Indian Killer (2 page)

John cries as the jumpsuit man hands him to the white woman, Olivia Smith. She unbuttons the top of her dress, opens her bra, and offers John her large, pale breasts with pink nipples. John’s birth mother had small, brown breasts and brown nipples, though he never suckled at them. Still, he knows there is a difference, and as John takes the white woman’s right nipple into his mouth and pulls at her breast, he discovers it is empty. Daniel Smith wraps his left arm around his wife’s shoulders. He grimaces briefly and then smiles. Olivia and Daniel Smith look at the jumpsuit man, who is holding a camera. Flash, flash. Click of the shutter. Whirr of advancing film. All of them wait for a photograph to form, for light to emerge from shadow, for an image to burn itself into paper.

W
HEN NO BABY CAME
after years of trying to conceive, Olivia and Daniel Smith wanted to adopt a baby, but the waiting list was so long. The adoption agency warned them that white babies, of course, were the most popular. Not that it was a popularity contest, they were assured. It was just that most of the couples interested in adopting a baby were white, so naturally, they wanted to adopt a white child, a child like them, but there were simply not enough white babies to go around.

“Listen,” the adoption agent said. “Let’s be honest. It’s going to take at least a year to find a suitable white child for you. Frankly, it may take much longer than that. Up to eight years or more. But we can find you another kind of baby rather quickly.”

“Another kind?” asked Olivia.

“Well, of course,” said the agent. “There’s always the handicapped babies. Down’s syndrome. Children missing arms and legs. Mentally retarded. That kind of kid. To be honest, it’s very difficult, nearly impossible, to find homes for those children. It’s perfectly understandable. These children need special care, special attention. Lots of love. Not very many people can handle it.”

“I don’t think we want that,” Daniel said. Olivia agreed.

“There are other options,” said the agent. “We have other difficult-to-place children as well. Now, there’s nothing wrong with these babies. They’re perfectly healthy, but they’re not white. Most are black. We also have an Indian baby. The mother is six months pregnant now.”

“Indian?” asked Daniel. “As in American Indian?”

“Yes,” said the agent. “The mother is very young, barely into her teens. She’s making the right decision. She’ll carry the baby to full term and give it up for adoption. Now, ideally, we’d place this baby with Indian parents, right? But that just isn’t going to happen. The best place for this baby is with a white family. This child will be saved a lot of pain by growing up in a white family. It’s the best thing, really.”

Olivia and Daniel agreed to consider adopting the Indian baby. They went home that night, ate a simple dinner, and watched television. A sad movie-of-the-week about an incurable disease. Daniel kept clearing his throat during the movie. Olivia cried. When it was over, Daniel switched off the television. They undressed for bed, brushed their teeth, and lay down together.

“What do you think?” asked Olivia.

“I don’t know,” said Daniel.

They made love then, both secretly hoping this one would take. They wanted to believe that everything was possible. An egg would drop, be fertilized, and begin to grow. As he moved inside his wife, Daniel closed his eyes and concentrated on an image of a son. That son would be exactly half of him. He saw a son with his chin and hair. He saw a baseball glove, bicycle, tree house, barking dog. Olivia wrapped her arms around her husband, pressed her face to his shoulder. She could feel him inside her, but it was a vague, amorphous feeling. There was nothing specific about it. During the course of their married life, the sex had mostly felt good. Sometimes, it had been uncomfortable, once or twice painful. But she did not feel anything this time. She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling.

Olivia knew she was beautiful. She had been a beautiful baby, little girl, teenager, woman. She had never noticed whether it was easy or hard to be that beautiful. It never really occurred to her to wonder about it. All her life, her decisions had been made for her. She was meant to graduate from high school, get into a good college, find a suitable young man, earn a B.A. in art history, marry, and never work. Somewhere between reading a biography of van Gogh and fixing dinner, she was supposed to have a baby. Except for producing that infant, she had done what was expected of her, had fulfilled the obligations of her social contract. She had graduated with honors, had married a handsome, successful architect, and loved sex in a guarded way. But the baby would not happen. The doctors had no explanations. Her husband’s sperm were of average count and activity. “In a swimming race,” their doctor had said, “your husband’s sperm would get the bronze.” She had a healthy uterus and her period was loyal to the moon’s cycles. But it did not work. “Listen,” the doctor had said. “There are some people who just cannot have babies together. We can’t always explain it. Medicine isn’t perfect.”

