Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Four

At the bottom of the stairs she picks up my ballpoint and drops it in my shirt pocket. “Okay, we’ve got that out of the way. Here, hold the flashlight.”

She inserts the key in the padlock and twists slowly until the shank pops free from the locking mechanism. She takes the flashlight from my hand, then pushes the door back on its hinges and shines the light inside. The interior is more than simply a cellar. The floor is concrete, the walls an aggregate of subterranean boulders filled in with hand-stacked stones taken from a riverbed. The air is cool and dry, the way cave air is, like a reminder of a pre — industrial age or maybe a monastic wine cellar. The flashlight beam dances on shelves lined with preserve jars.

“Where’s the light switch?” I ask.

“On the back wall.”

“I’d like to turn it on.”

“Enough is enough, Mr. Broussard.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look on the floor. I think that’s what you heard.”

She points the flashlight between two rows of shelves. Three piles of broken glass mixed with a green-and-red mess twinkle in the flashlight’s beam. “Tomatoes,” she says.

“I have a hard time buying that.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

I do not want to give it up. But my life is not a study in rationality. I have another problem. I do not enjoy my role as an old man in a nation that has little use for antiquity and even less for those who value it. I touch the surface of the cellar door. It is three inches thick and made of oak and rusted metal plates and iron spikes, the kind of door Vikings broke their axes on.

“This could have come out of the castle,” I say.

“Ready to go?” she says.

Accidentally the beam of her flashlight bounces off a piece of hand-carved blond wood into which a deep-brown glass eye has been inserted.

“What’s that in the corner?”

“My niece’s rocking horse.”

“She plays down here?”

“She died a few years ago.”

“I see.”

“I have to go, Mr. Broussard. I’ll put a Band-Aid on that scratch before you leave, okay?”

Just before she clicks off the flashlight, the beam lights up a page of tightly folded yellow notepaper on the concrete. I can see threads of green ink on the paper, the strokes as thin as a cat’s whisker. I pretend to sneeze and take my handkerchief from my pocket, then drop it. When I pick it up, I scoop the notepaper inside it. Before we go, Ruby Spotted Horse locks the cellar door, her face thoughtful. “The Culpepper man you mentioned earlier? He’s on a list at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The FBI knows him, too.”

“Culpepper is a terrorist?”

“An imperial wizard in Alabama. I don’t know if he’s active now. Let’s get some peroxide and bacitracin on you.”

She had brought up Culpepper out of nowhere and just as quickly and mysteriously dropped the subject. I follow her up the stairs. “I’ll skip the first aid, Miss Ruby. How about dinner sometime?”

She walks ahead of me into the kitchen, glancing over her shoulder as though making sure I’m with her. I wait for her to speak, but she doesn’t.

“Do you eat dinner with old people?” I ask.

“Sure, give me a call.”

“One more thing?”

“Oh, boy,” she replies.

“I’m still deeply disturbed about that cellar.”

“Then I don’t know what to say,” she says. “Steamed vegetables and fruit packed in airtight glass jars can explode as loudly as an M-80. You saw the mess on the floor. How about giving it a rest?”

“I saw dust fly off the door.”

“All right, you asked for it. This is the res. Things happen here that don’t happen in other places. The same on the Marias River and at the Big Hole and the Custer battlefield. Don’t question the power of the dead, Mr. Broussard.”

“You’re saying you have spirits in your house?”

“Look for them and you’ll find them. Don’t look for them and you won’t.”

Her thick dark hair is prematurely gray in places, her eyes mysterious, her petite stature and full bosom the kind that causes a mixed form of desire that men seldom untangle.

“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” she says.

“I don’t want to give you any grief. I’ll say goodbye now.”

“Listen, my great-grandfather was Nez Perce and at the Big Hole. My great-grandmother was Blackfeet and killed at the Baker Massacre. I get the feeling you think you have the right to invade my privacy because you sympathize with Indians. If that’s so, lose the attitude right now.”

“You got it,” I say. “I love your cat.”

I walk back to my truck and drive along the side of the Jocko, the spray on the boulders iridescent in the sunshine, the waterfalls high up on the Missions frozen like the teeth of animals. A moose with a huge rack is grazing in a grove of cottonwoods, the ground wet and green and shining. I try to take solace in the beauty of the day and the time on earth that I shared with my daughter, Fannie Mae. I think of her every day, over and over, and pray that she is with me and that one day she will contact me in an undeniable fashion and tell me that’s she safe from all the evil.

I almost forget the folded page of yellow notebook paper I picked up from the cellar floor. Could it be from Fannie Mae? Why can’t I receive a sign today rather than in the future? I hold the steering wheel with one hand and unfold the notepaper with my thumb and read the words that are written in a frail hand, perhaps by a child, perhaps by an elderly person: Help me. Please. I don’t want to die.