This Tender Land

by William Kent Krueger

  We trooped after him, all of us except Forrest, who simply watched us go. I felt a conspiracy between him and Mose, though to what end I had no idea. At that moment, because I didn’t know this new Mose, and a good deal of Forrest was still a significant mystery, I found myself wary of what we might be walking into. I could sense the same from Albert, who kept glancing at me and Emmy over his shoulder in a watchful way.

  Since we’d stumbled upon the skeleton on the island, nothing had been the same. I wondered if we were cursed. I’d read of such things in stories, people disturbing the dead and paying a terrible price. Or maybe because of his Sioux heritage, Mose had been possessed by a vengeful spirit. Whatever the truth, I wanted to go back. Back to the river. Back in time. Back to that place beneath the sycamore tree on the Gilead, where the fireflies had been like a million stars, and beside me, Emmy had held my hand, and for the briefest of moments, I’d felt completely free and deeply happy.

  “They’re all dead,” Emmy said.

  Which brought Mose to a halt. He turned slowly and nailed her with his dark eyes. Then he signed, Thirty-eight. He looked at me and Albert, as if we ought to understand, but saw clearly that we didn’t and turned and continued walking.

  Mose led us to a place I’d been before with Maybeth, a small patch of grass enclosed by the rails of an iron fence and, rising from the center, a granite slab like a headstone. Mose stood unmoving before the slab, as if he, too, were cut from granite, and gazed at the words chiseled there:

  HERE

  WERE HANGED

  38

  SIOUX INDIANS

  DEC. 26TH 1862

  “All dead,” I said, repeating the words Emmy had spoken, not only minutes before but also days before, when she’d come out of her fit on the island.

  “Is this where you’ve been all the time?” Albert asked.

  Mose shook his head and signed, Alone, thinking. And at the library.

  “Library?” I said. “What for?”

  Learning who I am.

  Emmy said, “Who are you?”

  Mose, he signed. And not Mose. Then he spelled out A-m-d-a-c-h-a. Broken to Pieces.

  “Did Forrest bring you here?” I asked.

  Mose nodded.

  “Did he tell you about the hanged Sioux?”

  Some. I learned the whole story on my own, at the library.

  “What is the whole story?” Albert said.

  Mose signed, Sit.

  * * *

  I WON’T GIVE you the full, sad, eloquently signed account that Mose delivered, but here’s what he told us in a nutshell.

  By the late summer of 1862, most of the land on which the Sioux in southern Minnesota had lived for generations had been stolen from them by treaties poorly explained or blatantly ignored. Because of the greed of the white men who’d been appointed as Indian agents, the allotments of money and supplies that had been promised to the Sioux hadn’t materialized. Starving women and children finally begged one of the agents for food.

  Do you know what the agent told them? Mose signed. He dropped his hands, and because of the tortured look on his face, I wasn’t sure he was going to continue. He told them to eat grass, he finally went on.

  Ill-fed and ill-clothed, angry and desperate, some of the Sioux of southern Minnesota went to war. The conflict lasted only a few weeks but with hundreds dead on both sides. The soldiers rounded up almost all the Indians in that part of the state, even those who’d had nothing to do with the war, and put them into concentration camps. In the winter that followed, deaths from disease rose into the hundreds. Those who survived were dispersed among reservations and settlements as far away as Montana.

  Nearly four hundred Sioux men were put on trial for their part, real or conjectured, in the bloody conflict. The trials were a sham. None of the Sioux were allowed legal representation. They had no chance to defend themselves against the charges, a great many of which were false. Some hearings lasted only minutes. In the end, more than three hundred were condemned to be executed. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but thirty-nine, who’d been found guilty of the most egregious acts. On December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas, Mose signed, and his bitterness was obvious—thirty-eight of those condemned men were marched to a scaffold ingeniously constructed in the shape of a square to execute them all at the same moment.

