Mean Spirit, page 28
“And Benoit?”
“After she was gone, it was his. And Nola’s. Nola was Grace’s girl. But she’s still a minor, so she can’t inherit the money directly yet.” Horse took out a page that had lines and boxes filled in with names. “They assigned her a guardian.” He looked toward the darkest, innermost section of cave. “He was Benoit’s attorney, too. Oddly enough, Nola’s married his son.”
Stace gazed at the page, “And Benoit married Lettie Graycloud?”
“Yes. But it’s not a legal marriage, not by the white laws, that is. But I don’t know that they realize it. Anyway, I think most of the money is tied up in lawsuits. And the property’s been taken away. Except that horse out there. He’s Benoit’s stallion.”
“That’s a neat little circle, isn’t it?” Stace looked at the older man’s face. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling.” Michael Horse looked away then looked back at him. “Maybe you can help us.”
The hog priest returned to find both of the Indian men quiet. Father Dunne thought they didn’t want him there. From time to time, he’d look at one or the other of them. But the men were just thinking. After a while Stace broke the silence by saying, “Where’s Nola?”
“I think she’s safe for now. She has guardians. Plus, the young man really cares for her. Everyone sees that.”
When the priest realized the men were talking about the murders, he grew nervous and he went to the door of the cave and began to pace back and forth outside. He couldn’t tell them he’d heard a confession and that he had an answer, or part of an answer. Horse, sensing Father Dunne’s tension, scrutinized the priest’s back, but then the priest stepped out for a walk in the sunlight.
That evening when Father Dunne returned, Horse took the two men down to a creek. He was teaching them how to shoot fish. “It’s like this, see,” he said as he leaned over the silvery surface of water. “You have to anticipate it, which way your fish will move.” He looked at the trout. It was resting in a little pool of rocks, down in the deepest part of the creek. He pulled back the arrow, then let it go. It entered the water. Horse grabbed the arrow and pulled the shining, twisting fish up with it.
The priest said last rites for the trout. Then he turned his attention to Stace. “By the way, how did you escape being a Catholic?”
“My family hid me.”
That night, after they cooked and ate the fish, the men stayed together in the cave. Horse told the others to be silent and they would see something wonderful. He left the lantern very dim, so it would not be discernible from the outside, and the men retreated back into a small corner of the cave and waited. They heard only their own breathing.
At the first opening of darkness, the deer came inside the cave. There were seven of them, three beautiful does, a buck, and three young and spotted fawns. The men watched the graceful animals who had come to lick the salty minerals off the cave walls, but when the deer turned to leave, suddenly the air itself cracked open with gunfire. The bullet hit the inner walls of the cave and ricocheted and the small herd of deer broke from each other and panicked, not knowing which way to run. Two ran out the entrance. The buck moved farther back inside the cave until it sensed the men there. Then, in a clatter of hooves, it bolted. The young deer were still. They sat down on the floor, the way instinct told them, and didn’t move an ear. There was another shot from outside, and then it was silent. After a while, a doe returned and made soft noises at the fawns. They rose up on bent, trembling legs and followed her out the door.
The men remained standing against the back wall. Horse was the first one to move, after he was certain that the poacher was gone. He seemed to be smelling the air. He looked for the bullet, picked it up, and put it aside.
That night they left the lantern dim and spoke only in low voices among themselves. The priest, happy to be in their company, told them how he had become a priest and how he now realized that the life spirit lived in hogs and chickens as well as inside churches and cathedrals.
The other men nodded at his words.
When they were quiet, thinking of the souls of hogs, a piece of rock gave way in the back of the cave. Its sound startled the men. But the cracking noise was followed by a little squeal and Horse took the lantern back in there in time to see a bat emerging from a little break in the stone. He was excited. He couldn’t hide his pleasure.
“What’s so great about a bat?” the priest asked. He looked confused.
