So I was surprised when I approached his cabin, which was situated in a stand of poplars on the lakeshore just south of Allouette, and the old VW pulled out of his drive and swung wide, directly into the path of my Bronco. I swerved. The VW jerked back toward the proper lane and rolled on down the road. I watched the taillights in my rearview mirror. The brake lights flashed a good deal. Whoever was driving was riding the brake pedal. I was concerned they were drunk, but I wasn’t a cop anymore, and chasing down a DUI wasn’t my responsibility.
Champoux’s vehicles were parked in a neat row next to the garage where he did all his own maintenance and mechanic work. I saw that there were a couple of gaps, like missing teeth, in the row. Gone were one of Ernie’s pickups and the VW. I thought about the Bug I’d narrowly missed and figured a relative of Ernie’s had taken it. On the rez, property was loaned and borrowed freely. Lights were on in the cabin, and I hoped Meloux was still up, though it was late for an old man, especially an old man who lit his own place with a kerosene lamp. I wore my knuckles out on the door. Finally I tried the knob.
“Henry!” I called and poked my head inside. “Ernie! It’s Cork O’Connor.”
Ernie Champoux kept his vehicles in better shape than he did his home. There was clutter everywhere and the sour smell of a dishcloth gone too long without washing. I checked the place briefly. No one was home.
Then I thought about the VW driven by someone who’d been drinking. Not a drunk, I realized, but an old man who never drove.
I caught up with him near the south end of the lake. He’d stopped dead in the road and was standing in front of the VW, staring toward the woods. I pulled up behind the Bug, got out.
“I hit a deer,” he said sadly. “It ran off into the woods, but it is hurt.”
“We can’t follow it in this dark.”
The old man nodded.
“Where were you going, Henry?”
Meloux turned his gaze toward the road ahead, lit for fifty yards by headlights. His own shadow created a long, dark emptiness there. His voice held no trace of apology. “Canada.”
What I’d figured.
“You don’t have a driver’s license, do you, Henry?”
“No.”
“How did you intend to get across the border?”
“I was going to think about that on the way. For a man who knows what he wants, there is always a way.”
“Let’s park the VW and pick it up tomorrow. Then we can go back to your nephew’s place and talk. I’d like to know the whole story, Henry, how you came to have a son you’ve never seen.”
He drew himself up. In the glare of the headlights, his eyes were like fire. “These things I will tell you, but secrets come at a price.”
“What price, Henry?”
“You will take me to Manitou Island. You will take me to my son.”
“I can’t promise.”
“Then, Corcoran O’Connor, we cannot talk.”
“Wait here.”
I slid into the VW, which was still running, and parked it on the gravel shoulder.
“Let’s go back to Ernie’s,” I said, walking to the Bronco. “I’ll think about your offer.”
I drove slowly, watching carefully for deer and rolling around in my mind the deal the old Mide had laid out. It was clear he was determined, one way or another, to see his son. The truth was that I wanted to be there when he did. Based on my own recent experience, I knew he’d need someone to watch his back. Also, the story Meloux had kept to himself for more than seven decades was one I wanted very much to hear.
The old man had me. That was all there was to it.
I parked at the cabin, and we went inside.
“Where’s Ernie?” I asked. “He told me he’d taken a couple of days off.”
“A man is sick. They called. My nephew went.”
Considering the attack on Meloux that morning, the choice Ernie had made didn’t seem a good one. On the other hand, in all this, I’d miscalculated a lot myself, so who was I to criticize?
“All right, Henry. You’ve got a deal,” I said. “Tell me your story, and we’ll go to Thunder Bay together.”
He looked around at the clutter in the cabin. “Not here. We will sit by the lake. We will smoke. Then I will talk, and you will listen.”
