Indian Affairs (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Yet, her imagination refused to be pragmatic. The high, clear air amplified voices from afar, full, deep, and impassioned. Her imagination envisioned the Indians awake beside their fires and playing eerie songs on their flutes.

  Then, faint and far away, a drumming reached out for her. The drumming accelerated to the point the thought she would go mad. She covered her ears with her hands. Yet, inexplicable tremors vibrated through her very bones like a plucked harp note.

  Manuel Mondragon. Okay, so he was handsome. Heart-stopping handsome. But he was also arrogant and cold.

  She wasn’t sure why, but she suspected he represented strength, survival, life. But not necessarily for her. She couldn’t chance giving into this seduction of the native tug, the baffling reserve, as Peg had.

  She was more realistic, wasn’t she?

  Frustrated, and determined to ignore the drumming, she punched at her pillow and restlessly turned once more on the feather mattress. She was an impostor and a cheat! Why not admit it? She felt something for Manuel Mondragon she had never felt for another man. And with that, she gave herself up to his impelling drumming and slid deeply into the first solid sleep she had known in months.

  Chapter Three

  “Uncle Paul was right. The idea to come here is bunk.”

  Alessandra’s brother was always stirring up trouble, pitting one side against the other, but at that moment, staring at the mud-brick rubble that was to be her home for the next year, she had to agree with Paul. “Watch your slang, kiddo.”

  “Kiddo is slang.” Jeremy rolled his long-lashed eyes at Jose, the ten-year-old son of Peg’s maid, Marta. At the back of Jose’s head, a black cowlick stood in erect attention. The Mexican boy put his dirt-crusted hand over his mouth and giggled.

  “All right,” she conceded. “I’ll watch mine. You watch yours.”

  “We could always go back to Washington, Mom.”

  She was tempted. Despite the warming sunlight, January’s chilly wind slithered beneath her riding jacket. She could have been snug inside the family mansion back in Washington. Yet the yearning inside her for something more had brought her to this – a hovel on the edge of the world? And to the Taos shaman. She did not understand her irrational reaction to Manuel Mondragon. She cursed herself and tossed the crumbling brick in the mounding pile. “What, kiddo? And leave this magnificent palace?”

  Jeremy’s mouth crimped. Jose looked at the fallen-down adobe, puzzled. He and Jeremy would go back to school tomorrow in the adobe building that housed grades one through twelve. When the General learned of that, his reaction would be more than an explosive “Well, bully!” Even though her father would have to rise and walk, he would abandon that damned wheelchair and haul Jeremy’s butt back to the family compound unaided.

  And Brendon? What would he do? He loved her, of course. He demonstrated his devotion in so many thoughtful ways, from a single picked wayside peony to an expensive Cartier brooch. But knowing he could be relentless on the Chamber Floor and behind closed doors of committee meetings, she also knew he could be a worthy adversary. She would deal with the General and Brendon when that time came.

  She tried putting a bright face on the disaster before her. “Tony Luhan said he can get some Indians to repair the place.”

  Jeremy jammed his hands in his knickers’ pockets. “Oh, swell, Mom. Next, we’ll be living in a tepee.”

  “Tony’s people live in pueblos, not tepees.” She didn’t want Jeremy to see she felt as crestfallen as he. Act as if you know what you are doing. As her family transferred from post to post, bravado had become her crutch, then her watchword.

  The quaint adobe house she and Jeremy were to live was a shambles. Its door, a converted pine table top, swung crazily on one rusted hinge. A floor of hard mud was solid and smooth from generations of bare feet. The ceiling, packed earth supported by peeled poles, had collapsed into the kitchen.

  She had chased a resident roadrunner out of what was supposed to be her bedroom, and a family of swallows had taken up residence in the other bedroom’s viga ceiling. Wild roses grew inside the chimney. A tangle of lilac bushes spilled over a paneless window into the sala. Tarantulas and scorpions, she was sure, had staked a claim to the weathered clapboard privy out back. In the front yard, the mud bricks that once ringed the water well had disintegrated.

  When Jose said something in a cataract of Spanish, her son grinned back. “Mom, can I go to the plaza with Jose? He says Gusdorf’s Mercantile sells red licorice . . . four for a penny!”

