Indian Affairs (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She refused to release his hand, to be turned away. She pivoted to face him. “You still didn’t answer my question,” she stalled. “You are a healer and yet you kill the deer for its hide. Why?”

  “Everything is a circle. Living and dying and living again. Drum becomes a living thing with the wood and the hide . . . which must be played to be kept alive.”

  “Well, I must be played to be kept alive,” she blurted.

  “So this is for what you come?”

  “You told me to speak my truth.” Eyes fastened on his dark-of-the-night ones, her words came now in bare, killing slivers of breath. “My body needs your stroking to be kept alive, Man.”

  Her words ignited a microcosm of fireworks in his pupils, then the hot sparks were quickly doused. “I will not be another Tony, isolated from my people by my marriage with a white woman.” His expression was unreadable, but she could not miss the implacable, live-wire tension in his voice. His hand squeezed unbearably on hers, and she thought her very bones would snap. Unaccountably, weirdly, crazily, she found pleasure in the pain he gave her. “Do you not understand this, Alessandra?”

  “I already have a husband.” She stood trembling, feeling as if she would shatter, waiting for his answer.

  He smiled, but just barely. The spider web of wrinkles at the corner of his beautiful black eyes looked more like laugh lines than age lines. He moved aside the wood shell of the drum he had been fashioning and, hunkering down, took her knotted hands, drawing her down onto her knees before him. “You have a husband, but you do not have life. This I can give you, no?”

  Her breath was shallow, uneven. “Yes.”

  Triumph blended with arrogance in his expression. He pulled her to him, twisting her waist until she lay on the fragrant aspen-shaven bed of earth. Then, he lowered his heavy body atop hers, his hands at either side supporting his crushing weight. ”And you do not have pleasure. This I can give you, no?”

  “Yes.” The single word quivered in the minute space between his lips and hers. “But . . . would you kiss me, Man?”

  His brow furrowed. His eyes closed. They snapped open. “No.” His voice rusked like dead leaves blown by a dry autumn wind.

  “Then fuck me!”

  His passionate gaze holding hers a prisoner, he shoved her tweed skirts up around her hips and yanked down her silken undergarment. With an economy of motion, his fingers made a movement that released his erection to slide up between her thighs. At last he truly smiled, emitting a low, husky, purely masculine growl. “I plow your field and give it the moisture of life.”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” She jolted as he screwed his thickness into her narrow, flesh furrowed entrance. Then he began a stroking rhythm with his hips. She wanted more. What she had initially pled for. And he knew it. His mouth fastened on hers, as if he would draw out of her the very seed he was implanting. With infinite patience and pleasure he attended to her. She was dimly aware of the burbling acequia that looped around them. Even that faded, as did the whole world. When his thrusting accelerated, she began to ride his pounding rhythm, crying out in sharp, short breaths. Yes, Man. Yes!”

  The pleasure grew almost too intense. She was hurtling on the crest of an explosive orgasm, when she felt him began to withdraw. Her hands gripped his back, knotting his shirt. “No, no!” she panted. Oh my God, don’t stop.”

  He nodded toward the other side of the noisy acequia. “A visitor comes.” His breath was jagged, as he drew her to her feet, smoothing her skirts down over her hips for her. She turned to see who the visitor was, but not before she glimpsed Man covering his massive erection with his purple loin cloth.

  Tony crossed the bridge and strode toward them. His hooded eyes danced with suspicion from her to Man and back. “Peg sent me to find you. She worried you were lost.”

  “Yes,” she replied with as serene a smile as she could manage, “I was lost, but now I’m found.”

  * * * * *

  In Bear Heart’s hand, the green cedar bough, symbol of undying life, sent up a serpent of thick, sweet blue smoke. It encircled and saturated the young woman laying supine on a rabbit fur-woven blanket on the floor, her feet pointed to the east.

  Should he not succeed in healing her, her friends and kinswomen would wash her body, insert turquoise in all its orifices, and dress it in fine garments. The body would be laid out on the floor with feet pointing to the west, the direction of her final journey. When finally buried, the body would face north, the direction from which their people had come.

