Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  Outside, Rex lay on the porch, front paws hung over the top step. He looked content. She would be like Rex, she told herself. She got the brown envelope out of the front seat and went back inside.

  In the kitchen, she opened the bottle of Chardonnay she found in the refrigerator door, filled a crystal goblet almost to the top, and carried it into the living room. Then she put a Gershwin CD into the player that stood on a table. She remembered the CD: she and Lawrence used to listen to it. She settled into one of the overstuffed chairs—not the one she’d always liked, a different chair, positioned between the sofas—and ripped open the brown envelope. Sipping the wine, she began thumbing through the articles.

  Somewhere in the black type that covered the pages, she understood now, was the reason a man was trying to kill her.

  9

  Dusk had deepened into the black night that falls over the mountains, and the cottage had turned chilly. Catherine was still curled in the chair, reading in a puddle of light. Rex snored and shook himself in dreams on the rug next to her. A month of her life, unfolding page by page to “Rhapsody in Blue.” She had turned over the stack and started from the bottom, reading the stories in the order in which she had written them, then setting them on the coffee table. Odd, the details she’d recalled as she read: the blanched face of the mother of the gang member shot by a Denver police officer when the officer was exonerated; the way the wind flapped the suit jackets of the dignitaries the day ground was broken on the luxury residence and office complex that Lawrence was developing; the waxy mustache of the former state treasurer during his trial in District Court on twenty-six charges of fraud and embezzlement and malfeasance in office.

  She’d written earlier articles on the downfall of the state treasurer, beginning with the first hint of irregularities after an accountant had blown the whistle and gone to the governor. Marcy Norton, the governor’s press secretary, had alerted her to the story and given her the accountant’s name. He had agreed to an interview and she had broken the story. The Mirror had piled on, the treasurer resigned, and charges were filed.

  But all of that had occurred more than a year ago. The trial took place nearly four weeks ago. The former treasurer was now in the state prison in Canon City. Had he wanted to kill her—and surely, he had reason—why hadn’t he sent the killer after her when she had first gotten onto the story? Before the Journal had published it?

  The stack of papers in her hand was getting smaller. At the beginning of the summer, she had written two or three stories on the lack of requirements for background checks on in-home daycare workers. She had found four people running daycare centers with past convictions of sexual and physical abuse of children. The stories had caused a storm— the paper’s telephones jammed with callers wanting to know if their daycare arrangements were safe. There were dozens of e-mails every day. And here was the story she had written two weeks ago on the tougher background checks that the state now required for anyone offering daycare in their homes.

  The new regulations would put at least four people out of business, she realized. It was possible one of them blamed her. But that was ridiculous. The Mirror and the television news had jumped on the story. Featured the people with prior convictions, blasted their photographs on the front page and the evening news. They had run editorials screaming for tougher regulations to protect children.

  She set the daycare story on top of the other stories on the table. The rest of the press had done a better job than she had, that was the truth. Marjorie had even called her into the office, waved the front page of the Mirror, and said, “I thought you were on this!”

  But by then she’d gotten involved with the story of the Arapaho and Cheyenne land claims. She had written two stories. But the story of the Sand Creek Massacre had touched something inside of her and drawn her in. She’d known she would follow the story wherever it led. She could hear Norman’s voice in her head. You’re Arapaho. We brought you the story.

  And maybe that explained the compulsion that had overtaken her, she thought. Made her neglect other stories, not return phone calls, let her e-mail pile up unanswered. Maybe it was her own story, the story she had never been told. She had spent hours—more time than she should have spent—in the Denver Public Library researching the Sand Creek Massacre. She had taken a lot of time writing and rewriting the story about Sand Creek, taking care to shape the sentences and paragraphs so the readers would understand how important they were.

  She started rereading the initial story, published two weeks ago. The headline across the top was smudged: “Tribes File Claims to Colorado Lands.”

  The Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes have filed claims with the Department of the Interior for twenty-seven million acres in Colorado, roughly one-third of the state. The tribes claim the lands belong to them under the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1851. According to Norman Whitehorse, Arapaho spokesman, the tribes were driven from their ancestral lands following the Sand Creek Massacre, November 29, 1864. He said that the tribes are willing to settle for smaller tracts of land where they could establish tribal ranches and raise hormone-free cattle. “We believe the market for the beef is very strong,” he said. “We know how to raise cattle. The ranches will give our people financial security.”

  Governor Mark Lyle said that the claims have clouded the property titles on most of eastern Colorado. “Property owners will be forced to take legal action to clear titles. The claims will bring a large amount of unwarranted expenses to ordinary Colorado families who will not be able to buy or sell property without extensive litigation.”

  The governor pointed out that Congress had settled the Arapaho and Cheyenne land claims for $15 million in 1965. He opposes any additional settlement with the tribes.

  Catherine slipped the page behind the second article—the interview with the elders. When the elders had described the site of Sand Creek, she had felt as if she had seen it herself. The large black headline ran across two columns: “Tribes Accuse Government of Genocide.”