I took a pack of Marlboros from a carton Ernie kept on top of his refrigerator, and I found a box of wooden matches in a kitchen drawer. We left the cabin and walked across the backyard, through the poplars to the lake. The moon had just risen, and its reflection cut a path across the black water solid enough to walk on. We sat on a bench Ernie had fashioned from a split log set on a couple of stumps. I handed Meloux the pack of cigarettes. He took one out, tore the paper, crumbled the tobacco into his hand, and made an offering. Then he tapped out a cigarette for each of us. We smoked a few minutes in silence. For Henry, as for many Shinnobs, tobacco is a sacred element, and smoking has nothing to do with habit.
“You have always thought of me as old, Corcoran O’Connor.”
“You are old, Henry. God only knows how old.”
“When you were born, I was in my forty-third year.”
“That’s pretty old to a kid. Besides, as long as I’ve known you, your hair’s been white as a bleached sheet.”
“It was not always that color. In my nineteenth year, it turned white overnight.”
“What happened?”
“It was something I saw, Corcoran O’Connor. And something I did.”
Meloux studied the moon, and I waited.
PART II
Meloux’s Story
NINETEEN
He didn’t keep track of years by numbers, but it was the same year President Harding died and Calvin Coolidge took his place in the White House. Sometime in the early ’20s, probably. He remembered Coolidge because in a certain way the man was like the Ojibwe. He didn’t speak much, but when he did he was worth listening to.
That day Henry watched the farmer’s son coming across the field of low corn. Under the brim of a straw hat, the kid’s face was dark with shadow. He was taller than Henry and, at seventeen, older by two years. He looked like the farmer, right down to the mean little eyes.
It was late June, hot in South Dakota, and Henry worked in overalls without a shirt. His shoes, supplied by the government boarding school in Flandreau, were falling apart. Although he’d tried to line the shoes with straw to block the holes, dirt and pebbles still found their way inside. Periodically, he stopped his work to remove the shoes and dump them clean. He was sitting at the edge of a dry irrigation ditch with his left shoe off when he spotted the farmer’s son approaching.
“My old man don’t pay you to sit on your ass,” the kid said when he got to Henry.
“Your old man doesn’t pay me at all,” Henry pointed out. He put on his left shoe and began to remove the other.
“You eat his food, sleep under his roof,” the kid threw back.
Henry could have pointed out that this choice was not his. The Flandreau school had a policy called “outing” that placed the Indian students in jobs during the summer months. The girls typically became domestics, the boys farmhands. The school superintendent spoke of the program proudly, claiming it taught skills that the students would use to better themselves, that would help them assimilate. But Henry Meloux had no use for farmwork. In the Northwoods of Minnesota, where his people lived, there was little farmland. He knew the truth of the outing program; usually a placement simply provided cheap labor for a local family.
Henry took his time with his second shoe while the other kid stood above him, arms crossed over his chest, watching with that disdain common to the whites in the communities around the Flandreau school.
“Ain’t you one ungrateful son of a bitch,” the farmer’s son said.
Henry finished with his shoes and stood up. “You walked a long way out here just to tell me that.”
“How come you never look at me?” the kid said.
“I look.”
“You never look me in the eye.”
“I have work to do,” Henry told him. He picked up the shovel that he’d laid in the dirt, ready to return to the irrigation ditch he’d been cleaning.
“Look me in the eye,” the kid demanded.
Henry paused, half turned away.
“You heard what I said. Look me in the eye.”
The prairie sun pressed on Henry like a hot iron. He felt the crawl of sweat down his chest and back and sides, the sting of it dripping into his eyes. He gripped the handle of the shovel with his strong, calloused hands and gauged the heft, the easy swing.
“You deaf all of a sudden?”
Henry turned slowly. He lifted his dark eyes and stared at the other boy.
The farmer’s son grinned with stupid satisfaction. “You got a letter up to the house. My old man says to come get it.”
