Hour of the Hunter

Chapter 8

It is said that from then on the people were very jealous of Little Bear and Little Lion. They wanted the boys’ beautiful birds to use the feathers on their own arrows. One night the boys’ grandmother warned them, “Tomorrow the people will come here. They will kill me and try to steal your birds. You must take the birds far away from here and throw them off the mountains in the east.”

The next morning, it happened just as she said. The people came to the house and killed Wise Old Grandmother, but Little Bear and Little Lion escaped, taking their beautiful birds with them. Back then, the people had not yet lost the ability to follow tracks, so they followed the two boys across the desert.

As Little Bear and Little Lion started up the far mountain, they heard the angry people close behind them. Little Bear was too tired to go on. “Here,” he said to his brother. “You take my bird as well. I will wait here for the people. They may kill me, but at least the birds will be free.”

And that is what happened. Little Bear kept the people with him long enough for Little Lion to throw the beautiful birds with their multicolored feathers off the mountain. And that, nawoj, is the story of how Sunrise and Sunset got their colors.

They say a certain type of criminal always returns to the scene of his crime, and Andrew Carlisle fit that mold. He was curious. He wanted to know if anyone had discovered Margaret Danielson’s body yet; not that he would actually have gone up the mountain to see for himself, but he couldn’t resist pulling off into the rest area at Picacho Peak since it was on his way. He was rewarded by the collection of law-enforcement vehicles parked haphazardly around the picnic and playground area, which told him what he needed to know.

The highway patrol had cordoned off almost half the rest area, but a few tables were still available. He took his Thermos to one of those and settled down to watch the fun, which included several milling television cameramen, some reporters, and a few stray newspaper photographers.

“What’s going on?” Andrew asked a man who came by lugging a huge television-equipment suitcase.

“An Indian killed a woman up there on the mountain,” the guy said. “They’re just now bringing the body down.”

An Indian? Carlisle thought. No kidding. They think an Indian did it? He couldn’t believe this stroke of luck. For the second time in as many chances, fate had handed over the perfect fall guy for something Carlisle himself had done, someone to take the blame. Sure, he’d gone to prison for Gina Antone, mostly because the cops thought he’d driven the truck that had inadvertently broken her neck. They had never suspected the real truth, not even that wise-ass of a detective, because if they had, it would have been a whole lot worse. Now, here he was again with somebody else all lined up to take the rap.

One thing did worry him a little. It hadn’t taken long for the cops to find her. He hadn’t expected them to work quite this fast, but he was prepared for it anyway. He was glad now that he’d taken the time to clean the bits of his flesh from under her fingernails. With something like that, you couldn’t be too careful. His mentors in Florence had warned him not to underestimate cops. The crooked ones had a price-all you had to do was name it. Straight ones you had to look out for, the ones who were too dumb to take you up on it when you made them an offer they shouldn’t refuse.

“Mom, if Rita dies, will we put a cross on the road where she wrecked the truck?”

They had just driven by the Kitt Peak turnoff on their way to Sells. With all the emergency vehicles gone, there was no sign of the almost-fatal accident the previous afternoon.

“Probably,” Diana answered, “but Rita isn’t going to die. I talked to her sister this morning. She’ll be fine.”

“Does my daddy have a cross?”

The abrupt change of subject caused Diana to swing her eyes in her son’s direction. The car almost veered off the road, but she caught it in time. “Why do you ask that?”

“Well, does he?”

“I suppose. At the cemetery. In Chicago.”

“Have I ever been there?”

“No.”

“Is that where he died?”

“No. Why are you asking all these questions?” Diana’s answer was curt, her question exasperated.

“Did you know Rita puts a new wreath and a candle at the place where Gina died? She does that every year. Why don’t we?”

“It’s an Indian custom,” Diana explained. “Papago custom. Your father wasn’t a Papago.”

“I thought you said I was going to turn into an Indian.”

“I was kidding.”

Davy fell silent for several miles, and his mother was relieved that the subject seemed closed. “Did you ever kill anything, Mom?” he asked at last. “Besides the snake, I mean.”

Jesus! She had almost forgotten about the snake. It was two years now since the afternoon she was inside and heard Bone barking frantically out in the yard. Alarmed, she hurried out to check.