  Their hands had been tied behind their backs and hoods had been placed over their heads, Mose signed. They couldn’t see one another, so they shouted out their names in order to let the others know they were all there, all together in body and in spirit. They were condemned but not broken. Amdacha was one of these men.

  Mose lifted his face, tearstained, to the sky and for a moment could not go on.

  Then: An enormous crowd of white people had gathered to watch. At the appointed hour, with one stroke from an ax blade, all thirty-eight men dropped to their deaths. And that crowd, that crowd of eager white spectators, cheered.

  As Mose told the story, tears coursed down my cheeks, too. All this—this gross inhumanity, this unconscionable miscarriage of justice—had taken place in the area where I’d spent the last four years of my life, yet not once, in any lesson taught at the Lincoln Indian Training School, had I learned of it. To this day, I can’t tell you if I wept for those wronged people or for Mose, whose pain I could feel powerfully, or if I wept because of the guilt that weighed so heavily on my heart. I’d come from different people than Mose. My skin was the same color as that of the people who’d cheered when Amdacha died, the same color as those who’d done horrible things to a whole tribal nation, and I felt the taint of their crimes in my blood.

  A cop car approached and slowed down.

  “We should go,” Albert said quietly, eyeing the patrol car as it passed.

  He started away, and Emmy and I came after him. But Mose lingered, his head bowed as he watered the grass around that headstone with his tears.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  AT DUSK, I headed back to Hopersville. Among the trees, charcoal-colored in the dim of approaching night, fires burned, little oases of light, islands of welcome. I was thinking about the Schofields, about how, from the moment they’d laid eyes on a kid who was no kin to them, they’d taken me in, showed me kindness, generosity. Love. I wanted to hold on to that, and the only way I could think of was to return to their camp. In a way, like going home.

  As I came along the river, a figure rushed to greet me in the near dark. My heart leapt at the hope that it would, by some miracle, be Maybeth. But after a moment, the man’s limp told me exactly who it was.

  “Buck,” Captain Gray said, a little out of breath. “I figured you might wander back. You need to leave. Right now.”

  “Why?”

  “Some people came looking for you today. One of them was a cop, a county sheriff.”

  “Warford? Big red-faced man?”

  “That was him.”

  Sheriff Shoot First And Ask Questions Later, I thought to myself.

  “What did the others look like?” I asked.

  “There was another man—tall, slender, black hair, dark eyes.”

  “Clyde Brickman. And was the other one a woman?”

  “Yes, his wife, I believe. You know them?”

  “Yeah, and they’re all bad news.”

  “They said they’d heard about a kid with a harmonica staying in camp. Wanted information. About him and a little girl he might be with.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing. But they were offering money, and desperate as we all are, I’m sure they had some takers. You need to make yourself scarce.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Then I said, “When you get to D.C., give ’em hell.”

  “That I will,” Captain Gray said with a solemn nod.

  I quickly returned to camp. In the time we’d been on the outskirts of Mankato, because we’d seen no one anywhere near our little copse of poplars, we’d grown a bit careless, and I found that Albert had
built a fire. He had the pans from his military mess kit over the flames, and I smelled hamburger frying.

  “Put out the fire,” I said.

  He looked up, the features of his face all drawn taut, ready to argue. “Why?”

  “The Brickmans are here and Sheriff Warford’s with them.”

  Emmy had been sitting cross-legged watching Albert cook. I heard her catch her breath. Mose was on the far side of the fire, where, whenever he was in our company, he’d been keeping himself separate from the rest of us. He’d been hunched over, staring thoughtfully into the flames, but at the mention of Brickman and Warford, he sat upright, rigid.

  Forrest said calmly, “I believe I hear the river calling you again.”

  Albert doused the flames and we ate our hamburgers very rare on white bread and in sullen silence. I don’t know about the others, but I’d begun to hope that maybe we had outrun the Brickmans or at least had outlasted their anger, and they’d returned to Lincoln School, content to resume their reign of terror over all those we’d left behind. Now, in the dark around the dead campfire, I was afraid that we would never be free of them, that there was nowhere we could run that they wouldn’t follow.

