Sacred Is the Wind (29 page)

“You are very beautiful. So …”—he shrugged—“it was the easiest decision I ever had to make,” Michael said. He got to his feet. She backed away from him. “Tell me you have been kissed like that before. I haven't. A little bird told me you were Cheyenne. I wanted to find out for myself. You are.”

“I am half Cheyenne,” Kate blurted out. She was used to being in control. After all, she was a physician. Now she was at a loss and didn't like it.

“Cheyenne is Cheyenne, part or whole. Didn't you learn that among the whites?” He saw his words had struck home.

“Don't ever …” she said, and flustered, lost her train of thought.

He cut her off. “Maybe the next time you will come to me on your own.”

“There won't be a next time,” Kate said. She wondered if she sounded as uncertain as she felt. Judging by the conceited grin on his face, she most certainly did. He clambered to his feet and patted the creases out of his jeans. “I think you had better leave,” she added. He nodded, placed his hat on his head, then something among the clothes in her trunk caught his eye and he reached down and picked up a Beadle dime novel. Kate took a step forward on reflex, but it was too late. Michael began to real aloud.

“‘
Guns on the Graybull
—being an account of the pursuit and capture of Panther Burn, notorious war chief of the Northern Cheyenne, the bloodthirsty Butcher of Castle Rock. The innocent avenged, justice at last.'” Michael glanced up at Kate, who blushed and folded her hands in front of her.

“I wanted to learn as much as I could about the place and the people I was coming to serve,” the physician defensively said. She held out her hand but Michael ignored her and stared down at the book.

“So you have read this?” he asked. She nodded. “Does it tell of how the village of Simon White Bull was attacked by the militia from Castle Rock and almost all my mother's people, men, women, and children, murdered? Does it tell of how my father surrendered because he could not bear to see his people starve, of how he entered the camp of General Miles under a flag of truce to negotiate terms for his followers, and was arrested, chained like a mad dog, and shipped off to prison in Kansas?” Michael dropped the dime novel onto the folded clothes. He noticed other penny dreadfuls, exploits of Indian fighters and Indian chiefs and lurid accounts of famous battles and massacres, as well as tomes about various and sundry lives lived among the savages. He looked up at Kate.

“Take down your hair, Doctor Kate,” Michael said with a sigh, his temper fading. “And come outside with the ‘savages.'” Michael started toward the door—spun around and headed for the door at the rear of the house. “I'd better stay out of sight for a while,” he explained. “Until Captain Morbitzer cools off.”

“I don't understand. He wasn't angry when he left to meet with Agent Gude. Unless you lied about Tyrell wanting to see him.” She sucked in her breath at the realization and stared at his already departing figure and then shook her head in disbelief. There had never been anyone like
him
at medical school. She touched her lips, for the warmth of his kiss lingered. There had never been anyone like him … anywhere.

•   •   • 

Unpacking was the hardest part of settling into her new home, not for the work but for the memories. After the dresses and high-topped shoes, after the tins and bottles of medicines, Kate carefully unwrapped a photograph mounted in a silver frame from its oilcloth package and cleared a space for it over the mantel among the pewter mugs and china plates Corinthia Gude had so laboriously collected. The photograph was of a small-statured delicate Cheyenne woman dressed in what appeared to be a black skirt (Kate remembered it was dark brown, the color of chocolate) and a white silk blouse with tiny pearl buttons that fastened from the waist to the throat. The girl, eight-year-old Katherine, was as dark as her mother and she wore a white flowery dress and white pantaloons and high-buttoned black shoes. Mother and child were standing in front of a flat painted to look like the entrance to a magnificent garden, though unfortunately, the sky had been torn and covered with sailcloth, ruining the illusion. Sunlight streamed through the western windows and a single golden beam fell across the photograph. She had strewn the contents of the trunks about the house, some in their proper places, others simply stacked upon the nearest available chair or table in her haste to find the picture of her mother. The photograph had been tucked safely away in the center of the clothes trunk, protected by woolen dresses and waistcoats. Music from a trio of fiddlers drifted in through the open windows. Kate began to hum along with their merry melody. A knock sounded at the door and Kate steeled herself, for she expected the return of an irate Captain Henry Morbitzer. She opened the door, blinked in disbelief, and finally stood aside as three Cheyenne children stepped into her living room, the oldest a boy of seven with dirty cheeks. A girl not more than five and another girl, just a toddler, held hands and waited just inside the room. The noise of celebration drifted in through the doorway, flowing over the children and filling the parlor.