She found all three of them-boy, dog, and snake-mutually trapped in the small area between the side of the house and the high patio wall. The rattlesnake, a fat four-footer, had been caught out in the open sunning itself.

It’s said that the first person can walk past a sleeping rattlesnake but a second one can’t. Davy had walked past the drowsing snake unharmed and was now cornered on the rattler’s far side. Bone, barking himself into a frenzy, was smart enough not to attempt darting past the now-coiled and angry snake.

Diana Ladd was usually scared witless of snakes. As a mother, this was her first experience in dealing with a life-or-death threat to her child. Instantly, she became a tigress defending her young.

“Don’t move, Davy!” she ordered calmly, without raising her voice. “Stand right there and don’t you move!”

She raced back to the garage and returned with a hoe, the only weapon that fell readily to hand. She had a gun inside the house, a fully loaded Colt.45 Peacemaker, but she didn’t trust herself with that, especially not with both Davy and the dog a few short feet away.

She had attacked the snake with savage fury and severed its head with two death-dealing blows. Only after it was over and Davy was safely cradled in her arms did she give way to the equally debilitating emotions of fear and relief.

“How come your face’s all white, Mom?” Davy had asked. “You look funny. Your lips are white, and so’s your skin.”

“Well?” Davy prompted once more, jarring Diana out of her reverie. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Ever kill anything besides the snake?”

“No,” she said. “So help me God, I never did.”

As the sun rose above her hospital room window, Rita’s life passed by in drowsing review.

Traveling Sickness came to Ban Thak the year Dancing Quail was eight and again away at school. The sickness crept into the village with a returning soldier, and many people fell ill, including all of Dancing Quail’s family, from her grandmother right down to little S-kehegaj.

Desperately ill herself, but somewhat less so than the others, Understanding Woman sent word to the outing matron asking that Dancing Quail be brought home from Phoenix to help. Understanding Woman also sent for a blind medicine man from Many Dogs village, a man whose name was S-ab Neid Pi Has, which means Looks At Nothing.

At fifteen, Looks At Nothing left home to work in Ajo’s copper mines. Two years later, he was blinded by a severe blow to the head during a drunken brawl in Ajo’s Indian encampment. The other Indian died. Looks At Nothing, broken in body and spirit both, returned home to Many Dogs Village. The old medicine man there diagnosed his ailment as Whore-Sickness, which comes from succumbing to the enticing temptations of dreams, and which causes ailments of the eyes.

First Looks At Nothing was treated with ritual dolls. When that didn’t work, singers were called in who were good with Whore-Sickness. For four days, the singers smoked their sacred tobacco and sang their Whore-Sickness songs. When the singing was over, Looks At Nothing was still blind, but during the healing process he came to see that his life had a purpose. I’itoi had summoned him home, demanding that the young man turn his back on the white man’s ways and return to the traditions of his father and grandfathers before him. In exchange, I’itoi promised, Looks At Nothing would become a powerful shaman.

By the time Understanding Woman summoned him to Ban Thak, Looks At Nothing, although still very young, was already reputed to be a good singer for curing Traveling Sickness. He came to Coyote Sitting, sang his songs, and smoked his tobacco, but unfortunately, he arrived too late. Dancing Quail’s parents died, but he did manage to cure both Understanding Woman and Little Pretty One. Looks At Nothing was still there singing when Big Eddie Lopez, dispatched by the outing matron, brought Dancing Quail home from Phoenix.

Riding to Chuk Shon inside the train rather than on it, Dancing Quail was sick with grief. With both her parents dead, what would happen if she had to live without her grandmother and her baby sister, too?

Soon, however, it was clear that Understanding Woman and Pretty One would recover. Dancing Quail was dispatched to pay Looks At Nothing his customary fee, which consisted of a finely woven medicine basket-medicine baskets were Understanding Woman’s specialty-and a narrow-necked olla with several dogs representing Many Dogs Village carefully etched into the side.

Dancing Quail approached the medicine man shyly as he gathered up his remaining tobacco and placed it in the leather pouch fastened around his waist. At the sound of her footsteps, he stopped what he was doing. “Who is it?” he asked, while his strange, sightless eyes stared far beyond her.

