This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

  Sister Eve knelt before Emmy and said, “You have something amazing and beautiful in you. You’ll realize that someday. I would love to be there when you do.” To Mose, she said, “I’ve never known anyone stronger here.” She touched his chest over his heart, and then she hugged him. To Albert, she said, “You’ll recover, and when you do, I know you’ll guide them all well.” She kissed his cheek. Finally, she handed me a small paper bag and said, “I’ve put some cotton balls, antiseptic, gauze, and such in there. You have to keep your brother’s wounds clean. I’ve also put a few other useful items in.” Then she leaned to me and whispered into my ear, “This is important. It’s up to you to make sure that Emmy is safe. Promise me.” And I did. Then she said, “Remember this. It’s an old saying but a true one. Home is where your heart is.”

  She kissed my cheek, too, and we were preparing to leave when I saw something that made all my hope sink. Among the cars arriving in the field was an all-too familiar silver Franklin Club Sedan, and right behind it came a Fremont County sheriff’s cruiser.

  “The Black Witch,” I said, and my heart began to race.

  “Go,” Sister Eve said. “I’ll take care of them.”

  We hurried off, although Albert, in his weakened condition, kept us from going as fast as I would have liked. We crossed the meadow and the railroad tracks and entered the trees on the bank above the river. Mose and Albert and Emmy made their way down to the water’s edge, then Mose headed toward the bulrushes where he and Albert had hidden our canoe. I stayed among the trees, watching as Clyde Brickman, that snake with legs, got out, went to the passenger’s side, and opened the door. The sight of Thelma Brickman, thin and dressed all in black so that she looked like a burned matchstick, was ice water on my soul. A heavyset, red-faced man emerged from the cruiser, and I recognized Sheriff Bob Warford, who’d terrorized so many runaways from Lincoln School. The Brickmans and Warford started toward the big tent, and Sister Eve came out to greet them.

  I didn’t stay to see anything further. I hopped down the bank to the river, where Mose had the canoe already on the water. He’d put in the canvas water bag, the blankets, the pillowcase with the letters and other documents we’d taken from the Brickmans’ safe. He’d tossed in the suitcase with the clothing Sister Eve had purchased for Emmy and me, as well as the basket of food Dimitri had thrown together for us. Albert was in no condition to paddle, so he sat in the middle with Emmy on the blankets, holding the food basket in his lap. I sat in the bow, Mose pushed us into the current and took the stern, and we paddled as hard as we could away from the place where I hoped Sister Eve was somehow misdirecting the Black Witch and her toady husband.

  The river curled around the eastern edge of New Bremen. We passed the flats where houses stood near grain elevators and the white steeple of the little church rose above the treetops. We slid under the railroad trestle where I’d sat before I stumbled onto Sister Eve praying upriver. We left the town behind. The current, coupled with our own efforts, took us between fields where young corn and soybeans rose out of the turned earth. The sun had fallen below a long, undulating ridge that edged the fertile floodplain. We moved inside the broad blue shadow of those hills, and for a long time no one spoke. Partly, I suppose, this was because Mose and I were putting all our effort into making distance, and I was breathing too hard for words. But I believe our silence was also because, once again, we were grieving loss. It was a feeling that should have been familiar to us by then, but does anyone ever get used to having their heart broken?

  About the time dusk began to slide into true dark, we came to a wooded island, and I called back to Mose, “We need to stop for the night.”

