The Spirit Woman (3 page)

The wind was cold and unyielding. Laura hugged the fronts of her white coat close and stamped her boots to restore the circulation in her legs. She realized she was the only one in the Shoshone cemetery. Sloping away were rows of graves with small wooden crosses and red and yellow plastic flowers that poked out of the bare dirt and patches of snow. The Wind River Reservation crawled eastward along the valley of the Little Wind River. In the near distance, the framed houses and tribal buildings of Fort Washakie seemed to shimmer in the wind. Fort Washakie was where Sacajawea had spent her last years.

The mountains rose on the west, peaks upon peaks floating into the clouds: Bold Mountain, Mount Windy, Knife Point Mountain, Mount Sacajawea. Stretching north and south along the horizon were the farther ranges of the Rocky Mountains, which had been heaved out of the earth in some ancient cataclysm.

“You crossed the mountains, you went to the Pacific, and you returned to your people,” Laura said out loud, as if Sacajawea were beside her. The idea made her laugh, a thin, brittle sound in the wind. That would rattle her colleagues, shake them to the very roots of their academic complacency, were she to announce at a Western history conference that she had visited the grave site of Sacajawea and had
felt
the truth. The real Sacajawea was buried here, not in some unmarked grave in South Dakota.

“And how do you explain the documentary evidence, Dr. Simmons?” her colleagues would demand. “ ‘This evening the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake squaw, died of a putrid fever. She was good and the best woman in the fort . . .' John C. Luttig, clerk, Fort Manuel Lisa, 1812.” To counter this evidence, she would smile and present her colleagues with irrefutable evidence—Sacajawea's memoirs, recorded on the reservation in the 1870s and 1880s by the wife of the Indian agent. The crowning glory of the unfinished biography that Charlotte Allen had left when she died. Laura had already edited the manuscript and written the foreword. She had only to locate the memoirs to complete the biography.

The wind caught at her coat again, wrapping it around her legs. She shivered and, raising a gloved hand, dabbed at her cheek—an automatic motion now, like an old habit. She'd been checking the bruise for two weeks. Still tender, but the color had begun to fade. It had seemed hardly noticeable in the mirror this morning, after she'd applied a second coat of makeup. She badly wanted a cigarette. She made herself take a deep breath—two, three breaths—gradually feeling confident again, like her old self. Professor Toby Becker was a nightmare that had finally ended, and she was free. She had her work: the classes to teach in the history of the American West at the University of Colorado, the Sacajawea biography to complete.

She threaded her way among the graves to the blue SAAB parked in a narrow dirt path. A trace of warmth still hugged the inside of the car, even though she'd left the windows down a little to clear out the cigarette smoke. The wind squealed over the window tops as she found the pack in her purse on the seat next to the large, brown folder. She lit another cigarette, inhaled slowly, gratefully, and turned the key in the ignition. The engine burst into life. The clock on the dashboard showed 11:30.

She threw the gear into drive and headed out of the cemetery and onto the road, taking another long drag from the cigarette. She'd arranged to meet an old college friend, Vicky Holden, for lunch in Lander. Just the person to help her find Sacajawea's memoirs, which were somewhere on the reservation. She pushed down the accelerator. She didn't want to be late.

V
icky Holden watched the small woman lifting herself out of the blue SAAB on the other side of Main Street. The long, straight blond hair parted in the middle, blowing in the wind, the pinched, anxious face, the way she gripped some kind of brown package as she crossed the street, shoulders hunched inside the white coat, a tan bag swinging at her side. She wondered if she would have recognized Laura Simmons had they passed in a crowd.

The call had come yesterday—a call out of the blue—and at the sound of Laura's voice, the memories had flashed through her mind, like an old, grainy movie in fast forward. She and Laura struggling through statistics class together, meeting for lunch in the glass-brick CU-Denver cafeteria, crying through commencement. They'd stayed in touch after Laura went back east to work on her doctorate in history and she'd entered law school. Phone calls now and then, a few quick lunches whenever Laura was in town. But after Vicky had moved to Lander, close to the reservation, to open a one-woman law office, the calls had become less frequent. She'd heard Laura had taken a position in the history department at CU in Boulder.

