The Story Teller (5 page)

She pressed hard on the accelerator. A quick look at her watch confirmed what she feared. She would have to race the clock all the way to the Riverton airport.

4

V
icky couldn’t get Annemarie’s story out of her mind. Settling back into her seat as the plane rose above Riverton, she went over what the girl had said: Todd suddenly appearing, unannounced, agitated about something, wanting to talk to Father John. Why would he make the long drive to the reservation unless he was in some sort of trouble? That’s when people always turned to Father John—when they were in trouble.

And then Todd had disappeared into Denver. Disappeared? Annemarie hadn’t been able to reach him for three days. That hardly constituted a disappearance. There had to be an explanation. Another girlfriend, most likely. In any case, after the meeting at the museum, she would find the young man, make sure he was okay, and explain how worried Annemarie was. Whatever was bothering Todd Harris, it wasn’t fair to keep his fiancée in the dark.

Feeling more relaxed, Vicky set her forehead against the rounded frame of the window and watched the great expanse of earth below, streaked in sunshine and shadow, melting into the rim of the sky. Wild grasses were the faintest of green now, but she knew they would soon turn brown in the summer’s heat. There was the occasional farm, the clump of reddish-brown buildings, the emerald circles of cultivated fields, but most of the
land was open, the way it had been when her people lived here in the Old Time.

She imagined another June, the time to move the village from the lee of the mountains onto the plains, where the great herds of buffalo could be found. The chiefs riding in the lead, women behind, with infants in cradle boards strapped to their backs, dogs in the rear, pulling travois piled high with clothing and household items, the warriors galloping back and forth, guarding the line. Somewhere below, among the cottonwood trees along the banks of the shimmering streams, the long line halted. The men tethered the ponies, the women scurried about setting up the tipis. They would think the shadow passing overhead was an eagle.

The squawk of static, the pilot’s voice droning through the cabin called her back to the present. Ten more minutes, and they would land in Denver. In the distance now, Vicky could see the skyscrapers gleaming silver in the sun, the tentacles of the city reaching onto the plains, the miniature cars and trucks rolling along ribbons of highways. To the west rose the massive white peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Then the airport came into view, its white Teflon roof peaked like the mountains, like the tipis in the villages of her people.

Forty minutes later Vicky gripped the steering wheel of the rented Taurus, heading west on I-70, a highway she had driven often in the years she had spent in Denver. It seemed different now. More automobiles, new exit and entrance-ramps, or had she just forgotten the rush of a city, the steady
brrr
of traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes? She banked through a series of turns that locals called the “mousetrap” and joined the stream of cars flowing south on I-25, past the warehouses and industrial buildings, past the run-down motels and country-western bars. The highway had once been a trail her people had followed as they moved along the front range of the mountains.

At Speer Boulevard, she swung south and headed across the South Platte River, then turned into downtown Denver. Locked in traffic now, she inched along sidewalks crowded with business people, briefcases in hand. Another turn, and she passed the small white building with marble columns marching across the entrance. She left the Taurus in a parking lot a block away.

The sun burrowed into her bare arms and the asphalt burned through the soles of her pumps as she strode through the intersection, the din of the city—horns and sirens, the growl of engines—rising around her. She looked just like the throngs of lawyers and secretaries and bankers, she thought: tailored linen dress, hair pulled back and clipped at the nape of her neck. But she was not one of them. Not because her skin was brown—she passed others with brown skin—but because she belonged to this place. This was where the villages of the
Hinono eino
had stood, where her people had traded with whites coming onto the land, where her people had died, their blood soaking the earth that lay buried under asphalt and piles of brick.

She passed the small shops with designer clothes draped in the windows, the glass-walled entrance to a hotel, the revolving doors into a skyscraper. Huddled next door, like a survivor of another age, reluctant to announce its presence, was the Denver Museum of the West.

The gray-haired woman behind the doughnut-shaped desk in the lobby seemed intent on shuffling a stack of brochures. After snapping the last of them into place, she raised her eyes. “Yes?” she said, a prolonged drawl.

“Vicky Holden. I’m here to see Rachel Foster.”

The woman swiveled toward the phone on the right curve of the desk. There was the tapping of keys, a few muffled words into the receiver, and she swiveled back. “Ms. Foster’s expecting you. Third floor. You can take
the elevator.” She tilted her head toward the alcove behind the desk.

Thanking her, Vicky started toward the alcove, her heels clicking on the marble floor. An archway yawned on the right, and in the gallery beyond stood a large canvas tipi, white as snow. She walked through the archway and slowly circled the tipi, studying the geometric designs painted in blues and reds and yellows on the sides: lines and circles, pyramids and diamonds symbolizing the earth and mountains, the villages, the paths individuals must follow. She tried to read the story the symbols told, but it was difficult. Circles inside squares, diamonds and crosses juxtaposed, vertical and horizontal lines interlocked—all shading the meaning. Mostly women wrote in symbols laden with meaning, whereas men wrote in realistic, detailed pictographs. She wondered about the woman who, more than a hundred years earlier, had painstakingly drawn the prayer symbols for her family.

