This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

  Albert and Mose, who seemed comfortable as you please in her company, grinned at that playful characterization. I couldn’t help thinking of the young man whose inner beast Sister Eve had tamed. It seemed that she’d worked the same magic on my two companions.

  “I’ve convinced your brother and Mose that, rather than trying to make your way to Saint Louis on the rivers, it would be much safer for you to travel there with me.” She lifted a white sack. “Would you like one?”

  Inside were donuts. Big, perfect, glazed, drool-inducing donuts.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  I settled myself on the sand and ate a donut. I couldn’t remember ever tasting something so good, so soft, so sweet.

  “Here’s the deal,” she said, opening her hands in both explanation and invitation. “I’ve hired Mose and your brother to help with the work of the crusade, at least until we get you to Saint Louis. I’ll put them up with the others who do that for me. You and Emmy will stay with me at the Morrow House. We’ll tell everyone that you’re my nephew and Emmy is my niece. I’ve got a couple straw hats with big, wide brims I’ll give her. Much nicer than the seed cap, but they’ll still do a good job of hiding her face.”

  “You know who she is? How?”

  “Not important. What’s important is that we keep you safe and get you where you want to go. I can do that.”

  “Like the trumpet player said, it could get you into trouble.”

  “Sid’s a worrier. I’ve danced around trouble all my life.”

  I glanced at Albert. “It’s really okay with you?”

  Albert shrugged. “She convinced me.”

  I looked at Mose, who grinned and signed, Donuts every day.

  “What do you say, Odie?” Her face was serious, her voice deeply inviting. “Are you on board?”

  I’d gobbled the last of my donut and was ready to swallow anything Sister Eve told me. “Heck, yes.”

  “Do you want to wake up Emmy and ask her?”

  Emmy lay curled on a blanket, still sound asleep. I shook her gently. She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, just a whisper.

  “You awake, Emmy?”

  She made a sound, not much, but enough that I knew she could understand.

  “It looks like we’re going to stay with Sister Eve for a while.”

  She blinked up at me sleepily.

  “I knew that,” she said, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I HADN’T TAKEN a shower since the day we left Lincoln School. Standing under a steady stream of clean hot water was like heaven. Sister Eve bought us new clothing and had our old things washed, and we settled into the life of a traveling Christian healing show.

  Emmy and I were given a bedroom in the suite of rooms Sister Eve rented at the Morrow House. To keep folks from suspecting a connection with us, Albert and Mose waited another day at our camp on the river. When they joined the troupe, they were given cots in the tent the men shared. The women of the crusade occupied another tent. Everyone had at least one work assignment, but most juggled several jobs.

  Mose was put in the kitchen tent, helping prepare the meals that followed each crusade service and also the meals that fed everyone who traveled with Sister Eve—there were nearly a dozen of them. The cook was a big man, bald as an ice cube, with a tattoo of a bare-breasted mermaid on his right forearm. He called himself Dimitri, although like everyone else who traveled with Sister Eve, that probably wasn’t his real name. He spoke with a thick Greek accent, and Mose loved him. Dimitri, who seemed to have no trouble interpreting the simple signs Mose used to communicate, swore he was the best laborer he’d ever seen.

  Albert worked with the roustabouts, most of whom were also crusade musicians. In no time at all, his mechanical knack and ability to jerry-rig a solution to any problem won their admiration. They took to calling him Professor because he had a general knowledge of just about everything.

  Whisker, the piano player, took me under his wing. He was thin, his arms and legs like soda straws, his skin the color of molasses. He was old, or what seemed old to me then, maybe fifty, and his eyes looked tired. He taught me about music in a way that Miss Stratton never had time for. I knew how to read sheet music, but I’d never been a part of a larger body of musicians. Whisker worked with me on timing and listening to the other instruments and feeling what he called the “noble bubble,” by which he meant that moment when all the notes of each musician slid effortlessly around and among one another so that a piece of music became such a beautiful sound that it captured the spirits of both player and listener and carried them effortlessly upward.

  “Like in a bubble,” I said.

