Winter's Child (18 page)

Father John peered
past the windshield wipers at Seventeen-Mile Road, blurred in the falling snow. He could barely see a car length ahead. It had started snowing sometime in the middle of the night and showed no sign of letting up. All around, the prairie and sky merged together, indistinguishable. Beside him, Shannon hunkered down inside her jacket with a scarf around her neck that billowed upward and connected with the knit hat, leaving a slit for her eyes. He jogged the heater knob, turning it on and off in an attempt to wake it up. Finally, the heater choked out a burst of warm air. “Giorni poveri vivea” played softly between them.

“Should warm up in a bit.” He hoped that would be the case. All winter the heater had operated with a mind of its own. Inside all the layers of wool, Shannon was shivering.

“How far do we have to go?”

He glanced over and gave her a quick smile. “A Boston girl,
complaining about the cold? Not far, fifteen minutes.” Probably longer, he was thinking. He kept the pickup at a slow, steady pace, watching for oncoming vehicles to burst out of the white haze. He had just gotten to the office this morning and was making coffee, measuring out the grounds, when the phone had rung. He had darted over to his desk and managed to grab the receiver before the caller was shunted to voice mail.

“This is Daisy Blue Water . . .”

“Hello, Grandmother.”

“Ah, Father. How's the weather at the mission?”

Always the polite preliminaries first, even in a phone call. Father John smiled. “It's still snowing,” he said. Only a handful of people at Mass earlier, and he didn't blame them for staying home. In fact, looking out at the wrinkled faces of the elders, snuggling inside their jackets against the chill in the church, he'd wished they had stayed home.

Daisy was going on about how she had gotten home yesterday from visiting her granddaughter's new daughter in Billings and how her grandson's boy had come over to shovel the walks before he went to school and how he would pick up groceries for her this afternoon. When Father John said she had a good family, she gave a sigh of contentment. And then she came to the point: “My relation Wilbur says you want to talk to me about my grandmother.”

He explained that his niece, Shannon, was doing research for her dissertation on the captive Fletcher girls. She was here to research Lizzie Brokenhorn.

“Lizzie,” Daisy said. “Grandmother loved that name soon as she found out it was hers. When you want to come over?”

He had suggested later this morning, and the old woman had agreed. Shannon hadn't come to the office yet. He suspected James
had brought her back late last night. They had been spending a lot of time together. Getting to know each other, Shannon had told him. He knew Shannon: the minute she came in and heard Daisy had called, she would want to see her.

And now Shannon sat with her hands encased in big, furry gloves, resting in her lap. She stared straight ahead. He could feel the thoughts building inside her, searching for an outlet. He waited.

“I hope you don't disapprove of me,” she said.

He shifted his eyes toward her and gave her another smile. “I'm proud of you and the work you're doing. I'm proud you think history is worth devoting yourself to.”

“Oh, come on, Uncle John.” He could feel her eyes lasering him. “James and I are together as much as we can be. We're taking our time. I want you to know we haven't started an . . .” She hesitated. “What you would call an affair. Our relationship's not about sex. I mean, it's bigger than sex. It's not that we don't want to sleep together. It's not the time, yet.”

He glanced over and gave her another smile. “I know you'll make the best decision for yourself.”

“You like James.”

“Yes, I do.”

He glanced sideways again. She was shaking her head, dipping her face deeper into the scarf. When she spoke, her voice sounded muffled and blurred: “I got a text from David yesterday. He's already moved out. Packed up his stuff, which pretty much was everything in the apartment, and poof! He's gone. The rent is paid for the month. In other words, I have a month to get my stuff out of there. That ought to take about an hour.” She lifted her chin, and he saw that she was crying.

“I'm sorry.”

“Breakup by text. Isn't that the best? No big arguments, just, So long, it's been nice to know you. I think there's an old song about that.”

She was running a furry glove over her cheek, mopping at the moisture. “I'm not that sad, really. I mean, we had already broken up. We had an understanding. We would only stay together while it was”—she paused—“convenient. It's just that I didn't expect it to be so . . . bloodless.”

