The Siren's Tale (31 page)

I was grateful that the cloak had done its job in protecting me from the terrible lightning strike. A second before it hit the spot where we were standing, I was removed from sure death. Curly went down, and when I returned to the spot a few seconds later, he lay dead at my feet, just as I had seen him in my dreams so many times. 

“Perhaps we may meet in the afterlife one day, Curly,” said I to him. “Or perhaps you will return in another form, to finish out the end of your story.”

I thought at that time Curly Drake was the type of human male best suited for me. Since then, I have revised my opinion. Passion, sweetness, and devotion, when they are found combined in a male's personality, are more conducive to keeping the intimacy alive and the flame glowing in a relationship than passion alone. I have known men like that, and I have, for the most part, kept them at a safe distance. 

Of course, the cause of Curly's untimely demise was not the lightning strike, but the curse. Lightning was the conduit the curse had taken, and the mark on my temple proved the case. From that day onward, I lived in fear of the curse and its return.

By continuing our relationship after the curse was laid on me, by allowing Curly to make love to me again and accepting his help for my flight, I had consigned my passionate lover to an early death.

I knew all this at the time I left Alta, and I accepted the blame. What I did not know was that I was carrying Curly Drake's second child.

Curly Drake’s spectacular death on Hatter's Field and Cassandra Vye's simultaneous disappearance from Alta dominated the gossip for six months in the northeastern district.

As Huck Finn said of
Pilgrim’s Progress,
“It was a story about a man that left his family; it didn’t say why.”

Those closest to the principal characters remained mum.

But, though their dignified silence was honored, the grapevine buzzed as loudly as tree frogs in a swamp. Most believed Widow Brown's claim that her curse had been honored by a vengeful God. He had struck down one of the guilty parties, and Satan's whore had been forced to flee to the devil. 

In the
spring, the chorus grew loud again with news of the sale of the Plush Horse and Clare Drake’s move to the Brighton Grange. Nicholas now would occupy only two rooms, leaving the remainder of the ranch house to Clare and little Nick.

Clare Drake had become
a rich woman with nothing to worry about except how to spend her money and care for her child. With Drake's dying intestate, Clare inherited it all. Drake's eleven-thousand-dollar windfall and proceeds from the sale of the inn were set aside for her son's education. With good investment, Nicholas Samuel Drake would one day be a very wealthy man.

A
s the sole inheritor of his mother’s estate, Nicholas Brighton was likewise relieved from any further financial concerns. Not that these had ever been much on his mind, but it did strike him as ironic that now his wife was gone, his financial worries were behind him. Gradually Nicholas turned over the administration of the ranch to his able foreman and was grateful his modest needs would be accommodated without much further effort in that direction. Now at last he could turn his attention to his vocation of elevating minds, those who were most deserving of or in need of enlightenment.

The holiday season went
by quietly. The two cousins did their best to cheer each other, cutting a tree from the mountain for little Nick’s first Christmas and decorating it with holly and mistletoe. In January, Nicholas received an answer to the note he had sent Cassandra through Captain Vye, offering his estranged wife financial assistance. She refused his help and told him to forget her. Nonetheless, he was convinced their paths would cross one day, though his belief was more a secret mist in his heart than any tangible plan for a reconciliation. 

Spring arrived early, and in March, Nicholas
received a plea for help from Annie May, who had quit her employment after her marriage to a local young man. Over a particularly harsh winter, Annie May's husband had died from alcoholism. Her people had suffered exposure, starvation, and disease. The tribe had become seriously depleted. Fearing for her survival on the reservation, she petitioned her former master to provide her a residence at the Grange in exchange for her services. Horatio was already living in the horse shed, and the nursemaid lived in Clare’s quarters.

As the Indian maid
showed a talent for management, Nicholas’s idea was to turn over the business management of the school to her, in return for housing and a decent salary. Annie eagerly accepted, and a compatible household of six was complete.

