Indian Affairs (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  But was materialism actually a sign of advanced culture? Was personal achievement the measure of self worth?

  She realized she was undergoing a philosophical and personal anarchism.

  That next morning, she walked to Peg’s. The cold congealed the fallow earth. Ice lazed heavily on the giant spruce and cork bark fir. A wagon creaked by, driven by a Mexican selling wood. A few shivering Americans braved the chill to go to the Plaza for their daily groceries. At a garage off Taos Plaza, a teenage boy in an aviator cap tinkered on the engine of a thrashing machine.

  When exactly did I come to love the slow tenor of life in the northern New Mexico? The outside, ordinary world may hurry on, as usual, but she preferred her wonder world.

  The Indian Defense Association bundled around the fireplace, hands cupping steaming coffee. “It’s time to prepare something greater than a denunciation of the Bursum Bill,” Alessandra told them.

  “And that would be?” Bert asked?

  “Although the government is committing a multitude of horrific violations against the very people it promised to protect, we need to focus on one issue only. That would be keeping Blue Lake from the Department of Interior’s clutches.”

  “Blue Lake?” Both hands braced atop the knob of his cane, Andrew leaned forward. “I disagree. We want to garner sympathy for the Indians. Concentrate on their poverty and inhumane treatment by the BIA. Some backwoods lake means nothing to the American people.”

  “Our colonies were settled because people wanted freedom of worship,” she countered. “Blue Lake is the Taos Indian’s holy shrine, and the loss of it combined with Bursum’s bill preventing their religious ceremonies will inflame Americans as nothing else could.”

  Peg nodded emphatically. “If we can get enough important people to sign the petitions, then we’ll proceed to publish it widely.”

  “I can contact the president of the Lions Club,” Bert offered.

  “I’m thinking bigger fish,” Alessandra said. “People’s names who will strike fear in the hard hearts of the Department of Interior.”

  Doc Martin grinned. “How about Al Capone? I’d say he and his goons have struck fear in the heart of Chicago.”

  “That’s all we need,” Andrew said, “a Molotov cocktail tossed into the Senate chambers.”

  “I was thinking of signers more along the line of creative luminaries,” Alessandra said. “You know writers, musicians, other artists you know. Peg you’re friends with Cather and O’Keefe. With D.H. heading up the list, surely — ”

  “Lawrence would never consent to having his name on the same list as Cather’s,” Peg said. “Remember, her One of Our Own received a Pulitzer nomination . . . and he didn’t.”

  “How about Jimmy Walker?” Bert asked. “Will Rogers? Had a drink with both at the Algonquin. That’s reaching literati proportions, isn’t it?”

  Blumy snorted. “Will Rogers’ signature would get tossed out on the grounds he’s half Indian.”

  “Or maybe lauded,” Alessandra said, “on the grounds he’s half Indian.”

  Impatience urged her to end the meeting and return to her Indian lover. Man, with his steady, faithful gaze. Man, with his ability to pour his love into her with such ease and ecstasy.

  A timetable ironed out, she adjourned the meeting, yet was the last to leave. At the door, Peg bantered with her, “You are positively radiating, my dear. Your eyes sparkle, you’ve put flesh on those bones and a lovely rose color to your cheeks. It couldn’t be Doc Martin’s choke cherry tea, could it?”

  Alessandra dimpled. “Nothing so mundane. It’s called primal passion. But I’m sure you know all about it.”

  A smug smile eased Peg’s stringent, square face. “Ahhh, yes. The erotic realm of our Indian lovers. Now, they are the real artists . . . at lovemaking.”

  Oh yes! How fortunate I am to be numbered among the few women to experience the Indian’s patience and inventiveness in that ancient art form.

  * * * * *

  “I want to wash your hair,” she announced.

  Just returned from the mountains with a burro load of wood, Man stacked it beneath the ramada. January’s phallic icicles dangled from rafters alongside the suspended spearmint, yarrow, and garlic, dried herbs to flavor the food and heal the body.

