Indian Affairs (historical romance)

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She paced the family library much as she had a scant year before. “I have a right to see my son.” Jeremy was home for the spring holidays, and she couldn’t miss the opportunity.

  One hip propped on the edge of his desk, Brendon watched her with a calm, cold expression. But she could see the pain in his eyes. “Jeremy’s asleep. Besides, the sight of you will just upset him.”

  She whirled. “Upset him? Where do you come off with an asinine remark like that! Dear God in heaven, I’m his mother! You can’t keep — ”

  “Look, Alessandra, if you’ll just call off this farce, this campaign against the Bursum Bill . . . and move back home, I’ll do everything I can to — ”

  Her lethal look stopped him in mid sentence. “I want sole custody of our son.”

  Surprise flickered. “No court in the land will give you sole custody.”

  From his wheelchair, her father stared at them, his mouth set grimly beneath the mustache’s masculine display. “Alessandra, if you go through with this Indian sideshow, you’ll be laughed out of the Senate chambers.”

  Brendon drew a deep, steadying breath, then plunged in, as if unwillingly playing his trump card. “You see, Ali, a mentally unstable woman is hardly capable of caring for a child. Especially an ailing woman who can’t even support herself.” He paused for effect. “Now why don’t you give up this . . . this obsession . . . and find a more suitable pastime?”

  How did I ever think him attractive? Handsome, yes. But far from attractive. In years to come, the heaviness of his character would manifest in the heaviness of his body.

  “I am no longer dying.”

  Paul, in white shorts and shirt sat on the other end of the desk and juggled tennis balls. “The rest of us in this room are already dead.”

  “For God’s sake, Paul,” Brendon whirled and, eyeing the balls, snapped, “do you mind?!”

  Paul caught all three and tossed one to her. “Ball’s in your court, Sis.”

  She caught the ball one-handed then stared at the white sphere. World without beginning, without end. That is Man to me. Wherever I go, he is there. At least, I feel his presence everywhere around me.

  Her careful and silent study fixed next on Brendon. He shifted into a defiant stance. Finally, she said “You overlook a small detail. Women now have the right to a political voice. They won’t stand for such misogynic tactics. I’ll defeat you and Bursum . . . and get Jeremy back.” She hurled the ball at Brendon’s chest. Hard. “Ball’s in your court.”

  “Bravo, Sis!” Paul called out as she headed for the front door.

  Well past midnight at Washington’s genteel 14th Street boarding house, she lay exhausted in the dark on the narrow bed, arm thrown across her forehead. Again and again she reviewed the reality of her situation. Despite her bravado and her persistence, she would be defeated.

  Brendon held the winning hand. Governors, priests, and other elder statesmen from seventeen Pueblo tribes, arriving tomorrow by train, would make a sidesplitting spectacle, not a powerful image of the peril their people faced. And she would appear a certifiable lunatic. Just what Brendon wanted. The final act that would enable him to have her committed any time he should so choose. Filing the legal papers, followed by her quiet disappearance from society, could be easily and efficiently arranged. She didn’t, couldn’t, believe he actually would do such a thing. But his ego had been terribly mangled. It was obvious to her he was hurting – and yet struggling to do what he thought was the right thing. But how well did she know him anymore?

  Damnable helplessness weighed her down. She couldn’t even pay the weekly rent on her boarding house room. The Women’s Club picked up that tab. And now she was chairman of its Indian Welfare Division. A woman who couldn’t manage the welfare of her own child. The little she made paid for the attorney Finefeld and his affluent lifestyle, so he could file a custody suit to get Jeremy back. Even Finefeld had clarified her chances were slight.

  Does Jeremy miss me? Or has Brendon managed to supplant memory of me so completely that my son is unaware of my absence? What about when he is afraid of the dark?

  Her chest heaved in an effort to suppress the tidal wave of pain. “Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she whispered against the void of darkness.

