North Star

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Ah, I’ll leave you to your reunion,” the man said. “Dirk, you’ll not want to miss chapel.”

  The young man nodded. The graying man in the dark suit vanished, and then Mary was alone in the austere room with her only child.

  “I have only a few minutes,” he said.

  “What are minutes?”

  “Ah, little bits of time.”

  “Then you must go?”

  “We cannot miss chapel, not ever.”

  “Sit here,” she said, motioning him toward the other chair.

  They sat, staring at each other. She could not fathom him. Everything had vanished behind his white man’s mask. She understood even without words that the years with the blackrobes had driven his Shoshone nature from him. He looked uncomfortable.

  “Can you speak the tongue of the People?” she asked softly.

  He stared, and finally shook his head. “The words might come back, but offhand I don’t remember them,” he said.

  “Then we will talk in Mister Skye’s tongue,” she said.

  He nodded. “I am wondering—why you came now. Is my father here too?”

  “No, I came alone.”

  “Is he—dead?”

  “He and Victoria are old but they are well enough. He is very stiff, and his eyes trouble him.”

  “He never came here to see me,” he said.

  She knew this was painful ground, for her son and for her.

  “I know. It was because … it would hurt too much.”

  “Does he want me now? Is this why you came? To take me back?”

  She carefully chose her words. “No. He is old and proud, and won’t say that he needs you, even if he does. I came to see you by myself.”

  “All alone, across the plains? To see me?”

  She nodded.

  He smiled suddenly. “You came to see me!”

  “It is my way. I wanted to see you now, with fifteen years upon you.”

  “I am doing well. I get high marks. They say maybe I will be like a white man. Tell Papa that I get good grades.” But then his bravado faded. “I wish I knew Papa. It’s like … I am an orphan. Year after year, I waited for him to come visit me here.”

  She didn’t want to hear that. He had ached for Skye and her to come see him, spent the months and years waiting and hoping. And Skye had let him down.

  There was another pregnant pause, and finally she broke it.

  “Are you happy?”

  “I am treated well. They tell me I can be a clerk or a teacher someday. The good fathers are kind to me. They say that a mixed-blood can do as well as a full-blood.”

  “Is that good?”

  “I suppose it’s better than living in a buffalo-hide lodge, freezing all winter, wondering where the next meal will come from.” He eyed her uncertainly. “I am very fortunate. They tell me hardly anyone from the western tribes has the good luck that I have.”

  Her son was staring at her, absorbing her, his gaze missing nothing. No doubt comparing her to the white people in this city.

  Sunshine and shadow crossed his face as he wrestled with strange and conflicting feelings. “I don’t know your world, or my father’s anymore. My memories don’t go back that far. My life really began when I came here. So it’s not easy, seeing you, knowing you are my mother, you raised me in a lodge, and my father hunted and kept us alive.” He brightened. “You are all that I dreamed you would be,” he said. “I had no mother. I lived with other boys, but you were only a memory. And the full-bloods …” His voice trailed off.

  She understood at once. Mixed-bloods were not respected. “Do the blackrobes treat you well?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what being treated badly is, either. They have always been kind to me.”

  “Do they favor other boys, North Star?”

  He nodded, slowly. “They are very kind to the Lakota boys.”

  The Sioux. “Do they let you have your Shoshone name?”

  “North Star? No, the blackrobes call me Dirk Skye.”

  “Would you rather be North Star?”

  “Please don’t ask me!”

  She sensed she had transgressed.

  “We were free,” she said. “We went where we wished. Now they have put us on a reservation, with lines around it we cannot see, but we are forbidden to cross them. Things will be different now. Chief Washakie is helping this to happen.”

  The youth stared dreamily out the window, which opened on the lushly planted courtyard. “I dream sometimes,” he said. “Of you and my Crow mother and my father, and a world where we could go anywhere, anytime we wished.” He smiled slowly. “But it is gone.”

  “I have two horses,” she said.

  He stared at her. Not until she said it did she admit to herself that the entire purpose of this trip was to bring him back to his people, and his family. Skye and Victoria needed him. She needed him. She suddenly grew aware of something that had burned in her bosom all those days of travel.