  He stared down at her beautiful, upturned face. Her expression looked both mischievous and mysterious. Her dreamlike quality belied her ferocity when cornered. Her swiftly changing moods, complex and unfathomable, never failed to divert him. “What for do you want this?”

  She glanced away, across the fields speckled with snow, and said softly, wistfully, “Peg told me that when a Pueblo man and woman are . . . courting . . . they declare their intentions by . . . well, the woman combs and washes her intended’s hair.”

  This act of great intimacy performed publicly . . . he wasn’t sure he understood why she wanted this. Was it her need to be respected as his chosen? Something to do with her society or culture he could not discern?

  He nodded. “We will do this thing.”

  Two days later, after dawn, when the men trotted briskly down to the Rio Pueblo to take their ritual morning dips, Bear Heart and Alessandra walked to the river, he in his blanket, she in her coat and carrying a pail. The morning sparkled in its coldness, the wind rattling the dry, tawny cornstalks. Neither of them talked. His spirit sought to support her but knew not how.

  In sight of women carrying water jars on their heads and three laughing children astride a single braying burro, Bear Heart sat cross-legged while Alessandra knelt behind and slowly unbraided his hair. Her fingers trembled as they raked his long, black hair into a waterfall cascading down his back.

  Looking over his shoulder, he reached around and caught her chilled hand. “What for are you afraid?”

  “What for am I afraid?” she echoed with a nervous laugh. Epileptic tension brightened her eyes. “Five-hundred Indians are watching from their apartments for this white woman to do something foolish.”

  “Five-hundred Indians watch to learn how white woman does it.”

  At that, they both started laughing. The tension eased, he released her hand and, while she dipped the pail in the stream, turned his gaze ahead, to the apartments on the stream’s south side where an old, blanket-wrapped man had taken up his post on the snow-covered roof top to work his magic.

  Gingerly, Alessandra dampened his hair. With the soapweed he had provided, she worked a lather into the wet strands with quick graceful hands. His eyes closed at the sensuous, relaxing sensation. “Hmmm, this is good.”

  “When we go back home,” she said, combing the tangles from his long streaming black hair, “you’re going to do this for me.”

  The teasing he heard in her voice relieved him. “That . . . and more,” he responded in a lighthearted tone. Fervently, however, he wanted this wonder and mystery of their love to be everlasting.

  He willed it so.

  * * * * *

  Pottery, well baked, could withstand the heat from cedar coals and the forced draft of the goatskin bellows Bear Heart used. When the heat grew sufficiently intense, he poured an ingot of molten silver into the trough he had chiseled into the sandstone slab.

  Jewelry making was not one of his best skills. Perhaps that was why he chose to make the bracelet rather than fashion a gift of leather. Leather would have been too easy. It did not require his complete focus, his complete self.

  When he judged the silver cooled and hardened enough, he lifted the bracelet with a pair of old pliers and held it in position on the anvil while he slowly, carefully hammered the piece into the first semblance of the shape he intended. At frequent intervals, in order to avoid cracks in the metal, the bracelet had to be warmed again.

  As he fashioned the bracelet for Alessandra, he wondered if he was trying too much to control their paths rather than let them move with the rhythms that flowed between the worlds. Control defied the risk of being open to the gifts of the divine Trickster.

&nbs
p; When the shaped silver was ready for ornamentation, he worked with a three-cornered file to tediously etch the design of a bear’s paw. A good feeling filled him, a feeling that love could overcome even what the Trickster would steal.

  * * * * *

  With his thumbnail, Bear Heart scored the match and put candlewick to flame. The light reflected off the silver bracelet on Alessandra’s wrist. He had savored the humility before her childlike delight at his gift. Her reaction had been contagious, and soon afterward they had laughed and rolled on the buffalo rug. The child play had turned to love play that had wreaked seizures through her body time and again and then convulsed his.

  “Your work, it need light,” he said.

  Alessandra glanced up from the papers she read, petitions she called them, and smiled. He detected a fleeting strain at the corners of her curving lips.

  She had been working long hours for more than a moon’s passage on this Bursum thing . . . this thing about which neither of them would talk. He had hoped her walks to Peg’s house, where her friends worked on the Bursum thing, would make her life seem less isolated with him.

