Watching Eagles Soar

by Margaret Coel

  “Yes, yes,” the old woman said. Nodding, brushing. A tangle of gray hair worked loose from one of the braids and fell across her cheek as she helped Father John out of his jacket. “I didn’t suppose you come all the way out here in a blizzard to drink coffee with an old lady. Sit down.” Josie tossed her head toward the sofa. She walked over and turned on the table lamp, sending a flare of light into the center of the room. Then she turned toward the kitchen. “You need some coffee to warm your bones.”

  “Let me help you, Grandmother.” Vicky started after her.

  Josie swung around. “I said, sit down, Granddaughter.”

  Vicky walked over to the sofa and dropped down beside Father John. From the kitchen came the muffled sound of the old woman’s footsteps on the hard floor and the clank of pottery.

  After a few moments, Josie was back, handing out two mugs of coffee with steam curling over the brims. Vicky took a sip, savoring the warmth that began to spread inside her.

  “Tell me about the worry that’s sitting on your shoulders like crows.” Josie settled herself in a recliner, smoothed her dress over her lap, and clasped her hands. She took up only half the seat, like a small doll leaning against the armrest. The edge of the light fell over her face.

  “It’s about Darryl Morningside,” Father John began. He had both hands wrapped around his coffee mug.

  “I hear Darryl’s real sick.” The old woman nodded.

  “His larynx is closing, Grandmother. Just like Leon Whiteman’s.”

  Something moved behind the old woman’s black eyes, as if a chink of memory had fallen loose. “Leon,” she said. “He wasn’t a bad sort.”

  “What happened to him, Grandmother?” Vicky shifted forward. “I remember the gossip.”

  “You were just a kid,” Josie said, brushing back the loose strand of hair and tucking it into the braid. “But kids always know, don’t they?”

  “I remember people saying Albertine killed her husband. How, Grandmother? Did she use some kind of poison?”

  “Poison!” Josie laid her head back against the chair and laughed. “Albertine Whiteman didn’t need poison,” she said finally. “That woman was the devil.”

  “What are you saying, Grandmother?” Now Father John leaned toward the old woman.

  “She had spiritual power, Albertine. Power to do good for the people, but all she thought about was herself. She didn’t ever think about the people. Just herself. Got mad at Leon and used her power to get revenge. She thought that was gonna solve all her problems.” The old woman gave a little laugh and rolled her head along the back of the recliner.

  Vicky took a long sip of coffee, but the warmth inside her had turned to ice. She was beginning to understand. The jumble of old stories, parts left untold, the whispering voices of the elders, the wordless sorrow in their eyes: all falling into place now. Albertine had used her power for evil.

  She said, “Albertine put a curse on her husband.”

  Josie kept her gaze steady, her face frozen in acknowledgment. “She made his larynx close up. Doctors might’ve helped him if she’d taken him to the hospital. But she didn’t. She just waited for him to die. Said she come home and found him. You think that wife of Darryl’s got spiritual power? You think she put a curse on the boy?”

  “I don’t know,” Vicky heard herself saying. She didn’t want to believe in curses—what doctor would believe a curse had caused Darryl’s larynx to swell? She glanced sideways at Father John, who was leaning forward, taking a drink of coffee. Did he believe? Maybe, she thought. There were people who received the gift of spiritual power. He had received his own. Spiritual power was always given to help others, but sometimes . . .

  “Darryl wanted a divorce,” she said, “and Cindy was very upset.”

  Josie was quiet a moment. Finally she said, “Moccasin telegraph says the girl’s part Arapaho, one of them city Indians. Who are her people?”

  Vicky finished her coffee and set the mug on the floor next to her boots, taking a minute to pull from her memory everything Cindy had told her about herself. “Her father was Cheyenne,” she began. “Jim Red Feather. Her mother was Arapaho. I don’t know her mother’s name.”

  The old woman exhaled a long breath, like steam whistling from a kettle. “Ah. I heard Virginia married a Cheyenne in Denver.”

  “Virginia?” Father John said.