Still staring at the ceiling, Olivia moved her hips in rhythm with her husband’s. She wanted to ask him what he was thinking about, but did not want to interrupt their lovemaking. She lifted herself to her husband, listening to the patterns of his breathing until it was over.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you, too,” Daniel said.

He lifted himself off her and rolled to his side of the bed. She reached out and took his hand. He was crying. She held him until they fell asleep. When they woke in the morning, both had decided to adopt the Indian baby.

Olivia was determined to be a good mother. She knew it was a complicated situation, that she would have to explain her baby’s brown skin to any number of strangers. There was no chance that she would be able to keep her baby’s adoption a secret. Two white parents, a brown baby. There was no other way to explain it. But she did not fool herself into thinking that her baby would somehow become white just because she and Daniel were white. After John arrived, she spent hours in the library. With John sleeping beside her, she would do research on Native American history and culture. The adoption agency refused to divulge John’s tribal affiliation and sealed all of his birth records, revealing only that John’s birth mother was fourteen years old. Olivia spent hours looking through books, searching the photographs for any face like her son’s face. She read books about the Sioux, and Navajo, and Winnebago. Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and Sitting Bull rode horses through her imagination. She bought all the children’s books about Indians and read them aloud to John. Daniel thought it was an obsessive thing to do, but he did not say anything. He had named the baby John after his grandfather and thought it ironic. His grandfather had been born in Germany and never really learned much English, even after years in the United States.

“Honey,” Daniel whispered to his wife when John woke up crying. Three in the morning, the moon full and bright white. “Honey, it’s the baby.”

Olivia rose from bed, walked into the nursery, and picked up John. She carried him to the window.

“Look, sweetie,” she said to John. “It’s just the moon. See, it’s pretty.”

Daniel listened to his wife talking to their son.

“It’s the moon,” she said and then said the word in Navajo, Lakota, Apache. She had learned a few words in many Indian languages. From books, Western movies, documentaries. Once she saw an Indian woman at the supermarket and asked her a few questions that were answered with bemused tolerance.

“It’s just the moon,” whispered Olivia and then she softly sang it. “It’s the moon. It’s the moon.”

Daniel listened for a few minutes before he rolled over and fell asleep. When he woke the next morning, Olivia was standing at that same window with John in her arms, as if she’d been there all night.

“We need to get John baptized,” she said with a finality that Daniel didn’t question.

Because the baby John was Indian, Olivia and Daniel Smith wanted him to be baptized by an Indian, and they searched for days and weeks for the only Indian Jesuit in the Pacific Northwest. Father Duncan, a Spokane Indian Jesuit, was a strange man. A huge man, an artist. He painted contemporary landscapes, portraits, and murals that were highlighted with traditional Spokane Indian images. His work was displayed in almost every Jesuit community in the country. He was a great teacher, a revered theologian, but an eccentric. He ate bread and soup at every meal. Whole grains and vegetable broth, sourdough and chicken stock. He talked to himself, laughed at inappropriate moments, sometimes read books backward, starting with the last page and working toward the beginning. An irony, an Indian in black robes, he took a special interest in John and, with Olivia and Daniel’s heartfelt approval, often visited him. The Jesuit held the baby John in his arms, sang traditional Spokane songs and Catholic hymns, and rocked him to sleep. As John grew older, Father Duncan would tell him secrets and make him promise never to reveal them. John kept his promises.

On a gray day when John was six years old, Father Duncan took him to see the Chapel of the North American Martyrs in downtown Seattle. John found himself surrounded by vivid stained glass reproductions of Jesuits being martyred by Indians. Bright white Jesuits with bright white suns at their necks. A Jesuit, tied to a post, burning alive as Indians dance around him. Another pierced with dozens of arrows. A third, with his cassock torn from his body, crawling away from an especially evil-looking Indian. The fourth being drowned in a blue river. The fifth, sixth, and seventh being scalped. An eighth and ninth praying together as a small church burns behind them. And more and more. John stared up at so much red glass.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Father Duncan.

