned closer. "Use a bowie knife."

  "Stop that."

  "Sorry. It slipped out."

  He glowered. "I don't use it. I threaten to use it."

  "There's a difference?"

  "There certainly is. A verybig difference, miss."

  "I'll reform," she promised, smiling. There were deep lines around his mouth and nose, and dark circles under his eyes. "Poor Matt. You're tired to death."

  "I spend long nights watching people I'm hired to watch." He studied her face under the wide-brimmed felt hat she was wearing. "You don't look much better."

  "Nursing is a tiring profession, too, Matt. I spent my day sitting with a patient who had a leg amputated. He was knocked down and run over by a carriage. He's barely my age."

  "Young for such a drastic injury."

  "Yes. And he was a baseball player."

  He grimaced.

  "He wants to commit suicide," she said. "I talk and talk, hoping I'll dissuade him."

  He touched her cheek. It was cold from the winter wind. "I felt that way myself, once," he murmured. "Then this pretty little blond girl came and held my hand while her father dug bullets out of my hide. And soon life grew sweet once more."

  "Did I make you want to live?" she asked. "Really?"

  He nodded. "My whole family was dead. I had nothing to look forward to beyond hating the white soldiers or trying to avenge my people. I was in such terrible pain. But the pain grew manageable, and I saw the futility of trying to fight a veritable ocean of whites. What is it you say, better to join than fight them?"

  "If the odds are against you." She liked the feel of his strong, warm fingers on her cheek. She stood very still so that he wouldn't move them. "Is it so bad, the way you live now?"

  He studied her face. "If I were a poor man, it might be. I have too many advantages here to feel sorry for myself." His eyes narrowed. "Tess, try not to get too embroiled in the women's movement, will you? Some of these women are very radical."

  "I promise not to go wild with a hatchet in any local bars," she said demurely. "Does that reassure you?"

  "Not a lot," he said. "Your father worried about you."

  Her pale eyes became sad. "Yes, he did. I miss him terribly. But I couldn't very well stay on at the reservation. The job was his, not mine."

  "They'd probably have hired you to teach, if you'd asked," he commented.

  "Possibly. Still, there was the persistent lieutenant. What a temptation he presented."

  His brow rose. "Temptation?"

  "I was tempted to put a bullet through him," she clarified. "I was atWounded Knee, too, Matt. I know he shot women and children and old men."

  His hand slowly lowered. "You should go inside. It's too cold out here for idle conversation."

  "You can't imagine how you look when I mention the massacre," she said softly. "I'm sorry. However painful the memories are for me, I know they're a hundred times worse for you."

  He gazed down at her with his heart twisting inside him. She was pretty, but her attraction went so far beyond the physical. She had a soft heart and a stubborn independence that made his breath catch. She had, he mused, a savage heart.

  "Why are you smiling?" she asked.

  "I was thinking how you go headfirst into a fight," he replied. "And how soft your heart is." He became solemn. "Don't wear it on your sleeve, little one," he said softly. "The world can be a cruel place."

  She saw the lines in his hard face and reached up hesitantly to touch the ones between his dark eyes. He flinched and she jerked her fingers back.

  "Sorry!" she cried, flustered.

  His expression grew even more grim. "I'm not used to being touched. Especially by women."

  She laughed nervously. "So I noticed!"

  He relaxed, but only fractionally. "I've grown a shell since I've been here," he confessed. "And now I'm trapped in it. I'm rich and successful. But under it all, I'm still a poor ragged Indian—to people more shortsighted than you are."

  "I've only always thought of you as my friend."

  "AndIam," he said solemnly. "I'd do anything for you."

  "I know that." She drew her old coat closer and smiled up at him, her gaze intent. "I'd do anything for you, too, Matt."

  As she turned away, he suddenly caught her arm and swung her back to him. The unexpected movement made her lose her balance. She fell heavily against him. His hand at her back steadied her, and she rested against him, breathing in soap and cologne and a faint scent of tobacco from the occasional cigar he smoked.

  His eyes were turbulent, and the hold he had on her was new and exciting.

  A little startled, she asked huskily, "What is it?"

  His gaze roamed over her face, then stopped on her mouth. Her lips were full and soft and he wondered not for the first time in their long relationship how they would feel under his. The hunger he felt made his heart race.

  "Matt, you're scaring me," she said all in one breath.

