Dance for the Dead (45 page)

Barraclough sat up and
tentatively shifted some weight onto his ankle. It hurt, but he could
tell it wasn’t broken. He was grateful, glad to be alive. He
wasn’t going to be trapped; he could still make it. He slipped
the pistol into his belt and walked to the left, toward the edge of
the factory, the tall fence, and the street beyond. Then he saw
Jane’s car parked near the side of the next building. For an
instant he struggled to fathom how he could have come out of the huge
building right where he had started, but then understanding settled
on him. She had not been running through the building at all. She had
driven along the outside to wait for him here.

Barraclough hobbled toward the
fence, gasping terror into his chest with each freezing breath. He
threw himself against the high fence, clung to the links with both
hands, and stepped up. He stretched his arm to clutch higher links,
then tried to feel for a footing he could maintain with his injured
ankle.

The blast of the shotgun slapped
his left arm against the fence and deadened it. He was falling. His
back slammed the ground hard and made him gulp air to reinflate his
lungs. He tried to push himself up, but his mangled left arm would
not respond, and he could see his dark, warm blood soaking into the
snow. As he struggled to rise, it occurred to him that he had already
heard the
snick-chuff
of the shotgun slide. “Stop!”
he screamed. The weak, pleading sound of his own voice sickened him.
He bent his legs under him, bobbed up, and turned to see her standing
in the snow ten feet from him. She was only a dark, shadowy shape
against the luminous snow. He waited for the roar of the shotgun, the
splash of bright sparks, but they didn’t come.

He gripped his injured arm with
his right hand and pulled it painfully toward the center of his body.
“Listen to me!” If he could just hide the right hand
behind the left to get a grip on the pistol in his belt, he had a
chance. “You need a way out of this as much as I do. The minute
you helped your first felon to evade prosecution, you were meat on
the hoof. Somebody – local cops, F.B.I. it doesn’t matter
who – was going to notice you and hunt you down.” His
fingers closed numbly on the pistol.

“Without a powerful
friend, you’re going to be somebody’s dinner.” He
swung the pistol upward.

The shotgun blast blew through
his chest. His body toppled backward to rattle the links of the
fence, then lay still. “But not yours,” said Jane. She
turned and walked back through the snow to her car, put the shotgun
in the trunk, and drove along the side of the building toward the gap
in the fence.

Judge
Kramer awoke from his dream. The house was dark, but the moon shone
through the big magnolia tree outside his window, so small patches of
gray-blue light fell on the bedspread. Something was wrong.

He heard the little voice and
remembered that he had heard it in his dream and tried to ignore it.
But it was all right. It was just the boy.

He swung his feet to the floor
and walked out of the bedroom and down the hall to the guest room. He
reminded himself that this was perfectly normal. A child who had seen
what this one had was going to have night terrors. Kramer rubbed his
eyes and struggled to wake up. He was going to have to be wise and
strong and reliable. That was what this child needed right now.
Adults came when you cried out in the night, and they told you
everything was all right. If it wasn’t all right, they damned
well made it all right.

He stepped into the boy’s
room and said, “It’s all right. Here I am, Timmy.”
He had barely uttered it when he realized he was wrong. The bed was
empty. He looked around him. The boy was gone.

Kramer ran to the landing in
time to see the triangular slice of moonlight appear on the floor of
the foyer. The front door had opened. As he hurried down the first
few stairs, he saw her step into the moonlight. “It’s
just me, Judge,” said Jane Whitefield.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve come for
Timmy.”

“No,” he said. He
was shaking his head, but he knew she could not see it. “There
are procedures for this. The law provides for it. You can’t
just…”

He could feel, not see, Jane
Whitefield’s eyes on him. “What does the law provide?”
she asked.

“When it’s safe,
Children’s Services will find him a suitable foster home.”

“It’s never going to
be safe,” said Jane. “Even if all the money is gone,
there will be people who think more might turn up or who know how to
get more just by using his name. Barraclough had a lot of people
working on these side cases for him. They’re still out there.”
She took a step with Timmy.

“You should know I have a
gun.” The judge reached into the pocket of his robe.

“So have I,” Jane
said. “I didn’t bring mine either.” She turned,
took Timmy’s hand, and then the slice of moonlight disappeared.

It was after midnight when Carey
McKinnon turned his car onto the long gravel drive that ran up behind
his old stone house in Amherst and parked his car in the carriage
house that had, at some point in his grandfather’s time,
started being called “the garage.” He swung the two doors
closed and put the padlock on the hasp, not because anyone had ever
tried to steal anything here but because the wind was cold tonight
and by morning it would be strong enough to blow the old doors off
their hinges if he didn’t secure them. He had heard on the car
radio that there was going to be another in the series of heavy
snowstorms that had blown in, one after another, from the west, and
he could already feel the cold front moving in.

Carey walked up the drive toward
his house, looking down at his feet and trying to step in the spots
where the snow had not drifted. He reached his front steps and stood
under the eaves, stamping the snow off his shoes as he stuck his key
into the lock, when he heard a car door slam. He looked over his
shoulder at the street.

There was a person- – a
woman – walking away from her car across his front yard: Jane.

He stepped across the lawn to
meet her. “Hey, I know you!” he said. “What
happened – did your flight get grounded?”

She smiled as they met, and he
tried to get his arms around her, but the brown paper bag she was
carrying was between them, so he snatched it away and put his arm
around her waist. “No.” She stood on her tiptoes to kiss
his cheek. “I’m home.”

They walked together to his
front door and he opened it. “Why didn’t you call me? I’d
have met you at the airport.”

“Great idea, Carey,”
Jane said. “Then tomorrow while you were at work I could walk
back there in a blizzard and get my car.”

“Oh,” he said.
“Well, there must be some way that normal people do these
things. I know some. I’ll ask.”

