This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

Still, those three unmarked graves gave me pause, especially coupled with the fury evident in the torn-up attic room, and I left the little cemetery full of unsettlingly dark speculation.

  When I returned with my hands cupped full of morels, I found the cottonwood had been felled and Mose and the pig scarer were taking a break from their labors, sitting atop the trunk, which was prone on the ground. They had their shirts off, and their skin was glistening with sweat. The pig scarer was smiling, as if he loved the work. And, oddly, so was Mose.

  “The hunter home from the hill,” the pig scarer declared exuberantly, and when he saw the mushrooms, he clapped me on the back and said, “A fine haul, boy. This’ll spice up our chicken dinner tonight real swell. Put them under the wood cart and get ready to sweat.”

  They’d already sawed several sections off the trunk, and the pig scarer put me to work lifting those sections and loading them on the cart. They were heavy and the labor was hard, and while I was at it, Mose and the pig scarer continued working the saw.

  We took another break, and the pig scarer said, “You got a name?”

  “Buck,” I said.

  “How about our mute friend?”

  I looked at Mose. He spelled out in sign, Geronimo.

  The pig scarer laughed when I told him. “Sure it is,” he said. “What tribe?”

  “Sioux,” I said.

  “Let me show you boys something.” He took a pocketknife from his overalls, cut a slender branch from the cottonwood, and showed us the cut end. “See that star in there?”

  He was right. At the heart of the branch was a dark, five-pointed star.

  “Your people have a story about this,” he said to Mose. “They say that all the stars in the sky are actually made inside the earth. Then they seek out the roots of cottonwood trees and slip into the wood, where they wait, real patient. Inside the cottonwood, they’re dull and lightless, like you see here. Then, when the great spirit of the night sky decides that more stars are needed, he shakes the branches with his wind and releases the stars. They fly up and settle in the sky, where they shine and sparkle and become the luminous creations they were always meant to be.” He looked at the star in that cottonwood branch with a kind of reverence. “And we’re like that, too. Dreams shook loose. You boys and me and everybody else on God’s earth. Your people, Geronimo, they got a lot of wisdom in ’em.”

  Mose smiled as broadly as I’d ever seen.

  “You didn’t like the story?” the pig scarer asked me, because I wasn’t smiling like Mose.

  “It’s fine, I guess,” I said.

  “You like it here, Buck?”

  “It’s hard work.”

  “Let me see your hands.” He studied the calluses on my palms. “You’re used to hard work.”

  “Doesn’t mean I like it.”

  “Everything’s hard work, Buck. You don’t wrap your thinking around that, life’ll kill you for sure. Me, I love this land, the work. Never was a churchgoer. God all penned up under a roof? I don’t think so. Ask me, God’s right here. In the dirt, the rain, the sky, the trees, the apples, the stars in the cottonwoods. In you and me, too. It’s all connected and it’s all God. Sure this is hard work, but it’s good work because it’s a part of what connects us to this land, Buck. This beautiful, tender land.”

  “This land spawned a tornado that killed Emmy’s mother. You call that tender?”

  “Tragic, that’s what I call it. But don’t blame the land. The land’s what it’s always been, and tornadoes have been a part of that from the beginning. Drought, too, and grasshoppers and hail and wildfire and everything that’s ever driven folks off or killed ’em. The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or, hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.”

  “Those orchard trees were in pretty bad shape before we got here. You love this land so much, why’d you let them go to hell?”

  “Failed ’em, Buck, plain and simple. Failed ’em. That’s on me. But finding all of you in that old potting shed has proved to be a blessing, and I feel refreshed.”

  I wondered if this was the same man who’d nailed the window shut in Emmy’s room and had shattered the liquor bottle against the barn wall and had cried his heart out under the oak tree. In a way, he was just like this land he loved, killer tornado one minute, blue sky the next. I wondered if it was the alcohol that caused the changes. Or was it just who he was and had always been, and maybe that was why Aggie had left him. If, in fact, that’s what she’d done.