Henry pulled his shirt-long sleeved and white, made of thin cotton-from the branch of the bush next to the ditch where he’d hung it when he’d begun his work. He carried it with him as he followed the long rows between the knee-high corn plants, dirt sifting into his shoes at every step. At the farmhouse, he let the kid go inside first while he took a few minutes to dump his shoes clean again and to wash himself off at the water pump in the yard. He put on his shirt, buttoned it carefully all the way up to his throat, and went into the house through the back door.
The kitchen still smelled of dinner, the noon meal, which was two hours gone. It had been generous portions of boiled ham, baked chicken, fried potatoes, corn casserole, waxed beans, heavy brown bread, and rhubarb pie. The farmer’s wife was a fine cook and a decent woman. When Henry had first come to the place, three weeks earlier, she’d stood firm that he should eat as well as any of the family because he worked his share. Mealtime, she put his plate together and brought it to the barn where he ate in his small quarters, which was an old tack room, no longer used for that purpose because the farmer, a prosperous man, had a Ford tractor now.
The farmer sat at the kitchen table drinking from a glass full of cloudy liquid. He was a tense, willowy man with a German name and a head as bald as a rock. Over his glass, his small, mean eyes took in Henry.
“Lemonade, Henry?” said the wife. She stood at the gaping oven door, her face red from the heat. She was small and plump. Her eyes were a sad blue.
“Thank you.” Henry stood politely, just inside the door.
She filled the glass and took it to him, looking as if she were about to speak something comforting, but her husband cut in.
“A letter come for you. From the boarding school. Took the liberty of reading it since I wasn’t sure you could.”
“I can read,” Henry said.
“The upshot of it is that your father’s dead, boy. Logging accident. I understand it’s dangerous work.”
“Karl,” the woman said. “Give the boy the letter and the decency of reading it on his own.”
“You snap at me like that again, Emma, I’ll take the strap to you. Don’t think I won’t.”
“Yah, you lay me up and who’s going to feed you, huh? Give the boy the letter.”
The farmer reached into the shirt beneath his overalls and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Come on,” he said holding it out. “Take it, boy.”
“For heaven’s sake.” The woman plucked the letter from her husband’s hand and brought it to Henry. “I’m so sorry. You take that lemonade and letter and you find you some shade. Take all the time you need, Henry.”
He sat under a crab-apple tree near the vegetable garden he helped the woman hoe. The writing was neat, the letters precisely made.
Dear Nephew,
It is sad news I tell you your father my brother die in that logging camp he works a white man drive here to tell me your father killed by log rolling over him he bring the body for me to bury and I have done beside your mother’s grave this news is heavy on me and I know will be for you great sorrow.
Woodrow Meloux
There was no date on the letter, no way of knowing when the death had occurred. It didn’t matter; it was done. His mother had died of tuberculosis three years before. His father worked as a logger and was away most of the time and could not care for his children. Henry had been sent to the Indian boarding school in Flandreau, South Dakota. His two younger sisters had gone to a boarding school in Wisconsin.
Henry read the letter again, folded it, and put it in his pocket.
Even in the shade the air felt thick, hot, heavy. He sat for a long time without drinking from the glass of lemonade the farmer’s wife had given him. He listened to the bawling of cattle in the pen beyond the barn. He stared across the cultivated fields and his dark eyes followed the flat line of the horizon that circled and imprisoned him.
TWENTY
Long after dark, Henry rose from his cot in the old tack room. He put on his white shirt, overalls, and shoddy hoarding-school shoes. He left the barn and walked out to the yard. Stars lay across the sky like a dusting of pollen, and the moon, nearly full, made everything around Henry silver. The farm dog, a German shepherd they called Joey, barked a couple of times, then recognized him and settled back onto the grass near the back door of the house. Henry started toward the dirt road that ran in front of the farmhouse, but stopped when he heard the hinges of the screen door creak.
She came toward him, a small, pale figure that seemed to float in her nightgown. Her feet were bare, but her hands were full. She held out a potato sack.
