The Man Who Fell from the Sky (10 page)

1899

MARY SPRINKLED A
handful of flour on the dough and thumped it onto the table. She leaned into it, rolling, pushing, and kneading until the dough became soft and pliable, then added more flour and repeated the process. Finally she plunked the dough into a metal pan and spread a cloth over the top. The kitchen was warm and muggy, filled with the smells of simmering meat, potatoes, and onions. She put another chunk of wood into the stove and stepped out onto the back porch. The hot breeze washed across the floor planks and rattled the thin metal chairs where she sat sometimes in the afternoons, getting her breath before Jesse and the hired hand came in from the pasture. This last week, there had been four men to feed, but she hadn't minded. It had been nice to settle in with George at mealtimes. The evenings, sitting out here, George and his friend Sundance on the steps, she and Jesse in the chairs. George as sunny and friendly as she remembered. He had lit up her life once, before she met Jesse.

She stretched her legs and massaged the cramps in her fingers. This was a hard place, but it was all they had. They had started from nothing, a patch of dry dirt scrambled with sagebrush and buffalo grass. They had built the house and barn and the outbuildings themselves. At times she had feared the place would kill them, with the hot winds that blew all summer and the blinding winter blizzards that piled snow against the doors and locked them inside for days. Jesse had gone to the bank a few years ago, desperate to keep what they had built. Borrowed enough money to buy hay to keep the cattle alive over the winter when the snows raged and the temperatures stayed below zero. Paying the interest had eaten up every extra nickel. And now the principal was about to come due.

She swatted at a mosquito. Banks were getting rich all over the county by foreclosing on ranchers who couldn't pay off their loans. If that happened, Jesse would have to hire out on other ranches. She would have to try to get work somewhere. They could lose the place, lose everything.

“Mary! What is it?”

Mary shifted around. George stood at the end of the porch, holding his hat in one hand, patting the top of his head with the other, as if to brush off a nest of mosquitoes. His hair looked thinner, lighter than she remembered. It was ridiculous, the way old times kept jumping in front of her.

“Just taking a little rest before dinner.”

George walked around and sat down on the step. He looked up at her. “Are you happy?”

“What a silly question.”

He turned toward the pasture. “I like to think of you as happy. Jesse's a good man.”

Mary was quiet. She stared at the back of his head, the round,
sunburned bald spot getting started. Finally she said, “I waited for you to come back like you promised.”

He was staring out at some point far away. “Didn't have anything to offer you, Mary. No kind of life to give you. Around these parts, I was a horse thief, and that's all I was.”

“You were a rancher.”

“Didn't work out, so I went back to stealing horses. On the run from the law all the time. You were a lady. Deserved better.”

“I guess that was my decision.” She started to say that he never said good-bye, then stopped herself. George Cassidy hated good-byes.

“I had to decide for both of us. Soon as they let me out of prison, I took off. Been running ever since.” He leaned back on the palms of his hands and turned his head toward her. The familiar smile creased his face. “Leastways I got a plan now. Get myself a big-enough stake and take off for parts unknown where nobody ever heard of the Hole in the Wall gang. Get me a nice spread and settle down. Nice place like this. No more running.”

“This will be the bank's soon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Principal due on a loan Jesse had to take out to keep body and soul together a couple winters back.”

George sprang to his feet and slapped his cowboy hat against his thigh. “I'll speak to Jesse.”

“Not your business, George. You got your own worries. The law could come riding out here anytime.” She thought she had heard the hooves pounding the ground last night. Lying there, next to Jesse, staring into the darkness, and wondering if that was the posse coming and if they'd shoot first and ask questions later. She stood up, smoothed her apron, and made an excuse about having
to check on dinner. Jesse would not have wanted her spilling their business to strangers.

*   *   *

GEORGE SEEMED THE
same at dinner, as if he didn't know the place was collapsing around them. The wide grin, the big laugh that rang around the walls, the way he thumped his fist against his thigh as he told about the bank teller who had turned to stone, eyes bugged out, mouth stuck in a circle, when bank robbers told him to hand over the cash. How one robber had held a gun on the customers while another had jumped over the counter and scooped the cash into a canvas bag. How the bank teller had stood there like a statue, except for the big puddle at his feet that the robber tried to avoid when he jumped back over the counter.

