“Men of all color and station drink.” Stewart looked down, rubbed the back of his neck, then glanced at Alma. “It does not entirely negate their worth or their testimony.”
“Guess we’ll see about that.” The man readied his reins. “Best you continue on now, before the sun sets. You’ve a whip, doncha?”
Stewart hesitated. “Yes.”
“Give ’im a good whacking and he’ll get you back. Let the farrier in Detroit Lakes handle him tomorrow.” He tipped his hat to Alma and spurred his horse, leaving a swell of dust behind him. The others followed.
All save one. James, the light-skinned Indian, hesitated, his eyes flickering between their wagon and his departing companions. The other riders disappeared behind a bend in the road, and James dismounted, cussing under his breath. “Merde.”
“We’re fine, thank you,” Stewart said.
James gritted his teeth and shook his head. “You whip this horse back to Detroit Lakes and he’ll never walk again.” He stroked the horse’s neck and whispered in its ear. “Steady, boy.”
The beast’s swishing tail stilled. Its ears relaxed downward and its breathing slowed. The Indian squatted and ran his hand down the horse’s leg. When he tapped the back, the horse raised his hoof. “It’s not a thrown shoe. Get me a stick.”
Stewart gaped down at him.
“A stick,” he said again, and let the horse’s hoof fall.
“Ah . . . right.” Stewart hurried to the edge of the road and pried a low-lying branch off a tree.
The Indian took the stick, snapped it in half over his knee, and whittled one end with a knife from his belt.
“I appreciate your help.” Stewart raked back his hair, leaving the slick locks rumpled. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about horses.”
Alma watched the young man shape the wood into a small, narrow hook. His nails were neatly trimmed, but his fingers strong and calloused.
“You work for the agency, don’t you?” Stewart asked.
He nodded, keeping his light-brown eyes trained on his work.
“What do you do there?”
“I’m editor of the Tomahawk, our weekly paper. And I translate from time to time for the agent.”
“You’re Chippewa, then?”
James raised an eyebrow in Stewart’s direction, then turned his attention back to the horse. He peeled away a few more layers of wood and closed his knife. “Métis—mixed-blood. My grandfather was a French trapper.”
“Did you know Harry Muskrat?”
To this, James said nothing. With one hand again bracing the horse’s hoof, he scraped away clumps of mud from around the shoe. “Here’s your problem.” He held up a jagged stone. “Don’t think it punctured or bruised the sole. Soak the hoof in warm water when you get back and he ought to be fine.”
Stewart extended his hand. “Thank you.”
“Yes,” Alma said. “Miigwech.”
James ignored Stewart’s hand and tossed the stone far away into the prairie. Then he turned for the first time to Alma. His eyes narrowed. “You should go home.”
Her skin burned. Was it the intensity of his gaze or the nagging feeling he might be right? “I can’t.”
He turned his back on both of them and mounted his horse. “There’s more than Agent Taylor who don’t want you snooping about here.”
“We’re not here to cause trouble,” Stewart said.
James smirked. “That’s what all you white men say.”
“I beg your pardon.” Without heed to his dirty hands, Stewart yanked down his shirtsleeves and fastened his silk knot cuff links. “We’re here helping one of your own race.”
“Helping? They say that too.”
“And what?” Alma’s hands clenched at her sides. “We should leave Askuwheteau to hang?”
Again, James’s eyes narrowed over her. “Go home. You’re chasing ghosts.”
“Why did you help us, then?”
He shrugged. “Pity.”
Stewart straightened his suit coat and donned his hat. “We don’t need your pity.”
“Not for you. For the horse.” He rode off, his shadow long and spindly in the waning sunlight.
“Don’t let him spook you, darling.” Stewart climbed back in the wagon and took up the reins. “We’ll show them all we have no intention of backing down.”
She nodded, but could not shake the half-breed’s words. Memories of her father’s grave had surfaced today. But his was not the only grave, not the only cemetery whose white slab headstones haunted her.