  Mose used his paddle to rudder us toward a small stretch of sand beach at the tip of the island. I leapt out and pulled the canoe ashore and helped Emmy and my brother disembark. Mose came last, bringing the blankets and the basket of food. Flooding over the years had laid up a wall of driftwood along the upper edge of the sand, which the sun had bleached white, so that the whole construction resembled a jumble of great bones. In the lee of that wall, I stretched out a blanket for Albert, who lay down immediately. Emmy put out the other blankets, and Mose opened the food basket. Inside were ham sandwiches and apples and a small container of lemonade, which we consumed but barely tasted. We sat in the gloom of approaching dark and were quiet, depressingly so. I felt the weight of sadness on us all and knew I had to do something, so I gathered driftwood and built a fire. Albert made a feeble attempt at objecting—“Dangerous” he said—but he was in no shape to argue. As the stars gathered above us one by one, and the glow from the flames pressed outward to keep the utter dark at bay, I played some lively tunes on my harmonica, which seemed to brighten us up a bit, then I put my mouth organ away and said to the others, “Let me tell you a story.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A WOMAN LIVED in a clearing in a forest of trees so tall and thick they blotted out the sun. It was always dark among the trees, dark as night, and over the years the woman’s eyes had grown used to seeing things that other people could not. She saw the shadows of dreams, the ghosts of hope. Nothing was hidden from her.

  The land beyond the forest was full of hunger and pestilence.

  “What’s pestilence, Odie?” Emmy asked, her blue eyes wide in the firelight.

  “It’s terrible sickness of all kinds.”

  “Is this a sad story, Odie?”

  “Wait and see.”

  One day four travelers came to the clearing in the forest, where the woman lived in a little hut. They called themselves the Vagabonds.

  “What’s a vagabond?” Emmy asked.

  “A wanderer. Someone who has no home.”

  “Like us?”

  “Exactly like us.”

  One was a mighty giant, one a wizard, one a fairy princess, and one an imp. The woman gave them shelter and food, and when she asked for news from the outside world, they told her how awful things were beyond the forest. They told her how the giant had once thrown a boulder that had felled a great dragon, how the wizard had devised magical machines, how the fairy princess had charmed fierce beasts, and how the imp was always getting the other three into trouble.

  “Sounds familiar,” Albert said from where he lay.

  The Vagabonds told the woman they were tired of wandering and asked if they could stay with her, but she looked into them, all the way down to their souls, and knew the true reason for their wandering. They were in search of their hearts’ desires, which were different for each of them, and she knew they would never find what they were looking for if they stayed in the safety of her forest.

  Instead, she sent them on an odyssey.

  “What’s an odyssey?”

  “A long journey, Emmy, filled with adventure.”

  On the far side of the forest was a castle where a witch lived.

  “The Black Witch?” Emmy asked.

  “As a matter of fact, all she wore was black.”

  “I hate her,” Emmy said.

  “With good reason,” I said.

  The Black Witch kept children locked in a dungeon. She had cast a spell that caused her to look beautiful in the eyes of adults, and whenever hunger or disease made orphans of the children, they were sent to the castle to be put in the witch’s care. Once inside those stone walls, there was no escape. What the adults didn’t know was that the witch lived by eating the hearts of the children. Even though she’d eaten lots of hearts, she was still as thin and black as a licorice stick, and her hunger was never satisfied. In the dungeon where she’d locked them away, there was no sunlight except what could make its way through a little crack high up between the stones. For a while every day, the smallest ray of sunshine would enter the dungeon and the children would put out their hands and feel how warm it was. Which was good, except for one thing. It gave them hope, and hope made their hearts grow big, which was exactly what the witch wanted. Hearts fat with hope that would feed her gigantic appetite.

  The
forest woman told the Vagabonds that they were meant to destroy the witch. So they set off together to seek her out and, although they didn’t know it, to fulfill their hearts’ desires. Before they left, she gave the imp a vial filled with a magical mist and told the imp that when everything looked darkest, he should open the vial and release its contents into the air.

  Because of her black magic, the witch knew the Vagabonds were coming, and she sent an army of snakes to attack them. Some of the snakes were poisonous, rattlesnakes and cobras and such, whose bites could kill, and some were boa constrictors and pythons, who wrapped their bodies around their prey and squeezed them until their eyes popped out.

  Long before they reached the castle, the Vagabonds spied the witch’s army. The giant, who traveled with a club as big as an oak tree, went first, swinging his mighty club and killing snakes right and left. The wizard cast a spell so the snakes’ poison couldn’t hurt the Vagabonds. The fairy princess used her wings to fly above them and sprinkle the snakes with fairy dust that turned many of them to harmless worms. But the snakes kept coming, so many that they threatened to overwhelm the Vagabonds, and things looked pretty bad.

