Killing Custer (7 page)

7

FATHE
R JOHN HAD
taken the early Mass. A dozen parishioners, missals propped open on the pews in front, rosary beads threaded through gnarled, brown fingers, lips moving silently. The sun slanted through the stained-glass windows and cast arrows of red, yellow, and blue light across the church—a small chapel, really—built by the Arapahos after the leaders had asked the Jesuits to come and teach their children. He offered the Mass for the soul of Edward Garrett, a stranger killed in their midst. And he prayed for the Arapahos who had ridden in the parade and for their families, all of whom would be waiting for the tornado about to touch down.

After Mass, he stood in front and shook hands with the people filing past. The old faithfuls, he called them, who drove battered pickups across the reservation to the morning Mass at St. Francis Mission almost every day. Mason Walking Horse had held on to his hand for a long moment. He had black, watery eyes that shone like pebbles at the bottom of a creek. “Who else they gonna investigate except the warriors?” He hurried on without waiting for an answer. “Tell that white detective we're watching him. Raps weren't the only people at the parade.”

Father John gave the old man what he hoped was a reassuring nod. He'd do his best, he said. It was true that hundreds of people had lined the curbs yesterday. But the fact remained that Garrett had died while the warriors raced around the cavalry. Logic could be implacable.

Walks-On bounced down the hallway when Father John let himself into the residence. He tossed his cowboy hat on the bench, then stooped over and scratched behind the dog's ears before following him into the kitchen. The bishop's chair was vacant, his breakfast dishes cleared. Already in the office, Father John thought. Waiting for the onslaught of calls begging the priests—the white priests—to talk to the white cops in Lander. He could imagine the pleas. Just because the warriors were there didn't mean they were guilty of murder. Guilty of being there was all.

Elena was swishing dishes at the sink, her back to him. He shook a little more dried food into the dog's dish in the corner and poured himself a cup of coffee. He was about to help himself to a bowl of the hot oatmeal on the stove when Elena said, “I'll get it, Father.” She still didn't turn around. Somewhere in her seventies; he had no idea how old she was. Ageless, really. Keeping house and cooking for the priests at St. Francis Mission for more years than anyone remembered. But she remembered everything. Pastors whose portraits now lined the front corridor of the administration building, watching him every day past rimless glasses, sometimes smiling, he had imagined, often frowning. Oh, Elena remembered the stories. How Father Peter quoted Shakespeare. A Shakespearean quote for everything. How Father Michael had run straight for Eagle Hall when he thought AIM had occupied the building. How Father Barry had kept the elderly Father Benson at the mission after he lost his eyesight.

Father John sat down at the table and sipped at the coffee, watching the old woman dry her hands, toss aside the towel, and ladle scoops of oatmeal into a bowl before she faced him. Eyes red-rimmed and sunken, as if she'd spent the night crying. Red blotches dotted her neck and cheeks.

“Sit down and tell me what's going on,” he said as she set a bowl of oatmeal in front of him.

Elena filled a coffee mug, slid onto the chair, and patted a strand of gray hair into place. “I should have stopped the killing,” she said.

The statement took him by surprise. He was about to take a spoonful of oatmeal, but he set the spoon down and waited.

“It's still going on.” Her voice cracked. She blinked hard against the tears shining in her eyes. “The killing and hatred. God help me. I could have stopped it.”

“Elena.” He reached over and took her hand. It felt small inside his own, her palm warm and smoothed with age. “Is this about yesterday?”

She stared at him a moment before she nodded. “I had a dream vision Saturday night.”

Father John understood. Men went off by themselves, fasted and prayed for three days for a vision, but women received visions in their dreams. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“A lot of horses circling around soldiers. Around and around, the warriors shouting and yelling. I saw the white chief with the big hat fall off his horse. I knew he was dead.” She took in a gulp of air. “I thought I should go and find him, tell him not to march in the parade. Tell him to leave our land.”

“Do you think it would have done any good? Do you think he would have left?”

