Ghost Dance (20 page)

Playing against the back wall of Gallagher’s questions was a larger, perhaps even more disturbing, query: how had Gallagher become so involved, when he had come to Vermont hoping to escape?

Fatigue crashed over him like a wave. His eyelids drooped, blinked open, then shut finally, and despite his every effort, he drowsed into the intoxicating rhythm of Andie’s breath.

In Gallagher’s dream, fog snaked along a river bottom choked with silver-barked trees. Cedar scented the air. The fog swirled and his mother staggered toward him singing, only to change into Emily shuffling out of a hospital in Paris. It was a warm, sunny July day. She hugged her stomach as if overcome by a sudden illness. Gallagher ran through the traffic to her.

‘You okay?’

‘I’ll survive,’ Emily answered stonily. The sharpness of her emerald eyes had become blunted in the two hours she’d been inside the hospital.

‘Here, take my arm. We’ll go back to the hotel, take it easy the rest of the day.’

‘Why did we do it, Pat?’

‘C’mon, we agreed last night. No second thoughts, Em,’ he pleaded.

‘I didn’t understand what I was agreeing to.’

‘Yes, you did,’ I said.

‘I didn’t agree to feel like this!’ she shouted. Her fists balled up and she pounded at his chest.

‘Calm down!’ he soothed. ‘It’s just the hormones going haywire, like they said.’

‘No, it’s not.’

Gallagher shook his head, not believing how wrong it had gone. ‘Think of it this way,’ he urged quietly. ‘It’s in a better place now.’

Emily slapped him across the face. ‘You hypocritical bastard!’

Andie suddenly appeared at Emily’s side. She cradled a whiskey bottle as if it were a newborn. Then the fog came again and Gallagher was on a river. There were tall, wet granite boulders standing on the far shore.

From out of the boulders walked an electric, pointillist version of the girl in the photograph of Ten Trees. Many Horses lifted her arms toward Gallagher and when she did contrails of many-colored lights arced in the air. The—light was blinding and he called out in frustration, ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I want you to set me free,’ she said.

‘But I’m not keeping you here.’

‘Of course you are,’ Many Horses said. ‘I was eaten not by fire, nor water nor earth, but by man.’

She gazed at Gallagher as if he were an unknowing child, then walked back among the boulders.

T
HE CARTERSBURG LIBRARY WAS
an imposing brick-and-white-trim edifice with a central rotunda under the peak of which was a circulation desk manned by a pair of twin women in their late twenties with iron-straight hair parted in the middle, pale skin and rheumy oval eyes.

The twins snuffled in near-perfect syncopation. Their mascara unwound down bleached cheeks like the support lines of a spiderweb. The one in a green Henley shirt was Danielle Carbone. She hiccuped every time Nyren’s name was mentioned. Rachel, her sister, who wore a black sweater, wheezed.

‘Can you tell us what Mr Nyren’s state of mind was?’ Andie asked.

‘State of mind?’ Danielle snuffled.

‘You know, was he happy, sad, agitated?’

‘Jeesum, I don’t know,’ Rachel wheezed. ‘He—David, I mean—he was very professional.’

‘But sweet,’ Danielle said, before hiccuping and blowing her nose, ‘one of those guys more comfortable with books man people. I mean, a librarian, right?’

‘Right,’ Gallagher said. ‘You said he was in here copying late. Was that unusual?’

‘Copying?’ Danielle repeated.

‘Or late?’ Rachel echoed

‘Both. Either,’ Andie said, gritting her teeth; it was infuriating to talk with them. But it had been her idea to come to the library. She wanted to get to Nyren’s staff, the people who supposedly knew him best, before Bowman’s detectives did.

‘He was always copying something,’ Rachel said. ‘And work late? Sometimes, like everyone.’

‘Where would he work?’ Andie asked.

The twins led them across the reading room and down a dark hallway into his office. It was a well-organized warren of tall, whitewashed shelves neatly jammed with books and stacks of papers and magazines. There was an expensive copy machine in one corner.

‘What was he copying Saturday night?’ Gallagher asked.

Danielle shrugged. ‘Jeesum, I don’t know. We went home at six. Sometimes he stayed all night Saturdays working.’