“You’ll be hungry, I expect. It’s not much. Couple of sandwiches, a jar of pickles, some cookies. And here.” She put coins in his hand. “Fifty cents. It’s all I can spare without him knowing. And take a blanket with you, the one on your bunk. You’ll be sleeping out some, I expect.”
He looked at the coins burning in the silver light. “Migwech.”
She eyed him with puzzlement.
“It means thank you,” he said.
“God be with you, Henry.”
She floated back to the house.
He rolled the blanket and tied it with a length of scrap rope he found in the barn. He slung the bedroll and the potato sack over his shoulder and left.
He followed roads that headed toward the east, toward Minnesota. Near dawn he lay down in a haystack in a field far from any house. When he woke, the sun was not yet directly overhead. He ate one of the sandwiches, a pickle, and a cookie and took to the road again. Whenever he spotted dust rising ahead of or behind him, he lay in the tall grass at the side of the road until the vehicle had passed. When he was thirsty, he drank from the creeks along the way. Near sunset, on the outskirts of a small town, he came across a train paused on a siding, loading from a grain elevator. The engine was pointed east. Henry climbed onto a coupling between cars and waited. Just as the sun hit the horizon, the train pulled out.
Near sunset of the third day, he reached the mission on the Iron Lake Reservation. It was a small, white clapboard building in the middle of a forest clearing between the tiny communities of Allouette and Brandywine. Behind it lay the cemetery, enclosed by a low wrought-iron fence. The clearing was empty and quiet. The sun threw a soft blanket of yellow light across the meadow, and the mission walls were the color of buttered bread. Henry stood at the cemetery gate looking at the assortment of headstones and memorials and grave houses and at the long shadows they cast. He’d been here many times in the past. Under the white man’s authority, Henry’s people died too easily. Diseases, especially tuberculosis, took them in great numbers.
He eased the gate open. The hinges cried like a hurt dog. He knew the place where his mother was buried. Beside her marker was another: a smooth, varnished wood plank with his father’s name burned across the face, and below that the figure of a cormorant, his father’s clan, upside down to indicate death. He sat down cross-legged, weary to the bone. He’d determined along the way that when this moment came, he would not cry. At the boarding school, he’d never cried, though many nights he’d listened to the so
bbing of other lonely, homesick boys. He understood that crying did no good. It could not change what had passed. It could not change what was, nor what was coming. Even so, he felt like spilling tears, felt more empty and alone than he ever had.
He lay down in the uncut cemetery grass, more tired than hungry, and went to sleep.
That night he had his first vision. It was like a dream, but it was not a dream. He stood outside himself, watching the part he played, feeling everything that occurred but at the same time remaining a separate observer. This was the vision: A huge white snake slithered among the stones and markers and grave houses of the cemetery. It swallowed Henry. Then it sprouted wings and took him on a long journey deep into the wilderness, far beyond Noopiming, the great woods of his home. It disgorged him on the shore of a lake he did not know. The lake glowed, as if a fire burned at the bottom. Fire under the water? How could this be? When he turned back, the snake had vanished.
He woke on the ground, curled and cramped, his blanket covered with dew. Dawn was just breaking, and he was hungry. It was midsummer, blueberry season, and he knew where the patches grew. He feasted on ripe berries as the sun rose above the pines and he continued his way north, toward the cabin his father had built. He figured the boarding school had probably alerted the local authorities that he’d run away, and he kept off the main roads, following instead the forest trails he’d known since childhood. He saw not a soul that morning, a good sign, he decided.
It was nearly noon when he reached the small cabin where he’d been born-and his sisters, too-where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life collecting fine memories that would remain strong even when he was an old man. The cabin stood at the edge of a pond. The water was still and blue and full of reeds along the edges. Wild grass had grown up around the cabin, and honeysuckle vines crept up the log walls. Henry came toward it slowly, with the knowledge that what awaited him there was little different from what the cemetery had offered. But he had nowhere else to go. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Thunder Bay co-7 Page 9