Wind Song (2 page)

She remembered thinking that if Tuba City was an example of a cosmopolitan Indian town, what would Kaibeto be like? What had she gotten herself into? It had been so simple—take the government civil service exam and, presto, she had her first job.

Now she had only to prove her competency as a teacher to Miss Halliburton. She had to! She would fulfill her two year contract no matter how difficult the job at the Kaibeto Boarding School— no matter how deplorable life on the Indian reservation. If only she spoke Navajo.

“I thought there would be some sort of indoctrination,” she said, then grabbed the door as the Bronco plunged into a deep gully and careened out of it to crest the next hill. “A workshop of sorts,” she finished on a desolate note.

Above a host of faint freckles his gray eyes met hers with laughter before he returned his attention to the obstacle course. “Oh, there was a two-week program—a language-customs project. But the government discovered that teachers adjusted more quickly by being immersed in the Indian culture rather than merely studying it.”

“A sink-or-swim affair,” she said dryly. “Exactly,”

Marshall laughed as he steered the Bronco over the dirt washboarded road that snaked ahead. “Just remember a few simple rules: Don’t admire anything that belongs to a Navajo, or he’ll feel compelled to give it to you. It’s better to make broad statements. Forget about using your camera. It’s terribly rude. If you’re ever invited to enter a hogan, enter to the left of the firepit. And—”

“And when do I get paid?” she interrupted, laughing.

“I forgot the most important thing, didn’t I? Your check will be issued every other Thursday. You can pick it up at the principal’s office. And there’s a telephone in her office, but it’s best to limit your calls to emergencies.”

Her eyes swung to his. “No phones?”

“Not in the dormitories. Cell phones are absolutely prohibited. No television or radio, either.”

“But the hogans,” she accused, pointing to one of the eight-sided homes of adobe and wood that could be detected periodically amidst the camouflaging landscape of sand and here-and-there cedars. The hogan incongruously sported an antenna jutting from its domed roof. “They’ve got television.”

“True. But the Kaibeto Boarding School’s too deep in a canyon to receive signals. There are newspapers, if you want to subscribe, though they’re delivered by mail a day late.”

“Don’t offer me another chance to change my mind,” she muttered. “I might accept.” She felt like crying. Silly of her. A grown woman. Her fingers went to her shoulder bag in a fruitless search for a cigarette before she remembered that she had given up smoking. Sheer lunacy to leave a husband and give up smoking all in one stroke.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Marshall said. But she caught his glance of understanding and sympathy . . . and the flicker of male appreciation in the depths of his eyes. That she could handle,
had
handled. But how did one handle this: hot, arid land and furnacelike air that seared the lungs; people who hid behind trees when a car passed rather than let themselves be seen; the total isolation from the rest of the world?

“I know how you feel,” Marshall said. “When I first came to Tuba City as the BIA director, I thought it was the end of the world. But in the past seven years I’ve discovered that people here are real. No plastic facades.”

Guiltily she glanced down at her long nails. She was glad now that she had removed the polish. And her false eyelashes. Even her hair was no longer smoothed back in the elegant, intricate knot that many a society matron, who didn’t have Abbie’s fine bone structure, had tried unsuccessfully to emulate. Now her hair, still its natural champagne shade but three months without a color job, was caught simply at her nape by a tortoiseshell clasp.

The one vain indulgence that she was unable to give up was her stylish clothing, as demonstrated by her white linen skirt and jacket over a pale blue silk blouse. The other teachers might dress in polyester pantsuits or jeans and dirty sneakers, but her fashionable clothing was her remaining identity with the old Abbie, and she was reluctant to abandon completely that identity.

“It took me a long time to get used to the Navajo reserve,” Marshall was saying, “to not being greeted heartily when I visited a Navajo family, until I realized that when a Navajo finally uttered a warm welcome . . . well, he really meant it.”

“I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the Navajo and this land.”

“It’s not that isolated, Abbie. Tuba City’s just down the road a piece, should you need.me.” “Fifty-two miles down the road,” she said in a flat voice that echoed the second thoughts that were eroding her initial confident decision to accept the post. “How would I get there?”

“Oh, Kaibeto has a government Jeep of World War II vintage, but you can use it only—”

“—only for emergencies,” she finished dryly, and Marshall laughed.

A greater number of Indian hogans, a few of the white man’s square houses—maybe a score in total and irregularly placed—and a wire-mesh fence presaged her first glimpse of the boarding school. After a car passed the sign marked
Navajo Indian Reservation
some one hundred miles before Kaibeto, no fences would be seen until this one.

The Kaibeto Indian Boarding School, enclosed by the fence, was built on softly rounded hills. It was more like a campus, with five one-story buildings surrounded by mammoth oaks and cottonwoods and enclosing a playground and basketball court. Marshall proceeded to label the various buildings.

“The larger three buildings are the dormitories. The nearest belongs to the younger girls and boys, the one with the blue shutters to the older boys, and the furthest building to the older girls. There, behind the cottonwoods, is the school, and next to it the cafeteria.”

The only other structure was a row of single- story apartments. Some had cars in the driveways, others did not. “Yours is the third one,” Marshall said.

He took the one suitcase she had brought out of the rear of the Bronco and handed her the apartment key. “Abbie?”

She looked up at him, puzzled by the inflection in his voice. “Yes?”

“Don’t let Miss Halliburton intimidate you into changing your mind.”

She was sure that he had been about to say something else. She smiled. “I don’t intimidate easily, Marshall.”

But that wasn’t entirely true, she thought, as she let herself into the empty, bleak apartment.

