Wind Song (10 page)

He laughed, his gaze suddenly tender. “I think I’d better get you home before I decide to forget that you’re a married woman.”

Chapter 5

I
t was the middle of November and the last of
Indian summer, just before the perfect fall days gave way to the harsh winter. Indian summer. The words conjured up beauty and mystery and romance.

And Cody Strawhand.

She couldn’t stop thinking about him.

He wasn’t the average man next door. There was a charisma about him—the way children clung to him, adults deferred to him, women watched him. She sensed that he must have overcome tremendous obstacles to rise to his position of importance in the art world, social prejudice being the least of them.

She folded the last of the Idaho Pink Beans burlap sacks that Orville had donated for the day’s outing and placed it on her desk with the rest. She couldn’t have chosen a better day to pick juniper seeds. The curio stands along the highways had given her the idea. Why couldn’t the children make necklaces out of dried seeds and glass beads and sell the finished product themselves? Dalah had already agreed to take the finished necklaces along with her hand-woven blankets into Tuba City for consignment there.

Persuading Miss Halliburton had presented more of a problem. “You can’t possibly watch thirty-four children, Mrs. Dennis. They’ll run wild. They could get hurt or lost.”

“Give me a chance.”

The woman relented, but Abbie suspected that the principal was almost waiting with baited breath for her predictions to come to pass. Transportation had presented another problem. Getting thirty-four children back into the canyons where the junipers grew thickest could never be accomplished in the government Jeep. But then Abbie had what she thought of as a brilliant solution: They could take the old springboard wagon.

True, driving a team of obstinate burros was beyond her capability. But there
was
Robert. More than once at recess, when she had panicked and thought that he had run away again, she had discovered that the child had wandered off to the corral by the shed to watch the malodorous burros. The indifferent creatures even suffered his caressing strokes. Surely Robert could hitch the burros to the wagon, and probably drive them, as well.

He indicated as much when she asked him, using charades as a last resort in the face of his blank look. The brief crimping of his lips told her that he had understood. She felt a tremendous sense of achievement in having solved two problems at once—transportation and Robert’s refusal to get involved.

Miss Halliburton sailed majestically into the room, and the children sprang to their feet, eager to be off. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Mrs. Dennis. The responsibility you are assuming?”

“Yes. I’ve even placed an order for boxes of coral beads from an outlet in Taiwan.”

Miss Halliburton’s narrow lips, bereft of liptick, twitched in exasperation. She fixed gray brown eyes that resembled ball bearings on Abbie. “You mean Kaibeto will be palming these necklaces off as genuine handmade Indian articles?”

Abbie tried to smile. “Well, they will be handmade by the Indians.”

Miss Halliburton's choleric expression indicated that she saw no humor in the remark, but before she could put forth another argument to block the field trip altogether, Abbie pointed to the tall boy in the back of the room and said, “Wagon, please, Robert.”

The boy bolted from his desk and sprang past Miss Halliburton like a contestant in the fifty-yard dash. The old woman grabbed at her wig as if she expected a backwash of wind to blow it off.

“Children,” Abbie admonished, when all of them began bobbing up from their chairs, “form a single line.”

“Don’t say I didn't warn you, Mrs. Dennis,” Miss Halliburton said and stalked from the room.

In the shed Robert deftly harnessed the two scurvy old burros and hitched them to the wagon. The children all scrambled for a place in the wagon bed that was blanketed with musty hay. Abbie climbed up beside Robert. Julie Begay, who had developed a case of adulation ever since Abbie’s wild drive into Tuba City, camped on Abbie’s other side.

For more than an hour the wagon bumped over a narrow rutted road that wound back through a red-streaked, sheer-cliffed canyon. The children’s laughter amplified with each steep dip and perilous curve of the road where the wash dropped away far below, but Abbie found her hand clutching Julie’s bony knee.