John did not understand. He was not sure if Father Duncan thought the artwork was beautiful, or if the murder of the Jesuits was beautiful. Or both.

“There’s a myth, a story, that the blood of those Jesuits was used to stain the glass,” said Duncan. “But who knows if it’s true. We Jesuits love to tell stories.”

“Why did the Indians kill them?”

“They wanted to kick the white people out of America. Since the priests were the leaders, they were the first to be killed.”

John looked up at the stained glass Jesuits, then at the Spokane Indian Jesuit.

“But you’re a priest,” said John.

“Yes, I am.”

John did not have the vocabulary to express what he was feeling. But he understood there was something odd about the contrast between the slaughtered Jesuits and Father Duncan, and between the Indian Jesuit and the murderers.

“Did the white people leave?” asked John.

“Some of them did. But more came.”

“It didn’t work.”

“No.”

“Why didn’t the Indians kill all the white people?”

“They didn’t have the heart for it.”

“But didn’t white people kill most of the Indians?”

“Yes, they did.”

John was confused. He stared up at the martyred Jesuits. Then he noticed the large crucifix hanging over the altar. A mortally wounded Jesus, blood pouring from his hands and feet, from the wound in his side. John saw the altar candles burning and followed the white smoke as it rose toward the ceiling of the chapel.

“Was Jesus an Indian?” asked John.

Duncan studied the crucifix, then looked down at John.

“He wasn’t an Indian,” said the Jesuit, “but he should have been.”

John seemed to accept that answer. He could see the pain in Jesus’s wooden eyes. At six, he already knew that a wooden Jesus could weep. He’d seen it on the television. Once every few years, a wooden Jesus wept and thousands of people made the pilgrimage to the place where the miracle happened. If miracles happened with such regularity when did they cease to be miracles? And simply become ordinary events, pedestrian proof of God? John knew that holy people sometimes bled from their hands and feet, just as Jesus had bled from his hands and feet when nailed to the cross. Such violence, such faith.

“Why did they do that to Jesus?” asked John.

“He died so that we may live forever.”

“Forever?”

“Forever.”

John looked up again at the windows filled with the dead and dying.

“Did those priests die like Jesus?” asked John.

Father Duncan did not reply. He knew that Jesus was killed because he was dangerous, because he wanted to change the world in a good way. He also knew that the Jesuits were killed because they were dangerous to the Indians who didn’t want their world to change at all. Duncan knew those Jesuits thought they were changing the Indians in a good way.

“Did they die like Jesus?” John asked again.

Duncan was afraid to answer the question. As a Jesuit, he knew those priests were martyred just like Jesus. As a Spokane Indian, he knew those Jesuits deserved to die for their crimes against Indians.

“John,” Duncan said after a long silence. “You see these windows? You see all of this? It’s what is happening inside me right now.”

John stared at Duncan, wondering if the Jesuit had a stained glass heart. Rain began to beat against the windows, creating an illusion of movement on the stained faces of the murderous Indians and martyred Jesuits, and on young John’s face. And on Duncan’s. The man and child stared up at the glass.

Father Duncan’s visits continued until John was seven years old. Then, with no warning or explanation, Duncan was gone. When John asked his parents about Father Duncan’s whereabouts, Olivia and Daniel told him that the Jesuit had retired and moved to Arizona. In fact, Duncan’s eccentricities had become liabilities. After the strange Sunday when he had openly wept during Eucharist and run out of the church before the closing hymn, Duncan was summarily removed from active duty and shipped to a retreat in Arizona. He walked into the desert one week after he arrived at the retreat and was never seen again.

As he grew up, John kept reading the newspaper account of the disappearance, though it contained obvious errors. Anonymous sources insisted that Father Duncan had lost his faith in God. John knew that Duncan had never lost his faith, but had caused others to believe he did. His body was never found, though a search party followed Duncan’s tracks miles into the desert, until they simply stopped.