Wind Song (9 page)

Though the autumn days were radiant with sun, the evenings were chilly, and Abbie missed the warmth offered by a car. She rode on the buck board seat of the wagon with Dalah and her bearlike father, who wore his long hair in the old way, with wool yarn wrapping the still blue-black strands into the squash-blossom style. But his clothes were modern western wear—jeans, plaid shirt, battered felt hat and soiled sheepskin jacket.

He held the reins loosely in his weather-gnarled hands and Dalah teased him about the plodding horse. “Whenever I suggest getting a car, my father always reminds me that hay is cheaper than gas.”

“And Sunflower is more reliable than the school’s burros,” Abbie added.

Dalah laughed and related her father’s joke on a
bil'langali’,
a tourist, who had come by their house. “The man stopped at our hogan yesterday and wanted to know what the smaller hogan was for. My father told him our bathhouse was a doghouse. The Anglo went away shaking his head in puzzlement.”

Her father grinned broadly, as if he understood the English translation. Charmed by the man’s delightful sense of humor, Abbie was beginning to feel more at ease . . . until Dalah said, “My family has also invited Cody, but he said he would have to come late.”

Very late, Abbie hoped.

The hogan was crouched in a straggly grove of cedars. A rusted barrel, used as a child’s bucking horse, was suspended by a rope from one of the sturdier trees. Not far away a pig rooted in the sunbaked earth. The hogan was not the typical earthen one that Abbie was accustomed to seeing but was constructed of cement and tarpaper. Inside, on the floor near the walls, were rolled sheepskins to be used later for sleeping. Abbie noted that the dirt floor had been watered and walked down. It looked as hygenically clean as any hospital. Yet it was difficult to imagine Dalah, who had been educated at Innermountain High School in Brigham City, living in what many would have considered substandard conditions.

Grateful for the warmth of the fire, she remembered to keep to the left of the firepit that burned with the nutlike scent of pinon. In a large pot over the fire something savory bubbled. An older woman, whom she recognized as Dalah’s mother, rose and nodded. This time, instead of men’s old work boots, Dalah’s mother wore moccasins, with the five-inch strip of cotton wrapping up the leg to serve as a protection against cactus and snow.

A mewling cry drew Abbie’s attention to the cradleboard not far from the woman. The cradle- board was made of cedar bark with, surprisingly, a Styrofoam mattress. “My brother, Victor,” Dalah said. The child, of course, had another name—a private name that was never to be used.

Abbie knelt before Victor and playfully tickled his fat little chin with her forefinger. Like all Navajo babies, he was red with black eyes and lots of black hair. A turquoise nugget was suspended from the cradleboard’s bow for good luck.

Three more children—two boys and a girl— materialized in the fire’s light, and Abbie thought with rueful humor why Dalah’s mother looked so old.

Without seeming to move her lips, the woman uttered something in the guttural Navajo tongue and Dalah said, “More water is needed. Would you like to come with me to the well?”

The well, drilled by the federal government, turned out to be a huge galvanized tank at the foot of an old wooden windmill. A few sheep grazed nearby. The number of sheep and cattle owned by a Navajo family was determined by their supply of juniper, pinion and greasewood.

As they carried the water in a bucket back to the hogan Abbie realized that she was reaching the most basic level of living. The water sloshed on her white denim jeans and jacket and on the smart leather boots where the dust collected in muddy lumps. Her arms ached, though the well was less than half a mile from the hogan. Dalah seemed not to notice the weight of the water bucket she toted.

Abbie almost dropped the bucket when she saw the pickup parked before the hogan. Her heart thudding, she followed Dalah inside. The girl’s mother was pounding purple corn with a stone
tnana
and a
metate,
and her father squatted on the far side of the firepit, deep in conversation with Cody. As always, Cody wore a mixture of Anglo and Indian clothing: faded jeans and a blue chambray shirt; a red flannel headband and high- top moccasins.