Andie tried the desk. The center drawer was filled with rulers, pens, paper clips and yellow Post-it notepads. The single side drawer slid back heavily, filled from back to front with bulging files. Andie fingered her way over the carefully labeled tabs, noting a file on the recent discovery of the wreck of Benedict Arnold’s missing gunship from the battle of Valcour Island on the bottom of Lake Champlain; and another file on the history of the Abenaki tribal settlements along the Clyde River in the Northeast Kingdom. Danielle began to blubber and Andie glanced up long enough to make a motion that Gallagher should get the twins outside.

As he passed through the reading room, he saw the headline across the front page of that morning’s
Rutland Herald:

MADMAN STALKS RURAL VERMONT

Under fire from the press, Lieutenant Bowman had come out and admitted that the three killings—Potter and Dawson in Lawton and Nyren in Cartersburg—appeared to be linked. She refused to describe exactly how the slayings were tied together, but ‘a source close to the investigation’ had leaked a copy of the last Charun drawing, which had set off a media feeding frenzy.
The Boston Globe
and
The New York Times
had stringers following the story. And CNN had made mention of the case on the morning newscast.

Bowman’s investigation now centered on a green van a neighbor of Nyren’s had seen racing from the scene. She also mentioned that they had gathered important DNA material from a vehicle the killer used to escape the scene of Nyren’s murder. The article ended with an assurance from Bowman that the FBI’s profiling team was now giving the case full priority, but a response was still ten days away.

Under the headline A RESORT TOWN IN GRIP OF FEAR, a sidebar chronicled the reactions of Vermonters and especially Lawtonites to the news of a vicious killer in their midst. People admitted sleeping with loaded deer rifles next to their beds. Local security and alarm companies were being deluged with calls. Elementary schools had brought in counselors to talk with hysterical students.

Chief Kerris was promising extra patrols with help from the county sheriff’s department. The New Jersey ski-hotel-and-condominium developer was now waffling on a deadline for closing the megadeal that would transform Lawton into a resort town with the stature of Stowe. Mayor Powell was pleading for calm.

When Gallagher returned to Nyren’s office, Andie was on the floor, going through stacks of books and papers.

‘Anything?’

She shook her head, then turned around to sit with her back against the wall. ‘Maybe we’re wrong about the journal. Maybe Nyren never had it and it was just sheer coincidence that he became Charun’s third victim.’

‘I don’t believe in coincidences like that,’ Gallagher said, crossing to Nyren’s desk. There was a long, awkward silence. At least the tenth long, awkward silence of the day. Each of them remained unsure of what the evening before had meant.

To make matters worse, Gallagher was still reeling from the second dream of Many Horses. Over the years he had talked with dozens of mystics who’d claimed to have had visions, and he’d always been able to explain them away as some altered chemical state brought on by a hallucinogen or an overdose of oxygen. Now Gallagher’s mind whirled and leaped backward and forward in search of some rational explanation for the vivid quality of his dream. But try as he might, he could not come up with one; and that realization was like a lava flow, bubbling hot, capable of melting everything in its path.

Gallagher felt claustrophobic and stalked around the back of Nyren’s desk to open the window. Warming air rushed in. He turned and happened to look down at the open drawer to Nyren’s file cabinet. ‘What’s the Vermont Asylum?’

Andie looked up from a stack of files in her lap. ‘Probably something about the history of the Brattleboro Retreat. It used to be called the Vermont Asylum for the Insane. Why?’

‘Because the other files in here are maintained with a neatness that borders on the anal,’ he replied. ‘That one looks like I might have filed it.’

Andie got up, went over and tugged at the thick file. It took several tries before it came free and she could flip it open on the desk. She skimmed the first page, then rapidly pawed her way through the file before looking up at him, beaming. ‘Don’t you just love obsessive-compulsives!’

A
HALF HOUR LATER
, Gallagher looked up from the file. ‘You never heard of any of this before?’

‘Not a word,’ Andie replied in awe. ‘I can’t believe it was kept quiet all these years.’

The file contained a synopsis of the slain librarian’s research on mortality and insanity rates in Lawton shortly after the turn of the century. There were also several pages of notes in which Nyren described how he had received a leather pouch from his father and speculated on whether it was related to those mortality and insanity rates; and, to Andie and Gallagher’s utter astonishment and delight, a photocopy of the librarian’s section of Sarah Many Horses’ journal.