  If his heart was right, he might yet heal this woman of child birthing.

  Twelve years before, he had sat just so before his wife. As a child, she too had been taken away to Philadelphia by missionaries. Picked out as a government agent had picked him for the go-away school. He remembered the agent mumbled something about “. . . needing smart kids to meet the kwolta.” His mother and father had not wanted him to go. The Kiva Chief, too, had protested because it was time for Bear Heart’s long initiation period. He had stayed at school long enough to learn he liked the white man’s music and that he hated their alarm clocks, factory whistles, and watches that regimented his time.

  Right after he had been taught how to sign his name, he ran away.

  His wife had been taught how to use a sewing machine. Not a single sewing machine was to be found in the Pueblo. When the Methodist missionary stole her innocence from her, she too ran away.

  But she had been away too long. She had forgotten how to weave her spirit with the community fabric of their tribe. Confused, she had sought answers in the white man’s deadly bootleg whiskey. For a time it had assuaged the utter isolation of being lost between the Indian’s and the white man’s worlds. Then she had given up and walked to the other side of life.

  Wild with grief, his heart had not been right. He had gone out to battle death, not seek life.

  Now, he was wiser, knowing neither world could be completely fulfilled without the other. Harmony in nature blended seemingly conflicting energies. And, most important, only the wounded could possibly heal others.

  He put aside the cedar branch and took up his drum. Tilting back his head, he began his power song. “Hay ya hey, ho hyo, ye ha ya te hey. Oh, painted drum who stand in the forward corner. Talk, sonorous drum. Skin-covered drum. Fulfill my wishes. Hey ya tey.”

  He set his tempo, slow at first, his song repetitive and monotonous. The drum beats arose in low frequency, sending more energy to vibrate through his body. On and on and on. Sweat poured from him. Sun traveled the sky.

  Through hazy time and far distances, he achieved his trance. Riding his wonderful drum, he crossed into another state of consciousness. With reverence and love, he talked with two of his power animals, the male and female black-tailed deer. Approached this way, Nature was prepared to reveal things to him not apparent in the Ordinary World.

  When the sun had been in the sky for nine hours, he received his answer – he returned with the soul he had retrieved. He rose and, ducking his head beneath the blanket, entered the adjoining room to meet with the woman’s anxious husband. “Your wife will live.”

  Bear Heart became ordinary again, became the human, laden with years and drained by demands. Leaving the adobe home, he unexpectedly found Henri and Alessandra’s son waiting for him. “The boy’s mother is ill?”

  He tried to keep the apprehension from his voice, to disguise the yearning for her he could not vanquish. The subtle torture of her nearness fired in him a blazing desire that lay waste the integrity of his calling. As many times as he might possess her it never seemed that it would be enough, seemed only to stoke the raging flames. Never had he known jealousy, and now it consumed him – the shared laughter between her and Henri, the hold her husband had on her, even Tony’s admiration – the small jealousies gnawed away at his self containment. The burning need of her crumbled any higher resolve he had once entertained. He wanted only to crush her to his throbbing heart, to bury his face in the fragrance of her wildly
curling hair. Yet he was required to turn his face from the happiness that was his when around her.

  “No.” Henri smiled. He was wearing his funny round hat. “No, Alessandria is fine. We were just visiting. Peg had asked Alessandra to accompany her in a call upon Elizabeth Harwood. The woman’s husband passed away this morning . . . tuberculosis.”

  “I heard.”

  “Since I volunteered to watch Jeremy, I thought this would be an opportune time to show him your pueblo.”

  Bear Heart hunkered down before Jeremy. He looked so much like his mother, with the the curling mop of dark hair and the same startled deer kind of look and. Nevertheless, the boy glared back, his fear masquerading as anger. What was he afraid of?

  Bear Heart was too tired to search. He pointed toward five youths playing Kick Race in the dusty Pueblo plaza. “They play deer-hide ball. If the ball breaks, Cloud Being will cause fields to run with rain.”

  Jeremy glanced up at the cloudless sky and back to Bear Heart. The boy’s expression barely concealed his skepticism.