  "Nothing scares you," he returned. "You walked right into the thick of the wounded, even before the soldiers had stopped hunting the people who escaped the Hotchkiss guns. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her, completely blameless. You and your father were kind…and so courageous."

  The contact with his hard chest was making her knees weak. Shebither lower lip, trying to regain some sort of control over her wandering senses. Her hands pressed gently into the silky stuff of his vest.

  "This is…unconventional."

  "Working as a nurse isn't?"

  She punched him in the ribs. "Don't you start. I get enough guff from those old ladies in there." She scanned the dark windows of the boardinghouse. Did a curtain move?

  "They're probably clutching the windowsills, dying to see what happens next."

  "What happens next is that you let go of me so that I can get in out of the cold," Tess said with far more confidence than she felt. Her reaction to Matt's closeness was surprising and a little frightening. She hadn't thought herself vulnerable to any man's touch.

  His lean, strong hands moved down to her tiny waist and rested there while he continued to look intently at her.

  "You aren't like any other woman I've ever known," he said after a long, breathless silence.

  "Do you know a lot of women inChicagowho shoot bows and speak Sioux?"

  He shook her gently. "Be serious."

  "I don't dare." She laughed. "I have…I have my life planned. I intend to devote it to the women's movement."

  "Totally?"

  She fidgeted in his grasp. "Yes."

  "Have they convinced you that men are superfluous? Or, perhaps, suitable only for the purpose of breeding?"

  "Matt!"

  "Don't look so outraged. I've heard members of the women's rights groups say such things. Like the mythical Amazons, they feel that men are good for only one pur
pose, and that marriage is the first step to feminine slavery."

  "It is," she said vehemently. "Look around you. Most married women have a child a year. They're considered loose if they work outside the home. They must bend to the husband's will without thought of their own comfort or safety. There is nothing to stop a man from beating his wife and children, from gambling away all they own, from drinking from dawn till dusk…Oh, Matt, can't you see the terror of this from a woman's point of view, even a little?"

  "Of course I can," he replied honestly. "But you speak of exceptions, not the rule. Remember, Tess, change is a slow thing in a large society."

  "It won't happen by itself."

  "I agree. But I also feel that it can't be forced in any drastic fashion. Such as," he continued coldly, "taking children away from their parents on the reservations and sending them away to government schools, making it illegal for them to speak their own language"—he paused, smiling now—"even making it illegal to wear their hair long."

  Her hands itched to touch his hair, as she had only once, in the early days of their relationship, when he was teaching her the bow. She searched his dark eyes, a question in her own. "Do you miss the old days?"

  He laughed shortly and let her go. "How can I miss something so primitive? Can you really see me in buckskins speaking pidgin English?"

  She shook her head. "No, not you," she said. "You'd be in a war-bonnet, painted, on horseback, a bow in hand."

  He averted his head. "I'll be late. I have to go."

  "Matt, for heaven's sake, you aren't ashamed of your heritage?"

  "Good night, Tess. Don't go out alone. It's dangerous."

  He strode away without a single look over his shoulder. Tess stood and watched him for a moment, shivering in the cold wind. He was ashamed of being Sioux. She hadn't realized the depth of it until tonight. Perhaps that explained why he rarely went home toSouth Dakota, why he didn't speak of his cousins there, why he dressed so deliberately as a rich white man. He hadn't cut his hair, though, so he might retain a vestige of pride in his background, even if he kept it hidden. She shook her head. So many of his people had been unable to do what he had, to resign themselves to living like whites, and the policies forbidding them their most sacred ceremonies and the comfort of their shamans were slowly killing their souls. It must have been easier for Matt to live inChicagoand fan the fires of gossip about his true background, than to go to the reservation and deal with it.

  She recalled the way soldiers and other white men had spoken to him when he lived with her and her father, and she bristled now as she had then at the blows to his enormous pride. Prejudice ran rampant these days. Nativism, they called it. Nobody wanted "foreigners" in this country, to hear white people talk. Tess's lip curled. The very thought of calling anative American aforeigner made her furious. Out west, one still could hear discussion about eradicating the small remnant of the Indian people by taking away all their remaining lands and forcefully absorbing them into white society, absorbing them and wiping out their own culture in the process.

  Did no one realize that it was one hairbreadth from genocide? It turned Tess's stomach. She'd always felt that the government's approach to assimilating the Indians was responsible for the high rates of alcoholism, suicide, and infant mortality on the reservations.