  “Your father, he needs you. Your Crow mother, she needs you,” she said.

  “Are they failing? Dying?”

  “It is hard to live when you hurt. He hurts. She hurts worse but doesn’t show it to anyone. We cannot help him. Before I came here, he left us to find a place where he could build a white man’s house, with a bed in it and a chair in it and a stove and a fireplace in it, and a porch where he could watch the clouds skim across the peaks.”

  “Where would this be?”

  “The upper Yellowstone.”

  “That is a good place to grow old,” Dirk said.

  “For him and Victoria,” she said, leaving herself out of it.

  “They tell me I am bright and there isn’t much more they can teach me,” he said. “They want to teach many boys with Indian blood, so that the boys will go back and teach the tribes.”

  “Teach what?”

  “All about God. Farming. Cattle raising, plowing, blacksmithing, living the way white men live.”

  “And how do they live?”

  He smiled. “I wouldn’t know. I have scarcely left here, but once in a while they take us to the cathedral.”

  “You cannot leave?”

  “A little. They watch over us.”

  “You see no one? Just the students and the blackrobes?”

  “Once in a while Colonel Bullock came. He sat there where you sit, and he would ask me how I was doing, and whether I wanted anything, and what should he tell my father? And then two years ago he stopped coming. I learned he had died. He grew old and his lungs would not take air. I haven’t seen anyone from outside since then.”

  “No girls?”

  “Especially no girls.” His face clouded. She saw a melancholy in him so deep she could barely fathom it. She saw all the spirits standing above him, sighing in the quietness. It was more than melancholy; she saw anger and frustration and loneliness too.

  “There are full-bloods here, and there are breeds like me,” he said. “The full-bloods, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Assiniboine, the Jesuit fathers like them and treat them like chiefs.”

  “And those born of two bloods?”

  “Born in sin,” he said.

  She found courage to ask one of the big questions. “Was it hard—going away?” she asked.

  “Not at first. I sat with Colonel Bullock in the stagecoach. It was an adventure. I looked at everything through the windows. It was only here, when I was given a narrow iron bed and a small locker in a dark room with other boys, that it was hard. Then my sunny world stopped. Do you know what I missed? Sunshine, open country, with you and my father bathed in sunlight. My new world was dark; dark walls, small windows, dark classrooms, teachers in black, darkness everywhere. That is the world of these Europeans.”

  “Is it still hard?”

  He looked away. “I am a white man now. I take my solace in work. They tell me none do better. I make the time go by with work. The suns and moons and winters of time, I make them go past me. I rea
d the classics. I know French. I do algebra and geometry. I have learned their history. I know their authors, the storytellers. I can compose a letter or a pleading or an index. They have even made me a mechanic. I know about iron and wood and the tools to shape them. I know about farming, even though I’ve never farmed.” He smiled. “See? I am a white man now.”

  She scarcely knew what he was talking about, strange words, strange studies. Did he know anything of his own people? Had he sat with the elders and learned? No, and he couldn’t remember the tongue of his childhood. He was as mysterious and difficult as any white man, and strange as Mister Skye.

  She remembered how hard it had been for her to fathom her man, once the blush of her marriage had faded and she found herself trying to learn his ways. Now this son was like his father. That had been Skye’s intent. Send North Star here so he might become a white man, and not one of the People.

  “Star That Never Moves,” she said in her tongue.

  “It has been a long time since I heard that,” he said.

  “We gave you two names, and now you have chosen.”

  “No, I never chose it, my mama.”

  “The blackrobes, they chose it, then.”

  “No, they didn’t choose it either. It just happened. When I was a boy, I called myself North Star, and it was lost.”

  The words ceased then, and they gazed at one another, and she felt him slipping away, and she wondered why she had come. She knew it would end like this. She would look at him and be glad, and then he would slip away, and she would sorrow. Now there was a gulf between her and him. He would call her a savage, and tell them he had a savage for a mother, and she would carry this in her heart.