“Its soul, just like the pig’s.” Horse tried to climb up the little chink in stone. “There must be another room in there.” He wanted to peer into the darkness. “There must be another entryway.”
Another bat began to squeeze out the hole, saw the men, then turned and vanished back into the stone.
The other men seemed uninterested in Horse’s quest for the bats. Stace was plotting out how to catch the horses. He’d paid good money for the mare, and didn’t want to lose her. The priest was thinking about the intelligence of pigs and about the last one he’d christened for one of the elderly men in town, Jim Josh, and he was thinking about how he’d been taught, wrongly, that animals don’t have souls. So Michael Horse gave up talking about the possibility of other rooms behind the cave and sat quietly, thinking of bats and old Sam Billy and all the strange things that happened in this world. He tapped his fingers nervously on his knee. He was anxious for the other men to leave so that he could investigate the cave and search around for another entrance.
Later that night he heard an owl. It was eating the same mouse who’d shared their cave the night before. Horse thought, but didn’t say, “The owl is asking the same question I’m asking. Who?” Then he went out and tried to imitate the owl. The other men listened. They could not tell one voice from another. After a while, Horse returned to the cave. He said, “I am the wisest of men but sometimes a little stupid. For the life of me I can’t understand the owl. Yet he understands me.”
That night, while it was dark and the other men slept, the priest left the cave. He had decided to tell as much as he could of what he’d learned in the confessional. He wrote what he knew in sand at the entrance to the cave, and he did not mention any names. Then he made his way down to the creek.
When Michael Horse went out the next morning to stir up the fire, he didn’t see the writing. It was only when he saw Stace peering at it that he went over to read what the earth was saying. It said: “One man was not in jail the night another man was killed.” For Stace it was the first solid lead he had. He sat alone, thinking about what the information might mean, that perhaps a man had escaped from jail and committed a crime.
Michael Horse walked around the stony walls outside the cave. He scoured the flesh-colored rocks for the entrance he was certain existed.
When Horse returned, Stace was gone. His footprints led down the hill and disappeared. Horse was glad to be alone. He set about searching for bats. He pulled his trunkful of papers over to the corner of the cave and stood on it. He began to hit the inside wall with stone. A piece at a time, he broke into the cavern behind Sorrow Cave. He could smell the dank odor, the moist mildew scent of bat guano. He heard the startled bats inside, a flutter of wings, a high-pitched sound, a scratching on the ceiling of the cavern. His breathing was heavy with exhaustion when he broke enough stone away that he could almost put his head through the opening and look inside the next cavern.
He stepped down off the chest, opened it and took out a candle. When he lighted it, he held it up to the opening. There was a flurry and flutter of wings. The bat sounds, like rushing water, told him where the opening was. He put out the candle, peered inside the dark room and waited for his eyes to adjust. Sure enough, he saw a little crease of light. He went outside and around the hill, and began to search in the vicinity the light had come from.
He was hot and tired when he found the entryway. It was disguised and he saw how easily he could have missed it if he hadn’t followed the light. It was covered with a plank of wood over a small doorway, and in front of the wood was a pile of stones. There was a small break in the wood that allowed just enough room for bats to come and go. Someone had kept this place secret and hidden.
One at a time, Michael Horse rolled away the stones. He was sweating. He stopped to rest. Then he pried the wood plank out from the cracked stone wall, and when at last it heaved and gave, the entryway was flooded with bats. They flew out, away, to escape the intruder and his lantern. They rose out of their home, the darkness, and took to the light.
Carrying his lantern, Horse explored the room. It might have been the first of several chambers. What he found, to his astonishment, was a painted and quilled medicine bag that he knew had belonged to old Sam Billy. He recognized it instantly; it had an American flag beaded on one side of it.
Inside the humid cave, the medicine bag lay beside a bowl of blue corn kernels that Billy had been famous for growing.