  She turned away from the cold wind and went inside the boardinghouse, her mind ablaze with indignation for Indians and women. Both were downtrodden by white men, both forbidden the vote.

  The two old ladies who lived upstairs, Miss Barkley and Miss Dean, gave her a cold stare as she tried to pass quickly by the open door to the parlor where they sat.

  "Decent young ladies should not stand in the street with men," Miss Dean said icily. "Nor should they attend radical meetings or work in hospitals."

  "Someone must tend the sick," Tess said. "I daresay it might do you both good to come to one of our meetings and hear what your sisters in life are bearing because society refuses to accept women as equals!"

  Miss Barkley went pale. "Miss…Meredith," she gasped, a hand at her throat, "I do not consider myself the equal of a man, nor should I want to!"

  "Filthy, sweating brutes," Miss Dean agreed. "They should all be shot."

  Tess grinned. "There, you see, Miss Dean, you and I have much in common! You simply must come to a meeting with me."

  "Among those radicals?" asked Miss Dean, scandalized.

  "They aren't," Tess returned. "They're honest, hardworking girls who want to live life as full citizens of this country. We are a new type of woman. We will never settle back and accept second-class citizenship."

  Miss Barkley was red in the face. "Well, I never!"

  Miss Dean held up a hand. "A moment, Clara," she told her companion. "Miss Meredith presents some interesting arguments. These meetings are open to anyone?"

  "Certainly," Tess said. "You may go with me next Tuesday, if you like, and see what they are about."

  "Ida, don't you dare!" Miss Barkley fumed.

  "I should have gone, were I twenty years younger," came the reply, and a smile. "But I am too old and set in my ways, Miss Meredith."

  "Tess," she corrected.

  The older woman's eyes twinkled. "Tess, then. I hope you achieve your goals. My generation will not live to see it, but perhaps yours will eventually gain the vote."

  Tess went to her own room, happily having diverted them from any discussion of her surprising interaction with Matt. It wouldn't do to have people in the boardinghouse speculate about the two of them. She refused to do any speculating on her own, either. She buried Matt's odd behavior in the back of her mind and got ready for bed.

  Outside the wind was blowing fiercely; snowflakes struck the windowpane. She closed her eyes, hoping for a heavy snowfall. She always felt curiously happy, often content, too, on snowy days.

  «^»

  Saturday's march was lively. It was held after dark with torches to light the path of the marchers. More than four hundred women showed up, carrying placards. Tess marched between two women she knew vaguely, but she missed the company of her friendNan.

  "Isn't this exciting?" the girl beside her asked. "We're bound to win with such large numbers of us demanding the vote now."

  Tess agreed, but less wholeheartedly. She'd learned one terrible truth in her young life, and that was the bullheadedness of government in the face of demands for change. Regardless of how just the cause, the people in power inWashingtonwere avid in supporting the status quo.Rooseveltwas keen on creating a safe place for wildlife and showing pride in the American spirit. But he was also a believer in Manifest Destiny, and a manly man. Tess wondered if he shared the same attitude toward women that most men of his generation harbored—that women were created only to keep house and bear children and look after men.

  Demonstrations inevitably attracted spectators; Tess glanced around at them. A man waving a flag that read UP WITH LABOR stepped from the Street into the ranks of the women, bringing a small body of cohorts with him.

  "This is not your group!" one woman yelled at him.

  "This struggle is also the workers' struggle!" the man yelled back, and kept marching. "We support your cause! Down with oppression of all kinds!"

  "You see?" one of Tess's companions grumbled. "We cannot even hold a rally without having a man step in and try to lead it. Well, I'll just show him a thing or two!"

  The small, matronly woman turned in the throng with her placard held like a club and beaned the advocate for laborers with it right on his bald spot.

  He yelped and dropped the banner, and the few men and women who were in his group started attacking the women's rights marchers.

  Tess stood very still and gave a long sigh as she heard the first of many police whistles start to sound. The authorities had looked for a way to break up this march, and the communist had given it to them. The small scuffle became a melee.

  As she tried to move back from the combatants, Tess was aware of a newcomer who didn't seem to
be part of either group. He was tall and young, expensively dressed, and he carried a cane. He seemed to be looking straight at her. While she was wondering about the odd incident, she was suddenly knocked down and all but trampled as the fighting accelerated.