Wind Song

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  Parris Afton Bonds

  Wind Song

  Kindle Edition

  Published by Parris Afton, Inc.

  Copyright 2012 by Parris Afton, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover artwork by DigitalDonna.com

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away.

  For Delbert and Elwana Brewster, who taught on the Navajo Indian Reservation,

  and Lynn DuBose, who lived on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation

  Chapter 1

  At the Kaibeto Trading Post an old Indian, wearing opaque sunglasses and turquoise nuggets suspended by leather thongs from his ears, pumped gas into a 1946 Studebaker. Marshall Lawrence wedged his Ford Bronco bearing the stenciled insignia Bureau of Indian Affairs Motor Pool between a battered pickup and a flatbed wagon. The attractive woman next to him glanced curiously at the wagon’s rubber tires and he explained, “The Navajo owner whose wagon has rubber tires is uptown. Iron-rimmed wheels signify middle class.”

  Abbie Dennis smiled, a stunning smile that reminded the Director of the Western Navajo Agency that he had been too long away from metropolitan cities and fashionable women. She looked more twenty-seven than the thirty-seven years her application had stated.

  “It seems that I have a lot to learn if I’m to succeed as a teacher out here,” she said.

  “Don’t let the desolation scare you. The Arizona desert kind of grows on you after a while.”

  Abbie arched a finely winged brow in skepticism.

  He grinned, his teeth white against his suntanned face and sun-streaked hair. “It’s true. And there are some mighty nice people who live here. I thought I’d introduce you to old Burnett— he owns the trading post—before I run you over to the Indian boarding school.”

  If the Kaibeto trading post was any indication of the condition of the boarding school, Abbie held out little hope for modern conveniences. The trading post, backed into the lee of a sheer red bluff, was an L-shaped native stone building with a corrugated tin roof and cedar post columns. A round mesquite-staked corral and the gas pumps were the only other man-made structures in sight.

  Marshall came around to open the Ford’s door, and Abbie gratefully got out to stretch her legs, legs that she had thought too long and gangly in high school. Immediately sand worked its way into her sandals. She ignored the grating beneath her feet and let Marshall, his hand solicitously at her elbow, lead her into the quiet, cool shade of the trading post’s porch.

  The hinges squeaked as he opened the screen door for her, and the two men inside broke off their conversation at her entrance. She first noted Burnett because his shock of white hair and drooping mustache stood out against the darkness of the large room. Only when her pupils adjusted to focus on the faded blue eyes of the octogenarian—while Marshall was making the introductions—did she perceive the other man.

  The impact of the man’s intense gaze almost stunned her.

  Actually, she had been aware of him even before the moment that her gaze locked with his. Later she tried to identify that awareness—the kind a mother experiences when she senses that one of her children is into some kind of mischief, the sort a wife feels when her husband’s routine actions are subtly altered. But those weren’t really good analogies at all. It was a primitive knowledge, as if her mind were a light that had been switched on, connected to a current that flows even though it can’t be seen. Whatever, he coalesced within her vision into a dark shape against the myriad rows of canned goods and zinc washtubs, saddles and coal irons.

  Jeans that were faded gray at the knees; a navy blue double-breasted shirt; a black felt western hat slung low over the forehead and rolled at the sides; smoldering dark eyes in a shadowed face— these were what she saw.

  But the essence of the man—that she felt like a blow to her senses. A raw, primeval masculinity that had nothing to do with flesh and blood stood before her. If anything, the man appeared leaner than suburbia’s muscle-bound businessman who worked out during lunch breaks at local spas and country clubs and jogged in the evenings along nicely regulated residential streets. In fact, this man seemed not quite as tall as Brad’s six-foot- three frame.

