The Ghost Walker (4 page)

T
he body preyed on his mind all night. Father John managed to snatch only a few intervals of sleep before getting up at about five. He alternated saying daily Mass with Father Peter Roach, the seventy-two-year-old Jesuit the Provincial had called from retirement six months ago to help out at St. Francis. This morning was Father John’s turn. He showered, dressed, and headed down the dark stairs. He flipped on the little light over the stove, which turned the kitchen into a blur of shadows.

After brewing a pot of strong coffee, he poured some into a mug and sat down at the round wood table, going over last night’s events again in his mind. Everything about the body was unknown: the name, the face, the terrible fate that had brought it to the ditch, the disappearance. There were no explanations, only questions.

A couple of times the three-legged golden retriever he’d acquired last fall—or who had acquired him, as Father Peter insisted—struggled off the rug in the corner and shoved a cold nose into his hand, then flopped back down and resumed snoring. Father John had named the dog Walks-on-Three-Legs. Walks-on, for short. He felt a kinship with this animal who had also arrived at St. Francis Mission not quite whole.

At about six-thirty, he let Walks-on go out for a few
minutes while he filled the dog’s bowl with canned meat and rock-hard chow. The quiet of the house was broken by the sounds of the dog slurping and chomping his breakfast as Father John shrugged into his parka and pulled on his gloves. Setting his cowboy hat low on his head, he let himself out the front door and plunged into the frigid morning.

The buildings of St. Francis Mission rose out of the snow around Circle Drive like a miniature village under a Christmas tree: the white stucco church, its bell tower floating among the ice-crusted Cottonwood branches; the stone administration building where his and Father Peter’s offices were; the cement-block Eagle Hall, half gym, half meeting rooms; the one-room guest house; the old school—the mission’s first building. He’d once suggested demolishing it, but the elders had raised such an outcry he’d ended up apologizing for the suggestion. St. Francis was like the reservation itself: What was here belonged here. It was a sacred space, enclosed by four sacred spaces: the Wind River, the Little Wind River, the mountains, and the sky.

On the far side of Circle Drive stood the new elementary school with a white stucco entry in the shape of a tipi. Behind the school lay the baseball field where, his first summer here, he had marked off the baseball diamond, carefully measuring ninety feet between the bases, and had started the St. Francis Eagles. The kids needed something to do in the summer, he had told himself, but he knew he needed a baseball team to coach.

The first daylight glowed in the east, spreading fingers of pink and orange and magenta across the silver sky. Last night’s snowstorm had passed over, leaving the sky clear and luminescent, a field of blinking stars. In the north was
Nahax,
the morning star, always the last
to rise. Father John had the sense that St. Francis was gripped in the same winter stillness that had lain over Arapaho camps on the plains in the Old Time.

The stillness of the plains had been the first thing he had noticed when he came here, after an eight-month stint in Grace House. The silence had seemed loud then; he sometimes thought he could hear it. Yet it was unlike the noise of Boston where he’d grown up. As a kid, making his rounds alone in the early morning, tossing the
Globe
onto the little stoops of the red-brick buildings that lined the streets of his neighborhood, he had been engulfed in noise—dogs barking, engines roaring, tires squealing, a baby crying. Noise had seemed natural then, but it was silence that was natural. It was only in silence, the Arapahos believed, that you could hear the Divine drawing near.

He began the Mass as daylight stole through the side windows of the church and played across the faces of the old people at prayer. The old faithfuls, he called them. The elders and grandmothers who climbed into pickups every day, no matter the temperature, and drove thirty or forty miles across the reservation to Mass. John and Mary Red Deer were here, and old Donald Lightheart in his usual place in the first pew, and Eddie Walsh, rosary beads twisted through gnarled fingers, and five or six others.

This was their church, the Arapahos’. They had built it and painted the walls with sacred symbols: the lines and circles that symbolized the journey of life. Above the front door they had painted the figure of the crucified Christ, the staked warrior, like the warriors in the Old Time who had staked themselves to the ground so that enemies might vent their anger upon them while the people escaped. On the wall next to the altar, they had painted a yellow daffodil, so that a flower might always grace the altar, even in winter. Father John knew
the Arapahos considered the Mass only one of the many ways to worship the Great Mystery, the Shining Man Above. There couldn’t be too many. He offered Mass for the body in the ditch.

By the time Mass ended, daylight filled the church. Back in the sacristy, Father John removed the green chasuble he’d worn this morning—green symbolized life and hope—while Leonard Bizzel, the caretaker, placed the chalice and prayer books in the cabinet. Leonard hadn’t reached fifty yet, but he moved with the deliberation of an old man. Every act received the same minute attention. “Bad things goin’ on,” he said.

The Arapaho had obviously skipped the preliminaries and gotten to what was bothering him: the dead body. The moccasin telegraph must have set a record for sprinting news across the reservation, Father John thought. Then he remembered Leonard’s son was on the BIA police force.

“That ghost don’t get a proper burial, it’s gonna cause plenty of trouble.” Leonard lingered on each word, as if it were an oracular pronouncement. “How come you seen the body?”

“The Toyota broke down on Rendezvous Road. I was walking to the highway to hitch a ride when I spotted it,” Father John explained as he hung the vestments in the closet.

“Ghost’s causing trouble already.”

“A radiator hose popped.”

“Ghost did it,” Leonard said.

