Winter's Child (12 page)

Father John felt the tension leak out of his muscles. He recognized the man. Thomas Horn.

“Sorry about the warning shots,” Thomas said. “Only way to keep trespassers from vandalizing the place.”

“My apologies. We should have asked permission.” Father John heard Shannon coming up behind him. Felt her rather than heard her. She approached silently in the snow. “This is my niece, Shannon O'Malley. She's researching the life of Lizzie Brokenhorn.”

Thomas Horn gave a quick nod, as if Shannon were in a long line of folks interested in Lizzie. “I got your calls.” The man turned and began stomping back toward the road. Father John took hold of Shannon's arm; she was shaking, and color had drained from her face.

“Sometimes grandmother's memory is sharp as ever.” Thomas had stopped and looked sideways. Then he started off again, and they fell in beside him. “Other times, she can't remember me. I was waiting for the best time to get back to you. She's been real good the last couple days. I expect she'd like a couple visitors, you want to stop by now.”

She was average
height, a little stocky, with rolls of flesh that bulged through a long-sleeved white tee shirt and rolled over the top of her blue jeans.
Full-figured
would be the correct term, Vicky thought. The figure of a middle-aged woman with a full resume of kids, ranch work, and part-time jobs to hold it all together.

“Come on in.” Rosemary Little Shield flung the door wide open. She had a way of looking at you out of the corners of her eyes, which reminded Vicky of Rosemary's relative, Eldon. Rosemary was Eldon's mother's cousin, to be precise, which Myra Little Shield had explained when Vicky called to get the woman's address. Not that it mattered. All relatives were the same.

Rosemary lived on a ranch that ran into the foothills west of Fort Washakie, Myra had told her, then adding the rest of the story: Rosemary and her husband, Larry—also Little Shield, another distant cousin of Eldon's—had inherited the ranch from her father. They
had hoped one of their kids—they had four—would stay on and help run the place, but the kids had scattered. The way of kids these days—off to college, a job in some city, forget they're Arapaho. Larry ran the ranch. Took on a hired hand when he could afford it.

“Clint said he was going to interview Rosemary,” Myra had gone on, “but we never heard what she had to say. Knowing Rosemary, she told things exactly as they are. No beating around the bush with her, and she saw Mary Ann the week after we'd gotten her. She knows how much we loved her from the get-go.”

Vicky had asked if she or Eldon knew a man by the name of Lou Bearing, and that had stopped the conversation. Vicky could almost hear the condensed quiet that had gathered on the other end. “It's not ringing a bell,” Myra said finally. “Maybe Eldon knows him. Why do you ask?”

Vicky started to explain that Clint had interviewed him after he'd talked to Rosemary, then stopped. There were no notations, no indication Clint had actually spoken to the man. Only the name written under three different days. It was possible Clint had intended to interview Lou Bearing and, for some reason, had changed his mind.

Myra had jumped into the silence. “I have to get back to work. I'm leaving early this afternoon to take Mary Ann to the dentist's.”

Now, Rosemary Little Shield was directing her to a love seat in the small living room and asking if she would like a cup of coffee. “That would be nice,” Vicky said, perching on the edge of a cushion. Outside the temperatures hovered below freezing, and despite the warm air blasting through the Ford, she had been chilled on the drive across the reservation. She unbuttoned her coat and kept it on, huddling inside the warmth, listening to the clinking, splashing sounds coming from the kitchen.

Rosemary came through the archway into the living room, a
mug in each hand. She set the mugs on the small table in front of the sofa and settled herself into a faded pink upholstered chair.

“Like I told you on the phone,” Rosemary said, “I don't have a lot of time. I'm on the early dinner shift at the diner today.”

Vicky said she understood. Ulrich's Diner in Riverton. She had eaten there many times. She supposed she must have seen Rosemary Little Shield there, another Arapaho woman working in town, a long drive every day. Women on the rez would go wherever they could find a job. It was the work that mattered, not the distance.

“So you've taken over Mary Ann's adoption case?” The woman had an open, matter-of-fact manner. There wasn't much time; the polite preliminaries had to be skipped. “That other lawyer spent a good hour here asking questions. He hung around so long that Larry came in from the pasture to see what was going on, so then he interviewed both of us.”

And that was strange, Vicky was thinking. In his notations, Clint hadn't mentioned Larry Little Shield. It seems there was a lot that Clint Hopkins hadn't mentioned.

