Hard Twisted (23 page)

He placed one cold hand on the swell of her belly while cupping the other as if to hold some unseen object. He spoke briefly in Navajo, his eyes lifted to the ceiling, while the elders stood stiffly behind him, splenetic and silent.

I'm much obliged, she said when he'd finished and the elders had knelt to rummage their bag. I guess I was expectin a Bible readin or some such.

The parson fixed her with his raw and terrible eyes.

Many are those who've found comfort in the good book, he said. And for each of them a thousand more whose cries of anguish echo yet in the dark hallways of history. In every tongue known to man, and in others strange yet to our ears precisely because of what is written there.

Lottie blinked.

I know what you're thinking, the man continued, fingering the gaudy cross. Why then does he don each day the very trappings of the oppression and subjugation which he so passionately deplores? The Diné have a saying, child, perhaps you have heard it. They say you cannot wake a man who only pretends to be asleep.

He looked to her for some sign of understanding.

In Coleman, he told her, they called me reverend. In Flagstaff, they call me parson. In Blanding I'm yet known as a man of the Christian cross. But these are mere guises, my child. Props and costumes, to suit the actor's purpose. And it is my purpose, indeed, it is my calling, to help the helpless, to clothe the naked, and to feed both physically and spiritually the hungry victims of my forebears' terrible genocide.

He removed the heavy cross, lifting it over his head and stashing it in a pocket.

Your host, Dibé Nééz, understands this. He is a wise man, unburdened by the white man's superstitions. And Leone is a fine woman, strong and true. In their fellowship, at least, you are blessed.

On the floor behind him, an oblong crystal lay prismed in the window light where the old men knelt beside it. One spoke in Navajo, and the parson listened and translated.

My friend asks whether you are the woman of Little Sheep, the man who tends his flock near the Garden of the Gods.

Yes, sir.

Again the old man spoke to the crystal.

My friend asks whether the baby that causes your sickness is the child of Little Sheep.

She did not answer. The old man spoke to his cohort, and they nodded and rose together in a complex girdering of hands on knees and arms on shoulders until the three men all now standing conferred in low voices, the parson glancing at Lottie where she lay. Then the parson stepped aside, and the old men stood paired at her bedside, druid apple-crones wreathed in the wig hair of Halloween window puppets.

One of them held her wrist in his small and leathery hand. His eyes rose to the ceiling, and he began a low chant. The other, his eyes tightly closed, soon joined in.

The chanting quickened. Lottie looked to the parson, but his eyes too were fixed on the ceiling. She felt suddenly lightheaded. She felt her throat constricting as the room closed in around her.

As the old shaman's wrist-grip tightened, his arm began to vibrate, and an electric charge ran from Lottie's forearm to her elbow to her shoulder. Thence to her entire body. She opened her
mouth to speak but she could not speak. Her legs tingled. Her feet tingled. The room began to blur.

She felt her arm rise. Then, as the old man released his grip, the chanting ceased and the room snapped into focus. Her arm, still tingling but dead now to her conscious mind, grew rigid. She watched, powerless, as the arm that was hers and yet no longer hers fell to the bed and rotated as by some force unseen to ten on the clockface, her finger stiff and pointing.

She heard herself scream. She heard, as through a heavy curtain, the voices of the men in conversation. As if debating the meaning of what they had seen. Of what it foretold.

Her arm ached. She tried again to bend it, and this time it bent.

The men regarded her with detachment. There were rapid footsteps on the stairs.

What all happened? she asked, her voice a whisper.

The parson touched a hand to her forehead. My friends wished to know the whereabouts of their people who went missing in the Garden of the Gods. They asked the great spirit to enter you, that you might show them the way.

Lottie felt sweat beading on her forehead, and a sudden wave of nausea, just as Mike burst forth from the landing. She stopped in the doorway and clapped a hand to her mouth, strangling a cry.

Lottie, still oddly quiescent, followed her eyes. To the bed. To the blankets below the rise of her belly. And only by sitting upright could she see the darkly crimson wellspring as it pooled between her thighs.

