Father John dropped the pencil. He remained absolutely still, aware of the sound of his own breathing. St. Francis closed? How could that be? Shock began to give way to anger, which welled inside him the way water pools in the middle of a river.
“You must be misinformed,” Father Peter blurted out. “St. Francis Mission has served the Arapaho people for more than a hundred years. It will continue to do so.”
“I’m afraid not, Father,” Keating replied. “Mission work has changed, outlived its purpose. When you Jebbies first came here, there were pagan Indians to convert and educate. Well,”—he threw out both hands—“mission accomplished.”
Sheldon added, “The Arapahos are already Catholic. Your high school closed ten years ago for lack of money. The BIA runs the mission’s elementary school. And—am I not correct—your financial situation is in desperate straits. There is no justifiable reason to continue this mission.”
It was all Father John could do to keep from jumping up and ordering both men out. Obviously the Jesuit Provincial, from his office in St. Louis, had decided to close St. Francis. He had informed the bishop who had sent these two saps to smooth over the details. No one had informed him. All of this going on. . . . He was so far out of the loop, he hadn’t even known there was a loop.
Sheldon continued, “This decision is in the best interests of the Arapahos. My client plans to build a multimillion-dollar family recreation center on the mission site. Movie theaters, bowling alley, gymnasium, restaurants, the works. Small towns can’t support such centers, which is why we prefer to build in the vicinity of several towns. That way, all the towns benefit.”
“How, exactly, will the Arapahos benefit?” Father John managed, struggling to keep his anger under control. He could feel the heat in his face.
“Jobs. The center will employ Indians.”
“St. Francis employs people from the reservation.”
The lawyer smiled. “A caretaker, two part-time secretaries, a housekeeper, religious education teachers. A total of ten. Sometimes twelve, when you can afford it. My client will employ at least a hundred.”
“Who is your client, Mr. Sheldon?” Father John was stalling now, trying to get his mind around the news. St. Francis Mission closed? Even in the worst-case scenarios, when he’d lain awake nights worrying about cutting back on staff or not making the payroll, it had never occurred to him the Society of Jesus might sell the mission.
“The Z Group. A private partnership based in California,” the lawyer said.
Father John got to his feet and leaned across the desk, his hands gripping the hard wood edge. “The Arapahos will never agree to this. St. Francis belongs to them. This is where the drums beat at Sunday Mass. Where they can sign the Our Father in the Indian sign language. Where the Christian message can take root in their own culture.”
The two ambassadors appeared to ignore him as they stood up and began fumbling with their topcoats. Then the lawyer met Father John’s eyes. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the point,” he said. “The Arapahos themselves have requested that we build the center on the site of St. Francis Mission. The business council will approve the plans at next week’s meeting.”
* * *
After they left, Father John stood at the window and watched the cherry-red taillights flickering in the darkness, aware of the sound of the old priest’s breathing next to him. Softly Father Peter said, “‘My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirr’d; And I myself see not the bottom of it.’”
This was not a quote Father John recognized, but he didn’t want a lecture on Shakespeare right now. He walked back to his desk and sank into the chair, trying to make some sense of this. “I suppose, sooner or later, the Provincial would have informed us,” he said. “In the meantime, the bishop decided to inform the other pastors, which forced Keating and Sheldon to tell us. Otherwise, we might not have heard until next week, after the business council had approved the deal.”
Father Peter shuffled across the office, folded up the metal chair, and stashed it behind the door. “Not a peep on the moccasin telegraph,” he said, shaking his head. “‘’Twas strange, ’twas passing strange.’”
“Not if somebody wanted the mission sold before the people found out about it,” Father John said.
“The question then appears to be what do you intend to do about it, my boy?” The old man eyed him from the center of the office, a teacher expecting the right answer.
Father John was turning over the options in his mind. After a moment he said, “I intend to make the acquaintance of Eden Lightfoot, the new economic development officer on the reservation. Obviously he supports this, or the Arapaho business council wouldn’t consider it. I’ll have to try to change his mind.”
