Dust Devil (16 page)

"You are stubborn, Turquoise Woman,” he said. But she noticed in spite of her lightheadedness that he did not leave her and that he had addressed her in Indian fashion. Then she let herself sink into a comatose sleep.

The jarring awoke her. Lario’s horse scrambled up the steep side of a
barranca
like a mule deer and followed a narrow trail hemmed in on both sides by sheer sandstone walls. The trail wound about, ribboning ever upward until it emerged into one of the many small canyons hidden in the Sandia Mountains. There, thickets of cedar, aspen, and pine partially hid the score or so of brush-covered shelters. The sounds of domesticity — children laughing, someone chopping wood, women calling to each other, and a dog barking — reached her ears.

Lario halted before one hogan nestled among a grove of firs. "You insisted on coming,” he said, his breath warm against her ear. "So you must be content to exist as we do. You will not be welcomed here by many because of the treatment suffered at the hands of your people. Never leave the hogan unless one of my family or Adala is with you.”

But Rosemary was impatient. "Stephanie—where is my baby?” she demanded.

Lario dismounted. "Our baby,” he corrected, "is within.”

He did not attempt to help her down but strode toward the hogan. She heard the joyous cry, "Lario!” and saw the young girl, Adala, step from the hogan’s entrance. Even in the evening’s dusk, she could see the radiance that suffused the girl’s face. Then Rosemary saw that Adala held Stephanie in her arms, and her anger exploded that another woman should hold her child. She tried to shove herself from the horse’s back, but her skirts impeded her. She fell to the earth with a thud that knocked the breath out of her.

There was a sudden silence, as if each Indian there saw the Anglo woman’s ignominious fall. Worse, when
she scrambled to her knees she saw the laughter in Lario’s eyes.

Always those laughing
mocking eyes. How she hated them now!

But
his well-defined lips were straight and firm when he turned back to Adala and took Stephanie, sharing words with the Indian girl that made her smile before she re-entered the hogan. Then in English to the baby, "It is time you knew your father, Sin-they.”

"Her name is Stephanie!” Rosemary sputtered, advancing on Lario. A mixture of rage and indignation coursed through her. Lario held the chubby infant out of her reach, and Stephanie, unlike Jamie, laughed at the action. She held out tiny hands to clutch the bright crimson bandana about Lario’s head, and Rosemary was furious that her child should betray her by taking a liking for the enemy; for Rosemary, peeved, refused to admit that he was also the child’s father. He was simply The Enemy.

Lario handed the child to her. "Sin-they needs to be fed,” he said and pushed aside the blanket over the doorway, stepping inside.

She
had no recourse but to follow, hobbling on painfully sore feet. She recognized Lario’s mother and grandfather, who were in the midst of eating, scooping with their fingers some kind of shredded meat and thick gravy from broken pottery. She nodded her head in response to their own polite nods and wondered if they realized she was to be their unwilling guest and if Lario had informed them for how long. His sister, Toysei, glanced up from where she spread a blanket over her son then looked away, her face as expressionless as Lario’s could be.

Two young braves, who Rosemary learned were Lario’s brothers, Hasteen and Guayo, reposed on the far side of the
firepit, seemingly oblivious to her presence as they accepted the food Adala ladled into their bowls. The older, Hasteen, wore a mustache, which gave lie to the dictum Indians had no facial hair. Guayo possessed the same fine features as Lario — a younger version of Lario at eighteen and therefore lacking the strength of character found in Lario’s face.

Adala handed Lario a bowl of the delicious-smelling meat with a shy smile and looked to Rosemary in question. "Do you wish to eat?” Lario asked her.

She could barely control the saliva that threatened to overflow her lips. Sweet Jesus, was she hungry—and thirsty! "Aye,” she managed to whisper.