  On the plains in southeastern Colorado, not far from La Junta, a dusty wind whips across an expanse of arid land covered with wild grass and broken by clumps of cottonwoods, arroyos, and the dried bed of what had once been Big Sandy Creek. On November 29, 1864, a village of Arapahos and Cheyennes under Chief Left Hand and Chief Black Kettle was camped along the creek. It was freezing cold, but the ground was dry, striped with the white traces of the last snow-storm. At dawn, with the sky turning red in the east, the silence of the plains was broken by the clank of artillery and harnesses and the rustle of horses’ hooves as the Third Colorado Cavalry drew up on the bluff overlooking the sleeping camp. The commander, Colonel John M. Chivington, lifted his sword overhead. He exhorted the troops to remember the whites killed by Indians. The Colonel did not believe in taking prisoners. The sword sliced the air. The soldiers spurred their horses and the cavalry swept down on the sleeping village. At the end of the day, one hundred and sixty three Arapahos and Cheyennes—most were women, children, and old men—lay dead. Chief Left Hand was mortally wounded. His family was killed, with the exception of his sister, Mahom, and her young children.

  Norman Whitehorse, Arapaho spokesman, called the Sand Creek Massacre “an act of genocide against Indian people who were under the protection of the United States government. Territorial Governor John Evans and other white authorities, including Chivington, had told the chiefs to bring their people to Sand Creek. They had promised to conclude a peace treaty with them. The chiefs had complied with the order.”

  Whitehorse points out that Left Hand and Black Kettle and White Antelope were known at the time as peace chiefs. “They’d been working very hard to keep peace between the Indians and the white people that had swarmed over their lands.” Chief Left Hand had even rescued three white children who had been captured by hostile Indians and turned the children over to Captain Edward Wynkoop at a camp out on the plains, an act that Whitehorse called “brave to the point of recklessness. Not long before he
rescued the children, two Cheyennes had ransomed a captured white woman and taken her to safety at Fort Laramie. The fort commander had ordered the Cheyennes hung in chains until they were dead.”

  “We’ve never forgotten Sand Creek,” said Harold YellowBull, Arapaho elder. “Nobody was expecting an attack. Most of the warriors had gone out hunting. They had six hundred people they had to feed. Women, children, and old men stayed behind.” He said that two young girls had gone to the corral at dawn. “They saw the soldiers on top of the bluff. They ran back to the village and shouted, ‘The soldiers are coming! The soldiers are coming!’ Chief Black Kettle ran out with an American flag so the soldiers could see it was a friendly village. Lots of people ran out of the tipis naked. They didn’t have time to get dressed before the soldiers started shooting.”

  Cheyenne elder James Hunting, a descendant of Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle, told a story passed down in his family. “The Chief called for people to gather around him. He held up his white flag and the people ran to him. Chief White Antelope did the same, and they shot him. The soldiers galloped through the village and shot everybody they could, even the little children. Shot them in the back, is what I heard.”

  “People tried to get away from the soldiers,” YellowBull said. “They were running about, crazylike. Some of ’em ran up the creek bed. A lot of ’em were shot down, but some got away. Most had been wounded. They ran for miles, carrying children on their backs. When the soldiers stopped coming after them, they made a little camp. It was bitter cold. The ones that were able gathered up dry grass and tried to make fires to keep the wounded and the little children from freezing to death. The children were crying, and people were moaning from their wounds. It was a terrible night.”

  Hunting said that when Chief Black Kettle saw that the soldiers intended to kill everyone, he yelled for the people to run up the creek bed. “He ran with them,” he said. “He thought his wife, Woman-To-Be-Hereafter, was running with him, but when he got to the camp, she was nowhere around. So he ran back! He found her on the ground. She’d been shot pretty bad. He picked her up and carried her miles to the camp. He saved her life, because the soldiers were riding up to the wounded and stabbing them to death.”

  Whitehorse pointed out that, after the attack, the soldiers mutilated the dead bodies. They took scalps, ears, breasts, and other parts of the bodies as trophies. “There was a big victory parade when they got back to Denver. The soldiers waved their trophies, and the crowds cheered.”

  He shook his head. “And they said we were savages!”

  “Because of Sand Creek,” Whitehorse said, “Arapaho and Cheyenne people were forced from their ancestral lands in Colorado. The government had acknowledged the tribal title to the lands in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Now we ask Congress to acknowledge the act of genocide, reconsider the reparations that were made in 1965, and give us a just compensation for our lost lands. We have been waiting for justice for one hundred and fifty years.”

  Congress has designated the site of the Sand Creek Massacre the nation’s newest national park. An interpretive center will be built to explain and preserve the history of the event. Visitors will be able to tour the periphery of the battlefield, but will not be allowed onto the actual site of the village. Whitehorse said that the tribes consider the site sacred ground. “It’s a place of death,” he said. “Sand Creek is the cemetery for many of our ancestors.”

  Whitehorse said he expects that Congress will finally settle the matter. “It’s different now,” he says. “The public knows the truth about what happened at Sand Creek, and the public expects Congress to honor the Fort Laramie Treaty.”