But first he intended to talk to Vicky Holden. If anyone had heard about St. Francis Mission being sold, it would be the Arapaho attorney. She had the pulse of the reservation. He pulled the phone toward him and punched in her number. He knew it by heart.
7
Vicky Holden aimed the Bronco through the silent streets of the Lander neighborhood she had called home the past three years. The headlights picked out the cars and pickups parked at the curbs and turned the snow-packed streets the pale yellow color of butter.
She turned into the driveway of the brick bungalow she rented, her mind on the divorce agreement she’d hammered out this afternoon with the attorney representing her client’s husband. She hadn’t gotten everything Mary Featherly wanted or deserved, but sometimes the best possible agreement had to be good enough. She intended to look it over again tonight. And there were three or four phone calls she still had to return.
One from John O’Malley. Probably about this morning’s article in the Gazette. She exhaled slowly into the quiet. The only time the pastor at St. Francis Mission called was when there was some kind of trouble. She would call him first, she decided, then scramble some eggs for dinner before getting to the rest of the work in her briefcase.
Darkness settled over the Bronco the instant she flipped off the headlights. She grabbed the briefcase and floppy black leather bag off the seat and stepped outside. Rather than walking up the sidewalk, which she had shoveled early this morning, she crossed the yard, watching the clouds of snow rise and scatter in her footsteps. Walking through snow always took her back to the times she and her brothers and sisters—cousins in the white world—had romped in the snow until they turned numb with cold and then had jostled one another around the stove in Grandmother’s kitchen, giggling and laughing themselves warm. Snow made the earth fresh and new.
Just as she stepped onto the wooden porch, she heard the footsteps. She whirled about. A large shadowy figure came up the sidewalk. She was fully aware of her surroundings as if everything had been caught in a freeze frame: light filtering through the darkness from the houses across the street; shadows of cars and trucks at the curb; the porch light on next door; the muffled sounds of a TV. Would the neighbors hear if she screamed?
“Who are you?”
The man in a cowboy hat and sheepskin coat stopped at the edge of the porch. “Ben.”
She leaned back, aware of the doorjamb against her spine, her heart catapulting in her chest. Her ex-husband, dropped from the sky, out of nowhere, out of the past. “You scared me,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” Ben placed one boot on the porch, but made no move to come up.
“Why are you here?”
“We’ve got to talk.” He still didn’t move. “I could use a cup of coffee. I’ve been waiting in the truck two hours.” He nodded toward the street, and she felt a wave of anger at herself as her eyes followed. She had driven by the truck, but she’d been so preoccupied with her own thoughts she hadn’t noticed anyone in it. She’d lived in the white world for almost eleven years, yet she still didn’t have the hang of it—watch your back, stay alert.
“Just say what you have to say.” Vicky felt the old wariness gathering inside her. She didn’t want to be alone with him.
> “It’s about Susan.”
She stared at her former husband. He always knew how to get what he wanted. He only had to mention one of their children, Susan or Lucas. She turned around and, after fumbling to insert the key in the keyhole, pushed the door open. She flipped the wall switch inside, and the lamp on the table sprang into life, illuminating the gray carpet, the blue-flowered sofa, the coffee table with its neat stack of magazines and her favorite pottery bowl, the dining table and chairs in the alcove beyond the living room.
“Nice place,” Ben said, closing the door behind them.
Vicky dropped her bag and briefcase on the sofa, then slipped off her coat and hung it inside the small closet next to the door before facing him. He had already tossed his hat and gloves next to her things, and was pulling himself free from the sheepskin coat. She felt a kind of shock at how much he was like that sense of him she carried inside her. Just over six feet, straight as a lodgepole pine, with powerful shoulders and chest and long, slender fingers. His hair was still black, but flecked with gray now, and combed straight back until it ran along the collar of his tan chamois shirt.
Laying the sheepskin over the sofa, he smiled at her. Years in the outdoors had imprinted squint lines at the corners of his eyes, which glistened like black pebbles in a mountain stream. She knew the contours of his face better than her own—the strong jaw and high cheekbones, the noble nose of her people, the confident mouth. She had fallen in love with him the summer she’d graduated from St. Francis High School. He’d been out of high school for four years, and had been in the army and gone to Germany. He talked for hours about the outside world, a world she knew nothing about. He spun a fantastic web of words, and she got caught in the web. He was everything she wanted. She was seventeen.