She settled herself far from the light of the fragrant fire that burned in the hogan’s center. As if in response to Lario’s question of eating, Stephanie began howling, and
automatically Rosemary’s fingers went to the buttons of her blouse, only to halt. No eyes watched her, but suddenly she was embarrassed in front of Lario. This is ridiculous, she thought. I have known this man’s body. I have carried his child. Still, she maneuvered herself so that her back was partially to the others and put Stephanie to her breast.

Adala came over and silently placed a bowl before Rosemary.
She forced herself to return the young woman’s soft smile. After all, it was not Adala’s fault that she and Stephanie were there against her will.

Soon Stephanie’s eyelids grew heavy.
She laid the child on the blanket that Adala had provided and hungrily turned to her now-cold stew. When she looked up again, Lario and his brothers had gone and their mother and grandfather were already stretched out on the blankets to sleep, their feet toward the warming fire. Toysei and Adala talked quietly. Rosemary did not doubt but they discussed her. But she was too tired to really care what they said or what they planned to do with her. She stretched out alongside of Stephanie and, despite her painfully throbbing feet, was half asleep before her eyelids even closed.

She felt as if she could sleep for a solid week, but something awoke her during the night although there was no noise to interrupt the deep silence of the hogan. Embers smoldered in the firepit. From outside there wafted the sweet smell of the spring night’s dampness as the hogan’s flap fell in place.

She rolled to one elbow and glanced about the darkened shelter. Two blankets were empty. To her left lay Toysei. But among the sleeping forms clustered about the firepit that of Adala’s was not to be found . . . only two empty blankets.

Rosemary turned on her stomach and buried her face in
her arms. If the other empty blanket belonged to Lario — well, it was none of her business. Soon she and Stephanie would be gone from those miserable hovels, would return to the secure warmth of her beloved Cambria.

CHAPTER 18

A hot, stiff August wind blew down through Arizona’s deep Canyon de Chelly, and Rosemary turned her face away from its fumacelike blast. She had just filled two large clay water jars, or
tus
as Lario insisted she call them, using the Navajo word, and they weighed heavily in her arms.

As she started back up the stream’s rugged, rocky bank toward the newest
rancheria
, she reflected disgustedly that in the space of four months of living with the Navajo she was daily becoming more like an Indian woman. She wore the clumsy silver-buttoned knee-high moccasins with the calico skirt and hot velveteen blouse; she braided her hair in rolls over her ears; she was even learning to weave blankets and rugs on the upright loom made from the forked branch of a juniper tree, though she had not the patience to struggle with the stubborn warp or the monotonous spinning.

She crossed to the hogan Adala had helped her build. The young girl had worked patiently with
her, showing how the thick evergreen brush was interwoven with the bent frame of stout pinon poles, leaving enough open space for the smoke hole in the roof’s center.

When she had finished the hogan,
she looked in through the wide door, seeing the cool darkness flecked with tiny spots of light and the sun shafting warmly through the smoke hole, and she was proud of her accomplishment. The hogan had not the strength and security of Cambria, but nevertheless it was something she had made herself.

The hogan belonged to Lario, for it had become obvious the first week of Rosemary’s arrival that the one hogan would not be large enough to accommodate the entire family.

"But why must I stay in your hogan?” she had demanded of Lario after he had informed her of his plans. She had trailed him to a stump some two hundred feet away from his mother’s hogan, and they were alone for the first time, if the spotted dog that yapped at her heels and the three naked children that played in the stream just beyond could be discounted.

"I want my daughter with me.” He resumed sharpening his hunting knife with the whetstone, as if she were dismissed, and that irritated her even more.

"But I am not your wife.”

His keen eyes fixed on her. "I do not treat you as such, do
I?”

Instantly she realized he had trapped her. "No. But others think that.”

"Do you wish it so?”

Rosemary stamped her foot in frustration. "No. You will have Adala, so do not be planning to add me to your list of wives!”

"Ahhh.” His mouth quirked in comprehension at her defensive action. "But Adala had no place to go after the soldiers captured her parents last month,” he pointed out. "And she is not yet my wife.”