She exhaled a pent-up breath and managed a weak smile for the children when Robert halted the wagon in a box canyon studded with gray green junipers. With bean sacks in hand, the children spilled out of the wagon and took off for the trees, scrambling under their low branches to collect the seeds.

Their squeals of delight at escaping the stuffy classroom on such a gorgeous afternoon echoed up and down the canyon. The pungent aroma of pinon and juniper scented the air. A light breeze, carrying the promise of winter, rustled through the needle-leafed trees. Bees droned over a patch of sunflowers. Nearby the burros cropped contentedly at the clumps of grass that thrust through the rock’s crevices.

A glorious day! Abbie would have liked nothing better than to stretch out on the shale-bedded slope and watch the meringue kisses of clouds that floated above. But, alas, only children had that privilege. She had to be content to sit and watch the children dart from beneath the trees like little field mice.

Contrary to Miss Halliburton’s dire predictions, the field trip was going without a slip-up. No casualties. No arguments. Only happy grins and sacks that were filling rapidly with seeds. Abbie was so pleased with the successful outing that she postponed the return trip for a full half-hour until the sun tiptoed atop a mesa that resembled an Indian woman’s flounced skirt.

Abbie never knew what caused the burros to take off with the wagon as if the starting bell had rung at the Kentucky Derby. The children claimed it was the
tchindee
spirits. Abbie suspected it was the bees she had heard humming earlier. Whatever, the braying of the burros grew fainter with each passing moment. Mary, Delbert, Julie, Joey, Wendy—all the children’s eyes turned to her as they waited for her wise counsel. All but Robert. He simply set his face toward the east. Abbie wanted to comfort him, because she knew he sensed that it was his fault the burros had bolted, that he should have secured the reins. But it would never have done for him to admit weakness before the other children.

She sighed. “We had better start walking back, children.”

When would she ever learn to wear sensible shoes in this abysmal terrain? She turned her ankle more than once, and only Julie’s quick little hands kept her from sprawling like a rug. Off came the high heels.

The canyon’s walls cast eerie shadows, but visions of a wrathful Miss Halliburton were even more frightening. Abbie could only hope that the children knew the way back. What if, in the dark, a child stepped off into the void of one of the deep washes? She cringed at the image of a sheer drop-off, a wayward step. Her fear of heights went to work, her stomach churning at each rolling pebble.

Soon a chill settled like a mist over the canyons. The children would get colds. The faint clip-clop of hooves reached her ears. “The burros!” she breathed. Ahead of her Leo Her Many Horses let out a war whoop of joy.

Abbie’s own joy was short-lived when the silhouette of a horseman came into view. The beam from his flashlight temporarily blinded her. Sudden exclamations in Navajo erupted from the children, and she recognized Cody’s deep voice reassuring them.
Damn!
One more reason to justify his judgment that she didn’t belong at Kaibeto.

He reined in the Appaloosa alongside her. His flashlight’s peripheral glow illuminated his mocking grin. “If it isn’t Moses and the lost tribes wandering in the wilderness.”

She checked her rush of grateful words. “Your humor is ill-timed. I suppose everyone is out looking for us?”

Beneath the brim of his hat his eyes laughed at her. “No, only Orville in his Packard. He persuaded Miss Halliburton to let the two of us search before she called out the tribal police, the BIA search heliocopters, the Arizona Highway Patrol
...”

Abbie groaned. “Say no more, please.”

He didn’t. He leaned over and, before she realized what was happening, caught her by the waist, pulling her up into the saddle to sit sideways in front of him. “Shall we go back and face the music?”

“I don’t think music is what I’m going to be hearing,” she said, her dejected laughter muffled against his denim jacket. She encircled his waist for support with one arm while her free hand tugged, to no avail, at the skirt that had ridden high up on her thighs.

