Winter's Child Read Online Free Page A

broken through the clouds and blazed like fire across the snow-covered grounds. Father John squinted into the brightness as he came down the front steps. The redbrick residence across Circle Drive, the old stucco school building that housed the Arapaho Museum, the yellow stucco administration building; all shining in the snow. He had been at St. Francis Mission on the Wind River Reservation nearly a decade, six years as pastor. Longer than Jesuit priests usually stayed in one parish. This was home.
    James waited at the driver’s door of his blue truck, the only vehicle still parked in Circle Drive. Red lights flickered in the tunnel of cottonwoods as the last parishioner drove toward Seventeen-Mile Road. Father John started to thank the man for helping out this morning, but James put up a black-gloved hand, palm out. “Got time for a sit-down soon?”
    He always had time, Father John told him. He could see his breath in the brisk cold. He took his gloves out of his parka, pulled them on, and started down the snowy path across the center fieldto the residence. He turned back. “Give me a call first. Make sure I’m here.” Things had a way of turning up at the mission. Emergencies, unexpected delays. The day was never his own. And this morning, his niece, Shannon O’Malley, the third of his brother Mike’s six kids, was arriving. He had to pick her up at the Riverton airport.
    Behind him he could hear the engine of James’s pickup coughing into life and sputtering around the curve in Circle Drive out to the cottonwood tunnel. Walks-On, his golden retriever, came romping through the snow toward him, tossing snow with his nose and leaping on his three legs as if the snow were a disc he could snatch out of the air. Walks-On fell in beside him, and he patted the dog’s head as they walked up the steps to the residence. He had shoveled the steps in the dark this morning before going over to the church, but a sheen of snow clung to the concrete.
    He was thinking James would make an excellent pastor at St. Francis. It had always been a Jesuit mission, but there were fewer and fewer Jesuits, and the day could come when diocesan priests might have to take over. James would fit right in, one of the people. But years of seminary lay ahead. He was jumping ahead, he told himself. James was still pondering whether he even had a vocation to the priesthood.
    Father John let himself into the front hall, draped his parka over a hook, and tossed his cowboy hat on the bench below. He tried to shake off the thought of another pastor at St. Francis Mission. But every now and then rumors reached him that the Provincial officials were reevaluating their commitments. There were times when he could feel the day when everything would change, closing in on him.
    The dog skittered down the hallway, and Father John followedhim into the kitchen. The odor of fresh coffee mingled with an unusual burned smell.
    â€œHelp yourself to the oatmeal.” Bishop Harry Coughlin—in his late seventies, round-faced and bald except for a stubborn fringe of gray hair that wrapped around his pink scalp—sat at the table, the Gazette opened beside his coffee mug. “Elena called. Her grandson’s pickup was dead this morning. She’ll be in as soon as they find someone to give them a jump. I made the coffee and oatmeal. I believe you will find them tasty.”
    Father John poured dry food into Walks-On’s dish and set it on the floor. He took a bowl from the rack in the sink and ladled in some oatmeal, trying to avoid the brown, crispy chunks that clung to the bottom of the pan. The coffee he poured into his mug had the washed-out look of dirty rainwater. He smiled at the image of Bishop Coughlin, who had spent thirty years tending to the spiritual well-being of Catholics in Patna, India, puttering around the kitchen, preparing oatmeal and making coffee. Father John had never known Elena not to make it to work.