Wind Song (3 page)

Before she reached the foot, which was scarcely wide enough for more than one person, a small dust devil danced across her path, pelting her eyes with sand and whipping her jersey dress high about her thighs. Eyes squinted against the sand and hands fighting her whirling skirts, she stepped out onto the footbridge. It shuddered beneath the force of the wind. Modesty abandoned, she grabbed hold of the railing. Her gaze dropped to the wash far below, and vertigo seized her. The knuckles of the hand that clutched the railing turned white.

The dust devil spun on past, but she couldn’t relinquish her grip on the railing. She felt that she would never make it to the other side. Then a hand grasped her wrist, and browned fingers gently pried loose her grip. An electrical charge zpped throuogh her. Her gaze spiraled up to encounter the impersonal gaze of the Navajo she had met her first day at Kaibeto. “I’ll walk you across the bridge, Mrs. Dennis.”

The height wadded up her stomach and tossed it over the bridge railing. “Call a fireman!”

At that he grinned.  “A Navajo is the best you’re going to get right now.”

She felt an Out-of-Body-Experience coming on.  Zombie-like, she walked just in front of him, grateful for the reassuring firmness of his hold on her upper arm and terribly aware of his presence in every nerve cell of her body. Once she reached the bridge’s end, she steadied herself with a deep breath and turned to him. Why did the sun seem so blasted hot? Perspiration beaded her upper lip. The air seemed to crackle around them, as if charged by lightning. “I feel so silly, clinging like a scared child to that railing.”

“Only children have the right to be afraid?” he asked.

She blinked, unprepared for such a direct remark. In Philly a man would have made some superficial reply. Brad would have said that she did look pretty silly.

Cody Strawhand didn’t wear a hat this time; instead, he had the typical Navajo’s red bandana wrapped about his wide forehead. She noted that his dark leather-colored hair glinted in the sun with streaks of honeyed brown.

Now that she had the courage to look him fully in the face, she was surprised to see that he had few of the features characteristic of the Navajo children she taught. Oh, he shared the deep-set eyes, the high-ridged bones over hollowed cheeks, the narrow-bladed nose, the generous curve of the lips—though all of these features were stamped in a harder cast. However, many an Anglo possessed those same characteristics. And Cody Strawhand’s eyes, flanked by a network of faint sun-wrinkles, were dark brown flecked with green the shade of the junipers, not the flat black of Indian eyes.

Unaccountably, she felt threatened by this overpowering virility and the way he seemed to see through to her innermost thoughts, perceiving even her fear of heights. She brought a distant, aloof smile to her lips. “I’ve never thought about it—fear not being solely a child’s right.”

He released her arm. “The word ‘right’—it belongs to the Anglo.”

The sudden inflection in his voice would have frozen a flame. “I—I don’t understand,” she said.

“The sun—the wind—the water. They are gifts. Not rights. The white man came brandishing paper—deeds of title—his right to the land.”

She almost countered with the fact that that had happened centuries ago—that it was futile to argue the point now. And absurd. Then she realized that the discussion had nothing to do with Anglo versus Indian. The man simply wished to put her on the defensive. Obviously, he felt as at odds with her as she was with him.

She made her own voice inordinately polite. “But then, if I understand my anthropology correctly, Mr. Strawhand, the Apache and Navajo haven’t been here since Creation either. They wrested the land from primitive and gentle basketmakers, the Anasazi—the Ancient Ones.”

“A moot point.” He smiled, a smile that did not reach his intelligent eyes, a smile that she somehow sensed challenged her as a woman. “You were on your way to the trading post?”

The swift change from enigmatic Indian to urbane gentleman threw her. A Machiavellian tactic, she was sure. She found herself talking rapidly to cover her disconcertedness as she fell into step with him. His long legs ate up the ground between the bridge and the trading post. “I was hoping that Mr. Burnett might have something for impetigo. One of the children, Karen Many Goats, has come down with it, and the dormitory isolation room, incredibly, has nothing for it.”

“Yes, incredible, isn’t it?” he said flatly. “Yet the BIA finds budget allotments for computer scientists and manpower development specialists.”

His voice had a deep resonant quality, the kind that hinted at intrigue, captivating the listener— the kind that storytellers through the ages have possessed. She wanted to listen to that voice further, but at the trading post’s porch he left her without a word and swung up into the cab of a rusted green pickup. Dust clouded the air once more as he backed the pickup away and took off down a dirt road that wound back into the canyon.

“Well!” Abbie breathed, pushing open the screen door. “If that isn’t an Indian for you!”

“Cockamamy!” Orville Burnett said from behind the counter. With his chaotic mop of white hair over wise, mournful eyes and his rumpled shirt and baggy pants, he looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Mark Twain.

“What?”

“Cody. He’s barely an eighth Indian—that’s how Indian blood is measured, in eighths.”

“Then why does he live here, like an Indian?”

Old Burnett humped his shoulders in a shrug and reached for some of the chewing tobacco that filled a tobacco tin nailed to the front of the counter. “Guess that’s what Cody prefers. His father, a Navajo code talker during the Second World War, had only two-eighths Indian blood. After Chase Strawhand was elected governor—”

“I remember coming across something about that.” It had been just after she had accepted the job at Kaibeto, when she had been reading everything she could get her hands on about the Southwest.

“Yep, Chase Strawhand—first Indian governor of New Mexico.” Orville dipped the tobacco flakes behind his lower lip. “Anyway, Chase married a young white woman. A New Mexico senator’s daughter—and by all accounts a blonde, good-looker like yourself.”

