Winter's Child (15 page)

Father John set
the phone next to the laptop on his desk where he could answer it right away. He had spent most of the morning staring at it, willing it to ring, picking up at the first jangle of noise. Two calls, so far. Lucinda Oldman, wanting to schedule the baptism for her new son, and Grandfather Black Wolf, letting him know Grandmother was back in Riverton Memorial. Could he visit her? Yes, of course. Later this morning for sure.

Nothing from Shannon. No call, no sound of James's truck plowing around Circle Drive. It wasn't his business, he kept telling himself. Not his business at all if his adult niece chose to spend the night with a young man. And who knew? The truck could have gotten stuck in the snow. Maybe the engine wouldn't turn over. What else could Shannon have done but spend the night and wait until morning?

He set both elbows on the desk and blew into his fists. He had
caught the glances between Shannon and James, the quick, warm smiles, like the remembrance of a private joke. Hadn't Shannon told him how wise and mature James was? He tried to tamp down the sense of alarm. Shannon, coming off a breakup, trying to hide the disappointment, confusion and pain enveloping her like a cloud. Back and forth he went between worrying and telling himself it wasn't his business. She was his brother's child, an adult, which meant she was part of him, too, an appendage he'd seldom thought about, until he'd begun to sense something was wrong.

He kept his eyes on the phone. Surely, it would ring. He had considered calling James's house, but that seemed intrusive. He had no right. He had every right, he decided, to confirm that Shannon was safe. He picked up the phone, scrolled to James's number, and tapped the call button. It took a moment before the ringing started, then three long rings before James's voice was on the other end. “Two Horses.”

“I've been worried about Shannon.” Father John picked his way through the words; he didn't want to sound like an overbearing busybody. “Is everything okay?”

“Everything's fine, Father.” They both knew the real reason for the call. “We're on our way to the mission now. See you in fifteen minutes.”

Father John pressed the end button. He got up and went down the hall, following the clack-clack of computer keys. Bishop Harry was bent over the small laptop. “Have a seat,” he said, his eyes on the screen.

Father John dropped onto the hard wooden chair the bishop kept for counseling sessions—guaranteed not to make anyone want to linger. He waited a moment until the clacking stopped and the bishop shut the laptop and looked up. He had blue eyes as shiny as
new marbles, lit with intelligence and humor. He nodded, an acknowledgement of the real reason Father John was there. “You're worried about her.”

“She's having a tough time. It looks like she made a mistake with her last . . . relationship.” Father John swallowed the word. What in heaven's name did it mean? A commitment with strings and end dates? Hardly a commitment at all. “I'm afraid she may be making another one.”

“We all have to find our way, John. Often the price is a mistake. Can you save Shannon from pain?” He waited until Father John shook his head. “You can be her friend, her uncle, part of her family. Families must love unconditionally. I would also suggest”—he nodded four or five times—“that you trust her.”

“What about James?”

“Ah, James. We've had two very interesting discussions. I believe he is making progress in discerning his vocation.”

“Do you believe he has a vocation?”

“Without a doubt. The calling came to him like a bolt of lightning. St. Paul struck down on the road to Damascus. He knows he must serve the people of God, go where the Lord leads him.”

The wind had come up, and the bare branch of a cottonwood tapped against the window, making an eerie, rhythmic sound. The old building sighed and creaked. “You're saying James has a vocation, but not for all of it.”

“Precisely.” The bishop gave him the benevolent smile he had probably bestowed on students in the school he'd run in Patna, India. “James also has a vocation for a family. He very much wants to marry and raise children. He must find his way.”

“The diaconate.”

“Or the Anglican priesthood. He must decide.”

Father John looked over at the window, the cottonwood branch scraping back and forth. He watched the wind unfurl and lift the snow across the space between the building and Eagle Hall and wondered if he'd had a vocation for all of it twenty-five years ago.

“I've been checking the online news bulletins from the province.” The bishop sat very still. His voice had gone soft and inward. “The powers that be are gathering for what they call a planning meeting. Planning the future of the Jesuit missions.”

Father John nodded. He supposed Father Jameson had called to let him in on what was going on. There hadn't been time to return the call. There would never be enough time, he thought, for the news that was most likely coming.

The front door opened and swooshed shut, sending a draft of cold air down the hall and into the small office. He got to his feet, conscious of the intensity of the old man's blue eyes on him. It was uncanny how the bishop could see through him, read his thoughts.

“You don't have regrets, do you?”

Father John turned around in the doorway. Regrets? How could he regret this? St. Francis Mission and the Arapaho people. He felt as if, all of his life, he had been on his way here. “No regrets,” he said.