  Brad—her soon to be ex-husband—belonged in her past, and this man—who in some indefinable way shook the self-containment that had taken her years to build—he certainly did not belong in the future she had planned. Defensively she donned a mask of cool politeness and forced herself to listen to what Marshall was saying. All the while her peripheral gaze took in the silver- banded bracelet inlaid with turquoise, the scuffed cowboy boots, the horsehead buckle on the concho-studded belt wrapped low about narrow hips. She remembered that when curiosity had prompted her to research her new state, she had discovered that the rodeo circuit was big in Arizona, especially in the summer and fall months. A rodeo tramp, she decided scornfully, illogically quite satisfied with her deduction.

  When Marshall paused in his introductions, she recollected herself and firmly, crisply, shook hands with the old man. “Glad to have a pretty filly out here, gal,” Orville Burnett rasped. “Marshall, son, yer getting better in yer choice of teachers.”

  Then Marshall was introducing the man. “And this is Cody Strawhand, our lapidary artist whose silversmithing gives Kaibeto its one claim to fame.”

  A craftsman. Worse by Brad’s standards. She could almost hear his scornful pronouncement: “Society’s dropouts.”

  She extended her hand. For a moment she thought that her hand would simply hang there in space, but then the man took it. Surprise washed over her. The way he pressed his palm against hers rather than clasping her hand ... it was the Navajo form of greeting about which Marshall had instructed her during their three-hour trip from Flagstaff to Kaibeto. The man was an Indian.

  The revelation had little effect on her, but his intense maleness staggered her. True, songs were penned about such encounters, novels written and movies filmed; she had gone through her teens and even the married years of her twenties daydreaming about such an experience. But she had thought that with the advent of her thirties and what she considered matronly maturity, she had outgrown such an absurd fantasy.

  Nevertheless, there she stood, flushing beneath his heavy-lidded regard, short of breath and extremely irritated with her schoolgirl reaction. And slightly frightened. Twenty years of repressing primal, private feelings had not prepared her for this open assault on her sensuality. Unbidden sensations flashed over her that no proper wife and mother was supposed to feel—at least not at thirty-seven. This was another situation that she did not know how to handle.

  “Ma’am,” Cody Strawhand said with a face as expressionless as a wooden Indian’s. Yet she somehow had the feeling that his handshake had been a calculated insult. The nostrils of his thin, bladed nose flared, as if he scented her.

  She met his inscrutable gaze with the superior smile she reserved for the more pretentious people she encountered in Philadelphia society. She had learned early how to play its games. “My pleasure, Mr. Strawhand.” Her response was about as genuine as the Indian beads in curio stands along the reservation’s Highway 89.

  After a few more uncomfortable moments of conversation, she escaped the man’s dominating presence when Marshall ushered her outside to the Bronco. After the coolness of the trading post, the unbelievably hot August air seemed to suck the moisture from her mouth.

  “Are you sure you really want to go through with this?” Marshall asked with a grin.

  Expecting an older businessman to meet her at Flagstaff’s small airport, she had almost overlooked this trim middle-aged man in khaki slacks and safari jacket. He winked teasingly at her now, adding, “It’s not to
o late to put through a request to the Gallop, New Mexico, headquarters for another assignment.”

  A moue of feigned despair pouted her lips. “Don’t tempt me.” Then, in a lighter tone she said, “Why didn’t you warn me when you were driving me here what I’d face?”

  Marshall grunted as the Ford Bronco lurched over a rock in the dirt road. “I’ve already warned you that this is the second most isolated post in the nation, Abbie, and that—”

  “—that Miss Halliburton will be looking for an excuse to fire me. But I know I can be a good teacher, Marshall—even though I’ve never used my teacher’s degree. I’ll prove it to her and the BIA.”

  “The principal doesn’t welcome changes or interference—and especially not from a beautiful, intelligent woman. The teachers don’t refer to her as Dragon Lady out of affection. She’s a domineering old maid who has a staff of misfits masquerading as teachers. Who else would be foolish enough to work under the conditions we have out here?”

  Abbie smiled wryly. “A misfit like myself.”

  Marshall grinned. “You’re one of the least likely misfits I ever saw, Abbie Dennis.”