“Hejel Wi’ikam,” she answered. “Orphaned Child. I have brought you your gifts.”

Looks At Nothing motioned for her to sit beside him. First she gave him the basket, then the olla. His sensitive fingers explored each seam and crevice. “Your grandmother does fine work,” he said at last.

They sat together in silence for some time. “You are glad to be home?” he asked.

“I’m sorry about my parents,” she said, “but I’m glad to be in Ban Thak. I do not like school or the people there.”

Looks At Nothing reached out and took Dancing Quail’s small hand in his, holding it for a long moment before nodding and allowing it to fall back into her lap.

“You will live in both worlds, little one,” he said. “You will be a bridge, a puinthi.”

Dancing Quail looked up at him anxiously, afraid he meant Big Eddie would take her right back to Phoenix, but Looks At Nothing reassured her. “You will stay here for now. Understanding Woman will need your help with the fields and the baby.”

“How do you know all this?” she asked.

He smiled down at her. “I have lost my sight, Hejel Wi’ikam,” he said kindly, “but I have not lost my vision.”

Fat Crack drove his tow truck south past Topawa on his fool’s errand. Rita had told him that Looks At Nothing still lived at Many Dogs Village across the border in Old Mexico.

The international border had been established by treaty between Mexico and the United States without either country acknowledging that their arbitrary decision effectively divided in half and disenfranchised the much older-nine thousand years older-Papago nation.

Because Many Dogs Village was on the Mexican side, Fat Crack would have to cross the border at The Gate-an unofficial and unpatrolled crossing point in the middle of the reservation. Once in Mexico, he would have to make his way to the village on foot, or perhaps one of the traders from the other side would offer him a ride.

Supposing Fat Crack did manage to find the object of his search, how would he bring the old man back to Rita’s bedside in the Indian Health Service Hospital? According to Fat Crack’s estimates, if Looks At Nothing were still alive, he would be well into his eighties. Such an old man might not be eager to travel.

The Gate was really nothing but a break in the six-strand border fence surrounded by flat open desert and dotted, on both sides, with the parked pickups of traders and customers alike. Owners of these trucks did a brisk business in bootleg liquor, tortillas, tamales, and goat cheese, with an occasional batch of pot thrown in for good measure.

Fat Crack approached one of the bootleggers and inquired how to find Looks At Nothing’s house. The man pointed to a withered old man sitting in the shade of a mesquite tree.

“Why go all the way to his house?” the man asked derisively. “Why not see him here?”

Looks At Nothing sat under the tree with a narrow rolled bundle and a gnarled ironwood cane on the ground in front of him. As Fat Crack approached, the sightless old man scrambled agilely to his feet. “Have you come to take me to Hejel Wi’ikam?” he asked.

Fat Crack was taken aback. How did the old man know? “Hejel Wi’ithag,” he corrected respectfully. “An old widow, not an orphaned child.”

Looks At Nothing shook his head. “She was an orphan when I first knew her. She is an orphan still. Oi g hihm,” he added. “Let’s go.”

Fat Crack helped the wiry old man climb up into the tow truck. How did Looks At Nothing know someone would come for him that day? Surely no one in Many Dogs owned a telephone, but the old man had appeared at The Gate fully prepared to travel.

Devout Christian Scientist that he was, Fat Crack was far too much of a pragmatist to deny, on religious grounds, that which is demonstrably obvious. Looks At Nothing, that cagey old shaman, would bear close watching.

Brandon Walker dreaded going home. He figured that after he’d spent the whole night AWOL, Louella would be ready to have his ears. He stopped in the kitchen long enough to hang his car keys on the pegboard and to pour himself a cup of coffee, steeling himself for the inevitable onslaught. Instead of being angry, however, when his frantic mother came looking for him, she was so relieved to see him that all she could do was blither.

“It’s a piano, Brandon. Dear God in heaven, a Steinway!”

“Calm down. What are you talking about?”

“Toby. I worry about buying food sometimes, and here he goes and orders a piano. For his sister, the concert pianist, he told them. His sister’s been dead for thirty-five years, Brandon. What is Toby thinking of? What are we going to do?”