  “You think no? Join them. Try to stop rain.”

  Jeremy watched for a moment, then shrugged indifferently. But Bear Heart could see his interest was roused.

  “Why don’t you take a shot at the game?” Henri urged the boy.

  Hands in pockets, Jeremy shrugged again but ambled off toward the rowdy group. The boys were brown and bare, with little flapping loincloths, their black hair bouncing loose about their thin, bony shoulders.

  Bear Heart rose to stand alongside Henri. “Why do you really come today, my friend?”

  “As you guessed, about a mutual friend of ours, his mother.”

  Bear Heart’s gaze followed Jeremy. Obstinately, the child stood off to one side, watching the running and laughing boys. Their manes were still downy soft yet wild all at the same time . . . and would be until after the year and a half of initiation, when they could braid their hair.

  The deer hide ball, filled with seed, rolled close to Jeremy. One of the taller boys motioned for him to kick it back. Wariness flattened Jeremy’s mouth. Then he gave the ball a furious kick.

  He would be drawn into the game.

  Bear Heart looked back to Henri. “I did what you asked. I walk, talk with the boy’s mother. Better your Doc Martin heal her.”

  “Why are you so reluctant, Man?”

  He could claim his responsibility was to his people. To maintain a vigil over the structure of daily pueblo life; keep the ceremonies so that his people were reminded of the role each played in the rhythm of the moon, the tides, the seasons, and of life and death; remind his people that the good of the pueblo relied on each person’s heart to choose the right way.

  But it was more than that. Beyond all else, he had to separate himself from this woman who threatened much disruption in his way of life. Were there any two more lonely people than he and Alessandra? “This woman is of your people.”

  “Then tell me what to do, damn it. I’ll do it!”

  “Those things cannot be told but learned.”

  “So, you’re going to stand by and let the lung weakness kill her?”

  Concern flowed for his distraught friend. “This disease . . . it isn’t killing her. Her brother, father, husband kill her.”

  “What?” Henri squinted at him. “You mean they’re trying to kill her? Like poisoning or something?”

  “Yes. Poison her heart.” For Bear Heart, the true disease was obvious. This woman was a wounded doe. Wounded by the male force that denied her female nature. Her husband and father would steal her identity, that loss of a part of oneself called soul loss . . . seen as a cause of illness and death. Should she not put a stop to this . . . .

  Bear Heart knew conveying this abstraction to Henri would be difficult. Words confined Truth as a corral confined clouds. “Henri, my friend, you do not push a thing before his time . . . as you do not push a plow before earth in winter.”

  Beneath the wire rimmed glasses, Henri’s mouth pressed thin. His freckles paled. “My mistake. I thought you were a man of compassion.” He turned and called to the woman’s son, who had, at last, lost himself in play. “Jeremy, time we started back.”

  * * * * *

  “Shit,” Alessandra muttered.

  Jeremy looked up from his reading of Huckleberry Finn. Stretched before her tufted chair, he lay prone on the turquoise plank floor. “You said ‘shit’, Mom.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He grinned. “Yes, you did.” He must have seen the worry in her eyes, because his grin retracted. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Nothing,” she said, embarrassed by her lapse, and unable to take her eyes from Brendon’s letter. “Just some unexpected news.”

  He cast her a ‘yeah, I bet’ look but went back to reading.

  The words before her faded. She put down the letter, rose and walked to the kitchen window, now tinted red by the sun’s dying light. On the way home from the Harwood house and before stopping at Peg’s for Jeremy, she had swung by the post office. The Taos post office was a center of gossip, news, invitations, and delivery by mouth of myriad messages.

  When the postmaster handed her the envelope from Brendon, she had become excited, thinking he was responding to her letter inquiring about the BIA and Burke.

  Not so.

  Brendon had made arrangements to travel to Taos. He’d be arriving in three weeks. In three weeks, he would learn of her deception. In three weeks, she would lose Jeremy. She had thought she had, at least, until the middle of June before she had to surrender him up to Brendon.

  She could refuse.

  She shook her head, clearing it. No, no way she could fight Brendon and her father and the power of their influence.