  The elite of Philly would probably have said the same. Abbie Dennis had given the best parties, attended the right club luncheons, hosted various civic functions and charity fetes, and been seen at the opera and ballet’s opening night galas. She had car-pooled the twins to their football practices and their riding and guitar lessons. She had responded dutifully and lovingly to her husband’s lovemaking. Abbie, the mother. Abbie, the wife.

  But who was Abbie the woman?

  The question haunted her. She knew when she looked in the mirror each morning that she faced a stranger. A lovely woman with flaxen hair skillfully—and expensively—streaked with tawny shades of gold looked back at her, coldly, impersonally. Who was she? Abbie meant to find out.

  Kaibeto Wash, a dry creek bed, lent the area its picturesque, postcard appeal. A long, narrow footbridge and a separate bridge wide enough for only one vehicle spanned the deep draw. Abbie held her breath as the Bronco clacked across the vehicle bridge.

  “Don’t let the dry bed fool you,” Marshall warned. “August and September are our monsoon months. At any moment you can expect to see a flash flood boiling down off the mountains beyond through the wash.”

  So that accounted for the predominance of large deciduous trees on a six-thousand-foot-high desert. There was an old Oldsmobile in the wash below, nose down in a loop of the sand-bed, that had apparently gotten caught in one of the flash floods. Just looking down made her dizzy.

  Once over the bridge, there appeared to be nothing but mile upon mile of red desert, a desert that was broken only by an occasional palisade of mesas or buttes. The stark rock formations resembled prehistoric monsters rising out of a sea of sand. A veritable moonscape—that was Arizona’s Kaibeto Plateau.

  Plateau. The dictionary had defined it as a relatively level surface raised sharply above adjacent land on at least one side. No heights to worry about, or so she had thought. But with no tall trees to help in gauging distance and size, the flatness was deceptive. Deep canyons, offshoots of the Grand Canyon, split the plateau. Due east of the Kaibeto Boarding School for Indians a high ridge of pale green stratified rock bordered the horizon for miles until it ended abruptly in a natural window formation. And to the north towered the granite dome that was Navajo Mountain.

  So much for heights.

  The Bronco bounced over another rut and plunged down the roller-coaster dip. Abbie held on to the sun-heated metal door and prayed that the journey would end before the caps on her front two teeth were jarred loose.

  “How much farther?” she asked.

  “Just two more miles.” At her groan he laughed. “You’ll get used to Kaibeto. And I’ll tell you now, the Kaibeto Boarding School is equal to the modern facilities at Tuba City.”

  She recalled passing through Tuba City on the drive to Kaibeto. It was the office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Western Navajo Agency, where Marshall was director. She had been stunned at the squat little town humped on the broad Kaibeto Plateau—a few elm trees, old houses of rock built by the Mormons a hundred years before, tar-paper shacks, and dilapidated stores. Only Marshall’s BIA office building, a two-story modern affair of brown basalt and mirror windows, resembled the civilization she knew. He had told her that the population of three thousand Navajos swelled to fifteen thousand come weekends and Saturday night when people came in to drink.

  She remembered thinking that if Tuba City was an example of a cosmopolitan Indian town, what would Kaibeto be like? What had she gotten herself into? It had been so simple—take the government civil service exam and, presto, she had her first job.

  Now she had only to prove her competency as a teacher to Miss Halliburton. She had to! She would fulfill her two year contract no matter how difficult the job at the Kaibeto Boarding School— no matter how deplorable life on the Indian reservation. If only she spoke Navajo.

  “I thought there would be some sort of indoctrination,” she said, then grabbed the door as the Bronco plunged into a deep gully and careened out of it to crest the next hill. “A workshop of sorts,” she finished on a desolate note.

  Above a host of faint freckles his gray eyes met hers with laughter before he returned his attention to the obstacle course. “Oh, there was a two-week program—a language-customs project. But the government discovered that teachers adjusted more quickly by being immersed in the Indian culture rather than merely studying it.”