  “Tell you what, Buck,” he said. “If you need a break, cart that wood to the barn. There’s a chopping block near the potting shed. You’ve seen it. Dump those sections, and before you come back, fill the wooden bucket at the pump with water and haul it here. I’m feeling a little parched. Think you can do that?”

  “I can do it,” I said.

  “What do you think, Geronimo?”

  Mose smiled and gave a nod.

  “Don’t dawdle, Buck. Work to be done. And I want a report on how things are coming along at the still, too.”

  I put the morels into the cart, but when I grabbed hold of the handles, I could have sworn I was lifting five hundred pounds. I threw all my weight into the effort and the cart began to roll.

  I dumped the wood at the chopping block next to the shed, grabbed the morels I’d collected, and went inside the barn to check on Albert’s progress with the still.

  There was something in my brother that compelled him to do a job right, whatever that job was. The little still he’d built for the pig scarer—copper cooker and coils of copper tubing—was a thing of shining beauty. At the lower end of the coiled copper, which was called the worm, sat a clean, half-gallon glass milk bottle collecting the hooch as it dripped.

  Emmy was with Albert. She wore a different dress that day, a little blue jumper. She knelt in front of the small, open furnace beneath the cooker, her face aglow from the flames there.

  “I get to put the wood in, Odie,” she said.

  I asked my brother how it was going.

  He nodded toward the milk bottle, which was already half-filled. “Clockwork. How’s it going out there?”

  I told him about the graveyard I’d found and about how Mose and I had followed the pig scarer there the night before.

  “I don’t know what to think, Albert. I kind of like him, but there’s something scary about him, too.”

  Emmy said, “He’s nice to me, but I wish he’d let me stay out here with you.”

  “I wish he’d feed us more,” I said.

  “He doesn’t have much food,” Emmy said. “He doesn’t eat any more than we do.”

  “He’s got our money. He should spend a little of it and stock his cupboards.”

  “Maybe he’s not spending it because it’s our money,” Albert said.

  Which, if true, made me inclined to like the pig scarer even more. So much so that I decided I was ready to stop thinking of him as the pig scarer. From now on, he would be Jack.

  I left the barn, set the morels on the doorstep of the farmhouse, and filled the wooden water bucket, but I didn’t take it immediately back to where Jack and Mose were at work on the cottonwood tree. My conversation with Albert and Emmy had got me to thinking. I wondered what Jack had done with the pillowcase full of the things we’d taken from the Brickmans’ safe. I set the bucket beside the front door of the farmhouse, slipped inside, and stood a moment, thinking. If I wanted to hide something from us, where would I put it?

  First, I checked Jack’s bedroom, which had no closet, so the only two possibilities were the chest of drawers and under the bed. Nothing. I didn’t bother with Emmy’s room. I opened the kitchen cupboards, looked under and in back of the furniture in the living area, and finally eyed the ladder leading up to where the shredded mattress lay with the stuffing spilled out like entrails. I had a visceral reaction to the idea of going up there again, a sick twisting of my stomach. But
I wanted to find that pillowcase, so up the ladder I went.

  The curtain still cut off the area that held the bed and mattress and chamber pot. I rummaged through the items stored in the other part of the attic room, which included a shipping trunk of wood and leather. I lifted the lid and found a handmade quilt, carefully folded, a wedding dress, also folded and put away with great care, a Bible, a pair of bronzed baby shoes, and other mementos from the past. Digging deeper, I came across an army uniform and with it a framed photograph. Two men in military dress stood in front of a barracks. One of them was Jack, before he’d lost his eye fighting the Kaiser. The other appeared to be the same age. They were both smiling, and Jack had his arm around the other man, in the way of friends. Along the bottom of the photograph, written in white ink, were the words Death before dishonor. Rudy. Which reminded me a little bit of Herman Volz’s vow when we’d parted: I defend your honor and mine to the death.

  I put everything back in the trunk, closed the lid, and finally pulled the curtain aside.

