Indian Affairs (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  A Packard touring car from Lamy brought her to the plaza. She walked to her beloved empty adobe in the silent, starry night. A large moon, Old Woman Moon who had woven her magic on Man and her at Blue Lake, crossed between the ranges, its light iridescenting the sky from Wheeler’s Peak, twelve miles to the east.

  On still, moonlit evenings like this, everything seemingly transformed into something else. Man had once told her she could only see him when he let her.

  Was the juniper tree Man in one of his shape shifter forms?

  How she envied him. He knew himself, who he was, what he stood for. Self contained, yes . . . but also deep, permanent, and true. Because of him, she had learned what it really was to love and be loved . . . as well as to suffer and to cause another’s suffering.

  Tired, more tired perhaps than she had ever been, she lit a candle, poured a glass of gin, sat at the kitchen table, and stared at Jeremy’s Christmas present, a train set she had found in one of Chinatown’s curio shops.

  Tomorrow she would mail the gift. But she had the night to get through first. And so many lonely nights to come. Every night for the remainder of her life.

  Long after the single candle gutted, she still sat at the table, drinking. Slowly, just enough to numb her feelings. Just enough to induce the insensibility of sleep. When at last her head dropped to her arms on the table and her eyes closed in sleep, dawn’s yellow light flowed over and down Mystery Mountain, bringing its warm solace into her adobe.

  And with the dawn came Man. She felt herself lifted, cradled. She opened her eyes and stared up into his. He gave her his face . . . that mobile, impassioned face.

  “Why?’ she rusked.

  “You called to me.”

  No more than that, no empty words to fill a silence too infused with mystery.

  This, Man, was what she wanted, and she must have given some sign, although she had no awareness of doing it . . . but he caught her to him and sealed their fate with his kiss.

  Her arm wrapped around his neck. Ecstasy overflowed her, and she heard from afar the soft sounds she was making, as if she were singing that ecstasy into his mouth. His smell communicated something elemental like wildfire and sandstorm and flash-flood. Though touching only in a few places, her body felt as if he touched her everywhere. Every cell was stroked with his loving passion.

  Later, he carried her outside into the magic half-light and placed her in front of him, astride his bald-faced pinto. The mare turned its steps toward the familiar direction of the Pueblo, where spirals of pale blue smoke began to ascend from 150 apartments. The plaza below awoke with life.

  As did she.

  * * * * *

  Two days later Alessandra returned to her adobe home only long enough to collect the feminine items necessary for life with Bear Heart. He left home to go fishing. Pretexts for both of them, he knew. Both needed time alone to make the inner adjustment to something miraculous . . . and overwhelming.

  Taking neither bait nor hook, he fished as he had at Blue Lake with Alessandra and as he had all of his life. Kneeling quietly in the shadow of a red willow where the Rio Pueblo curved deeply and silently beneath its thin sheath of ice, he broke its crust and dropped down a small loop of finely woven horsehair. And then he waited patiently for Brother Trout . . . as he had waited for Alessandra.

  He reviewed what he had done, its magnitude and consequences. Beyond the possibility of forfeiting his heritage as his tribe’s religious leader existed the probability of the emotional pain he would cause Mud Woman.

  As the hours passed into afternoon and he stared at the dimly visible fish, he saw what he must do. I cannot escape it. I must go now to Mud Woman and her parents.

  In the plaza, he watched his people go about their work as usual, without recognition that anything had happened out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, he knew they were aware the white woman had been at his adobe for two days. In this, he would receive no censure.

  To forsake his duty, to invalidate his word, to break his alliance with Mud Woman in marriage . . . this was likely when his people would turn from him as their spiritual leader.

  Mud Woman, her parents, and her little sister, playing with her corncob doll, sat in their windowless apartment with patches of chipped linoleum covering its mud floor and listened with inscrutable expressions as he stated simply, “My thoughts, my self, my soul are turned elsewhere. I would not bring this shame upon you in marriage.”