Chasing ghosts. If he only knew.
CHAPTER 25
Wisconsin, 1890
Days passed with their accustomed rhythm—morning lessons, afternoons of sewing, piano, and the occasional social call in La Crosse—but Alma stumbled through them like an unpolished dancer, languid and off tempo.
She visited Charles each afternoon in the infirmary, spoon-feeding him broth and relaying whatever bits of gossip she thought might raise his spirits. He rarely smiled. Pain and despondence deadened his eyes. George had been right on one account. Charles needed his family.
Today, on her way from the kitchen with Charles’s lunch tray, she stopped at her father’s study. “Any news of Charles’s family?”
Her father looked up from the stack of newly opened letters on his desk. “What?”
“Charles’s parents. It’s been two weeks since the accident. Surely they’re on their way.”
“I thought it best not to worry them. Dr. Austin says the boy’s condition is stable.”
“They don’t even know?” Her fingers clenched around the tray. “He’d benefit so from their company.”
“What do you suggest? Have his family journey two hundred miles—in midwinter no less—when all they could do here is fret?”
She realized in that moment how glib her remark—the white man alone being able to heal Charles’s injury—must have sounded to George that night by the well. Doc Austin saved the boy’s life, it was true. His injury would heal. Nothing in the doctor’s black bag could heal his melancholy, though. “Think of what comfort it would bring him to have his family by his side.”
Her father’s attention drifted back to his letters. “The Lord comforts his people and will—”
“I know. Have compassion on his afflicted ones.” Alma sighed, still hovering by the doorway. “Couldn’t we send Mr. Simms with the sleigh?”
He groped for his magnifying glass, speaking even as he read. “The school could hardly do without him for so many days.”
“Oh, Father.” She stomped to his desk, set down the tray, and grabbed his silver-rimmed glasses. Soup sloshed from the bowl. “Just use your spectacles.”
“The writing here is terribly small. How is one ever expected—” He reached for his glasses, but Alma kept hold. At last, his eyes ventured upward. “Sit down, kitten.”
She dragged forward a plain straight-backed chair. He took her hand and patted it. “You’ve always been such a sweet girl. Your concern over Charles does you credit. But he will be just fine. The Lord is watching over him. We are his family now.”
“But his arm . . . perhaps if his parents cannot make the journey to Stover, Charles could be taken to them once he is well enough to travel.”
Her father stiffened. “No, such talk is out of the question. If he were to go to the reservation now, it’s likely he would never return. And what would he do there? Without an arm he would become nothing more than a beggar, wallowing his life away on the agency’s doorstep.”
Her father’s blue eyes had grown wide and cold. She looked down. Her free hand fell to her side, her fingers sliding over the chair’s unvarnished wood.
“But—”
“After Charles heals we’ll start straightaway teaching him a skill, a trade he can perform, limited as he is. That’s what’s best for him, for his future, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but—”
“Good. I know the event was traumatic. I’m sorry you were
there to see it.” He let go of her hand and turned his eyes back to the pile of correspondence. “Keep Charles in your prayers and encourage the other girls to do so as well. That’s the best thing you can do for him.”
A splinter pricked the pad of her thumb. She pulled it out and sucked away the blood. Why couldn’t he see?
“The boy’s soup, Alma, it’s getting cold.”
She returned the chair to its corner—this time without scraping its legs atop the floor—and crept from the room with Charles’s tray. Before closing the door, she looked again at her father. He sat straight now, spectacles in place, his finger tracking his place on the paper. Naught but the dinner gong would break his attention. He’d grown stout these years. Veins the width of thread crisscrossed his cheeks beneath his waxen skin.
Inside the infirmary, Charles lay beneath a shrouded window in the corner. Two other beds crowded the tiny room. Other students, hacking and feverish, intermittently filled them. Today, they both lay empty.
