THE REDSHIELD PLACE was at the end of a two-lane road close to the Little Wind River. Sheltered under a cottonwood was a small, rectangular house with brown siding and patterns of sunshine running down the sloped roof. There was a barn in the back that looked like a larger version of the house, and beyond that, nothing but the blue sky dipping down to the ground tipped in gold and red and vermilion as far as he could see, as if the earth were on fire.
Father John pointed the pickup into the tire tracks that crossed the yard and parked next to the house in a patch of dirt where a vehicle had obviously been parked not long before. He got out and slammed the door hard—a brittle sound that reverberated through the silence—to let whoever was inside know there was a visitor. He’d called Eunice from his cell as he’d turned out of the mission grounds. She’d be here, she told him. Maybe out in the barn.
Father John waited a moment, then headed down the side of the house for the barn. Through the open door that had scraped a halfmoon into the dirt in front, he could see the woman moving about, a bucket hanging from one hand.
“Hello,” he called, giving the door a rap and stepping inside.
Eunice Redshield lifted up the bucket, eyes round with fear, chest rising inside the folds of a denim jacket. “Oh, my goodness! Scared the bejeebers out of me, Father. How come I didn’t hear that old pickup of yours? You didn’t get yourself a new car, did you?”
“Afraid that’s not in the budget.” He laughed at the idea of a budget. Hay was scattered over the dirt floor, and the walls were covered with shelves filled with ropes, tack, and blankets. Two geldings bent into a trough of oats. The air was warm and humid with the horse’s breath and the odors of manure and hay.
“Just got the boys their breakfast,” she said, throwing her head toward the horses. She dropped the bucket on top of a large bin. “I got coffee brewing in the house.”
He followed her across the yard and into the kitchen. “Have a seat, Father.” Eunice nodded toward one of the chairs at the table, then hung her jacket on a hook behind the door and worked at tucking the ends of her T-shirt into her blue jeans. She was a short woman with a squared look and thick legs encased in the jeans. Probably in her fifties, he was thinking as he draped his own jacket over the chair she’d indicated and sat down. She had a weathered look, with curled gray hair and worry lines etched into her forehead. Old enough that the kids on the rez would call her grandmother.
“You been doing okay, Father?” she asked, stretching upward on her toes to reach a shelf and pull down two mugs.
The question took him by surprise. “What makes you ask?”
“I hear that new priest you got at the mission is pretty much taking over. Got involved with the business council to get Senator Evans over to the mission.” Eunice poured coffee into the mugs and set them on the table. Then she dropped with a loud sigh onto the chair across from him. “Gossip says you might be getting ready to leave. That true?”
“I’m not planning to go anywhere.” He forced a little laugh and took a gulp of coffee. He could feel it burning somewhere deep inside his chest. The gossip on the moccasin telegraph that reached him was always about somebody else, never about him. He didn’t want to think about leaving St. Francis. Fitting himself again into a teaching job at a Jesuit prep school or university. Finding his way again, his place somewhere else.
“Father Damien’s a pretty good priest,” she said. Then she took a sip of coffee and reached over and patted his hand. “People hereabouts like that other priest fine, but we’d sure hate to lose you, Father.” She seemed to contemplate the possibility for a moment, the lines in her forehead frozen in concentration.
Sitting back, she worked at the coffee, then she said, “Hear that white woman at the museum went off somewhere. Hope nothing bad happened to her. She was one of them nervous types, you know, face all pinched and white like the blood drained out of her. Looked like she was running fast with an evil spirit right behind her. Hear somebody tore her place up. Think the police’ll find her?”
He said that he hoped so, trying for as much reassurance as he could muster. Then he pulled the brochure on the Curtis exhibit from his jacket pocket. Smoothing out the shiny paper, he pushed it across the table. “I understand one of the warriors is your ancestor,” he said, tapping at the photograph of the village on the front.
The atmosphere seemed to change, as if the warm air blowing through the vent had turned frigid. Eunice stared at the photo for several seconds before she started tracing the figure of the warrior on the right with one finger. “My great-grandfather, Thunder,” she said. “Don’t mind telling you I was real surprised when I walked into the museum and seen his photo. I went into the curator’s office and told her she had my great-grandfather on the wall.” The woman looked away, gathering the memory. “I remember she went on about how Edward Curtis never got around to identifying a lot of people in his photos, and she was sorry but the Arapahos weren’t ever gonna be identified. I said, you got that wrong, ’cause I know my own great-grandfather. I got another picture of him. She got real interested then and said she’d like to see my picture, so I said, ‘Come on over any time you want.’ Hold on a minute, Father.”
Eunice pushed away from the table, got to her feet, and disappeared through the archway behind her. There was the sound of drawers opening and closing, then she was back. “The lady came last week, and I showed her this,” she said, slapping a large, sepia-toned photograph with curled corners next to the brochure. “Plain as day,” she said. “Thunder had a real distinctive nose and big chin, and he had dimples in his cheeks. Don’t see many Indians with dimples.”
Father John pulled the brochure and photo in front of him. The man in the photo looked tall and muscular, with a clump of hair standing up from his forehead and thick braids that hung down the front of his fringed shirt. He smiled into the camera a hundred years ago, and the smile showed the dimples that made him seem relaxed and content. But in the dark eyes was a mixture of wariness and surprise, as if he wondered how much of himself the camera might capture. There was no doubt about it: The smiling man in the snapshot was the warrior with the feathered headdress and broad stripes of paint that looked like lightning zigzagging across his face and naked chest. Same forelock pulled up from his forehead, same nose and squared jaw and dimples.
