The Arrow Keeper’s Song (4 page)

“I sent them off with Faith Louise. They're in the kitchen baking Christmas cookies,” said Eleanor. Faith Louise, a youthful serving girl of cheerful demeanor and abundant energy, had been assigned the formidable task of keeping the three-year-old twins from underfoot.

“Well, then, let's go for a walk. I shall no doubt find myself longing for dry land the moment we weigh anchor.” Joanna started toward the bedroom door.

“But, Jo, why leave at all? I mean, if you must … tend … sick people, there are plenty in New Orleans.” Eleanor had tried to understand, but the whole idea seemed frightfully depressing.

“And remain under father's thumb? No. I cannot stay. And besides, Cuba sounds terribly exotic. There are four of us going in all. Just think of the adventure. The people of Cuba have been fighting against Spanish rule for nearly half a century. Read here. One rebellion after another. Martyr after martyr. I heard the most marvelous man speak at Tulane. A former teacher, now he is one of the leaders of the revolution. Antonio Celestial. The Spaniards have put a price on his head, yet he will return to the island.”

“Why should he come to the United States in the first place?” Eleanor asked in a most skeptical tone of voice.

“To enlist donated funds and materials, to seek America's help in their struggle, which is so similar to our own revolution. President-elect McKinley has already sent stern warnings to the Spanish forces suggesting we might become officially involved. Celestial invited any of us to come to Cuba and put our skills to good use. And it ought to be very exciting, to actually be part of such a gallant struggle.” Joanna's eyes lit up as she spoke.

“Excitement could get you killed,” Eleanor soberly replied.

But her admonishment had no effect. Doctor Joanna Cooper held a firm belief in her own invulnerability. As far as she was concerned, her course was set. No turning back.

They descended the stairs together. Reaching the front room, Joanna left her leather bag by the door and walked out onto the veranda. White wooden chairs looked out on the circular drive. It was a damp, hazy night. The New Orleans Road beyond the cobblestone path was completely obscured by fog.

“I'm going back inside. It's too gloomy out here,” Eleanor remarked.

“I'll join you in the dining room,” said Joanna. “But if father starts in on me again, I shall have to await my carriage out here on the veranda.”

“You two are something,” Eleanor muttered with a wag of her head.

Joanna chuckled and stepped down onto the path that rounded the house and led down to the mist-shrouded lake. Great weeping willows and stalwart cypresses rose out of the mist as she drew closer to the shoreline. She stood there facing the silent gray expanse, lost in a world of her own thoughts. Images of her vanished childhood filled her mind, like characters in some play, each happy, innocent moment coming forward to take its bow, to say “good-bye.”

The strains of “O How a Rose Ere Blooming” drifted through the mist. Joanna smiled. It was her favorite Christmas hymn, one that Roxanne always made a point of playing at this time of year. Catfish darted beneath the surface of the lake and sent wavelets lapping at the shore. Beyond the shrouded night, wild geese called across the black expanse.

Music and hearth and home touched the woman's heart. Steeling herself against her father's last-ditch effort to change her mind, Joanna turned and started back toward the house. But she'd gone only a step or two when a strange cold wind sent the mist churning around her like lost souls in a mad dance. It increased in intensity. The cape that had almost been too warm for the night became a boon. Joanna found herself clutching at the folds and wrapping herself in its woolen embrace. The strange wind howled, and for a moment she thought she heard keening voices and the deeper resonant cadence of beating drums. Joanna remained awestruck, unable to move while the eerie gust buffeted her and clawed at her with its icy talons.

What was that? That sound?

“Is someone there?” she called out.

The wind died as quickly as it sprang into being. The chill left her. The mist drifted apart like torn silk to reveal the stone path that stretched on to the house. Joanna brushed the debris from her dress, breathed deeply, and steadied her reeling senses.

“Well …,” she muttered, and continued on her way. “Well …” She searched the darkness. “I know what I heard.” She paused and listened again. Nothing.

But for a moment, trapped in the center of the whirlwind, Joanna was certain she had heard neighing horses and pounding hooves as if the animals were being ridden at a gallop, close at hand. But she had seen no one. And the ground around her was devoid of tracks.

