Blood of the White Bear Read online

  Copyright ©2013 by Marcia Calhoun Forecki

  and Gerald Schnitzer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from publisher.

  Published by WriteLife, LLC

  2323 S. 171 St.

  Suite 202

  Omaha, NE 68130

  www.writelife.com

  ISBN: 978-1-60808-090-8

  First Edition

  BLOOD

  OF THE

  WHITE BEAR

  Marcia Calhoun Forecki

  and

  Gerald Schnitzer

  All the characters in this book are fictional.

  Fact: In May 1993, a lethal strain of a previously unknown New World hantavirus began claiming victims in the Four Corners area of the American Southwest. Called Sin Nombre Virus (SNV), the disease attacked healthy adults. Through the cooperative efforts of the Centers for Disease Control, the state health departments of New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, the Indian Health Service, the Navajo Nation, and the University of New Mexico, the virus was isolated, and its host, deer mice, was identified. Sin Nombre has claimed over hundreds of lives since it first appeared.

  Fiction: The mutated Sin Nombre Virus in this book is fictional.

  Fact: In 1979, the second largest contamination by radioactive material in history happened at Church Rock, New Mexico, when an earthen dam containing uranium tailings broke and released radioactive materials into the Rio Puerco.

  Fiction: The pursuit of anyone by people in black SUVs from the companies responsible for the contamination is fictional.

  The authors thank editors Ed Vogel, David Martin, Erin Reel and Deb Derrick for their generous assistance.

  The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives.

  — Lakota Proverb

  Wisdom comes only when you stop looking for it and start living the life the Creator intended for you.

  — Hopi Proverb

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Five little toes curled around the eighth rung of a wooden ladder, leaning against the back of Rachel’s house. Five dimpled fingers grasped the ninth rung. A chin, sticky with grape jelly, pointed to the roof of the house. Rachel pulled her five-year-old body up and settled both bare feet on the eighth rung. Without hesitation, her left hand reached for the tenth rung.

  Reaching the roof undetected, Rachel put her head in the space between two rungs and wiggled her skinny, pre-kindergarten body through it, until she was on all fours high above the ground. The little climber’s Uncle Henry was repairing this part of the roof. He left the ladder in place and a bundle of shingles a few feet higher up. Rachel thought the bundle would make a good seat and crawled toward it. The surface of the roof felt rough on her palms and knees, like a kitty’s tongue but with much bigger bumps.

  From her seat on the roof, Rachel looked out into the tops of maples and birches and conical evergreens. She could not see the river through the branches, but she looked for it anyway. It was not the topography of her home in New Hartford that beckoned Rachel to climb a ladder and sit on the roof. She looked up, directly over her head, into the blue spring sky. Ribbons of clouds swept the horizon, like a paint brush had left them. What was on the other side of the clouds, Rachel wondered. What could she climb to get there?

  “Rachel,” called Henry. The girl was out of his sight, somewhere on the roof. Henry stepped back from the ladder. He stretched his neck, until his muscles burned. “Rachel! Are you on the roof?”

  Pansy stood behind Henry. They were Rachel’s aunt and uncle, her only relatives and caretakers since the death of her parents.

  “I can see her,” said Pansy. Her voice was strained with both panic and relief, panic that the little girl was in danger sitting on a pile of shingles on the roof and relief that the girl had not yet fallen to her death.

  Henry started up the ladder. Pansy waved her arms, trying to get Rachel’s attention. “Uncle Henry’s coming for you, honey. Just sit still, and don’t move.”

  Henry crawled on all fours to the pile of shingles and helped Rachel climb on his back. Once they were safely on the ground, Pansy grabbed the girl and held her tightly against her chest. “Not today,” said Rachel, quietly. Pansy had heard these words before, in fact, nearly every day recently.