*   *   *

“James has a
wonderful idea.” Shannon had already swooped her laptop off the desk in the closet-sized office and was in the corridor, laptop gripped to her chest, still bundled in her coat, gold-colored cap pulled down to her eyebrows. Red curls sprang from beneath the cap. Her eyes brimmed with enthusiasm. James stood behind her as if he had stepped back to give her center stage. “He's arranged for me to view an old movie Lizzie and her husband were in.”

Of course, Father John thought. Dozens of Arapahos and Shoshones had gone to Hollywood in the early nineteen-twenties to be in the first cowboys-and-Indians movies. The Brokenhorns had been part of the troupe.

“Almost two years in Hollywood! Imagine. I'll be at the library in Lander, in case”—she stopped, as if she couldn't imagine why he might want to know where she was—“you know, anybody calls here, in case they can't reach me on my cell.”

Father John smiled at this niece of his and walked her and James to the front door. He closed the door behind them, shoving it hard against the wind, then went back to his desk. A sense of relief flooded over him. A wise man, the bishop. They would find their own way, Shannon and James.

He had just begun to pay a few bills—not all of the bills stacked in front of him, since there wasn't enough money in the mission account, but those that had worked their way into the highest priority—when he heard the dual growl of engines. Shannon and James, driving off; someone else arriving. He wasn't expecting anyone, but parishioners were always stopping in. A chat, maybe a little counseling, a cup of coffee. He finished writing the first check. The engine cut off, leaving the whistling noise of the wind. Then the clack of boots on the steps, the pneumatic whoosh of the door opening. He recognized the footsteps in the corridor and was on his feet when Vicky rapped on the door frame and stepped into his office.

“I took a chance I'd find you.” Snowflakes sparkled in her hair and on the shoulders of her black coat. She looked flushed with fatigue.

“Let me take your coat.” He was surprised at the ease in which she shrugged the coat into his hands, something weighing on her mind.

“Coffee?” He was already at the small metal table behind the door, filling two mugs with the coffee he'd made this morning. He shook some powdered creamer into his mug. Vicky liked her coffee black.

He handed her a mug, then leaned back against the edge of his desk. She wouldn't sit down, he knew, preferring to sip at the coffee while she trolled about the office. Window, door, back again. She thought better when she was moving. She had never actually told him this, but he knew it was true. He took a drink of his own coffee and waited until she turned to face him.

“What do you know about Lou and Debbie Bearing?”

“I've met them a few times.” This wasn't what he was expecting. He'd thought she might have some news about Vince White Hawk. Everything about her warned that the news she did have wasn't good. He had tried to call Betty last night, but she hadn't answered. He intended to stop by the school where she worked. “What's going on?”

“I think the Bearings are involved with Vince White Hawk's disappearance. He still hasn't shown up, and Betty is worried sick. She's . . .” Vicky hesitated, then plunged on: “She's falling apart, John. She's been drinking. I met her at the Buffalo Bar last night. She'd convinced herself that if she hung around there, Vince would come in.”

“You think Lou and Debbie Bearing know where he is?”

Vicky had started circling again, sipping at the coffee. “Betty thinks Vince got his drinking money from them.” She stopped again. “Ten years ago, the Bearings hired Vince's dad, Rickie, to help them steal a car in Casper and bring it back to the rez. Betty went along. She and Rickie were following the Bearings back to their place, speeding on Seventeen-Mile Road, when Rickie's pickup turned
over. He was trapped behind the steering wheel. He died there. The Bearings drove on. They didn't stop to help.”

Father John took a moment. The accident, as everyone called it, that had killed Vince's father, had happened a few months before he'd come to St. Francis. “Does Betty think the Bearings had Vince help them steal a car?”

“She says it's what they do. Steal cars for the parts Lou uses in the shop he's set up in his barn. When I went to see them . . .”

“You went to see them?”

“Yesterday. I didn't learn much. Lou was working on a sedan and a truck. A black truck. He and Debbie claimed they didn't know anything about Vince.” Vicky was pacing again, working out something in her mind. “They're lying. But there's more, John. I think they also know something about the Little Shields and their daughter.”

She stopped pacing, and this time she walked over and leaned against the desk beside him. “The Little Shields had hired Clint Hopkins to help them adopt their daughter. I've taken over the case.”

He nodded and started to say how sorry he was about the lawyer, but Vicky was going on, something about how she had been following Clint's investigation. “I'm running into brick walls, but I'm convinced that”—she took in a gulp of air—“he found out something that got him killed.”

He didn't say anything, waiting for her to pick up her thoughts again, arrange them in some kind of order that made sense. He had counseled Myra and Eldon Little Shield a few times. They weren't parishioners, but they had come anyway, worried sick that they could lose their little girl. He had encouraged them to seek a legal adoption. They must have hired Clint Hopkins. The
Gazette
had said Clint's death was an accident. It was clear Vicky didn't think so.

