Footsteps clamored in the hall and her father bounded into the room. “What’s happened?”
“Accident with the lathe,” the groundskeeper said.
Her father stepped closer to the table, then reeled back. “My Lord! Is he dead?”
“No, sir, but he’s lost a lot of blood. Best we fetch a doctor and quick.”
“Yes . . . yes . . . go saddle the horses. I’ll fetch my cloak and be out presently.”
Mr. Simms flew from the room, parting the cluster of gaping boys who huddled at the back door.
“Off with you,” her father said to them. “Close down the workshop and retire to your dormitory. Prayer is what the boy needs now.”
They shuffled outside with wide eyes and anxious, thin-lipped expressions. A group of girls had gathered in the hallway at the opposite door. Her father shooed them away in similar fashion, sending the newly arrived Miss Wells to keep them upstairs.
“You’ll be okay, won’t you?” he said to Alma and George. “Mrs. Simms is here.”
Alma glanced over at the cook. The woman sat in the corner on an upended pail, her face the color of the whitewashed walls, her eyes glazed and vacant.
Without waiting for a response, her father left the room, his heavy steps muffled by the hallway rug.
Alma looked at George, the sight beneath her hands too gruesome to regard. Sweat beaded across his forehead. His disheveled hair fell forward, shielding his downturned eyes. She could hear Charles’s raspy breath, uneven and urgent, as if he were drowning beneath a current of invisible water. She felt the spasms of his body, his skin cool while his blood ran hot. Her eyes remained anchored on George, not looking as much as clinging, desperate for refuge.
“How did this happen, George?”
He looked up. A glossy sheen covered his eyes. Taut jaw muscles bulged beneath his tawny skin. His breath quivered with each inhale. “I was . . .” He stopped, raked back his hair with a bloodstained hand, and then continued. “I was sanding wood. At the lathe. A leg. For to make a table. Charles came. The end of his shirt—by his hand—”
“His sleeve?”
George nodded. “It caught in the spindle, pulling him. And his arm. The belt ate his arm. Chewed and twisted and spit it out. I stopped. Took my foot away from the treadle. Too late.” He lowered his head, shielding his face from her.
“This wasn’t your fault. I’ve been in the wood shop before. It’s too crowded. So much is going on all at once. Just last week Frederick cut himself on a saw blade and needed stitches.”
“Plenty more than stitches is needed here.”
“I know, but—”
Charles gasped. His eyes opened, wide and frantic. Alma took one hand off the wound and laid the back of it on his cheek. His clammy skin was cool against her fingers. “It’s okay, Charles. The doctor shall arrive any minute. Shh, now. Be still.”
She stroked his cheek and his breathing steadied. When his eyes fluttered shut, she looked back at George. “He’s so cold.”
George cleared his throat, regaining his composure. “Mrs. Simms, do you keep any blanket in the kitchen?”
The cook’s frazzled-haired head popped up. “What, dear? No . . . no, I don’t need a blanket, thank you. I’m just resting here a bit before I start dinner is all.”
Laughter slipped through Alma’s lips while tears mounted at the rims of her eyes. “I’ll go fetch one from the trunk in the hall. I think the bleeding has stopped a bit since Mr. Simms put on that tourniquet.”
Alma returned with a thick wool blanket and tucked it around Charles’s body. Blood wicked into its fuzzy fibers.
“Like ink,” she said aloud. “Mother will be irate over the stains.”
Again, she wanted to laugh. What did it matter what her mother thought at a time like this? A smile twitched at the corner of her lips. She glanced at George. What must he think of her? But a crooked grin sprang to his lips as well. A fleeting moment and their smiles faded. Their eyes strayed away.
Through the silence, Alma listened, begging of each passing moment the sound of horse hooves. The angst of her younger self, waiting, listening for a similar sound, flashed in her memory. She had never dreamed the arrival of the Indians would lead her here: standing beside a broken body, across the table from the boy who called her enemy, her ears once again straining to hear the cry of wagon wheels through the empty air.
When the sound did come—snow crunching, hooves pounding like a frantic drumbeat—Alma released a heavy sigh. Her father rushed in, followed by Dr. Austin and Mr. Simms.
