Lake of Fire (19 page)

Cord pulled the plats of the Lake Hotel closer, and his obsidian paperweight fell from the table and rolled. He bent and retrieved it, rubbing it between the fingers of his left hand as he scribbled rapid notes.

He’d worked through dinner, using his bed as an improvised table.

Though Cord had been discouraged by Hank’s incumbent advantage at the hotel, the documents Edgar had brought him this afternoon were the ammunition he needed. With them, he could show the railroad that Hank had not managed the hotel maintenance properly.

Eager to look at some concrete details of the construction, he checked the nickel alarm clock on the bedside table and found it nearly nine.

A few feet down the hall, he tapped on his banker’s door.

After a few minutes without an answer, he continued down the long corridor and outside. Over the hills the western horizon still glowed. It reminded him of the light fading behind Mount Moran as he and Laura ate ptarmigan, seasoned with salt from his pack and sage from the meadow.

Beneath the pines and darker firs that loomed only
a few yards from the hotel walls, the day’s heat had dissipated. No attempt had been made at carving a lawn out of the rough earth, but there were footpaths, worn tracks that crisscrossed their way through the trees and volcanic boulders.

Cord stopped to examine some ugly places in the foundation. Extracting his pocketknife, he peeled a little paint from some boards and smiled, then struck out walking.

The evening fire at the tent camp blazed. Silhouettes of people crowded around to listen to a storyteller or watch a short play.

Cord cursed the proximity of William Wylie’s permanent tent camp, hoping that if he bought the hotel, the camp would not eat into his business. On the other hand, the “Wylie Way” meant the cheap opportunity for those who couldn’t afford the hotels, so perhaps it would be all right.

Drawn to the laughter and applause, Cord approached the entertainment. Taller than most, he stopped at the outer ring and looked over others’ heads.

In front of the tipi Constance had remarked upon this morning, the Wylie Camp barker waved his arms for silence. An expectant hush fell, and just as the group began to become restless, the tipi flap was thrown back.

An older man emerged, bending his back to clear the pole. His crown of dark hair was streaked with white at the temples, and a pair of long braids fell over a bare and bony chest. Bright dark eyes, his strongest
feature, flicked over the crowd and came to rest unerringly on Cord.

It couldn’t be, but Bitter Waters’s arms rose over his head. Gazing at his nephew, he began a chant Cord recognized from the night he returned to camp with a hunk of obsidian in his small hand. All the elders had gathered, even Chief Joseph, to honor one of the smallest, who had braved the wilderness to find a guardian spirit.

Outrage swelled Cord’s chest. How dare Bitter Waters remind him of their past?

The chant ended.

Bitter Waters motioned for silence, the firelight casting his hawk nose in prominent shadow. “Tonight, I speak a story—no, not a story, but the truth.”

Cord sucked in his breath.

In a mix of pantomime and words, his uncle began in his peculiar precise accent.

“Seeyakoon peered round the door frame at me and my great friend Tarpas Illipt. We sat on her front porch beside Oregon’s Wallowa River, playing poker and drinking whiskey.”

Cord’s nostrils flared at the name Tarpas: the man who had loved his mother before she chose his father. The one who had brought the painted hide that occupied a place of honor in his parents’ home. Franklin Sutton must have been secure in love to let her keep
the piece as a memento of her prior life.

Bitter Waters paced the edge of the fire ring. “My mother claimed her name of Seeyakoon, ‘the spy,’ came from her keen eyesight.” He smiled. “But everyone said she had been caught listening at the flap of the smoking lodge by Chief Joseph’s father, Tuekakas, when she had but four snows.”

Cord could not have achieved four snows of his own when Sarah had placed him on Seeyakoon’s lap. He could still recall the smell of his grandmother, of summer flowers dried in the sun and apples from the trees on her land.

Bitter Waters seemed to be speaking directly to Cord. “The first day of May, 1877, was unseasonably warm. Seeyakoon carried out a dipper of well water that she added to the pitcher on the table. Small droplets made dark patches on her white deerskin dress. Still slim for a woman of fifty snows, she moved deftly to drink from the whiskey bottle.”

Bitter Waters rolled his eyes, and the Wylie crowd chuckled in appreciation. Cord moved forward a few feet, heedless that he was blocking others’ view. As the story continued, he imagined his grandmother’s homestead beside the Wallowa, where he’d been put down to sleep near the fire.

Bitter Waters continued to spin his tale of two young men at cards.

Tarpas crowed and threw his straight flush onto the table. “Luck is not with you today, Bitter Waters,” he observed slyly, “or skill.”

Bitter Waters folded his own hand without revealing it and looked up at Seeyakoon.

She reached to ruffle both men’s hair as though they were still small boys coming up to her porch from fishing in the river. Tarpas’s rich mahogany hair fell in waves over his strong shoulders, while Bitter Waters’s raven braids hung to his lean hips.

Seeyakoon looked at the whiskey bottle and scattered playing cards. “Kamiah want you home,” she cautioned.

Bitter Waters already knew he had best start winning and sober up before his wife saw him and started asking about the money that had gone into Tarpas’s leather pouch. It would be months before cash came in from this season’s crops.