“Would you mind telling me what you told Clint?”

Rosemary lifted her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “What you'd expect, I guess. How Myra called and said they had a new baby to care for. Naturally, I was surprised, 'cause they'd just lost their baby. So I was thinking, where did this new baby come from? She told me they were foster parents, and they hoped they'd have the baby for a long time, like the rest of her life. That evening, Larry and I went over to see the baby. I remember we brought some stew I'd made. You always need food with a new baby. And Mary Ann was real new, you could tell. Tiny little thing. But alert, with big blue eyes that followed you around, watching you, like she was trying to figure everything out.”

“Did it strike you as unusual that she was white?”

“You mean a white foster child with an Arapaho couple? I guess, but Myra said they thought the mother was Arapaho, and the baby happened to look more white than Indian, which would probably change as she grew. You know, the Indian side would come out. All I know is what I told Clint. Myra and Eldon were as happy as I'd ever seen them. There never was a couple more in love with a baby. I was so happy for them, after what they'd been through. Larry and I, neither one of us, wanted to throw any cold water, so we kept our mouths shut. But we were both thinking, soon as social services finds a white couple to take Mary Ann, the Little Shields will lose her.”

“But it didn't happen. Didn't you wonder why?”

“You sound like that other lawyer.” She gave a throaty laugh. “Like I told him, it didn't happen, and pretty soon the whole family just accepted Mary Ann as one of us. We figured Eldon and Myra would adopt her, and that's what they are trying to do.”

“Did you hear any rumors or gossip around the rez?”

“Rumors? Like what?”

“Clint didn't ask about rumors?”

Rosemary shrugged. “There's always busybodies that's got an opinion and can't keep it to themselves. Sure, there were rumors, some of them real nasty, like maybe Mary Ann was stolen, or Myra and Eldon bought her from somebody. Nobody paid any attention. Mary Ann had a good home. It was all that mattered.”

Vicky was quiet. Everyone on the list was related to the Little Shields, all of whom had probably ignored the rumors. Clint had no way of knowing what people might have said behind the family's back, but a judge would want to know. A judge would demand hard evidence to prove Mary Ann had been left on the Little Shields'
doorstep. She felt a downdraft of weariness. Is that what Clint had experienced? A sense of the impossibility of proving Mary Anne had been left on the Little Shields' doorstep?

“Why did you suggest Clint talk to Lou Bearing?”

“Who?” Rosemary had sprung upright and was pulling on a jacket she had yanked off the hook “I just realized the time. I can't be late for my shift.”

“The man Clint interviewed after he spoke to you.” Vicky got to her feet and started buttoning her own coat.

“You mean Lou and Debbie Bearing? Don't really know them. Keep to themselves. Never seen them at the powwows or farmers' markets. Why would I send Clint to talk to them?”

“I thought they might be neighbors.”

Rosemary threw a scarf around her neck as if she were throwing salt over her shoulder and could read the future based on the patterns in which the crystals fell. “Neighbors? What are you talking about. The nearest neighbor is a mile away.”

Vicky looped her own scarf under her chin and followed Rosemary out into the frigid air. A sheen of frost lay over the Ford. She was trying to picture Clint's calendar. In the jottings below Rosemary's name, he had written the word
neighbor
. The following day he had written Lou Bearing's name for the first time.

Except there was no one who could qualify as a neighbor, and Rosemary had not suggested Lou Bearing.

“Hope you have good luck helping Mary Ann,” Rosemary called over her shoulder as she turned toward the pickup on the far side of the stoop.

“Thanks for your time.” Vicky's voice sounded sharper in the cold air than she intended. She veered in the opposite direction, toward the Ford, and was about to get inside when she stopped. She
must have misinterpreted the sequence of Clint's notations. Neighbor could have referred to Lou Bearing's neighbor.

She swung about and started back across the yard, waving at the woman maneuvering the pickup into parallel tire ruts that ran out to the road. Finally the pickup rocked to a stop and the driver's window began a slow, jerky motion downward.

Vicky grabbed hold of the door handle. Her breath floated into the cab, a cloud of stream. “Who did you suggest Clint talk to?”

The woman blinked several times, as if she were trying to comprehend. “I didn't suggest anybody. I'm going to be late.”

“Please. It's important. You must have mentioned someone.”