The middle-aged physician shooed Alma from the table. His alert, beady eyes scanned Charles from head to toe. He lifted the saturated towels from the wound. “If there’s any hope of him living, I’ll have to amputate. Open my bag, Mr. Blanchard, and retrieve my saw. We’ll need water set to boil and fresh linen too.” He flung the soiled rags on the floor. Blood spattered across the kitchen.
Alma’s stomach turned. The glint of the long metal handsaw caught her eye; the room blurred and spun. She pushed through the back door and raced down the steps to the yard. Falling to her hands and knees, convulsions overtook her and she vomited in the white snow.
The sun had sunk behind the trees, but rays of light knifed through empty boughs, casting a barbed-wire pattern of light and dark across the ground. From inside came an arresting shriek. The kitchen windows rattled. Alma’s stomach heaved again.
How long she remained there, hands and knees buried in the snow, Alma did not know. Eventually, the door behind her swung open and closed. Footfalls descended the stairs toward her. She covered her vomit with snow and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
George offered her a hand and helped her up. The warmth of his skin made her entire body crave his touch. He sandwiched her frozen fingers between his own and brought them to his mouth. His hot breath began to thaw her.
On any other occasion, Alma would have pulled away. But it was not just her hands that were numb. Her entire body felt shrouded in fog.
Her mother’s voice from within the kitchen startled her back to reality. “Great heavens! What’s happened here? Where’s Alma?”
She slipped her hands from George’s grasp just as the back door whined open.
“Alma, come inside this instant.”
She turned around and her mother gasped. “You’re covered in blood. That’s not your silk gown, is it?”
This time, Alma found no humor in the absurd exchange. “No, Mother, just my cotton work dress. I was helping Mrs. Simms in the cellar when . . . when the accident happened. I’ll wash up at the well and be in presently.”
Her mother frowned. “Very well. You too, George. You’re absolutely gruesome.”
The two of them plodded to the well. The air had cooled with the sun’s retreat, creating a frozen crust atop the snow that crunched beneath their feet. Alma’s legs felt heavy, each step a chore. She sank onto the lip of the well while George cast and reeled the bucket. They washed their hands in the frigid water without a word. Alma scrubbed hers frantically, rubbing the skin raw. George smoothed his together in slow, circular motions, his eyes fixed, distant.
She dried her hands on a patch of skirt not soiled with blood, vomit, or melted snow and started back to the schoolhouse. George did not follow.
“George—”
“Tε·h!” His voice bellowed across the open yard. He backhanded the water pail, sending it careening through the air. The pink-tinged liquid spattered over the snow. “The white man and his white man ways. This never would have happened if not for that!”
Alma staggered backward. “Accidents happen. It’s not anyone’s fault.”
His dark eyes, made even darker by dusk’s dim light, raked over her like talons. “No? The Menominee never made machines that eat boys’ arms.”
The blood flared in her veins. “You don’t have doctors like Dr. Austin who can heal such injuries either.”
“You know nothing of our .”
“I know Charles wo
uld lose a lot more than his arm if not for Dr. Austin.”
George crossed the distance between them in two heavy strides. He stood so close the hot cloud of his breath engulfed her face. He pointed toward a lonely break in the trees. “If white medicine is so great and powerful, what happened to them?”
Even before her eyes followed the trajectory of his arm, Alma knew to what he pointed. At the far end of the yard, like a deep pockmark in the otherwise smooth line of trees, stood a small cemetery. Eleven headstones jutted from the earth. Each was identical in form, plainly wrought and inscribed.
Alma hugged her arms against her chest, her fingers pressed to bone. The first death had happened quickly, only a few months into Stover’s first term. Pneumonia. ROBERT, JANUARY 1882, was the only epitaph. The boy’s true name, his Indian name, had faded from her memory, but his copper face lingered. Death had come every winter since. She remembered every face.
When she spoke, her voice came thin, wavering, equal parts anger and sorrow. “And children don’t die on the reservations? Death, I suppose, is also the white man’s invention?”