BY MR. HARTWELL
: Miss Garrett, just so we're clear on this, you never saw Mr. Palmer kill the alleged deceased, is that correct?

A
: You mean my daddy?

Q
: That's precisely whom I mean.

A
: Then that's true.

Q
: Or take an ax to him?

A
: No, sir.

Q
: And you never saw this skeleton that the state claims to be the remains of the alleged deceased until... when was it? Last week?

A
: Yes, sir.

Q
: And that was with Mr. Pharr and Sheriff Newton both present?

A
: Yes, sir.

Q
: And which of them told you that the skeleton belonged to your father?

BY MR. PHARR
: Objection.

BY MR. HARTWELL
: I'll rephrase. When Mr. Pharr first took you to see the skeleton, tell the gentlemen of the
jury exactly what it was he said you were going to go look at.

She called out in darkness, and after a long while the door opened and a quadrate beam of bright light climbed the wall where she lay. Within it, the black and graven silhouette of a woman. Then all was dark again.

When next she awoke, it was daylight. The door to the hallway was open and she heard the distant tapping of a typewriter. Her head was throbbing. She tried to sit up but could not, and she vaguely apprehended through an ethylene fog that her wrists were bound to the bedrails.

On her third awakening she found herself unbound and attended by a woman of middle years. The woman was seated, her hair severe and tightly pinned. She leaned and touched a hand to Lottie's cheek.

How are you feeling, dearie?

Lottie's tongue was thick.

I'll bet you'd like some water, the woman said, rising and crossing to the door. Don't worry, I'll be right back.

The room was sparsely furnished. Other than the chair just vacated, there was a small table on caster wheels, and a painted radiator beside it. A porcelain pan resting on the table. The room's lone window was small and without curtains, and she could see from the sunlight on the worn linoleum that the window glass was inlaid with a fine wire mesh.

The nurse returned with a tray. She set it on the table and carried to the bedside a drinking glass with a straw.

Here. Try some of this.

Lottie tried to sit, but her pain was hot and stabbing, and in its radiant clarity she remembered that she'd been pregnant, at the same moment she realized that she no longer was.

On the third day of her convalescence, the doctor appeared. He was a precise man with a trimmed mustache and steelrimmed spectacles. He set his calfskin bag on the table, and the sight of it, its familiar shape, was to her as a millstone tossed to a drowning woman.

Where's my baby? They keep sayin I got to wait for the doctor.

The doctor shot a cuff to expose a wristwatch. He sat.

Mrs. Palmer, he began, with a demeanor whose gravity took the last of her breath. Please try to relax. You've had a very difficult time. You've lost a great deal of blood, and it's only through God's healing grace that you're with us still.

The doctor rested his hand on hers where she held it balled against her thigh. His touch was cold and light, like a settling moth. Like the shadow of the angel of death she knew him to be.

Your baby was born alive, but prematurely. I'm afraid it's very small and very, very weak. The odds of its survival are almost nil. I'm terribly sorry.

Where's my baby? I want to see my baby!

The doctor pressed her down by the shoulder, and the sunlight from the window toggled his spectacles. Clear. White. Clear again.

I'm afraid that's not advisable. Or even possible.

I got a right to see my baby! I got a right!

The doctor stood. Again he checked his watch.

Just tell me, please. Is it a boy or a girl?

The doctor crossed to the table and lifted his valise.

A boy or a girl, damn you!

He turned to regard her for a final time. I'm sorry, he said again.

Two days after the doctor's visit, Lottie was encouraged to walk. Made to walk, in fact, though bent and shuffling with the nurse soothing and steadfast at her elbow. Once, twice, down the long hallway to the picture window with the view of Blue Mountain, the new snow white on the alluvial cedars like confectioners' sugar.

The next day she was called to the telephone, where Mike's words were hollow and distant, as though coming to her through a long stovepipe.

Johnny Rae?

Where are you?