Nyren’s father, who suffered from diabetes, had told his son the week before he died that Sarah Many Horses had indeed been murdered in Lawton and that the circumstances of the slaying were heinous. His father also said that the relatives of those who now held the journal had helped avenge the murder of Sarah Many Horses, though in what manner he did not say. Like Andie, Nyren had tried to track down more information about the journal, but had been unsuccessful and abandoned the effort years ago.

Six months prior to his death, however, while researching an unrelated subject in Montpelier, the librarian had come across a scantily documented report from the Vermont Department of Health, dated 1910, that noted an unexplained cluster of suicides and killings in the town of Lawton in a nine-year period around the turn of the century.

Nyren’s subsequent inquiry had not only supported the report of the abnormal incidence of self-slaughter and murder, but also revealed that during the same nine-year period, an inordinate number of Lawton citizens were committed to both the Vermont Asylum for the Insane in Brattleboro and the Vermont State Mental Hospital in Waterbury.

The last page of Nyren’s notes included a list of names. After each name was information, in parentheses, that noted whether the person had gone insane or committed suicide or was involved in a violent killing. Andie pointed at the twelfth name down the list and whistled: ‘That’s Lamont Powell, the guy the hospital was named for. He’s the mayor’s great-grandfather! Mike Kerris’ great-great-grandfather.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive!’ Her eyes danced, pitched and manic. ‘Lamont Powell was mayor of Lawton around nineteen hundred. They made a big deal of the relationship when Bruce Powell was elected mayor fifteen years ago. He was the fourth generation of his family to hold the office stretching back to Lamont.’

Gallagher remembered the Lawton police chief looking at Charun’s note in Nyren’s yard. ‘Kerris sure didn’t want you pursuing that journal, did he? And he sure got to the Nyren homicide awful quick.’

Andie nodded, but her hands worked nervously.

‘You’re scared of them, the Powells I mean,’ Gallagher said.

‘You’re damn right I’m scared of them!’ she snapped. ‘I know what they’re capable of.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘First thing we’re going to do is read Nyren’s piece of Many Horses’ journal,’ she said.

‘Looking for Lamont Powell?’

‘Among others.’

SEPTEMBER 1891

By June the horse was dead, but I’d made it to Iowa. The hot air on the dusty road looked like sun on water. The fields were leaf green with young corn. It was late afternoon and I had a powerful hankering for food. The last three days I had only eaten four eggs I stole from chicken coops, cracking the tops off with my knife and sipping the yokes like liquid gold.

As the sun got low, I hunted for a place to sleep and a chicken coop to rob. Then eight wagons, two with white canvas, the others more like shacks on wheels, bucked down the road, tugged by horses whiter than bones. There were flies at the pink noses of the horses. The side of the first shack on wheels was painted the color of bird eggs with a big eye in the middle. Fire shot out of that eye. And above that burning eye was gold lettering in the shape of an upside-down horseshoe. It said:

DANBY BROTHERS MYSTICAL SPECTACULAR

AND RARE ODDITY EXTRAVAGANZA

The lead wagon whoaed and a man called to me, asking me if I was Injun. Joshua Danby perched up on that wagon bench like he was a hawk, nose up, taking me in sideways. He had greased hair and a twirly mustache and a beard like a little spear tip under his lip. He wore a white shirt with one of them high collars, a string bow tie, a black bowler and a waistcoat. Mostly, I was studying the meat sandwich in his hand.

Another man sitting next to him on the driving bench grinned at me in a way that made me think he was addled. Caleb Danby was older brother to Joshua. His pink eyes and skin put me in mind of the horses’ noses. His hair was like the last white feathers that stick to the skin of a duck after you pluck it.

Joshua asked me what kind of squaw I was.

I picked up my head, proud, and told him I was Hunkpapa Lakota. He got this right odd smile on his face and asked me where was I going, a Sioux squaw alone in Iowa, when by law I was supposed to be on an agency near a thousand miles away?

