Winter's Child Read Online Free

please.”
    â€œYou sure you feel like working today?” Roger took a step forward, as if he might catch her should she slump to the floor. “I can handle whatever you have going on.”
    â€œI’m fine,” she called over her shoulder as she made her way to the desk. “Everything’s just fine.”

3
    James Two Horses was six feet tall with short black hair slicked back behind his ears, skin the color of cinnamon, thick wrists and knuckles surprisingly knobby for a man in his twenties. He had sown his wild oats, he once told Father John. Sown more than he could remember, since most of the time he had been drunk. Sober now and had been for five years, and for the last two of those years, he had felt the calling. Waking him from a deep sleep in the middle of the night, a quiet voice in the back of his mind: Come follow Me.
    On two or three mornings each week for the last six months, James had shown up at St. Francis to serve Mass. Weighing the possibility of a vocation to the priesthood, he had explained. Seeking to experience what it might be like.
    Father John O’Malley hung his cassock in the closet of the sacristy next to the altar while James arranged the Mass books, the stole, and the chalice in the cabinets. Father John was gratefulfor the help. For some time now, either he or Bishop Harry had offered the early morning Mass without a server to help set up the altar, bookmark the prayer books for the proper readings, and tidy up afterward. They alternated the weekday Masses, he and the bishop. Today had been his turn.
    It was the fourth Tuesday in March, the Moon of Buffalo Dropping Their Calves, according to the Arapaho way of keeping time. A handful of parishioners had scattered themselves about the pews, the Old Faithfuls, he called them. No matter the weather, the blowing snow and icy roads, they propelled their old trucks to St. Francis Mission for early Mass. They were gone now. The silence in the church made its own sound.
    He had offered his prayers this morning for the soul of Clint Hopkins, a white man hit by a truck last night in Lander, and for the family the man had left behind. James told him about the accident while Father John was robing for Mass, pulling on the long white alb, the stole, the chasuble. “I hear he was a lawyer,” James had gone on. “Adoption cases for the most part. He helped a number of Arapahos and Shoshones adopt kids. Witnesses saw the accident. Hard to see anything in the blizzard last night, you ask me. It’s a wonder folks don’t have the sense to stay home.”
    All of which, Father John gathered, James had learned from his sister, the night dispatcher at the Lander Police Department. Somehow, between last evening and seven o’clock this morning, the news had made its way across the moccasin telegraph.
    Father John, pretty sure the telegraph hadn’t missed any details, had asked if Clint Hopkins left a family. In his near decade at St. Francis Mission, he had come to regard the moccasin telegraph as nothing less than a miracle of technology.
    â€œWife and daughter,” James had told him. “They must be inshock. The man went off to a meeting he’d probably gone to dozens of times. Everything the same. Sure, the weather was lousy, but he’d lived in the area all his life, so he probably thought he could handle whatever the storm handed out. He never came back.”
    â€œWe’ll pray for his family.” So many deaths, and yet each one a shock, a disruption of nature, a realignment of the world.
    With everything in its place in the sacristy, Father John followed James back through the small church built by the Arapahos more than a century ago. Faint odors of cold-stiffened leather and tobacco and perspiration hung in the air. He stopped to scoop up a wool scarf from the back pew before exiting through the front door that James held open.
    The mission was iridescent in the sunlight that had