he pressed. “Soon?”
Cassie considered this. “I’ll call back,” she conceded, thinking about the baby and what Alex had a right to know. “I’ll call when I want you to come for me.”
She wanted him to come. She wanted him. “Are we talking days? Weeks?”
Alex asked. He let a grin dance under his words. “Because after tonight, my schedule’s a nightmare.”
Cassie smiled. “I’m sure you can prioritize,” she said. She hesitated before giving Alex a gift to keep through the months that would stretch out ahead. “I miss you,” she whispered, no longer smiling. “I miss you so much.” And she put down the phone before he could hear her fall apart.
Alex stared at his Oscars. The proofs of his success lay toppled on the floor, scarring the wood when they had landed. The last statuette stood beside the telephone. Cassie had severed the connection; all that remained was a dull dial tone. Alex did not notice when he began to cry. For an hour, he held the receiver like an amulet, even when the tuneless voice of an operator told him over and over to hang up and try again.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
CYRUShad repeated the third grade for eight years, not because of his limited intelligence but because in the 1920s, the reservation’s school didn’t go any higher. He had a rudimentary knowledge of reading and writing, but math other than addition and subtraction was beyond him and his spelling was phonetic. His specialty was history—
not the white man’s history, as he told Cassie, that the missionary teachers had tried to cram down their throats with their textbooks, but the way it really was.
Because Dorothea spent so much time at the cafeteria, Cassie was left alone with Cyrus quite often. She had a feeling he liked having the company; he’d put away his knitting and sometimes he whittled when they walked together, but mostly he just made conversation. He told her stories that had been passed down to him from his own father—
Indian myths, boyhood tales about Crazy Horse, near-eyewitness accounts of the Battle of Little Bighorn and the tragedy at Wounded Knee.
Yesterday, Cassie had asked Cyrus to take her toPaha Sapa, the Black Hills. She knew that fossils had been found nearby, and that there had been controversies about removing them from the sacred lands of the reservation. It wasn’t that she was planning to start a huge excavation, which the tribal council would certainly veto, but she was itching to at least find the clues that would lead her to believe there was something below the surface—the pitted rock, the overgrown vegetation. She felt compelled to take advantage of living among the Sioux, scant miles from their ancient burial grounds. For years, her colleagues had been trying to get access to places like this, and had repeatedly been refused.
Today she had borrowed Abel Soap’s army-issue jeep and packed a picnic lunch. Just in case, she told herself, she’d tossed in a pick and a spade that Abel had offered her from his junk shed. Cyrus had swung himself into the jeep like a man much younger. “You know,” he said, “Sioux kids believe that the bogeyman lives in the Badlands.”
Cassie had smiled. “I’ll take my chances.”
But several hours later, with the strange smooth rock-scape spread in front of them, it was easy to see why impressionable kids would believe such a thing. Unlike the peaks and turrets of most of the Black Hills, the Badlands were flat and low, like a hollow of gigantic boulders that over time had melted into each other. The wind moaned through the sparse pine trees that lined the upper ridge, and swept into the knotty valley like a whirlpool.
“You going down there?” Cyrus asked, coming to stand beside Cassie on the ledge.
Cassie glanced at him. “Why? Are you coming?”
“Hell, no,” Cyrus said. “I can think of better places to die.”
A chill ran down her spine at his words. “What do you mean by that?” she asked, but Cyrus had walked to the back of the jeep and could not hear her.
He returned with her pick and her shovel, and held them out. “You want these?”
Cassie nodded and tucked them into the belt she’d borrowed from Cyrus. She’d taken to wearing other people’s clothing since hers no longer fit. She watched Cyrus pull a piece of cold meatloaf out of the hamper and sit cross-legged on the ledge in front of her. Gingerly she reached over the edge with her foot, gripping a rock and feeling for a toehold as she began her descent into the valley. She ran her hands over the stone walls, supple as marble and veined with lichen.
“Should have brought a Ghost Dance shirt,” Cyrus called from somewhere above her. “That way the bad spirits can’t get you.”
“That’s a good idea,” Cassie said, panting, not having the slightest idea what he was talking about. “And after I find one, I can make a fortune selling them to the doomsday preachers on the Avenue of the Stars.” She slipped her foot down another notch in the natural ladder, nearly twisting her ankle on the rounded surface of the boulders that made up the valley floor.
“Don’t laugh,” Cyrus said. “There really were shirts that the People believed kept you invincible. My great-grandfather had one. They were sort of a fad in the 1880s, part of a new dance that was supposed to bring back the dead warriors and the buffalo, a whole new world without the white man.” Cyrus stood up and leaned over the lip of the valley. “You gonna eat the meatloaf?” he yelled.
“No,” Cassie said. She shaded her hand with her eyes. He was twenty feet above her, looking down, as if his interest could guarantee her safety. “You go ahead.”
“Well, anyway, my great-grandfather brought the Ghost Dance from a Paiute medicine man back to the Sioux. And he had this shirt with him, painted with the sun, the moon, the stars, and magpies. Dorothea has it packed away somewhere. As long as you were wearing that shirt, no harm could come to you.”
“Like a rabbit’s foot,” Cassie said, digging with her pick at a little notch in the rock. Even if she did find something, she thought to herself, it would probably be a mastodon, not an ancient human.
“Yeah,” Cyrus said, “except it didn’t work like it was supposed to.
The white army thought if it was such big medicine, the Sioux had to be planning some kind of attack against them. So they told the People they couldn’t do the Ghost Dance.”
Cassie felt the sun heat the crown of her head, and she was reminded of her first days in Tanzania with Alex, when she had believed that nothing could go wrong; that truly, they were invincible. Who was she to judge a Ghost Dance shirt? Love, at least at the beginning, could be just as powerful a charm.