Nicholas solicited and then carefully listened to Annie's revelations of the true conditions of life on the reservation
. Her personal experiences with privation, starvation, and broken promises had a powerful impact on him, lifting an issue of theoretical interest into a driving moral passion. Brighton began to write polemic tracts on the shameful behavior of the white man and the government toward the tribes. With the assistance of Caleb Scattergood’s ice delivery route, he disseminated his tracts locally, then branched out to street corners in Laramie and Cheyenne, and finally received the attention of regional newspapers and magazines.

By the summer of 1902, Nicholas Brighton was known across the nation for his writings on the Indian question. Brighton had struc
k a nerve chord in America’s moral fiber. Though sentimentality continued to cloud the public’s sensibility about the so-called winning of the West, a contrary voice was now being heard.

Hi
s insights and detailed stories prompted serious discussions on the national level, both for and against his position. He said that vast amounts of land featured in romanticized stories of the West had been stolen outright from the Indians and with the collusion of the American government.

At first, Caleb was the only local
supporter of Nicholas in his Indian rights crusade. Caleb was now in a position to flout the prevailing winds. In the two years he had been in business for himself, his success far exceeded anyone's expectations. He had sold the business to a larger Casper concern but continued to draw a nice salary from managing the northeastern office. With the profits from selling the business, he then purchased a goat-farm in Belle Fourche on which to live. As it happened, this was the very farm Mary Vye's cousin had owned, the one Mary Vye had lived in so long ago with her daughter Kate, and where Cassandra had later been born.

Caleb's prosperity was
enough reason for the former coalminer to begin thinking of hiring on a full-time employee and marrying. In the former regard, Caleb was not long in settling on Horatio Nelson, a strapping lad with a good head on his shoulders, who was eager to stretch his employment experience beyond odd jobs at the Grange. Horatio was Nicholas’s top student at the evening charter school, and so it was arranged that the lad would continue to reside at the Grange and finish his schooling, while spending half his daylight hours on Alta Mountain harvesting ice for Caleb. 

His loyalty
to Clare Brighton resulted in a happy ending. The combination of his new station in life and his years of devotion had made a strong impression on Clare, and one day she blushingly asked Nicholas to be the best man at their June wedding. Initially, Nicholas was reluctant; he feared his sainted mother might not have approved. But after some prayer, he went to them with his sincere best wishes, offering the Grange for their wedding reception.  

D
uring this same time, Nicholas became even busier in his chosen vocation. He expanded the scope of the Samuel Brighton Charter School, opening a night school for Indian girls. Annie May was his first student. She took his courses in business management and accounting. He published his own textbooks for the school, enriching traditionally neoclassic materials with essays of the Transcendental philosophers, Indian folklore and wisdom, and the works of naturalists such as Thoreau, Rousseau, and Muir.

Promotional materials were sent abroad to his former colleagues, both the intelligentsia in the East and the businessmen of the West. Thus, interest and support were garnered from other innovative thinkers in the fields of educatio
n and multi-cultural relations. In turn, they sent him talented but poor students whose parents were either missing or too poor to provide an education for their gifted youngsters. He took them in, even when they could pay nothing.

The day of Clare Drake's and Caleb Scattergood's wedding was set for the 27th June, 1902. Everyone in town was invited to partake in the evening reception at the Grange.
The couple was married at eleven o’clock in the morning at the Alta Methodist church by Pastor Bill Dodge. The bride was simply garbed in her Sunday best. The couple and Nicholas had been carried to the church in a special carriage rented for the occasion, coming all the way from New Gillette. The driver, a Mr. Riley, seemed to think it his duty to look down his nose at the natives, but even he enjoyed the lavish supper.

Preparations were in full swing at the Grange
for the reception, but anybody who passed by would have been struck by how quiet it seemed compared to the raucous bedlam emanating from their immediate neighbor’s house.

At the Victorian home of
Fairwell, the unflappable cobbler-barber, several native sons who congregated daily at Bottomlys’ butcher-and-coffee shop had been busying themselves since daybreak. They left it to their wives and children to attend the wedding, as they had something more important to do. In what would one day become John and Sarah Bellum's living room, Fairwell was hosting a bed-ticking in the couple’s honor, an old-fashioned event during which inebriated married men stuff goose feathers inside linens (provided by their wives) to create a down quilt for a wedding couple. Nicholas declined Fairwell’s invitation to join in.