Turning onto the highway, gripping the steering wheel against the back tires that were slipping about, Father John took a moment. The outskirts of Riverton—warehouses, garages, trailer homes—punched through the whiteness. “What about James?”

She was quiet for so long, he feared he had overstepped the sense of intimacy she had established. He was not her father.

“I think I'm falling in love with him.”

He looked over at her, and she caught his eye and smiled. “He is so not called to be a priest.”

“Falling in love . . .” He let the words settle between them.

“He's a good man,” Shannon said. “One of the best I have ever met. He's . . . well, he's mature. He's not looking for a convenient relationship. He wants us to be together, to love each other for the long term. He's a forever-after guy. You'd approve, wouldn't you? Forever after?”

Father John was about to say he was glad she and James were taking their time, when she said, “I can write my dissertation anywhere, isn't that what you told me? I have all my research on the computer, the records and documents on Amanda Mary and Lizzie, the interviews with descendants. As soon as I finish the research on Lizzie, I can start writing. Two white girls captured by the Indians with completely different lives. Is it okay if I do it here?”

For how long? Father John was thinking. How long would there be a guesthouse and a mission? “The guesthouse is yours . . .”

She interrupted. “I told James you'd say that. I'll have a friend pack my stuff and send it. It won't be a big box, I promise. James and I, well, we can continue to get to know each other, see where we're going.”

He was driving down the side streets of Riverton now, through a residential area: bungalows set back from the street, snuggled in snow, snow lining the curbs, banked against the parked cars. A forever-after guy, she had called James. That was what she wanted. Not the Davids who broke up by text. Not the commitments with strings attached, but the real thing. Maybe it wasn't really so different from the way it had been when he was Shannon's age. He had loved her mother then. He had wanted to marry her. Forever-after. He kept his eyes on the snowy asphalt ahead, aware of Shannon's presence filling up the cab: the daughter he might have had.

“You know she loves you, don't you?”

He felt as if Shannon had tossed a hard, icy snowball that caught him in the solar plexus. He didn't say anything, and she went on: “I saw the way she reacted yesterday when she thought you might have been killed.”

He started to say they were friends, he and Vicky. They worked together. But Shannon shot out a furry glove. “Oh, please. I heard it yesterday from her. You're just friends and all that BS. There must be some way . . .”

“There is no way,” he said. He found the brown-frame bungalow he was looking for, turned in alongside the curb, and gave his niece a reassuring smile. The commitment he had made was forever. “No way,” he said.

*   *   *

“I was touched
when Wilbur called me.” Daisy Blue Water sat upright in a chair with flower-print upholstery and worn armrests, a small, ancient woman, fragile-looking, with a wrinkled face. She held her head high, a duo of paleness—light-brown hair fading to gray, cropped close to her head, and ghostly blue eyes. He would have taken her for a white woman, if he hadn't known she was an Arapaho grandmother. She kept her hands clasped in the lap of her red skirt and crossed her feet, a prim and reserved posture left over from the mission school, he thought. So many of the elders who had gone to St. Francis School retained what the nuns would have called “good deportment.”

“I'm sure Grandmother would be surprised to think anyone cared about her life. Apart from her family, naturally.”

Shannon scooted herself to the front of the sofa cushion beside him. He could feel her excitement. “I understand you knew her.”

“Oh, yes. I have very clear memories, even though I was very little, you know. She died in 1928. I was five years old.”

Father John could see Shannon doing the calculations in her head. Daisy was ninety-three years old. Living in the home she'd occupied for fifty years, cooking meals as she had always done, visiting her new great-grandchild. She had family close by, descendants of Lizzie Brokenhorn, looking out for her.

Shannon leaned toward the old woman, concentrating on her story: how her grandmother used to pull her onto her lap and sing to her. “She liked to bake cakes. Her cakes were terrible, tasted like plaster and hard as stones. Naturally, all us kids ate them anyway. They were sweet, and we had powerful cravings for sugar.”