“We come to visit you,” the boy announced. The five-year-old nodded in accord and the toddler simply stared wide-eyed. The girls wore homespun dresses, the boy seemed lost in a pair of baggy Levi's with the cuffs rolled up to form a thick band of denim around his ankle.

“Won't you sit down,” Kate invited. The three walked over to the couch and sat down and looked at her. And said nothing. Just sat, watching and waiting.

“Well …” Kate began lamely, searching for a topic. She clasped her hands, sat in a cushioned easy chair opposite them. “Well … how nice.” She told them her name. She told them she was a doctor. The children giggled and laughed and continued to study her. Kate asked them their names and they told her … Jonah Yellow Leg and Susan and Sara Pretty on Top. Sara was the youngest. They offered nothing further than their names. They sat and they smiled and continued to giggle nervously from time to time. And then Kate remembered the peppermints she had bought from a general store in Miles City. She dropped a couple into each child's outstretched hand. The children, contentedly munching their gifts, promptly concluded their visit. The three left, telling her good-bye. When Kate invited them to come and see her again, the children laughed among themselves as if sharing some private joke that only a child could understand, most certainly not an adult. Kate smiled and watched the children scamper off and then lifted her gaze to the couples dancing on the platform by the agency, and she thought she spied Michael Spirit Wolf. For a moment she felt drawn toward the dancers. But necessity won out over desire; she had too much to do, too much settling in yet. In truth, she was afraid. After all, she was a stranger. A priest looking like a great raven flapping his broad black wings strode into the center of the platform, waving his arms and shouting that the wrestlers were gathered at the lodge-pole near Camp Merritt. Kate closed the door as the dancers hurried off the platform, following the fiddlers who had bolted from their stage, instruments in hand. Kate had no interest in wrestlers. She returned to the mantel and the photograph.

“I'm here, Mother. As you wanted. As I wanted too …. At least I think so.” Yet, who had planted the seed of her yearning? “Whose idea, Mother? Yours or mine alone?” Alone. Kate had always been alone except for Esther. Alone as a child. Alone as a young woman, although blessed with an education. She closed her eyes and tried to picture her mother alive. But all she re-created was a headstone rising out of the Pennsylvania country-side, a burial plot in the rich farmland near Haverford, the Madison ancestral home. A month ago seemed like a century now. Yet only a month. It had been the last day for Kate and she had come to say good-bye ….

Esther Madison

b. 1846 d. March 9, 1889

Forgive

Through lazy days of golden sunshine and gentle silvery showers, the land grew lush with the blossoms of spring. Green buds thrust through their blankets of earth, yawning tendrils awakening from winter's sleep. The landscape was a tapestry of rebirth promising a summer of abundance, of flourishing crops, the earthly riches to be won from the land. Nowhere was the advent of summer more evident than among the croplands and meadows of the Madison farm. Five miles out from Haverford, a bustling village of pristine cottages and well-stocked stores, of whitewashed fences and sober freshly painted Congregational churches, simple and direct in appointment, much like the residents of the area themselves. Sam Madison's forebears had settled here, ten miles from Philadelphia, back in the days when the Delaware and Algonquin carried out their raids. Madisons had fought and died to keep the land they claimed as their own. Madison iron had armed the Continental Army in exchange for vast acreage grants up in the Piedmont country, Madison iron had cast cannon in the War of 1812, and Madison forges in Philadelphia had helped to arm the Grand Army of the Union during the Civil War. Sam Madison could count the fourth President of the United States among the branches of his illustrious family tree.

Kate had learned the lineage of her father's people by heart. Learned and forgotten now, or at least was determined to forget. She was twenty-three years old, no longer a half-breed girl growing up in a household of wealth where even servants looked upon her as more of a curiosity than the daughter of Samuel Madison. None of it mattered now.