  Wrapped in her red and blue fringed shawl, Mud Woman ducked her head.

  Her mother, sitting shapelessly in her black shawl, averted her eyes.

  The father, his coarse silver-black hair parted in the middle and shining with oil, peered into the fireplace’s flickering flame. At last, he spoke, saying with calm dignity, “Then this is what must be.”

  A great well of compassion for Mud Woman and her family poured out of Bear Heart. In the limitless expanse of the great beyond, in the dark depths of here and now, his actions became but a single, faltering step in the unknown. No road, no tracks or signs pointed the way. He had only faith in the mystery of life. Faith that he lived with the courage of his heart to choose the right way.

  * * * * *

  How good he felt. Bear Heart knelt atop his adobe roof, mending a leak caused by melting snow washing from the mud plaster. He had knotted his blanket about his waist and tied his braids together in back so they would not lash about as he worked. The winter sunshine warmed his skin. The sight of Alessandra crossing his fields toward him warmed his blood. Strange and wonderful, how the smallest movement of her lips playing over his could excite emotions as fiery as piñon kindling and at the same time waft hot air to fuse his soul with hers.

  She raised her hand, displaying the mail she had collected at the Taos post office. This had been her first foray into her world since she had come to live in his the week before. His breath eased from him. He had not realized he had been apprehensive, wondering if that week with him had surfeited some unknown desire she entertained for the oddity, the different, the strange. If he had been merely a diversion for her . . . when she was his purpose in this life.

  She waited below for him to climb down from the roof. Sunlight reflected off her wildly twining hair. He loved to watch the way its strands twisted around his fingers like buffalo gourd vine around mesquite fence. And the color of her hair, almost black like that of his people . . . but gifted with the reddish hue of firelight.

  She stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips. He delighted in this intimate gesture of her own people. His nostrils flared at the very delicate, amber-musky sensual smell of her. All over again, his groin spasmed in that apricot fire of want. Did it never abate? Too vividly, he was discovering love as a painful bondage.

  Grinning, she waved the collection of envelopes and wrinkled her nose. “I had thought the Ordinary World had ceased to exist.”

  His forehead wrinkled in its own code. “You are ready to return?”

  She caught his hand and coquettishly tugged him inside. “I can live out my fantasy here.”

  His head tilted. “Fancy? What’s this fancy?”

  “Fan-tas-ee.” She tossed the mail on the table and drew him over to the wooden bedstead. “I’ll show you.”

  His first wife had not participated in this love-play, and his delight in this unsuspected side of Alessandra went beyond anything he could have imagined. She kissed him, sharing his breath while mapping the broad plain of his cheekbones with her fingertips. They slipped lower to traverse the hillocks of his nipples and the well of his navel. And he lay helpless, a completely new experience for him.

  “This is living my fantasy,” she whispered, loosening his pants drawstring to free him. Her tongue tip darted in and around his fleshy crown. When she circled him with her lip-protected teeth and began to suck, taking him deeper into her throat than he thought was possible, then pulled back, scraping her teeth gently along its throbbing veins, he shuddered with the extraordinary pleasure.

  His thi
rst for her had grown so immense even all the water in Blue Lake could not quench it. “Now I show you,” he growled.

  He captured her hands, pinning them above her head. Then, despite the lust boiling within him, he embraced her tenderly and with his deep inner vitality, he began his loving of her. His energy caressed her with the fluent, varied strokes of warmth and radiance and ferocity and tenderness he was feeling.

  With his touch, his kisses, his words, he composed hundreds upon hundreds of moments of motion designed to keep her at the summit of desire, immeasurable without release. Something he had been unable to bestow that first time, so ravaging had been his need of her.

  Looking down at her, he saw her lips flush red and swell with the heat of passion he had aroused.

  “Is it always like this?” she breathed.

  “No, sometimes there is very much passion,” he joked and was rewarded with her velvety laughter. More seriously, he said, “It can be always like this . . . when willing to center all on most important.” He did not know how to convey to her that loving was an expense of time and an expanse of spirit.