  “Zactly,” he said and grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. He sipped from the glass that always sat atop his piano, filled with two fingers of bootlegged whiskey that never seemed to diminish in volume no matter how long he nursed it. “Doesn’t always happen, Buck, but when it does, feels like God’s lifting you up in the palm of his hand.”

  His real name was Gregory but everybody called him Whisker, including himself. “My mama used to say I was so thin I could hide behind a cat’s whisker. Kinda stuck.” The other musicians were friendly and welcoming, but I could tell that Sid, the trumpet player, wasn’t fond of me in the least. I thought it was simply because of the danger in which he believed our presence had placed the crusade, but Whisker clued me in to another possibility.

  “He’s jealous.”

  We were having lunch at one of the long tables where, at night, we ladled out soup and handed out bread.

  “Jealous of me? Why?”

  “You got something natural in you, something special that comes out through that mouth organ of yours, something that can’t be taught or learned. Maybe it’ll make a musician out of you, maybe something else. Who knows? But it’s there. Also, Sister Eve likes you a lot. You’re her nephew, her family. Puts you one up on Sid. Man, that cat hates it when Sister Eve pays too much attention to anyone else.”

  I didn’t know much of Whisker’s history; nobody talked a lot about their past, so we fit in pretty easily. He did tell me he came from Texas sharecroppers, and growing up he’d wanted nothing more than to escape the cotton fields of the panhandle.

  “Hard work on hard ground flat as a griddle cake,” he said. “Done nothing in my whole life rough as picking cotton.”

  I asked about his family and he said he hadn’t seen them in more than twenty years.

  “Do you miss them?”

  “Got a new family,” he said and opened his arms to the crusade tent.

  The crusades began at dusk, and within a couple of days, I was among the musicians on the platform. Sister Eve held forth on the Lord and we backed her up with music that lifted the soul. The hopeful raised their voices in familiar gospel tunes. At the end, the lights went down except for one that shone directly on Sister Eve, and the blind and the crippled and the broken came and knelt at her feet, begging for her healing touch. They did not go away disappointed. Even if the blind eyes weren’t given sight, if the twisted leg didn’t right itself, through her very countenance, it seemed, Sister Eve gave them hope.

  “They eat it up like molasses on oatmeal,” I overheard Sid tell one of the other musicians. “Doesn’t matter they walk away still crippled. They leave with a light shining in their hearts, and it makes all the difference to those poor devils. They crack open their wallets and the money pours down like rain.”

  That should have put me on the alert. But I figured it cost a lot to feed the people who came to the tent meetings. Times were tough, and for many, the soup and bread dinner was probably the only real meal they’d had that day. What paid for the food was the generosity of those who didn’t stick around for the meal, those who had some money and whose hearts and consciences were touched by Sister Eve.

  My favorite times were when, long after the crusade service was over and the hungry had been fed, Sister Eve and Sid gathered around Whisker at the
piano, and they let me join them, and we made the kind of music a church choir would never touch. Sister Eve was crazy about songs out of Tin Pan Alley, written in what Whisker explained to me was the thirty-two-bar form—four sections, each eight bars in length. A lot of Irving Berlin tunes were thirty-two-bar, he explained. They weren’t difficult to play and were full of schmaltz, and Sister Eve knew how to wring out every ounce of feeling. She’d sip bootlegged whiskey—they all would—and smoke a cigarette and wrap her throat around the velvet of a song in a way that made you want to cry. Little Emmy was usually dead asleep by then, laid out on a blanket in the back of the tent. When the night finally came to a close, Sid would carry her to his car and drive us back to the hotel and lay her in bed, then say good night to Sister Eve at the door to her suite.

  “Like this all the way to Saint Louis?” I heard him ask one night, his voice full of longing.

  “All the way, Sid,” she said. “ ’Night, honey.”

  Sid wasn’t the only one under her spell. Everyone who traveled with her loved Sister Eve. They were a misfit bunch, castoffs, down-and-outers. But in the same way she gave hope to the halt and the lame, Sister Eve buoyed the spirits of us all. I thought about the kids at Lincoln School, who, in so many ways, were just like Sister Eve’s people, lost and broken. I thought that if only she had been in charge instead of Thelma Brickman, the Black Witch, life there could have been so different.