  “A sink-or-swim affair,” she said dryly. “Exactly,”

  Marshall laughed as he steered the Bronco over the dirt washboarded road that snaked ahead. “Just remember a few simple rules: Don’t admire anything that belongs to a Navajo, or he’ll feel compelled to give it to you. It’s better to make broad statements. Forget about using your camera. It’s terribly rude. If you’re ever invited to enter a hogan, enter to the left of the firepit. And—”

  “And when do I get paid?” she interrupted, laughing.

  “I forgot the most important thing, didn’t I? Your check will be issued every other Thursday. You can pick it up at the principal’s office. And there’s a telephone in her office, but it’s best to limit your calls to emergencies.”

  Her eyes swung to his. “No phones?”

  “Not in the dormitories. Cell phones are absolutely prohibited. No television or radio, either.”

  “But the hogans,” she accused, pointing to one of the eight-sided homes of adobe and wood that could be detected periodically amidst the camouflaging landscape of sand and here-and-there cedars. The hogan incongruously sported an antenna jutting from its domed roof. “They’ve got television.”

  “True. But the Kaibeto Boarding School’s too deep in a canyon to receive signals. There are newspapers, if you want to subscribe, though they’re delivered by mail a day late.”

  “Don’t offer me another chance to change my mind,” she muttered. “I might accept.” She felt like crying. Silly of her. A grown woman. Her fingers went to her shoulder bag in a fruitless search for a cigarette before she remembered that she had given up smoking. Sheer lunacy to leave a husband and give up smoking all in one stroke.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Marshall said. But she caught his glance of understanding and sympathy . . . and the flicker of male appreciation in the depths of his eyes. That she could handle, had handled. But how did one handle this: hot, arid land and furnacelike air that seared the lungs; people who hid behind trees when a car passed rather than let themselves be seen; the total isolation from the rest of the world?

  “I know how you feel,” Marshall said. “When I first came to Tuba City as the BIA director, I thought it was the end of the world. But in the past seven years I’ve discovered that people here are real. No plastic facades.”

  Guiltily she glanced down at her long nails. She was glad now that she had removed the polish. And her false eyelashes. Even her hair was no longer smoothed b
ack in the elegant, intricate knot that many a society matron, who didn’t have Abbie’s fine bone structure, had tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Now her hair, still its natural champagne shade but three months without a color job, was caught simply at her nape by a tortoiseshell clasp.

  The one vain indulgence that she was unable to give up was her stylish clothing, as demonstrated by her white linen skirt and jacket over a pale blue silk blouse. The other teachers might dress in polyester pantsuits or jeans and dirty sneakers, but her fashionable clothing was her remaining identity with the old Abbie, and she was reluctant to abandon completely that identity.

  “It took me a long time to get used to the Navajo reserve,” Marshall was saying, “to not being greeted heartily when I visited a Navajo family, until I realized that when a Navajo finally uttered a warm welcome . . . well, he really meant it.”

  “I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the Navajo and this land.”

  “It’s not that isolated, Abbie. Tuba City’s just down the road a piece, should you need.me.” “Fifty-two miles down the road,” she said in a flat voice that echoed the second thoughts that were eroding her initial confident decision to accept the post. “How would I get there?”

  “Oh, Kaibeto has a government Jeep of World War II vintage, but you can use it only—”

  “—only for emergencies,” she finished dryly, and Marshall laughed.

  A greater number of Indian hogans, a few of the white man’s square houses—maybe a score in total and irregularly placed—and a wire-mesh fence presaged her first glimpse of the boarding school. After a car passed the sign marked Navajo Indian Reservation some one hundred miles before Kaibeto, no fences would be seen until this one.

  The Kaibeto Indian Boarding School, enclosed by the fence, was built on softly rounded hills. It was more like a campus, with five one-story buildings surrounded by mammoth oaks and cottonwoods and enclosing a playground and basketball court. Marshall proceeded to label the various buildings.