And so, when Lathias was not working, and sometimes even when he was, the boy was almost always with him. He followed Lathias around like a little lost puppy, that is what people, the kinder ones, said.
“Ach,” they said, as they had once said of Leo and Cecilia Krauss, “even a crooked pot has got a lid, not?”
The others: “Tell me, what does a man his age want with a boy, and a boy like him? What does that halfbreed think he’s doing?”
NINE
The boy loved him beyond sense and reason. He loved the horse-smell of his bunk in the loft cornered off and made private with close-stacked bales of straw, loved his worn leather boots and the hunting knife he kept tucked with some books and photographs and other things in a small chest by his bed and the wooden rosary nailed to the wall. Loved the mystery of him, too, the way he spoke, the German that was German but not quite the way everyone else spoke it, either, the way he ate salt and pepper instead of jam on his buttered bread, the things he knew about: the old fort, the Indians who had lived there for a time, the fur traders; how he knew that pile and circle of stones atop the Bull’s Forehead was not just from farmers clearing their land, as his own father had said, knew that it should be respected and not touched. Yes, the boy loved all that mystery, maybe loved that most of all, loved that when anyone asked Lathias where he had come from, he just said, “South,” and when they said, “Where, Eastend? Maple Creek? Havre?” he nodded vaguely and said, “Around about there.” The boy loved walking with him at the river, fishing in the summer for the pickerel and pike they would gut and then string up in the smokehouse until the strips were brown as leather; skating on the blue, treacherous ice in the winter; digging around where the old fort used to be. Most of all, the boy loved his stories, the old stories of bloodshed and ghosts, though they sometimes kept him lying awake at night, listening to the peal of coyotes and the rattling of bones across the darkened fields.
When there was not time for the river, they would sit in the long evenings behind the barn where Lathias, and on rare occasions Stolanus, would go in order to smoke without the silent weight of Helen’s disapproval.
Lathias and the boy would crouch down there behind the sweet wild rose bushes in the evenings, and Lathias would pull a cigarette from his pocket and light it and sit for a while and smoke slowly, just staring out at the beginnings of a moon, ghostly in the still-light sky, and listening to the slow croak of crickets beneath the granaries and watching hawks swoop over the fields and, sometimes, a coyote loping in the distance, until the boy could stand it no longer and he prodded Lathias’s boot with his own and said, “Come on. Tell it. Tell that one.”
Lathias would say, “What one?”
And the boy would say, “You know. About that girl.”
“No,” he would say. “It makes you too sad.”
“It doesn’t,” the boy would say, “it won’t. Not this time.”
And Lathias might resist a bit more, teasing the boy a little, and then, at last, he would tell it, just the way he always did, just as the boy knew he always would.
“All right,” he would say, leaning back. “All right. It used to be,” he would say, “that this whole area from north of the Forks down south to the Sand Hills and east along the river as far as Harrison’s Landing was so dangerous hardly no one would come here. Before that, people were through here all the time. Different tribes. Sometimes they would fight, warring parties raided from the south. This was a place where people passed through. Always moving. Following the buffalo. But, then, when the fort was built, people started to stay longer and longer. Whites. Europeans. Americans. Frenchmen. Indians, too, because of the whites and the fur trade.”
“And that’s when everything changed,” the boy said.
“That’s right.” Lathias flicked ashes away from his cigarette. “The trouble began one winter, and the first to die were four Iroquois working for the fur traders, killed by a band of Gros Ventre kicked out of the fort. Some Blackfoot found them and buried them and covered the shallow graves with stones, to keep the animals away. But the Gros Ventre dug them up again and cut off their hands and feet. Then, later that spring, more were killed. Ten Iroquois, two white men. All working for the fort. The Gros Ventre rode their horses around and around the stockade, singing and hooting and waving the bloody scalps of the killed men on long poles.”
Lathias glanced at the boy, who always looked away at this point, out into the middle distance, as if better to see the image of the riders, or else not to see it at all.
“Soon,” Lathias said, “the Blackfoot brought word there would be an attack on the fort. So, just as quick as the ice was out on the river, the traders packed up and left. Good thing, too. People had begun to think of this as a bad place.”
“Not even the traders would come, then,” the boy put in, “not even for furs, not even for money.”
Lathias nodded. “Two years the fort stood empty while the Indians slowly tore it apart for wood. Eventually what was left of the place burned, no one knows how, or no one said, anyway. When the traders came back all they found was a charred place in the earth and so they started to build another fort, just downstream of the Forks. By Christmas, they had no food and trade had come to a stop.”
“And they couldn’t even hunt, right?” the boy said. “Because of all the fighting?”
“Yes, they were afraid to leave. And so they sat inside their fort, starving, freezing, wondering why they’d come in the first place and how they could get out.”
“But they were greedy, weren’t they?”