“Yes.” Elena bent her head into her hands. “I heard my grandfather's stories running through my head. How his father was camped with Chief Black Kettle at the Washita River. It was 1868, four years after the fool soldiers killed the people at Sand Creek. Killed both Cheyennes and Arapahos, women, children, old people. Everyone they could shoot. After that, Black Kettle kept leading the people around the plains, trying to stay out of the way of the soldiers, waiting for the government to tell them where they should go and live. Then Custer brought more soldiers to the village, and it happened again. Killed Black Kettle and his wife, Woman To Be Hereafter. Left their bodies floating in the river. So many people lying on the ground, crying with pain. They shot my great-grandfather in the hip and left him for dead. Grandfather said he never walked right after that. Custer took his hostages. Children and old people and many beautiful women. He gave the women to his men for whores. The warriors scouted him after that. They vowed to kill him. I would have told him that, and he would have known to leave.”

“I understand,” Father John said. “But Edward Garrett was not Custer.”

“He thought Custer was brave and honorable.” Elena swallowed hard and looked down at her hands wrapped around the coffee mug. “Now he's dead. More killings will come. Just like after Bighorn, soldiers dropped out of the sky and flooded our lands and killed the ancestors. Cops are gonna flood the rez, and the tribal cops will help them, just like they helped kill Crazy Horse. I should've found the white man and told him.”

“Listen to me, Elena.” Father John had let go of her hand, but now he took it again between his own. “I'm a white man. I'm telling you that the chances are very small, probably nonexistent, that Garrett would have given your dream vision any thought at all. His own daughter had a vision. She pleaded with him not to ride in the parade, and he rode anyway.”

“No good will come of this.” She sat back against her chair and stared past him a long moment. “I wish I could go to the ancestors.”

“What about the people who need you here? What about the mission? What would we do without you?”

“I don't have good feelings.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You'd starve to death.”

That was true, he told her.

* * *

IT WAS ALMOST
noon before the phones stopped ringing. What will happen to the warriors? Will they all be arrested? Charged with murder? He had tried to convince people not to worry too much. The investigation had just started. The voice of the bishop saying much the same floated from the back office. After a fifteen-minute lull, he'd walked down the hallway and told the bishop he was going out for a short while. The old man had looked up from the book open on his desk, given him a little wave, and said what he usually said. He would hold down the fort.

Traffic was light on Seventeen-Mile Road, a few old pickups and sedans, sun glinting on the windshields. The brown humpbacked foothills rose into the sky ahead. An odd silence hung over the plains around him. Wind rippled the wild grasses and knocked against the pickup. In the distance, he could see horses grazing in a pasture. It reminded him of a still-life painting, everything stopped and waiting.

He swung right and fifteen minutes later pulled into the dirt lot behind a convenience store in Ethete. Light traffic moving through town, people pumping gas in front of the store, others going in and out. Almost normal, he thought, and yet a heaviness in the air, as if a storm were gathering. He parked and walked through the shade dropping from the building toward the entrance, waved to Ernest Featherstone, about to jam a gas nozzle into the tank of his truck, then held the door for a woman and two toddlers. Inside, cool air washed over him from the air conditioner that buzzed overhead. A small crowd bunched around the food counter on the left.

“How you doing, Father?” Mike Longshot stood behind the counter, crooking his neck to peer past a heavyset woman with a thick, black braid that curled down the back of her white tee shirt. Father John waited while Mike poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, straightened out the wrinkled bills the woman handed him, and swung toward the cash register. He was thin, with ropey arms and a blue vein that pulsed in the middle of his forehead. He wore a light blue shirt buttoned down the front with a nametag clipped to his chest that said, Mike. About five foot eight, Father John guessed, but he loomed taller from the platform behind the counter, absorbed in counting change into the woman's outstretched hand, as if the rest of the store, the people sipping coffee and Cokes and eating hot dogs in the blue plastic booths behind them and wandering up and down the aisles with wire baskets hooked on their arms, didn't exist.

“Got a minute?” Father John said after the woman had walked away.