Like the Pied Piper, Cody, astride the horse with her ensconced in the crook of his arm, led the children down out of the canyons. The children loved the adventurous trek. And Abbie— she tried not to let herself think or feel anything during that odyssey. But it was impossible, with Cody’s hand resting tantalizingly just below her breast. Beneath her thigh she could feel the hardness of him. He wanted her . . . but did he even like her? His contempt was too often evident.

In an effort to redeem herself, she tried to explain the circumstances that had caused the predicament into which she had gotten herself and the children. “With the profits the children make from selling the beads, we can take a field trip into Flagstaff come spring. Just think, these children have never seen a train or a plane or a supermarket. . . . But now I’m afraid that the Dragon Lady will cancel the trip.”

Above her head his low chuckle fanned her hair. “I’m sure you’ll carry through with aplomb, Abbie Dennis.”

He began to talk of other things—to take her mind off the coming confrontation with the principal, she suspected. “Did you know, Abbie, that the juniper berries, because of their pungency, are used to flavor gin?”

She shook her head in a negative gesture. Against her cheek she could feel the strong beat of his heart.

“The name gin,” he continued lightly, “comes from the old French word for juniper,
genievre
—a glass of which you will, no doubt, have need of when we get back.”

Foolishly, she wished the ride could continue forever. She told herself that it was only because she wished to postpone the inevitable meeting with Miss Halliburton.

All the lights in the school buildings blazed.

And the Dragon Lady was waiting on the school porch, arms akimbo, when Cody rode into the fenced-in grounds.

* * * * *

With a shudder, Abbie told Marshall about the nightmare of the field trip when he took her up on her invitation for coffee the next day. “The worst,” she lamented, “is that Miss Halliburton has written me up for the incident. It won’t take many such blots on my record before I’m relieved of my duties.”

“As long as she doesn’t file the report with the BIA in Gallop, you’ll be all right. I might remind you, Abbie, that you still have the rest of your two-year contract to convert her opinion.” He stirred cream into his coffee. “Why do you stay, Abbie?”

“I’m not sure,” she said with a strained smile. “Maybe because I want to prove that Abbie Dennis can function just as easily as Mrs. Brad Dennis. Maybe just to prove that Abbie Dennis
does
exist. But I won’t give up. No matter how badly Miss Halliburton wants me to leave, no matter what kind of incompetent Cody Strawhand thinks I am, no matter how much you yourself try to persuade me of the futility of my efforts.”

“I think I’m becoming glad you don’t listen to me.

She passed off the indirect compliment. “And you? Why did you come to Kaibeto, Marshall?”

He took another swallow of coffee. His freckles were as pale as the diluted liquid. “My wife took our daughter and left. I was with an international division of a food company. Moving from country to country, living in dirty cities like New Delhi or Teheran. It wasn’t the executive wife’s life she had in mind when we graduated. And, to do her justice, not many of the marriages in international divisions last. I could have applied for a stateside job—a big desk, long lunch hours, country club membership. But to me the benefits glittered like fool’s gold. There had to be more to life.”

“And is there?” His answer was important to Abbie.

He shifted and crossed his ankle over one knee. “For me—yes, there is. The beauty and simplicity of this land and its people. Where else do you see such kaleidoscopic sunsets and rainbows that are doubled and tripled?” An embarrassed grin at his impassioned speech spread across his face. “At least here I’m not suffering bleeding ulcers and tension headaches. Two of the side benefits— along with people like you, not to mention your coffee.”

Abbie needed more than coffee when she picked up her mail the following week at the trading post, which besides serving as the Kaibeto post office also passed as a bank, though none of the local Indians possessed checking accounts. The envelope was marked with the State of Pennsylvania’s return address. Slowly she unfolded the legal-size sheets. For long moments she stood at the counter, staring at the blurred words.

“Bad news?” Orville asked.

She looked up at the kindly old man. His mustache drooped like her spirits. He wore the same baggy, rumpled pants, along with a ragged, faded mulberry red sweater. “I’m a Ms. now.” Her trembling hands passed him the sheaf of papers. “My husband—we’re divorced.”