by Anya Seton
Calise Cunningham might help, he thought suddenly. He had entered the ghost town and he turned from the road up the shattered trail towards the great silent mansion. He saw a thin strip of light between the velvet portieres in her ground-floor window. As he mounted the broken steps, he heard the rippling of a piano, and a low clear voice singing. He hesitated, his hand on the silver knocker until the song stopped. There was silence after his knock, then the door opened a crack.
“It’s Dartland,” he said quickly, “I just wanted to see you for a moment. May I come in?”
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and opened the door. “Come in.”
She was dressed in a neat black wool which hung loose about her slender body. This was the type of dress in which he had always seen her, except the once he had brought Hugh there. Her thick white hair was coiled into a black net on the nape of her neck. Tonight there was no perfume, rouge, or jewels. Except for her grace of movement and the carriage of her head, she looked her full age.
She surveyed Dart with her calm dispassionate eyes, then silently led the way into her living room. It was not large, it had been only an ante chamber in the original house, and aside from the velvet portieres which shrouded the windows and a wall of bookcases, it was starkly furnished. There was a table and two straight chairs, some fiber matting on the floor, and the piano, nothing else. But on the table there stood an Indian bowl full of desert broom—a common bush Dart had seen a thousand times, but in this bare room it sprang to feathery pearl and olive beauty.
“What is it you want, Dart?” she asked, sitting down on the piano stool and smiling a little.
He hesitated, caught from the impulse which had sent him there by the strength of the impression she always made on him. Bare as the room was, it repeated the same note of order and peace which emanated from her. A crystalline force, almost tangible. She is like a silver bell, he thought.
“I wanted your help—” he said at last.
Calise raised her eyebrows. “Help from a crazy old woman who sees ghosts?”
“You see more than ghosts,” he said slowly. “I think you see into the true spirit behind things—behind people. I think you have suffered much, and understand much.”
She looked at him steadily, the inward, withdrawn look in her wise, dark eyes. “I have suffered and I have prayed. Often now I am happy, for God answers me—in music, in my books, in the mountains.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’ve found happiness where so few could ... It’s...”
She nodded. “You’re troubled about your wife,” she said, “I see it now. You are strong and she has not yet learned to be. She is very young.”
“If you’d let her come up here and see you. Talk to her. She needs a friend.”
Calise laughed then. A warm gay sound. “Ah, Dart, you choose strange friends for your little bride. Do you know what I was playing when you came?” He shook his head. "Don Giovanni. ‘II Mio Tesoro’—Listen!”
She turned on the stool and began to sing, “ ‘Take my beloved in your keeping, console her, drive away her tears’—It’s very apropos, is it not?” She turned and he nodded smiling.
“I’ll do what I can, Dart,” she said and stood up. “But she must not come here at the bad times. She would be frightened.”
He frowned, suddenly realizing how grotesque his effort to promote the friendship of this woman would seem to Amanda, or indeed to anyone in Lodestone. But she’s not a lunatic, he thought.
Calise read his thoughts again and the cool impersonal flame which nourished her warmed in the sympathy between them.
“It is like this—” she said slowly, groping to express that which she had never told, the terror of which she tried never to think until a day or so before it happened, and she was forced to accede. Then the first sinister premonitions gave way to torment, then to a mounting agony of the spirit, and she was once again plunged into the inexorable tragedy.
“It is like the cinematograph—the movie, you call it now? It comes again and again, never changing, the same in every detail—except that I cannot watch from a safe seat in the theater. I am in it, and I must play my part, as I did the first time.” Her pupils dilated and she turned her head away. “My bitter, bitter part.”
“But it’s not real—you know that,” he said quickly.
“Ah, but it is,” she answered in a dull voice. “Look. I’ve studied much to try to understand.” She gestured towards her books. “Time—the other dimensions, the curve we cannot see. It is that Time, for me, has caught itself on a snag, in this one thing it cannot flow on. The past always becomes the present and the future, but by God’s grace, usually we do not know it. It is my punishment that I am caught. Not allowed to forget.” She raised her thin, white hand and let it drop again, she looked back at Dart with eyes of resignation. “It comes back, you see—and I must feel as I did once, and Raoul must come to me here, young and handsome as he was that night. He was my cousin from New Orleans, and I loved him when I was twelve, even in the Convent from which I later fled—breaking the good sisters’ hearts. Raoul must come and I must take him to my bed as I did then. My husband’s bed, the man I never loved, though I married him because he was so rich. Then my husband comes home because he guesses, he finds us and he shoots Raoul six times, until the head of my beloved is a bloody pulp on the pillow. And he would have shot me, as I begged him to, but something burst in his brain. He fell to the floor paralyzed. His body never moved again until he died. I killed them both.”
Dart looked at her with a pity she made no call upon. “No, you didn’t kill them,” he said gently. “And your share, your guilt, you’ve expiated long ago. After all, it was a tragedy, but something like that has happened often enough before to people who’ve——”
She stopped him with a strange half-smile. “I’m not ‘people.’ Each one of us is separate in our destiny. Each one of us must struggle on alone fighting the monsters of deceit and lust and cruelty until at last, someday, somewhere, we reach the top—and peace.”
