65

The Desert

Will would have liked to have slept a little longer. He would have liked to have held Hasbaá and shared her touch before having to leave. He thought wistfully and lustfully of their lovemaking earlier. But, indeed, a faint glow lit the eastern sky, and it was time to get underway.

Soon the settlement calmed. There was still a sense of tension in the air, but the wailing and grieving had stopped. Dezba sent one of the young boys over to the Agent’s quarters to get Will some clothes. Will ate a little to prepare himself. He collected the few supplies he’d need. When he was ready to go, he looked around for Hasbaá. But she had already gone off on her mission. He felt sad that he hadn’t got to say goodbye. He wondered what she was doing.

As he rode away, he remembered his last sight of Michael Halyerd. “Save yourself,” he had called out to him as Michael fled his father. He never saw his friend again. Now as he fled from Fort Sumner—to save himself—he wondered if he would ever see Hasbaá again. What if Carleton is not removed? I certainly have no place on this reservation otherwise.

Barboncito’s horse seemed to understand the importance and urgency of this journey and bore him swiftly. They made the distance in under three days.

The trip was not so exhausting this time. Will rode, the crucial evidence at his heart, with ease and expectation. He was thrilled to realize what had happened to his life. He wondered how it had happened and what it was that really had happened.

How had he returned to Washington, D.C. to that fateful moment when he’d been given his appointment? Of course, he had actually been in that waiting room sleeping a couple of months ago. And so somewhere in his mind, perhaps, he’d heard the telltale conversation. So maybe, in some way, Hasbaá had rekindled his memories so that he was able to recall what he had unconsciously overheard.

The European magician Anton Mesmer had used animal magnetism to induce strange trances in people. Perhaps Hasbaá had used such animal magnetism on me. Once a Mesmerist had come through Lynchburg with a carnival and used this animal magnetism to cause volunteers to do odd things, such as quack like a duck or stand on their heads, while in deep trance. His father preached against the carnival and said, especially, that the Mesmerism demonstrations were the work of the devil. Will felt sorry for his father; the old man’s narrow view of life prevented him from perceiving so many marvels.

It was a marvel that had somehow brought these papers into his possession. How had that happened? The door unlocked, the mud tracked in, his face clean shaven—these he explained away as coincidence and amnesia. After all, he’d been exhausted and punchy and famished from days of traveling even before going into the sweat lodge. Who knew what state his mind was in?

Maybe all of it has obvious explanations. Maybe Lt. Bauer forgot to lock the door. Maybe I came up by way of the creek and got my shoes muddy there—but it was yellow mud I tracked in, not the red clay around Fort Sumner. How was that? Maybe I stopped at my quarters in my delirious state and shaved and just forgot. But how could I have done that? How did I know to find the key in the inkwell? Had Dezba or Hasbaá told me in my sleep? But then how did I see in the dark?

Will had seen it in his own mother’s eyes and in the eyes of soldiers back in his father’s congregation who’d been wounded in the war: anodynes they were given for pain or nervous conditions, like laudanum or stramonium, caused their pupils to constrict or dilate. Maybe if my eyes were dilated more light would get in and I could see better. Maybe it was that potion the Indians gave me. I wonder what was in that. Whatever it was, it was like a miracle…

Will remembered childhood hopes of working miracles. In fact, these events were closer to that than he’d ever really expected. He used to believe the power to work miracles would come from being obedient to God’s law. Now he realized it was the natural outcome of good intentions and a will for the harmony of life. Perhaps that’s what God’s law really is.

Maybe miracles are always a combination of such things as coincidence, forgetfulness, and misperception—like sleight of hand. Perhaps the real miracle isn’t the event, but that the coincidence happened at just the right moment and that the mind perceived it as a miracle. That was certainly miracle enough.

Will scried a hawk again in the sky. He felt its presence a comforting omen.