  Once again, her soft, fluttery kisses turned wild, hungry. And he set about that one purpose of taking them through that excruciating, torrid torment, that self-losing crescendo to an almost unendurable play out of gratification.

  * * * * *

  It was the Sunday before Christmas. Bear Heart entered to find Alessandra at the table. For days, she had been writing letters to people everywhere about the Bursum Bill. His nostrils picked up the acrid smell of the India ink she used.

  She glanced up at him with a smile, but he could see the sadness buried deeply behind her bright blue eyes. She missed this special time of year with her son. He propped his ax against the banco and went to pop a few more piñon sticks in the fireplace. “Tonight, at Rancho de Taos, we go to La Posada.”

  “La Posada?” she asked, rising to hold out her hands to the flame. “What is La Posada?”

  He loved her hands. Loved observing how she used them. Loved how, when she didn’t know he was watching, she hid her face in her open palms when close to tears; loved how, when she paced, she ran her hands up and down her arms; and when upset with her work, she wrapped her hands around her shoulders and rocked. Her small, short-fingered hands were her butterfly messengers for her love.

  “Better we go,” he said, smiling.

  He had been taught as a child by the fathers at San Geronimo Church that the Virgin Mary and Joseph had gone from inn to inn looking for a place to stay and that the Virgin was forced to give birth in a barn. In the Ordinary World, a virgin who could give birth were terms that conflicted; but he knew better. Knew in the Non-Ordinary World all possibilities, all possible futures, existed as some awesome alternative.

  He enjoyed the story of Mary and Joseph, especially its enactment by the Hispanic community. That night, a crowd gathered at the chilly plaza of Rancho de Taos as it did every year. Little straps of bells on the restless horses rang pure and true as Anglos, Indians, Hispanics lit candles in anticipation of the arrival of the holy couple costumed in flowing robes. The crowd followed Mary and Joseph as they went from store front to post office to café around the plaza, seeking a room for the night.

  At each stop they would sing, with the crowd’s accompaniment, imploring the owner to let them in. And at each stop, a man dressed as a red devil would sing a growling denial, sometimes stepping from behind a door to reveal himself, at other times crouching from a rooftop. This denial would bring on a round of hisses from the merry revelers . . . until, at last, the holy couple were admitted into the church.

  And then the fun really began. Still carrying their candles, the people followed the holy couple back into the plaza, directly in front of the church where fragrant bonfires burned. All the revelers were treated to biscochitos and the slightly acid, slightly sweet Mexican coffee, then Christmas carols in Spanish.

  Tonight, with Alessandra at his side, his pleasure and awareness intensified. Never had the air been so crystal clear. Their frosty breaths mingled with the thin blue haze of pungent wood smoke. The coffee warmed them wonderfully. And whenever they glanced at one another, their gazes danced, like their candle flames, with the dazzling light of their delight.

  Their first appearance together in public, where he openly gave her his face, was a declaration of his intention. Bear Heart waited and watched, wondering how her people would accept him . . . and how his people would accept her.

  And . . . how will my people accept me?

  Even as a child, he had always been set apart from his friends by his calling, future shaman and soul-keeper for his people. This isolation had robbed him of the easy camaraderie his friends had experienced and still exchanged as adults. Alessandra somehow filled that void, that vital need for connection. And his childhood friends nonetheless had seemed to value his presence and seek him out. Would they still, now that a white woman was at his side? Grandfather Turtle, hobbling on his cane, made his way over to Bear Heart. “You have decided on this woman?” the very old man asked in Tiwa, displaying his toothless gums.

  Bear Heart nodded once. At his side, Alessandra intently watched the exchange.

  The old man’s rheumy eyes had seen through the storms of many men’s passion to the center of their hearts, to their Truth. “In your gentle Pueblo blood runs the wild strain of indomitable spirit. Perhaps in choosing this woman your spirit is also choosing to learn the lesson of submission.” Innocuous words said in a friendly, teasing tone, but beneath them ran a message much clearer.

