48 ETERNAL FAWN

48

ETERNAL FAWN

The evening before Ogden dies peacefully in his bed, when Vida is eighteen and he is eighty-five, they linger over dinner while her uncle fascinates her with stories of the nomadic peoples that once traveled the plains and mountains of this state, hunting buffalo and exploring—Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apache, and Shoshone. He has much knowledge of them and admiration for them. They were as deceitful and violent as human beings are in all times and places, but they were also as courageous and noble and wise in numbers alike to those of other cultures, with rich traditions and codes by which they ordered their societies. He is sentimental, but his sentiment ranges from sweet nostalgia to melancholy. "They fade away," he says. "So do we. This country isn't what it was when I was a boy."

Growing up, Ogden knew many people of the Cheyenne, Apache, and Shoshone nations who still kept proper faith with their history and ancestors. Three-quarters of a century later, few know the truth of the past in all its cabled fibers—or care to know it. Some operate casinos and are as slick as the Vegas sharpies who partner with them. Others boil their culture into a syrupy reduction of color and noise and dance, robbing it of its complex meaning while purifying it for the pleasure of audiences. With every generation, the young define themselves less by the history out of which they were born, and pour themselves into the one mold that globalism demands. This is also true of recent generations of other cultures, of all races and ethnic groups. The ruling elite loudly champion diversity but use the powerful tools of technology to shape everyone into like-minded worker bees and mindless consumers, into an obedient oneness. Her uncle has lived long enough to see this, weary of it, and mourn.

Toward the end of the evening, on a lighter note, he recounts vivid, charming stories about a Cheyenne maiden named Eternal Fawn. In his opinion, the other name imposed on her by the bureaucratic state isn't worth speaking. In 1953, Eternal Fawn was a medicine woman dedicated to preserving the knowledge of ancient therapies, but also an artist of great promise, working in pencil and in oils to produce portraits, often of the living elders of her nation, each rendered in exquisite detail, with great care and respect.

"The portrait of you in the library," Vida says.

"Yes. A gift from her."

Only now, after raising Vida for more than thirteen years, he reveals it was Eternal Fawn who divined the existence of the placer mine and led him to it, who taught him, among so many other things, which mushrooms are edible and which poisonous, who saved him from despair when he came home from a war fought against a merciless and depraved enemy.

After they clear away the dinner plates and pour fresh glasses of wine, he tells her more about the artist. Too subtle to be felt, a draft floats golden waves of candlelight over her uncle's face, a lavage that appears to wash away effects of his well-lived years. Or perhaps it is his memories of Eternal Fawn that, for this interlude, restore to him an appearance of youth.

Vida is enchanted by her uncle's revelations. "You loved her."

"The more amazing thing is that she loved me, too. I've thought about that for more than sixty years, and I still don't know why she did or how she could."

"Now, Uncle, no one could be easier to love."

"That's sweet of you to say, but you didn't know me back in the day. When I came home from the war, most of the light had gone out of me. I was a house of empty rooms—and over two years, she furnished them."

With her uncle's first mention of Eternal Fawn, a mystery has been born and grows deeper with each memory he shares. Now Vida asks that it be solved. "Yet you never married. Why not?"

Spectral light sheets against the windows, followed by the first thunderclap, which begins as a hard crash and fades into a scrooping sound, as if the gates of Heaven are opening against the resistance of rust.

"Her family was proud of their heritage and deeply committed to Cheyenne ways, she no less than her parents and two brothers."

"No intermarriage?"

"Not to anyone with skin like mine. They called me a wasicus , which is a Lakota word some other indigenous people adopted."

"That's so . . ."

"So 1950s," he says.

"But love is love, no matter what."

"She loved them, too. Maybe not more than she loved me, but she had loved them longer. They conceived her in love, and she couldn't imagine life without them. But that was the choice they gave her."

"How could she imagine life without you ?"

"Don't blame her. I never did. She was grace personified, and she gave me back a life that the war had taken from me."

Sharper lightning and harder thunder than before crack the shell of the promised storm. Across the slate roof, rushing rain sizzles like oil in a hot skillet.

How odd it seems to Vida that she never asked—and he never explained—why he's lived alone for so many decades, until a niece he had never seen needed a home. Could it really be that two years of the Cheyenne woman's love was so profound that it established in him peace and contentment for the duration of his life?

He says, "I think it matters you know about her and me, how it was and how it could have been, so ..."

When her uncle doesn't continue, Vida says, "So?"

"So you'll keep in mind that we don't get a thousand chances in this life. When one of the best kind comes along, it's rarer than you might know at the time."

The candlelight reveals tears pooled but unshed in her uncle's eyes, and her feelings for him are so tender that she's loath to ask why he chose a life alone. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after, in a moment less emotional than this, she'll pose that question.

In the morning, he doesn't come to the kitchen for breakfast. Vida knocks on his door. When he fails to respond, she enters his room and finds he has moved on from this world during the night.

After Herbert Lagare has come in his mortuary van and collected the body and gone, Vida is inconsolable. As she circles through the small house obsessively, every item inspires memories, and though all of them are good, they don't assuage her grief.

Soon she realizes that, the previous day, her uncle must have sensed his death impending. That was why, after keeping the story of Eternal Fawn locked in his heart for so long, he finally spoke of her.

Vida goes to the library and reaches across the turntable and takes the framed portrait down from the wall. She sits with it in an armchair. In youth as in old age, her uncle's face was benevolence made flesh, as if kindness were the very substance of which he had been created; in her experience of him, appearance and reality were one and the same.

The pencil portrait is on a page from an art-paper tablet and supported with pressboard. Vida turns the frame over. On the back, she finds a message in the artist's elegant hand: If I live to a hundred, I will never forget your face. Under those words is the stylized fawn.