She looked away a moment, then turned back. The tip of her nose was red with the cold. “It was just conversation. We were talking about the adjustment Eldon and Myra had made to take care of a baby, and the baby wasn't even their own. It's not like babies know the difference between night and day, so they're up all night, crying. You don't know what's wrong. I told him what Dina said . . .”

“Dina?”

“Dina Fowler. Worked the same shift at the diner. She'd come to work looking like she'd been up all night, and she didn't even have a baby. It was her neighbor's baby. Crying all night. I remember Dina saying she hadn't even realized the neighbor's were expecting. Then, one night, the crying started.”

Neighbor.
Clint had jotted the single word, and Vicky realized she had assumed that Lou Bearing was Rosemary's neighbor. He wasn't; he was Dina Fowler's neighbor. She said, “Does Dina still work with you?”

“Left a couple years ago after she and Matthew moved to Lander. She opened her own place on Main Street. Like I say, we were just
chatting. I never expected Clint would go find Dina.” The window began creaking upward. “I really have to go.”

Vicky stepped back and gave the woman a little wave of appreciation. Hard pellets of ice and snow sprayed from the wheels as the pickup ground forward. Clint Hopkins had been a good adoption lawyer because he was thorough. Nothing was unimportant, no idle chitchat. Every comment might lead to something.

Fire crackled in
the wood burning stove, a survivor from the nineteenth century, glowing red and orange and emitting heat waves into the small room. Traces of gray smoke escaped from the metal chimney that rose through an opening in the ceiling. Shannon was conscious of her uncle standing close behind her in the small room. A few feet away, slumped in a chair in front of the stove, was an old woman bundled in a Pendleton blanket, with a lined, leathery face and a pink scalp covered with strips of thin gray hair.

“Grandmother.” Thomas Horn bent over the woman. The gentleness in his tone surprised Shannon, as if he were speaking to a child or someone quite ill. “Are you up for visitors?”

The old woman stirred and shifted about inside the blanket. “I love visitors.”

“Father John from the mission is here. He brought his niece.” Shannon felt the man's eyes dance over her for a moment. “They would like to talk with you.”

At that, Theresa Horn strained sideways and looked over her shoulder. Light flickered in her narrow black eyes.

Shannon watched her uncle move in a little closer, drawn to the warmth of the fire. The woman squared herself again in front of the stove. From somewhere in the folds of the blanket, she brought out a hand, speckled with spots and thin as paper, the fingers as crooked and fragile as dried sticks. Uncle John held her hand in both of his for a long moment. “How are you, Grandmother?”

Voice crackling like the fire, the old woman said she was as ornery as ever. Waiting for winter to blow away so her bones could warm up. “And who's this pretty thing?” She strained sideways again, and now Shannon felt the old woman's gaze traveling over her.

“My niece, Shannon.”

“Oh, yes, so Thomas said. My grandson tells me what he wants me to know. He thinks I'm too senile to know what he's up to, so I always check.” The old woman gave a little laugh that rumbled about the blanket.

Shannon stepped in closer to let the old woman take her in, make up her own mind as to what kind of heart beat inside this white woman. Good heart? Bad heart? A day on the reservation and its ways were taking hold of her. If Theresa Horn decided she had a bad heart, Shannon knew, they might as well leave, because the old woman would go as silent as an abandoned drum.

“I'm so pleased to meet you.” Shannon leaned down—not too far, just enough to allow the old woman to bring her into focus. “Your grandson was kind enough to invite us over.”

It took a moment, but gradually a smile worked its way through the old woman's expression. First the black eyes, then the mouth. She lifted a hand again, and Shannon took it, conscious of Uncle John watching her. Was her excitement contagious? She was holding
a hand that had held Lizzie's hand. The small hand of a child then, when Lizzie was in her late fifties or early sixties. The hand of an old woman now, roughened and muscular.

“So you want to know about my grandmother.” Theresa Horn retrieved her hand and hid it again in the blanket. “Thomas told me Father John called about bringing you by. You come from back east.”

The old woman was sharp today; she hadn't missed anything. Shannon glanced up at Uncle John beside her. He was easy to read. Thomas hadn't returned his calls because his grandmother hadn't made up her mind whether she wanted to share her most precious possession—her stories—with a stranger. Even when Thomas brought them home, he probably wasn't sure how she would react.

“Chicago,” Shannon said.