She smiled. “I take that as a compliment. Do Cody Strawhand’s parents live on the reservation?”

“Nope. At least, not Cody’s mother.”

Orville turned to heft a bag of sugar onto the shelf behind him. “Course, Cody never says nothing about his family. Only that he has mongrel blood. No doubt mixed with some French trapper from way back.” Orville turned around and splayed his gnarled hands on the counter that was grooved with initials and stained with age. “I see you’ve lasted the week now. You might just have the grit it takes to buck old lady Halliburton.”

“Not me,” she laughed. “I just want to be a competent teacher, not reform the whole boarding school system. I need this job too badly.” She purchased a box of bicarbonate of soda. It was the only home remedy she could think of that might halt the spread of impetigo. Little Karen’s face was too adorable to be blotched with suppurating sores. Her concern for Karen Many Goats lured her thoughts back to Cody Strawhand. She wished that she could stop thinking about him.

Still, even as she prepared for bed that night, she continued to think of him. Brushing out her hair, she wandered from the bedroom back to the combined living room and dining room, trying to divert her thoughts in other directions.

Brad would have filed for divorce by now.

Her kitchen was a small rectangular box, but perfect for her.

Had Jason and Justin made the university’s football squad this year?

The furniture, a blend of contemporary and Indian design, was shabby, no doubt secondhand. But then, she no longer had to concern herself with impressing Brad’s friends and clients, did she?

The twins were as bad at writing as she was. She really must get a letter off to them.

Had Dalah put the baking soda paste on Karen as she had instructed?

Did the young Indian woman and the other aides help the children say their prayers when they tucked them into their bunk beds? Abbie thought of all the nights she had knelt before the boys’ beds. Sometimes Brad would come in and stand beside them. But never did he kneel ... as if the act of kneeling threatened his ego.

Oh, those twins’ prayers! They had provided precious moments of reflection and amusement— and closeness. But that period was behind her, and she didn’t miss it as much as she had thought she would. She felt as if she had been wrapped in a chrysalis for twenty years, had been waiting for something, some act of nature, to release her.

Cody, if he had been bom at the end of the war, would be her age, or maybe thirty-eight. The thought pleased her.

Really, she must stop thinking about him. She hadn’t escaped her subservience to one man just to strangle herself in an involvement with another. She wanted to be on her own, to answer to no one but herself. This was her chance. Thirty- seven wasn’t too late to begin life again, was it? She would
not
think of him.

Was he married—with several wives, as was the Navajo custom?

Chapter
2

“
T
hat’s very good
.”

Robert Tsinnijinnie looked at Abbie blankly, as if he didn’t understand a word she said. But she knew better now. That second week she had finally coaxed him from his post at the window to sit before the long, low table. At eleven, he dwarfed the chair. He was older than most of the boys in the first grade class, but that wasn’t unusual.

The Navajo Tribal Council had decreed that a child could continue through the eighth grade, which was the mandatory minimum grade level, until the child reached eighteen. Mostly girls attended the boarding school, because parents needed their sons to tend the sheep. Sometimes a boy went for one year and his brother the next, alternating every other year.

Abbie bent to study the boy’s drawing of an Indian shepherd on horseback following his sheep across a desert. Invariably Robert’s drawings showed Navajo Mountain in the background. She had noted that all the Navajo children seemed to have a sharp eye for detail. Robert’s crayon picture even showed the tracks made by the horse’s hooves in the red sand.

Always the red landscape. Later, during recess, she commented on this to Dorothy Goldman.

“Oh, yes,” the plump and dowdy old woman chuckled. “Red sand for the red man. The Indian says that the Great Spirit undercooked the white man, overcooked the black man, but the red man he cooked just right!”

Abbie smiled. The Indians had a great sense of humor, which she was just beginning to appreciate. Her gaze swept over the laughing children on the playground. They still had not accepted her, but their aloofness was giving way to a cautious reserve. If only she could speak the Navajo language a little. As it was, they spoke little or no English, and she felt that she faced double the problems of an average first grade teacher.

All the Kaibeto teachers faced unusual problems, but then, maybe the teachers were unusual. Misfits, as Marshall had facetiously commented?

There was the wasted-looking forty-year-old woman who had kicked her tranquilizer habit but had been unable to convince the Denver school board. There was the young black teacher—he had been unable to find a job in a small, all- Hispanic Texas community. And Linda McNabb, unmarried and a mother. Even in such a liberated era, the Baltimore school system had refused to hire the pregnant woman two years earlier. The BIA, desperate for teachers, hadn’t. Redheaded Linda was enthusiastic about being able to keep her toddler on the school grounds with her and have an Indian woman for a nurse, since the Indians were noted for their love of children.

As she watched the children play during recess, Abbie thought that she herself was one of those misfits. But would she ever find out where she did fit?

Karen Many Goats, her impetigo already fading, gave a war whoop as she swished down the slide. And Joey Kills the Soldier pushed three other children on the merry-go-round—his stagecoach, he had told her the day before. Beyond, on the basketball court that was cracked like a jigsaw puzzle, the older boys were already practicing for their first intertribal game.

Abbie was on duty for the thirty-minute recess, and an uneasiness assailed her as her gaze scanned the playground. Four or five more times her gaze swept over the raucous children before she realized what it was that bothered her. Robert was no longer out there. She crossed over to another teacher, a recent graduate of Brigham Young University, who was off duty that period.