She moved across the fiber matting to the door. “Now go,” she said. “I’ve talked too much. It’s not good to talk about these things. But you have in you something which will understand a little. I will see your wife, if you still wish it, but come first yourself to be sure that it is now with me and not thirty-five years ago.” She smiled and held out her hand, touching his lightly. And in the cool contact he felt the crystal quality of her and felt, too, the agony it must be, when the unknown force no matter whence it came, poured into this crystal vessel the ugliness of bloody passions which had been long since spent.
“I don’t entirely understand—” he said, “but I admire you very much, madame.”
As he walked down the trail he heard the piano again. The cool, pure notes of Mozart and her voice, silver-toned as a bell in the night air. “Take my beloved in your keeping, Console her, drive away her tears——”
He smiled a little to himself as he hurried up the mine road. Yes, she might help Amanda, incongruous as it seemed. Because Calise had integrity, that most desirable of all virtues. Even in the recurring storm that racked her there was integration, for she submitted to it with fear certainly, but also with recognition of its mysterious part in a larger purpose. How few people admitted the existence of evil, and yet had wisdom enough to fight it with the only weapons of any value, the beautiful comfort of simple things, like her Indian bowl full of desert broom, or the making of music. How few knew the values of solitude and the quiet persistent search for glimpses of the Spirit.
She is like Saba in many ways, he thought. And a longing came to him for his mother. Perhaps Saba would leave San Carlos for a few days and come to see them. Even as he thought that, he knew it would not be a good thing. Where could she stay? And though she would try to hide it, how deeply Amanda would be shocked by the gaunt silent woman in the flounced Apache dress with the blue tattoo marks on her chin. Nor, with the state of the mine as precarious as it was, could he take time to
visit the reservation himself. If the roads were dry a hurried trip might be made on a Sunday, but he knew that it was wiser that the two women should not meet yet. His mother understood this as she understood all direct elemental matters of feeling. It was thus in silence, with instinctive wisdom, that she had sustained his father, and himself as a boy, even during the period when he had been East to prep school, and ashamed, not exactly of his Indian blood, but suffering the normal adolescent shame of being different from his fellows. She had known then how to give him strength, and after his father died she had known how to console his deep grief with a substitute father—Tanosay, her own father, the fierce Apache war chief, who had never repented of any of his actions, who lived out most of his life in a remote rancheria in the Natanes Mountains untouched by missionary or agency, and who became for Dart the rock and the salvation of his turbulent adolescence.
Those were strange years in which Dart had had a foot in two different worlds; the American boarding-school life in a small New England town, punctuated by Christmas and Thanksgiving with Professor Dartland’s spinster sisters in Boston, and the summers in an Apache wickiup in a fastness of the Arizona mountains with his grandfather Tanosay, and Saba. Belonging to both worlds, and yet not quite in either of them, it had been necessary to learn to live without belonging, to develop a unity within the self which needed no support.
Tanosay had had no doubts, ever. For him there were no half-tones. There were friends and there were enemies. The friends you died for, the enemies you killed, and a lying tongue which pretended to be friend and was not should be killed with torture. That was but justice. Though pain and death in themselves were never as important as the Spirit’s humiliation. Nothing must ever threaten the essential dignity of the soul. And Tanosay believed in the tangible existence of the soul, as he believed in Usen, the God-Spirit, whose essence pervades all created things.
Tanosay, lean and wary as an Arizona lion, had been a powerful shaman as well as a chief. He was related to the Great Cochise, Chief of the Chiricahuas, and had shared with him and the other Apache tribes much of the forty years’ struggle with the white man. A history of violated peace treaties, of corrupt agents, of greed for land and gold, of hysterical fear. And also of an occasional opponent worthy of respect like Crooks, Clum, and Jeffords. These were good men, all too soon replaced by weaker, double-tongued ones, in response to the impatient and vacillating policies of the Indian Bureau three thousand miles away.
It had been in 1882 that Tanosay and many other Apache chiefs traveled the warpath for the last time, and eventually accepted defeat with the stoicism popularly attributed to Indians, though it was really compounded of two more positive factors—recognition of the changing order, and the desire to save their people from extermination. True, Geronimo’s guerrilla warfare continued for four more years, but Geronimo was an outlaw amongst his own people, and his little band of renegades, squaws and children—though it required five thousand United States soldiers to subdue never had the support of the wiser Apaches.
Tanosay had justification for his series of raids in ’82, one of which resulted in the capture of little Nellie Brown, Saba’s mother. Tanosay’s brother, Na-Klin, had always had friendship for the whites because of General Crook, for whom he had acted as scout against the Mojaves. And yet, after the trouble at Cibicue in which five scouts were accused of mutiny, Na-Klin, who was innocent, was summarily hanged with the rest.
