Winter's Child (11 page)

Shannon Mary O'Malley
was her full name. Irish Catholic to the bone, like all of the family Father John had left behind in Boston. He thought of them often, and he kept them in his prayers, those people from another time, a lifetime ago. Seventeen-Mile Road unspooled ahead, the snow crisscrossed and rutted, soft and fluffy as cotton on the surface and sharp as knives below. He was aware of the girl's soft intakes of breath beside him. “Soli or siamo!” played softly between them.

It was after ten this morning when Shannon had arrived at the administration building, a blast of cold air trailing her down the corridor and into his office. She gripped a coffee mug in one hand.
Any coffee, by chance?
Sorry she had missed breakfast, but she hoped Elena wasn't offended. She'd overslept. All she really needed was coffee.

He remembered smiling. Looking up from the letter of
recommendation he was writing for Justin Spearman's application to Creighton, and taking her in. Bundled up in a jacket twice her size, knit cap perched on the red hair that sprang over her shoulders, face flushed from the cold. She was like a breath of fresh air. He'd gotten to his feet and filled her mug with coffee at the little table next to the door. He made fresh coffee every morning for the bishop and himself when he got into the office, and usually by midmorning, he made another pot. This was the second pot.

“Enjoy your evening out?” His voice had come back to him tentative and insecure. He was on shaky ground in this parental role.

“Yeah, it was great.” She had held up the envelope-thin laptop she grasped in her other hand. “I'm reworking my notes on our talk with Wilbur Horn. Strange how much more you remember, the more you think about something.” She took a sip of coffee, then toasted him with the mug. “You don't know how much I needed that. Off to the office,” she said swinging into the corridor.

“Shannon, wait.”

She looked back and for a moment he'd thought he glimpsed a flash of resistance in her expression, as if she had expected him to interrogate her about last night. He walked back to his desk and rummaged through the pile of papers he'd brought over from the residence. Dear Lord, being a parent was tough. Shannon was leaning against the door frame, drinking the coffee. He'd found the page he was looking for and carried it over to her.

“Oh, that! I found it on the internet some time ago.” She had given a dismissive wave, coupled with a sly half smile, as if she appreciated his efforts, but she was the scholar here.

“I thought you might like to visit it.”

That had stopped her. She tilted her head back and stared at him, as if a different uncle had appeared in front of her. “You mean . . .”

“It still stands west of Blue Sky Highway, near the foothills.”

“Oh my God. Lizzie's house! Yes. Yes. How soon can we go?”

He'd told her to give him a minute to finish something, and she had clumped down the corridor in her heavy snow boots. He had heard her fiddling with the door to the little office he'd cleared for her. Then the door opened and closed. In ten minutes she was back, refilling the mug. Jacket still on, zippered up, scarf looped and re-looped around her neck, the knit cap pulled lower.

He had finished e-mailing the letter to the Creighton admissions office and closed the laptop. She was heading for the front door as he pulled on his jacket, grabbed his cowboy hat and walked to the back office. He told the bishop that he and Shannon were going out, and the bishop said what he always said. He would hold down the fort.

Shannon was on the front stoop, stomping her boots with impatience. He followed her down the concrete steps glazed with ice, buttoning up his jacket as he went. Her boots left a trail of notches through the snow to the pickup. Inside, he jiggled the ignition and, under his breath, encouraged the old engine to turn over one more time. Finally it sputtered into life, a low growling noise, like that of a man waking after a long sleep.

Now, after that first outburst of excitement, Shannon settled into a dreamy silence in the passenger seat, gloved hands around the coffee mug she lifted to her lips now and then. Houses slipped past, silent in the cold air, lopsided piles of snow on the roofs, frost fringing the windows. Everything stopped in the winter, but Father John knew that wasn't true even as the thought crossed his mind. Pickups and cars bobbed down the frozen road toward him, some with headlights flashing through the grayness. From time to time, depending upon the direction in which the road bent, he glimpsed a trace of sunshine over the mountains.

