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She went to a window and gazed from it into the distance, at the vast mountain that stood near the fort.
She had been told that a band of Apache were holed up there, high up in a stronghold, under the leadership of a young chief, Chief Storm.
She was Apache.
She was keenly aware of the silence behind her, and realized that again George did not wish to speak of the past, especially about that horrible day which she now recalled as though it had happened only yesterday.
She turned to him again. “I know that you would rather not know these things,” she said, her voice breaking. “But as I told you, I felt an eeriness from the very first day of our arrival at my birthplace here in Arizona. It is as though someone is calling to me, especially when I look toward the mountain. It seems that someone is beckoning me there. Might . . . it . . . be my true mother? Can she feel my presence even now?”
She went to George. She gazed into his faded eyes. “Do you hear what I am saying?” she murmured. “Or . . . are you trying to ignore it, thinking I will soon forget these feelings and continue on with my life as I have known it?”
“It is just that I do not know exactly what to say,” George said, uneasy under her close scrutiny and the questions he wished would not be asked.
He walked past her, the cane and his wooden leg making an ominous ringing sound against the oak floor, then sank down into a thickly cushioned chair before a huge stone fireplace.
In his maroon satin robe with his initials monogrammed on its one pocket, he gazed at the slowly burning fire on the grate.
“All that I do know is that I should never have brought you here,” he said ruefully. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” He looked over at her as she sat down on a chair across from him. “I truly thought you would . . . had . . . gotten past the
se feelings. But now I doubt that you ever shall.”
“No, I never shall, and . . . I don’t want to,” Shoshana said, nervously combing her long, slender fingers through her thick, black hair, positioning it over her shoulders. “Since our arrival here, I have felt many, many things. I have felt my Apache people calling to me inside my heart. I feel different from the people here at the fort, even more strongly than that day when I learned just how different I was from the children I was growing up with in Missouri.”
“Yes, and what happened there was unfortunate,” George said thickly. “I should have prepared you for such a situation.”
“Yes, you should have,” she said, recalling that day as though it had happened yesterday. “When that boy called me a savage squaw and held me down on the ground and cut off the tail end of my braids, I knew how much white people, even children my own age, despise people of any skin color but their own. It is so unfair . . . so evil.”
“Yes, I shall never forget how you came home crying,” George said, sighing heavily. “Your questions that day came so fast and furious, I found it hard to follow you. You wanted to know why those who you thought were your friends treated you in such a way, and why you would be called such a name. I know how it hurt you inside when that child cut off the ends of your braids.”
“And you told me that, yes, my skin was different, and to go and look in a mirror so that I would see what everyone else saw when they looked at me,” Shoshana said. “I did. I looked into a mirror. I saw nothing different about myself that day than any other day when I played with those children. And I knew long ago that my skin was different from those other children’s, but I was never treated differently. I knew that I was an Indian, but until that day, no one approached me with prejudice. I was happy. I . . . I . . . felt loved.”
“When I first brought you home, Dorothea and I wanted you to feel loved and to be happy. We especially hoped that you could forgive the wrongs and injustices done to your people on that day,” George said softly. “We always felt such love for you. We . . . I . . . especially, felt I owed you so much. You brought something into our lives that we could never have had otherwise.”
“After that incident at school, I was afraid what else the children might do to me,” she murmured. “I . . . I . . . was afraid to go to school the next day.”
“I didn’t know that,” George said, feeling a sudden sharp pain in his gut to know she had felt such fear. “I’m sorry, Shoshana. I had hoped that it would never come to that.”
“But you surely knew that it would,” Shoshana murmured. “You were raising an Indian child.”
“As I explained before, I saved your life, Shoshana, while others around you were dying,” George said thickly. “I wish I could paint a better picture of that day in your mind, but I can’t. What happened . . . happened. It was the way of the military back then to—”
“Please don’t say any more about it,” Shoshana said, interrupting him. She did know that he had saved her, yet moments before he had done that, he had been killing her people.
And, yes, it was the way of the military to do those things back then; just as now the army was forcing her people off their land and into reservation life.
After finally remembering the truth about everything, Shoshana had begun to question her loyalty to a man who had had a role in the slaying of so many people of her own kind.
That day he had come into her village with gunfire splattering all around Shoshana and her mother, she had thought that she had been the sole survivor. But now? She truly believed that her mother had somehow survived as well.
Had her mother been injured that day, badly enough to have been rendered unconscious, yet alive, after all? Had someone found her and taken her to safety and cared for her wounds? Could she be thinking about Shoshana even now, hungering to have her in her arms as Shoshana now hungered for her true mother’s embrace?
Now, so close to where it had all happened, Shoshana knew she must seek answers to the questions that plagued her.
George saw something in Shoshana’s expression and eyes that troubled him. He rose from the chair and took her hands, urging her to her feet.
He did not want to feel how she tensed as he drew her into his embrace, something that happened often now that they were in the land of her ancestors.
He cursed the day he had decided to come to Arizona. He should have known something like this might happen.