Kate saw herself leaning to run her fingers along the letters etched in granite. Her lips silently formed her mother's name. In the room, in her mind, the name that was conspicuously absent from the headstone … Esther
Bird Hat
Madison. Now a breeze set the branches of a nearby willow atremble and ruffled the hem of her skirt, where she stood at her mother's grave as her memories reenacted the past ….

“Mother …” Kate knelt to touch the mounded earth. Images … memories … of her mother's tender voice, of her mother's hidden pain, of guilt, of hatred and love, the mixture of emotions that had bound her to her husband and yet separated them in the same house. Esther Madison had learned of the massacre at the Warbonnet from an Eastern newspaper, hard, bitter reading that had sealed her fate. She could never go back now. Her people were gone—murdered. And worse, it might have been prevented. Sam should have tried, no matter the risk. Family … friends … all dead. Later she had read that some of the Southern Cheyenne had survived and joined the Northern Cheyenne and a war chief by the name of Panther Burn in a raid upon the town of Castle Rock, an occurrence that sadly seemed to silence any public outcry concerning the destruction of Simon White Bull's peaceful village. That same winter Kate had been born. And while Sam slowly abandoned his ministerial calling for the duties of his family's business, Esther undertook the rearing of their daughter. Sam's Cheyenne bride changed, became bitter and increasingly morose. Meanwhile Sam found himself continually preoccupied with his father's legacy. The ironworks needed new contracts and Sam resolved to get them. That involved repeated visits to Washington. Then the shipping interests needed attention, not to mention a variety of land speculations in South America. Life in the nation's capital and in Philadelphia where the Madisons kept a town house was furious-paced and impossible for Esther to fathom. Overwhelmed by her husband's world, Esther retreated to the ancestral farm near Haverford and concerned herself with her daughter's education, arranging for tutors to visit from Philadelphia. Esther was determined to see to it that Kate had the skills to survive in a world utterly alien to the Cheyenne. Kate endured her isolation. And as she matured, she begged her mother for stories of Esther's past and of the Cheyenne way. In her aloneness, Kate began finally to feel a sense of belonging. A bright, well-read young woman, she left home at nineteen to enter the School of Medicine at Syracuse. That she was the only woman in her class, and part Indian at that, mattered little to Kate Madison. Her father's name and prestige smoothed her entry. But a keen mind coupled with plain old-fashioned stubbornness helped her through the rigorous three years of training. Now she had come to say good-bye, knowing in her heart it was forever. A shadow fell across the grave. Poor Mother. Pennsylvania had finished the task Jubal Bragg had begun twenty-three years before. Another Cheyenne was dead.

“Father is expecting me to meet him in New York,” Kate said. “He has secured a teaching position for me at the Women's School of Medicine. I think he takes personal pleasure in guiding my success. Maybe it helps him sleep at night.” Kate glanced around at the horse and carriage tethered by the wrought-iron fence that bordered the family cemetery plot. So many Madisons buried here. Did they care that an Indian lay among them? “Forgive me, Mother, but I can't hate Father. I know you wanted me to, but I cannot. But neither can I live with him. You made me a stranger as much as the color of my skin ever did. You left me hungry for more than the lonely world of Samuel Madison.” She lifted her eyes to the elegant spacious farmhouse but a hundred yards away and imagined the servants watching her from the windows, trying to guess her intentions. Oh, they knew she was leaving, but to go where? New York, to be with Mr. Samuel, the cook might say and the upstairs maid agree.
No … not New York
. “Good-bye, Mother. Sleep well.”

Images melted like snow in May. Reflections of the past became a still life, a single picture, yesterday merged with today. She leaned forward and kissed her fingertips and placed them against the image of Esther Bird Hat Madison.
Sleep well
. By now Samuel Madison probably knew the whereabouts of his daughter, but what would he do? She had not joined him in New York, but fled westward from his wealth and position, from loneliness itself, to Montana, to this reservation, to the people of the Morning Star.