  That’s when the imp remembered the vial the forest woman had given him, and he pulled out the stopper and released the mist into the air. The little cloud grew huge and gray and blinding to the snakes, and they couldn’t see the four Vagabonds, who slipped away and left them far behind. Blind and confused, the snakes began fighting among themselves, killing one another until the whole army had destroyed itself.

  “And that’s the end of that adventure,” I said.

  “But what about the Black Witch, Odie?” Emmy said. “Do they ever kill her?”

  I tapped the end of her nose with my finger and said, “Their odyssey isn’t over, and that’s another story.”

  It had grown late. The fire was dying and the sliver of a new moon had risen over the island. Emmy lay wrapped in her blanket, safe between Mose and me. Albert, still weak from his ordeal, lay at my other side, his eyes already closed. After a while, I heard deep, sonorous breathing from them all. I was still plagued with the insomnia that had beset me after I killed Jack, and after a while, I stood quietly and walked across the sand, a soft stretch of pale gray under the stars and the slender moon. The river was broad and still and black in its sweep around the island. In the distance beyond the trees that edged the riverbank, a gathering of lights marked a small village. I imagined the people in the houses there, safe in their slumbering, happy in the comfort of the love they shared as families, as friends. I’d envied them once, but no longer. Like one of the Vagabonds, I had no idea where I was headed, but it didn’t matter. Because I knew exactly where my heart was.

  - PART FOUR -

  THE ODYSSEY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  WE STAYED ON that island in the middle of the Minnesota River for two full days while Albert continued to recover his strength. The wall of jumbled driftwood, much of which was whole tree trunks that had been carried on the raging river’s back during floods, offered us both shelter and a blind behind which to hide from prying eyes, although in the time we were there, I saw not a single soul along the riverbanks. I made Emmy another sock puppet to replace Puff, which Jack had taken from her. For this one, I fashioned bunny ears and took one of the cotton balls from the medical supplies Sister Eve had given me to tend Albert’s wounds and tied it with thread as a little tail. I diluted some iodine with a little water, put a small drop below the button eyes as a pinkish nose, and on either side made three whiskers with black thread. When I presented it to her, she was delighted and promptly named the puppet Peter Rabbit.

  When she’d handed me the paper bag of medical supplies, Sister Eve had told me she’d put in a few other useful items. They turned out to be five ten-dollar bills. I thought maybe it was one of the envelopes I’d seen in Sid’s satchel. It wasn’t nearly the size of the windfall we’d found in the Brickmans’ safe, but it was still a lot of money in those days. The second morning on the island, I took one of the tens, and Mose and I crossed the river channel in the canoe. I made my way to the nearby village, whose lights I’d seen in the night, and found a small market, where I filled the water bag and bought food supplies. When I saw that they sold night crawlers as bait, I bought some of those, too, along with a roll of fishing line and a package of hooks. I also picked up the most recent issue of the Mankato Daily Free Press because Emmy was part of a front-page story about the Federal Kidnapping Act—or the Lindbergh Law, as it was to become popularly known—which Congress had just recently approved and which made the taking of Emmy a federal crime, a capital one. We could get the chair.

  When I gave him the newspaper, Albert read it to himself, so as not to alarm Emmy. Mose and I were already well aware of our precarious situation. The one element that offered a measure of relief was that Sister Eve and the Sword of Gideon Healing Crusade weren’t mentioned. According to the article, there was still no news at all concerning the fate of Emmaline Frost, the kidnapped girl. Thelma Brickman had been interviewed about the impact of the Lindbergh Law on her own heartbreaking situation. She was eloquent in expressing her fear for the safety of her sweet little girl, and God alone knew what horrors those deviants might be subjecting her to. “Whoever they are,” the article quoted her, “these criminals must be the Devil’s own disciples, and they deserve the swift and merciless punishment this new law dictates.”

  Albert said, “I think our camp needs some livening up, Emmy. Could you gather some wildflowers for us?”