I lit out down the road. Joshua smacked the horses’ rumps. His wagon jolted beside me, the white horses snorting and chomping on their bits. Then Joshua jumped down, stopped me and told me not to be scared, that he had a proposition for me. He said he could make me money if I’d let him. He said until the month before, an Ojibwa woman had traveled with the Danby Brothers Spectacular, but she went back to her people after a show outside of St Paul. He asked me if I wanted her place in the show. Ten dollars a month, my own wagon to sleep in, food every day.

Sitting Bull once went all the way to London, England, with Buffalo Bill’s show. I asked what I had to do.

He said I had to dance.

There was something about Joshua that I did not take to and still do not. He talks like he’s trying on the way he talks the way some folks try on clothes. And he’s got a way of looking at you, right slow and gentle, that makes you believe you are powerful important to him even though you hear a voice inside that says you are not. I think it’s his eyes make you feel like that. They ride so far up in his head the bottoms look like the last week of the moon.

I asked him what direction he was heading in and he said east for the summer, south for the winter. I told him long as he did not head west, I’d dance.

Joshua’s dancing is not hard after you do it three times.

But the first and second times, when you take off your shirt for the men, you feel smaller and weaker and meaner than before. I did not want to do it. But Joshua said the men would pay good money for the show. On the posters Joshua nails up, I am Sitting Bull’s Dangerous Daughter. He says men will come to see Sitting Bull’s Daughter take off her shirt, but not his sister’s daughter.

I fretted awful that first time. I went on after the Great Dimitri, who is from a place called Macedonia. Dimitri and his wife, Maura, walk across a rope hung between two high fence posts. It is something to see.

The way it works, the Spectacular has two tents. There’s a show every half hour, one tent, then the other, back and forth. After Dimitri and Maura finish, all the womenfolk and children head on over to the other tent to see Mr and Mrs. Small, the dwarfs who do a right nice fight with the longest snake ever.

Mr Cosotino’s from Italy. He lets ten men stand on his stomach. He lifts triangles of iron over his head. His wife, Isabella, makes the white horses that pull the wagons line up and walk on their hind legs. Isabella made the buckskin dress and vest I wear to dance.

Between the two tents Joshua has a booth where he sells his Magic Elixir. Caleb says it is corn liquor and a liquid that comes from cocoa plants down in a place called Colombia. Joshua’s got the formulation down in a way that two spoonfuls set the mind to flying like an eagle above the Grand River.

The men that first night crowded onto the benches. And I was right scared enough to drink some of that elixir before I went on stage. When the piano commenced to playing, all them men hooted and hollered. I got dizzy and then all the men had the face of the soldier with
t
he black teeth. They yelled at me to take my shirt off, so I did straightaway, then lit off the stage like a spooked deer.

Joshua was right mad at me. Caleb tried to get between me and him, to tell me it would be okay, but his brother slapped him in the face and told him to go get ready for his show.

Joshua said I had to torment the men, make them think they can’t take no more tormenting before I take off my shirt. Joshua said that’s the way things work. It’s like telling a story. The listener thinks they want the ending right now. But they don’t. They want the ending when they can’t stand it no more.

He made me come and watch Caleb’s show so I’d see how it was done.

Caleb sits in a box on the stage. Before the lights go out, Joshua tells the story about Caleb and him when they was boys back in a place called Vermont. He says his mother’s great-great-grandmother was one of the witches in Salem down in Massachusetts who got burned at the stake.

Joshua tells the people in the tent that it was from his mother’s great-great-grandmother that he and Caleb got their powers. When they were babies, people used to see ghosts near their cradles. When they were in school, pencils flew near them and windows opened by themselves. Joshua rolls up his sleeves and Caleb’s sleeves and shows the audience the scars on their arms. Joshua’s father burned him and Caleb with afire iron to try to drive the spirits from their bodies!

Then Joshua says Caleb’s gonna call up some spirits.

The lights go down. Joshua stuffs Caleb into a wooden box. He closes his eyes and puts his hands on the box. He says he’s helping Caleb into his spirit trance. Pretty soon, a nice-dressed man with a white cloth wound up like a hornet’s nest on his head comes popping out on top of the box and people get right fidgety then. He says he is a spirit from India named Mamood. He plays a flute.

