“Is he hard of hearing?” Lissa asked.
“Yes, very. Yes. I forgot that.”
Lissa knocked again and waited. A minute passed. Then she heard footsteps, and the door opened revealing a man with stooped shoulders, long ears, and white wisps of hair retreating from his forehead. His jeans hung on a pair of suspenders. He did not look pleased to see them. “Huh,” Robert said. “You’re here anyway.”
His trailer was crowded, boxes stacked on the surfaces as if he was preparing to move. “Find someplace to sit,” Robert said. “Can’t believe what it’s like living in one of these when there’s nowhere to put anything.”
“At least you got somewhere to put something, right?” Lissa said.
“Some people got, yeah…” Jill said, trailing off. She was breathy, talking to herself.
Lissa pushed aside a box and sat at the table. She noticed a set of photographs and reached for them, listening quietly as Jill and Robert spoke. In one photograph, KC was no more than five, smiling largely on a leather sofa in the crook of his grandfather’s arm. In another, taken some years later, the two of them stood in a parking lot against a backdrop of forest, a camera slung around Robert’s neck.
“That Mountrail County sheriff—boy, he was a real ass,” Robert told Jill. “I don’t know what his name was. I don’t remember. He says, ‘Even if I find him, I don’t have to tell you anything. He’s twenty-nine.’ ”
“I got the same story,” said Jill. “I got, ‘Well, maybe he wanted to disappear.’ ”
“After I found out that was a phony call, it must have been two, three weeks, and I still hadn’t heard from KC. That caller told me the only reason KC hadn’t called was there was nowhere to get service in eastern Montana up around the oil fields.”
“Somebody’s trying to throw you off,” Jill said.
Lissa looked up. “Did you ever get the phone records?” she asked Robert.
“No, see, I wasn’t smart enough to save the records. I thought everything was all right. I didn’t—” Robert sounded tired, like he was ready for them to go. “What a mess,” he said. “How’d you find this place?”
Jill nodded to Lissa. “She can find anyone,” she said.
Robert didn’t seem to hear. “I have to take Tom”—a neighbor—“to the doctor once in a while. He’s had hip replacements, knees. Albany—you go down a one-way street, turn, go a block, and think you can go back the other way, but hell, you don’t know where to go.”
“How often was KC calling you then?” asked Jill.
“Oh, I don’t know, probably average once a week, maybe go two weeks without a call. When he was in Texas”—working at the car dealership—“he’d get upset ’cause he couldn’t sell anything and then he wasn’t very friendly. Then he’d have a good week, and he’d call. In [North Dakota] he called me on the road. Sometimes we’d talk for twenty, thirty, forty minutes, but all of it was about the job, and how the job was going, and the hours he was working. A couple times he mentioned that he was saving money.”
“Did he ever tell you he had any problems with James?” Lissa said.
“No,” Robert said. “It was all a big surprise that there were any problems. I found that out from Rick Arey. I was trying to figure out where that house was that Judd and KC lived in. I finally called Judd on the job where he was working, and he talked a little bit, but he had to get back to work. [Then] I called Sarah, and she went into hysterics. I didn’t get anything out of her. She just said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ and hung up. The bawling hysterics, I mean, not laughing.”
“Do you have any other pictures of KC?” Lissa said.
“That box right there is full of them.”
“Can I look?”
“Help yourself. Turn the lights on overhead there.”
Lissa rose, lifted the box, carried it to the table. Once, Robert continued, he visited his grandson in Washington and “took a whole pile of pictures,” which he later gave to KC. “I don’t know if he ever went through them or not,” Robert said. “The people he was renting from, they sent the box to me.” His voice cracked and quieted. “They’re not organized. You can keep any of those you want.”
Jill began to cry. “It’s okay, Jill,” Lissa said. “It’s part of what we got to go through.” Lissa lifted a photograph from the box and handed it to Jill. “Is this you?”
“I don’t know,” Jill said. She had left her glasses in the car.
Lissa lifted another, this time of Robert’s late wife—KC’s grandmother. She had planned to make an album, Robert explained, but then she had surgery and never woke up. That had been a few years ago.
