Mary struggled with an instinct to flee but forced herself to stand quietly. When a man appeared, it was not a person in black robes, but a man wearing the suit of the white men, and wire-rimmed glasses perched far out upon a bulbous nose. He peered at her.
“I have come to see my boy,” she said.
He looked doubtful. “But it is class time …”
“I have come from the mountains to see my son,” she said.
The mountains meant something to him, and he softened. “You are?”
“I am Mary, the woman of Barnaby Skye, and Dirk Skye is my son.”
“Oh, Dirk,” he said, warming a little.
He opened the grilled gate and she entered a serene courtyard, with somber buildings surrounding it. Somewhere, somewhere near, would be the Star That Never Moves. Her pulse lifted. In truth, she hadn’t the faintest idea what she would do when she saw him. But that was all she wanted. She had come all this distance, all these moons, to see him.
He led her to an austere reception room, white plastered walls, a crucifix, some chairs, a small window opening on the yard. He nodded her toward a wooden chair and vanished through a door.
She felt utter confusion then. Why had she come here? What did she expect? Who was she, that she had abandoned her husband to come here? What would her son look like? Would he accept her? Would he smile? Would he turn his back to her?
It took a long time, and she resisted an impulse to flee to the safety of the street, collect her horses, which she had tied to a hitching post, and escape.
But then she heard noises, the door opened, and she beheld a thin young man in white men’s clothing with warm flesh, medium height, dark hair, the strong cheekbones of her people—and blue eyes.
She gave a small cry. It was North Star. She uttered his name in Shoshone, but he looked puzzled.
“You are Mary of the Shoshones?” he asked in English.
“Oh, my child.”
“Are you my mother?” he asked, his own bewilderment as large as her own.
“Seven winters, seven winters,” she said, a river of anguish flowing through her now. “Seven winters ago.”
He stood quietly. “That was what Papa wished for me,” he said.
But she could not speak.
“Ah, I’ll leave you to your reunion,” the man said. “Dirk, you’ll not want to miss chapel.”
The young man nodded. The graying man in the dark suit vanished, and then Mary was alone in the austere room with her only child.
“I have only a few minutes,” he said.
“What are minutes?”
“Ah, little bits of time.”
“Then you must go?”
“We cannot miss chapel, not ever.”
“Sit here,” she said, motioning him toward the other chair.
They sat, staring at each other. She could not fathom him. Everything had vanished behind his white man’s mask. She understood even without words that the years with the blackrobes had driven his Shoshone nature from him. He looked uncomfortable.
“Can you speak the tongue of the People?” she asked softly.
He stared, and finally shook his head. “The words might come back, but offhand I don’t remember them,” he said.
“Then we will talk in Mister Skye’s tongue,” she said.
He nodded. “I am wondering—why you came now. Is my father here too?”
“No, I came alone.”
“Is he—dead?”
“He and Victoria are old but they are well enough. He is very stiff, and his eyes trouble him.”
“He never came here to see me,” he said.
She knew this was painful ground, for her son and for her.
“I know. It was because … it would hurt too much.”
“Does he want me now? Is this why you came? To take me back?”
She carefully chose her words. “No. He is old and proud, and won’t say that he needs you, even if he does. I came to see you by myself.”
“All alone, across the plains? To see me?”
She nodded.
He smiled suddenly. “You came to see me!”
“It is my way. I wanted to see you now, with fifteen years upon you.”
“I am doing well. I get high marks. They say maybe I will be like a white man. Tell Papa that I get good grades.” But then his bravado faded. “I wish I knew Papa. It’s like … I am an orphan. Year after year, I waited for him to come visit me here.”
She didn’t want to hear that. He had ached for Skye and her to come see him, spent the months and years waiting and hoping. And Skye had let him down.
There was another pregnant pause, and finally she broke it.
“Are you happy?”
“I am treated well. They tell me I can be a clerk or a teacher someday. The good fathers are kind to me. They say that a mixed-blood can do as well as a full-blood.”
“Is that good?”