  There was the mattress still on the floor like an animal eviscerated. I looked the area over carefully but could see nothing that might hide the pillowcase and its contents. The longer I stood there looking, the greater the belief I had that something terrible had occurred here, something frightening. I stumbled back and hurried down the ladder, fleeing that cursed place. At the bottom of the ladder, I stood awhile to settle myself.

  That’s when my eye was caught. In one corner of the kitchen, the boards rose just a hair above the rest of the flooring. I knelt and pried up the cover of a small larder, a little hole beneath the house meant to keep food stored and cool. It contained no food, but the pillowcase was there, along with the blankets and the water bag Volz had given us. I checked the pillowcase. The letters and documents and the bound book were still inside, but the money was gone, all of it. That didn’t surprise me. If I were Jack, I’d probably have snatched the cash in a heartbeat, too. But I was surprised to see Brickman’s gun. I’m not sure what possessed me—maybe it was the result of having just come from that upper room full of the evidence of rampage—but I grabbed the pistol, dropped the pillowcase back into the larder, and closed the lid. I went quickly to the barn, shielding the weapon from Albert and Emmy as I entered. I put it in the tack room under the hay matting, next to the wire I’d fashioned for escape. I hurried back outside, grabbed the water bucket, put it in the wood cart, and returned to the Gilead and the felled cottonwood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THAT EVENING BEGAN with a celebration. Jack invited us into the house and we sat at the little table, just like family. We ate roasted chicken, along with the morels I’d gathered and Jack had sliced and sautéed in butter. I swore they were the best things I’d ever tasted. There was, of course, liquor. Jack poured the clear corn whiskey from one of the half-gallon milk bottles into his glass and sipped as he ate and talked and laughed.

  “Been a long time since there was laughter in this house,” he said. “Norman, you’ve done a hell of a job with that still in the barn. Geronimo, I never saw any man work harder or better than you did today. Emmaline, I thank you for cleaning up this place and for letting sunshine back in. And, Buck?” He studied me with his one good eye. I wondered what he would say. I hadn’t worked as hard as Mose or created anything like Albert’s marvelous little still or given him the kind of comfort Emmy seemed to offer. “Thank you for bringing music back into my life. You and that harmonica, you’ve saved me.”

  Jack talked, talked a blue streak, talked like someone who’d been shut up in his own quiet room way too long. Despite the camaraderie, his shotgun was near at hand. After supper, we gathered the dishes and washed them while Jack drank his corn liquor, and then he said, “Buck, pull out that harmonica of yours and let’s have a little hoedown in the barn.”

  He grabbed his fiddle and shotgun and told Emmy to bring the milk bottle, and we all moseyed across the farmyard. The sun, which was the color of a blood orange, hung nailed above the horizon, and long bars of red light came through the gaps in the old barn walls and lay on the brown dirt floor like little streams of hot lava.

  “Geronimo, bring us a couple of those bales of hay and set ’em here. Buck, you take one, I’ll take the other. Norman, are you and Emmaline in a mood to kick up your heels?”

  My brother didn’t reply, but Emmy cried, “I like to dance.”

  “Well then, girl, you just dance your little heart out.”

  We played a bunch of old folk tunes my father had taught me or that I’d learned from a songbook my mother had given me on my sixth birthday, which was not long before she died. Emmy danced joyfully, and Mose joined her, reeling himself wildly. They came together and then apart like spinning tops, sending dust swirling into the air. Albert stood by, and although he didn’t dance, he kept time to the tunes with claps of his hands. Between numbers, Jack drank his liquor, and beads of sweat formed on his brow and more and more his eye took on a fevered look.

  It was almost dark and the light was nearly gone from the barn when Jack said, “Let’s play ‘Red River Valley.’ ”

  “You sure?” I said.

  He glowered at me. “Just do what I say.”

  And there it was again. Blue sky one moment, the threat of a tornado the next.

  He took a long swallow from his milk bottle, then set it in the dirt beside his hay bale. He snatched up his bow, nestled the fiddle beneath his chin, and gave me a nod.