Vicky slid out of the booth and was halfway to the door when it flew open. A gust of cold air swept over the café, rippling the red-checkered tablecloths and paper napkins. Laura closed the door and smoothed back her hair with one hand, the other still gripping what Vicky could see was a large folder.

“Laura,” Vicky said, walking over. And then she saw it—a large, purple bruise traveling like a shadow over Laura Simmons's right cheekbone. She tried not to stare as she held out her hand. Laura's hand felt as cold as an ingot inside the smoothness of the leather glove. “We have a table over here.” Vicky nodded toward the booths along the plate-glass windows.

“God, I'm glad I found you,” Laura said when they were seated across from each other. She had left the white coat draped over her shoulders, which made her seem even smaller, like a child lost in a tent of fabric. She wore a silky mauve blouse that folded loosely around her pale throat.

“It's good to see you, Laura,” Vicky heard herself saying, trying not to let her eyes rest on the bruise. She'd forgotten how much she missed some of the friends she'd made at the university, after she'd left Ben and gone to Denver thirteen years ago—a lifetime ago. The women like Laura, whose eyes didn't reflect “Indian” every time they'd looked at her. She didn't have many friends on the reservation anymore. The girls who had gone to college hadn't returned. And the others—girls like herself who'd gotten married out of high school—well, she no longer had much in common with them. She tried to push away the feeling nagging at her lately: she didn't belong anywhere. Not among her people, not in Denver.

A guffaw of laughter erupted from the cowboys in an adjoining booth, and Vicky forced her attention to the waitress who had wandered over and was scratching Laura's order on a small pad: Caesar salad, hot tea. She ordered the same.

The waitress moved away and Laura said, “I still can't believe you came back here.” She gestured toward the squat, flat-faced buildings beyond the window, the two pickups and the twenty-year-old Chevy grinding down Main Street. “You had a great career at that Denver law firm.”

Vicky laughed. Wes Nelson, the firm's managing partner, had said almost the same thing when he'd called last week and offered her a new position. “Seventy-hour weeks making rich corporations a whole lot richer,” she said. “Is that your idea of a great career?”

It will be different,
Wes Nelson's voice sounded in her head.
Indian land issues, natural resources, artifacts. A chance to help the tribes. We need you, Vicky.
She pushed the voice away. “What brings you here, Laura? You sounded anxious on the phone. Is there any trouble?”

“Trouble?” Laura gave a tight, mirthless laugh. “I think I'm finally free of trouble.” She waited until the waitress had set down twin plates of Caesar salad, two mugs of steaming water, and a couple of tea bags. Then she unfolded her napkin, smoothed it in her lap, and began unwrapping one of the bags. “I'm working on the definitive biography of Sacajawea. Actually, it's the work of another CU professor, who started it twenty years ago.”

She swished the bag into the mug in front of her a moment before taking a long sip. Light glinted in her pale, gray eyes. “It's the opportunity of a lifetime, Vicky, and it dropped into my lap. An old woman came to my office last summer and said she was Charlotte Allen's mother. Well”—a glance at the ceiling—“I'd never heard of anyone named Charlotte Allen. And get this,” Laura went on, leaning closer, “I almost sent her away! I thought the woman was looking for directions to somebody's office, and I don't consider myself a traffic cop. But for some reason, thanks to whatever spirits exist, I let her in.”

Laura lifted the flap on the folder next to her and withdrew a thick stack of papers, which she laid on the table. “This is Charlotte Allen's biography of Sacajawea,” she said. “Her mother asked me to finish it and see that it's published.” She shrugged. “A memorial, I suppose.”

“What happened to her daughter?” Vicky asked.

“Charlotte Allen was a wilderness freak.” Laura took a bite of her salad and chewed thoughtfully a moment. “Well, that wasn't exactly the way her mother put it, but she was one of those women who like to take long hikes in the mountains.” She pushed a piece of lettuce around her plate, her attention caught by an intervening thought. “Like Sacajawea, I suppose. Only Charlotte Allen set off on a long hike and didn't come back. She got lost up around Sacajawea Ridge twenty years ago. They never found her body. Maybe you heard about it?”