“What bank was this?” Anthony, the hired hand, was the only one not laughing.

“Just a story I heard around,” George said.

Anthony mopped up the last of his stew with a piece of bread, then sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “Seems to me you and Sundance here live a right dangerous life.”

George let out a shout of laughter. “Nah. Pretty tame life, isn't that right, Sundance?”

Sundance hadn't said anything during supper, but he had been a man of few words since he and George had arrived. Sitting back, watching. It was George who made the party.

“You say so,” Sundance said after some consideration.

Anthony scraped his chair back and got to his feet. “I thank you, Mary, for a fine meal. If you don't mind, I'm gonna retire now. We're branding calves tomorrow.”

It was like a cloud drifting out of the house, Mary thought, as
the hired hand's boots clicked across the kitchen floor. The screened door opened and snapped shut.

“What do you know about him?” Sundance set his elbows on the table and leaned toward Jesse.

“Never asked questions,” Jesse said. “Law of the West. Man does his job, that's all that matters.”

“I was thinking the Union Pacific has probably put up a nice bounty on us by now.”

“Any man works for me and blabs our business to the outside is a dead man.”

Now it was Sundance's turn to get up and thank Mary for the supper. He was going to take a walk, he said, and have a smoke. When the door slammed after him, George turned to Jesse, and Mary felt her neck muscles tighten into the familiar knot that usually brought on a headache. She rubbed at her neck.

“How can I help you, my friend?”

“You're helping me plenty. Got the fences fixed, cattle rounded up. Finish the branding tomorrow.”

“I mean help you keep this place.”

Jesse shot a glance down the table at Mary. “We got our problems, but I intend to work things out with the bank.” The words sounded empty and hopeless. “Anyhow, it's our business.”

“Well, I don't mean to interfere. But this is a real nice spread that you and Mary have put your sweat into for how long now?”

“Four years.”

“You have Mary here to think about, and I don't want to see you lose what you've worked for like a lot of other ranchers in these parts. Banks are a bunch of vultures. They always know when to swoop down.” George took his time getting to his feet. Without saying anything else, he went outside.

“You shouldn't have told him,” Jesse said.

“It's been on my mind, Jesse. Nothing else I been able to think about, so I blurted it out.”

She could hear George's footsteps receding across the porch. The tension in her neck was shooting into her head. Then the footsteps came back, the screened door opened and closed, and the footsteps reverberated across the kitchen and into the dining room.

George walked over to his place at the table and set down a metal box. The lid squealed as he lifted it, as if the hinges needed oiling. Stacks of bills sprang free around columns of gold coins. “How much you need to get free of those vultures?” He had fixed Jesse with that determined stare he had used when he meant business.

“I can't take your money,” Jesse said.

“Well now, it's not exactly my money, is it?”

“If the railroad catches up to you, they'll want their money back.”

“Let them get it out of the bank. Here's an idea. Let them rob the bank.” George threw his head back and laughed. Then he started counting out bills. “What's it gonna take? Thousand? Two thousand?”

Mary put her hand to her mouth. “You said that was your stake,” she said, the words muffled and queer against her fingers.

“There's lots more where this came from.” George leaned across the table and set the bills in front of Jesse.

Jesse stared at the bills for a long moment. Then he peeled off the top two and pushed the rest back toward George. “This is all I need, and I thank you. Soon as I'm able, I'll pay you back.”

“You'll have to find me,” George said. “I'll be off on my own place somewhere.” He set the bills back in the box, closed the lid, and held the box against his chest. “All the same to you, I'm going
to ride into the mountains first thing in the morning and find a safe place for this loot. I'll be back in time to help finish up the branding.”

“Safe place?” Jesse's head jumped back in surprise. “What are you fixing to do? Hide it under a tree? Bury it?”