The old woman nodded. “Grandmother came from a place near Chicago. You have that in common, that and red hair. Oh, I remember reddish hair poking out of the calico cloth she wrapped around it. You'd better sit down.” She motioned to the kitchen chairs Thomas had pulled over.

Shannon dropped onto one of the chairs and leaned forward, conscious of Uncle John taking the chair next to her and Thomas Horn hovering nearby in the shadows, close enough to hear everything. The old woman was saying something about her grandmother dying when she was seven years old.

Shannon felt a stab of disappointment. How much could the old woman remember? How much would be true?

“I remember how she hated her hair,” Theresa said. “Hated her white skin. Used to try and hide them. My father got her light skin. His hair was light, not red like grandmother's. Never made any difference. He knew he was Arapaho, but I guess that was what
bothered grandmother. She knew she wasn't Arapaho, no matter what her heart said.”

“It's wonderful that you have those memories.” Shannon could feel her whole being reaching toward the old woman. This was as close as she would ever come to Lizzie Brokenhorn, these people on the rez with Lizzie's blood in their veins.

“I may be old as the hills.” Theresa gave another cracked laugh. “Some days I still got my marbles. What else you want to know?”

What else? Shannon threw another glance at the man beside her. Information is a gift. It was impolite to ask for a gift. Finally she said, “You actually knew her. I was hoping you could tell me if”—she drew in a long breath, then plunged on—“if you think she was happy.”

The old woman sank further down into the blanket until her chin disappeared. “Nobody asked questions like that back then. You were alive, so you were happy. Grandmother worked hard. She did her chores. She cooked our food every day. We ate stew. Rabbit, deer, elk, if Dad and Grandfather got lucky. Beef when we got our rations once a year. Beef on the hoof.”

Another laugh erupted from the blankets. “I guess they thought, let those Indians play at being Indians and slaughter their food. One beef for a family. The men killed the cow and Grandmother went to work. She had a big knife, sharp enough to take off your finger, and she got down on the ground and skinned and butchered the carcass. Up to her elbows in blood when she finished. She cut off big slabs of beef that she pounded with the berries us kids found on the prairie. She stretched the beef out to dry on racks grandfather built. We had beef stew on real cold days in the winter when we needed extra fat on our bones, she used to say.”

“We saw her house.” She'd been right, Shannon was thinking.
Lizzie had made the stew at the stove. “It looks like there was a stove inside.”

The old woman shook her head. “Grandmother cooked over the big wood fire in the tipi. If we came inside to get warm, she put us to work. Go to the creek and get more water. Go clean the potatoes in the snow. She always had a bucket of wild potatoes and onions she dug in the fall. The dirt stuck to them like glue. By the time I got them clean, my fingers were frozen. Grandmother didn't take to excuses. If I complained, she told me to get back to work.”

“She sounds very . . .” Shannon could sense the man beside her waiting—his breath suspended— while she searched for the word. “Disciplined.” She had almost said
tough
.

“She survived, didn't she? The old people kept us alive. Hunting, trying to grow crops on this no-water land, working all the time to keep our bellies filled. You want to know if she was happy? I'd say she would've been happier living free on the plains in the Old Time. But when she came to the people, the Old Time was gone, and the people were sick and hungry. Weren't any good times before or after the rez.”

Shannon gave Uncle John a quick glance.
When she came to the people
. As if Lizzie Fletcher had come on her own.

The old woman had tilted her head back until her chin emerged from the blanket. Her gaze trailed the chimney to the ceiling. “I remember how she taught me to make fry bread. ‘Pinch off a piece of dough,' she'd say. Those white hands of hers were quick and strong. ‘Pat it out.' The old woman patted at the blanket until Shannon could almost see a ball of dough taking shape, round and fat and smooth like the photos she had seen of Indian women working in the food booths at powwows.

“‘See?'” the old woman said, her hand still patting the blanket.
“‘Not like that. Like this!' Oh, she was a stickler for doing it right. Not worth doing unless you did a thing right. She'd toss the dough into hot oil and turn it with a stick until it was golden brown and sizzling. You could see the steam coming off it, and your mouth would start watering. She always kept pieces of fry bread in her necessary bag. When us kids got hungry and started crying, she'd pull out a piece of fry bread to shut us up.”