  We began to play the slowest, saddest tune of the evening. Emmy sat in the dirt of the barn floor, and Mose sat with her. Albert stood leaning against a wall. I could barely see the corners of the barn now, the light was so dim. But I could see Jack’s face as he played. His eye was closed, but that didn’t keep the tears from rolling down his cheek. When we finished, he was quiet for a long while, with the fiddle still beneath his chin. He finally opened his eye and stared where Emmy sat in the gloom of the barn.

  “You like that one, Sophie?” he asked.

  “I’m Emmaline.”

  Which seemed to startle him. “I know you’re Emmaline, goddamn it.” For a moment, I thought he might throw his fiddle at her. “Evening’s over.” He grabbed his shotgun, which had been leaning against his hay bale the whole while, and stood. “Pick up that bottle, girl. You boys, back in the tack room. Now!”

  Emmy hurried to do as he’d asked. I put my harmonica in my pocket and started toward the tack room, then I heard the soft thud of the milk bottle and turned back. Jack and Emmy stood together, looking down where the bottle lay on its side, its contents making mud of the dirt on the barn floor.

  “Goddamn it!” Jack screamed. “Goddamn it to hell, girl! Look what you done.”

  “I’m sorry,” Emmy said. “It’s dark. I can’t see.”

  “Excuses,” he said. He grabbed her arm. “We’ll see about excuses.”

  “Let her go,” Albert said.

  “Shut your trap, boy.”

  “Let her go,” Albert said again, standing straight and tall, blocking the door to the barn.

  Jack did let her go, but only to take his shotgun in both hands and level the barrel on Albert. “Move aside, boy.”

  “Promise me you won’t hurt her.”

  I saw Mose edging toward the workbench where the tools and such were kept. Out of his one good eye, Jack saw him, too.

  “Hold it right there, Indian.”

  Mose stopped. But now I turned and began to walk.

  “You, Buck, where you going?”

  “The tack room, just like you said.”

  Jack gave a snort. “One of you knows what’s good for him anyway.”

  Inside the tack room, I grabbed the gun from where I’d hidden it under the loose straw that morning, and I stood in the doorway. I didn’t think Jack could see what I held in my trembling hands.

  “Move,” Jack ordered Albert. “Move, boy, or I swear you won’t live to regret it.”

  “Emmy,” I said. “Step away from him.”

 
Jack turned his good eye my way, which meant he couldn’t really watch Emmy, and she ran quickly to Mose, who put himself between her and the shotgun.

  “Mutiny,” Jack said. “I take you in. I feed you. And what do you do? You turn on me. Every one of you.”

  “We’re leaving,” Albert said.

  “Like hell,” Jack said.

  And looking at that shotgun, I also thought, Like hell.

  “Don’t push me, boy,” Jack warned. He brought the shotgun up and nestled the stock against his shoulder, and he and Albert stared at each other and there was not a sound to be heard in the whole world.

  Move, Albert, I wanted to cry. Because I knew, knew absolutely, that Jack would carry through with his threat. There was something in him, some monstrous rage, and because of that mattress lying shredded in the upper room of the farmhouse, I’d already seen the evidence of what it could do.

  I didn’t think. I just pulled the trigger. The sound of the gunshot shattered the evening into a million pieces.

  Emmy screamed, and Jack dropped in a heap to the barn floor.

  * * *

  LOSS COMES IN every moment. Second by second our lives are stolen from us. What is past will never come again.

  I’d killed Vincent DiMarco, which had done something to me that could not be undone. But if you asked me, even to this day, I would tell you that I’ve never been sorry he was dead. Jack was different. I knew it wasn’t his fault, the rage inside him. I’d seen a different Jack, a Jack I liked and, who knows, given time and other circumstances, a Jack I might have been happy to call my friend. Shooting him was like shooting an animal with rabies. It had to be done. But when I pulled that trigger, I lost something of myself, something even more significant than when I’d killed DiMarco, something I think of now as a sliver of my soul. And in the moment after, I sat down hard in the dirt of the barn floor, done in by regret.

  Albert bent over Jack, then looked up at Mose and said, “Right through his heart, looks like.” He walked to me, but I barely felt his hand on my shoulder. “We need to go, Odie.”