  He took up his drum and began to play, soft, insistent stroking that called for the body to relax.

  “After I visited with Peg today, I walked to the Pueblo,” she said, picking up her pen to make scribbling marks that he could not decipher.

  His hands ceased their rhythmic slapping. His eyes roamed over her blank expression, waiting. Something was coming.

  “Peg teaches knitting to your people. I thought I’d try to teach painting. I carted canvas, brush, and paint two miles to the Pueblo.”

  He nodded. “That is good.”

  She dropped the pen and swung around to face him. “That is not good. That is stupid, Man. What makes me so arrogant . . . “ she waved an impatient hand, “ . . . so, so goddamned blind to others that I’d think I could teach people who already paint as well or better than I?”

  Alarm raised chilling prickles on his scalp and skin. That was not what this was about. He said nothing. Waited. Soon she would say what was truly in her heart.

  She got up, started pacing, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “What makes me so goddamned blind to think that I could fit in with your people! So goddamned blind to think your people would accept us as a couple!”

  He put aside the drum, rose, and took her by the shoulders to stop her wild pacing. “My people accept us. What for do you think all this?”

  Her jaw clenched. Her eyes were bleak. “They don’t accept you, Man! Not as their spiritual leader!”

  So this was what her agitation was about.

  “When Calf Man’s son reaches his twelfth Man Moon,” she demanded, “do you truly think Calf Man will bring his son to you for his year and a half’s spiritual tribal instruction in the kiva? Do you really think Grandfather Turtle or Cloud Eagle will consult you for spiritual guidance in this holy war to win back Blue Lake?!”

  Consult? He did not understand this word. But he understood the direction of her thoughts. Over the past three months, he also had divined the result of his taking this white woman for his own. Strong, she was but determined to have things her way. She would not forget a slight . . . so how to approach her on her terms?

  She tried to push away, but he wouldn’t release her. “Man, this thing between us . . . it’s just chemistry. That’s all. After a few years . . . .”

  “Chemistry?”

  “You know . . . .” she looked around the room, trying to find the right word. “Uh, magnetism, eh . . .”

  “Magnetism?” He wanted passionately to understand her, to communicate with her beyond the surface of words.

  She turned on him. Her eyes blazed. “All right, magic!”

  And he had succeeded. He smiled. His brows she had plucked smooth of hair, rose. “Ahh, magic!”

  “Magic can’t make everything right! Not always. Not everything.” Tears glistening in her eyes, she shoved free of him. “Don’t make this harder for me than it already is.”

  In her, he perceived a strange, female power and had no means to defend his thoughts. “I know one truth, Alessandra. This Truth, it is faith in magic of life. Love is magic.” His fingers thumped his chest. “I keep this Truth here. I believe in its power.”

  Veins stood out beneath the delicate skin of her temples. Her jaw clenched and unclenched, as though she prepared herself for battle. She whirled from him, grabbed her coat, papers, and some scattered personal items. “Obviously, you are too backwards to see the real truth . . . that your do-nothing principle is a sham for laziness and fear! Somewhere, sometime you have to ‘do’ and not just ‘be’!”

  She got within arms-length of the door latch. His hand clamped her shoulder, spun her around, and thrust her up against the door so hard her breath exhaled in a whoosh. Unfamiliar anger exploded in him, and he knew it had come to beat back this also unfamiliar feeling of fear. A fear that chilled his blood like shards of ice blizzarding through his veins. He pinioned her wrist to the door slats, and her coat and papers and things slithered to the floor. His eyes blistered her startled face. “You don’t speak the truth of your heart,” he growled.

  She swallowed hard, blinked, then hissed, “There’s no better way to say this than to be blunt. It’s been entertaining, amusing, living with you these past couple of months. But I’m bored, Man. Do you understand? Bored to tears!”

  He flinched. But he refused to let her heart-killing words have their way. His hands cinched her small wrists brutally. “This thing you will not do!”

  “Watch me.”