He flicked on the light and they
stepped into the little old-fashioned entry. He set the bag on the
bench, hung his coat on a hook, slipped hers off her shoulders and
hung it beside his, then took her into his arms. They kissed in a
slow, gentle, leisurely way, and then Jane put her hands on the sides
of his face, held him a few inches away, and looked into his eyes.
“You waiting for the wind to close the door?”

He shrugged, went to close the
door, then came back and picked up the grocery bag. “Bring your
laundry?”

She took the bag and pulled out
a bottle of champagne. “There was a power failure in the store,
so I thought this was Tabasco sauce. I figured you might be able to
use it.”

“A common mistake, but I
can’t launch the ship in this weather. Maybe we can drink it or
something.”

She reached into the bag again
and pulled out a bouquet of white roses.

He looked at her for a moment,
puzzled. Finally he said, “Oh, you brought my roses back.
Thanks. It was getting to be about time, but I didn’t want to
say anything.” He took the roses and sniffed them. “Held
up pretty well, didn’t they?”

“Remarkably,” Jane
said, but she barely got it out because he scooped her up and started
to carry her toward the staircase.

He took her up the stairs, set
her gently on the big bed, and began by taking off her shoes. He
proceeded to undress her slowly. When he had finished, he sank down
on the bed with her. He said quietly, “I love you, Jane,”
and before she could answer, his lips were on hers, and then by the
time she could have spoken and remembered what she had wanted to say,
words seemed unnecessary.

Hours later, Carey McKinnon
awoke in his dark bedroom and moved his arm to touch her. She was
gone. He stood up and walked down the hall. He found her downstairs,
sitting on the couch in his big, thick bathrobe, looking away from
him to stare at the fireplace. She looked tiny, like a child. He
could tell she had heard him. “Hi, Carey,” she said.

“What are you doing,
figuring out how you’re going to redecorate when your regime
comes into power?”

“No. Come sit with me.”

He walked down the stairs and
sat beside her. He saw that she was not smiling. “What’s
wrong?”

She leaned over and kissed him,
then said, “I’ve been thinking about your offer.”

“You look like you’ve
made up your mind.”

“I have,” she said.
“One year from tonight, the tenth of January, you can set the
date. If you’ll give me some notice, I’ll be there with
something borrowed and something blue. If not, I’ll just be
there.”

He grinned, but then his eyes
began to look troubled. “Why a year from now? I mean, I guess
what I want to say is, ‘I’m happy. Ecstatic. I love you.’
But what is there about it that takes so long? It’s not as
though we don’t know each other.”

Jane turned to face him. “I’m
going to tell you a story. At the end of it, you’ll say that
you understand.”

“I will?” he asked.
“Then the year is to see if I really do understand. So it’s
that kind of story.”

“I’m going to tell
you about my trip.”

In
the spring of the year, as they had forever, Seneca women met at
Tonawanda one evening at dusk to sing the Ohgiwe, the Dance for the
Dead. Spring was the time when the dead came back. There were no
drums, no rattles or flutes or bells, only the sad, beautiful voices
of the women.

In the center of the big
longhouse-shaped room, there were six lead singers who knew the
ancient songs of the Ohgiwe best and had melodious voices strong
enough to last through the night. They would sing the burden, and the
women who danced along the walls of the longhouse would answer in
chorus. Tonight the lead group included two who were not among the
usual singers. One was Jane Whitefield, who had not been to Ohgiwe in
some years, and the other was Martha McCutcheon, senior mother of the
Wolf Clan in Oklahoma. She had been the one to sponsor Sarah Cartman
in open council – not the Sarah Cartman everyone had known
since birth, but the new Sarah, the one who had been adopted with her
son, Timmy, in accordance with ancient practice.

The new Sarah Cartman danced
along the wall in the circle with the other Nundawaono women. Six
months ago she had been Mary Perkins. Six years ago she had called
herself something else – maybe Stoddard or Stafford or Comstock
– but she had done nothing under any of those names that she
wanted to remember, so she did not think of them tonight. Instead,
for a moment she anxiously wondered if she would be home in time to
pack Timmy’s lunch box for school tomorrow, then remembered
that tomorrow was Sunday. When she had been Mary Perkins, she had
neglected to develop the habits of mind that she considered necessary
to a good mother, so sometimes she overcompensated. Still, she was
becoming more comfortable as Sarah Cartman, and after a time she had
even begun to feel safe. By then she already had a name, a job, a
household to run, and a son to raise. Doing had made her Sarah
Cartman; being was an afterthought. Through the long night, as her
feet became accustomed to the dance steps and she repeated the words
in the unfamiliar language, she began to forget that she had not
always known them.

There were nearly a hundred
other Nundawaono women, old grandmothers and young girls barely out
of puberty, who danced for the dead on this night. Some wore modest
spring dresses, as Sarah did. Others wore the traditional tunic,
skirt, leggings, and moccasins, beaded and embroidered with all of
the flowers that grew on the back of the great turtle that was the
Seneca world. They wore them because women were the keepers and the
source of life, the force that fought endlessly against the Being
that is Faceless.

There were guests among the dead
tonight too, and there were those in the longhouse who could feel
their presence. The women sang the Ohgiwe for all of them together
and for each in his own right. Some sang for the first Sarah Cartman,
who had died in an automobile accident this winter at a young age.
There was one who sang for Timmy Cartman’s first parents, and
for the couple who had taken him in and raised him. And she sang for
Mona and Dennis, the lovers who had died in the fall.

The women sang the Ohgiwe and
danced together as the grandmothers had, for the brave and the
unselfish, for the protectors. They sang until dawn, when the spirits
of the dead were satisfied and returned to their rest, where they
would not be tempted to disturb the dreams of the living.