Louise calmed herself with the idea that she was staying with Baptiste because she wanted to stay. She was here in Baptiste’s room of her own desire. If there was a spell on her she was smart enough to recognize it. She chose to believe she was with him because there was a strength in him she would never have. He was not ashamed to be Indian. The nuns couldn’t wash the smell of spirit smoke from his hair with all their kerosene. They couldn’t soap away his Indian tongue.

Sister Sebastian once told Louise that the best thing Louise could do for herself and for all of her race was to marry a white man and move off the reservation. She thought of all the young Indian women who had chosen to marry white men. They would come back to the reservation with their half-breed sons, with their daughters, faces watchful and afraid. Indian women who held their pale children back from the dance while their husbands visited other squaw men and talked about the stupidity of the tribe, the drunken Indians, all the ways in which Indians could never make things work, lazy Indians, stupid Indians, grinding talk applied to everything Indian, while their own half-breed children squatted in the warm sawdust at the edge of the arena, or stood frowning at the fry bread stand, always away from the teepee circle. Louise knew what it was to be a half-breed. She had lived on the reservation her whole life. Even though she belonged here, even though she was Indian, she couldn’t claim her place here like Baptiste. Baptiste had something she desired, a power beyond medicine that she would never have.

She remembered the silver November day Sister Sebastian had looked up from her attendance sheet, her peach-colored face hardened. “John,” she said, “John the Baptiste.” Everyone kept still in their chairs, tracing their pencil holders, hiding their hands in their desks, keeping their eyes down, hoping not to be called upon, hoping not to be the object of the sister’s ridicule. Baptiste Yellow Knife with his wild hair, Baptiste in his animal skins and high-topped moccasins had become John the Baptist eating bugs, John the Baptist thick with lice. Dirty. Dirty Indian. Louise had felt the damp heat beneath her arms, the sudden thump of her heart. Baptiste had been held back three years because his mother had refused to allow him to attend the Ursulines’ until he was eight years old.