“Did the check clear?”

“No. Of course not. Do you know how much Steinways cost? The store called me and said there must be some mistake. I told them it was a mistake, all right.”

“Where’s Dad now?”

“Inside. Taking a nap. He said he was tired.”

“Let’s go, Mother,” Brandon ordered. “Get your car.” This time he wasn’t going to allow any argument.

“The car? Where are we going?”

“Downtown to the bank. We’ll have to hurry. It’s Saturday, and they’re only open until noon. We’re closing that checking account once and for all.”

Louella promptly burst into tears. “How can we do that to your father, Brandon, after he’s worked so hard all these years? It seems so. . so underhanded.”

“How many Steinways do you want, Mom?” His position was unassailable.

“I’ll go get my purse. Do you think he’ll be all right here by himself if he wakes up?”

“He’ll have to be. There’s no one else we can leave him with. We’ll hurry, but we’ve both got to go to the bank.”

It wasn’t until he was left alone with the young deputy that Ernesto Tashquinth realized exactly how much trouble he was in. Come to think of it, the Pinal County homicide detective had been asking him some pretty funny questions: Why did he go up the mountain to check the spring in the first place? What was the woman’s name again? How long had he known her? How well did he know her?

Ernesto tried to be helpful. He patiently answered the questions as best he could. The buzzards, he told them. He had seen the circling buzzards, and he was afraid if something was dead up there, the smell might come down to the picnic-table area and get him in trouble with his boss.

But now the detective had gone up the mountain to oversee the removal of the body, and Ernesto was left with a young hotshot deputy who couldn’t resist swaggering.

“How come you bit that poor lady’s boob off, Big Man? Do you know what happens to guys like you once you’re inside?”

Ernesto didn’t need the deputy to draw him any pictures. He remembered all too well a former schoolmate from Sacaton who, accused of raping a white woman, had turned up dead in a charco, suffocated on his own balls.

“I want a lawyer,” Ernesto said quietly. “I don’t have to say anything more until I have a lawyer.”

“The judge will be only too happy to appoint you one, if you live that long,” the deputy told him with a leering grin. “He’ll do it by Monday or Tuesday at the latest, but it’s a long time between now and then, chief. If I were you, I’d be good-very, very good.”

They brought squares of Jell-O for lunch, and Juanita tried to feed them to her, but Rita shook her head and closed her eyes once more.

The next years passed happily for Dancing Quail, although no one called her that anymore. She became Understanding Woman’s ehkthag, her shadow. Dancing Quail kept busy caring for her little sister, looking after the fields, and helping her grandmother make baskets and pottery. At age six S-kehegaj herself went off to school, taking her turn at riding to Chuk Shon in Big Eddie’s wagon. Pretty One thrived in the new environment. She returned home the following summer wishing to be called only by her new Anglo name, Juanita, and refusing to part with her stiff leather shoes.

When Dancing Quail’s young charge went off to school, no one thought to send her. People forgot that Dancing Quail was little more than a child herself. By then, her grandmother was so frail that she needed someone with her most of the time. Dancing Quail was happy to be that someone. She spent all her waking hours with Understanding Woman, caring for her and learning whatever lessons her grandmother cared to teach.

Dancing Quail was fourteen and had passed her first menstruation with all due ceremony the summer Father John rode into her life. He had hair the color of autumn grass and funny red skin that sometimes peeled and flaked off in the hot sun.

Father John came to Ban Thak because the sisters at Topawa had sent him. They worried that Alice Antone’s orphaned daughter was growing up too much under her grandmother’s pagan influence. The girl never came to church anymore, not even at Christmas and Easter. The sisters sent Father John in hopes that by offering the girl a cleaning job at the mission in Topawa, they might also coax her back into the fold.

Father John, fresh out of seminary, was an earnest young man on his first assignment. When he saw Rita with her long black hair flowing loose and glossy around her shoulders, when he saw her dancing brown eyes and bright white teeth against tawny skin, he thought her the loveliest, most exotic creature he had ever encountered. He was intrigued by the fact that, despite the heat, she didn’t wear shoes. When he rode into the village in his dusty, coughing touring car, she ran beside it barefoot, along with the other village children, laughing and making fun of him because they could run faster than he could drive.