“I know what I heard,” Joanna repeated, then wondered whom she was trying to convince. A ghost wind, the plaintive voices, spectral riders, drumbeats …

Up ahead Robert Cooper appeared at the corner of the veranda. He waited, hands tucked in the pockets of his frock coat, his features etched with concern.

“I thought I heard you call out,” he explained as his daughter approached.

“It was nothing,” she said, trying to convince herself with a lie. Suddenly she was grateful for the amber warmth spilling from the window, for the familiar sights and sounds she would soon be leaving behind.

“How can I make you listen to reason?” Robert said. The diminutive man was not about to accept defeat without one more last-ditch effort.

“Don't try, Father. Please.” She climbed up the steps and slipped her arm in his.

“Bah. I might as well be talking to the wind,” he remarked.

Joanna gave a start and glanced over her shoulder at the night. The icy kiss of that cold breeze seemed to clutch at her soul. But the drums … or had it been the beating of her own frightened heart? Spectral riders in the mist, their unearthly voices wailing …

Joanna shivered and hurried toward the light.

PART ONE

A P
RAYER TO THE
S
UN

CHAPTER THREE

Oklahoma Territory, 1897

I
N THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE
A
LL
-F
ATHER
, M
AHEO
. A
ND
Maheo was lonely as He walked the Great Circle, so He created a great sea and reaching down into the sea He found little mounds of mud and these He shaped in the palm of His hand and set them upon the water. And the little mounds grew and grew until the sea was covered with land. Then the All-Father took a rib from His right side and created a man and took a rib from His left side and created a woman. Maheo placed the man in the south and the woman in the north. Man and woman walked toward one another, searching, always searching, for they too were lonely. And as they journeyed, they saw all matter of animals and birds, and these they named. Eventually man and woman found one another and their lives became one. Maheo was pleased with them. To their children He gave the sacred songs to bind the world, songs of power so that the world would not end, songs of healing and renewal and magic.

The Maiyun whispered these songs to Sweet Medicine when the Cheyenne prophet received the Sacred Arrows. And so the songs were passed from one generation to another, down the long dark trails of time, from one Arrow Keeper and his circle of elders to the next.

Seth Sandcrane knew the songs, and he had taught them to his son, preparing Tom for the day he would one day receive the Mahuts from Seth's own hands. Now it was all lost. Tom had abandoned the old ways. And though the songs still lived within Seth, he was no longer the Arrow Keeper and there was no point in singing them.

Seth emerged from the cabin he had built at the foot of a wooded knoll south of the settlement and glared at the newly risen sun as if he resented its arrival. Perhaps he did. Mornings were a hard go for a man without a purpose. He wiped his mouth on the tail of his whiskey-stained shirt and then tucked the shirt into his Levi's and pulled his faded brown suspenders over his shoulders. He scratched his back against the corner of the log cabin, working the blunt end of an out-thrust log between his shoulder blades. His gaze inadvertently drifted to the ceremonial lodge nestled between the oaks on the slope west of town. A ribbon of smoke unfurled like a banner above the treetops, and Seth could only imagine Luthor White Bear standing by the medicine fire atop the bluff overlooking the lodge. Seth began to sing softly to himself the creation song that the world might not end. But the words trailed off, his voice became a whisper, then grew still. Old responsibilities, like habits, died hard.

Seth studied the scattered buildings that made up the settlement and allowed his thoughts to slip back twenty-nine years. It was in the time of the hard-faced moon, November, and Chief Black Kettle's band of Southern Cheyenne were wintering on the banks of the Washita, about five miles up-river from Cross Timbers. Seth was sixteen years old. He had just gone down to the river when the bluecoats struck. Custer had chosen his time well, for many of the braves were on a hunt, and only a few remained to defend the old ones and the women and children.