Shannon sat back, reluctant to let the moment pass. Theresa Horn was deep in memories now, transported to another time. A child following her grandmother around, doing what she was told, hoping for another piece of fry bread. And where was her own mother? Tending to the crops, hunting for wild berries and vegetables, hauling water? Working. Working. She knew enough about tribal life to know it was the older women, the grandmothers, those whose work kept them closer to home, who raised the children.

“Lizzie sounds like a good grandmother,” she said, wanting to keep the memories flowing, to hold the old woman in the past.

“We didn't think of good or bad. Grandmother looked after us. She taught us kids how to survive. How to tan hides and sew shirts and pants and dresses. She took us to the Sun Dance. Oh, I remember riding in the back of the wagon that bounced all over the place. Grandmother up on the buckboard handling the horses. They never gave her any trouble. She could turn and stop them whenever she wanted. She taught us to be respectful of the dancers 'cause they danced in the heat for three days without water or food. They made a sacrifice to the Creator so that He would take pity on the people. After the dancing ended, we helped Grandmother hand out the chokecherry juice so they could drink water and eat food without getting sick. She knew all these things, Grandmother did. She passed them on to us.”

The old woman slumped downward until her chin disappeared again, and Thomas stepped forward, not saying anything. His look said it all: She's getting tired.

Uncle John stood up first, and Shannon rose beside him, reluctant to let go of the past. This old woman had known Lizzie Brokenhorn, held her hand, sat at her side, breathed in the essence of her. “Thank you,” she said, but the old woman's eyelids had dropped down and she had receded into some other place. Perhaps she was still with Lizzie.

Shannon waited while her uncle shook hands with Thomas Horn and thanked him, then she did the same. The man crossed the room, opened the door, and Shannon stepped out first into the blast of cold air.

*   *   *

“She didn't tell
me everything.” Shannon watched the cabin, a dark smudge in the gray light, pass outside her window as they drove along Blue Sly Highway.

“What else would you have liked to know?”

“What else?” Shannon laughed. “E degio e posso,” one of her favorite arias, was playing between them. “Everything else. Did Lizzie ever look at her white arms and legs and wonder who she was? Where she came from? Why was she different from her people? Why she resembled the white people in town? Did she wonder what they thought of her?”

“What do you think?”

“Of course she did. So did John Brokenhorn. He moved the family into the mountains at one point to hide her from white people who might take her. Recapture her.” She slid sideways into the corner and stared at the man beside her, the clumps of reddish hair
beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. They were alike; they were related; they came from the same tribe. What was it like for Lizzie to look at her Arapaho family—husband, aunts and uncles and cousins, all the people who gave her her place on the earth—and know she was different?

She straightened herself and stared out the windshield. It looked like snow again, the dark clouds hanging low, stationary and heavy, waiting to open up. She would spend the rest of the day writing out her notes, deciphering what she wrote, reading between the lines. Is that what history was about? The past that lodged between the lines?

And this evening? This evening she would see James Two Horses. Hamburger or pizza someplace. He would know a little restaurant with small tables that they could hover over, faces close, voices low, talking. She still felt the ripples of amazement that had run through her last night. She had never been able to talk to David like that, where she felt he was taking in every word, taking her seriously.

She turned into the passenger window and dabbed at her eyes. She didn't want Uncle John to see. God, she couldn't think of David without crying. It was as if his name turned on a faucet inside her. What a fool she'd been. She had always known it was coming. She had to give him that—he hadn't lied to her. But she had hung on, hoping for what? That he would change his mind, of course, fall in love with her, be unable to imagine life without her.

“Are you all right?”

She felt Uncle John's eyes on her. She couldn't hide from him.

She swallowed hard and tried to compose herself before she turned toward him with the most relaxed smile she could muster. “Sure. The research is going just as I hoped.” She drew in a long breath, aware of the stuttering sound. “James and I are having dinner again tonight. I hope Elena and the bishop don't take offense.”

Uncle John gave her a sideways glance. A glance, nothing else, but she knew that he knew everything.

She stopped the words crowding into her throat:
I might have been tempted to sleep with him last night if he hadn't said, “We'd better go. It's time I got you back to the mission.”
It was the way it should be. The last thing she needed was to jump into another relationship after David. And James was different, so much more solid and real. Any relationship, if it happened, would be like that.

Uncle John understood. She saw the truth in the throb of a tiny blood vessel in his temple, the way he glanced over and smiled at her. She felt raw and exposed, all her secret hopes thrown into the road for everyone to see.

“I'll let Elena know,” he said.