“In case you're interested, James was a perfect gentleman.”
Shannon's voice erupted like that of an announcer on a radio program that had been off the air for a while.

“I wouldn't expect anything else.”

“After we ate dinner, we went to his house.”

His house.

“
Used to be one of the ranch buildings behind the house where his mother lives. James insulated it, fixed it up. Put in a wood stove that keeps the place pretty cozy. He's very handy.”

“Ah.” He was learning more and more about James Two Horses.

“We talked for a couple hours.” Four or five. “About everything. Have you ever met anyone you felt you could talk to for the rest of your life and never run out of things to say?” Father John felt her eyes playing over him. “I guess not. But let me tell you, it is a wonderful thing. I felt I could tell him anything. He didn't judge me or tell me how stupid I've been or how I should have made better choices. All that stuff. What do you think?”

He was thinking that James Two Horses had the makings of a good priest. He said, “I hope it was helpful.”

She laughed at that. “What I ought to do and what I probably will do are different things for me. Always have been.”

“You're talking about your . . .” He hesitated.

“Lover. You might as well call it for what it is. David is leaving. I've always known that. I wouldn't be surprised if he's moved out already.”

Father John let the silence ride between them a moment. Then he said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. James let me talk it all out, all the dysfunctional aspects of David's and my relationship. When you step back and look at it, there was no other way it could end. Or should end.” She took a long drink of coffee. When he looked over, he caught the sheen of moisture in her eyes before she turned toward the window.

He braked at the stop sign and waited for three trucks on Blue Sky Highway to pass, then took a right. There would be a cutoff ahead, not much more than an alley that could be obscured in the snow. He took his foot off the gas pedal to let the pickup coast, and he hunched forward, looking for the cutoff.

A truck turned out of the snowy field that ran between the highway and the foothills, brown and traced with snow. Father John tapped the brake and slowed to a crawl. As soon as the truck turned, he swung into the cutoff and maneuvered the pickup into the twin ruts sprinkled with dirt and black splotches of oil that zigzagged ahead. The white fields folded around them.

“Lizzie must have liked it out here,” Shannon said, “in the middle of nowhere. Maybe people forgot about her and her white skin and freckles.”

Father John smiled to himself. How easily the barriers between the past and the present slipped away when you took a step into the past, into those long-ago lives, and imagined yourself living them. It had happened many times when he was studying American history, researching the life of somebody no one else cared about. But he was caught up, as if he had stepped out of his own skin and into that of a man who had lived a hundred years ago, and he had known—
known—
how that man thought and felt and engaged the world.

And now Shannon was caught up in the life of a woman by the name of Elizabeth Fletcher Brokenhorn.

He came around a wide, lazy curve conscious of the rear tires slipping a little. He'd been thinking he should get new tires for some time now, as soon as the mission finances looked a little better. A perennial hope, he realized. The finances never changed. Random donations from people he'd never heard of. For a moment, he thought about the upcoming meeting in Milwaukee, the discussion
on whether St. Francis Mission could continue to operate. He knew he had been putting off returning Father Jameson's call.

There it was, leaning sideways in the snow as he came out of the curve, the Brokenhorn cabin, a century of hand-hewn logs and resolve. Shannon let out a loud gasp beside him. He turned off the CD; “Il balen del suo sorriso” faded into the quiet.

He was thinking he should have tried to reach Thomas Horn for permission to visit the cabin. He had called Wilbur, who told him to call his relation, Thomas, who looked after the old place, but Thomas didn't seem to be around. Father John tapped on the brake, searching the road ahead. No driveway, no cut into the waves of untouched snow. He stopped the pickup in a direct line from the cabin. “Hope you brought your snowshoes,” he said.

Shannon was out of the cab, slamming the door behind her, before he had slid out. Still studying the expanse of snow, searching for any hint of an easy way across. Shannon was already striding into the field, snow banking around her boots and crawling up the legs of her jeans. Then she was running, yelling with delight, hands in the air, like a kid playing in the snow. He could feel the charge of excitement as he started after her.