Horse picked up the bundle. It was moving. It bulged and struggled. He opened a corner of it to see what was moving inside the bag when a bat flew out. Horse was so startled that he fell backward against the stone wall and scraped his shoulder. But even with an aching in his back, even with his skin scratched and beginning to bleed, he stirred a finger in the kernels of corn, and when he dared to open the bag one more time, he saw that it was empty. But Sam Billy was there in spirit, Horse knew that. And the bats had come out of the medicine. The medicines were coming alive.
* * *
That spring, nearly all of the full-blood Indians were deemed incompetent by the court’s competency commission. Mixed-bloods, who were considered to be competent, were already disqualified from receiving full payments because of their white blood.
And that spring, Moses Graycloud received notice that his hearing was to take place in mid-May. Uncertain which of the attorneys could be trusted, he prepared his own case, but in spite of his intelligent arguments, he was assigned two legal guardians, and any further lease money that might have been earned by his grazing leases would have to go through the attorneys. By the time they deducted their legal fees, for services rendered to him, he owed them large sums of money. Michael Horse’s car, in Moses’s possession, was impounded and sold. The last of the cattle were taken away, his bull bought and paid for by Hale. Ben’s telescope was sold to the attorneys. And Belle, afraid they’d take her prize possession, wore Star-Looking’s meteorite inside her clothing so that no one would see it.
But at least the discovery of oil on Belle’s land had not been revealed. As it was, they felt helpless and depressed. Moses slept with a rifle beside the bed. Belle argued with Moses to leave the territory. “Listen to reason,” she told him. “We’re in danger here.” But he pointed out that even leaving was dangerous. “Look how many of us have been followed and killed on the roads,” he reminded her. And it was true. The ring of murders ranged all the way to Europe. Three Osages had been found dead in England. One Osage woman had been murdered by her husband in Colorado Springs. No place was safe and they had to bide their time however they could, making themselves silent and invisible until things turned around once again. But they were afraid. Each time Belle rounded a corner, she stopped first and listened. She walked past every window with hesitation and felt fear rise in her chest each time she passed a stand of trees. She hated the money-hungry world and how her land had involved her in it, and she hated without limit the man named Hale. By then he’d fenced in yet another part of the Graycloud land holdings. They were almost surrounded by the leased-out land. And already the land around them was shorn and bare from the grazing of cattle and buffalo. In places it had only the slimmest chance of recovery. Where the fires had burned, however, the charred land was again sending forth new shoots of life and for this small gift, Belle was thankful.
“Do not be too afraid,” Michael Horse had once told her, in such a gentle, calming voice that she listened and remembered. At night, with her eyes closed and her hands clasped together, she would repeat that phrase to herself. “Do not be too afraid.” But everything that took place grieved her. Especially the digging that went on at night.
One night Belle again heard the sounds of shoveling. It was out in the darkness. It sounded close to her cornfield. The next morning she woke to find three large holes near the naked scarecrow in the middle of her field. She was puzzled. A day later, there were two more holes. The new plants were cast aside and the soft earth overturned. One night, as she watched like a ghost from her bedroom window, she saw the exiled Angus bull from across the way unlock his gate and walk down the road to stand at the fence where he cried and watched his cow women that were locked in with the buffalo bull Hale was trying to mate them with.
Other nights, Belle heard Lettie moving about her room, sleepless, or crying softly into the blankets, and Belle knew Lettie’s wounds of sorrow were not healing.
Around two one morning, Lettie, remembering the words of Lionel Tall, got up from bed and dressed herself in the moonlight from the window. It was like daylight outside, the moon was so full. She stole across the ground to the barn. As Lettie picked up her shovel, the last two lonely workhorses whinnied at her. The air smelled rich and acid with manure, and moist. She started out down the road. It was white in the moonlight. She shifted the shovel from hand to hand as she walked the distance to Benoit’s, thinking of what Tall had told her. When her arms both ached, she tried to hold the shovel across her arms, like she would carry a child. It was heavier than she expected and the handle was starting to splinter.