  Hands on her hips, she tilted her head and narrowed her eyes at the two conspirators. “Now how’d you know that . . . since you don’t know Spanish and Jose speaks very little English?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “You know, signs and other ways. Mom, I have the money. Henri gave me two bits to go play.”

  “He bought you off, did he?” She pushed her fingers through his defiant curls. Embarrassed by this affectionate display, he shrugged away. “All right, go on with you, kiddo . . . but be back by lunch.” The two streaked off along a path worn through gray-green sage and chamisa. It led along the crest of the hill past a garlic farm to Peg and Tony’s hacienda, less than a mile away.

  In the other direction, at an equal distance, Taos Plaza lazed in the dry, chilly morning sunlight. From her vantage point, she could see beyond Taos Plaza the grandeur of the paprika-colored landscape a hundred miles westward. Spellbound, she slowly pivoted, taking in a 360-degree kaleidoscope of colors, sounds, and smells.

  At that moment, the passion to paint again erupted within her like uncorked champagne, taking her by surprise. Yes, she would paint this mysteriously lit land! She would try capturing on canvas the splendor of this bold, expansive and sun-drenched land. Its immense southwestern sky, strong colors and convoluted, massive shapes. Elation, carried on her blood, made its way through her body, filing its every atrophied nook and cranny. When she returned to Washington – and she would live to do so, by God – she would return with her paintings and this land’s inspiration in her soul. And she would find a way to market her awe of this Shangri La in the concrete corridors of Washington.

  Less than a quarter mile distance to the north, rose-colored willows cast lacy shadows onto the acequia, an irrigation ditch bordering the Indian land. Above the Indian land towered the snow-mantled Mystery Mountain, alive and breathing. It beckoned with its chalcedony hued shadows, offering peace and a vague promise of healing.

  She wondered if somehow, maybe subconsciously, she had arranged to come to Taos . . . seeking some kind of holy place like a Southwest Lourdes that would heal her body and reorient her fragmented self. Dr. Jung might be willing to supply that answer, but he was leaving soon. So any answers would be hers to discover. She suspected she already had the answer – a return to her creativity, to her art. Her creativity seemed to have vanished along with her wild, free days in Paris.

  She was eager now to implement her idea, but she would have to wait until she and Jeremy had a place to live – and she had a place to paint. Painting would keep at bay this fascination with Manuel Mondragon. Surely, she was over reacting to something that was merely her imagination. True, he was very attractive, charismatic, confident even, but surely that confidence was born of his male arrogance. And male arrogance was something with which she had been suffocated.

  With Jeremy and Jose out of sight, she went back to clearing rubble away from what was to be her kitchen. Its beehive horno or oven was right outside the back door. What she needed was a stove like Peg’s big blue one . . . indoors.

  She had donned jodhpurs and a jacket, a wide-brimmed hat, and canvas gloves, which Peg had insisted on the night before. “The little brown spiders here are deadly.” Just jolly! But the warning made her careful when she inspected a broken, long-handled bread paddle for any critters that may have set up housekeeping.

  She worked quickly, thoroughly, restlessly. She was on the run with Jeremy. Mere months left to recreate herself. Digging in rubble that was as dea
d as she used to be, she wondered how had she fucked up her life so badly? Well, she was reoriented now. She would have to speak to Peg about getting canvases, paint, and brushes. But first things first, and that meant clearing out this hovel and making it into a home for her and Jeremy.

  A home for me and Jeremy! Standing in the crystalline sunlight, with the otherworldly beauty of this lofty land wrapped around her, she was overcome with gratitude with what she did have. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she whispered, neither knowing nor caring to what or whom she offered her soulful utterance. Her mother had sought to raise her and Paul in the Catholic Church, but the military and its far-flung outposts had squelched that feeble attempt.

  Half an hour later, she looked up to see Peg, wearing a celery green duster, strolling along the same path Jeremy and Jose had taken. Even from a distance, the woman’s flowered and beribboned shepherd’s hat gave lie to winter’s still slumbering foliage.

  When Peg was close enough, Alessandra waved. “I thought you told me you never rose until after ten a.m.?”

