The Ghost Walker Read Online Free Page A

River, the Little Wind River, the mountains, and the sky.
    On the far side of Circle Drive stood the new elementary school with a white stucco entry in the shape of a tipi. Behind the school lay the baseball field where, his first summer here, he had marked off the baseball diamond, carefully measuring ninety feet between the bases, and had started the St. Francis Eagles. The kids needed something to do in the summer, he had told himself, but he knew he needed a baseball team to coach.
    The first daylight glowed in the east, spreading fingers of pink and orange and magenta across the silver sky. Last night’s snowstorm had passed over, leaving the sky clear and luminescent, a field of blinking stars. In the north was
Nahax,
the morning star, always the lastto rise. Father John had the sense that St. Francis was gripped in the same winter stillness that had lain over Arapaho camps on the plains in the Old Time.
    The stillness of the plains had been the first thing he had noticed when he came here, after an eight-month stint in Grace House. The silence had seemed loud then; he sometimes thought he could hear it. Yet it was unlike the noise of Boston where he’d grown up. As a kid, making his rounds alone in the early morning, tossing the
Globe
onto the little stoops of the red-brick buildings that lined the streets of his neighborhood, he had been engulfed in noise—dogs barking, engines roaring, tires squealing, a baby crying. Noise had seemed natural then, but it was silence that was natural. It was only in silence, the Arapahos believed, that you could hear the Divine drawing near.
    He began the Mass as daylight stole through the side windows of the church and played across the faces of the old people at prayer. The old faithfuls, he called them. The elders and grandmothers who climbed into pickups every day, no matter the temperature, and drove thirty or forty miles across the reservation to Mass. John and Mary Red Deer were here, and old Donald Lightheart in his usual place in the first pew, and Eddie Walsh, rosary beads twisted through gnarled fingers, and five or six others.
    This was their church, the Arapahos’. They had built it and painted the walls with sacred symbols: the lines and circles that symbolized the journey of life. Above the front door they had painted the figure of the crucified Christ, the staked warrior, like the warriors in the Old Time who had staked themselves to the ground so that enemies might vent their anger upon them while the people escaped. On the wall next to the altar, they had painted a yellow daffodil, so that a flower might always grace the altar, even in winter. Father John knewthe Arapahos considered the Mass only one of the many ways to worship the Great Mystery, the Shining Man Above. There couldn’t be too many. He offered Mass for the body in the ditch.
    By the time Mass ended, daylight filled the church. Back in the sacristy, Father John removed the green chasuble he’d worn this morning—green symbolized life and hope—while Leonard Bizzel, the caretaker, placed the chalice and prayer books in the cabinet. Leonard hadn’t reached fifty yet, but he moved with the deliberation of an old man. Every act received the same minute attention. “Bad things goin’ on,” he said.
    The Arapaho had obviously skipped the preliminaries and gotten to what was bothering him: the dead body. The moccasin telegraph must have set a record for sprinting news across the reservation, Father John thought. Then he remembered Leonard’s son was on the BIA police force.
    “That ghost don’t get a proper burial, it’s gonna cause plenty of trouble.” Leonard lingered on each word, as if it were an oracular pronouncement. “How come you seen the body?”
    “The Toyota broke down on Rendezvous Road. I was walking to the highway to hitch a ride when I spotted it,” Father John explained as he hung the vestments in the closet.
    “Ghost’s causing trouble already.”
    “A radiator hose