He didn’t once glance in the women’s direction, nor did Dalah make any effort to greet him. The two men talked to each other or sometimes to one of the children, but they ignored Abbie, Dalah and her mother. Abbie was not accustomed to indifference, and she found it difficult to sit quietly with Dalah and watch the mother fry sweet bread in deep mutton fat. Occasionally Dalah would chatter about something, but all of Abbie’s senses were more attuned to the tall, extraorindarily good- looking man who sat behind her.

“You can’t imagine how disappointed my mother was that I did not learn how to weave at the white man’s school,” Dalah was saying, and Abbie forced herself to listen to the young Indian woman’s soft voice speaking English rather than Cody’s deep resonant voice speaking Navajo. When he made love to a woman, did he use Navajo endearments?

She shook off the intimate thought and refocused her attention on Dalah, who had moved further back into the hogan to show her the loom her mother used to weave the sheep’s wool. “My mother designed her rug from linoleum floor sample,” Dalah said, reverting to the Navajo’s habit of not pluralizing words.

But Abbie heard only what went on behind her. Cody shifted his hunkered-down position.  The fine hair at her nape tingled her flesh, and she knew instinctively that he was watching her. Yet when she turned around he was lighting a cigarette.

Soon the family gathered around the firepit for dinner. Cody sat across from Abbie; Dalah and her mother were on either side of her. Tentatively she tasted the beans and stew. Across the fire she saw the mockery that curved Cody’s lips. He said something in Navajo to Dalah, and the young woman laughed. “Cody reminds me to tell you that the stew is made of mutton.”

“It does ease my qualms,” Abbie said dryly. She had no reservations about the sweet bread. The air bubbles in it were filled with honey.  “I don’t think anything has ever tasted anything so good,” she said with a sigh.

“That’s because Navajo women use their spittle to add extra moisture,” Dalah explained.

Abbie was afraid to ask if she had heard aright.  She swallowed hard and left the remaining bread on her tin plate.

Between bites the conversation was carried on in Navajo, with the children, all sharing Dalah’s lovely dark eyes and rose-shaded cheeks, piping in like magpies. Not once did Cody accord Abbie the courtesy of addressing her, and she would have felt left out had it not been for Dalah, who translated much of the conversation into English —except for the final sentence Cody directed to her father before he uncrossed his moccasined feet to rise in one smooth motion.

“I have told Dalah’s father I will save him the necessity of taking you back to the school,” he translated himself as he spoke to her for the first time.

Abbie sat dumbfounded. To argue would have been discourteous to the older man. But she certainly did not want to return with Cody. This was the second time that she had been forced to accept his offer of transportation—and the last, she silently swore as she took his outstretched hand and let him pull her to her feet.

She thanked Dalah, whose face had a curious expression, and the girl’s mother and father, who merely nodded. Cody shrugged into his denim jacket but didn’t bother to help her with her own. Wordlessly he escorted her to his pickup, his hand firmly at her elbow, as if he thought she would bolt. She refused to say anything, either. She sat in furious silence as the vehicle picked its way down the rutted trail, lit by the headlights and the bright, frosted light of a pumpkin moon.

Cody shook a cigarette from its package and offered her one. She badly wanted and needed it. “No, thank you,” she said stiffly, even so.

He pocketed the package and said, “Tonight you discovered what a narrow little world you lived in before coming to Kaibeto, didn’t you?”

“Is that why you didn’t once speak to me?” she asked in a voice tight with growing anger.

The lighter flared in the darkness of the cab, and he bent his dark head to the flame. “I didn’t think you would notice.”

She ignored his sarcasm. “You were unspeakably rude.”

“Was I?” He returned his attention to the demands of the almost nonexistent road. “How many times has the white man done the same?”

“That’s unfair!” she accused. “You’re generalizing.” She leaned toward him. Her voice was low and harsh, her clipped words rapid. “You were purposefully rude because you wanted to make me feel uncomfortable. You still want to prove that I don’t belong at Kaibeto.” She paused and caught her breath, then said in a puzzled tone, “You don’t want me here, do you?”

Without taking the cigarette from between his lips, he muttered, “No.”