Vicky shook her head and took a bite of her own salad. Twenty years ago her life had revolved around Ben. A contortionist's life, bending herself to Ben's comings and goings, his moods. If a white woman had gotten lost in the mountains, she had no memory of it. People were always getting lost in the mountains.

“Do you have any idea how many biographies have been written about Sacajawea?” Laura went on. “Why, I came very close to asking the woman to leave. I'm up for tenure next year, Vicky. I have to publish something significant or my career is finished. I told the woman I had no interest in trying to publish another biography of Sacajawea.”

Suddenly Laura pushed her plate to one side. Most of the salad remained. She leaned across the table, the gray eyes darkening with intensity. A vein pulsed at the outer edge of the purple bruise. “That's when the woman told me her daughter had discovered Sacajawea's memoirs.”

Vicky held a gulp of warm tea in her mouth a moment, then swallowed. She'd grown up with stories about the old Shoshone woman who had claimed to be Sacajawea. Stories about the medal Meriwether Lewis had given her, which was buried with her son, Baptiste. The important papers she always carried to prove that she was somebody, which were buried with her adopted son, Bazil. And stories about how Bazil's grave had been exhumed in the 1920s. The papers were found, but they had turned to dust. She had never heard any stories about Sacajawea's memoirs.

Laura dug into the folder again and pulled out a red leather notebook. “Charlotte Allen was a meticulous researcher,” she said, waving the notebook over the table. “She kept a journal of her research, a record of her sources and where she located them, the names of Sacajawea's descendants she'd interviewed. Her mother found the journal wedged in the spare well in the trunk of Charlotte's car after she disappeared.”

Laura opened the notebook at the place where a bookmark protruded and began to read out loud, with the precise diction of a lecturer: “Sarah Trumbull Irwin, wife of the agent, Dr. James Irwin, spent many hours with Sacajawea. She recorded in a notebook everything Sacajawea said about the part she had played in the expedition. Mrs. Irwin placed the notebook at the agency in Fort Washakie, which was destroyed by fire in 1885. It has always been assumed that Sacajawea's memoirs were lost.”

She closed the journal. “The memoirs survived, Vicky,” Laura said, her voice rising in excitement. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

“I can imagine.” A piece of the past, Vicky thought, something that would explain what had really happened.

Laura was shaking her head, as if the meaning was too important, too precious, for anyone to grasp fully. “It will settle a hundred years of arguments about what happened to Sacajawea after the expedition. It will prove that she lived out her life with her people and told her stories when she was a very old woman.”

Vicky pushed her own plate aside. Another shout, like a hurrah, went up from the cowboys, mingling with the clatter of plates, the swish of the door opening and closing. She took a sip of the tea, lukewarm now. “I've never heard that the memoirs survived, Laura. Where do you think they are?”

Laura studied the red notebook in her hands. “The Shoshones have kept the memoirs a secret. A man Charlotte called Toussaint knows where they are,” she said. “Can you help me find him?”

The name had a familiar ring, Vicky thought. Something she'd read? Some story she'd heard? “Toussaint,” she said, trying the sound of it. “Wasn't he . . .”

“The French trader Sacajawea was married to,” Laura said quickly. “Toussaint Charbonneau. The man Charlotte met must be a descendant.”

Vicky remembered now. Once in a while the elders had mentioned the name.
He was a hard, brutal man. He beat her. Captain Clark had to interfere. And after they got back from the Pacific, Toussaint whipped her in front of his Ute wife.

“I've never heard of anyone on the res by that name,” Vicky said.

Laura pressed back against the seat and began lifting and closing the cover of the journal. Open, shut. Open, shut. “Charlotte did some research in the Shoshone cultural center. Maybe she found a document that led her to Toussaint. Or maybe one of the elders she interviewed . . .” She leaned forward again, allowing the white coat to drop behind her. The pale light filtering past the window burnished the mauve silk blouse. “Would you introduce me to them? Assure them that I intend to write the truth? Sacajawea was a great woman, Vicky. Her story must be told.”