  Out of that darkness a soft solace moved over her, enveloped her, dispelled the heaviness. Out of the darkness came a gentle radiance. She gave herself over to Man’s chimerical voice, filled with its loving passion. Was it her imagination . . . the melodic words that sang softly over her weary body, bathing their ointment of healing music in every pore, every muscle, every artery? She imagined herself at peace, enfolded in his arms and gave herself up to sleep.

  “Come to me. Come to me. Come to me.”

  * * * * *

  Through the locomotive’s hissing steam, the Pueblo Indians descended the coach steps. Garbed in their garish, striped blankets, the brown-skinned men attracted a curious crowd. Some rudely laughed at the bewildered Indians who clutched their Spanish and Lincoln canes as if they were magic wands that could protect them against the terrors of the unknown.

  Alessandra hung back from greeting the Pueblo elders. The heat of embarrassment surged beneath her skin. Finally, more shamed by her reaction, she pushed through the gawking men, children, women and newspapermen with their photographers to join the cluster of bewildered Indians. Several of them were the leaders she had spoken to on her New Mexico tour.

  “Welcome,” she said to John de Jesus Romero, the old Taos chief. He was her one link with Man. She wanted to ask him about Man but held her tongue.

  John Romero politely nodded and she turned to acknowledge the other Pueblo leaders. Remembering to use few words, she let her heart speak for itself. With returning dignity, they gave her their faces and she sighed in relief.

  The crowd parted as she ushered her stoic entourage to the numerous waiting taxis. Safely ensconced at the boarding house, she gathered them in its parlor and outlined the agenda for the following week: meetings with the local Women’s Club, the Petroleum Club, the Red Cross, the Corinthian Sailing Association, the Federation of Garden Clubs, the Ambassadors League.

  They had three weeks to tell their own stories to the public of the Department of Interior’s hideous system of Indian management. Three weeks before the House Committee met for Appropriation Hearings.

  Her planned march to the Mall turned into a disaster. Washington’s thick, smoky humidity suffocated the Puebloans. Traffic piped carbon monoxide gas in blue clouds. Summer in the city turned its pavement smoking hot, sucking the air from the Indians’ burning lungs. Becoming sick, they hardly looked the heroic figures she wanted to present. In their eyes shone their longing to return to the pure, bright vastness of their homeland. Or what had been their homeland . . . if the white man won once again.

  At the boarding house, she sat with the Indians, as sick at heart as they.

  “Why people live this way?” they asked. “What for? How they stand it?”

  She had no answer. Worse, these Pueblo leaders elicited, not sympathy, but ridicule for their simple manner, their broken English, their rustic bearing. Nevertheless, she willed herself to continue the crusade.

  The next morning, she sat at her desk, soft pencil in hand, paper waiting . . . but no words came. She longed to see Man, the source of her happiness. More importantly, though, she needed him here to help in the last ditch effort. But what to write? He could not read, if she did. And she didn’t want Peg to have to read her letter to him.

  She thought about what Man had tried to convey to her. When the heart is right . . . when the heart is right, all manner of providence unfolds to help. She put her pen to paper and wrote only three words: Come to me.

  * * * * *

  Bear Heart accepted the envelope from Doc Martin and stared at the lines as incomprehensible to him as petroglyphs had been to Alessandra. Thanking the old white man, who waited to see what he would do, he turned his back on the doctor, th
e ramada, and his half-fashioned drum shells. His long stride carried him along the Rio Pueblo up into the foothills and higher still . . . up Mystery Mountain, toward Blue Lake.

  Night engulfed him by the time he reached the lake, the temple of his people. Though worn out by the ascension, he made a fire to purify himself with the smoke of the sacred cedar. Quiet and calm, he sat until he could hear his spirit speak. It thanked the lake, the trees, the mountain. Mother Earth and Father Sky.

  Then he unfolded the letter from its rumpled, dirt-smeared and sweat-stained envelope.

  From across the vast empty space between them, her feelings spoke from the indecipherable markings. He gave himself up to the mystery of her spirit speaking to his through an outpouring of vital energy, of blood, bones, and nerves converted into the line markings on paper, transmitted across the breadth of a continent. He accepted the mystery of how he translated those lines without use of eye nor ear. This was the mystery of love beyond logic and reasoning.