Beyond the tipi was another archway with a sign at the entrance:
THE STORY OF THE CHEYENNE MASSACRE AT SAND CREEK.
Vicky flinched. Her people had also been killed at Sand Creek. Slowly she walked into the large room with polished wood floors and glass-fronted display cases. In the case on her left stood a miniature village: circles of white tipis, tiny figures of women tending kettles over glowing fires, men wrapped in buffalo robes, hunched down, cleaning rifles and stringing bows, boys herding ponies into a corral. Traces of snow littered the ground; ice crusted the creek winding through the village. It was winter when the massacre occurred, November 29, 1864, a day burned into the memory of her people.

Vicky moved toward the next display, drawn and repelled at the same time. The painted horizon depicted a gray dawn, a hazy sun lifting out of the east, and the Colorado Cavalry, Third Regiment massed on the bluff
overlooking the sleeping village. She instinctively stepped back, wanting to flee the malevolent force about to hurtle toward her. Pivoting around, she walked out of the galleries toward the elevator.

On the third floor, she stopped at the door with the small sign that read
RACHEL FOSTER, CURATOR.
She rapped once before letting herself into an office about the size of her own, but much neater: books perfectly aligned in bookcases, two leather-slung wood chairs in front of a desk, its polished surface clear except for a computer. A woman in her late forties, Vicky guessed, leaned toward the monitor, red-tipped fingers tapping the keyboard. Stylishly cut blond hair brushed the shoulders of her red suit jacket. There was a slash of red at her lips. “I’ve been waiting for you,” Rachel Foster said, lifting her eyes slowly from the monitor.

Vicky approached the desk, feeling like a kid called into the principal’s office. “I’m afraid I was caught by your exhibit on the Sand Creek Massacre,” she said, a kind of apology, although she felt little inclination to apologize.

The curator waved her toward one of the leather chairs. “Quite an exceptional exhibit,” she said. But not a valid excuse for keeping her waiting, the tone implied.

“We were there, too,” Vicky said, taking the seat and setting her handbag at her feet, the briefcase in her lap.

“I beg your pardon?” Rachel Foster lowered her chin, eyes squinting in coldness. For an instant Vicky recalled the look that used to come into the eyes of her ex-husband, Ben, as he leaned against the fence of a corral and assessed a wild mare: how much trouble to break her?

She blinked back the memory. “Cheyennes weren’t the only people massacred at Sand Creek,” she said. “Many of my people died there.”

A mixture of exasperation and impatience came into
the curator’s eyes. “A highly contested theory,” she said. “Professor Bernard Good Elk consulted with us on the exhibit. He’s head of Native American studies at Regis University. Surely you know him?” She gave a little wave as if it weren’t important, and hurried on: “He has devoted many years to studying the massacre. His research supports the theory that only Cheyennes were there. About five hundred, I believe he told me. One hundred and sixty-three were killed.”

Vicky swallowed hard. Almost one third of the dead—fifty men, women, and children—were Arapaho. Was everything to be taken from her people, even their history? She saw the implications: if only Cheyennes were at Sand Creek, then only Cheyennes would have a right to the Colorado lands promised by Congress to the tribes that were there. She said, “Perhaps Professor Good Elk should come to the Wind River Reservation and interview the descendants of the Arapaho survivors.”

The curator gave her a wan, forced smile. “I’m sure he would have done so, had he thought it productive.” Clasping her hands on the desk in front of her, she said, “You mentioned on the phone there was some sort of problem.”

Vicky extracted the blue folder from her briefcase, then let the briefcase slide to her feet. It made a muffled thud against the carpet. “We have reason to believe the inventory of Arapaho artifacts may be incomplete,” she said, locking eyes with the woman on the other side of the desk.

Gripping the arms of her chair, as if to steady herself in a sudden gust of wind, Rachel Foster blurted, “Incomplete? You can’t be serious. I personally oversaw the compilation of the inventory myself. We furnished inventories to numerous tribes, and I can assure you they are all complete. Our consultant was another highly respected
expert—Professor Emil Coughlin. You must know him.”

Vicky shook her head. She had never heard of any of these so-called experts.

The curator went on, eyes narrowing in impatience. “Don’t know him? A highly regarded ethnohistorian? Why, he is known around the world for his expertise on the artifacts of the Plains Indians.”

“That may be true,” Vicky said in her courtroom tone, calm and firm. “But the inventory does not include the Arapaho ledger book.”

“A ledger book? In our collections?” The curator’s voice rose in incredulity. “Why would you suppose that, Ms. Holden? Indeed, I’ve never heard that an Arapaho ledger book even exists.”

Vicky drew in a long breath, her hands gripping the folder. This was the difficult part: a ninety-three-year-old man, a story—all the evidence she had. She said, “One of our elders saw the ledger book on display in the museum in 1920.”

“Nineteen-twenty?” The other woman threw back her head and laughed. The sound was dry and strained. “Is this some kind of joke? Some old man says he saw a ledger book here almost eighty years ago?”

“Exactly.”

“It could have been another museum.”

“He believes it was this museum,” Vicky said.

The curator set her elbows on the desk and brought her red-tipped fingers together in a tent below her chin. “Please, Ms. Holden,” she began, amusement in her eyes, “you can’t expect me to take this seriously. This is beyond what NAGPRA requires.”

Vicky held the other woman’s gaze. “We have a right to know the whereabouts of our ledger book.”

Rachel Foster said nothing for a moment. The amused expression faded into grimness. “I take your inference that we are hiding something quite personally,”
she said finally. “My job is to know every item in the museum’s collection, and I do my job very well.” Suddenly she was on her feet. “Come with me.” She swung around the desk and started toward the door.