“Only other safe place I can think of is the bank. And we all know, banks aren't that safe these days.” He was still laughing as he retraced his steps across the kitchen and outside.

Jesse didn't say anything for so long that Mary wondered if he would ever speak to her again. Sitting there, staring at the table, ruffling the bills. “I did this for you,” he said after a moment, his voice low and sad. “I made you a promise I'd take care of you, and if this is what I have to do to keep that promise, I'm gonna do it.”

“You can't take that money to the bank.” The truth of it made her heart skip about. She narrowed her eyes with the pain that spread through her forehead. “The bank knows we don't have the money. The whole county knows George and Sundance are hiding out around here. You show up with that kind of money, the bank will put two and two together. Somebody will figure out that we've got visitors. They'll send the posse out here.”

Jesse seemed to mull this over. “I'll come up with a story,” he said. “Tell 'em my rich brother came to visit and gave me the money. That ought to be good enough. For a while,” he added. “George never stays anyplace very long.”

A HAZY SUN
shone through the white clouds that drifted across the sky when Father John left the church and headed toward the residence. He and Bishop Harry took turns saying morning Mass, and today had been his turn. The sound of sputtering engines floated from the cottonwood tunnel as cars and pickups drove toward Seventeen-Mile Road. His parishioners, the same wrinkled brown faces that looked up at him every time he said Mass, fingers turning the pages of missals, working the rosary beads.

When the bishop had first arrived, Father John had suggested the old man sleep in the mornings. After all, the bishop had come to St. Francis to recuperate. Father John had assured him that he could handle the Masses. The bishop had reared back as if he'd taken a punch in the stomach, and in a way, Father John guessed that maybe he had, that his suggestion was a polite way of saying the old man was no longer up to the job. “Far as I know, I'm
not dead yet,” the bishop had said. “When I'm dead, you can say Mass every morning, nobody to stop you.”

Walks-On had been asleep on the front stoop. Now he came bounding down the path, the red Frisbee clamped in his jaws. It was the golden retriever's morning routine. Either Father John or the bishop had to throw the Frisbee a few times before he could go inside for breakfast. But the dog never wanted to let loose of his prize, and it took Father John a little while to snatch away the Frisbee and toss it beyond the grass. The dog followed the red blur that sailed through the air, hip hopping on three legs, head and neck stretched forward.

Father John threw the Frisbee a few more times, then ran up the concrete steps of the stoop and let himself into the entry, Walks-On trotting behind him. The bishop was in the kitchen, bent over the
Gazette.
“Investigation into Robert Walking Bear's death still going on. Up at the lake all by himself. What else could it be except an accident. Might've had a heart attack before falling into the lake.”

“Heart attack! Accident!” Elena let out a loud snort. She stood at the stove, ladling oatmeal into a bowl. The same breakfast every morning, but this was a routine Father John had settled into. Not long ago, the housekeeper had decided to make pancakes, and he remembered exchanging glances with the bishop. The pancakes were delicious, but a change in the routine didn't seem right.

“What do you mean?” Father John took his place at an angle to the bishop, who had set the paper down and was staring at the housekeeper's back.

Elena took her time. Filling the bowl to the brim, carrying it over to the table, moving the small pitcher of milk closer to the bowl. “Don't like to say anything about the dead with Robert's spirit still roaming until he gets buried and sent off to the ancestors.”

“But you don't think his death was an accident.”

“When people get sad, they do unexpected things.”

Father John didn't say anything. He could hear the quiet, raspy breath of the bishop. Elena turned back to the stove, lifted the pan over to the sink, and turned on the faucet. Eventually she looked around. “Like I say . . .”

“You don't want to speak of the dead, but you believe Robert was sad.”

“He had a dream that would never come true. He was going to find buried treasure, and that was going to change his life, make him happy. Now if that isn't sad, you tell me what is.”

“Maybe the fun was in the hunting, even if he never found anything.”

“Nobody's going to find that treasure. Butch Cassidy himself couldn't find it.”