Mike slid his eyes toward a large man at the far end of the counter, the buttons of his uniform shirt popping over his stomach. “Not supposed to visit with customers,” he said. “But . . .” He held up a hand, palm out in the Arapaho gesture of peace. “Break in ten minutes, you want to hang around.”

Father John ordered coffee and carried the cup over to a booth that a couple of teenage girls had just vacated. He pushed their glasses and squashed napkins to the back of the table, sat down, and sipped at the coffee. Strong and bitter, probably sitting in the coffeepot all morning. Jason Smidge and Leticia Yellowman walked over. “Good to see you, Father,” they said, a duet in different keys. “What brings you to Ethete?”

“Visiting parishioners.” He shrugged, smiling off any further questions. One of the things that had struck him when he first came to St. Francis was the way the parishioners kept track of the priests. Where they went, who they saw, what they said. Days after he had visited someone in the hospital, another parishioner would stop him and recount his conversation with the patient. It was the way news moved across the rez. Nobody wanted to be left out. Like the Old Time, he thought, when criers walked through the villages crying out the news. He asked about Jason's new baby and Leticia's daughter, who had joined the army and was on her way to Afghanistan. “Pray for her,” Leticia said, and he said he would pray for both of their families.

Jason gave a small salute and headed toward the front door. Leticia made small talk for a couple of minutes—too bad about that guy getting killed in Lander; what was he thinking? Showing up like Custer?—then ducked back into the aisles as Mike set another cup on the table and slid into the booth. “You here about yesterday?”

“Your mom came to see me. She's very worried.”

“Yeah? Isn't everybody?” Mike dropped his eyes and studied the brown liquid in the Styrofoam cup. “They'll blame us warriors.”

Father John took another drink and studied the young man across from him. He wondered if Mike had any idea that his mother feared the other warriors would offer him up, the sacrificial lamb. “The police are going to talk to all of you,” he said.

“How they gonna find us? We were painted and wearing regalia. How they gonna know who was there?”

“They're going to start with the two Arapahos at Garrett's performance Saturday night,” Father John said. At that, the complacent expression on the Arapaho's face dissolved into a look of shock, as if he had been sleepwalking and had awakened at the edge of an abyss.

“What's that prove?” he said. “We can't go to a theater in town and watch a white man make a fool of himself? I went along with Colin to see for myself if Custer was as stupid as Colin said.”

“His name was Edward Garrett.”

“He's still stupid.” Mike took a gulp of coffee and stared past Father John's shoulder. “Okay, you want the whole story?” He hurried on without waiting for a response. “Colin and some of the other guys came out to the house last week and asked if I would show them some riding tricks. They had an idea to make a dare ride at the parade, you know, gallop around the guys pretending to be the Seventh Cavalry. I said, ‘What the hell? Why not?'”

“You weren't concerned?”

Mike leaned over the table and locked eyes with him. “I'm always concerned. But they needed me. Nobody else knows how to gallop thirty horses in a tight, double circle without one of the horses getting spooked and bucking off the rider. So I went to Colin's pasture and we went through the routine about ten times until all the warriors could have kept the horses under control in their sleep. Colin said, ‘You want to ride with us?' I said, ‘No thanks.' I didn't have a beef with Custer. I didn't give a damn if he paraded down Main Street. ‘Well, you should hear the guy talk,' he said. I guess he'd watched a video on YouTube. So I went.”

“Is that what made you decide to ride?”

“You could say that. White man up on the stage, looked just like Custer. I'm sitting in the back row thinking, He's come back. Like an evil spirit nobody can kill. Strolling across the stage, bragging about clearing the land for civilization, killing the savages. A lot of white people clapping and laughing at his stupid jokes. We walked out early, 'cause we'd both had enough. ‘I'm in,' I told Colin.”

Father John waited a moment. This was worse than he'd feared. Probably thirty warriors in a conspiracy to commit murder. Dear Lord, the whole area—rez and towns and the fragile peace built across borders over more than a century—would break apart. “They were planning to kill him?” he said.