He spoke to Understanding Woman that afternoon as best he could. Unable to communicate in a common language, they were forced to call upon Dancing Quail to translate in her own inadequate English. She giggled as she did so.

Father John trotted out all his best arguments, including the one he thought would make the most difference. “If you work at the mission,” he said, “the sisters will pay you money so you can buy nice things for yourself and for your grandmother.”

“Where?” she asked. “Where will I buy these things? The trading post is far from here. I have no horse and no car.”

“I could give you a ride sometimes,” he offered.

“No,” Dancing Quail said decisively. “I will stay here.”

“What did he say?” Understanding Woman asked anxiously. There had been several exchanges during which Dancing Quail had translated nothing.

“He wants me to work at the mission. I told him no. My place is here with you.”

“Good,” Understanding Woman said, patting her young granddaughter’s hand. “It is better that you stay in Ban Thak.”

A Mormon missionary, dressed in a stiffly pressed white shirt and wearing a carefully knotted tie, brought word to Rebecca Tashquinth that her son, S-abamk, the Lucky One, was being held in the Pinal County jail in Florence and that he would most likely be charged with the brutal murder of Margaret Danielson. It was thought, the missionary reported dutifully, that the woman had been raped as well, but no one knew that for sure. Not yet.

Rebecca was well aware of the kinds of lawyers local judges appointed for Indian defendants, particularly those accused of serious crimes against Anglos. She didn’t waste time on a useless trip to Florence. The guards at the jail wouldn’t have let her see her son anyway. Instead, she got in the car and drove to Ahngam, Desert Broom Village, to speak to her father.

Eduardo Jose was a man of some standing in the community, a man with both livestock and a thriving bootleg-liquor business. Eduardo knew how to deal with Anglos. He had even hired himself an Anglo lawyer once to help him when the cops had caught him transporting illegal tequila across nonreservation land to the annual O’odam Tash celebration in Casa Grande.

If anyone could help her son in all this, Rebecca’s father was the man who could do it.

Diana was still angry with Rita when she got to the hospital. She resented Davy’s questions about his father, questions he had never asked before. She blamed Rita for bringing all that ancient history back to the foreground, but when she saw the old woman, seemingly shriveled in the bed and swathed in bandages, she forgot her anger.

Rita’s sister, Juanita, was sitting by the bed when Diana entered the room, but she rose at once and went out into the hallway. Diana knew Juanita didn’t like her, and she had long since ceased worrying about it. If Gary’s parents didn’t understand why she and Rita were inseparable, why should Rita’s relatives do any better?

Rita opened her eyes when Diana stepped to the head of the bed and touched her good hand.

“How’s Davy?” Rita asked.

“He’s fine. He has a few stitches in his head, that’s all.”

“Is he here? Can I see him?”

“The doctor won’t let him come into the room. He’s too young. You have to be sixteen.”

Rita reached for her water glass and took a tentative sip through the straw. “Yesterday was the anniversary,” she said quietly. “Davy went with me. He may ask questions.”

Diana laughed uneasily. “He already has, Rita. It’s all right. I’m getting a lot closer to being able to answer them.”

“He’ll want you to put up a cross. For his father, I mean. A cross with a wreath and some candles.”

“I can’t do that.”

In Diana Ladd’s mixed bag of fallen-away Catholic religion, suicides were never accorded full death benefits. She had told Gary’s parents to bury him wherever they liked, but as far as she was concerned, Garrison Ladd still didn’t qualify for a memorial wooden cross and never would.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were a virgin?”

“You didn’t ask.”

Diana Lee Cooper and Garrison Ladd cuddled together on Diana’s narrow three-quarter bed nestled like a pair of stacked teaspoons. With his back pressed against the wall and his head propped up on one elbow, Gary’s other hand glided up and down Diana’s slender back. He liked the feel of smooth skin stretched taut over backbone and rib and the gentle curve of waist that melted into the small of her back. He liked fingering the matching indentations of dimples that marked the top of her buttocks. Most of all, he liked the fact that she didn’t warn his hand away from places most other girls wouldn’t let him touch.