She forced her thoughts to the present, the Time Being. “What about Susan?”
“What about the coffee?”
Her eyes locked with his a moment. He had driven sixty miles on snow-crested roads, in plummeting temperatures, across the reservation from the Arapaho ranch up north where he was the foreman, and had waited in the truck two hours. She could throw herself upon him and beat against his chest, but he wouldn’t tell her why he was here until the time was ready.
She walked past him into the shadowy alcove. Moonlight filtered through the sliding glass doors that led to the patio, which was mounded in snow. She turned into the small kitchen and flipped on the overhead fluorescent light. A white glow suffused the wood cabinets and cream-colored countertops.
Ben leaned against the edge of the counter as she measured out the coffee grounds and poured water into the Mr. Coffee. “I was going to scramble some eggs,” she said.
“Sounds good.”
She felt his eyes on her as she broke the eggs into a bowl and whipped them with a fork. After pouring the thick yellow liquid into a frying pan, she dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.
“Just like the old days,” Ben blurted, as if his thoughts would no longer be contained.
“Don’t, Ben,” Vicky said, pushing the lumpy eggs across the pan.
“Sometimes at night, I lie awake in my bunk and watch the pictures in my head. You and me and the kids back on Lean Bear’s ranch. They’re good pictures, the way it used to be.”
“You used to hit me, Ben.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him shift against the counter. “I try to see that, too, Vicky, but the picture’s blurry. The drinking times are big black holes.” He was quiet a moment, then said, “I haven’t had a drink going on six years now.”
“It’s no longer my business,” Vicky said, dishing the eggs onto two plates. She laid a slice of toast beside the eggs and, skirting around him, avoiding his eyes, carried the plates to the table. A gauzy light floated across the alcove from the kitchen and living room. Ben planted himself at the end of the table, a puzzled expression on his face as if he weren’t certain which of the turns in the past had been the wrong one.
Opening the top drawer in the buffet that stood against one wall, Vicky removed two place mats, two napkins, and a handful of knives and forks, which she arranged on the table. Then she returned to the kitchen and poured two mugs of coffee.
“I just wanted you to know about the drinking,” Ben said as she delivered the coffee mugs and settled into the chair across from him. The drinking. The words reverberated inside her as if he had shouted them in a mountain canyon. It was true, he had only hit her when he was drinking. If there was anything she was grateful for, it was that he had never hit the children. He had truly loved the children. Yet, that had been the hardest to accept—the fact that he had been able to control his rage around the kids, which meant his treatment of her had been deliberate. That was the Ben she must remember. Not the handsome and confident man across from her.
“Please, Ben,” she said, scooting her fork under a clump of eggs. “What about Susan?”
The Arapaho took a long draw from his mug before saying, “You know she’s back?” His black eyebrows rose upward, as if he suspected she did not know. “Susan came to see me last week. Drove all over the ranch lookin’ for me. I was out pitching hay for the cattle.”
Vicky swallowed the eggs slowly, trying not to betray the emotions boiling within her. Her daughter—their daughter—had returned to Wind River Reservation and had not called her, had not come to her, but had gone to Ben. In Susan’s and Lucas’s eyes, she was the one who had broken up their home, had given them to her own parents to raise, had gone away to Denver to college and law school, had gotten the court order that kept their father away.
“I guess she’s not mad at me,” Ben said, not in a hurtful way, but as if he’d read her mind.
“When did Susan leave Los Angeles?” Vicky heard her own voice, disembodied, calm. She could feel her heart thumping.
“Didn’t say. She’s here with some white man and a couple of his buddies. She wanted to know if they could rent our old place.” Finishing the last of the scrambled eggs, Ben rested his forearms on either side of the plate. “Nobody’s lived at Lean Bear’s ranch since you took the kids and left. I only stayed long enough to close up the place. But I keep an eye on it. It’s still in good shape. So I told her, sure, but she didn’t have to pay me rent. She said her friends wanted to keep everything legal. So I said, okay, and the next day she came back with a certified check for six months’ rent.”