“They die. They die in the arms of their mothers and fathers. Tshipe’kaino is performed in their honor. Here is a lonely death.”
Alma blinked back the tears that returned to her eyes. “The Lord is always with us. We never die alone.” But the words sounded like her father’s.
“Whose Lord? The Indian does not want your God any more than he want your killer machines.” He glared down at her a second more, then stormed back toward the house.
The cold twilight closed in around her, but Alma did not move. Her hands trembled and her chest heaved. She hated George—his arrogance, his pride, his refusal to cede even the smallest ground.
After several deep breaths, she mustered a semblance of poise and turned back to the house. Her eyes caught on the meager cemetery, pale headstones like ghosts at the edge of the woods. Their memory ripped through her, and though her feet moved toward the warm, gaslit rooms of the grand brick schoolhouse, her heart questioned their direction.
CHAPTER 24
Minnesota, 1906
Alma looked back at the wide field beyond the agency as she and Stewart rode from town. A large group of men squatted around a blanket, whipping long sticks at shoe-shaped patches of buckskin. The moccasin game. Asku had explained it to her once. A good player could win a new shirt, headdress, or pony; a poor player leave in want of the same. The men laughed and hollered. The hider shuffled bullets beneath the moccasins and a new round commenced. Nearby, several women chatted beside a crackling cook fire. Children romped and dallied.
Then drums sounded—deep, resonant, staccato. The kind of beat that captured the heart and overrode its rhythm. The sound was more rich and commanding than the music made from hollow logs and upturned pails Alma remembered from her youth. But the effect was the same, the yearning immediate. The Indians would dance tonight, sing and celebrate in firelight until dawn lit the sky. Alma imagined herself among them—her body moving in time with the song, her feet striking the hard ground, her lungs stinging from the smoke and exertion. This life could have been hers, too. Yet when she closed her eyes, the vision was hazy, blinking, like the lantern of a steamboat obscured in fog.
Alma clutched the wagon’s splintery sideboard and refused another look back. Her free hand found Stewart and nestled into the crook of his arm. Here, beside him, was where she belonged.
Onward they drove, and the drumbeat loosed its grip, fading behind leaf chatter and birdsong. Though the sun had dipped westward, it promised enough daylight to see them back to Detroit Lakes. She recounted the day’s events and, for the first time since their arrival in Minnesota, felt a sense of victory. They’d found only one witness, but Zhawaeshk’s account of the murder seemed definitive. He’d come upon the body less than a minute after the shooting and had seen no one else on the road. From his telling, the others—the shopkeeper, the sheriff’s deputy, the Indians who’d been gambling in the nearby woods—all arrived at staggering intervals afterward. None of them had actually witnessed the killing.
She turned to Stewart and smoothed his coat lapel, letting her hand linger a moment on his chest. His poor lip had doubled in size. She’d fix it up tonight with iodine and ice if the hotel could come by it. He’d been amazing today, surprising her at every turn. “How do you know so much about guns? Don’t tell me you read all that in a book.”
“No.” He smiled, a rare sight these days, and ever so welcome. “Well, part of it I read. But my grandfather was somewhat of a collector.”
“Really?” It was nice for once to feel like she wasn’t the only one withholding bits of the past.
“He kept an old set of dueling pistols, a seventeenth-century musket, the flintlock rifle his great-grandfather used in the Revolution.”
“Did you ever fire them?”
“I was forbade to even touch them.” His handsome smile broadened; his gaze lifted toward the sky. “I did, of course, one night when all the grown-ups thought I’d gone to bed. I was five, maybe six. Nearly blew my foot off . . .” His voice drifted and he chuckled. “Grandma raged a fit over the hole in her Oriental carpet.... Needless to say, I got a good lecture about how gentlemen handle firearms.”
Alma laughed, envisioning a young Stewart—inquisitive and precocious even then—sneaking into his grandfather’s study. She thought of her own escapades, all the times she’d snuck around without her parents’ knowledge, and felt a fleeting moment of kinship with her husband. Perhaps their childhoods weren’t so different after all. Then, as always, her mind drifted to that last evening she’d ventured out in secret. Of course they were different—utterly and irrevocably so.