A moment passed before she drew in a long breath and said, “I've talked to Dina Fowler. She and her husband, Matthew, used to live near the Bearings. She told me they didn't have children, but she had heard a baby crying at their house for a week. It was in March, five years ago. The same time the Little Shields got Mary Ann. Eldon said they told you about it. He gave me permission to discuss it with you.”

Father John waited while Vicky went over to the table, poured some more coffee, and resumed pacing. “A baby left on their doorstep,” she said. “Myra's cousin worked for social services. She gave them papers that made them think they had temporary custody. I suspect the relative was trying to help them out, since they had just lost their own baby. The point is, they love that little girl. They want to adopt her. I believe Clint must have stumbled onto something that could complicate the adoption.” She turned around and faced him again. “Clint Hopkins, the best known adoption attorney in the county, asked me to be his cocounsel. An Arapaho lawyer. Whatever he learned, he believed the tribe would be involved.”

“You're saying Clint could have learned where the child came from?” The Little Shields' biggest fear, Father John was thinking: that their child's natural parents existed somewhere, and cared.

“I'm saying that Lou and Debbie Bearing could know something about it.” Vicky threw one hand in the air. “Five years ago, a neighbor heard a baby crying at their house. A relative's baby, the Bearings say, and who could disprove it? How could anyone connect Mary Ann to the Bearings?”

Vicky circled over to the window and looked out. “Lou is a nervous man. It's like he has something on his conscience that he would
like to be free of. I got the sense he might have told me something if Debbie hadn't come in.”

He'd had the same feeling the other night at the Buffalo Bar, Father John was thinking. Lou Bearing had shrunk away from him and Betty, holding on to the edge of the table, as if the table could protect him from their gaze, their accusations. A feeling was all it was, a second sense that came from years of watching people shift about in their chairs, avoid his eyes, clasp their hands together, and, finally, unburden themselves.

“I can go out to the house,” Father John said.

Vicky gave him a quick smile. “I was hoping you would say that.”

Shannon stared at
the image on the video. An ordinary-looking woman, leathered, wrinkled face with no makeup, no sign of concern about her appearance.
Take me as I am
. Staring out at the camera, unsurprised, as if this were normal, acting in a movie, pretending to be someone else. She wore a blouse embroidered with quills, a printed skirt that swished about her legs, and a headdress filled with eagle feathers she would have earned, Shannon knew, from the trials she had overcome. The headdress concealed her hair. Her eyes were light, her face pale.

Standing beside her was John Brokenhorn, wrinkled like Lizzie, but dark-skinned with narrowed, defiant black eyes. His eagle-feathered headdress listed to one side. On the chest of his dark shirt were beaded and quilled pendants, gifts from Lizzie, most likely. And a silver peace medal with the hard-to-decipher image of some politician who had promised the Indians peace.

All of this, plunked down in Hollywood.

“She looks old and tired.” James rolled his chair closer to Shannon's and hunched toward the photo.

“In nineteen-twenty-two she would have been fifty-nine.”

“She had a hard life.”

“Is that what you think?” Shannon turned toward him and smiled. She didn't know where James Two Horses had come from. Out of the blue, confident and assured, settled within himself. He had a vocation to the priesthood, he'd told her. But there were other vocations, other callings, he couldn't ignore. He'd been talking to the bishop, and the old man had helped him to see that he would have to find the way to honor all of his vocations.

Her heart had sunk when he'd first mentioned the priesthood. How silly, she told herself now. What had she expected? A man she had just met, even though it seemed as if they had always known each other. They had talked for hours last night, talked about everything. It was great, taking it slowly, getting to know each other. She had never met a man like James. He seemed to be part of her, connected by some invisible thread she hadn't realized existed. She remembered the faintest light shining in the window just before she'd fallen asleep on the sofa. When she'd awakened, she saw that James had draped a blanket over her. She could hear him moving about the kitchen. Smells of coffee and bacon drifted through the sadness that permeated her. This man, who seemed part of her, was considering the priesthood. Well, maybe she was kidding herself. Soul mates didn't exist, except in romance novels and fairy tales—the
forever after
s. She no longer believed in all of that.

She was glad for his presence now, the way he found her work—her project—exciting and interesting. Unlike David.
Who cares about what happened a hundred years ago?