Alma set the tray atop the bedside table and pulled back the curtains. Charles squinted in the onslaught of light and scooted up into a semi-seated position. His face had regained only a hint of color. The hollows of his eyes were dark and sunken. It was hard for Alma to look at him and not recall that night—the blood, the screams, the saw. For his sake, she hoped Charles remembered none of it.
She drew the room’s lone chair up beside the bed and reached for the soup.
“I can feed my own self, Azaadiins.”
“Yes, of course.” She perched the food tray on a pillow atop his lap.
With a shaky left hand, he grabbed the spoon and sank it into the soup. His other limb was nothing more than a bandaged nub. Alma looked down but watched him eat through the corner of her eye. The spoon wobbled, but the yellow broth did not spill.
“I used to do everything with this hand until I came here and Miss Wells made me learn it all over again with my other. She’s vicious with her ruler stick.” A smirk flashed across his face. “She won’t have no more choice now.”
Alma had no reply.
He took a few more sips of soup. “Estotkeh auptoonnauwaukun? No words for me today?”
She bit her lip and thought back on the day’s events. “Frederick and Walter got ten demerits today for speaking out of turn in class.”
“Unnunnaumpauk?”
“No, in English. But it was supposed to be silent study. Walter slept through reveille and was late to drill practice. Fifteen demerits for that.”
“I no miss that.” Charles put down his spoon and leaned back. A grimace spread across his face with the movement.
Alma rescued the tray just as the soup began to slosh over the side of the bowl. Beads of sweat had broken out across Charles’s forehead and his eyes remained scrunched shut. She fumbled in the bedside drawer for the bottle of laudanum and coaxed open his mouth. His lips puckered when the drops of reddish-brown liquid hit his tongue, then relaxed. The deep furrows around his eyes softened.
She put away the laudanum and continued, mostly to fill the silence. “I do have one bit of good news. Father received word today that the Woman’s National Indian Association has awarded Asku a scholarship to continue his studies after graduation. I don’t know if he’s selected a college yet, but—”
“Azaadiins, can you sing at me?”
“Oh no, you wouldn’t like that. I have a most unlovely voice. Let me get Minowe. She sings so well.”
Without opening his eyes, Charles groped for her hand. “I no mind. Please, a song.”
Her eyes traveled from his face to his gauze-wrapped stump and back. She sighed. “What shall I sing?”
“Anything.”
She knew many piano melodies but few of the accompanying lyrics. Several church hymns came to mind, but she settled instead on a tune with more levity. Leaning in close, she took a deep breath and began to sing.
The girl that I lov’d she was handsome,
I tried all I knew her to please,
But I could not please her one quarter so well,
Like that man upon the trapeze.
He’d fly thro’ the air with the greatest of ease,
A daring young man on the flying trapeze.
She stopped after the chorus. Charles’s chest rose and fell with the heavy rhythm of drug-induced sleep. Was it folly to believe he would ever recover? Even with his ambidextrous skill, one limb could never match the speed and precision of two working in concert. Was Stover to blame and she by extension, or had fate eyed him for this tragedy since birth?
Alma shook her head and stood. These questions had plagued her since the accident and still she had no answers. Guilt gnawed at her. She knew he longed for other voices—those of his mother and father—and other words, Mohican words. Perhaps for now the opium could sweeten and transform her song, but it would not last forever.
The ceiling creaked. The other girls were undoubtedly gathering upstairs with her mother for sewing instruction. Six mechanical sewing machines now crowded the upstairs parlor—a far cry from the early days of simple stitching. The girls rotated between machine work, where they made new uniforms and linens to supply the school, and handiwork like crocheting, knitting, and detailed cross-stitch and embroidery.
The sway of the wrought-iron treadles soon hummed down from the rafters. She thought of the crowded parlor, her mother’s reproving eye, the concerned looks passed between her friends after glancing in her direction.
