Reason To Believe (20 page)

And he would always be her own first love. It was a fact of life she could not change. So she sat there, watching Ben adjust Anna's borrowed saddle to fit her seat, enjoying the excitement in her daughter's eyes. The paint horse had quickly become Anna's pride and joy. She had pictures of him on her bulletin board and a lock of his tail braided into a friendship bracelet. Anna "the good kid" had been reborn. She had been doing well at school, following all the terms of her probation and all the rules at home. They had been doing things together— talking, laughing, making plans for the ride. Clara wasn't sure which part of the gift was more important to the girl, the horse itself or the fact that her father had put so much of himself into choosing and preparing it for her.

Clara might have permitted herself similar musings about the bay mare, patiently waiting close by. Underneath the dense winter coat was a well-conditioned, well-disciplined animal, trained to the exacting specifications of a cowboy. More than just a trail mount, the mare had Ben's signature all over her, from selection to finished product. All for Clara. If she thought about that and nothing else, if she simply watched the way he fussed over the animals, the pains he discreetly took to show her what he'd accomplished for her in a short time, she couldn't help loving him for it.

Mixed emotions. God, what torment.

"It's a lovely spot, isn't it?"

Startled, Clara turned abruptly toward the sound of the voice. Robert Cady snapped her picture.

She laughed. "Oh, that's not fair." He raised the camera again. "When you're ready, then."

"I won't be. Believe me. I'm anything but photogenic."

"That's for me to say. I'm the expert." He let the camera drop to the end of its neck strap and turned his attention to the activity around the monument. "Hard to imagine a murder happening in a place like this, isn't it?"

Clara shrugged. "Hard to imagine a murder happening anywhere."

"What do those colored markers signify, do you know?"

Clara shaded her eyes with her hand. "That's where the cabin was, the way it's remembered."

"Depending upon the rememberer's point of view, right? The camera remembers things exactly."

"I think the camera has a point of view. It's in the eye of the so-called expert." Turning to converse with Robert Cady, she put her back to her family. "Actually, there were photographs taken of the cabin when it was here, but obviously the surroundings have changed. Did you know that the cabin was removed and put on exhibition in Chicago at the World's Fair less than four years after Sitting Bull's death?"

"Everyone wants a piece of the action, don't they?" Cady wagged his head in dismay. "If you can't explain the source of the power, grab everything connected with it and pick it apart. Curiosity knows no bounds."

"Neither does bullshit," said a familiar voice.

They turned in unison. Ben stood close behind them, menacing the man with a cocky smile.

"That's probably another legitimate word for it," Cady said with an easy laugh. "Will you be taking part in the ceremony your father's setting up for?"

"You could say that."

"But no cameras?"

"You got it." He laid his gloved hand on Clara's shoulder. "It's that curiosity thing you were just talkin' about."

The photographer nodded. "And the releasing of spirits during this next ceremony, how is that accomplished?"

"I wouldn't wanna spoil it by givin' it away ahead of time." He gave Clara's shoulder a quick squeeze as he backed away, but his hard gaze held Cady's in wordless challenge. "Just keep your eyes and ears open, Cady. And your lens cap screwed on real tight."

"I'm not sure what I've done to offend your husband," Cady said quietly as they watched Ben take purposeful strides toward the monument. "But I have the distinct impression he doesn't like me."

"Whether Ben takes part or not, he's very protective." Clara smiled, remembering. "Once I saw him take the camera right out of a man's hands and smash it on a rock. He'd warned him twice, and the man kept pushing his luck."

"You think that's what it is? Defending his rights? Is that r-i-g-h-t-s, or r-i-t-e-s?" He smiled at Clara, as if they shared some commonality she should have known about. Perhaps knowledge of spelling. Or mainstream etiquette. "I'm not here to interfere," he assured her. "And I do take instruction in matters of decorum quite readily."