“Will you wire the judge when we return to town? Lobby for a mistrial?” she asked after several moments of silence.
“Not yet.”
“What more evidence do you need?” She pulled away from his side and scrutinized his face. “Surely, you now believe Harry innocent.”
“My beliefs matter little. It’s the judge or, more likely, the jury we’ve got to convince.” Stewart kept his attention forward, navigating around a shallow pit in the lane. “We can now cast doubt on the prosecution’s version of events—who witnessed what, who had access to a gun—but none of that actually refutes Mr. Muskrat’s involvement. What Mr. Zhawaeshk said about the recent allotment proceedings is interesting. Tomorrow we’ll look more into—”
“But you do believe that he’s innocent?”
He pulled his eyes from the road and gave her a quizzical look.
“You mustn’t believe what Zhawaeshk said,” she continued before he could give her an answer she didn’t like. “About Harry being a vagabond and drunk.”
Stewart’s expression, now as it had been when Zhawaeshk told his tale, was inscrutable. But she knew his distaste for such behavior. He was puritanical in that regard. She knotted her hands and buried them in the folds of her skirt. Maybe then she wouldn’t be tempted to chew through her leather gloves to get at the skin around her nails. Everyone made mistakes, had faults and secrets. Surely Stewart could see that. This wouldn’t change his commitment to the case. To her. Would it? “All I—”
The horse lurched, throwing the carriage off-kilter. Stewart shook the reins, but the animal continued to hobble and slow, favoring its right hind leg.
“He’s hurt,” Alma said.
Stewart stopped the carriage and jumped down. When he approached the horse, it whinnied and shied away.
Alma winced. Her bookish husband knew little of animals. “Careful.”
He bent down to examine the leg and the horse reared back, kicking up a cloud of dirt. The buggy swayed and nearly toppled. Alma grabbed the side and held her breath. Stewart staggered back, dusting off his coat. “Blast it! Are you all right?”
Alma stood. “Here, let me help.”
“No.” Stewart flung off his derby and shrugged out of his overcoat and suit jacket. “Stay in the wagon, darling.”
Alma crossed her arms and remained standing. She couldn’t help but smile as he rolled up his crisp shirtsleeves and inched toward the horse again, arms outstretched and fingers splayed. “Stay now.” He patted the horse’s back, then tugged lightly on its leg.
Despite Stewart’s gentleness, the horse refused to raise his hoof. Instead, he snorted and whipped his tail at Stewart’s face. Alma started to climb from the wagon when she heard the clamber of approaching riders. Four men drew up behind them, steam rising from their stallions’ nostrils in the cooling air.
“Trouble?” a ginger-haired man asked. He was one of the men she’d seen yapping with Sheriff Knudson and handing out rations earlier that day.
Stewart took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Alma could tell he hated being out of his element. “It seems our horse has gone lame.”
“Might’ve thrown a shoe,” the man said without even a glance in the animal’s direction. “Don’t suppose you’ve a hammer and spare.”
The other men chuckled.
“No, I’m clear out,” her husband said through gritted teeth.
“All the better. A city man like you.” He sized up Stewart and snorted. “Course, there’s a farrier back in the village. Doubt you’d make it there and back to Detroit Lakes before dark, though.” His muddy-green eyes cut to Alma. “I’d hate for you to get lost along the way.”
She shivered, but held his gaze.
“Saw you talking to Zhawaeshk over there by them funny houses they build over their dead. He tell you anything useful?” He opened a small tin and stuffed a wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth. He smiled at her then, his lower lip protruding, his teeth the color of dirty dishwater. She thought she might be sick. Had he been following them all day, lurking in the trees and brambles beyond the cemetery?
“What Mr. Zhawaeshk said is privileged information,” Stewart answered for her.
The red-haired man swung his gaze back to Stewart. “That’s right. You’re here on official business.” He tugged with exaggeration on his grimy bow tie. More chuckles from the other men. “They put a lot of stock in that down there in the capital? The testimony of a piss-drunk Indian?”
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