  At midmorning the next day, he returned home to Mud Woman. For a long time he watched her barefoot trampling of the wet clay spread on a damp canvas she had acquired at El Rincon Trading Post. She stepped first on the edge, then into the center, mashing and mixing the clay and tuff.

  Ever the dutiful wife, she said nothing at his reappearance without explanation as to his absence. Beneath the dingy gingham dress, her stomach barely betrayed the new life she carried. Bits of corn silk littered her black hair. With the outside of her wet foot, she picked up tuff and pushed it into the clay. Her pottery was being snapped off the shelves at the Rincon Trading Post. She was proud of her work, and he was happy for her.

  He began collecting his things and felt it when she glanced at him. “I go to the home of the Great White Father,” he said. “I will return before the passing of two months’ moons.”

  She bit her lip, nodded, and returned to mashing the clay.

  He laid aside his white blanket and crossed to her. Kneeling, he wrapped his arms around her slender form, pressed his head against her mounding stomach and gently kissed it. “You are most revered of women, Mud Woman.”

  “I would rather be most loved by you.”

  He would rather that, too. Would rather be the centered, unfragmented person he was before Alessandra walked through Peg’s doorway. Most of all, he would rather be true to his belief of doing no harm. He sighed. “That is a choice not given to us.”

  Her dark, liquid brown eyes looked into his soul. “The fire in our home will still be burning when you return.”

  * * * * *

  When Alessandra saw the massive expanse of bone and flesh clad all in white at the train station, life flooded back into her. Every strand of hair, every artery, every blood cell opened to life as the flower does to sunlight.

  “I come,” Man said

  “I see.” His gentle smile and hungry eyes made her feel giddy, lighthearted.

  “What for do you stay here?” he asked after they were settled into a Hansom cab. She thought the two-wheeled, covered carriage pulled by a horse would be something he could readily identify with, but the Hansom plodded along behind a double-decker bus belching fumes. Even the poor horse threw its head side to side in protest.

  Man filled the carriage, his presence overflowing into her. They sat so close she could see the new growth of brow hair that had appeared since his journey to her had begun.

  “I stay because here I have purpose. Here is my son.”

  “Yes,” he said after a moment, “children is good. Mud Woman is carrying our child.”

  A knife twisted in her breast. “I see.” Then, “I’m happy for you.” She tried to evoke Man’s detractions. Unyielding. Unpredictable. Uneducated. In the awkward silence that followed, she remembered the gift. She held out the sack. “Saltwater taffy candy.”

  He grinned. From the very wise man she respected and loved, he reverted to a small boy popping wads of candy in his mouth. Oh how she loved the little boy, too. Loved how he fully focused on the moment. Fully lived in it, like right now, giving his attention only to the candy. Its sweet flavor, its sticky substance, its sugary smell. He had given that same riveted attention to his loving of her body.

  The boarding house guests stared as she walked beside him upstairs to one of the three rooms she had reserved for the Puebloans.

  “Do you like it?” she asked, as he stood in its center and surveyed it.

  He looked like an animal alert, sensing his surroundings. “Too much noise.”

  The identical sensation had overwhelmed her, also, when she first returned East. The tooting horns of constant traffic outside. The radio blaring across the hall. The toilet flushing next door in the floor-shared bath. Everything crowded in on her. She understood his confusion and felt sad but not sorry for asking him to experience her world.

  He turned to her. “What now?”

  Love me until I forget all else. Forget Brendon’s betrayals, Jeremy’s absence, the lackluster crusade.

  “The Pueblo elders are at the Museum of Natural History now. Tonight at dinner, we’re meeting with a lawyer named Finefeld and a lobbyist hired by the Women’s Club’s local chapter.”

  “Lobbyist? What is this?”

  “Jack Middleton. He mingles with our country’s elected politicians. Convinces them of the wisdom in supporting Indian rights. The Women’s Club has raised $3,500 to present our case.”