She cared, and part of coming to the reservation, she realized, was to be with her uncle, an historian who cared, and to do research where Lizzie had actually lived and be with the people she had loved. To find more than history. To find the
story.
And she had found James. He had suggested they watch a video of
The Covered Wagon,
one of the movies Lizzie and John Brokenhorn had been in. He arranged with the librarian at the Lander Library to set up the video. They were alone in the small, glass-enclosed room. Beyond the glass, the librarian—Nancy somebody, who James had gone to school with—stood behind a counter, in an earnest conversation with a young woman. People milled about, wandering among the stacks of books on the far side of the counter.

He turned toward her and smiled. “Ready to continue?” When she nodded, he pressed the forward button, and the images started moving again across the small screen. Indian warriors racing past on horseback, the long, winding wagon train coming over the prairie, all accompanied by the tinny plunking of a keyboard. The images looked grainy and unstable, as if sand were blowing through. Lizzie, huddled with the other Indian women in front of a tipi, stooping over a kettle, a little fire dancing beneath it.

At one point, James reached for her hand and squeezed it. “It must have been hard for her.”

She was struck by the sympathy in his voice. She studied his profile for a moment: the dark eyes, almost black. The bump at the top of his nose, the high forehead and the strong, wide chin, the generous mouth. Brokenhorn might have looked like this, so handsome that he had taken Lizzie's breath away.

“Living on the reservation?”

James shook his head. “Hollywood.”

Yes, of course. She went back to watching the images flash past.
“An Arapaho woman.” She kept her voice low, parsing her thoughts over the ripple of piano keys. “Not really Arapaho. A white woman, born into a white family, plunked down among her own people for a while. White people everywhere she looked. On the streets and sidewalks, on the movie lot. She was surrounded by white faces.”

She shifted toward James. “She must have wondered how her life might have gone had she not been captured. How could she have looked at the cars and houses and shops and restaurants and all the rest of Hollywood and not thought, What would this have been like? What would I have been like?”

“You think that in the two years Lizzie spent in Hollywood . . .”

“She might have regretted the way her life had gone.”

James was shaking his head, giving her that thoughtful look she was getting used to, as if he had heard every word and was turning what she'd said over in his mind. “It wasn't her world. She had never known white towns and crowds of white people. The only white people she'd had contact with lived in Lander and Riverton, and I doubt she went to town very often. There were signs on the shop windows then: No dogs or Indians allowed.”

Shannon sat back. “She never wrote anything.” The movie had ended, the screen shimmered gray, and James pressed another key.

“She would have been illiterate,” James said. “Some Arapahos went to the school at St. Francis Mission, but most worked the ranches and farms. They had to work, or they didn't eat. Not many girls went to school.” He gave a sharp laugh. “They had to do most of the work.”

“It's impossible to know what Lizzie felt. All I have is conjecture and . . .”

“That's not history.”

“Exactly. Besides, what was Lizzie supposed to do if she had felt
regrets or longings? Leave Brokenhorn? Leave the only life she knew? Whatever she may have felt, I think she would have kept silent and gone on.”

*   *   *

The sun held
all the way across the reservation. It had broken out this afternoon, a red disc that flared against the gray clouds moving across the mountains. Always welcome, the sun: warming the frozen air, licking at the ice at the edge of the roads. Father John squinted in the brightness as he drove toward Lou and Debbie Bearing's place outside of Fort Washakie.

He had stopped by Riverton Memorial first to visit Grandmother Black Wolf, who assured him she would be up and about and home, where she belonged, in no time. After that he had doubled back to Wind River school, where he had found Betty White Hawk in the break room, gulping coffee, jittery as a cat. No, she hadn't heard from Vince. Every day she worried that this would be the day her son could die.

Coming around a bend, he spotted the house and barn rising against the Wind River Mountains in the background, like the painting of a winter's scene in a Western museum. Except for something odd: a woman with long black hair was stomping through the snow in front of the house, arms waving, beseeching, clutching at the air. She flung herself about, shrieking like a trapped animal. He pulled a sharp turn across the road, bumped over the barrow ditch and stopped a few yards from her. She paid no attention, lost in herself, shrieking and reaching for the sky, in some kind of primitive dance. A dance of grief.

Father John jumped out and ran to her. “What is it?” His own voice mixed with the woman's cries. “What's happened?”

She stopped moving and looked at him, eyes unfocused, skittering about. The shrieking died back into a gurgling noise. She wrapped her arms over her chest and started plucking at the sleeves of her jacket.

“Debbie?” he said, and the name seemed to grab her attention. She folded downward, sinking onto her knees in the snow, boots splayed behind her. She was sobbing.

Father John hunched down beside her. “Look at me, Debbie. I'm Father O'Malley from the mission. I want to help you. Tell me what's happened.”

“He's dead.” The woman spoke so softly, he had to lean forward, bracing himself with one hand in the snow. “Lou's dead.”