"I'm sure that's true. And Ben's generally pretty easygoing." At the first sound of the drumbeat she hopped off the tailgate and pointed at the pickup cab. "Why don't you leave your camera here? No one will bother it."

She didn't notice whether he followed her suggestion. That was Cady's business. Hers was attending to the ceremony.

A pole with red and black flags had been driven into the ground just a few steps east of the poles representing the corners of the cabin. This was the spot, according to the elders, where Sitting Bull had fallen when he was shot at daybreak a century before. While singers wailed and beat the drum, Dewey smudged the area to purify it by trailing smoke from the sweet grass and sage he had burning in the bottom of a large coffee can. He offered tobacco to the earth, then offered the pipe to the four directions. The river flowed to the west. The brown, barren hills stood to the east.

At the dawning of a new day a hundred years past, as the old man was taken from his cabin by force, he would have instinctively faced east, seeking the coming daylight as he emerged. Clara turned to the hills and imagined glimpsing the same horizon, hearing the blast, feeling her chest explode. More shots were fired, and more bodies fell to the ground. Policemen, Ghost Dancers, and the young Crow Foot, Sitting Bull's son, who begged his uncles among the
ceska maza,
the Indian police, to spare him. But by then hot tears mingled with hot blood, demanding more of the same.

The drums rolled. The singers' voices dipped and soared. Puffs of pipe smoke drifted above the official Historical Society marker.

And the spirits of the old ones were set free.

"You can sure tell some of these guys haven't been around horses much lately."

Ben lit a cigarette as he scanned the gathering of wannabe cowboys and gotta-be Indians. Some new faces, some he'd known all his life. He guessed most of them had grown up with the same heroes, whether they'd had a television set in the living room and a dollar for a movie every Saturday or the kind of occasional access he'd had to screens, large and small. In one way or another he was sure they had all acted out the same fantasies, playing the Indian when it was the only way they could get into the game. Children knew all about winners and losers. Winners wore the straw hats with the chin cords. Winners had the Red Rider BB guns and got to decide who could come into the fort and who had to stay out. Winning added up to being one of the cowboys, even in Little Eagle, South Dakota, where the honest-to-God Indians lived.

Now, here came a truly motley crew to celebrate a lost cause in true lost-cause fashion. Catch as catch can. Sheila Bird had paid a local rancher
$135
for the use of a one-trick pony. Its trick was crow-hopping. Dan Medicine's horse was doing its damnedest to put a dent in Cheppa Four Dog's pickup.

Some white woman with an Oklahoma drawl said she'd heard about the ride, loaded her saddle into her brother-in-law's eighteen-wheeler, gotten off his rig at the sale barn in Mobridge, and bid on every saddle horse they'd run through the ring until they'd stopped going over her price, which was $160. The mare she'd bought was hardmouthed as hell, and she wouldn't neck rein worth a damn.

Yessir, there were going to be some fandamntastic slapstick catastrophes on some of these begged, borrowed, and rented mounts. Ben could see it coming.

"Teachers, ambulance drivers, tribal councilmen," he mused on the tail of a stream of smoke. A pair of spurs caught his eye. They were almost as shiny as the silver toe caps on the owner's brand-new boots. "That guy probably hasn't been on a horse since he was a kid. We are definitely losin' touch with our roots."

"Is this the cowboy talking, or the Indian?" Clara wondered.

"One and the same, me."

Ben had his trappings, too, but at least they were all bought and paid for, and well broken-in to boot. In fact, the soles of his boots were nearly worn through. He dressed Western because he
was
Western. Always had been. Nobody ever challenged Ben's right to call himself a cowboy. He wore black leather chaps for brush-popping and windbreak, not for slick. He'd shaped his battered black hat for shade, not for cool. He wore a black jacket and black boots, not because they matched anything, but because they were what he had. No feathers. He'd never earned any. No beads. He'd given some as gifts in his time, but his own personal style tended toward austerity. Especially lately.