It took me about ten times watching the show up close to figure out Mamood is Dimitri. But most people are scared and have never seen Dimitri before, so they don’t look close. Later on, Dimitri’s wife, Maura, comes out of the box. She’s dressed as a woman who died tending to the wounded during the Civil War battle at Gettysburg. Everyone likes her. Some nights five spirits come out of Caleb’s box.

It’s a funny thing. But most everyone wants to believe what they see in Joshua’s show. He’s got a way of making people believe what he wants them to believe.

My job, Joshua says, is to make the men believe I am Sitting Bull’s Dangerous Daughter. I drank more of that elixir, then went out on stage like I hated the men, which was not hard. I looked at them like I wanted to kill them. That made them crazy. Then I looked at them like I wanted to kill them real slow. And it was like Joshua said: in their lips and their eyes they could not take it no more and I stripped off my shirt and they got to shouting loud and coming toward the stage. Caleb and Joshua and Dimitri had to make sure I got off safe.

Joshua picked me up and kissed me, said I was a natural.

That was the worst of it. I’ve been dancing in the tent four months now. When I go out on stage it is like I am someone else, Sitting Bull’s Dangerous Daughter, and not Many Horses. If I think of myself dancing the Ghost Dance with Painted Horses in the cottonwoods near the Grand, I can’t hear the men calling at me no more.

Except the night before last.

I was commencing to take my shirt off when a man holding a Bible like the one Miss Mary Parker used to read from came through the tent flaps and yelled at all the men, asking them did their wives know they were in here looking at a naked savage. Them men stopped their hooting and acted like they was whipped dogs.

Cosotino told Joshua we’d better pack up our tents and skeddadle before things got powerful ugly. But Joshua was in an awful spell. He got a letter that morning and him and Caleb had been in their wagon jabbering all afternoon. Joshua doesn’t like to be told what to do. He said people paid to see him and Caleb summon the spirits and he didn’t want to give that money back. He said he needed that money now.

So he and Caleb started the show. About the time Joshua laid his hands on the spirit box, the minister charged into the tent with half the men that an hour before were hooting to see me naked. He called Joshua a blasphemer. Joshua commenced to yelling back, and the next thing you know, the minister and his men were coming at the stage. Joshua bolted like a horse that’s been snake-bit. Dimitri, too. Caleb was tied up in the box.

I hid in the trees and watched the mob drag Caleb
o
utside and tear his clothes off. They painted his body with tar, then tore up pillows and shook feathers over him. They tied his wrists and ankles to a post and carried him into town the way menfolk used to tote dead antelope back at Standing Rock. They rode Caleb around for near an hour, calling him names and kicking him and having a good old time. Then they dumped him in a pile of cow dung beside a barn on the road to Rosedale. I waited until their voices had gone to nothing before I went for him.

Caleb was blubbering. I told him not to fret none, that it would be okay once I got the ropes off him. I stole some kerosene and some rags from the cow barn to clean the tar and feathers off his body best I could. Caleb never said nothing while I cleaned him. He just stared at me in the moonlight with them pink eyes. It wasn’t like the soldier with the black teeth neither. I don’t think Caleb thinks like that. But it made me feel windy inside anyway and I told him to stop it.

You’re right kind for an Injun, he said, and his cheeks went in and out like a horse the flies are after. He asked me if he could tell me a secret and I said okay. Caleb said his scars were for real. His pa used to hurt his ma and his kids. The day Joshua turned sixteen, he shot Caleb’s pa in the back of his head while he slept. Some ways, Caleb’s ma was happy, but she was afraid someone would figure out what happened and it got so she could not stand to see Caleb and Joshua around. She sent them away with a traveling show that come through Lawton.

We been out here ever since, Caleb said. Fifteen years. Imagine that.

Caleb looked up at the moon and commenced to sniveling a third time. He said Joshua had gotten a letter in the morning telling the brothers their mother died.

I went and stole a horse blanket I seen in the barn and we set back up the road toward Gilead.

On the way, Caleb said Joshua had done the right thing, keeping the show open, because I needed the money, too. I told him I didn’t need it so much he had to get rode on a fence post.

But Caleb said I did. Joshua was figuring to shut the Spectacular down. Their ma had left them the farm and a passel of money. They were going home to Vermont, after fifteen years. Imagine that. And if’n Caleb had his way, I was gonna go, too.