Free The Eagle Catcher by Margaret Coel Page B

Vicky because school was easier for Indian kids if they had names like white kids. When she came back to the reservation, after she had been away all those years—seven years for her BA and law degree and three years in the Denver law firm—the elders gave her a new name, Hi sei ci nihi. Woman Alone.
    Vicky stopped the Bronco behind a battered white pickup with a cracked windshield. Ernest’s one-story house, with green paint peeling off the sides, squatted in the middle of a patch of dirt strewn with old tires, beer cans, scraps of paper, and torn cardboard boxes. A white propane tank stood on short metal legs alongside another pickup, rusted out and sagging to one side. Next to it lay a yellow refrigerator, a rope tied around the middle. Vicky could see Jenny Oldman pulling laundry from the clothesline that angled off a back corner of the house. Jenny must have heard the Bronco, but she didn’t turn around.
    Vicky slammed the Bronco door and walked down the driveway. The house looked like most houses on the reservation, some bi-levels, others tri-levels. How the houses came to be was one of grandfather’s favorite stories. The warriors had come home from places like Normandy and Okinawa and Iwo Jima and had found the people still living in tipis and shacks. So they went to Washington and asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs people, “What were we fighting for?” After the warriors asked that, Arapahos got houses like other Americans. Her generation was the first to be born in houses. Her mother had been born in a shack. Her father, like her grandfather, had been born in a tipi.
    Jenny kept her back toward Vicky, dropping clothespins into a bucket at her feet, adding to the stack of laundry piled over one arm.
    â€œJenny? How are you?” Vicky asked, walking up slowly behind her.
    â€œWhy’d you come here?” Jenny reached up and pulled another towel off the line, her cotton dress straining across thin shoulders. A thick black braid hung partway down her back.
    â€œHow are the kids?”
    The pile of laundry started to slip from Jenny’s arm, and Vicky reached out to help steady it. It was then she saw the angry purple bruise that spread from Jenny’s right eye across her cheekbone.
    â€œOh, my God,” Vicky blurted. She felt a knot tightening in her throat as she instinctively put an arm around the other woman’s shoulders and pulled her close. The pile of laundry between them smelled like fresh, sweet sage.
    Jenny started to cry. “Don’t look at me,” she said, pulling back and shaking her head. “He don’t mean it. He ain’t like this normally. He loves me and the kids, you know he does. It’s just that things’ve been so bad since that job on the highway ended and the wells stopped pumping, so he got to drinkin’ again.”
    Vicky took the clean towels and diapers and little shirts from Jenny’s arm and laid them in a basket near the concrete stoop at the back of the house. Two small brown faces with wide eyes peered shyly around the top step, then quickly pulled back. Lucas and Susan had been like that, small and vulnerable. She felt herself trembling. Trying to swallow the knot still in her throat, she walked back to Jenny who was standing over the bucket single-mindedly plunking in clothespins like a child at a game.
    â€œWhen did it happen?” Vicky asked.
    â€œIt don’t matter.” The last clothespin hit the ground. Jenny leaned over, scooped it up, and laid it in the bucket.
    â€œYes, it does. It matters, Jenny.” Vicky heard her voice rising.
    Jenny straightened up and looked straight at her. The white of her eye was the color of a raw beet. “It was my fault. I should’ve just let him alone. Only I was so worried, not knowin’ where he was last night, so I started at him when he come in this mornin’.”
    â€œYou need to get away for a while,” Vicky said, glancing at