  He moved closer, staring down at her upturned face. She felt her body, every bone, trembling, as though Capitol Hill rocked with an earthquake.

  “Our case?” he asked. “You are one of us after all, Alessandra?”

  “I called you to me. That should answer your question.”

  “You are part of me.”

  Not “I love you.” Indians didn’t use those words. It was a given. Understood. And that was enough for her. Man was married. So was she. They looked deep into each other’s eyes, reaching toward the other’s shining spirit, which communicated from the shell it temporarily inhabited.

  * * * * *

  Too soon, the tribal elders returned to the boarding house. They were shepherded by an agitated Agnes Wainwright, chapter president of Washington’s Women’s Club and its historian, a timid little mouse of a woman. The various Puebloans greeted their newest arrival with great enthusiasm, as if Man were intimately acquainted with their clans people and carried news from each. The soft, liquid tones of their native language reminded Alessandra of the warmth, sincerity of these people and all they represented.

  All she had left behind.

  But she had Man, for the present, at least.

  The buxom Wainwright launched into description of the afternoon’s meeting. “Awful!” she whispered, darting a look to see if she had been overheard. “No one paid the slightest heed to what I was saying. We shower our congressmen with telegrams and letters. We tread the halls of Congress, pleading, cajoling, and reasoning . . . and what happens? They don’t take us seriously. They think we’re putting on some gratuitous performance.”

  “Then we go back tomorrow,” Alessandra said, “and threaten retaliation at the voting box.”

  She made certain Man led the Indian delegation. Made sure reporters and photographers were there to record his noble profile with its impassive dignity, the sculpted dark face with its Roman nose and deep-lidded intelligent eyes.

  Like the other Puebloans, he flinched at the flashes, believing the photograph stole part of his soul. Alessandra was not sure his opinion was entirely unwarranted. Nevertheless, she intended to one day paint his portrait.

  When questions were asked, she occupied Agnes Wainwright so Man could speak. Speak he did, if only a few words. But those few words were eloquent for their simplicity.

  “My people will close her doors to the outside world, will starve in protest of Bursum Bill.”

  and . . .

  “When my people go into all-night kiva watch, we pray not just for our people, but for entire world, every person, every creature. Th
is our duty.”

  and . . .

  “Our spiritual life, it is not shaped by your sharp religious fences. It is more open spiritual life of all people. We all are one.”

  But the congressmen would be a more hardhearted lot than the newspapermen. They had more at stake.

  Late at night, while the others slept, Alessandra sat up with Man, guiding him through the labyrinths of political machinations and going over questions that might be asked at the hearing he would attend as a representative expert witness. She expected her husband to be the most vicious of Man’s adversaries at that hearing.

  It required every fiber of self-restraint to keep from begging Man to make love to her. Aware that he slept just down the hall from her room . . . and on the floor because “. . . bed too soft.” Well, the images kept her awake at night. Knowing her all too thoroughly, he must have sensed her turmoil.

  In the midst of their preparations, Man crouched before her chair, took the notes and pen from her hands, and held them captive in his big paws. His gaze could not be called impassive but rather distant . . . and as mysterious and sacred as his Blue Lake.

  “Know this, Alessandra. That wherever you are, my heart is. Where you go, my heart follows. If takes forever, I wait.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Wherever Man went, he drew huge gatherings of curious citizens and won new partisans.

  It didn’t take long for journalists around the country to begin speculating in their newspapers. The headlines were titillating: Senator’s Wife and Indian Chief Making Whoopee? and Senator Brendon O’Quinn and Wife to Split? and The Savage and the Senator’s Wife.

  Paul was the first to telephone. “Sis, this isn’t helping the General and Brendon. You know . . . the family image thing and all that bunk.”

  She took the call at the end of the hall. His admonishment had her facing the corner, glaring at the faded yellow flowered wallpaper. So her voice wouldn’t carry, she spoke in low, carefully enunciated words. “Since when did you worry about family image?”