*    *    *

Father John retraced his steps to the priests’ residence under a sky the color of blue-tinted glass. The snow sparkled in the early morning sun. He tried to push thoughts of the body to the edge of his mind by mentally
ticking off the day’s schedule: bills to pay, phone calls to return, meetings to arrange, people to counsel. He should call one of the parish priests to find out about last night’s meeting. Scratch that idea, he decided. The bishop’s representative would eventually call him with the news plus a reprimand for not attending.

What he did want to do was drive out to Joe Deppert’s place to see how the old man was doing after his surgery. And Banner expected him at Fort Washakie to meet with the local FBI agent. Any report of a dead body on the reservation meant the FBI would be involved; major crimes in Indian country fell in FBI jurisdiction. But how the day went depended on when Jake Littlehorse returned the Toyota.

He could smell bacon frying as he came up the stairs to the concrete stoop in front of the priests’ residence. He piled his parka and the rest of his winter gear on the bench inside the entry as Walks-on shuffled down the hallway, tail wagging, a red Frisbee in his mouth. “Later,” Father John said, patting the dog’s head before following the aroma into the kitchen.

Father Peter sat at the table, his head bent into the
Wind River Gazette.
The old man’s frizzled white hair wrapped like a muff around a circle of pink scalp. Elena was at the stove scrambling eggs and tending wide slabs of bacon in a pan. Little dots of grease spouted into the air.

Elena had been the housekeeper long before Father John had heard of St. Francis Mission. With her round face and stocky build, the old woman had the look of the Cheyenne, or the
Shyela
, as the Arapahos called the people who had traveled with them across the plains. She had once told him how her grandfather had been a Cheyenne dog soldier. When he saw the beautiful Arapaho girl who came with her family to the Cheyenne village
to trade, he had approached her father and asked permission to marry her. Her father had agreed because it was a dog soldier who asked. After they were married, they had lived with her people, and the dog soldier became one of the
Hinono eino.

“I’ll have my eggs fried this morning.” Father John bent over the old woman, unable to resist teasing her a little.

She scooped the scrambled eggs onto a plate and laid a couple of pieces of bacon alongside, flashing him the kind of exasperated look his mother had turned on him when he was a kid. “Behave yourself,” she said, handing him the plate, “or that ghost’ll shoot his ghost arrow at you and give you a big pain.”

Another second, and Elena had placed a mug of coffee on the table, scooped up the empty dishes in front of Father Peter, and sauntered over to the sink. Father John set his plate down and took the vacant chair across from the old priest, still engrossed in the
Gazette.
Father Peter was the temporary assistant at St. Francis, but temporary was beginning to look more and more permanent. There weren’t a lot of Jesuits clamoring for assignments on an Indian reservation in the middle of Wyoming.

When Father John first came to St. Francis, Father Peter had been the superior. But four years ago, a heart attack had sent the old man into retirement. There he was last fall at Ignatius Center, immersed in his beloved Shakespeare, when the Provincial had called him back.

Now their roles were reversed. Father John was the superior, responsible for operating the mission and looking after his elderly assistant. A couple of mornings when Father Peter hadn’t appeared at breakfast, he had pounded on the old man’s bedroom door, fearful of what he might find.

Father Peter pushed the newspaper toward him. “You made the front page, my boy.”

Father John glanced at the headline:
PRIEST REPORTS BODY IN DITCH
. Then his eyes ran down the column. It was all there: Father John O’Malley, pastor at St. Francis Mission, claiming to have found a dead body last evening in the ditch on Rendezvous Road. Chief Art Banner explaining how the police were unable to locate any body.

“Now, you wouldn’t be having visions, would you?” The old priest’s blue eyes twinkled, but Father John knew he was only partly kidding. Probably all the Jesuits expected him to fall off the wagon sooner or later. It had happened before.

He washed down a forkful of eggs with a sip of coffee, giving himself a moment to reply. “People will think so,” he said finally, “if the body isn’t found.” That’s what really bothered him. The fact that the body might never be found. An unknown dead person, with no one to grieve for him or remember him. No one to bury him.

“‘Alas, poor ghost.’” The old priest sighed again and looked away a moment. Then, his eyes back on Father John’s, he began waving a knobby finger. “You could’ve been dead out in that blizzard yourself.”

Father John drained the last of the coffee and smiled at the old man. “Always carry emergency supplies in the winter. I believe that was the first lesson you taught me.”

“Well, you might have fixed the pickup.”

“But then I wouldn’t have found the body.”

Father Peter leaned across the table, a mixture of mirth and irritation in his eyes. “Are you saying you don’t carry emergency supplies because they might keep you from finding dead bodies?”

“Sounds logical.” Father John pushed back his chair
and got to his feet. He liked bantering with the old Irish priest. He reminded him of his father.

“Well, I’ll tell you what’s logical,” Elena said, turning partly from the sink, hands submerged under billows of soapsuds. “That ghost wants to do his mischief. He’s not ready to go to the spirit world yet.”

4

I
t was almost noon before Jake Littlehorse wheeled the Toyota around Circle Drive, and Father John called Banner to say he was on his way to Fort Washakie. He drove Jake the thirty miles back to the garage and, after paying him what came perilously close to the last of the mission’s ready cash for January, he followed the highway across the southwestern edge of the reservation. At a junction he turned onto a narrow road that shot straight west. Every few miles, he passed a painted frame house with a propane gas tank propped on spindly metal legs in the snow-covered yard, a couple of trucks scattered about, laundry stiff on lines out back, and a TV antenna perched on the roof.