  “Tony wouldn’t let me sleep in. He was up and about at dawn, determined to roust some workers to get this place back in shape.” Her glance took in the ramshackle adobe house, and she made a face. “It’s worse than I remembered. You know, Alessandra, Bursum or someone should have warned you.”

  “I believe the senator did explain to my husband there weren’t any decent places to rent.”

  “That’s because people don’t leave Taos. At least, not alive.” Immediately, Peg bit her lip and glanced away.

  With inordinate attention, Peg fumbled at her duster’s pocket where she had tucked work gloves. “I’m not used to manual labor myself. The Indians love it. For them, they are always making something. Continuing something that is alive to them. As though they live through their creations.” She nudged each finger into her gloves. “I thought this would give you and me some time alone. Sometimes, like last night, D. H. can be a horse’s ass and monopolize all conversation.”

  Alessandra managed a polite smile at the reference to her arrival the night before. As tired as she and Jeremy had been, Lawrence had kept them up late, debating incessantly with Jung over psychoanalysis, transference, and neuroses. Lawrence’s and Jung’s hyper-intellectualism only served to remind Alessandra how behind the times she was . . . as well as how little she cared anymore.

  “And you’ll have to forgive Tony,” Peg continued, as she picked up a crumbling straw-flecked mud brick and tossed it atop the trash pile Alessandra had started. “He nods off every evening in his chair, but he’s the only man who would not let me ride roughshod over him . . . or send him away. My other three husbands put up with a lot.” She gave a dry laugh. “A fair trade off, they must have thought, in exchange for my money and patronage.”

  Grateful for Peg’s easy manner, Alessandra went back to sifting through the debris. “What’s Henri doing? Jeremy and Jose must have waken him this morning.”

  “Henri’s up in my aerie, dallying at his typewriter.”

  In Alessandra’s furtive tour of Peg’s house that morning, which was a curio shop with Florentine, Japanese, Indian and Hindu objets d’art, she had encountered fat Marta on the first floor on her knees polishing the red-brown and black tiles with beeswax. The aerie was actually a third-floor sunroom. But the second floor proved to be the most interesting. Both Peg’s bedroom door and Tony’s, mere steps apart, had been closed. Were the two still lovers?

  Peg’s cupid bow lips turned up at the ends. “Henri could be Lord Byron to America with my help.”

  “He’s that good?”

  Peg shrugged her square-set shoulders. “He’s a dilettante. But that’s beside the point. My raison d’être is to help the male express his creative genius.”

  “Ahh, yes, we, the male’s handmaidens, always so eager to service them with our life force.”

  Peg’s laughter climbed the scale. “Alessandra O’Quinn, I’m so glad you chose to live nearby,” her gloved hand swept out, “despite the tumbledown condition of this claptrap house.”

  “Well, I can always convert the outhouse into — ” A violent coughing spasm seized her. “The dust — ”

  Peg waited until the seizure passed, then leveled her gray-eyed gaze on Alessandra. “I’ll admit I’m a busybody. So point blank – what do you think about seeking out Manuel Mondragon for help with your . . . health?”

  Giving herself up to this arrogant man’s control resurrected the repression of living under the control of all the men in her life, and she blurted, “A backward Indian?” Seeing the woman’s affronted expression, she realized she had blundered badly. “I’m sorry, Peg, truly, but I’ve seen the country’s best doctors. One after another and at the most exorbitant fees.”

  “Well, hey! A chicken or a sack of beans has got to beat the fees back East, doesn’t it?” Then, more seriously, “Look, Alessandra, I know a lot of people pooh-pooh this Indian spirit thing, but since coming to the southwest five years ago, I’ve witnessed some inexplicable results by modern standards. I can tell you this, Man Mondragon has both the passion and the purity required of his calling. How many quacks today can claim that? So, what do you think?”

  What do I think? My chest constricts just thinking about him. For all his impeccable manners, something wild and primal about him reminded her she was very much a woman. A married woman, however. But her vows of her marriage had been broken long before this. “I think I’d better tackle first things first.” She added with a rueful smile, “And settling into my new home is foremost, wouldn’t you say? And I’d like to try my hand at painting again. This land, this light – ”

  “I’d say you’re all too busy, Alessandra O’Quinn. But, then, so was I . . . once. Visiting the Rancho de Taos when fancy beckoned, picnicking, dashing about on horseback, gossiping, painting, corresponding back home . . . and talking of Indian wisdom, all the while sneering at their superstition. I no longer sneer.”