As he talked on about how glad he was Susan had come back, how he’d never liked the kids living in L.A., how he believed families belonged together, the image of Lean Bear’s ranch flashed through Vicky’s mind. Ten miles up Sage Canyon in the foothills of the Wind River Mountains, it was the place Lean Bear had chosen for his family when the Arapahos came to the reservation a hundred years ago. Lean Bear was Ben’s great-grandfather, one of the leading men of the tribe. He had ridden with her great-grandfather, Chief Black Night. It had always seemed as if invisible threads, stretching into the Old Time, had woven her life to Ben’s long before either of them was born. It was to Lean Bear’s ranch he had brought her after they were married.
“What are Susan’s plans?” Vicky took a sip of coffee, conscious that it had turned lukewarm.
“She said they plan to start a business buying and selling Indian arts and crafts.”
“In Sage Canyon? It’s so far away, so isolated,” Vicky stammered. Something about this didn’t make sense. She saw in Ben’s eyes that he had reached the same conclusion.
“I’ve been askin’ myself why any white man wants to live like a hermit with an Indian girl,” he said. “And how come his friends are hanging around?” Ben was quiet. After a few seconds he went on. “I’ve been worried about her, so I drove up to Lean Bear’s place this afternoon, first chance I got. Nobody around. The house was locked up, and they’d changed the lock. I looked in the windows. Stuff everywhere. A real mess, not like you used to keep the place, Vicky. I’d like to go back tomorrow, but we’ve got to get the hay bales to the upper ranges, or the catt
le are gonna be real hungry.”
“I’ll go there first thing tomorrow,” Vicky said.
Her ex-husband looked at her a long moment, a blend of approval and gratitude in his eyes; then he pushed back from the table and got to his feet. She watched him slip on the sheepskin coat, sensing its heaviness as if it had fallen over her own shoulders, and methodically set the cowboy hat on his head, an act he performed every day. She fought against acknowledging the empty space he had left in her life.
“Let me know what you find out,” he said. “You can leave a message at the ranch office.”
Vicky stood up and followed him across the living room to the front door. He had more than an hour’s drive ahead, in temperatures no creature should be out in. “You can stay here tonight,” she said. “On the sofa,” she added hurriedly.
Ben turned toward her and smiled. “Not this time.”
8
Vicky managed to open the door to her office while juggling her briefcase, a stack of folders, and the black leather bag, the strap of which had slipped off her shoulder and was riding down her coat sleeve. She balanced herself on one foot to close the door with the other. Ginger, her secretary, jumped up from behind the computer desk and hurried across the small waiting room, grabbing the folders before they spilled over the brown carpet.
“She barged in here and said she had to see you now,” Ginger said, blue eyes blazing. She was a breed—an Arapaho mother and a long-vanished white father—which accounted for the combination of rosy skin and oil-black hair that hung in a single braid halfway down her back. Dressed in her usual blue jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse, she looked as if she might depart for the rodeo at any moment, but she ran the office like a war chief, causing documents and letters to materialize out of the computer, fielding phone calls, marshaling clients through the day. Ginger did not appreciate any sudden change in the schedule.
Vicky glanced through the doorway across the waiting room to the little space that served as her private office. Mary Featherly sat in one of the rounded wood chairs in front of the desk, a yellow parka draped around her shoulders. She clasped a large red purse on her lap. Her appointment wasn’t until this afternoon, and this morning Vicky had intended only to drop off some documents before driving out to Lean Bear’s ranch. Susan had come to her in a dream last night, walking across the snowy fields, crying. Vicky had bolted upright and pulled the comforter around her shoulders to hold back the cold seeping into her bones. She had lain awake the rest of the night thinking about Susan at the ranch with three strangers—white men—and rerunning in her mind the old movies of Ben and her and the kids, wishing the ending had been different, for the kids’ sake.
The Ghost Walker Page 5