Shannon slipped a photo of Lizzie and John Brokenhorn from
her bag, a photo she'd found on the internet, she'd told him earlier. She popped to her feet, handed Daisy the photo, and sat back down. “Is this how you remember her?”

“Oh my.” The old woman held the photo with her fingertips, as if it were a sacred object. “It's been years since I've seen this. It looks just like I remember her, and Grandfather, too. Only the photo makes her look darker. Her hair was very light and fine, like silk. I used to love to brush it. She had eyes like clouds, the faintest blue, and skin as white as winter. One time I asked her why her skin was so white, and she told me something was wrong with my eyes. She was brown, she said, like the rest of the people. But I had the same color of skin and light hair. I remember showing her my arms and asking why I had white arms. She would say, ‘Don't think about it. You'll be brown soon enough.' She was right. In the summers I turned brown, but the brown would go away, and in the winter I looked white again.”

Shannon glanced over at Father John, questions lighting her eyes. It wasn't polite to ask for the gift of information. He felt a surge of pride, the way she leaned back now and waited.

After a moment, Daisy said, “Oh, Grandmother knew she was white. She learned her story when Amanda Mary found her in 1902. She'd been looking for her for thirty-seven years. She never gave up hope. She wrote letters to the army, even wrote to Custer. It would get back to her that a trader had spotted a white child in an Indian camp, but when soldiers went out to look, the camp would be gone. Vanished into the plains. Amanda Mary kept at it. The woman had grit, I say.”

Shannon waited a moment before she said, “I believe Lizzie also had grit.”

“Oh, yes.” Daisy was staring across the room, a distant look in
her eyes as if she had gone somewhere else. “Especially when she finally met her sister. Amanda Mary rode the train to Casper and took a stagecoach to the reservation. A hundred miles, bouncing over the plains. Must have taken her back to her own time in captivity. It was brave of her to come. You want some coffee? I put a coffee cake in the oven.”

The old woman pushed to her feet and steadied herself against the back of the chair a moment. Then she pushed off toward the kitchen. Father John stood up. “May we help?”

Shannon was close behind the old woman, and Father John followed. A few minutes later, they were seated at the dining room table, mugs of coffee and slices of coffee cake all around. Odors of warm cinnamon and sugar melted into the fresh coffee smells. “Thank you,” Shannon said, sending a smile toward Daisy at the head of the table.

Father John could sense the urgency in Shannon's silence as they ate pieces of cake and sipped at the coffee. Finally, Daisy set her fork down and clasped her hands around her mug. She had long fingers with short, pale nails. There was a small gold band on her left hand.

“Grandmother never told me about meeting Amanda Mary, but my mother was there. She sat beside the interpreter that came from the agency. Grandmother never learned English, but my mother had gone to the mission school, so she knew English. She told me Grandmother was very upset. She didn't want to know she was white. Inside, she was Arapaho. Amanda Mary told her she was her sister. Grandmother's name was Elizabeth Fletcher, but their mother called her Lizzie. She was two years old when the Cheyennes attacked. Amanda Mary said they rose up out of the bushes along the creek, out of the ground. They were everywhere. She was holding her baby sister, Lizzie, in one arm. And she was holding their
mother's hand when their mother slumped to the ground, and she saw the arrow in her chest. Next thing she knew, a warrior grabbed Lizzie. Mother said Amanda Mary cried when she told the story. “She had feared her baby sister was dead, but there she was, sitting beside her on a wooden chair Grandfather had made.”

Daisy took another bite of cake, another sip of coffee. Letting the story live for a while, make its own way into their minds. After a moment, she went on: “Amanda Mary had come to take Lizzie home, back to her own people. She said Lizzie would live in a big house and wear pretty dresses and eat meat and potatoes every day. She would learn English and read books. They would be together again, two sisters, the way it was supposed to be.

“Grandmother started crying, Mother said. She talked so soft the interpreter had to keep asking what she said. She told Amanda Mary that she was home. She was with her people. She had her husband and children. She said something else . . .”