Diana Lee Cooper lay on her side, head on a pillow, with one arm dangling loosely off the edge of the bed. Unsure of herself, Diana worried that perhaps it hadn’t been all Gary had expected. “Was I all right?” she asked.

Garrison Ladd laughed out loud. “It was more than all right.” He kissed the back of her neck. “The boys in Joseph must not have been paying attention.”

“The boys in Joseph called me names,” Diana replied grimly.

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head. The boys had called her names, but they were pikers compared to her father. Max Cooper was the champion name-caller of all time.

She turned so she could look Gary Ladd full in the face. Maybe this man who, like her, also hated his father, could help her decode her own, help her understand that looming darker presence who even now reached out across the state and attacked her with bruising words far worse than his punishing fists.

“My father was the worst,” she said, carefully controlling her voice. “‘Cunt’ happened to be his personal favorite.”

Gary Ladd shook his head in disbelief. “Your father called you that to your face?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

She suspected it was because calling her that robbed her of her books and dignity and cut her down to size. While she still mulled the question, Gary Ladd lost interest in the conversation. He rolled Diana over on her back so he could caress her full breasts and run his hands up and down the ladder of ribs above her smoothly flat abdomen. He twisted the curly auburn pubic hairs around the tips of his fingers and touched what lay concealed beyond those curiously inviting hairs.

He waited to see if she would object and move his probing fingers away. Some girls did, even after screwing their brains out, but Diana didn’t. She lay with her eyes closed, her body quiet and complacent beneath his touch. Diana Ladd was the girl of his dreams. How could he have been so lucky?

“What brought you to Eugene?” he asked, wanting to delay a little before taking her again. “How’d you get here?”

“By horse,” she answered.

He checked her expression to see if she was joking, but her face was unsmiling, impassive.

“Come on. You’re kidding. You rode all the way across Oregon from Joseph to here on a horse?”

“My mother got me the horse, a beautiful sorrel quarter horse,” she said. “His name was Waldo. Waldo was my ticket out of town.”

Diana came home from school carrying an armload of books, half of them textbooks and the others from the library. She found old Mr. Deeson’s pickup, with horse trailer attached, parked in front of their house. The presence of a neighbor’s pickup wasn’t particularly unusual. Chances were, Mr. Deeson had stopped off to unload some garbage, and her mother had invited him in for a cup of coffee or freshly baked cookies. She often encouraged customers to stop by for half an hour or so in order to stave off her ever-present loneliness.

Diana hurried past the trailer with its stamping load of horseflesh. In the kitchen, she found George Deeson and her mother chatting over coffee, just as she’d expected. What she hadn’t expected was the sudden silence occasioned by her arrival.

“There you are,” Iona said eagerly. “We’ve been waiting for you to come home. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“Out front. I thought you’d want to unload him yourself.”

For a moment, Diana wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. “Unload him?” she repeated. “You mean the horse? That’s the surprise?”

“Your Granddaddy Dale did me a favor once way back when,” George Deeson drawled. “I never did quite get around to paying him back once I got on my feet. My brother gave me this here horse out yonder, and Waldo-that’s his name by the way-was just standing around in my pasture, taking up room and eating my hay.

“The girl who had him before, my niece, I’m sorry to say, didn’t do justice by him a’tall. All she ever did was race barrels. Take him out, run him around those barrels hell-bent-for-election, and then lock him right back up in his stall. A good horse needs more than that, needs some companionship, needs some time off. Know what I mean?”

Diana nodded, but she didn’t understand, not really. George Deeson continued on as though she did.

“It occurred to me that maybe you folks could make good use of him. What do you think, girl? Would you like a horse?”

Diana staggered to the table and put down her load of books. She had long ago shed the childish dream of ever having a horse of her own. The Coopers simply didn’t have the money. Not only was there the initial purchase price, there was also the ongoing expense of feed and upkeep and tack. In addition, Max Cooper had told his daughter over and over again that he didn’t like horses and wouldn’t ever have one on his place.

“We can’t afford it, can we, Mother?”

“I already told you, girl, that there horse is free,” George put in. “You don’t have to pay a dime for him. I’ve got the papers right here in my pocket, all ready to sign over to you.”