  “That is what I have been doing since first you met my eyes at Peg’s. Watching you. I still do.” He saw her eyes flare, her gulp, and hope flared in him. He pressed his advantage. “ Your heart is not right with your mind. You cannot do this thing, Alessandra.”

  Her beautiful bow-shaped mouth flattened, and he could see she was struggling for dominance. Then her lids narrowed. “Try to stop me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alessandra lay curled tightly on the plank floor in a fetal position, as if she could ultimately reduce herself to the embryo state, safe in the darkness of the womb, safe from unbearable, unrelenting pain. The glowing embers of the adobe’s dying fire refused her that comfort.

  “Oh, Goddddddd!” she howled. Rolling supine, flinging her arms wide in a martyr’s cross and bruising her fists, she gave way to the torrent of dammed tears. They flooded over her lids onto her face, pooling in the shells of her ears, saturating her matted hair, staining the floor. Why did doing the right thing demand the death of hopes, dreams, all possibility of love fulfilled?

  Her naïve assumptions that their love could be different, could survive the brutal attack of the practical, ordinary demands of the establishment had been unrealistic. Foolish. Futile. She could not stand at Man’s side and watch him lose face because of his commitment to her. He was born to lead his people, and step aside she must.

  She needed to get away. To escape the talons of northern New Mexico’s heartbreaking beauty. So out of the ashes, the phoenix took wing.

  * * * * *

  Her correspondence with Stella Atwood was enabling the Indian Defense Association to get on its feet. If progress were to be made, if the Taos Indians, were to be allowed to keep their religious ceremonies and Blue Lake, then more strategic plans had to be discussed, mapped out, carried through. To do battle, let alone plan it with Man so near and yet so far out of reach, meant flight.

  Lying in the train compartment’s lower tourist berth, she stared out the window at the moonlight-silvered Great Salt Lake, stretching out of eyesight. Since she could not see the narrow train tracks, it seemed the train sailed across an ocean. Its gentle shift and sway lent reality to the illusion until she gave awareness to the steady, persistent clackety-clack of steel against steel. That mechanical sound destroyed the illusion . . . and reinforced the reality that she was being taken farther and farther from . . .

  What was that Spa
nish word? . . . La Querencia, that was it. The soul’s comfort, the heart’s joy. Where one was drawn by an attraction without logic, yet with an undeniable force. La Querencia. That was Man and northern New Mexico.

  She tried to stay awake, determined to see the entire width of the Great Salt Lake. Such things meant something to her now. The distances of the Southwest had taught her well, working attentiveness into her soul.

  However, before the train completed its crossing, she fell asleep, her cheek on her braceleted wrist. When she awoke still feeling tired and even more grief, she chided herself and hurriedly dressed before the train pulled into in San Francisco.

  The effervescent Stella met her with a rickshaw. A charming little Chinese man, trotting with the two-wheeled cart in tow, took them to the wharves. Covered with long warehouses, the docks stretched into the bay waters, ships tied up on each side. The nearby fish markets reeked of octopus, lobster, shrimp, and sea turtles.

  The lively dock activity and salt air revived some of Alessandra’s energy until she looked beyond the wharves at a military prison squatting on Alcatraz Island. Its morbid, forbidding presence completely vanquished the bay’s potential beauty. She shivered, recalling her mother-in-law’s fate . . . and possibly her own. Was Brendon really capable of doing something so unthinkable?

  “We’re having lunch with Dr. Frear,” Stella explained as they boarded a ferry steamer for the trip across the bay to the town of Berkley. “He was a doctor posted with the military on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. Now he’s regent of the University at Berkley and intensely interested in the Indians’ plight.”

  Dr. Frear’s home, a mansion, had been built with materials brought around the Horn in sailing ships a hundred years before. Perched on a hill, its estate was guarded by a high wrought-iron fence and two life-size lions of Italian marble crouching at either side of the entrance gate.

  A studious, balding man, bent and nearing seventy, Dr. Frear’s smile reflected his youthful spirit. He radiated the same driving force as Stella. They shared a light repast of tea and finger sandwiches . . . which Man had once labeled dead food. Alessandra shook herself to focus on Dr. Frear’s words.