Tarpas stretched, scratched his broad bare chest, and looked pleased.

Seeyakoon studied him with a serious air. “You need to marry, like Bitter Waters and Kamiah.” Her words echoed what Bitter Waters had told Tarpas before.

But he suspected Tarpas still carried a torch for his sister, Sarah, even though she had gone away years ago. As his half sister with the blood of a white father, it was for the best that she traveled away with white man Sutton, the odd one who picked up rocks and studied them as though each told its own story.

Tarpas shrugged off the talk of matchmaking.

Seeyakoon sat on the step in the shade looking out over the sandbar in front of the house where she lived alone. Two of her men were buried on the hill beside the river.

Bitter Waters’s father, Isa Tilkalept, known as Yellow Wolf, had married Seeyakoon through the arrangement of families and died young of the fever and ague during the winter of 1837, before Bitter Waters’s birth. Though their marriage was not unhappy, Seeyakoon fell truly in love but once, with Sarah’s father, Andrew Brody, whom she met after Yellow Wolf’s death. They never married, though they loved each other. When he was shot while hunting in 1869, some said the tragedy was no mystery. With tensions rising between tribal people and the United States, the shooting might have been a message that white men were not welcome to the women of the Nez Perce.

Behind Seeyakoon’s cabin, the sound of an ax rang out in the woods.

A jay fluttered down from a nearby tree and landed on the porch rail next to her. Chattering, it moved closer, then perched on her shoulder while she reached to smooth its feathers with a fingertip.

Tarpas gathered the cards and dealt. Preoccupied with arranging his hand, Bitter Waters failed to notice that Seeyakoon got up and wandered barefoot across the yard, the bird on her shoulder.

“I will have to loan your money back, or you will not dare go home,” Tarpas crowed, laying down three twos against Bitter Waters’s pair of queens and jacks.

“Damn!” Bitter Waters swore in English, for the Nez Perce language lacked profanity.

“What are you doing cutting my timber?” Seeyakoon demanded. The jay flew to a tree and scolded.

Bitter Waters and Tarpas were off the porch in an instant.

“I am building an orchard and vineyard,” a man’s deep voice said. “I need fence rails.”

Bitter Waters recognized Raymond Harding, a miner from the Florence district who had lately settled a short way downstream from Seeyakoon. It had been rumored that the rough-looking man in his forties had been to sea; tattoos on his forearms seemed to bear this out. Sweat stains darkened the armpits of his blue work shirt.

Before Bitter Waters could order Harding to leave, his mother stepped into the dirt track before the team of horses. Her white skirt swung as she pointed toward the river. “You go now!”

Harding leaped onto the wagon seat. His splotched and sunburned face seemed to turn even redder, as he pulled a pistol from the waistband of his trousers.

Bitter Waters and Tarpas were both unarmed.

Seeyakoon stared at Harding, her face devoid of expression. The green scent of trampled grass rose from beneath the team’s hooves.

Harding held Seeyakoon’s gaze for a long moment. Then he slowly replaced the pistol at his waist. “Hiyah!” He gathered the reins. “Out of my way!”

Seeyakoon stood her ground in the rutted track.
She raised both arms and extended her hands toward the horses.

Although Harding snapped the reins smartly onto the horses’ flanks, they did not move. One flared its nostrils and sniffed, and the other twitched its ears toward the murmuring sound coming from the woman before them.

Seeyakoon swayed as though in a trace, her eyes half-closed. Bitter Waters felt himself relax. His mother was using the power of her guardian spirit, her uncanny ability to communicate with animals.

“There!” Harding shouted. “Go, you bastards.”

The horses danced and side-footed in their traces, but did not pull forward. Harding pulled a whip from a slot beside the seat and raised it.

Seeyakoon sang softly, a sibilant “Sh-sh-sh.”

The whip whistled through the air, landing with a crack on the back of the horse on the left. “Look out!” Tarpas shouted.

Seeyakoon’s eyes snapped open, her trance evaporated.

The whip fell again.

Bitter Waters began to run, but it was too late. The team surged forward and trampled his mother. Wagon wheels ran over her limp form.

Cord might have been a child once more, so clearly did he hear in memory the announcement Bitter Waters
had made when he burst into the cabin. The news that his grandmother Seeyakoon was dead had been mere words then. Words swallowed by the terrible deeds of that night when his mother and father were killed before his eyes.

Tonight, listening to Bitter Waters, it was as though he watched Seeyakoon die, saw a vivid image of a white man’s wagon running her down like an animal.

Caught up in his own reaction, it took Cord a moment to realize what was happening around him. His last words spoken, Bitter Waters retreated with swift steps to the tipi. He left behind a restless crowd that seemed unsure how it should react.

A smattering of uncertain applause mixed with commentary.

“He said a white killed her …” a man’s angry tone, “ but everyone knows those Injuns went on the warpath and started the trouble.”

“Damn right.” Cord looked over his shoulder and saw that the last came from a uniformed soldier. “We don’t need this old man stirring up more.”