The door hung slightly ajar, the windows gaped open, any glass that might have been in place at one time was gone. Shannon was yanking at the door, which squealed and creaked and held steady, frozen in place. Father John took hold of the edge, tugged upward until he felt the hinges settle into place, then pushed the door inward. He stood back, expecting Shannon to lunge inside, but she laid a hand on the frame and leaned forward, and he understood that she was stepping into the little house in her imagination, like Lizzie a hundred years ago.

He waited, not wanting to break the spell. Finally, she turned toward him and smiled. “Let's see what it's like.”

It was freezing inside, as if the cold had burst through the open windows and expanded into something hard and permanent. Snow blanketed the floorboards. He clapped his hands together, conscious of the whoof his gloves made in the cold. Shannon was patrolling the rectangular perimeter, not more than fifteen feet by ten.

She stopped in front of a window that framed a view of the foothills and stared outside for a long moment. “Lizzie stood here,” she said. “She saw this same view. Winter, spring, summer, fall—all the changing colors.” She walked over to a wall with a round hole cut into the logs. “This is where she cooked. The stove stood here.” She pointed at the hole and swiped at the snow with her boots, as if she might uncover evidence of a wood-burning stove. “She cooked everything. Whatever John could bring home. Whatever commodities they received from the government. She made bread from the flour they received. For a few weeks they would have bread, until the flour ran out.”

She circled the area in front of the stove. “They slept here, the whole family. Lizzie and John over here.” She gestured to the right. “The five kids here.” A gesture to the left. “Huddling close for warmth, wrapped in buffalo robes.” She glanced up with a start, as if she had just realized she wasn't working things out alone. “Don't you think so?”

“I hope so.” Buffalo robes would have been scarce on the reservation. Sold off to traders long before for food, and impossible to replace. The great herds of buffalo were gone. It was likely that Lizzie and her family depended upon the thin, woolen blankets they got from the government, along with the other rations promised in exchange for the Indian lands.

“Lizzie is so close. I can almost feel her presence here, in her home. Can't you?”

He smiled. He supposed she was right. If he let himself move into
that realm of imagination—lose himself, as he did back in graduate school—then he supposed he could
feel
Lizzie Brokenhorn's presence. That was a long time ago.

The shot came like thunder that split the air and rumbled beneath the snow-covered floorboards. “Get down!” He took hold of Shannon's shoulder and pushed her to the floor, then, stooping low, he made his way to the nearest window. The field was open and quiet, their footsteps the only trace of activity. He moved to the side window, near the spot where the stove had been, and peered past the edge. He could see a pickup parked behind the Toyota, and a man standing next to it, rifle raised.

Another shot blasted across the field, and Father John dropped to his knees, his heart hammering. “Lie down flat,” he said.
Dear Lord, don't let anything happen to her.
“I'm going out.”

“You can't do that! Please, don't do that.”

Hunching down, he worked his way across the floor and pulled open the door. “It's Father John from the mission!” he shouted into the white abyss. “I'm coming out.” God, where was his handkerchief? He dug into the front pockets of his jeans, then the rear pocket, the other rear pocket, and finally pulled it free and, shaking it out into a small white frame, he reached around the door and waved the white handkerchief in the direction of the road.

“It's Father John!” he shouted again. His own name reverberated across the field and over the cabin. He got to his feet, sheltering next to the door frame, still waving the flag.

“No!” Shannon's voice sounded behind him, high-pitched in terror. “Don't leave me.”

He stepped outside, holding the flag of truce. Waving. Waving. He could feel the man watching him. “I mean no harm,” he shouted. “I was visiting the Brokenhorn cabin.” He kept walking.

The man didn't move for a long moment. Then, he lowered the rifle and started stomping through the snow toward him. “Father John?” He came closer. “What in tarnation you doing here?”