  For weeks, Rachel had been fascinated with heights. It started when Uncle Henry decided to remodel the cottage on the river. With a child to raise, they had to become more sedentary. Not ready to completely give up the outdoor life, Henry decided to install a sky light in the roof, over the living room. He wanted to see the Connecticut sky. While working on the skylight, Henry realized the shingles were in pretty bad shape. He did not want to have to repair leaks in the winter, so the ladder was still propped against the gutter.

  Rachel laid on the living room floor, looking up at the sky. The clouds framed in the skylight smiled and spoke to her. One day, Rachel jumped up from the floor, ran up the stairs to her bedroom, opened the window, and climbed out. She was sure the clouds were there on the roof, close enough to touch.

  Pansy was working in her summer garden, behind the house and happened to look up and see Rachel pulling her legs through the open window. She raised a dirt-covered hand over her mouth, not wanting to scream and frighten the girl and ran into the house and up the stairs. Without speaking, Pansy reached out of the window, pulled Rachel back into the bedroom with one arm, and slammed the window shut with the other. Later, Henry hammered nails into the window frame, a few inches above the bottom pane. Rachel could open the window for air, but not wide enough to crawl through.

  Rescuing Rachel, Pansy smeared garden dirt from her hands onto the girl’s arms and face. Washing up in the kitchen sink, Pansy said, “What were you looking at?”

  “Clouds,” said Rachel. She was concentrating on the soap bubbles Pansy blew into the air and did not pick up on her aunt’s panic.

  “You can see the clouds through the windows and outside from the swing.”

  “I can’t hear them,” Rachel insisted. She was surprised that Pansy did not see the difference. She thought her aunt knew everything. She even knew where Rachel’s parents had gone—to Heaven.

  Orphaned at age three, Rachel was adopted by her only paternal uncle and his wife. They settled in New Hartford, Connecticut, to raise their niece. Before Rachel came permanently into their home, Henry and Pansy moved around, seeing the country. Henry’s brother called him the last living hippie, though he was far from that. After the last of the fall foliage had dropped to the ground in New England, Pansy pulled her husband to the Southwest. Even before the “Me Generation” discovered Santa Fe, Henry and Pansy knew all the native artists. After Rachel’s parents’ plane crashed in New Mexico, Rachel’s aunt and uncle kept her in the east, safe in the forest, away from death in the sky.

  * * *

  Rachel begged for a tree house in the spring of the year she turned seven. Pansy was reluctant, but Rachel’s interest in rooftops waned in the previous two years. Henry built a magnificent tree house in a big, forked maple. All through the summer, Rachel spent hours in the tree, watching the birds build nests, catching insects and giving them a thorough examination, and reading library books by the stack. When the leaves fell that fall, Henry realized that Rachel had not spent all her time in the tree house. One afternoon, he watched her crawl out of the tree house window and onto its roof. From there, she climbed expertly up to a branch twenty
feet above the ground.

  It was Henry’s voice that startled her. Rachel fell silently through the bare limbs toward the ground. Henry managed to catch her, and they both collapsed into a huge pile of leaves. Henry broke his wrist. The emergency room doctor found nothing physically wrong with Rachel.

  Things were quiet in the Bisette household for several months. Then, in the spring before her eighth birthday, Rachel carried her favorite baby doll, Mindy, outside. Walking through the kitchen, she opened the drawer where Aunt Pansy kept matches and removed the whole box. Rachel watched carefully as her aunt and uncle lit fires in the living room fireplace throughout the winter, and she knew how it was done.

  Under the maple tree that held her tree house, Rachel collected dried leaves and small twigs. She patted them into a circle with a clear spot in the middle. Around the outside of her circle of leaves, she scraped a little ditch with a stick. She had seen Uncle Henry make a little ditch around camp fires. Rachel placed Mindy in the center of the circle, her arms outstretched, and had no difficulty striking the big wooden, kitchen match. The leaves around the doll caught quickly. In seconds, Mindy was surrounded by a circle of fire. Rachel watched the flames in silence.