Now night was falling across the windows of the trailer. “I don’t have anything to give you guys,” Robert said. “I’ve got coffee if you want it.”
“We should probably hit the road,” said Jill.
“Would you mind if I did a video of you?” Lissa said. “If you had something to say to KC—”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m not very good at that sort of thing,” said Robert.
“If he was alive?”
“There’s no way that he’s alive, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think there’s any use wondering anymore.”
* * *
—
A WEEK AFTER Lissa and Jill visited Robert Clarke, they heard that he had died. This did not surprise Lissa. In Fargo, she loaded onto her computer an audio recording she had made of their visit and listened to it over and over. Even in the distant scratch, Robert’s grief was deep and unmistakable. As Lissa and Jill left the trailer that night, Robert had put on his shoes and followed them outside. “Got to bring the cat food in,” he said. “We trapped a coon the other day and it chewed the cage up so bad trying to get out that it bloodied itself, must have broke teeth.” Lissa had barely heard Robert over the crickets singing in the fields beyond the property, above the wind scattering leaves across the lawn, but in that moment, she recognized in his voice something she had heard in her uncle’s on the day, now more than two years ago, that Chucky told her he had come home to die.
It was not, as people sometimes said, that they had nothing left to live for. It was that the living became too much. It was the living, not the wanting to die, that weakened a person, Lissa thought, and it was this weakness that invited bad spirits. So it had been for Chucky: A bad spirit had taken hold, and he could not let it go.
5
What Good Is Money if You End Up in Hell
IN THE WINTER OF 2013, the oil boom slowed in North Dakota. Although the price of oil remained high, at ninety dollars a barrel, companies would drill only the wells they had begun or those where their leases would soon expire. Many workers fled south to oil fields in Oklahoma and Texas, while those who remained braced themselves for the cold. They skirted campers with plywood, stuffed scraps of insulation into makeshift walls, lined the insides of huts with emergency blankets, and reinforced windows with duct tape and sheet plastic. They installed propane heaters, praying they would not leak. They lived as many tribal members lived, burning what fuel they could find.
Snow came. The roads iced over like plates of glass, causing semis to jackknife across the highways.
Lissa visited the reservation almost every weekend, though the snow made it difficult to search for KC on foot. Instead, she drove, stopping here and there to take photographs. She took particular interest in the tribal dwellings she passed that winter: in one image, a pale-yellow shed; in another, a concrete bunker with plastic sealing the windows; then an old blue clapboard, the paint peeling; and a trailer set crookedly in its lot. Later, when asked why she had taken the photographs, Lissa would say she was documenting “our oil-rich reservation.” The irony of the season had not been lost on her—that while many reservation families struggled to heat their homes, the oil that once had lain beneath their feet had gone to keep others war
m.
She often stopped in White Shield to visit her grandmother Madeleine. Since Lissa’s first summer out of prison, the tribe had built Madeleine a new house—a single-story white house at the end of the same dirt lane, with a window looking east over fields and sloughs past the border of the reservation. The farmhouse Madeleine lived in previously had been coming apart for years, crawling with freeloaders that rambled in from the prairie—mice that scurried through cracks in the walls and snakes that crept through the plumbing. The snakes in particular were a problem. They bobbed in the toilet bowl and climbed the curtains in the living room. Once, when Irene asked Lissa to fetch beets from the cellar, Lissa had gone down barefoot, and when she pulled the chain that dangled from a light at the bottom, the snakes had writhed and scattered. Lissa had screamed. An uncle laughed from the top of the stairs. “Better put some shoes on,” he warned. Lissa suspected it was because of the snakes, and the mold, that the tribe had granted Madeleine a new house. She suspected also that the tribe had taken pity on her grandmother for having lost her oldest son.
Chucky’s death had shocked the family. Even Lissa, whom he told of his intent to die, experienced a strange lack of feeling whenever she visited White Shield after he was gone. It was as if, in dying, her uncle had clipped the thread that bound her memory to the reservation, and now the two existed separately for her, parallel but never touching. Her grandmother’s new house felt too sterile, and the old farmhouse, though it remained standing, and though an uncle had moved in and filled the rooms with his belongings, seemed emptier than it had ever been, a museum of forgotten objects.
