What work, he had asked.
The work of God, she had said, and left him without a further word, left him to his conscience.
For they shall obtain mercy, Lucia thought to herself.
At least it would be safe for Aunt Zita at the ration point, used every second Saturday.
There would be soldiers there.
Of late, because of the Ghost Dancing, Aunt Zita had not visited the settlements and encampments themselves. She had been turned back more than once, at rifle point, by strangely clad Indians.
Aunt Zita had thought the better of martyrdom, and had turned the buckboard about and driven away.
Martyrdom would interfere with my work, Aunt Zita had pointed out to Lucia.
Lucia had agreed.
With God’s work, Aunt Zita had added.
Lucia had said, oh. Once, in a careless and unwise moment, Lucia had asked Aunt Zita the grounds of her assurance of her call, her vocation. It came to me in prayer, Aunt Zita had said.
Lucia had thought about this for a while, and then had decided to stop thinking about it.
Lucia’s father, now dead, had given her books to read which were not available at the finishing school. Though she was a girl, he had taken her for walks, and spoken of the trees and the stars, of insects and the changes of animals, and the mysterious world of which all she knew occupied but the corner of a particle. They had spoken gravely of many things, and Lucia had learned how much that men did not, and perhaps could not, know. She had learned not simply the records of empires, the tracks of the bones of time, but tried to see if they spoke the stories that she had been told, and found that they did not. Though she was a girl, and destined for the home, for sewing, the work of a house and the raising of children, he had wanted her to sense the depth of the puzzles about her, and the flatulence of the common formulas that would trivialize the depth of mysteries, humiliating and domesticating them into the comforting, cardboard truths that men, terrified of the dark, would sell their lives by rather than renounce.
Sometimes Lucia wished that she had the faith, the untroubled, uncomplicated mind, the ironclad serenity of Aunt Zita, who held the universe, its inhabitants and its purpose in the pocket of her apron. Then, thinking about it, Lucia decided that this was not her wish at all. She recalled her father and loved him, and rejoiced in his gift to her, that gift of question and wonder that so often hurt her, that refused to let her have rest, that would bring her not simple happiness perhaps, but the torment and awe that somehow, in rare moments, were beyond such happiness, becoming inexplicably something nobler and more priceless, becoming something that in the wind and under the stars gave her keen, unutterable joy.
Yet Lucia was a woman, and it was lonely and cold in the dark spaces between the stars, lonely and forsaken at the ends of time, and the mysteries of an alien universe were no more marvelous to her, nor should they have been, than the growth of a blade of grass or a kitten’s fur or the imagined touch of a man’s gentle, loving hand.
Lucia looked at the range against the wall of the soddy, smelled the fumes of the chip fire, and the iron of the range seemed warm and beautiful to her, and even the smell of the burning cow chips seemed somehow individual and sharp, and pleasurable and welcome.
Lucia got up.
She took the cover from a wooden bucket in one corner, tapped with the chipped iron dipper through the plate of ice frozen over the water, put some four dippers of water into a heavy metal pot, blue with black flecks, recovered the bucket, measured coffee, and set the pot on the range.
Lucia was very pleased that Aunt Zita would be gone for several hours.
She wasn’t worried about Aunt Zita, for the woman would be riding to the agency, in the full daylight, and would return the next day, probably in the early evening, well before dark.
It did not occur to Lucia, whose school had been closed for nine days, due to lack of attendance, that she herself would be in greater danger than Aunt Zita. She was alone, unarmed, and not far from the Grand River encampment of Sitting Bull, who was generally regarded as a ringleader of the Ghost Dancing.
Major McLaughlin, the agent at Standing Rock, who had been very kind to her, had assured her that the Ghost Dancing would stop soon and that she could resume her duties. In the meantime, her pay, more than a dollar and a half a week, would be continued without interruption. Vaguely, when the major had spoken of the ending of the Ghost Dancing, Lucia had gathered that Sitting Bull was to be taken into custody, or somehow dissuaded from encouraging the Ghost Dancers. The major had not gone into detail and Lucia had not pressed him. He had apparently not wished to speak to her at any length about it.
Lucia thought of Sitting Bull, now an old man and almost a legend with his people, a medicine chief of the fighting Sioux in their days of greatness, one of the coup-counters at the Little Big Horn, a symbol in his way of his people’s vanished glories, with which the Ghost Dancing itself seemed to have some pathetic, obscure connection. Lucia wondered what would happen if someone, most likely the Indian police acting on orders from the agent, were to attempt to arrest or capture Sitting Bull.
Nothing would happen, said Lucia to herself, but the Indians would not like it. No, she said to herself, they would surely not like it.
But there was nothing to worry about.
The day of the eagle feathers was gone.
Lucia could smell the coffee on the range now, and all was well with her, and her world.
Let the wind blow, she said to herself.
Lucia turned over the coffee cup on the table so that it was rightside up.
She poured the cup until it almost brimmed over on the table.
Satisfied, she went to a large, ironbound trunk, against the wall of the soddy where her cot stood.
Fishing about in this trunk, beneath linen, sheets, blankets, clothes, assorted boxes and packages, bags of hairpins, spoons wrapped in tissue paper, and such, Lucia extracted, from amidst several books near the bottom, an inexpensively bound novel, written in French.
She was rather pleased that she had learned French at the finishing school.
She placed this novel squarely on the plank table by the coffee, found her place and, sipping coffee, slipped from the soddy at Standing Rock to the marbled floors and mirrored walls of the palace of Versailles in the time of Louis the Fifteenth.
Brazen was she indeed, Madame de Pompadour, making her entrance at court on the arm of his majesty himself, the king, that woman so bold and proud under the scornful but frightened glances of the scandalized noblewomen.
The little soddy filled with the gay rustle of silk and the click of high, hard heels on the marbled floor.
Listening closely one could remark the minuet, something by Mozart perhaps.
The coffee popped and bubbled on the range.
Lucia leaped up once more and this time from the trunk, from the secret depths of a fur muff, she drew forth a wire and cloth contraption, bright and flouncy with red and yellow ribbons, from New Orleans.
It was deliciously vulgar and had been purchased secretly before she left Saint Louis-why Lucia was never sure.
Lucia threw back her head and laughed as she tied on the bustle.
Swinging her hips she flounced from one end of the soddy to the other.
Her father would certainly have been surprised, but then fathers never understood these things, and Aunt Zita would have been horrified, and would have thought that she understood them only too well.
It is sinfully attractive, thought Lucia, rather.
And I am pretty, thought Lucia, I think.
I wonder, she asked herself, if a man would desire me, if he would want me-want-yes, she said-want me.
Why not, she asked herself.
She laughed again.
Then, with a certain provocative regality, a certain aristocratic insolence, Madame de Pompadour, favored mistress of his majesty, on his very arm itself, entered the court, bold and proud under the scornful but frightened glances of the scandalized noblewomen.