  Pansy smelled the burning leaves from inside the house. She was making Rachel’s bed on the second floor, stepped to the window, saw Rachel standing over the ring of fire, and jerked on the window, but it would not open past the nails Henry installed for Rachel’s protection. Pansy shouted through the narrow opening, “Rachel! Get away from the fire. Henry! Out back, quick!”

  Pansy turned and ran down the stairs. She flung the backdoor wide open and jumped from the top stair down to the ground. Running as fast as she could to the maple tree, Pansy saw Rachel step over the fire, now nearly burned out but still dangerous. Standing inside the circle, Rachel grabbed Mindy and hugged her. Then, she jumped over the flames and stepped away. Pansy shouted Rachel’s name over and over, but the little girl seemed entranced by the ritual she was performing. She carried Mindy away from the flames, and taking a crochet hook from her pocket, she poked the end of one of Mindy’s fingers. “There,” she said, “I’ve saved you.”

  Pansy grabbed Rachel by the shoulders. Henry had arrived in the back yard by this time. He scooped both Pansy and Rachel into his arms.

  “What’s going on?” Henry shouted.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” said Pansy. “Well, young lady?”

  Rachel looked lovingly at her aunt and uncle. “I saved her from the fire. See, she only has a scratch on her finger.”

  Pansy dropped to her knees. She pulled Rachel toward her chest and sobbed into the little girl’s hair. It smelled of smoke. Rachel had a scar on one of her fingers, up near the pad. It had been there since the accident, the one that took her parents to Heaven.

  * * *

  “It’s a form of post-traumatic stress,” Dr. Finch said. “We’re seeing it in soldiers who served in Vietnam. The Army doesn’t recognize it, but it’s real all the same.”

  “A soldier, from combat? Rachel is a five-year-old girl,” Pansy exclaimed. She held her purse on her lap, mindlessly snapping the clasp open and shut, unaware of the sound. Henry reached over and put his hand on top of his wife’s hand, to stop her nervous play.

  “Any trauma can create this condition. For Rachel, the trauma of being in a plane crash would have been enough to trigger nightmares, acting out, withdrawal, even regression of her developmental milestones. In Rachel’s case, she also lost her parents in the crash. She undoubtedly saw her parents’ bodies before they were recovered from the accident. She was a three-year-old, strapped in a seat with fire around her. It’s amazing she has done as well as she has. I think that’s a tribute to you and your husband, Mrs. Bisette.”

  “We love Rachel very much, and we would do anything to help her, of course, but we just need to know what to do.”

  Dr. Finch was a pediatric neurologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Rachel’s pediatrician recommended she have a neurological workup before going any further with a treatment plan for Rachel. The CT scan showed no damage to her brain, and the EKG showed no seizure activity. Neurologically, Rachel was sound. However, her fascination with dangerous heights and fire was very disturbing.

  Dr. Finch leaned back in his oversized, leather, desk chair. The leather squeaked a little. He put his hands on the arms of his chair, ready to push himself up and walk Pansy out of his office. He had five patient files carefully stacked in a cascading array down the side of his desk. Rachel’s file had been moved to the other side of his desk, to his version of an out basket.

  “Patience is important,” he said, placing his hand on Pansy’s shoulder, as much to turn her toward the door as to comfort her. “Distance, too. Planning any trips to New Mexico soon?”

  “Is that a bad idea?” Henry asked. He leaned forward, his hands clinched between his knees.

  “For now. Watch for other dangerous behavior.”

  “We will keep her safe,” Pansy whispered.

  “Children remember the events of their trauma, but they can get the details wrong. It’s important to tell her the truth, if she asks questions. It’s common for children to act out parts of the trauma in their play. We see this in cases of severe abuse. They repeat certain parts of the trauma with toys and friends.”

  Henry glared at Dr. Finch.

  “I understand that Rachel lost both her parents in a plane crash, Mr. Bisette. Another thing, some children come to believe they were responsible for the trauma. When you do talk to her about it, make clear it was not her fault, and she could not have prevented the crash. We see that kind of self-blame in older children, but it’s something to be aware of as she grows older.”

