Wife of Moon

by Margaret Coel

  The elder squared his shoulders and tilted his chin toward the sky for a long moment, and Father John had the sense that the old man was praying. Finally Max said, “Bashful Woman was where the deaths started.”

  Father John caught Vicky’s eye for a moment before Max set off again, and they fell into line behind. Right turn, left turn, zigzagging around the mounds until Max found the one he wanted. Etched on the cross were the words: THOMAS BRAVE WOLF. SEPTEMBER 2, 1890–JUNE 6, 1921.

  “One of Stands-Alone’s boys,” Max ran the back of his hand over his mouth. “He was next to die. Thought he was smarter than his father. Didn’t stop there, the deaths.” He was walking again, this time Vicky stayed on his right and Father John moved in on the elder’s left, bending his head to catch the old man’s words. “Twelve years ago, Thomas’s grandson, Lester, got himself shot. Found him down by the Wind River with a bullet in the back of his head, like he’d been executed. The FBI agents said he must’ve gotten mixed up with a bad crowd. They never got the killer.”

  Max halted next to another grave. On the crossbar, the words LESTER BRAVE WOLF, AUGUST 6, 1948–JULY 1, 1992.” In the silence engulfing them, Father John again had the sense that the elder was saying another silent prayer. He offered a silent prayer of his own: “Dear God, have mercy on the souls of the people here. Grant them peace.”

  A few moments passed before Vicky said: “Please tell us about the deaths, grandfather.” Her voice was low and respectful.

  Max sucked in his breath and nodded toward her. “They was after justice,” he said. “They wanted what was ours. They knew they wasn’t ever gonna get the ranch back, so they wanted some compensation. They had proof of how Carston Evans got hold of Arapaho land.”

  “The Curtis photographs,” Vicky said.

  “Three photographs and the glass plates they come from. They showed what happened, how Evans shot her, cold-blooded, not a thought about the beautiful life he was taking. Just wanting the land, that’s all. It was all there in the pictures, the story of grandmother’s death. First Thomas, then Lester thought all they had to do was show the Evans family the proof and they’d give us something of what belonged to us.” Max gave a snort of laughter. “Stands-Alone was the one with sense. He said, ‘We ain’t never getting the land. We got what’s important. We got the child. Let it be.’ ”

  “The child,” Father John said, almost to himself. He glanced at Vicky, and in her eyes—the brown, knowing eyes of her people—he could almost see what must have happened, and he understood why Bashful’s family hadn’t taken revenge on Carston Evans. Stands-Alone had made a deal with the man. He could keep the ranch. Stands-Alone would take his sister’s child, because the child belonged with the people.

  “Long as Stands-Alone stayed alive, nothing happened,” Max went on. “Soon as he was gone, his first son, Thomas, paid a visit on the Evans people. Next thing you know, somebody found Thomas out in his field shot in the head. After that, the rest of the clan said, ‘We gotta let it be, like Stands-Alone told us.’ So that’s what happened, till Lester got to thinking he was smarter than everybody else. Evans was running for senator, Lester said, and no way was he gonna want people to know the truth about his grandfather and the ranch. Evans was gonna give us some money now, Lester said. I told him, don’t be a hothead. Nothing good’s gonna come from this. Next thing I hear, Lester’s body is down on the riverbank.”

  Max turned slowly and faced Father John. “I never told the FBI agents, if that’s what you want to know. What was the FBI gonna do? Go to the brand new senator and say, you know anything about this Indian that got himself shot?”

  “What about the photographs and the glass plates?”

  “Funny thing, they disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” A note of incredulity sounded in Vicky’s voice.

  “Before Lester went to see the Evans people, he brought the box of plates and pictures over to my place. For safe keeping, he tells me.”

  “You had the photographs and plates?” Vicky asked.

  “After Lester got himself killed, I put the box out in the shed. Maybe someday the time was gonna be right for the truth to come out, but the time wasn’t here yet. Then Denise started coming around, asking questions. Always wanting to know how things used to be. She come down straight from Bashful, so I decided she had the right to know about her great-grandmother. I gave her the box. You be the keeper of the past, I says to her.”

  He paused and shook his head. “Only mistake she made was showing the photographs to that husband of hers. The temptation got too big for T.J., just like it did for Lester and Thomas. Like a monster on their backs that they couldn’t carry around no more, so they had to do something about it. Denise knew she’d made a mistake, so a couple days before she died, she comes driving into my place and gives me the box of photos and plates. She says they wasn’t safe at her house anymore ’cause Evans was gonna get ’em, one way or another.”