We're in Flagstaff, honey. We came down for New Year's, but we're heading home to night.

How was Christmas?

Christmas was fine. We all missed you. We saved you some cake, and there's still a gift under the tree with your name on it. Johnny Rae? Are you there?

I'm here.

Listen, honey, I can't talk for very long. Harry and I were thinking, maybe you'd like to stay with us for a while. Until spring, maybe. Or longer. It's really up to you. What do you think about that?

Silence.

The nurse said we could come up next week and take you home. To the trading post. Maybe on Tuesday. How does that sound? Would you like that?

Yes, ma'am.

Mike.

Ma'am?

Call me Mike, honey. Or Leone.

All right.

All right then. Are they taking good care of you?

Yes, ma'am.

Is there anything you'd like us to bring?

I don't know. Maybe some clothes. I'm not sure what they done with my clothes.

All right then. We have to run now. Harry sends his best. And, Johnny Rae?

Yes, Mike?

I'm so sorry about the baby.

On the day next following, Lottie was asked by the nurse to sit with another patient, an elderly man who'd fallen from his roof while shoveling snow. He'd been found by neighbors the next morning, frostbitten and delirious.

Man and girl sat opposite one another on hard wooden chairs. The man wore flannel pajamas and a tattered robe of no determinate color. His nose was purple and bulbous, and he talked to Lottie in a gravel voice of the crossing at Hole in the Rock, and of Indian wars and range wars, and of the founding of Bluff City. He talked to her of horses he had owned, and dogs, and of wives and children born and buried, and he moved his tokens on the checkerboard with stubbed and bandaged fingers.

Of the baby, nothing more was said. Lottie knew it was a boy, and she knew from her conversation with Mike, and from the faces of the Mormon women, that her baby boy had died. Just as
she knew from the old man at his checkerboard that death and childbirth were, in that cold and windswept Zion, but two faces of a coin.

Two days later, as Lottie stood at her window watching the mallards circle over the bare cottonwoods, she heard a familiar voice downstairs.

She left her room on stocking feet and crossed the cold linoleum to where she could see him leaning unsteadily, hat in hand, over the woman at the desk. And as she appeared above him, silent at the balustrade, he stopped in midsentence and turned and lifted his face.

He reeked of firesmoke, and of bourbon whiskey. They rode together in Harrison Oliver's Model A Ford, in a silence as frozen as the black macadam, and when the pavement ended, Palmer reached for the glove box and opened it and removed a stoppered bottle. He offered it to her, and when she did not respond, he bit the cork and tilted his head to drink.

You're skinny as a bedslat, he told her. I guess there's that at least.

She watched the frosted plain and the white and twisted cedars, and in the bleary door glass she watched Palmer as he drove.

The winter had aged him. His skin was raw and mottled and there were crow's-feet at his eyes and slack now in the line of his jaw. His eyes were yellowed, and bloodshot, and he had neither shaved nor bathed.

I got a surprise, he told her.

What surprise?

He grinned drunkenly. The sheep are fine, thank you, in case you was wonderin. Oh, and we got us a new horse. Only that ain't the surprise.

What horse?

He drank again and set the bottle between his legs. Let's just say a stray showed up one day, all cold and hungry-like, so I give him a good home. I been breakin him to the stock. He ought to be just about right for you in a couple weeks. And guess what? He's a pinto!

He cackled crazily as he turned to regard her. Ah, you ain't foolin me. I know you always wanted a pinto.

The snow outside Blanding was mostly gone, and what little remained had been plowed from the red-clay roadway into low drifts that appeared as the bloodied dressings of some ghastly wound laid open. Palmer leaned forward and wiped the fog from the windscreen with his shirtsleeve.

I want you to tell me somethin, she said, breaking their long silence. The truth. I want you to tell me what really happened to them Indian herders.

What?

Them two Indians was working for Harry.

I already told you. I run 'em off with the gun. Why?

Cuz they got friends down at Goulding's was askin after 'em, that's why.

Askin what?

Askin did I know where they'd gone to.