Father John thought about what Eldon Lone Bear had said. That Butch had returned to the reservation some thirty years after he supposedly buried some money. That folks in the area had seen him, met with him, gone camping with him in the mountains. “You don't believe Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in Bolivia?”

Elena blew out a puff of air, then poured a cup of coffee and set it in front of Father John. She went back to washing the pan in the sink, scrubbing hard, elbows flying with determination. “I guess we know what happened on our own rez,” she said, almost under her breath.

“A familiar quandary.” The bishop sounded as if he had been mulling things over and had reached a conclusion. “The past has many truths, depending upon how it lives on in the minds of the living.”

Father John sipped at the coffee and watched the old man over
the brim of the cup. He had enormous respect for Bishop Harry Coughlin, philosopher, theologian, pastor with a deep understanding of the human heart. But he had been taught to find the evidence, and you will have the truth. One truth, not many. He said, “Either Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died in a shoot-out in Bolivia, or they didn't. If they died, Butch Cassidy was not on the rez in the 1930s.” He could hear Lone Bear's voice playing in his mind:
He came back, all right
.

The bishop held out his hand and wriggled his fingers. “Evidence is elusive, is it not? Like sand running through your fingers. A new piece of evidence surfaces, and old beliefs are wiped away, proved wrong.”

It was true, Father John was thinking. The truth could be found in stories passed down through the years. He had heard so many stories on the rez that differed from the history books, until the history books were proven wrong. A battle on the plains where the official records claimed belligerent Indians had killed dozens of soldiers, but descendants of Arapaho warriors had said, no—only Arapahos had died. Warriors, women, and children. One day letters turn up in an old trunk in an attic, written by troopers who had witnessed the events, disclaiming the official reports. Only then did historians change their minds about what had actually happened. They had a way of believing what had been written down.

“Butch himself was here.” Elena pivoted about and faced him, drying her hands on her apron. This was how she stood when he had pushed too far, doubted too much: straight, shoulders back, head high, daring him to contradict her again, like one of the women warriors in the Old Time, as brave and determined as the men. “Go talk to Mary Boyd's granddaughter over at White Pines. Might give you a gift.”

*   *   *

HE HAD STARTED
the pickup and was about to back into Circle Drive when Walks-On came running over. Lately the dog had insisted upon going along whenever he headed out to visit parishioners in the hospital or have coffee with the elders. Sometimes he wondered if the dog understood the conversations around him. Before he had excused himself from the table, the bishop had nodded in his direction and told him he would hold down the fort. Which made Father John smile at the idea of Bishop Harry, rifle in hand, on the battlements of an old log fort on the plains, fending off any attackers, holding it down. Walks-On had sprung off his blanket and started for the front door.

And now here was Walks-On, such a mixture of disappointment and hope flashing in his black eyes that Father John put the car in neutral, pushed open the passenger door, and waited for the dog to jump inside, which he did with alacrity, pushing off his single hind leg.

By the time he headed into the tunnel of cottonwoods, Walks-On was licking his ear. He turned up the volume on “E fra quest'ansie” and made a right onto Seventeen-Mile Road. The voices of Nedda and Silvio soared over the wind blasting across the open windows. “Good boy,” he said, hoping the dog would get the message and stop licking.

*   *   *

FATHER JOHN FOUND
a parking place in the shade in front of the low-slung, tan brick building with the sign next to the door that said, White Pines. The nursing home had a familiar feeling about it. Any number of parishioners had spent the last years of their
lives there since he'd been at St. Francis. Morning was usually the best time to visit.

He left the windows down and told Walks-On he'd be back in a few minutes. Inside was the stilled hush of important things happening in a routine manner. Several elderly patients sat in the upholstered chairs arranged around the vinyl floor. Odors of antiseptic mixed with the faint odors of coffee and fried eggs. He stopped at the counter on the left and waited until the receptionist swung her chair around. She gave him a wide grin. “Father John! Good to see you. Who is the lucky resident you've come to visit?”

“Julia Marks. Is she available?”