  Brendon’s boldly penned words came again across her mind. “I have a meeting with Senator Bursum I most attend in Santa Fe. Besides, I must see you, if only for a few days. I miss you more than I ever imagined possible.”

  I can’t let Jeremy be taken from me. He’s too young. I’m not ready yet. Please, God, not yet.

  What if she hid Jeremy? Sent him off to stay with Mary and Blumy or crippled old Andrew for a few days? No, sooner or later the truth would come out. Man had made her see that if she were to truly live, her own truth must come out.

  At first, she thought her tears blurred the sight of Mystery Mountain. Then, she realized it had started to rain, a rare happening on the high desert. The damp dust of the spring storm spiced the air. On the walk back home that afternoon, the teal sky had been empty of clouds. God, I could use a cigarette.

  “Gee willakers, Mom, I don’t believe it!” Jeremy ran to join her at the window. He pressed his face and palms against the panes.

  Arms folded, she glanced down at his dark curly hair. “Believe what? That it’s raining?”

  “Just like Man told me today.”

  “He told you it would rain?”

  Jeremy’s upturned face wore an earnest expression. “Man said if the deer-hide ball some Indian kids and I were kicking around broke . . . it held seeds . . . then it would rain today. Mom, just before the game ended, I kicked the ball . . . and it broke.”

  “Really.” She looked out the window. Tears ran down the glass, distorting the stalks of hollyhocks in their long rows by the outhouse. “Henri didn’t tell me you two had visited the Pueblo.”

  “Yeah, it was swell.”

  She didn’t bother to reprove his language, not after her own gaffe. Instead, she crossed to the back door that opened onto the portal and her hammock. Standing in the doorway, she watched the rain gush from the adobe’s canales. With Jeremy leaving, that rain might as well be the blood gushing from her heart.

  Jeremy followed her. “Mom, did you ever play in the rain, I mean, way back when you were a girl?”

  A smile worked itself from her quivering lips. She couldn’t’ bring herself to tell him yet he would be leaving and soon. “You mean a thousand years ago? Yes, but I’ve forgotten how after all that time.”<
br />
  “Tom Sawyer walked barefoot in the rain.”

  “Well, you’re not, kiddo.”

  Disgruntled, he shuffled back into the house and to his book.

  After he went to bed, she walked outside again to stand beneath the portal. Rain drip-dropped irregularly from the canales. The dark and chilly night wept with her heart.

  What was it Man had said about dancing? That it was a powerful form of magical ritual? If I danced, could I summon up the power of my spirit?

  She wondered if that power would be strong enough to thwart her husband from taking Jeremy back with him.

  Abruptly, she stepped out into the drizzle. Eyes closed, she turned her face up to the night’s tears and began to dance. One hand extended the hem of the black day dress she had worn to call upon the Widow Harwood. The other arm encircled the shoulders of her phantom partner.

  Yes, it was a day to mourn.

  One-two-three. One-two-three. One-two-three. To Strauss’s “The Last Waltz”, she circled the well, her eyes glancing down. Its trim of zinnias, daisies and cosmos all drooped their heads in sympathy with her sorrow. One-two-three. One-two-three. One-two-three.

  The rain plastered her hair against her neck and weighted her dress. Panting, she rested against the well’s rocks. Hidden away, suspended in that desert refrigerator, were Coca-Cola bottles as well as butter and milk.

  And that jug of Taos Lightning.

  She leaned over, drawing on the rope, pulling forth the nectar of the Gods, the potion that offered temporary amnesia of all grief.

  How long have I neglected that gift? Five weeks?

  Five weeks too long.

  The cork reluctantly tugged free. She swallowed the potent relief. Another swallow and she was ready to dance. Bet I could out dance any of Man’s people! Laughing softly, she set the jug on the well’s adobe brick and resumed her shuffling sway. One-two-three. The waltz melody hummed in her mind and on her lips. One-two-three. One-two-three. Her bare feet sloshed through the rivulets that ribboned the sand. One-two-three. One-two-three. One-two-three.

  She danced until she collapsed.