  * * * * *

  Frieda stirred dry vermouth with gin and passed the glass to Lawrence. He was discoursing on Burke, the latest Commissioner of Indian Affairs, currently in Taos on an inspection tour.

  Peg’s guests, most of whom were members of the Taos Art Society, had gathered in the Rainbow Room, which served as a second living room and library that was lined with rare volumes.

  Alessandra sat, her legs curled under her, on one end of a banco de pared, an adobe bench flowing in a smooth mold from the wall. Jeremy’s tousled head nested in her lap, he stretched out on the bench, asleep. She brushed back a lock from his sunburned cheek. He and Jose had fished in Red Willow Creek after school. Just fished and played. So different from the regulated physical activities Jeremy underwent at Foxhurst.

  How she wished she were a child again. All she knew back then were the alphabet, her multiplication tables and some nursery rhymes. But her lack of knowledge hadn’t bothered her, because she didn’t know what she didn’t know. Things had been easier then.

  Now she knew about lust, about wanting, about dangerous fantasies. Would Manuel Mondragon join the gathering again tonight? With the hope he might and the fear he would, she had awakened twice in the night, her heart pounding. She couldn’t understand this nonsensical tumult that occupied her every thought almost.

  Old Doc Martin interrupted her reverie. Peeping over his half-spectacles, he asked, “Feeling any better since you came out here, gal?”

  By now, her health was an open subject. She smiled apologetically. “Honestly . . . I can’t say I feel any difference yet.”

  “Well, I prescribe my patients a cup of choke cherry tea, daily, if possible.” Then he flashed a Cheshire cat grin and raised his glass, eyeing its contents appreciatively. “But I find my own health most benefited by a strong shot of whiskey. Preferably as often as possible.”

  “What a stupidly cruel thing to do.” Lawrence’s raised voice drew her attention again. “To denounce the tribal elders as half-animal.” Tonight, he wore checkered
trousers stuck in a pair of low cowboy boots and a pleated soft shirt with a thin black tie ribbon. “Surely, the government won’t actually enforce its ridiculous Religious Crimes Act!”

  “What’s that? A mime act?” the Lady Brett asked, tilting her brass hearing trumpet. The British aristocrat had been partially deaf since childhood. She had a long, pointed nose and a weak chin but impressed Alessandra as being very intelligent. Lady Brett was friends with notables such as Katherine Mansfield, John Huxley, and George Bernard Shaw.

  “Crime Act,” Peg enunciated, raising her voice to the Lawrence’s traveling companion.. “Burke told the Indians . . . they must put a stop to their religious ceremonies . . . warned them to continue would be a punishable offense.”

  Though Alessandra was probably more political informed than these artists gathered in the Rainbow Room, she withheld comment on this current plight of the Taos Indians. She would not be drawn into petty religious quarrels. But she was elated to be in their presence. The Taos Society of Artists was more a commercial cooperative, but the tiny Taos art colony was turning into an international art center – and this was her golden opportunity. It seemed the things she had wanted the most – and had gotten – had turn to dust in her mouth; and the catastrophes had more than often been revealed to be blessings. Surely, somehow, she could make her exile here turn out to be just that.

  Bert Phillips asked, “Doesn’t Burke understand that to take away an Indian’s religious ceremonies is to take away his heart . . . leaving him a corpse?” In 1898, the same year Alessandra’s father charged San Juan Hill, the rear wheel of Bert’s horse-drawn surrey had broken down outside Taos. The brilliant desert light, perfect for painting, kept him and Ernest Blemenschine, who like herself had studied art in Paris, at the garden spot protected by mountains.

  And now I, too, have arrived at this garden spot. So, is it mere accident or Fate that has brought me more than half way across the continent to this tiny outpost and these people whom I for so long wanted to emulate. And is it the Cosmic Force of Taos that has brought me to Man? At the ridiculous thought, her heart nevertheless tripped a double beat. Her gaze kept straying to the doorway, both hopeful and fearful he might make an appearance at the social gathering.