“I suppose it’s better than living in a buffalo-hide lodge, freezing all winter, wondering where the next meal will come from.” He eyed her uncertainly. “I am very fortunate. They tell me hardly anyone from the western tribes has the good luck that I have.”
Her son was staring at her, absorbing her, his gaze missing nothing. No doubt comparing her to the white people in this city.
Sunshine and shadow crossed his face as he wrestled with strange and conflicting feelings. “I don’t know your world, or my father’s anymore. My memories don’t go back that far. My life really began when I came here. So it’s not easy, seeing you, knowing you are my mother, you raised me in a lodge, and my father hunted and kept us alive.” He brightened. “You are all that I dreamed you would be,” he
said. “I had no mother. I lived with other boys, but you were only a memory. And the full-bloods …” His voice trailed off.
She understood at once. Mixed-bloods were not respected. “Do the blackrobes treat you well?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what being treated badly is, either. They have always been kind to me.”
“Do they favor other boys, North Star?”
He nodded, slowly. “They are very kind to the Lakota boys.”
The Sioux. “Do they let you have your Shoshone name?”
“North Star? No, the blackrobes call me Dirk Skye.”
“Would you rather be North Star?”
“Please don’t ask me!”
She sensed she had transgressed.
“We were free,” she said. “We went where we wished. Now they have put us on a reservation, with lines around it we cannot see, but we are forbidden to cross them. Things will be different now. Chief Washakie is helping this to happen.”
The youth stared dreamily out the window, which opened on the lushly planted courtyard. “I dream sometimes,” he said. “Of you and my Crow mother and my father, and a world where we could go anywhere, anytime we wished.” He smiled slowly. “But it is gone.”
“I have two horses,” she said.
He stared at her. Not until she said it did she admit to herself that the entire purpose of this trip was to bring him back to his people, and his family. Skye and Victoria needed him. She needed him. She suddenly grew aware of something that had burned in her bosom all those days of travel.
“Your father, he needs you. Your Crow mother, she needs you,” she said.
“Are they failing? Dying?”
“It is hard to live when you hurt. He hurts. She hurts worse but doesn’t show it to anyone. We cannot help him. Before I came here, he left us to find a place where he could build a white man’s house, with a bed in it and a chair in it and a stove and a fireplace in it, and a porch where he could watch the clouds skim across the peaks.”
“Where would this be?”
“The upper Yellowstone.”
“That is a good place to grow old,” Dirk said.
“For him and Victoria,” she said, leaving herself out of it.
“They tell me I am bright and there isn’t much more they can teach me,” he said. “They want to teach many boys with Indian blood, so that the boys will go back and teach the tribes.”
“Teach what?”
“All about God. Farming. Cattle raising, plowing, blacksmithing, living the way white men live.”
“And how do they live?”
He smiled. “I wouldn’t know. I have scarcely left here, but once in a while they take us to the cathedral.”
“You cannot leave?”
“A little. They watch over us.”
“You see no one? Just the students and the blackrobes?”
“Once in a while Colonel Bullock came. He sat there where you sit, and he would ask me how I was doing, and whether I wanted anything, and what should he tell my father? And then two years ago he stopped coming. I learned he had died. He grew old and his lungs would not take air. I haven’t seen anyone from outside since then.”
“No girls?”
“Especially no girls.” His face clouded. She saw a
melancholy in him so deep she could barely fathom it. She saw all the spirits standing above him, sighing in the quietness. It was more than melancholy; she saw anger and frustration and loneliness too.
“There are full-bloods here, and there are breeds like me,” he said. “The full-bloods, Blackfeet, Pawnee, Assiniboine, the Jesuit fathers like them and treat them like chiefs.”
“And those born of two bloods?”
“Born in sin,” he said.
She found courage to ask one of the big questions. “Was it hard—going away?” she asked.
“Not at first. I sat with Colonel Bullock in the stagecoach. It was an adventure. I looked at everything through the windows. It was only here, when I was given a narrow iron bed and a small locker in a dark room with other boys, that it was hard. Then my sunny world stopped. Do you know what I missed? Sunshine, open country, with you and my father bathed in sunlight. My new world was dark; dark walls, small windows, dark classrooms, teachers in black, darkness everywhere. That is the world of these Europeans.”