The bride was disappointed as well when her cousin
declined to take part in any of the feasting and festivities.

“
My dear Clare, I would be the skull at the banquet. I am no good at social events.”

“
Nonsense, Nick.”

“
Well, apart from that, I would not be happy to be there. It would bring back too many memories…of her. Not that I am unhappy about your union, dear. No one could be more pleased than I. I will frequently be over to see you at your new home. My absence now won’t much matter.”

“
Then I give up. Do whatever will be most comfortable for you, Nick.”

So
, after standing up at the wedding, Nicholas retired to his quarters and gave himself over to his writings. As evening drew on, the sounds of life and movement in the lower part of the household became more pronounced, and the front gate clicked incessantly. Finally Nicholas put away his books and went down the back staircase, out onto the adjoining field by a back way, to avoid encountering boisterous guests.

T
here was Horatio's horse shed. Once upon a time, in advance of his own wedding, he had lived there. Secretly, he had enjoyed that short period of being so completely alone. Then it struck him. Other than Horatio and Annie, after tonight, he would live alone. The thought revolved in Nicholas's mind as a kind of epiphany: finally, he would be on his own. The distractions, the depression, and the guilt were suddenly gone.

Free! He was free to do his work
the way he had originally envisioned it, in his native homeland and for the native peoples living on the mountain, brown and white, male and female, old and young alike.

He was sorry to have lost his
mother. He was sad not to have kept his wife and had children of his own. He would miss Clare and little Nick.

But he was content despite these losses, and he had
the dust, the wind, and the magnificent, sweeping vistas of the land. He loved them as he always had done, but now he could love them unapologetically. He loved the great white pelicans that nested here and the bighorn sheep that could scale a sheer mountainside. He even loved the relentless winds that drove others crazy.

“
As you are in the light, walk in the light,” he murmured, continuing his walk with a lighter step. 

Within a few minutes,
he came upon Horatio, who was just returning to his shed from a hard day’s work of harvesting ice in the mountain recesses. It seemed the lanky lad must have grown at least a foot in the past year. Though Nicholas was not a short man, Horatio now towered over him. His freckles were fading, and his carroty hair was starting to turn auburn.

“
Hello, Horatio.”

“
Good evenin,’ Mr. Brighton,” said Horatio politely.

“
Horatio, I understand there was a square dance recently for young people in our barn. Is that right?”

“
I heard about it, sir. But I didn't go. I don’t have much interest in that sort of thing anymore.” 

Horatio
looked downcast, thinking about the last time he had danced with his mistress, only a few hours before she left town forever. He was also thinking guiltily of the note between husband and wife he had intercepted and destroyed.

“
A pity. Dancing is good for the soul, Horatio. My wife loved to dance and was—is still, I suppose, immensely talented at it.”

“
Yes, sir. I mean, I am sure you are right.”

“
You rather liked her, didn’t you, Horatio?”

“
You might say so, sir. She was my mistress.”

“
But beyond that, I believe she meant something special to you. Perhaps she was a symbol to you of all that is mysterious and magical about women. I think she made you want to be the best man you could possibly be, for her sake. Am I far from the mark?”

Horatio could not help gaping at the schoolmaster. How could this man possibly know the private things which he
tried to keep secret even from himself?

“
You ain’t angry at me, I hope, sir,” he said slowly.

“
Oh heavens no. Nothing like that. Cassandra did much the same for me. However, I was thinking I might be able to do something for you.”

“
You already have, sir. You’ve given me a place to stay, educated me, helped me get a full-time job. It’s me who owes you, sir.”

“Gallantly said, Horatio, and almost grammatical as well. I would expect nothing less to come out of your mouth. You will go far some day with that combination of intellect and humility.”

“
Thank you, sir. I hope so. Only—”

“
Only what, son?”

“
Well, since you brought up the subject of Mrs. Brighton, I was wondering—I hope you don’t mind my asking a question about her, sir.”