On Fremont Road, Lettie saw a glove. It was lying in a dark thicket like a ghostly hand trying to touch the earth. It was stiff and dusty. It was one of Sara’s.
In the cornfield, too, parts of Sara’s and Benoit’s lives were strewn about. An unbroken jar of hair pomade sat beside the road. Lettie picked it up and twisted open the rusting lid. It smelled like Benoit and she remembered him leaning against the window of the car on the night of the explosion, and how his head had left a trace of the sweet-smelling oil on the glass. She laid her shovel down, sat in the field, and cried. The field smelled like spring, yet nothing grew there except devil’s claws and other choking weeds, and at that time of night, the weeds looked black around her. Still, it contained the dead, dry stalks of plants from another year.
Then she estimated the field’s center, put her foot to the shovel, and set to work pushing it into the earth. It was good ground, easy to shovel. There were few rocks, only the obstinate roots of hungry weeds. She dug a knee-deep hole.
That first morning Lettie thought her labor was fruitless. She found little things, little nothings, that had belonged to the household. There was a package of razor blades, a key, and a deep blue bottle that contained rosewater. The pink rose was still visible on the partly burned label. But fruitless or not as her work might have been, she put these things in her pocket, as if their closeness would whisper secrets through the pores of her skin. She wanted them beside her, to read with her hands as she walked.
She walked back home slowly. Though she was tired, the physical labor comforted her and she felt stronger. The sun was beginning to rise, and the dawn made promises it wouldn’t keep. Spring was rich and heavy in the air. All the plants were turning over, beginning another journey upward toward the sun.
It was almost daylight when she returned the shovel to the barn. Then she went down to the creek and spring to think. But when she neared the creek, she saw John Stink’s ghost. It was crying and heaving and wiping its eyes. She didn’t know that it was crying because an enormous fish had caught and dragged its dog down beneath the smooth, leaden surface of water. She left before it saw her, returned to the house, turned back her sheets, and laid down in bed. The spirit’s unhappiness reminded her of her own, but she was tired from her labor and she slept.
* * *
One sleepless morning a few days later, Belle pulled the blankets aside from the window and peered out. She saw the figure of Lettie coming up the road, carrying a shovel. It was the second time Belle had seen her. She watched her grow nearer, then listened in the hallway as Lettie made her way up the stairs and tried to steal quietly into her own bedroom. Then Belle slipped outside and examined her cornfield. The plants were nearly a foot high by then, but the holes were numerous and spreading outward. Belle was worried about her field and now she was certain that Lettie was the one destroying it. Angry, she marched back up the stairs to Lettie’s room, knocked loudly on the door and without waiting for a response, flung it open and went inside.
Lettie could hardly hold her head up. She smiled at her mother.
“Show me your hands,” Belle demanded.
The smile vanished from her face. “What’s going on, Mama? What is it?”
Belle examined her daughter’s hands. As she thought, there was dirt beneath the fingernails and new calluses on the palms. “All right, Lettie,” she looked sharply at her. “Why have you been digging in my cornfield?”
“I haven’t.”
“Look at your hands.”
“It isn’t me.”
“Don’t lie to me. I saw you with the shovel.”
Lettie pulled herself up from the bed. “I’m not digging here. I’m digging over at Sara’s cornfield.”
Belle’s hands were on her hips. “Why are you digging at all?”
“To look for clues. Mr. Tall told me to.”
Belle thought it over. She looked at her daughter. She wished she could tell her to forget the past, to forget clues or solving things, but she herself was overwhelmed with the situation and she softened. “Did you find anything?”
“Nothing, just a key and some razor blades.” She pointed to the dresser. Beside the key and the blades was the dirty glove and a blue bottle of rosewater.
Belle went over, picked up the items, and examined them. “This looks like the key to our car.”
“That’s what I thought. Yes, it’s a Buick key.”