  All of it history, Catherine thought. A story about a massacre that had occurred in the nineteenth century when Denver was nothing more than a collection of log cabins and tents that rose up overnight on the banks of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Running beneath the story of the massacre, she knew, was the bigger story of the settlers and the Indians contesting the same lands. She’d found an old photo of that time in the Denver Public Library. Just beyond the town were the tipis of an Arapaho village at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River. Not long after the photo had been taken, the Arapaho village had moved.

  Nothing in an article on history that would make someone want to kill her.

  She slipped a paper clip over the tops of the two articles. Loss and the absence of justice—that was what they were about. She could write similar articles about any group of people. Irish people at the hands of England, Mexicans and South Americans at the hands of generations of oppressive governments, Africans and Middle Easterners, Muslim women—the list was endless. It was the history of the human race.

  And yet someone wanted to kill her.

  She was missing something. She scanned the pages again, rereading sentences and paragraphs, searching for words that carried more than one meaning and could have been misinterpreted by a crazy man with a gun. She couldn’t find anything.

  But this evening she would write the story about the Arapaho and Cheyenne plans to settle the claims for five hundred acres where they could build a casino. And casinos were controversial. She felt a new flare of anger. Whitehorse and the elders hadn’t told her about the plan to use the land claims as a way of bypassing the state and the people of Colorado to get a casino. There were casinos in Black Hawk, Central City, and Cripple Creek, and on the Ute Reservation in the southwestern corner of the state, but voters had turned down proposals for additional casinos seven times.

  She would write about the rally and the announcement of the casino plans. She would quote the developer, Peter Arcott: “We’re going to give you a first-rate casino!” The article wouldn’t appear until tomorrow morning. And yet, someone wanted her dead now.

  She squared all of the articles on the table, stuffed them back into the envelope, and finished off another glass of Chardonnay. Then she went out into the kitchen and refilled the glass. Nothing made sense. She’d gone along with Bustamante’s theory—and everyone else’s, it seemed—that the intruder had come after her because of something she had written. It made her want to laugh—the classic blame-the-victim theory. It was all her fault—a divorced woman, living alone, walking her dog at night, writing newspaper articles that pissed somebody off. The whole idea was ridiculous.

  She gulped the Chardonnay and poured another glass. The bottle was half empty, and she felt a little drunk. She could feel the warmth moving through her, the tenseness draining out of her. And maybe tonight she would sleep. She opened the refrigerator door and looked at the food bulging on the shelves. She wasn’t hungry, but she hadn’t eaten since last night, except for the nutrition bar she’d gotten out of the vending machine at the newspaper. And she had an article to write tonight. She took out the roasted chicken and set it on the counter. There was a loaf of bread in the cabinets somewhere. She pulled open the doors.

  Rex started to growl. Scrambling to his feet in the living room, toe-nails clawing at the wood floor. He was barking now and emitting low, furious growls that almost drowned out the sound of knocking.

  Catherine dropped the loaf of bread she’d lifted out of a cabinet and went into the living room. She felt as though she were walking underwater, legs heavy with the effort. Rex was throwing himself against the door. The sound of his barking reverberated around her. She lifted the lamp off the table as she walked by. The cord stuck for a moment, then ripped free and bounced along the floor. The light went off leaving the light from the kitchen spilling around her. She steered herself toward the window next to the door and peered around the edge. Beyond the flare of the porch light was an endless stretch of darkness broken by the silvery motion of the pine branches.

  The knocking came again. She stepped toward the door, gripping the lamp with both hands. Rex was on his hind legs, front paws pressed against the door, growling. His top lip curled back and strands of saliva drooled out of his mouth.

  “Who is it?” she called.


  “Catherine, it’s me. Can I come in?”

  God, Lawrence! She leaned against the door and tried to catch her breath. She felt as if she had been running uphill. Her heart was crashing against her ribs. Her hand slipped over the knob, and it was a moment before she could grip it firmly enough to open the door.

  10

  “May I come in?” Lawrence Stern stood in the light flaring over the porch, the black night banked around him. He looked a little older than she remembered, Catherine thought. The frown lines a little deeper, the tiny red veins in his face a little more noticeable, the strands of gray in his dark hair more obvious. But then, she always remembered Lawrence as he was when she’d fallen in love with him almost eight years ago. Thirty-three years old then, tall and handsome, as polished as the handcrafted shoes he wore, striding into a restaurant or theater— anyplace they went, even the zoo—with square-shouldered confidence. He had set self-imposed limits back then: no more than one cocktail and two glasses of wine at dinner.

  “Catherine?”

  “Sorry.” She shoved the door open and moved aside. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  Lawrence strode into the living room—hand-tailored striped shirt and expensive trousers and hundred-dollar haircut. “What’s with the lamp?” He nodded at the crystal lamp she was gripping with one hand, the shade pitched sideways, the cord strung along the floor.

  “You scared me, Lawrence.” Catherine slammed the door shut.

  He walked over, took the lamp out of her hand and set it on the chest next to the door. “I thought you might like a little company,” he said. She felt the slight pressure of his arms around her, drawing her close. His breath smelled minty, traces of whiskey odors breaking through. She leaned into his chest and slipped her own arms around his waist. It was familiar, the safety of his arms.