The Lost Bird (24 page)

He’d picked Megan up from the hospital in the morning and brought her back to the mission, where he left her at the guest house with instructions to rest. They both understood that she had no intention of doing so. He had been in his office about an hour when she showed up, complaining that the walls were closing in and that she preferred to work rather than die of boredom. The morning had slipped by him: phone calls, people dropping by, and his own unsuccessful attempts to get some work done. He managed to complete the arrangements for Father Joseph’s memorial Mass and the feast that would follow. Finally, after a quick lunch of tuna-fish sandwiches with Megan at the residence, he’d driven out of the mission and headed west on Seventeen-Mile Road.

Now he wheeled into the dirt yard in front of the house. Esther Tallman was pulling laundry off a line
that stretched between the cottonwoods on one side. The sheets and towels billowed in the wind, like the sails of a boat slipping across the plains. He let himself out and started toward her, holding down the brim of his cowboy hat in the wind. She stuffed the last towel into a basket at her feet. Stepping past her, he picked up the basket. “Let me give you a hand!” he shouted over the wind.

He followed the old woman up the cement steps to the little stoop at the front door. She stepped inside and waited as he brought in the basket and deposited it on the floor. Then she closed the door against the noise of the wind. A hush fell over the small living room. Faint smells of detergent and stale coffee wafted through the door to the kitchen in the rear of the house. “Get you some coffee or cola?” Esther asked, heading toward the door.

He said a cola sounded good, tossed his hat onto the sofa, and sat down next to it. In a moment she returned with two cans of cola. She handed him one and took the chair next to the television. After straightening her skirt over her knees—a prim, nunlike gesture—she pulled the tab on her can, took a long drink, and fixed him with a steady gaze. “It’s good to see you, Father. Don’t get many visitors out this way.”

He followed the old woman’s lead and kept up his end of small talk: there was a cool bite to the wind; winter was coming. Finally, the exchange of pleasantries over, he set his cola can on the small table next to the sofa and leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, hands folded between his knees. “Grandmother,” he said in a supplicant tone, like that of a sinner, “I’d like to know about Father Joseph.”

A questioning look came into the old woman’s face. “He came by here last week.”

Father John nodded. “What can you tell me about when he was here before?”

“Like I tol’ you, he was a real good man.” The old woman’s features relaxed, like a mask slipping back into place. “He come here every day while Thomas and me and the kids was havin’ our bad time.” The dark eyes swept the room with an expectant look, as if a dead husband and grown children might materialize. “Sat right where you’re sitting. Had the sense not to say anything. Just grieved with us, real quiet, and tried to take some of the pain off us. That was when we lost the boy. He was our last baby. We’d thought we was too old to be havin’ any more, then we found out another baby was on the way. Well”—she paused, gathering the memories—“Thomas was like that stallion we had out in the pasture, prancing ’round, proud as all get out.”

The old woman took in a long breath and continued: “Guess that’s what made it so hard when the baby got that meningitis. Doctor took it real hard, too. There was tears in his eyes when he come into my room that mornin’ and told me our baby was dead.”

Father John nodded slowly and gave the woman a smile of sympathy. “Where was the baby born?”

“Over there in Lander at that real nice clinic. We thought that was where I oughta go, me bein’ older and all.”

“The Markham Clinic?”

“How’d you know? Dr. Markham’s been gone a long time. He’s real famous now.”

“Do you remember Dawn James, the nurse who worked for him?”

“Dark-haired girl, small, with strong, comforting hands.” The woman gave a quick nod. “Seemed pretty smart. Knew what she was doin’. She was a real good nurse. I felt bad when I read about her shooting herself down by the river. Guess she just couldn’t take it—workin’ around all the babies that died. There was a lot that year.”

Father John waited a moment before he asked how many babies had died.

The old woman threw her head back and stared at the ceiling. “Twelve, fifteen. All lost because of that bad water. The doctor said don’t drink the water. But where was we supposed to get good water? There wasn’t fancy water for sale, those days. A lot of women was lucky. Maybe they was able to do like the doctor said. Their babies was fine. It was hard seein’ those chubby babies on the res and watchin’ them grow up.”

“What else happened, Grandmother?” Father John heard the persistence in his voice. “What did you hear about Dawn James and Father Joseph? Did anything happen that they would have wanted to keep secret?”

The woman’s expression dissolved into puzzlement. “What’re you gettin’ at, Father?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he admitted. He didn’t want to explain how Dawn James’s sister was convinced the woman had been murdered. “It must have been a sad time for Father Joseph. I can’t understand why he wanted to come back.”

“That’s easy, Father. He never forgot us. He wanted to see how all us folks that lost our babies was makin’ out.”

“Who else did he visit?”

She listed the names of several families he didn’t
know. Then she said, “A couple families are all dead now. Some others left the res. Went off to Denver or Cheyenne or Casper or someplace that didn’t remind ’em of what they lost. Lucas Holden—that’s Ben’s father—died some years back. Cyrus Elk’s been dyin’ up at Riverton Hospital.”

Father John swallowed hard. He’d intended to ask Father Joseph to stop by the hospital and see the old man. The request would have been unnecessary. If Joseph had been visiting the families still on the res, he’d probably visited Cyrus.