She fled the infirmary, but instead of ascending the stairs to join in the needlework, grabbed her cloak from the hallway chest and hurried through the kitchen to the backyard.
Work had resumed in the wood shop. Steam billowed from the grease- and soot-covered engine along the shop’s far wall. The usual din of hammers, saws, and spinning lathes reached her across the snow-covered lawn. She imagined the unvarnished floorboards, stained and warped with blood, now covered, forgotten beneath a blanket of sawdust. How could they all go on—her father, her mother, Mr. Simms—as if nothing had happened?
Around the far side of the schoolhouse, she found a measure of peace. Her breathing slowed and her heart regained a steady rhythm. The trees pressed in closer here than on any other side of the house, leaving but some thirty yards of clearing. She seated herself on a long wooden storage box nestled alongside the schoolhouse. Swollen gray clouds crowded the sky, dropping the occasional snowflake, but the eaves of the house shielded her from their assault.
In the open silence, she set about unspooling her thoughts. The hateful gossip at the dance, the recent accident, the cemetery whose headstones she could just make out through the trees. To all this, her father was blind.
Her eyes wandered the blankness of the clearing. A lone archery target stood nestled against the tree line. The painted rings had faded and the burlap covering had frayed. Two years back, the school had staged an archery exhibition at the La Crosse fair. Alma remembered the hearty applause. The lace-fringed hands of a dozen ladies had shot into the air at the offer of one-on-one instruction. She could almost smell the rich scent of popcorn and roasted peanuts that had wafted from the food stands. Were such carefree days gone for good?
She stood and heaved open the lid of the storage box on which she sat. Several dusty bows and quivers of arrows lay inside. She grabbed a set and fit one loop of the bowstring into the bottom nock. Next, she braced the bow against her leg and bent the upper limb forward. The stiff wood whined in resistance. Her hand slipped and the upper limb sprang back, missing her nose by only inches. She tried again, putting all her weight and strength into the endeavor; the loop slid into the nock.
Facing the target, she blew away the cobwebs from the feather vanes and positioned the arrow. The bow felt foreign in her arms. Her muscles struggled to recall the correct movements. She pulled back and shot. The arrow sang through the air, at first on target, then veering left, striking not the bull’s-eye, but a nearby tree.
“Good shot.”
Alma jumped at th
e voice and spun around. George stood a few paces off.
“What are you doing here?”
He looked down at the heap of wood scraps in his arms, then nodded toward a large stack of lumber piled along the brick wall.
“Oh . . . well . . . carry on,” she said.
“What would your mother think? You holding the bow and arrow of the Indian.”
She raised her chin. “Archery is a respectable pastime among ladies.”
He snickered and walked past. Halfway to the pile he began to whistle. He tossed his load atop the waist-high stack of timber and turned around. Instead of retreating, he leaned against the brick wall, arms and ankles crossed like a train-yard hobo, and continued to whistle.
Confounded boy! She turned her back to him and marched to the tree line to remove her arrow. They’d said nothing to each other since the night of Charles’s accident, but where she once found satisfaction in their enmity, the silence and retreating glances now perturbed her. She throttled the arrow, yanked it from the tree trunk, and strode back to her bow.
Clear as birdsong, George’s whistle-tune filled the small yard.
She tried to focus on other sounds—the swoosh of her skirt over the snow, the occasional rustle of barren branches bending in the wind—but it was not enough to distract her from his song. Then the melody hit her. Her eyes went wide and heat rushed into her cheeks.
He’d fly thro’ the air with the greatest of ease, a daring young man on the flying trapeze.
“You were listening?”
“Very funny song. What’s a trapeze?”
“How dare you listen!”
His lips curved into a mischievous grin. “Why you never sing with Minowe and ?”
“I haven’t the voice for it.” She shook her head. “That’s not the point. I only sang to avail poor Charles. It has nothing—”
“I like your voice. Sing it again.”
Between Earth and Sky Page 18