The first family reunion after Chucky’s death, in the summer of 2012, had been a smaller gathering than usual. Lissa’s children in particular seemed less eager to accompany her on trips to Fort Berthold. “I like the reservation,” Micah said once, “but it’s kind of like a restaurant you don’t have in town. It’s like Big Boy. It’s great every once in a while, you look forward to it, but you don’t want it in your city, because it kills the fun.”
If asked where they were from, all of Lissa’s children replied, “White Shield,” but Lissa could not deny that they were city kids—and now, with Chucky gone, and the family overcome with grief, the reservation did not seem as fun to them anymore. Even Obie, always eager to see his grandpa Dennis, who had left Fargo and moved back to the reservation, appeared to have lost interest in visiting. On a recent visit, Obie had been shamed for taking bacon from the breakfast table before his elders had been served.
Lissa did not mind going alone. In winter, the cottonwoods faded in the bottoms of the coulees, and the grass was cut to its stiff, sharp stems, and the prairie turned gray and brittle. The weather shifted wildly. Some days were warm, the next mornings cold, the snow so dry it blew away in a light wind. Madeleine’s house thronged with relatives. Lissa’s aunt Cheryl had moved in, and there were more cousins than Lissa could count, who trailed babies through all the rooms. Lissa rarely went to the old farmhouse anymore. Once, when she passed by, she had peeked in Chucky’s bedroom and noticed his furniture had not been moved.
“There’s too many spirits in there,” Dennis told Lissa. Dennis wanted to burn the house down, and Lissa agreed. If the house was gone, her memories might return to her, she thought, but as it was, Lissa felt nothing for the house, and this nothing reminded her of her family’s loss.
“At least when it’s gone you can romanticize it,” she said. “I’d rather it be ‘the house that used to be there’ than have to look at it and feel nothing.”
* * *
—
THE NEW HOUSE was the fourth Madeleine had occupied since moving to White Shield in 1953. Her first house had been an old clapboard, dragged up from the bottomlands and propped on cinder blocks just in time for the flood. Then she had moved across the street, to a cluster of homes the government built for relocated families. In 1981, when Madeleine and Willard bought their third home, the old farmhouse, they turned the second house into a store. YB’s, they called it. They sold candy, pop, and sandwiches, which you could not get from the government commodity truck that delivered rations monthly to White Shield, and eggs and meat they raised on the land they had purchased, where they resurrected the old farm. In addition to chickens and hogs, they kept horses and planted gardens from which they harvested and preserved much of their own food. Lissa’s generation of Yellow Birds helped on the farm but more often roamed the property. They tied belts around the hogs, loose enough to slip a hand underneath, and took bets on who would hold on longest. In the summertime, they swam in sloughs and rode horses to the lake, where they played along the banks. Sometimes their elders joined them there and told stories from the years before the flood. It was not far from shore where Nishu and the other villages had been—where the schools and churches and forests had been—so one could imagine, looking out on the lake, another world beneath the water.
It was this world Madeleine had tried to replicate when she and Willard bought the old farmhouse. She had been raised some miles north of Nishu, on the road to Garrison, where her family grew carrots, corn, potatoes, peas, and rutabagas, and raised hogs for bacon and cows for cream, which they delivered to Nishu. Madeleine spent much of her childhood in Nishu with her grandfather, Clair Everett, and grandmother, Fannie Bear, who lived in a frame house on a bluff overlooking a slough. Below the house were thickets of chokecherries, Juneberries, plums, and gooseberries, which her grandparents harvested and preserved, and forests so lush and tall that nothing grew beneath them. Here, in the springtime, Clair came to hunt, departing the house before dawn, and often when Madeleine woke, a duck would be roasting in the oven.