  Sister Eve told me that the crusade was scheduled to stay two weeks in New Bremen. On our fourth night, when everyone had filed out of the tent to head to their homes or to the long table for soup and bread, Sister Eve sat down on the steps of the platform. I sat beside her.

  “I’d kill for a cigarette and a shot of booze right now, Odie.” She bumped me playfully with her white-robed hip.

  “These people think you’re perfect. They better not catch you drinking and smoking.”

  She laughed and put her arm around my shoulder. “Only God is perfect, Odie. To the rest of us, he gave all kinds of wrinkles and cracks.” She lifted her hair from her cheek, showing me the long scar there. “If we were perfect, the light he shines on us would just bounce right off. But the wrinkles, they catch the light. And the cracks, that’s how the light gets inside us. When I pray, Odie, I never pray for perfection. I pray for forgiveness, because it’s the one prayer I know will always be answered.”

  I saw Albert all the time but didn’t worry about people connecting us. We didn’t look much alike. I figured that was because Albert, with his red hair, took after our father’s side of the family, and I took after our mother’s. I often sat with him at a long table when Mose and the other folks who worked the kitchen served us meals.

  “How is it, living up there at the Ritz?” he kidded me one day at lunch.

  “You know, Albert, I’ve been thinking. What if we don’t find Aunt Julia in Saint Louis? I mean, we don’t even know where to begin looking.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “But what if?”

  “You’ve got something on your mind?”

  “Well, I’ve been thinking. Maybe we could just stay with Sister Eve.”

  Albert was chewing on a bologna sandwich. He looked toward the big tent, then beyond it across the meadow where the river ran and where he’d hidden our canoe.

  “It’s too good to last, Odie,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “When has it ever been easy for us?”

  “That doesn’t mean it can’t be.”

  “Look, it’s when you relax that you get hit in the face. Don’t get too comfortable. And look out for Sid. That guy’s got it in for you.”

  “Sister Eve can handle him.”

  “Sister Eve can’t watch him all the time. Mark my words, Odie, he’s a snake.”

  Sid and Sister Eve spent a part of every day in the hotel going over what she called the books. In addition to his trumpet playing, Sid acted as her business manager, paying the bills, making sure the groundwork was laid in the towns ahead, seeing to publicity. He must have been good at it, especially the publicity part, because people showed up at the crusade who’d come from long distances, as far away as the Twin Cities. Even Whisker, who had no special affection for Sid, gave him credit.

  “When I first hooked up with Sister Eve down in Texas, she wasn’t much of a show. Did her praying and her healing, like she does now, but when Sid came along everything changed. That white robe makes her look like an angel? That was Sid’s doing. Those lights, a full backup of musicians, even the soup and bread, that’s all pure Sid.”

  “How’d he become a part of the family?” I used that word because that’s how I’d begun to think of the crusade folks.

  “Same way all us lost souls did. Sister Eve just found him. He was part of a carny show in Wichita when we put on a crusade there couple of years ago. He was blowing his horn and doing a snake act. That cat fell for her the way everybody does.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “You don’t know? She’s supposed to be your aunt.” He laughed. “I always knew you were like the rest of us. She found you lost, tapped you, and you just followed her. Don’t worry, Buck. Your secret’s safe with me.” He shook his head. “Got no idea where she comes from. With that fondness she’s got for cowboy boots, I figure she must’ve come out of the West somewhere. That and the fact the snakes don’t seem to bother her.”

  “Snakes?”

  “Oh, right. You ain’t seen Sid and her handle the snakes yet. Now that’s something, let me tell you.”

  “What do they do with them?”

  “Use them to make folks understand that Satan can be handled if you got God on your side. It’s quite a show. They don’t do it much up North, but in the South, man, those crackers eat it up.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “Don’t suppose it’d do any harm.”