  “First light, we’re on the river,” Albert said. “We’ll be out of here before anybody’s stirring.” Then he said something that hit me like a rock. “Will you come, Mose?”

  I couldn’t see Mose’s face clearly in the dark, but I could see his hands as he lifted them and signed, Don’t know.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. It wasn’t just my usual insomnia. It was the world I knew breaking apart. I got up and walked to the river’s edge, sat on a big rock, and stared up at the two connected stars, Maybeth’s and mine, which would always point north. That’s where the river would take us next. The moon hadn’t risen yet and the river was a dark flow, and although I’d once thought of it as a current that carried with it the promise of freedom, now it seemed to offer only disappointment.

  Then I had a thought so black that I could taste its bitterness: Why had we ever left Lincoln School? It was a hard life, sure, but it was also, in its way, predictable. The police weren’t after us there. The Brickmans were demons, but I knew how to deal with them. Albert and Mose were almost finished with their schooling and would be free to do as they chose, and as for me, I could manage the years I had left. Here, on the river, there was no certainty except that the Brickmans and the police would hound us until we were caught. I was sure a night in the quiet room would seem like a picnic compared to what awaited us after that.

  * * *

  IN THE RAT gray light before dawn, we rose and quietly loaded our canoe. Mose helped, though he gave no indication whether he’d continue with us. I was worried about his answer, so I didn’t ask. It was Emmy who finally broached the subject.

  “Please come, Amdacha,” she said, using his Sioux name. “We’re family.”

  Mose looked at her a long time, then a long time at the river. Finally he signed, Until I know you’re safe.

  I understood that it was only for Emmy he was agreeing to come, not Albert or me. Family? Dead as the hope with which we’d begun our journey.

  “What are you going to do, Forrest?” Albert asked as we prepared to shove off.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “You could come with us,” Emmy offered.

  Forrest gave her a grateful smile but shook his head. “No room for me in that canoe of yours. Besides, this is my home. I’ve got family here. Time I visited them.” He looked to Albert. “You’re on your way to Saint Louis, but you’ll have to visit another saint first. Saint Paul. I know folks there, good folks, who’ll be happy to help you.”

  He took a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil from his shirt pocket, scribbled something, and gave it to my brother. He shook Albert’s hand, then mine, then tousled Emmy’s hair.

  He turned to Mose, Amdacha now, and put his hand on his shoulder. “Wakan Tanka kici un.”

  Emmy whispered to me, “May the Creator bless you.”

  Amdacha held the stern while Albert climbed into the bow and Emmy and I took our place in the center of the canoe. Amdacha stepped in, lifted his paddle, and Forrest shoved us into the current.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  IT HAD BEEN a month since we’d fled Lincoln School, and I was tired of the running. All that morning, I sat in the canoe and brooded in silence. The others were quiet, too, even Emmy and Peter Rabbit. There was nothing about the landscape to lift our spirits. All along the river lay the evidence of cataclysm. Debris, dry and rotting, hung in the low branches of the trees on either side, and wherever the river curved, driftwood lay piled against the high banks. The bleached limbs of whole, submerged cottonwoods that had been ripped from the valley floor long ago and become anchored on sandbars rose up midstream like the bones of dinosaurs. Maybe it was the effect of all this evidence of destruction that kept us silent, or maybe the others, like me, simply felt as misplaced and hopeless as those uprooted trees.

  Around noon, we pulled to a sandy beach shaded by the branches of a great elm. We ate some lunch from our dwindling stock of food.

  “Look,” Emmy said, pointing toward a cottonwood across the river whose trunk was split ten feet above the ground. A mattress, stained and decomposing, lay caught in the fork of the divide. “How did it get up there?”

  “A flood,” Albert said.

  “That big?”