  “Someone was to blame, but not Rachel,” Henry said.

  “Henry! We don’t know that.”

  “If there are facts about the crash being intentional, Rachel should know them, as she gets older. It will help her acceptance of the tragedy. Only if you are sure,” said Dr. Finch.

  “I can recommend a therapist for Rachel to talk to, if you like. When children as young as Rachel experience trauma, they usually work their way through it by adolescence or early adulthood. Still, it might be beneficial for the whole family to have a session or two. Let me ask my nurse to give you a referral card.”

  On the drive back to New Hartford, Pansy suggested they stop in Danbury. After lunch, they strolled around a mall, looking in store windows. Pansy stopped in front of a fabric store. “How about I make you your own quilt for your bed?” Rachel shrugged.

  Inside the store, Rachel looked at bolt after bolt of soft flannel for the quilt’s backing. She kept coming back to the bear print: little brown teddy bears with blue bow ties on the boys and pink bows between the girl bears’ ears. “I want the bears,” she announced.

  Henry said, “Bears are terrific, Rachel.” He was eager to get out of the mall and back on the road home.

  “Bears are soft, and they give big hugs,” said Rachel.

  “Perfect,” Pansy said. “These bears will keep you warm and safe. Let’s get home, and we can start cutting out the pieces.”

  Chapter Two

  Albert Bisette was eleven years old when the United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities. What Albert remembered of that date was that his older brother, Henry, returned home from the war in Europe. While the world powers battled, Albert was absorbed in another clash of cultures, with the deadliest weapons of the time, man-made and biological. The Conquest of the New World, and the history of the American West, fascinated him. He read avidly about de Soto, Coronado, Cabeza de Vaca, Geronimo, Black Elk and Crazy Horse. The great passions of Albert’s youth, so far, were the American West, Indians, heroic warriors, last stands, and sole survivors.

  Albert’s daughter, Rachel, was born late in his marriage to the former Cathy Campbell. Albert pursued a Ph.D. in geology an
d postponed starting a family until he was tenured at Dalton University. As a young professor, he traveled every summer to the Southwest. Cathy preferred to stay in Connecticut, to be near her large family in North Carolina. Albert feared his exposure to the Nevada blast might affect his ability to produce normal children. As the years progressed, research emerged about genetic effects of radiation sickness in Japan. Albert never said anything to Cathy about his fears, and as the years passed, she began to feel that his reluctance to have children was due to a flaw in their marriage, meaning, a flaw in her. Albert realized he would lose his wife if he did not give her a family. He contacted veterans’ organizations and got in touch with some of his buddies from the detail. They all had families, and no one heard of any ill effects on the second generation. Still, when Rachel was born, he cried with relief as much as joy to see that she was whole, loud, and a healthy pink.

  Albert gave Rachel a kachina doll for her first birthday present. It was just a cloth doll with an embroidered kachina mask, so that a baby could play with it. One of Rachel’s first words, at the astonishing age of nine months, was a sort of “chi-chi,” by which she meant her kachina doll.

  Albert continued to do research in New Mexico and Arizona. He wrote articles about the Anasazi culture and their life in the bluffs until 1200 CE. Albert did not agree with the prevailing theories that drought and famine wiped out the people who successfully lived in a difficult environment for thousands of years. Droughts had come and gone, and the people continued to thrive. Something else either pushed or pulled them from their homes in the Four Corners. Albert did not have a favorite theory for the Anasazi disappearance, but he believed the answer was there, under the sand and the rocks. He returned summer after summer, trying to find it.

  Cathy always declined Albert’s entreaties that she accompany him to the desert. He understood the trip would be no fun for her. Albert was so focused on his research, and she hated the dry climate. Cathy came from a large family, and she usually summered with them, spending a couple of weeks with each sibling and a week with her parents.