Tanosay’s heart lay like a dark and bitter fruit in his breast while he led his band of Coyoteros on the path of revenge. From the Ton to Basin to the Gila he burned isolated ranch houses, and clubbed or shot the owners, determined to rid Apacheland of these treacherous white intruders. He was down in Arivaipa country near Fort Thomas when he spied, from ambush in the rocks, an isolated mule-drawn wagon plodding along the road towards Globe. It was driven by Abner Brown from Missouri, who was lured like many another by the rich silver-mining district around Globe—the mining district which had been arbitrarily grabbed from the Apache reservation as soon as anything of value had been found there.
Abner Brown had with him in the wagon his wife, his grown son, and his sixteen-year-old daughter Nellie, and being of an arrogant and foolhardy nature, he had ignored the warning of Apache uprisings he had heard along the road from Silver City.
Tanosay, whose lust for revenge had now been somewhat sated, might not have bothered with the lone wagon, but he needed ammunition and the shiny new rifles which the two men carried across their knees.
During the brief fight Abner and his son killed three of Tanosay’s warriors, and fought so bravely that by Tanosay’s orders, and according to immemorial custom, their bodies were not molested after death, nor was that of Mrs. Brown whose husband shot her through the heart with his last bullet to save her from the Apaches. Little Nellie had fainted and Tanosay thought for a while that she, too, was dead. When he found that she was not, he picked her up and took her back to his hidden rancheria in the wild Natanes Mountains, along with the bodies of his three slain warriors.
Nellie was a gentle pretty girl of limited intelligence at best. Nature now mercifully wiped from her mind in a total amnesia the horror which had befallen her family, and all memory of her life before that moment on the Globe road.
Tanosay took her to his own wickiup and she was kindly received by his wife, Man-tzee, who was a plump and good-tempered woman from the Chiricahuas, though regrettably barren. Nellie was not unhappy, she fitted herself into the domestic life of the tribe, she danced well, she wove baskets, she roasted mescal, and she learned how to brew from fermented corn a tizwin as potent as any in the rancheria. Tanosay grew fond of her and married her. Man-tzee did not complain. The two wives lived together amicably. The next year when Saba was born to Nellie, it was Man-tzee who received the baby with a soft cry of pleasure, and it was Man-tzee who tenderly nursed Nellie through the ensuing childbed fever. Tanosay used all his medicinal arts for Nellie—he invoked Usen, the deity, through Tanosay’s own particular totem, the white-tailed deer; he sang for Nellie the Purification chant; he sprinkled her with the sacred pollen; and when these failed he sent for another shaman from Fort Apache across the mountains.
But Nellie died. The baby, Saba, never knew that Man-tzee was not her mother, nor that she herself was only half Apache, until the fall that she was twelve and went to the Indian school at San Carlos. Then it was that Tanosay told her her history and soothed her grief and shock with thoughtful words. “The world has changed, my daughter. The white man now rules this land of ours, and we must accept. One must never rebel against the things one cannot change, for that is weakness. It is better that you go to school and learn the white ways which were once the ways of your real mother.”
In truth, the arms of the agency were lengthening each year, and Tanosay had had to bow to compromise. He could no longer keep his people separate and self-sustaining as in the old days when they had ranged over half Arizona at will. If they were not to starve they must move down from the mountains for the winter months, at least. They must learn agriculture and they must accept the weekly rations doled out by the patronizing government. All these acceptances were distasteful things, and though the Apaches bowed to the inevitable, nothing could force them to enjoy a way of life so alien to their natures, nor force them to admire their conquerors. They remained proudly aloof.
Saba, more aloof than any of them, ignored her white blood. None of her teachers, nobody at the agency ever guessed it. Her skin was lighter than some, but Indian skin tones vary as do white ones, and her features were those of Tanosay. She learned English with rapidity, as she learned all her lessons, fast and well, but most Apache children are highly intelligent, and she evoked no special notice beyond a recommendation that she go on to the new Indian school at Phoenix for further education. And it was at Tanosay’s insistence that she did so. He loved her and he was wise enough to wish her to be as well equipped as possible for coping not only with the new order, but with the inevita
ble day when her white blood should awake, and she begin to suffer the humiliation and the loneliness inherent in the term “half-breed.”
That day never actually came, for Saba continued to feel entirely Apache, and yet it was no doubt her white blood which contributed to the success of her marriage. Her heart had never been touched until the morning when Professor Jonathan Dartland, wan and thin from the tuberculosis which had sent him to Arizona, came to the Indian school in search of an efficient girl to be his part-time housekeeper. Saba had always thought to marry an Apache, one of her father’s band, when this tedious exile should be over, but she fell deeply in love with Dartland and he with her. And for the fifteen years of their marriage until his death, they were happy together and with little Dart in a modern house on the desert near Phoenix. And then, after the funeral and to the disapproving amazement of their few friends and acquaintances, Saba had quietly returned to the reservation and to Tanosay.
“Can you beat that!” people said. “Right back to the blanket, filthy wickiup, no plumbing, raw meat in a pot, and those ridiculous clothes! After all those years with a charming, refined man like Professor Dartland. Once an Indian always an Indian. Why in the world do we waste the taxpayers’ money putting a veneer on them that rubs right off?”