“Oh, I believe so. Julia spends most of the day watching old movies on TV. You'll find her in the recreation room.” She gestured with her head toward the sunny space that opened off the far end of the reception area.

He knew the way. Most of the time it was in the recreation room where he found his parishioners who had moved into White Pines. The wall of windows that ran along the west side looked out across Riverton to the rolling brown foothills of the Wind River range. He often found the elderly Arapahos staring out the windows at the trees and roofs of Riverton, as if they were seeing the wide spaces of the reservation nestled beneath the foothills.

Julia Marks sat slumped in a padded recliner, clicker in her lap, eyes glued to the TV a few feet away. A black-and-white movie was playing, the volume so low that the buzz of conversations drowned out the staccato movie voices. Julia stared at the screen with an entranced, faraway look. A howl of triumph went up from a nearby table where three gray-haired women and a bald-headed man were playing cards. Father John found a vacant
chair and pushed it close to Julia. “How are you, Grandmother?” he said.

She lifted her gaze from the world unfolding on the screen and turned toward him. Her eyes were wide spaced and dark, with pinpricks of light. She had tightly curled white hair, the whitest hair he had ever seen, untouched by any other color, as if the curls had been painted onto her head, and the clear, unwrinkled skin she must have had forty years ago. “Buster?” she said. The light in her eyes flickered on and off.

“Father John. It's good to see you again.”

She waited a few seconds, her jaw moving around inaudible words. “My friend from the mission.”

“Yes, that's right.” It had been about two months since he was last here. Two of his parishioners had died six months earlier, leaving only Julia and Will Morningstar, and Will had been in a coma for weeks. He had meant to visit Julia; it had been on his list of things to do. He told her how glad he was to see her.

“Is Charlotte here?”

Charlotte? Oh yes. Charlotte, her daughter, who lived somewhere in the area. “I haven't seen her,” he said.

The old woman was looking around now, craning her neck and twisting her head sideways, eyes scanning the room. Another shout of triumph rose from the card table. A man moved past on a walker, nodding at Julia as he went. “You have a good morning, you hear?” he said.

Father John decided to take a chance. Sometimes the present faded away, but the past . . . the past had a way of remaining. “Do you remember your grandmother Mary Boyd?”

“Mary.” The old woman settled back into her chair and stared at the TV, as if she were trying to reconcile this new thought with
the story she had been lost in. It was a long moment before she looked back. “Grandmother taught me my ABCs, taught me to read. I used to slip off her lap, it was so big and round.”

“Did she talk about Butch Cassidy?”

Julia went quiet. “Who?” she said eventually.

“The outlaw, Butch Cassidy. I've heard he and your grandmother were friends.”

“Oh?” she said. “Is that a fact?” Nodding, staring at him, the light gone from her eyes. “What would she be doing with an outlaw? Charlotte!” She stretched herself in the chair and tossed her head again. “Where's Charlotte? She'll tell you Grandmother never knew any outlaws. Where is she? Charlotte!” She was shouting, and the buzz of conversation died around them.

Father John took the old woman's hand. It was as light and smooth as a moist leaf. “It's all right,” he said. “I'm sure Charlotte will be coming soon.”

A nurse in green scrubs with a stethoscope around her neck materialized beside them. “Are you all right, Julia?”

The old woman gave a series of quick nods, like a child eager to please. Then a dark shadow passed across her eyes. “You're not Charlotte,” she said.

“Your daughter called. She will be here later. Would you like to go back to your room and take a rest?”

“Oh no. I must watch my movie. I don't know what might happen. Anything might happen in the movies, you know.”

The nurse patted the old woman's shoulder. “You call if you need anything.” She bestowed a complicit smile on Father John, as though they shared something that had eluded Julia. “I'm sorry, Father, but . . .”

“I'll come by another time.” He laid Julia's hand on the armrest
and got to his feet. “I'll see you soon,” he said, but the old woman had entered into the movie story, the muted voice of a politician at a podium, waving his arms.

The nurse walked him to the reception area. “Sometimes she remembers the past as if it were yesterday,” she told him. “The next time you come, she may remember everything.”