BURY MY HEART
Chapter 1The brass bell jingled on the print shop's telephone. Dan Reid wiped his pencil-stained fingers on his burlap apron as he got up to answer the call.
He had been proofreading a letter-to-the-editor about the President McKinley's upcoming re-election campaign. Life was good that Christmas season of 1899. Decades of a topsy-turvy economy and bouts of financial panic were solidly behind them, and a new age of prosperity glowed before the American people like a sunrise on the horizon. The Daily Sentinel that Dan Reid edited was getting downright dull lately. No big labor strikes and union riots in East Coast factories. No more heated editorials arguing for or against the United States becoming an imperial power, now that the Philippine islands had been annexed back in February and the soldiers were coming home. No more cattle, sheep, and homestead wars in Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. And definitely no Indian news to report, with Sitting Bull long dead and Geronimo safely locked away.
He walked to the rear of the print shop, passing rows of typists pecking at their Remingtons. A burly bearded man was cleaning and oiling the Linotype machine—a genuine Merganthaler Base Model I, a behemoth of a machine the size of two upright pianos strapped back to back
Dan plucked the wall-mounted telephone's horn off its hook. By habit, he leaned an elbow into the back wall as he slouched over the mouthpiece.
"Yep, Reid here."
"Danny? Are you busy? Can you come home?" Betsy, his wife, sounded worried.
"What's wrong, sweetheart?"
"Nothing really, Danny. Just it's that we've got us an unexpected visitor. A fella says he's your Uncle John."
"My Uncle John?" Dan blinked his pale blue eyes. "Naw, you must've got it wrong. I don't have an Uncle John, Betsy, not even on my mother's side. You must mean my cousin Hannah's husband."
"No, he said uncle. I'm sure of it. Says he's your Uncle John from Texas."
Shame and shock burned his cheeks. It was a ghost from the past, another life, another time. How could he forget who John Reid was? Because for practically Dan's whole life, he had known his late father's younger brother by another name: The Lone Ranger.
##
Dan Reid pedaled the bicycle hard through street traffic. He dodged carriages and splashed mud to women's long skirts. Horses neighed their alarm. Mothers snatched their children out of his way.
On the edge of this quiet Southern California town lay a row of two-story gabled houses. The Reid's house was the white-and-green one at the end. Picket fences caged in a square lot full of rose bushes and crab grass. A stray cat mewed, startled, and dashed away as he rolled to a stop.
Dan Reid dumped his bicycle on the flagstones leading up to the covered porch. He took the steps in one leap.
Betsy Reid caught her husband at the threshold. He breathed so hard that he couldn't talk. She held him by the shoulders to steady him and looked him stern in the eye. Betsy was of Scots-Irish stock from the Appalachian mountains, and in her high-button shoes she equaled her husband in height. She wore a lead-colored skirt, a pin-striped blouse, and a cloisonné brooch at her throat, so the only color on her entire person was her upswept waves of auburn hair.
"He's in the sittin' room," she said, her Kentucky accent more noticeable in her excitement.
Dan slipped out of her strong hands and entered the parlor.
After his exhausting bicycle ride across town, he felt flushed and his heart raced. He could hardly breathe the stifled air heavy with the musk of cross-stitched upholstery and woolen Navajo rugs. The oak walls of the narrow corridor were always dark, as the incandescent light bulbs that replaced kerosene lamps went un-used; Betsy was afraid of electricity.
As Dan plunged into the parlor, he nearly keeled over from the strong blast of conflicting odors: black tea, cinnamon, perfumed lace doilies, and a sweat-soaked horseman.
"Do you play?" asked an older man who sat hunched on the sofa.
Glancing to the upright piano shrouded in beige lace, Dan Reid shook his head. "My son will start lessons after the New Year…. Uncle John?"
Thin and shrunken, his shoulders slumped, his frock coat hung in ill-fitting folds. Knobby knees pinched together, he nursed a cup of tea. A salt-and-pepper beard obscured the lower half of his face. Round black spectacles replaced his former mask. The only part of his flesh that showed was the sharp tip of a nose and a high forehead gaining ground over his receding hairline of white curls.
"Merry Christmas, Dan," the old man said.
The clock on the mantle gave a ping to signal the half hour before noon.
Dan settled onto a straight-backed chair in between the piano and the tea table. "I thought you were dead."
"It's a nice home you've got here. What a lovely wife. When did you get married?"
"Back in Ninety-two," Dan said.
"Congratulations. Do you have children?"
"Two. Uh, one. I've a son, Britt who's five. My daughter died last year in July. She was barely three. Whooping cough."
"Sorry to hear that, Dan." The old man slowly raised the blue-and-white tea cup to his beard. Still the gentleman, he made not a sound as he sipped his tea.
"Why are you here… Uncle John?" Dan could barely talk. The memories of his youth were still so fresh: a fiery white horse galloping across the open prairie, the crack of a Colt .45 pistol echoing in the desert air, a man with a black mask and a white Stetson hat.
The ranger set down his cup on the matching saucer with a muted clink of china-upon-china. Then, reaching into his jacket pocket, he brought out a folio of papers tied by frayed string.
"These are for you." He handed the heavy packet over to Dan.
"What are these?"