  A low, mournful bell tolled.

  He smiled. “Vespers,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “It is a small service late in the day, offered to God.”

  “Do you follow the same path as Skye?”

  He paused, hesitantly. “No,” he said.

  The door opened and a blackrobe swept in, this one young and dark, with almond eyes.

  “Vespers, Dirk,” he said.

  The boy bolted upright out of his chair. “I must go, Mama. It is time for chapel. Good-bye. I am glad you came.”

  The father stood amiably in the door, waiting. He smiled at her. “Ironclad duty,” he said to her.

  “Give my respect to my father,” he said.

  North Star followed the blackrobe through the door, and she saw the door close behind them. She sat in the small silence of the waiting room, with a heavy heart.

  Was this it, then? Had she come across the mountains and plains and rivers, through these nearby woods, across great rivers, for this moment, now passed? She had. She always told herself she only wanted to see him, just to see him, and now she had seen him, and had feasted on him, this slender, serious, two-bloods boy with blue eyes and strong cheekbones and warm flesh.

  The soft bonging of the bell ceased, and faint on the air came the sounds of solemn song, boys’ voices, many voices, singing something that sounded a little like the songs sung at a Shoshone campfire by old men, to the sharp syncopation of the drums.

  She could not bring herself to leave, not with North Star so close that she could hear the singing, so close that one of those male voices must be his. So she sat in the starchy room, listening, until at last the song ended, and she imagined he was going to his bed. She rose, stiffly, glad that she had seen her son, glad that he was alive, and he was very bright and pleased the blackrobes. She looked around, uncertain how to navigate to the ponies tied outside, but she found her way out the door, into the yard, and she saw no one. Maybe they were all at this vespers. She found the grilled gate to the street, and saw how to open it, and stood one last moment, knowing she would never see North Star again, knowing that her journey was complete. She saw birds flocking in the lush trees, trees of a sort she didn’t know, and then she stepped through the iron grille and closed it gently behind her, and stood staring at the moss-covered wall, which was crowned with vines, which grew in profusion from the moisture and heat.

  The horses stood quietly, their tails lashing at the clouds of flies. She felt sticky from the heat and wet. Beside her, the great edifice of St. Ignatius rose silently, its walls a reproof to this world of the street.

  She slowly undid the rein, and also the lead line of the packhorse, and climbed onto her saddle horse, and turned to leave.

  The gate clanged, and she turned to see him there. “Mama, wait,” he said.

  twenty-eight

  Skye had known loss all his life, and now that familiar and ancient grief flooded through him. Mary had vanished. No one in the village had seen her. She should have been there long ago. Victoria stood stiffly, her loss as large as his, her lips taut.

  Mary’s brothers and clan could offer nothing. Skye found himself cataloguing all the ways that people died in the wilderness. Snake bites, grizzlies, sickness, broken bones, a tumble down a cliff, getting bucked off a horse or stepped on by one, a runaway horse plunging into forest, a poisoned spring. And that was only a beginning. A lone, beautiful Indian woman in her middle years was prey. She might be a slave of the Arapaho or Sioux or Cheyenne. Or still worse, she might have become the plaything of those Texans in the Big Horn Valley, someone to use and abandon.

  The bleak catalog scrolling through his mind could embrace only a few of the possibilities. He probably would never see Mary again, nor would he discover her fate, and as the days and weeks and months rolled by, all hope would fade and there would be only loss.

  He had first known loss when a press gang had plucked him off the streets of London and he found himself a powder monkey in the Royal Navy. He never saw his mother or father or sister again, nor any of his cousins or other relatives. That had been the greatest of all his losses, but he had lost friends, horses, clients, and colleagues over the decades in the North American wilds, each loss vivid and mysterious.

  Now his younger wife.

  “We’ll go look for her,” he said to Victoria.

  But she seemed afraid. It had been all he could manage to ride here to the Wind River Reservation. Her odd expression told him that she doubted he would have the strength to go look. And it seemed a futile enterprise anyway. Look where? There were many thousands of square miles to search, and each one contained its secrets.