  “I can see that girl yet. Fourteen years old, she was, thin as a stick with long black hair and eyes that stared at you but didn’t see nothing. She never cried, not one tear, when her daddy died. She knew. Oh, she knew, all right, what her mother had done.”

  “Wait a minute, Grandmother,” Father John said. “Are you saying that Cindy is Albertine Whiteman’s granddaughter?”

  Josie nodded. “She could’ve learned the curse. It could’ve been passed down to her mother. Her mother could’ve given it to her.”

  Vicky lifted her head toward the window behind the old woman. Outside the snow was still falling through the thick, gray light. “What about the spiritual power?” she said.

  “Albertine was blessed with the power to do good. Maybe Cindy got the same blessing.” The old woman’s voice sounded far away. “Albertine chose evil. Now Cindy’s gone and done like her grandmother.”

  “How can we help Darryl?” Father John said.

  Josie shook her head. “Cindy’s the only one can help him. She put the curse on him. She’s the one has to take it away.”

  “She’s going back to Denver.” Father John got to his feet. “We’ve got to catch her before she gets on the bus.”

  Vicky held his eyes a moment. He did believe. She said, “Cindy won’t take the curse away. She’s angry and hurt. All she can think about is revenge.”

  “There’s something else she better think about,” Josie said, pushing herself out of the recliner. “Let’s get over to the bus station.”

  * * *

  The station looked like a brown cube dropped into the middle of the snow-covered parking lot. Black exhaust belched out of the blue and silver bus parked at the entrance. Father John caught the word DENVER in the destination slot above the windshield. A group of people—they all looked alike, bundled in coats and hoods—were getting on board. He stopped a few feet away and scanned the faces. Cindy wasn’t there, and he could see that several passengers were still making their way out of the station.

  They got out of the pickup and threaded their way past the passengers, Father John holding one of Josie’s arms, Vicky the other. The waiting room was hot and smelled of stale food. Behind the ticket counter, the agent sat hunched over the book opened in front of him.

  On the far side of the waiting room, Cindy was shrugging into a jacket, fixing a black bag over one shoulder, her gaze on the windows and the bus beyond. She reached down, grabbed the handle of the roll-on at her feet, and started pulling it toward the door. The wheels rattled over the hard floor.

  “Hello, Cindy,” Father John said.

  The girl stopped. She looked at Father John, then swung her gaze to the old woman. A mixture of fear and comprehension bubbled beneath her expression. “What’re you doing here?” she said.

  “You come sit down.” Josie reached out, took the girl’s hand, and led her to the bench beneath the windows.

  “I gotta catch my bus.”

  “We want to talk to you, Cindy,” Father John said. He and Vicky followed them over to the bench.

  “I don’t need no priest. I don’t need no lawyer, either.”

  “You’re going to need a lawyer when Darryl dies,” Vicky said. “You could face a murder charge.”

  “Murder?” There was a spasm of laughter. “You’re all crazy.” The girl had perched on the edge of the bench, keeping her eyes averted from the old woman beside her.

  Father John sat down on the other side. “We know about the curse,” he said. “Darryl�
��s still alive. It’s not too late. You must take the curse away.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe that Indian crap about curses.” Cindy was watching the door where the last passenger had stepped outside. “Look, I gotta go.” She jumped to her feet and gripped the handle of the roll-on. “Cops sure as hell ain’t gonna believe Darryl got himself murdered by a curse,” she said. “There ain’t a white judge or jury in this world that’s gonna believe it. I don’t care what you say; they ain’t gonna believe you.”

  Father John exchanged a glance with Vicky. The girl was right; they both knew it. There was no place for curses—Indian superstition—in the world of law and rationality.

  “It don’t matter what white people think.” Josie set one hand on the roll-on, as if to hold it in place. “What matters is, the spirits gave you a gift. You was blessed. You gotta use your gift to help people. You gotta send goodness into the world, not evil.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, you know, all right,” Josie said. “You send goodness into the world, it comes back on you. You send out evil, it’s gonna come back on you, just like it did on Albertine.”