Seth closed his eyes and sucked in his breath. He could still hear the pounding hooves of the cavalry, still smell the gunsmoke and hear the screams of the dying as the troopers fired into throngs of women and children. Seth waited for his chance and leaped astride a trooper's back, dragging a fresh-faced youth (who looked no older than his attacker) from the saddle and plunging his knife into the startled trooper's chest. He grabbed the dying man's Springfield carbine as a second bluecoat charged him with pistol blazing. Seth snapped the carbine to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. The carbine roared. The trooper straightened in the saddle and fired into the air, then toppled backward and rolled across the rump of his horse and onto the ground.

The advantage was Custer's that day. The tribe, having lived in peace with the whites, had not expected trouble and was unprepared for such an attack. But when the shooting started and the Seventh Cavalry charged the camp, both men and women fought tenaciously as they struggled to escape. In the confusion of the melee, young Seth managed to lead several families to safety. Hidden among the wooded hillsides, they watched as Yellow Hair and the Seventh Cavalry burned the village and drove off the horses and assembled those stunned stragglers the troopers had taken prisoner.

Seth wrinkled his nostrils. Even now the stench of death assailed him from the crucible of his memories. He would never forget crouching in the shadow of the white oaks while the soldiers destroyed the lodges. His father, Strong Fox, crawled up beside his son and there in the emerald shadows removed the Sacred Arrows from the bundle. Seth remembered how his father had pointed the Arrows at the soldiers and begun to softly sing. His words could have been spoken by the wind, they came so softly. Words of vengeance and words of death. When Strong Fox had finished, Seth knew that Custer was doomed. Yellow Hair would pay for what had happened on the banks of the Washita, as would the troopers of the Seventh Cavalry. Eight years later he wasn't surprised to learn how the carrion birds feasted on the bones of the Seventh where they lay, butchered along with Custer in the valley of the Little Big Horn.

“Mr. Sandcrane?”

Seth turned and fixed Willem Tangle Hair in a steel-eyed stare. The tribal policeman looked fit for burying in his frock coat and black trousers, his red hair slicked down and blousy white shirt freshly washed. He nervously fumbled with his flat-crowned black hat as he sat astride a nimble-looking mare.

“I was looking for Tom,” Willem explained.

Whenever Tom was in Cross Timbers and not working for Allyn Benedict and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he stayed home with his father. A bedroom off either side of a main living room afforded both father and son their privacy.

Willem could feel the tension. For eight and a half months the former Arrow Keeper's disappointment and wounded pride had festered. Seth could be as hard and unforgiving as the land itself. “He's already gone on to church.”

“Oh. We were going to ride over together,” Willem replied. He suspected Tom and his father had started off the morning with a quarrel and his friend had left rather than continue the fight.

“Why don't you come along with me?” Willem suggested, hoping to bridge the gap between father and son. “You have friends over at St. Joachim's.”

“The path of the white man is not my path. The white man's god does not call me by name,” Seth retorted, then shrugged. “Anyway, I'm a mite dry.” He walked up to the freckle-faced breed, the offspring of an Irish father and Cheyenne mother. Seth winked, patted Willem's horse, and continued on toward the split-rail corral beyond his house. Within the corral a piebald gelding thrust its muzzle through the rails to nibble at a few blades of grass growing at the base of one of the posts. The animal whinnied and pawed the ground as Seth approached.

Willem watched with obvious concern as Seth saddled the piebald. He understood what the older man had implied. Although whiskey was supposedly forbidden on the reservation, Jerel Tall Bull and his brother, Curtis, ran a tavern called Panther Hall in the hills north of the Washita. The roadhouse was frequented by many of the Cheyenne. With the impending dissolution of the reservation, the Tall Bulls operated their establishment with impunity. Allyn Benedict and the BIA had made no move against them.

“That's a rough lot out at the Tall Bulls',” Willem called out. Seth waved in Willem's direction, brushing the half-breed's admonition aside.

The tribal policeman shrugged, took up the reins of his own brown mare, and turned the animal in the direction of the settlement. There was nothing more to be said there. But Tom might like to know how his father intended to spend this Sunday. Willem regretted being the bearer of such bad news. As he rode off toward the settlement, the hooves of his mount kicked up a whiskey bottle within a couple yards of Seth's front door.