  He and Victoria would be welcome with any of Mary’s clan or brothers, but somehow without Mary it wouldn’t seem right. He thought maybe after he had rested they should return to the Crows and wait. And wait. And wait. But even as he contemplated this, a youth arrived, and the lad spoke a surpassing English he had gotten somewhere.

  “Sir and madam,” the bronzed boy began, “our good chief, leader of all the Eastern Shoshone, wishes the honor of your presence.”

  Skye nodded. “Tell Chief Washakie we will be along directly, and thank him for inviting us,” Skye said.

  The slim boy smiled slightly, and trotted toward a white clapboard cottage, one of the first at the Indian agency.

  Skye and Victoria excused themselves from Mary’s clan, and led their horses across a green sward toward the cottage where the great chief awaited them on his porch. He wore a denim shirt and black britches and a flat-crowned felt hat, but kept his jet hair in tight braids, in the style of his people.

  “Ah, it is you, Mister and Mistress Skye,” he said, waving them up the wooden steps to his broad roofed porch.

  “Shall we go in? I live like a white man now. Come and see,” the chief said.

  And indeed, Skye discovered an interior furnished very like the homes of white people, with a rocking chair, Morris chairs, stuffed horsehair couch, a dining table and chairs, a well-equipped kitchen and two bedrooms, each with a brass bed frame. His women stood shyly, in gingham dresses.

  “Tea for the Skyes,” Washakie said, steering his guests to the parlor.

  Victoria perched primly on a seat. This was big medicine to her, and she looked to be ill
at ease.

  “Your beautiful wife is missing,” Washakie said.

  Skye nodded.

  “I have received the news. Anytime someone comes to the agency, I hear everything. So our own Blue Dawn was due here long ago, coming down from the Yellowstone, and she is not here. Have you any understanding, Mister Skye?”

  “No, sir, we learned of this only a while ago, and neither Victoria nor I can offer the slightest reason. But all trips have their peril.”

  “And Texans flood into our lands with their cattle. And these are a particularly—shall I say undesirable?—lot of men.”

  “They worry me more than anything else, sir.”

  “Yes, that is my worry, as well. Your Shoshone wife is famous for her skills at travel, her powers over the spirits, and her courage. She can subdue a brown bear with a smile. She can quiet a horse made mad by a rattlesnake. But I am not sure she would be a match for some of those men who herd the cattle onto our lands.”

  Skye glanced at Victoria, who was keeping quiet. The Absarokas claimed the Big Horn Valley too, and probably had a better claim to it. Some of the tribe wintered there year after year.

  “We will go look for her, Chief.”

  The Shoshone paused, gently. “You look worn, Mister and Mistress Skye. You have traveled far. Even if you should return over the trail from the Yellowstone, you would be covering a vast land, with great mountains, rushing rivers, grasslands as far as the eye can see, thick dark forests, snowfields, strange places where the spirits gather, places where ancient peoples have built rock cairns for their own purposes. Who can find one small, lone woman in all of that?”

  “We will go look, sir. Mary is my wife, and beloved spirit sister of Victoria, and the mother of my son, and the woman to whom I have pledged my love and life.”

  “Well said, Mister Skye. But you are worn, and even as you sit you favor that leg, which hurts so much you cannot let it rest.” He paused. “You have come a great distance, longer than old people should have to travel. And if you leave us, looking for this beloved woman in this country we call our home, I will understand, and will make sure you carry some pemmican with you.” He smiled slightly. “And your chances would be poor indeed. I have a better idea. It is our home. My young men know it and keep its secrets. I will send them out, all that will go, to look for Blue Dawn. They will cast a wide net, clear up to the Yellowstone, and before long you will have a good understanding of Mary’s fate. They have sharp eyes. Young eyes. They see the distant eagle on the wing, and the field mouse at their feet. They see the moving dot on the hillside. If they find Blue Dawn, her heart will be freshened by her tribal brothers. And they will heal her and help her … in any case, you will have news. So come, stay here with Mary’s clan; I welcome you as honored guests of the People.”