Dan untied the string and unfolded yellow papers in his lap. He squinted at the grandiose cursive handwriting in the old style, where the s's looked like f's. He judged it to be half a century old, or more.
"On top is the deed to a hundred forty acres in southern Indiana that belonged to your grandfather. Tenants live there now, honest folks, farmers who pay their rent to the bank. The rent goes into an account jointly held in my name and yours."
Flipping through the pages by the corners, Dan identified more real estate property deeds in Kansas, in Oklahoma, in Nevada, in Pennsylvania, in eastern Massachusetts, and in Long Island New York. Although the family bible had been lost years ago, Dan recalled his father's stories of the Reids being among the first wave of permanent settlers after the Mayflower.
"And this?" Dan picked up the bottom leaflet.
"Oh, that." The ranger coughed dry. "That's title to the silver mine."
"The silver mine? Your…? That silver mine?"
"You've got the title papers and contact for the bank in Abilene that manages the operation. I think they've installed a telephone by now. I'm sorry, I don't know what its assets are worth right now. The price of silver goes up and down with the phases of the moon, these days. You may want to have it appraised."
Dan put the bundle of papers on the tea table, nudging aside a pair of glass doves and a tray of little mint candies. He leaned forward over his knees and peered intently through the spectacles masking the old man's eyes. Twinkles of clear blue irises eyed his nephew guardedly.
"Do you ever wear the….?" Dan gestured to his face.
"No. I took it off nearly ten years ago."
"I guess I never thought I'd see the day. What happened to you?"
"I got old."
"You're only fifty-nine going on sixty next April, if I remember right. That ain't so old. Hell, the banker holding my mortgage is a proud sixty-eight."
The ranger looked down at his pale freckled hands. "I'm fresh out of silver bullets."
I've still got mine, Dan wanted to say but didn't. He glanced to the locked music box on the fireplace mantle.
"My investments should be in your hands, not in my saddle bags. You can keep the properties for the rental income or sell them for the cash if you need to."
"But Ranger—"
"Don't call me that!" The old man snapped a pointer finger erect. "Don't ever, ever call me that. No one alive but you, Dan, knows me for anything but your wandering hobo of an uncle from Texas."
That said, the ranger rose off the sofa. He ambled with the stiff bow-legged gait of a man who had spent most of his life in a saddle.
Dan walked his uncle down the narrow hallway, around the bulging banister of the crescent staircase, and to the front door. A stained glass oval window glittered rainbow colors on the throw rug. He took his uncle's canvas duster from the wall hook. The coat was still damp in the shoulders from the rain that had lightly sprinkled that morning.
"Uncle John, aren't you going to stay a while? I can borrow set you up in our spare room."
"No, I really couldn't, Dan. You know me. I do what's needed and then I leave."
The ranger tapped on a small-brimmed bowler hat atop his receding hairline. He opened the front door for himself, and Dan dogged his steps. Their mismatched shoes clumped loudly on the hollow boards of the wraparound porch: a trail-worn pair of riding boots and a sensible pair of city loafers.
An idea bolted into Dan's mind, and he seized his uncle's elbow. "My god. You said, 'no one alive.' No one alive knows you were…. My god."
"What, Dan?"
The ranger kept walking toward the dappled gelding that awaited him, hitched to the iron post by the porch.
"Tonto?" he whispered. "Where is he? Why isn't he with you?"
"He's dead."
Dan Reid let go of the overcoat's sleeve, let the ranger walk forward a few steps, and watched dumb-founded as Uncle John mounted his unspectacular horse. Dan shaded his eyes. He saw in the halo of sun-blurred illusion the man he used to be. For that brief, fleeting instant, as the old man settled into the stirrups, and with the wintry sun gleaming on the brim of his beige hat, he was the Lone Ranger riding again.
"Why? How? When?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Please, Uncle John. He was my friend too!"
"I said, I don't want to talk about it. I'll ask you to respect that." His voice had a hard edge to it now, a sternness reserved for facing-off a drunken bank robber who'd just busted up a saloon and shot the piano player.
Though he was family, Dan felt a shudder at that voice. "Sorry."
Old John Reid gathered up the reins in his hands and turned his horse toward the gate of the picket fence. "No, I'm the one to apologize for snapping at you, Dan. It was exactly nine years ago, this month. You'd think I'd be over it by now."
"How….?"
"He was shot by cavalry soldiers in South Dakota, at a frozen creek outside the Pine Ridge Reservation, along with a couple hundred other innocent people."
"Wounded Knee," Dan whispered. He had done the typesetting for the newspaper when the story broke.
"I took off my mask, then and there. I threw it into the ditch with the pile of bodies. It's buried with him."
With a nudge of his knee and a cluck of his tongue, the ranger coaxed his mild horse into an ambling gait. The loose tail swished back and forth like a broom.
Dan Reid stood in his own front yard, purchased free-and-clear, in his peaceful town, just a shout away from his loving wife and his five-year-old son, where until this moment he had rejoiced in each new day. He watched the broken man go away down the street. He could only imagine what the Lone Ranger must have seen in the blizzard snows of South Dakota nine years before.
"My god," Dan said to the trio of blackbirds whistling on the leafless branches of a pear tree. "Tonto. Wounded Knee."