Cody Strawhand had managed to intimidate her merely by the sheer force of his masculinity. His deliberate rudeness had annoyed her, but she had been even more annoyed at the unsettling effect his presence seemed to have on her. She had spent half a lifetime paying for an impulsive marriage at seventeen to a husband who was hardly ever home. Another man to complicate her life was the last thing she needed now.

* * * * *

The hand slid lightly up her calf and Abbie yelped. The tin can and its crayons, pencils and scissors clattered onto the tiled floor like a tumultuous hail storm. Two days of teaching first grade still had not prepared her for the open curiosity of two hundred fifty-two Navajo children.

But then, a life at the Mount St. Mary on the Hudson boarding school for the daughters of celebrities, diplomats and so on, followed by twenty years of marriage to a renowned lawyer, had hardly prepared her for the Kaibeto Indian Reservation.

Could she survive her two-year contract in the primitive desolation of northeastern Arizona? She had to. A thirty-seven-year-old woman with no previous teaching experience had little hope for a position in a normal suburban school system.

At that moment Miss Halliburton, the principal and third-grade teacher, loomed in the doorway. She was a tall, raw-boned woman with a plain face. Though she was in her early fifties, no lines marred her sallow complexion, and no wrinkles rumpled her severely tailored clothing. A mask of powder that never cracked and a pewter gray wig were her two concessions to femininity.

Her eyes, the flat gray-brown shade of stone, glared impatiently. “Well, what happened this time, Mrs. Dennis?”

Abbie glanced down beneath the desk where the boy knelt, watching her solemnly. “Joey Kills the Soldier was feeling my hosiery,” she replied with a mortified smile.

“Oh, that.” The spinster huffed with exasperation. “You’ll just have to get used to it if you intend to stay.”

In a rare moment of feminine vanity that overrode her military bearing, Miss Halliburton lifted her hand to pat the synthetic hair that resembled a ball of steel wool. “My first week at Kaibeto the youngsters kept fingering my curls. Indian children are fascinated with curly or light hair, you know.”

Abbie never let on that she knew the woman wore a wig. “I’m finding that out.” She recalled her first day when a portrait-perfect Navajo girl, Karen Manygoats, had tentatively stroked Abbie’s cascade of tawny gold hair.

The older woman turned to leave, and Abbie said, “Miss Halliburton, just a moment.” She rose from her chair and crossed to the door. “It’s Robert Tsinnijinnie.” She nodded surreptitiously to the eleven-year-old who stood stonily looking out the window toward the massive domed Navajo Mountain that dominated the northern horizon. “He refuses to color with the rest. Even if he doesn’t speak English, I know he’s old enough to understand it.”

From between almost-lashless lids the principal eyed the slender boy. “It’s his first year at school. You can spot the first-year children by their G.I. haircuts.”

Abbie glanced at Robert, who had not moved from his post by the window. His hair was cropped almost as close as a sheep at shearing time.

“It still isn’t necessary to practically shave the child’s head,” Abbie protested. She was appalled at the impersonal treatment of the children. She could well imagine the indignity the child must have suffered at the haircut, especially at his age.

The woman’s knuckles rapped the wall. “What I am trying to impress on you is that there are a lot of procedures you’re not going to like or understand, Mrs. Dennis. But you’ll just have to get used to them. You can’t be a soft touch and survive out here.”

Well, wasn’t that what Abbie wanted? To find out how capable a person she was? Whether she could survive on her own initiative rather than coast through life as Mrs. Brad Dennis, the attorney’s wife?

But teaching on a Navajo Indian Reservation? She must be reaching senility early. More than likely she would lose whatever identity she had achieved, rather than discover it, in this wilderness of sheep and greasewood that comprised almost a quarter of Arizona and was larger than all of Pennsylvania. She was one-hundred-twenty- five miles from the nearest commercial airport , miniscule Pulliam Airport just outside Flagstaff—one-hundred-and- twenty-five miles of undulating desert.

Yes, she must have lost her mind when she signed the BIA two-year contract.

“You’ll just have to learn to adapt, Mrs. Dennis,” the principal reiterated before marching from the room.

Despite all her good intentions, despite her resolve to do just that—adapt—Abbie found herself clenching her hands in agitation on Friday when she discovered that lovely, cherubic Karen had impetigo and nothing could be done for the skin infection. Since the school had no clinic, she took Karen across to the children’s dormitory, which she knew had an isolation room.

“Are you certain?” she questioned one of the Navajo aides, all of whom had at least a high school diploma. “Only aspirin and antacids?” The dusky-skinned, lovely young woman nodded her head vigorously, and her ebony hair swished back and forth against the small of her back. “Yes, yes. We are not allowed to give out drugs. We must wait for the weekly visit of the BIA’s Public Health doctor.”

An hour earlier Dorothy Goldman, the second- grade teacher who only had one year left until retirement, had said the same—and added in a whiskey whisper that it wasn’t wise to make waves.

“But what happens in an emergency?” Abbie asked the young Indian woman now.

Dalah, clad in jeans and a yellow knit pullover, smiled. Abbie had found herself coming up against that smile often that week—the friendly, blithe smile of teachers and aides who accepted everything as inevitable and right and questioned nothing. “Oh, then it’s all right to go into Tuba City. You can use the school’s Jeep.”

Fifty-two miles to Tuba City! “Give Karen a warm bath and use plenty of soap. I’ll be back.” On foot, the three miles to the trading post seemed much longer. Sand crunched inside her open-toed high heels. With sidewalks connecting the various buildings on the school grounds, she had forgotten about the hazard. She would wear something more sensible next time she decided to hike.