“Is it still hard?”
He looked away. “I am a white man now. I take my solace in work. They tell me none do better. I make the time go by with work. The suns and moons and winters of time, I make them go past me. I read the classics. I know French. I do algebra and geometry. I have learned their history. I know their authors, the storytellers. I can compose a letter or a pleading or an index. They have even made me a mechanic. I know about iron and wood and the tools to shape them. I know about farming, even though I’ve never farmed.” He smiled. “See? I am a white man now.”
She scarcely knew what he was talking about, strange
words, strange studies. Did he know anything of his own people? Had he sat with the elders and learned? No, and he couldn’t remember the tongue of his childhood. He was as mysterious and difficult as any white man, and strange as Mister Skye.
She remembered how hard it had been for her to fathom her man, once the blush of her marriage had faded and she found herself trying to learn his ways. Now this son was like his father. That had been Skye’s intent. Send North Star here so he might become a white man, and not one of the People.
“Star That Never Moves,” she said in her tongue.
“It has been a long time since I heard that,” he said.
“We gave you two names, and now you have chosen.”
“No, I never chose it, my mama.”
“The blackrobes, they chose it, then.”
“No, they didn’t choose it either. It just happened. When I was a boy, I called myself North Star, and it was lost.”
The words ceased then, and they gazed at one another, and she felt him slipping away, and she wondered why she had come. She knew it would end like this. She would look at him and be glad, and then he would slip away, and she would sorrow. Now there was a gulf between her and him. He would call her a savage, and tell them he had a savage for a mother, and she would carry this in her heart.
A low, mournful bell tolled.
He smiled. “Vespers,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It is a small service late in the day, offered to God.”
“Do you follow the same path as Skye?”
He paused, hesitantly. “No,” he said.
The door opened and a blackrobe swept in, this one young and dark, with almond eyes.
“Vespers, Dirk,” he said.
The boy bolted upright out of his chair. “I must go, Mama. It is time for chapel. Good-bye. I am glad you came.”
The father stood amiably in the door, waiting. He smiled at her. “Ironclad duty,” he said to her.
“Give my respect to my father,” he said.
North Star followed the blackrobe through the door, and she saw the door close behind them. She sat in the small silence of the waiting room, with a heavy heart.
Was this it, then? Had she come across the mountains and plains and rivers, through these nearby woods, across great rivers, for this moment, now passed? She had. She always told herself she only wanted to see him, just to see him, and now she had seen him, and had feasted on him, this slender, serious, two-bloods boy with blue eyes and strong cheekbones and warm flesh.
The soft bonging of the bell ceased, and faint on the air came the sounds of solemn song, boys’ voices, many voices, singing something that sounded a little like the songs sung at a Shoshone campfire by old men, to the sharp syncopation of the drums.
She could not bring herself to leave, not with North Star so close that she could hear the singing, so close that one of those male voices must be his. So she sat in the starchy room, listening, until at last the song ended, and she imagined he was going to his bed. She rose, stiffly, glad that she had seen her son, glad that he was alive, and he was very bright and pleased the blackrobes. She looked around, uncertain how to navigate to the ponies tied outside, but she found her way out the door, into the yard, and she saw no one. Maybe they were all at this vespers. She found the grilled gate to the street, and saw how to open it, and stood one last moment, knowing she
would never see North Star again, knowing that her journey was complete. She saw birds flocking in the lush trees, trees of a sort she didn’t know, and then she stepped through the iron grille and closed it gently behind her, and stood staring at the moss-covered wall, which was crowned with vines, which grew in profusion from the moisture and heat.
The horses stood quietly, their tails lashing at the clouds of flies. She felt sticky from the heat and wet. Beside her, the great edifice of St. Ignatius rose silently, its walls a reproof to this world of the street.
She slowly undid the rein, and also the lead line of the packhorse, and climbed onto her saddle horse, and turned to leave.
The gate clanged, and she turned to see him there. “Mama, wait,” he said.