Besides his wedding band, the only bit of flash he wore was a turquoise and silver trophy buckle he'd won on the Indian rodeo circuit in 1976. He'd earned a chunk of turquoise, but not an eagle feather. A conservative Indian, Clara had called him once. Hey, he was a real cross-dresser, he'd told her, and proud of it. His heritage was written all over his face, so it didn't much matter what he wore when he ventured off the reservation.

"If your roots are potted in horses, then you're back in touch now," Clara said. She rubbed the mare's neck.

"I'd forgotten how much time they take. The ol' man doesn't mind if I turn 'em out on his grass, but you've gotta spend time with 'em. Otherwise, they won't be much good for anything."

"They're good for you. They're just what you needed."

Maybe, he thought. Wants and needs were two different things. It had taken a while, but he'd finally figured out the difference, and she was right. Without the horses, the time he'd done on his own lately would have been unbearably bleak.

"Look at that guy. He's gonna get—" Nipped in the butt. Ben shook his head, grinning. "Well, now he knows. It's gonna be a long ride." He turned to catch his wife smiling, too. "Ready?"

"I can't believe I'm doing this," she muttered, mostly to herself. "But I am. I really am." He stood by while she mounted. When she was settled, he took a marble-size red cloth bundle out of his pocket and tied it to her horse's halter.

"Thank you. Is that a tobacco tie?"

He gave a curt nod as he handed her the reins.

His deliberate concession to custom surprised her. She noticed that he'd added the same sacred symbol—a bit of cloth containing a pinch of tobacco—to his horse's halter and to Anna's. She might have expected the gesture from her father-in-law, but not from Ben. Not the Ben she knew, anyway.

He was quick to distract her from questioning the move or the meaning behind it, or the sentiment that might be attached to it somewhere in the back of his mind or in hers. "Stirrups look a little long." He stuck his cigarette in the corner of his cocky smile and squinted up at her, nudging her thigh aside so he could make the needed adjustment. "You shrinkin' or what?"

"Getting old."

"Nah. You're thinkin' young today." He patted her knee, signaling her to test the change. "Better?"

"That's perfect."

He savored one long final drag on his cigarette, then dropped the butt into the grave he'd dug with his bootheel. Clara watched him step into his stirrup and swing his long leg over the saddle in one smooth, fluid motion.
That
was perfect.

Shouts of
"Hopo!"
drew general attention to Dewey and Elliot, who were mounted now and waving arms in the air, signing for a circle.

"We'll start and end every day with a prayer circle," Ben explained. "We gotta pray real hard for all these tenderfeet. Okay?"

"I think that includes me." Clara smiled. "Okay?"

"How about me?" Suddenly he was as serious as she'd ever seen him, probing her with a disturbingly imperative stare. "You ever pray for me anymore, Clara?"

"Yes, I do." She said it quickly, avoiding his eyes. She wasn't sure why. Maybe because, like the tobacco ties, the question was such a wonder, coming from Ben. So simple, so straightforward, so unexpected, that it nailed her to the spot. It sounded raw. It felt intensely personal, startlingly intimate. It challenged her integrity, compelling her to add, "But not the way I used to."

"Why not?"

She remembered staring out the window, peering into the darkness, feverishly praying on headlights as though they were rosary beads.
Bring him home safely. I don't care what condition he's in, as long as it's one piece. I don't care what he's done, just bring him home.
It was a woman's prayer of last resort. She'd used it when he'd taken the car and left her with a sleeping baby. She'd used it when she'd run out of phone numbers, and there was not a damn thing left to do but wait. And because she couldn't accept waiting as a passive activity, she'd devised the prayer.

She'd always said it a few times before she remembered to add the word
please. Please bring him home.
Because without that, it sounded as though she expected her own will to be done. Her will, her way. Which, of course, would be pure vanity on her part.

But surely God's will was concurrent with her own in some instances, and surely this was one of them.
Please make him come home now, and everything will be fine.
But it wasn't fine.
Cancel the prayer of the foolish woman, God. Please, just make him stay away.