  Cindy jerked the roll-on free. “My grandmother died in a car accident. Could happen to anybody.”

  “One year after your granddaddy died of the throat sickness, Albertine’s car went off the road, but it wasn’t the accident killed her. You know that, don’t you, Cindy?” The old woman hurried on. “It was the evil that come back and killed her. The car went into the river. Real shallow river, but the water came up and got in her throat and cut off all her air, so she couldn’t breathe no more. Just like Leon couldn’t breathe no more after she put the curse on him. You want the evil coming back on you, Cindy? You wanna die like your grandmother? All your air cut off?”

  “Stop it!” The girl swung around and faced the old woman. “You don’t know what Darryl did to me. Stood up in front of the judge and said he took me for his wife. Said he was gonna love and cherish me forever and ever, and three weeks later, he says to me, ‘I don’t want you no more.’ ‘Don’t want me!’ I said. ‘Where’m I supposed to go? What’m I supposed to do? Nobody’s gonna want me now, if you throw me away.’ He says, ‘I don’t care. Get outta my life,’ so I think, Jesus, now I need a lawyer. But then I think, I don’t need no lawyer, and I don’t need Darryl, and he was gonna pay for the lies that come outta his throat. I got the power, all right, just like Grandmother, and she give the curses to my mama, and Mama give ’em to me.”

  The front door opened and a gust of cold air blew across the waiting room. The driver leaned inside. “Last call for the Denver bus,” he shouted.

  “It’s not too late.” Father John got to his feet. “Call the evil back, Cindy.”

  Vicky said, “If you won’t take the curse away for Darryl’s sake, Cindy, you’d better do it for your own.”

  The driver had disappeared. From outside came the muffled sound of the bus motor turning over.

  The girl stood motionless, staring into the gray light of the waiting room. Finally she leaned over, pulled open the zipper on the roll-on, and began tossing out items: tee shirts, jeans, sneakers trailing over the floor. Finally she held something solid in her hands.

  She sat down and placed the object in her lap. It looked like a gourd, Father John thought, except that the rounded end was smooth and painted like a doll, with black hair around the forehead, black eyes and nostrils, and pinkish, scowling lips. The neck of the gourd was long and wrapped with a leather thong. Cindy stared at the gourd a moment, then looked around at Josie.

  “Go on,” the old woman said.

  The girl set both hands over the gourd, leaned into the wall again, and closed her eyes. Her lips began moving silently; her arms and hands seemed to go limp. Finally, she opened her eyes and cupped the head of the gourd in her left hand. With her right hand, she began unwrapping the leather thong.

  Father John watched the thong falling over the girl’s lap, like a brown snake uncoiling itself. He thought he detected—Dear God, could it be true? The painted face seemed to relax, as if the gourd itself could now breathe. The girl was shivering. Tears, like silver threads, were running down her face, which seemed softer, relaxed, as if the mask had slipped away.

  Father John took her hand. “You’re free now, Cindy,” he said.

  * * *

  “I’m happy to report that our patient’s doing fine.” Dr. Jordan had stepped out of Darryl’s room just as Father John and Vicky were about to enter. Through the doorway, Father John could see the young man sitting up in bed, laughing and gesturing with one hand toward his grandmother, who had pushed her chair so close the white sheet draped over her lap. And yet, Father John thought, there was something different about the young man, as if he’d been traveling in a foreign place and was marked by the experience.

  “A couple hours ago,” the doctor went on, not trying to disguise the relief in her voice, “Darryl woke up and indicated that he wanted the tube taken out. And, indeed, the swelling in his larynx has gone down. It appears the steroids have started to work, after all. I want to keep him overnight to be sure he’s going to be okay, but I suspect he’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “That’s good news,” Father John said.

  The doctor was quiet a moment, as if she were trying to grasp some other idea. Finally she said—shifting her gaze from Father John to Vicky—“It wasn’t an allergy, was it?”

  Father John shook his head.

  “I see.” Her tone indicated that she didn’t see at all. “No infection and no allergy.” She shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Darryl’s recovering, and that’s all that counts.”