  Within the crusade’s tent village was a small tent just back of the kitchen where Sister Eve prepared herself for the service each evening. Whisker lifted the flap over the opening and beckoned me to enter. Inside was a dressing table with a mirror, and in front of it a padded bench. Next to the vanity stood a rack where a number of white robes hung, along with other clothing. There was a big traveling trunk and scattered around it lay several pairs of shoes, mostly the plain, white flats that Sister Eve wore during the meetings, but also a couple of pairs of cowboy boots. On a low, narrow table near the back wall of the tent sat three glass enclosures, what I would learn were called terrariums, a word that was new to me. There was some vegetation in each terrarium and also a big rock or two for the snakes to slither around and, I supposed, hide behind.

  “What kind are they?”

  “Them two snakes look exactly like corals.” He nodded toward the glass cage where a couple small, black-yellow-and-red-banded snakes slithered over one another. “You know about coral snakes?”

  I told him I didn’t.

  “Terrible poisonous. And that one there we call Mamba. Watch.” He tapped the glass of the middle terrarium, and the snake inside, which was dark gray and three feet long, rose up, spread the skin around its neck and head, and looked prepared to strike at him. Whisker laughed. “Just like a cobra.”

  “But it isn’t?”

  “They just look dangerous but they ain’t. They’s just snakes that people mistake for the poison ones. But this one”—and he nodded toward the largest of the terrariums—“this one is different. He’s the real thing. We call him Lucifer.”

  “Lucifer?”

  He leaned toward the glass and the snake coiled and lifted itself to strike. “This here’s a bona fide rattlesnake. When Lucifer shakes his tail, let me tell you, little brother, it makes my bones shiver.”

  “Sister Eve handles all the snakes?”

  “The coral-looking snakes and Mamba. Only Sid handles Lucifer. Him and that snake been together a long time, I guess. Was part of the carny act he was doing when Sister Eve found him.”
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  “They never get bit?”

  “Sometimes. But the corals and Mamba, their bite don’t do nothing. And Sid, he always milks out the venom before he handles Lucifer.”

  The snake was coiled, so it was hard to tell its length, but its body was as thick as my wrist. It looked right at me, forked tongue darting in and out, as if trying to taste me.

  “What does he eat?”

  “We drop mice in there mostly. He swallows those critters whole. Sometimes little rats, too, if we catch them running around the kitchen tent.”

  I thought of Faria in the quiet room back at Lincoln School. I imagined him being gobbled up whole by that big rattler, and it made me hate the snake.

  “You don’t be trying to handle these snakes,” Whisker cautioned. “Only Sister Eve and Sid do that.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, backing away from Lucifer. “I’m never touching those things.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE CRUSADE WAS family. They worked together, trusted one another, found pleasure in each other’s company. Before Albert and Mose were taken on, there’d been six men and four women. Until Emmy showed up, there’d been no children, and everyone in the crusade took her under their wing like mother ducks. Although she was often in the company of Sister Eve, even when she was alone, Emmy moved freely about the little tent village, helping where she could, but mostly bringing delight. She wore the wide-brimmed straw hats Sister Eve had given her all the time so that she could tip the brim low to hide her face whenever someone from the outside world came around. I’m sure everyone in the crusade knew that she wasn’t really kin to Sister Eve, but I don’t think they knew her true identity, or if they did, they didn’t care.

  Some of the men were pretty rough-looking. Dimitri, with his bald head and huge chest and tattoos. Torch, one of the musicians, whose hair looked like something coughed up by a cat. Tsuboi, a kid about Albert’s age whose face, the whole right side of it anyway, was a mutilation of scar tissue. Whisker told me it had happened when he was thrown from a train he was trying to snag for a ride. Though no children traveled with the crusade, not all the women were childless. Cypress, an exotic-looking woman with long hair the color of a river at night, had three children who’d been taken from her because of drink. She didn’t drink anymore, at least not that I ever saw, and when Emmy was around her, her face lit up as if a warm fire was burning in her heart. What few belongings each of them had were kept under their cots, where anyone could have stolen something. No one did.