“What did the curator say?”
“Oh, she got real excited. Wanted to know where I got the photo. ‘Portrait,’ I told her. Stories that come down in the family say that Curtis took the portrait in his tent out there by Black Mountain. Thunder got killed, you know, after Curtis set up that attack on a so-called Arapaho village. Other warriors got killed with him. Them others didn’t leave any descendants.”
“How did they die?”
The woman was quiet for so long that Father John wondered if she’d heard. He sipped at his coffee and waited. Finally she went on: “Wasn’t something Dad wanted to talk about, but one time he told me that people said Thunder and the others killed a woman in Curtis’s village. Told me the family had it real hard afterward, and no sense dwelling on the past. “She reached over, picked up the snapshot, and stared at it. “Dad said that Curtis took lots of portraits of people in his tent. Had people come in and dress up in fringed shirts and beaded necklaces that Curtis brought along, some of it from the Sioux. Even made the village look like a village in the Old Time. That’s it right there.” She tapped the brochure.
Father John was quiet a moment. “Who was the woman Thunder was accused of killing?”
Eunice shook her head and blew out her breath. “He was innocent, Father. All three of them warriors was innocent.” She looked away a moment, then, bringing her gaze back to his, she said, “Name was Bashful Woman, the daughter of Sharp Nose. That’s how come Thunder and the others had to die, I guess, ’cause people wanted revenge for a chief’s daughter getting shot.”
“You told Christine about this?”
The woman started nodding. “She wanted to know if I had a magnifying glass. So I went and found an old one in the desk and gave it to her. She stared at the village, moving the glass around, studying this and that, not saying anything for a long time. Then she handed me the brochure and the magnifying glass. ‘You see the women in the village?’ she says. I told her, ‘My eyes aren’t gone yet.’ And she wants to know, who was the woman that got shot. I said, ‘How would I know that?’ ‘Somebody must’ve told you what she looked like,’ she says. I tell you, Father, I got fed up with that pushy white woman. I said, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, but I showed you what I got, and I told you what I know.’ I quit talking then, and that encouraged her to leave. But you know what she says on the way out? Says she could get me a thousand dollars for my photograph, and would I like to sell? I told her I wasn’t selling any image of my ancestor. Then she wants to know who else on the rez has Curtis photos, and I told her, ‘Nobody,’ but that didn’t satisfy her.”
Father John picked up the brochure and studied the image of the village. He could make out the figures of women in the shadows. Black hair in braids, light-colored dresses with fringe that dropped over their moccasins. One carried an infant on her back; another sat in front of a tipi, cradling a small child in her lap. He could almost feel the curator’s excitement at the possibility of identifying more people, of making sense out of what had happened.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Christine wanted the names of Chief Sharp Nose’s descendants.”
“Oh, she wanted names, all right.” Eunice shrugged. “I told her, ‘That was a big family with descendants scattered around the rez. You can find lots of people that come down from Chief Sharp Nose. He was the last chief, and people got a lotta respect for the old chiefs.’ ”
“Did you give Christine the names of any descendants?” Father John could think of two or three elders who were great-grandsons of the last Arapaho chief—Max Oldman was one—but an outsider like Christine wouldn’t know who they were unless someone told her.
Eunice shook her head. “Sharp Nose family’s had enough trouble down the years, you ask me. Max Oldman’s nephew got himself shot some years back, and now Denise . . .” She let the thought trail off.
Father John didn’t take his eyes from the woman. Denise Painted Horse was also a descendant of Sharp Nose, and chances were good that Christine Nelson had gone looking for descendants with Curtis photographs. He swallowed hard against the gaps in the logic. There were probably dozens of Sharp Nose descendants on the rez, and Eunice hadn’t given Christine any names. What was the connection? Where was the proof that Denise and Christine had even met?
He drained the last of the coffee and got to his feet. “Thank you, Eunice,” he said.
“See, that’s the difference between you and white people like her.” The woman stood up next to him. She barely came to his shoulder. “They never say thank you for what they get. You think that white woman went looking for one of Sharp Nose’s people and got herself into some kind of trouble? You think that’s why she’s disappeared?”
“I don’t know,” Father John said. The lines in the woman’s forehead deepened, and he realized that it was now his turn to give the gift of information. He said, “I think she could have been on her way to meet someone on the reservation when she disappeared.”
“If she asked any Arapaho that come into the museum about the Sharp Nose people, she would’ve heard about Max Oldman.” Eunice stepped back and pushed her chair against the table. It made a sharp noise, like the ring of a hammer. “Oldman’s head of the family now.”
Father John pulled on his jacket, only half following what the woman was saying: something about how she hoped the white woman would turn up okay. He was thinking that he’d drive over to Max’s place and have a talk with the elder. But before he did, he wanted to find out what had happened at Curtis’s village.
He was outside and around the corner, following his boot prints along the side of the house, when he heard Eunice call out: “Come back any time, Father. I always got the coffee on.”
He slid behind the steering wheel and, leaning across the seat, fumbled through the papers in the glove compartment for his cell. The cab was warm in the sun. He rolled down the window and pushed in the number for the mission.
“Father Damien.” The voice on the other end was clear and confidant and . . . Dear Lord. Damien was at the mission and in control.
“Everything okay?”
“You had a few calls, but I took care of them.”
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“No need to hurry,” the other priest said.
Father John hit the end key and tossed the cell onto the passenger seat. Then he started the engine and shot out onto the road. He had to laugh at the irony. Finally an assistant who took a real interest in the mission. It looked as if his prayers had been answered. The problem was, he now had an assistant who could replace him.