  “This river was born in flood, Emmy,” Albert said. “Ten thousand years ago there was a lake in the north, larger than any lake that exists anywhere today. It was called Agassiz. One day, the earth and rubble wall that held it back broke, and all the water came rushing out, a gigantic flood that was called the River Warren. It carved a valley miles wide across Minnesota all the way to the Mississippi. This river we’re on is all that’s left of that great flood of water.”

  My brother was always showing off what he knew from his reading. Even though I found it pretty interesting, I wasn’t about to tell him so.

  “Will it flood while we’re on it?”

  “It might, if it rains enough.”

  Please don’t let it rain, I thought to myself.

  But Emmy’s eyes grew huge with wonder. “I would like to see that.”

  Mose—I was still trying to get used to thinking of him as Amdacha—sat apart from us, not far but enough that it felt like a separation.

  “Odie, you never told me if the imp and the princess got married.” When Emmy saw my look of incomprehension, she said, “The imp and princess in your story. Did they get married?”

  While I considered my reply, a long piece of driftwood came into view, got caught in an eddy, and began to spin.

  I hadn’t told any of them about Maybeth and me, not a word. When Albert had gone to help Mr. Schofield fix his broken truck, I’d let on that it was just a family I’d come to know, a family in need. I wasn’t sure why I’d kept my true relationship with the Schofields a secret or my deep feelings for their daughter. I tried to tell myself it was because I wanted Maybeth—even if it was just the memory of Maybeth—all to myself, unsullied by the need to explain anything, protected from the jabs Albert might take at this first love of mine.

  But as I watched that piece of driftwood going round and round, I finally accepted the truth, which was that I’d already sensed the cracks threatening to divide Albert and Emmy and Mose and me, and I was afraid that we were falling apart. In that terrible moment, I couldn’t help wondering, much to my own dismay, if I’d chosen to stay with the wrong family.

  “The imp and princess didn’t get married,” I finally said to Emmy. “The princess stayed to help her people and the imp went his own way.”

  “Oh,” she said, her face sad.

  “Love doesn’t always work out,” I told her and threw a rock at the river.

  We canoed until dusk, when we reached the outskirts of a town.

  Albert said, “Forrest gave me a general idea of the river. That must be Le Sueur ahead. Let�
��s pull in for the night.”

  We made camp in a little cove. As we settled in for the evening, we heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the town.

  “Who’s shooting?” Emmy asked.

  “And who are they shooting at?” I added.

  Albert cocked his head and listened, then a smile came to his lips. “Not gunshots. Firecrackers. Today’s the Fourth of July.”

  * * *

  ALTHOUGH AT THE Lincoln School we were never allowed fireworks, every year on Independence Day, we were paraded into town, where we joined other citizens gathered near Ulysses S. Grant Park to watch the Jaycees shoot off their skyrockets and artillery shells and booming mortars. I think now how unfitting it was to force children who had no freedom, whose freedom had, in fact, been ripped from their people decades before, to take part in this observance. But the truth was we all loved these mesmerizing displays of aerial splendor, and after the lights had gone out in our dormitories, we whispered among ourselves, replaying the best moments and recalling especially the magnificence of the finale.

  The fireworks in Le Sueur began not long after dusk. The park must not have been far from the river, because the explosions in the sky and the sound of their reports came very close together, the booms shaking the air around us.

  “Oh, look,” Emmy cried when a huge chrysanthemum of magenta sparks blossomed amid a shower of gold. In her excitement, she grabbed Amdacha’s hand. I saw him flinch, then relax and, to my great amazement and relief, smile, the first smile I’d seen on his lips in what seemed like forever.

  “Play something, Odie,” Emmy begged when the night grew quiet again.

  My heart was beginning to feel light but not particularly patriotic, so I put my Hohner harmonica to my lips and blew the notes for “Down by the Riverside,” a song Emmy’s mother had taught me and whose tune and lyrics always lifted my spirits.

  Emmy picked up on it right away, throwing her little heart into singing, “Gonna lay down my sleepy head, down by the riverside . . .”