  His friend Calf Man and his wife threaded their way through the press of merrymakers to show Bear Heart their new baby. Calf Man was short, stodgy, but seemed infinitely taller because of his simple dignity and good heart. Shyly yet proudly, his wife Estrellita passed the infant to Bear Heart.

  “He squalls like his mother,” Calf Man said, casting his scrawny wife a playful glance.

  Bear Heart pushed back the heavy blanket to gaze at the swarthy, sleeping baby and sniffed. Its head smelled fresh, unpolluted by life and dirt.

  Like all women, Alessandra, peering down at the infant, cooed in delight. “Oh, the baby is beautiful.” With tenderness shining in her eyes, she glanced up at him, and he could see in her gaze the painful yearning for another child that either Nature or her husband had denied her.

  Which? He did not know how to ask these things of her. He did not know how to bridge the confusion of their words, their languages. Perhaps with time, they would learn how to communicate, more importantly, those things that could not be spoken. Perhaps with time, with the smooth union of their lives, the harmony of their love, they would learn to communicate answers to such questions in other ways. Not that she would be obedient or compliant as a good Indian wife. And for this he would have to learn to make concessions. Like Grandfather Turtle predicted.

  He was willing. For him, Alessandra was like sunshine falling. Unceasing, warming, life-giving.

  A little later, his sister, a raw-boned woman as inordinately tall almost as he, edged her way toward him and Alessandra. “My sister Juanita,” he said, “and her husband, Reynaldo.” The man flashed a near-toothless grin at Alessandra. Small gloved hands clasped lightly before her, Alessandra smiled back. Obviously, she was trying to keep herself open to his people, and this pleased him more than he would have imagined. His sister’s practiced eye scanned every minute detail of Alessandra, from her Russians boots to her gray woolen coat and peacock-patterned silk scarf wrapped around her throat and lastly settled on the steady gaze the white woman returned. After a long moment, Juanita nodded. A small sigh issued from Bear Heart.

  Cloud Eagle, bow-legged playmate of his youth, stopped to talk with him. And, of course, to scrutinize the white woman for whom Bear Heart had defied both tribe and tradition. “Will you come back to watch the chiffonetas dance in our plaza afterwards?”

  Bear Heart knew Alessandra would enjoy the Indian clowns. The Mud-Heads, a society of men, danced
naked but for breechclouts and moccasins. They wore leather masks with clay nodules tied in bundles, their bodies smeared with black and white clay.

  But Bear Heart also knew, despite Alessandra’s brave smile, she felt highly uncomfortable, lost amidst these strangers and strange customs. Like he, she had given up all that seemed real in the world, all that was counted of value in that world. Given up all that was familiar for something elusive, something that held no promise beyond the moment.

  * * * * *

  “Be still.”

  Man’s smooth brows twitched beneath the tweezers she wielded. “Your plucking hurt more than plucking arrow from flesh.”

  “Hush your grumbling.” She was enjoying herself thoroughly. Enjoying the close moments of intimacy she and her beloved shared. Enjoying the common chores they shared. The chores made their lives seem more normal, as normal as she could call milking a goat normal for her or shoveling coals from the horno or washing their clothes on a rock at a hot springs.

  She glanced down at her hands. In Washington, she would have been ashamed of them, chilblained, her nails rimmed with black from cedar ashes she had removed from the oven that morning. But . . . she was deliriously happy. For the first time in her life she understood true fulfillment.

  The purity and freshness of northern New Mexico sunlight had burned her clean of the waste and sickness of Washington society. The untamed landscape rebirthed her imagination.

  “What goes on in those kiva meetings?”

  “Ouch! What happens is never spoken of. To know what happens is powerful. Dangerous. Like lightning.”

  All her life she had heard that knowledge was power. Facts. Details. Information. Man taught her there was more. His people’s primitive credo affirmed that mystery was more powerful. On the surface, the white man’s approach appeared to offer proof.