  She looked delighted at the prospect and scampered off.

  “I don’t understand it,” I said, when she’d gone. “The Brickmans know we took Emmy. Why don’t they just say that?”

  “Because it could get messy for them,” Albert said. “I think they want to conduct their business with us as privately as possible.”

  “How? Ambush us and kill us?” I’d said it in dark jest, but I could see from the look on his face that Albert wasn’t kidding.

  “Something I haven’t told you,” he said. “Bring me the pillowcase.”

  I retrieved it from the canoe and handed it to my brother. He reached inside, drew out a small book bound in black leather, which he opened. Page after page was filled with names, dates, money amounts.

  “A ledger,” Albert said. “Payoffs of some kind. Sheriff Warford’s name is in there. The Lincoln police chief, too. And the mayor.”

  “Payoffs for what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the bootlegging. Maybe other things.” My brother closed the book, looking as drawn as he had when the snake venom was climbing toward his heart. “Bet there’s lots of folks in that county who think it would be best if we all just disappeared and this ledger never came back to haunt them.”

  “Shoot first, ask questions later,” I said, recalling what the cop had told one-eyed Jack. “But we’re not in Fremont County anymore. Maybe we should just turn ourselves in to the police around here and tell them everything we know. Show them all those letters in the pillowcase and that ledger book and tell them how Emmy doesn’t want to be the Black Witch’s daughter at all.”

  “And how you killed two men?”

  It wasn’t an accusation, just a cold reminder of the reality of our situation.

  He killed to protect himself and us, Mose signed.

  “Couple it with kidnapping, and who’s going to believe us? Jail for us all at the very least,” Albert said in that dead voice he’d been using since the snakebite. He glanced down at the headline. “Maybe worse.”

  We fed that newspaper to the fire.

  I had earthworms and fishing line, and I rummaged around in the driftwood until I found three straight sticks that would serve as poles. While Albert lay in the shade of a huge ash tree whose branches overhung the driftwood wall, Mose and Emmy and I stood on the sand at the river’s edge. I’d attached a dry little twig to each line as a bobber. Emmy, who’d grown up on a farm, had no compunction about skewering an
earthworm with her hook, and she had her line in the water even before Mose and I did. We fished through the afternoon without a nibble.

  Finally Mose put down his pole and signed, I’m going to noodle.

  Which, I recalled, was how Forrest, the Indian we’d encountered before New Bremen, had said he’d caught the catfish he’d shared with us.

  Mose wiggled his fingers like worms to give us an image of what he was planning. Then he followed the edge of the island until he came to a place where a great cottonwood had been undercut by the river and the arcing lacework of the exposed roots formed little caves that were half-filled with river water. Mose scooted out along one of the thick roots, laid himself down, reached his hand into the water among the roots, and held it there. I couldn’t see his fingers, but I suspected they were wriggly and delectable-looking to a fat catfish.

  Emmy watched and whispered in a frightened voice, “Will they eat his fingers?”

  “I guess they’ll try,” I said, and the image of Herman Volz and his hand with only four and half digits filled my mind. I didn’t know about catfish, but I hoped their teeth were a lot more forgiving than those of a band saw.

  Mose was nothing if not patient. He lay on that thick root long after Emmy’s attention had drifted, and mine, too, and we left him to his noodling and went into the woods that covered the island. The trees were thick with vines, and the ground under the broad reach of the boughs was covered with brush. Emmy and I made our way slowly. I told her we were exploring the island because we were vagabonds on an adventure.

  “To kill the witch?” Emmy said.

  “And all the other monsters who threaten children,” I proclaimed.

  I grabbed a vine and pulled it loose from the trunk where it had hung, and I tried to swing, in the way Johnny Weissmuller had done in Tarzan the Ape Man, which was one of the few movies I’d been allowed to see in the theater in Lincoln. The vine broke under my weight. I came crashing down and landed in the middle of a clump of sumac, square on my butt. I sat for a moment, a little stunned, and heard Emmy calling my name with concern. Then I turned and looked down and screamed.