  “That’s all that counts,” Father John said, but the doctor had already spun around and was hurrying down the corridor.

  “She wouldn’t believe you if you told her,” Vicky said.

  “She knows.” He smiled at the Arapaho woman beside him. “It’s an Indian matter. She doesn’t expect to understand. Come on,” he said, ushering her into the room. “Let’s go see Darryl.”

  Bad Heart

  The Third Commandment: Thou shalt not take my name in vain.

  From inside the apartment came the muffled sound of a ringing phone. Vicky Holden balanced the bag of groceries against the wall and dug inside her purse for the key. She’d heard the ringing the minute she’d stepped off the elevator. She’d hurried down the corridor to her apartment at the far end, the sound growing louder, more distinct. Then the ringing had stopped. Now it was starting up again.

  “Hold on,” she said out loud. She jammed the key into the lock and turned the knob. Gripping her purse and the grocery bag in one arm, she plunged across the living room toward the desk and lifted the receiver. A can toppled out of the bag and rolled over the carpet, clinking against the leg of the coffee table.

  “Hello,” she said as she struggled to right the rest of the groceries on the desk. She set her purse down and flipped on the little lamp that beamed a puddle of light over the brown paper bag.

  “Is this Vicky Holden, the lawyer?” She couldn’t place the man’s voice, yet there was something familiar about it, something unsettling, with a hint of intimacy that made her think the caller must be someone she knew.

  “Yes,” she said. She could hear the hesitancy in her own voice. The caller was probably an Arapaho looking for a lawyer, picked up on a DUI or an assault, calling from the Fremont County jail, his one desperate call. Vicky was accustomed to such calls. They came during the day at her law office in Lander at the southern edge of the Wind River Reservation. Sometimes they came in the middle of the night. She was the only Arapaho attorney in the area.

  “This is Warden Ransom from the state penitentiary.”

  Vicky dropped onto the chair in front of the desk and stared into the shadows falling through the living room. Beyond the sofa, lights from outside flickere
d across the window in the wind. The bag of groceries toppled sideways, spilling oranges and a loaf of bread onto the desktop.

  “What is it?”she asked. Two or three of her clients had been sentenced to the penitentiary in the last couple of years. The best she’d been able to manage for them were reduced sentences. The warden had never called her before.

  “Seems like you’d want to hear about Lonny Hereford.” The voice waited a beat, then hurried on. “You remember Lonny, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.” Something wasn’t right. Lonny Hereford had never been her client. Vicky felt her fingers tighten around the receiver. Her thoughts raced back three years. Lonny Hereford hunched over the grave of his wife, Muriel, at the St. Francis Mission cemetery, loud gusts of grief erupting from his throat as the coffin disappeared into the earth, everybody pressing around, patting the man’s shoulders. Even members of Muriel’s family, sad-eyed and solicitous, gathered around Lonny in an invisible harness of agreement. A horrible accident. Slipped and fell down the basement steps in the house the couple had been renting in Riverton, hit her head wrong on the concrete floor. Nobody could live through that, and Lonny was so broken up. Kept swearing to God that he wished it could’ve been him, and everybody in the family had believed him.

  “Yeah, thought you wouldn’t forget Lonny. He told me himself that you and that mission priest on the reservation, Father John O’Malley, I think he said, was responsible for putting him behind bars.”

  Vicky didn’t say anything for a moment. The morning she’d read about Muriel’s death in the newspaper, she’d gone to the detective in charge of the investigation and told him how Muriel had come to her office two days earlier. Vicky could still see the woman, not much more than a teenager, with long black hair and thin, hunched shoulders, hesitating at the door, fingers kneading the flowery red bag clasped to her chest. She’d moved inside, slowly, eyes scanning the office as if she expected something to jump out at her, and perched on a side chair. She wanted to divorce Lonny, she’d said, her voice small and whispery. She’d had enough, all the drinking and raging and knocking her around. She’d gone to Father John and told him the same thing. He was the one who said, “Muriel, for your own sake, you have to leave him.”