  The elder turned and started toward the road and the brown pickup parked a few feet back from Father John’s pickup. Farther down the road was the Jeep, Adam Lone Eagle still leaning against the side, hands in his trouser pockets, his gaze not leaving Vicky.

  “There’s been enough deaths,” Max said, evenly. “I went to the library and read a book about Curtis. You know what his family did? Smashed his glass plates. Forty-thousand glass plates smashed to smithereens. All them images of Indians was what took Curtis away year after year and hurt his family, and they hated the images. I figured the plates that Curtis left here been hurting the Sharp Nose family ever since.”

  When they reached the brown pickup, Father John held the driver’s door open while Max climbed inside and settled behind the wheel. The elder dragged a key out of his jacket pocket and inserted it into the ignition. The engine sputtered, then turned over.

  “After Denise got killed, I got to thinking that Curtis’s people was right.” Max kept his eyes straight ahead. “I burned the photographs, then I got out my hammer and smashed all three plates. Yesterday I took little pieces of glass out to Black Mountain and scattered ’em over the earth. They ain’t gonna bring any more death.” He turned his head up to Father John. His eyes seemed darker, more intense. “You coming to the giveaway?” he asked.

  The giveaway—he’d almost forgotten. The family would give away all the new blankets, shawls, and dress goods that their relatives and friends had brought them before the funeral. It was the Arapaho Way.

  “I’ll be there,” he said, closing the door. He stepped back, watching the old pickup pull out and start down the center of the road, pitching from side to side.

  “It’s over now,” Vicky said, her voice small beside him.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Adam’s waiting. I should be going.”

  When he didn’t say anything, she started walking away, then stopped and looked back. “I miss you, John, you know.”

  He gave her a nod that he hoped conveyed what he was thinking—that he also missed her. He didn’t take his eyes away as she hurried down the road and got into the Jeep. Another moment and the vehicle was heading around the drive after Max’s pickup, Adam at the wheel.

  He waited until the Jeep had turned onto Seventeen-Mile Road and disappeared behind the spray of gold and bronze cottonwood branches. Then he walked over to his own pickup, started the engine, and pulled into the tracks in the dirt road worn by the other vehicles. He would go to the giveaway. He would drink the coffee and eat the plate of roast beef and fry bread and gravy that someone was sure to give him, and he would visit with the family and friends and try to pull from his own heart some words of comfort. Words. He wanted to laugh at the idea. Such a small, fragile bulwark against the enormous sense of loss opening inside him.

  He would do his job, he thought, and he would put her out of his mind. He would be the priest his people needed him to be, for as long as they needed him. He would try.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chief Joseph. Geronimo. Ca
non de Chelly. The Vanishing Race. Countless people, not only in the United States but around the world, recognize these photographs that capture the haunting beauty and spirit of the Old West. They are like old friends, imprinted in our consciousness, containing such clarity and detail that the subjects seem to exist in a timeless space of their own.

  The photographs are only a few of the magnificent images of western American Indians made by the photographer Edward S. Curtis. From the late 1890s to the late 1920s, Curtis logged 40,000 miles across the West, consumed with the desire to photograph Indian traditions before those traditions had vanished. He traveled by train, boat, horseback, and on foot, packing his favorite Premo camera and cartons of supplies, eventually visiting eighty western tribes and capturing on dry glass plates a total of 40,000 images.

  Between 1907 and 1930, Curtis published 272 twenty-volume sets of photographs and ethnographic texts. Each set was accompanied by a portfolio containing large photogravures printed from engraved copper plates. The sets were titled The North American Indian.

  Volume VI in the series, published in 1911, contains nine photographs of Arapahos on the Wind River Reservation—a very small number considering that Curtis took dozens and sometimes hundreds of photographs of other tribes. The few photographs of Arapahos suggest that he spent only a brief time on the reservation, but there are no historical records that might explain why that was the case.

  Neither are there records to document when Curtis actually visited the reservation. Records do show, however, that between 1904 and 1909, he photographed numerous tribes on the northern plains, including the Sioux and Cheyenne, both closely allied with the Arapaho. And in the summer of 1907, he was again on the northern plains photographing the Sioux, Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, Apsarokee, and Atsina. It is likely that at some point within this time frame, Curtis traveled south to Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation.

  For the purposes of the story, I have chosen to place Curtis on the reservation in October 1907. I have also imagined the circumstances that would explain why his stay among the Arapahos had been so brief.

  Other parts of the story, however, are based on documented facts, including the unintended and often horrendous consequences of the Indian allotment acts and the fact that one of Curtis’s daughters elected to destroy her father’s 40,000 glass plates.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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