“Why?”

He braked the pickup in the shadows of Camel Rock and flicked the half-smoked cigarette out the window. Looking straight ahead, he said, “Your kind—”

“I’m tired of you throwing ‘my kind’ up to me,” she lashed out.

He swung to face her. “I’ve met others like you,” he grated.

“But I’m not them!”

“I know.”

It was said in such a muffled voice that she wasn’t sure she had heard him. His hands shot out to grab her upper arms and jerk her against him. She should have pulled away, but something in the dark liquid eyes held her in an almost catatonic stupor, so that it seemed she ceased to breathe as he lowered his head to hers. His lips were hard with his anger, stunning her own lips to the point that she sat nearly passive beneath the onslaught of the kiss—until his lips softened almost imperceptibly and he matched his mouth to hers. Slowly she came alive to the sweet passion his kiss infused in her. Her hands, splayed defensively against his chest, slipped up in hesitant increments to clasp the muscled ridges of his shoulders.

The kiss after the flash flood—she had experienced its virulence and reveled in it. But this tenderness—it nearly undid her. Small tremors in her stomach rippled outward until her entire body was shaking.

“Open your mouth, Abbie,” Cody mumbled in a husky voice against her trembling lips. Unwilling to think clearly, incapable of refusing, she did as he bade. His tongue played lightly on her bottom lip before shafting between the two of them to find her tongue.

The hands that had clasped his shoulders now clenched with unfamiliar feelings, feelings long forgotten, that coursed through her. Her tongue answered the primeval question his own posed. The kiss lasted a lifetime. ... It lasted through the twenty years of homogenized love- making she had known. Its intensity staggered her. Inexplicably she wanted to cry, but the rising passion, setting her afire, quenched the need to release her emotions in tears and replaced it with a stronger need, the invincible desire of one soul, one body, to fuse with another.

His lips relinquished hers to find the hollow of her throat. “Your mouth . . .” he said. “It tastes of the honey you ate tonight. I want to know how the rest of you tastes.”

She murmured no protest when he pressed her down on the seat, his massive body half covering hers. His hand slid inside her jacket and under her cashmere sweater to rub tantalizingly along the curvature of her ribs. “Abbie,” he muttered rhetorically, his lips feathering along her arched neck, “why did you have to come to Kaibeto?” His hand cupped the underswell of one breast. “Why couldn’t you have stayed in your own safe little world?”

She didn’t care what he was asking; she only wanted him to continue what he was doing to her. Again and again he kissed her so that mere thinking was impossible. His hand slipped lower to clamp about her hipbone and press into the concavity of her abdomen. Her hips shifted, arched to meet the gentle but persistent persuasion of that hand. It slid under her sweater again and around to the small of her back to press her into him.

His lips found her ear to trace its delicate convolutions. He raised his head. His eyes glittered against the darkness. “Abbie, I want to make love to you.”

“Love?” she echoed blankly. “I . . . I don’t remember what it is.” She shook her head, as if trying to clear away the fog of sensual lethargy that stupefied her brain. Her hands strained at his corded upper arms. “I know that you haven’t one particle of affection for me, Cody, that you despise me . . . and still I want you.”

He pulled away to sit up. “You’re harmfully honest.”

She laughed brightly, almost too spontaneously. “If I were, I wouldn’t have fooled myself, even for a minute, about what was happening just now.”

To her astonishment he pulled her upright and drew her jacket about her. “And what did happen?” he asked quietly as his nimble fingers prodded at the jacket’s buttons.

“Nothing,” she murmured after a moment.

“Exactly,” he said coldly, precisely. “But it could have.”

She flared at his words, but he ignored her furious sputter. Finished with the buttons, he started the pickup. “As I told you before, Abbie, your kind doesn’t belong out here. You belong in your safe little world of protocol and propriety.” Surprising her, his strong, white teeth glistened amidst the darkness in the semblance of a smile. “You won’t last the year, Abbie Dennis.”

She answered his smile. “I’ll prove your prophecy wrong, Cody Strawhand.”