“We’ll manage,” Iona told her daughter firmly. “You just sign the papers and don’t worry about it.”

“But what’ll Daddy do? He always said. .”

“Never mind what your father said,” Iona countered. “I’ll handle him. You go ahead and sign the papers.”

Within minutes, the bill of sale was signed, and Waldo, a registered quarter-horse gelding, belonged to Diana Lee Cooper.

“I reckon we’d otta go unload him now,” George Deeson said. “He’ll ride in a trailer all right as long as it’s movin’, but he don’t much like standin’ around being cooped up in ’em for very long afterward. Me neither, if you know what I mean, missus.”

George Deeson picked up his battered straw hat from the floor next to his chair and led the way out to the pickup and trailer. Waldo came complete with a whole set of tack-horse blankets, two saddles, and several bridles, all of which George Deeson unloaded in a heap on the Coopers’ front porch.

“Are you sure all this comes with the horse?” Diana asked.

“Sure, I’m sure,” he told her. “Now your mama said we should take Waldo and all his stuff out to the old barn. She says she’s fixed him up a stall.”

George eased the horse out of the trailer and handed the reins over to Diana. “You’d better try leadin’ him. He’ll need to be gettin’ used to you, and you’d better plan on spendin’ plenty of time with him, too.”

Diana led the way around to the old barn where a newly cleaned stall was waiting. When had her mother had time to do so much extra work along with all the other things that demanded her attention?

“Know anything about takin’ care of horses?” George Deeson asked.

“Not very much. I’ve never owned one before. Some of my friends have horses, but I don’t get to ride very often.”

“Reckon I’ll be over of a Saturday mornin’ to give you a lesson or two as long as your mama throws in some of her coffee and homemade biscuits.”

“How come, Mr. Deeson? I don’t understand.”

“How come? Why, girl, hasn’t your mama told you yet? Me and her’s gonna turn you into a rodeo queen.”

“Me?” Diana asked in stunned disbelief.

“Yup, you. You’re how old now? Thirteen?”

Diana nodded.

“It’ll take around four years, I reckon, give or take.” He leaned over and studied Diana’s face.

“Yup,” he said, “this girl’s got good bones. She’ll do just fine, but take it from me, missus, them braids gotta go. Braids don’t win no prizes these days, although they used to. They sure enough did, and not so very far back, neither.”

That evening, after supper, Iona cut off Diana’s braid. The following day, when school got out, Iona drove Diana to the drugstore in La Grande and bought her rollers, hair spray, combs and brushes, and makeup. When Diana came downstairs the next morning wearing her first tentative attempt at makeup, she waited for her father to say something, but he was strangely silent on the subject, almost as though he didn’t notice.

The next Saturday morning and for almost every Saturday morning that followed during the next four years, George Deeson appeared at the Coopers’ house bright and early to spend hours working with Diana and Waldo. When it was too cold to be outside, they worked in the barn. He taught her saddling and bridling and grooming. Together, Waldo and George Deeson taught Diana barrel racing. George taught her how to sit astride the horse so girl and horse were a single, symbiotic unit. He taught her how to read Waldo’s moods, how to calm him down during rumbling thunderstorms and barrages of exploding firecrackers, how to coax him in and out of unfamiliar horse trailers.

George Deeson taught Diana self-reliance, encouraged her to take Waldo off on long, solitary trail rides to one of the fifty-two alpine lakes in the Willowa Mountains surrounding Joseph, Oregon. There, with only her horse and her books, alone sometimes for days at a time, Diana could read and fish and care for her horse far away from Iona and Max Cooper’s day-to-day conflicts. And those trips weren’t good only for Diana, either. Starved for human companionship by his previous owner, Waldo thrived on the generous doses of attention Diana lavished on him.

But more than all that, George Deeson educated Diana Lee Cooper in something she never could have learned from her own mother. George Deeson taught Diana presence, schooled her in how to carry herself. He tutored her in the art of smiling and helped her master the rodeo-queen wave. Most of all, he infected her with his unshakable belief that one day she really would be queen of the Chief Joseph Days Rodeo.

George Deeson taught Diana all that and more. It didn’t dawn on her until years later that he never told her why.

And she didn’t ask.