Clair Everett’s original name had been Elk Tongue, but in 1901, when he was nine years old, a government agent rounded up children from Fort Berthold and placed them in boarding schools. Elk Tongue had been sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where the superintendent was a U.S. Army captain, Richard Pratt, famous for his punitive pedagogy: “Kill the Indian and save the man.” If students spoke a native language, teachers beat them or washed their mouths with lye soap. Elk Tongue, who spoke only Arikara when he arrived, was severely punished. One day, he went with some younger boys to a pigpen on the school property, where older boys had been riding a sow and, by accident, killed her. The older boys told the younger ones to say yes when asked if they had done it, tricking them into believing that “yes,” in English, meant no. And so the younger boys admitted falsely to killing the sow and were whipped and deprived of food. They quickly learned English. After five years at Carlisle, Elk Tongue returned to the reservation as Clair Everett, and in 1936, he would be among the first men elected to serve on the new tribal council.
He still spoke Arikara, though rarely around Madeleine, who learned words but never became fluent. She did not blame her grandfather for this. As Madeleine later understood it, her elders were protecting her from the shame and punishment they and their own elders endured. For decades, Indian agents had kept tribes from practicing their traditional ceremonies, and in 1887, Congress codified the ban, allowing agents to arrest holy men. What ceremonies the Arikara carried on they practiced in the privacy of their homes. Many of these ceremonies made use of bundles, assemblies of sacred objects wrapped in wool blankets, each containing at least a pipe, tobacco, and an ear of Mother Corn. There were many of these bundles—for childbirth, for women, for men, for each of the twelve Arikara clans—but those containing the most power were the medicine bundles, capable of healing physical and spiritual wounds. Clair kept several medicine bundles, having inherited their stewardship from his parents, and their use was documented by Melvin Gilmore, a white anthropologist who visited Fort Berthold in the 1920s. One bundle contained bear medicine, which treated fractures and injuries to the abdomen. Another comforted mourners after a death in the tribe—“to wipe away their tears,” Gilmore wrote. In one of these ceremonies, a holy man retold the Arik
ara origin story, and when he came to a part at which death entered the world, the women began to wail. Then, all at once, the women stopped. Together, the mourners smoked a pipe contained in the bundle, and one by one they stepped forward, wrapping their lips around the ear of Mother Corn and drinking from a mussel shell dipped in tea. They spit the tea into their hands and washed their faces in its medicine.
Madeleine was born a few years after Gilmore recorded the ceremony but would never witness anything like it. When she was six years old, her parents enrolled her in a missionary school in Elbowoods, the reservation town fifteen miles west of Nishu, where she hardly noticed that students were forbidden from speaking their native language, since most had never learned their language anyway. Madeleine was a devout Catholic. She recited the rosary every morning and rarely missed Mass. For high school, she returned to Nishu, where she met Willard Yellow Bird, who served in the military for two years following the Second World War. When he returned, he and Madeleine married and had their first child, Irene.
In 1948, the year that the Three Affiliated Tribes signed a contract with the U.S. government approving the Garrison Dam, Madeleine gave birth to Chucky. With young children, she had no time to attend meetings about the dam, so what little she knew she heard from her father, Ben Young Bird, who had been elected to the tribal council. By then, the dam was inevitable, the council grasping at any rights it could salvage from the designs of U.S. congressmen. In 1952, Ben made several trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby for a bill ensuring that the mineral rights beneath the lake would be returned to the tribe and that landowners would be able to go on grazing their horses and cattle along the banks. The bill succeeded.
By 1954, 586 graves had been dug from the bottomlands and reburied. That March, pools formed in the Nishu lowlands, and a newsletter issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs warned of the coming flood: “When the spring runoff starts coming down the Missouri River, the waters will rise rapidly.” The first village to flood would be Beaver Creek, and then Red Butte, and then Nishu: “The Nishu School will be flooded in June. The road from Albert White Calf’s old place, east three miles, and the old Fort Berthold Public School, will be flooded sometime during July. The old Rapp Store and the Lucky Mound Corner will be under water about the first of June….By August, the bridge at Lucky Mound, the bridge at Shell Creek and Sully’s Lake will be flooded….By December, the site of Elbowoods will be under some 55 feet of water.”
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