"You are refusing to understand me!” she had exclaimed and spun away, leaving him
with his wicked smile.

She
shifted the water jars in her arms as she reached the hogan and gingerly set them down before she began to string one jar from a willow rafter to keep the insects out. She was relieved that she would be alone for another night, for Lario had gone out on one of his "rescue missions” as she referred to them.

She would not have to lie awake on her own pallet and hear the steady cadence of
his breathing. She wondered if sometimes he thought about that one night they had made love during the sandstorm . . . and if he still desired her. Was it their daughter who slept at her side that prevented him from coming to her in the night — or was it his love for the delicate, lovely Adala?

And from there Rosemary’s thoughts conjured visions of Lario’s dusky hands and generous lips making love to Adala as he had to her, and she felt the bite of jealousy. Ridiculous! she reminded herself. Lario is but an Indian. It is only that he is educated that makes him seem more
— more what? Human?

How bigoted she was! Why not admit she wanted him? But she knew she never could submit to
him, could never be one of many wives, as was the Navajo practice. If nothing else there was always the specter of the Sepoy Rebellion to loom between them.

She
realized how absurd her speculation was, for Lario had never intimated he wanted her for a wife. Or that he even wanted her. He had wanted her only for his daughter’s nursemaid.  She was angry with herself, realizing that even with him gone most of the time, she still thought about him. It would be better, she chided herself, to think instead about escaping from the canyon and making her way back to Cambria and Jamie.

She should try while Lario was away. In another day or so, she knew he would be returning, probably bringing back several dozen more Indians that had been captives bound for the Bosque Redondo Reservation. But she might as well be separated from Cambria by an ocean so little did she know about finding her way back. Better to wait and hope for rescue.

And then the thought struck her that Lario might not return. What would become of her and Stephanie? Would the Navajo turn on her then?

But for some reason she felt that Lario would always come back. He and his brother Hasteen were fighters, survivors. The youngest brother she worried about more, for Guayo was neither as powerfully built as Lario nor as experienced as the rebellious Hasteen in battle. Guayo was a shepherd by nature whose gentle manner earned
her reluctant friendship. She had even given him the bracelet Lario had made for her that first Christmas after Guayo saved Stephanie when she tumbled into a mountain stream.

Having strung both water jars from the rafters,
she stepped outside in search of Adala, who had kindly offered to take Stephanie with her for the day to tend sheep. Rosemary was coming to genuinely like the young Indian girl, though she could not understand her complacent acceptance of another woman sharing her future husband – for surely the young girl’s imagination must assume that with Lario and Rosemary sharing the same hogan, they also shared sex, as well. But then that was the way the Indian women were brought up from childhood. Of all the tribes, the Navajo men were most notorious for their polygamy. Rosemary was sure if she loved a man as Adala loved Lario she would scratch the woman’s eyes out. Yet Adala treated her as a
deezi
, a sister.

She
shielded her eyes from the bright sunlight. More and more hogans now dotted the canyon as the numbers of liberated Indians brought back by Lario and Manuelito mushroomed. But only a few women and children moved among the hogans, the rest still tending the sheep in the higher ranges where the grass grew more tender. She thought about taking the opportunity for privacy to go down to the cold, rushing stream and bathe, but she had no sooner returned to her hogan for the
amole
root the Indians used for soap when there was a commotion from the direction where the ponies were picketed.

Once more she stepped outside. The men were back! Seven or eight new Indians, mostly Navajo, but
she recognized two as Apaches, were looking about the rancheria at what would be their new home. Lario strode toward the hogan with his two brothers falling in behind him. Hasteen raised his fist in an angry gesture and said something that she could not catch. Guayo turned away as the men reached their mother’s hogan, but Hasteen caught sight of Rosemary and pointed at her, saying something now that she, with her limited knowledge of Navajo, did not comprehend, then . . . "You are wrong, Lario!”