Father John thanked the woman for the gift of information. Then he picked up his hat and got to his feet. Motioning her to stay in her chair, he let himself out. He didn’t know much more than when he’d come, other than that it seemed Dr. Markham and Dawn James were good at what they did.

23

I
t was late afternoon when Father John turned in to the mission. As he came around Circle Drive, he spotted the Bronco angled in front of the administration building. He parked beside it, scarcely believing Vicky was there. She must have learned something about Joseph’s murder—a legitimate reason to return. He was immeasurably glad. There was so much he wanted to talk over with her.

As he let himself out, a pickup slowed around the drive and pulled up alongside him. Leonard leaned out the window. “You lookin’ for Vicky, I seen her walkin’ that way.” He waved at the alley between the administration building and the church.

Father John started down the narrow alley. Cottonwood leaves littered the ground and snapped under his boots. Branches swayed overhead in the breeze, a flash of golds and coppers against the blue sky. Vicky was walking ahead, wearing blue jeans and denim jacket, the black bag dangling from one shoulder. Walks-On trotted on his three legs at her side. Suddenly the dog turned and ran toward him. He reached down and patted his head as they walked along.

Vicky had turned around and was waiting. “I’ve got
to talk to you in private, John,” she said when he reached her. The dark eyes flashed with intensity. “Can we walk down to the river?”

He set one hand lightly on her arm and guided her back in the direction she’d been heading. Whatever she wanted to talk about was important. He could feel the tension in her. It didn’t surprise him that she wanted to walk to the Little Wind River, where the Arapahos had camped more than a hundred years ago when they had first come to the reservation. It was a sacred space.

They started down a path that wound through stands of cottonwoods and a tangle of red-gold underbrush that spread like smoldering fire beneath the trees. The last of the day’s sunshine dappled the path ahead where Walks-On trotted, tail wagging, his coat a shimmer of gold.

When they reached the riverbank, Vicky stopped and faced him. Her expression was one of barely controlled fury. “What do you know about the black market for infants?” she asked, the tone hard and tense.

“What are you talking about?”

She turned away, as if to gather her thoughts, and stared out across the river at the endless stretch of the gold-drenched plains. The sound of lapping water mingled with the shush of the wind. Finally she looked back. “I believe there was a black market operating here in 1964.”

He was quiet. A black market for babies? The year fifteen infants died? The same year Father Joseph had been pastor of the mission? He took her arm again and led her to a fallen tree trunk. Vicky dropped down on the nubby surface, and he sat next to her. Walks-On stretched at their feet. “Tell me what you’ve found.”

“The infants were buried in sealed caskets,” she said. “I checked with Aunt Rose and called three elders. They all said the elders performed the funeral rituals—the sacred painting and cedar smudging—on the caskets, not the bodies. The families never saw the dead babies. I spent the morning at the library checking the newspapers. The caskets were sealed.”

“Sealed!” Father John said. It was incredible. Beyond imagining. How could such a thing be? From his own experiences—how many funeral services?—the family determined whether the casket would be opened or closed. “The families had the right to see the bodies,” he said.

“The right?” Vicky’s eyes widened in surprise. “You can talk about rights, John. You’re a white man. Thirty-five years ago the people didn’t know they had any rights. The coroner said the caskets had to be sealed. He was the authority—a white authority. No one would have questioned him.”

Father John glanced toward the river, his mind searching for some logical, rational explanation. “Maybe the coroner ordered the caskets sealed to protect the people,” he said. “The water was polluted. It must have carried some infectious virus. Esther Tallman told me her infant died of meningitis.”

Vicky got to her feet and started carving out a small circle in front of him. “All the babies supposedly died of meningitis or some other infectious disease,” she said. “I found the obituaries in the newspapers.” She stopped pacing, dug a piece of folded paper out of her jeans pocket, and handed it to him.

Father John unfolded the paper and glanced through the names. Fifteen infants. Tallman, Holden, Red Feather, other families he knew. Still others he
had never heard of. He looked up at Vicky. She had started pacing again. She always paced, he knew, when she was angry or upset.

“The water was polluted all right,” she was saying. “There were several articles about it in the newspapers. The county health department sent out a couple of investigators and did some tests. They concluded the contamination came from the old gold mines in the mountains or from the uranium processing mill that had been here in the fifties. A handy explanation that no one questioned back then. The company that owned the mill denied that possibility, of course.”

Vicky stopped pacing and locked eyes with him. “The water wasn’t contaminated by chemicals. It was contaminated by raw sewage from a housing development near Ethete.” She glanced away a moment. “The county officials had to know. They looked the other way.”

Suddenly Vicky resumed pacing, creating a path between a stand of trees and the fallen trunk. “Don’t you see, John? Jeremiah Markham took advantage of the contamination. There’s always been a black market for healthy, white-looking babies. Couples that can’t adopt any other way, desperate for a child, for a family. Babies are sold for fifty, a hundred thousand dollars today. How much did they bring thirty-five years ago? Fifteen, twenty thousand? A fortune. For that kind of money, there have always been people willing to supply the babies. Doctors like Jeremiah Markham, running private clinics. Lawyers willing to produce false birth certificates and relinquishment papers and other documents to satisfy the courts. Whole organizations devoted to acquiring healthy babies and placing them through independent adoptions with well-heeled couples.”