“That’s right. It was not enough for them that they get out with their lives, no, they wanted to sneak out with all their property, didn’t want to leave nothing behind. They thought the Indians would kill them for their ammunition and their liquor. For tobacco.”
“Would they have?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
“Your grandmother was, though. Right?”
“Great-grandmother. She was just a child then, not much younger than you.”
“They figured they were pretty smart,” the boy said, “those traders.”
“They did. So they thought and thought, how could they sneak all their things out of there? In the end, they came up with a big plan, how to get the Indians away from the fort. So they built this kite, in secret, a big white one, and on a night when there was no moon, they flew it, up from the fort, brought out all the little kids to see it. They made sure the Blackfoot kids especially were there. I guess it must have looked like a bird, or a ghost maybe. They let the kite be carried away by the wind so it looked like it had disappeared. None of the kids had seen anything like it. They were all excited, afraid. They ran to tell the adults.”
The boy leaned forward, rubbing the heels of his palms together lightly in anticipation. They were coming to the good part.
“So,” Lathias went on, “among the Blackfoot there was a medicine man and he had a daughter. She was the youngest of all his children, and his favourite. She was very beautiful, this girl, but she was not right.”
“But born that way.”
Always, the boy said the same thing, and always it twisted Lathias’s gut.
“Yes,” he said after a moment, “she was born that way. She was always around somewhere. And she was there that day the traders played their trick on the Blackfoot, she was there, standing in the yard of the fort with the other children, watching that great white bird, and when the bird disappeared, she began to cry. My great-grandmother tried to comfort her, and stroked her hair and wiped her tears and kissed her, but she cried and cried and then she ran out of the stockade, back to the Blackfoot camp.
“Word of the ghost bird spread quickly. The next morning the chiefs came to the traders’ hall and the traders’ interpreter showed them a paper with some marks on it and said, ‘This is from the Master of Life. It says you are to go away from the river and stay many days. Otherwise you will meet with a big party of Assiniboine
and Cree.’
“While they were talking, the kids played out in the yard. The medicine man’s daughter was there, drawing pictures in the dust with sticks, when this peddler, a short man with a red beard—”
“Stinking of rum,” the boy said.
“Stinking of rum, this red-bearded peddler came and watched her. She was not afraid of anyone, and so when the peddler gestured to where the kite had disappeared into the river valley and motioned for her to follow him, she nodded and the peddler took her by the hand, out of the yard, toward the river.”
“What did he do to her?”
“No one ever knew. He must have taken her in a canoe downstream. That’s where his body was found later, his throat slit with his own knife. The medicine man’s daughter must have done it. But she did not come back to the fort and she did not come back to the Blackfoot camp.”
“Why didn’t she?”
Lathias shrugged, shook his head. “She hid back up a draw, in one of those hollows where the runoff washes out chunks of earth and rock in the spring. When she didn’t come back, the men went out to search the hills. They searched all that day and all that night and they called and she must have heard them, but she didn’t answer. Maybe she did not want them to find her.”
Lathias leaned forward and rolled the long ash from his cigarette off against the sole of his boot.
“The sun rose and set and rose again. Still, the men could not find her. There was much discussion about what to do. But after three days, the chiefs decided it was best for the tribe that they move on as the Master of Life had commanded. ‘My friend,’ the chiefs said to the medicine man, ‘the river takes many. Come with us. Do not bring bad fortune upon us.’ But he would not go.
“Days passed, and nights, while the medicine man searched those hills along the river. The traders packed up and snuck out of the fort. The medicine man might have seen them, the traders, but he did not notice, or did not care. He cared only for his daughter. But she was a small girl and the prairies are huge, especially for a man searching for his child. She could have been anywhere. She could have drowned.
“When the medicine man found the peddler’s body plucked and bloating in the brush, he dragged it back to the stockade and dumped it there in the dust of the yard and said, ‘Here is your son. Where is my daughter?’ But by then, it was just halfbreeds there. The traders were long gone. That is what they told him. ‘They are gone. They tricked you all.’ It was then that the medicine man knew his daughter was dead. He turned and walked out of the stockade for the last time, back to the abandoned Blackfoot camp. He prayed and worked his medicine on the Bull’s Forehead, and brought stones and placed them all in a circle, praying for a vision, a sign. But there was nothing. On the third day he collapsed. He lay there for some time. Then he rose slowly, looking up at the sky, that morning sky red and yellow and fast with clouds—like it looks now, see, as if it is all moving. Three hawks screeched and circled a rocky outcrop. And the medicine man knew. His daughter was dead.
“He followed the hawks and brought her back and laid her on a mound of stones, her black hair shining in the sun. He stood over her and cursed the valley and the river and the land in every direction.
“When the Blackfoot returned and learned of the trickery, and of the medicine man’s daughter, they knew this was a bad place, the land around the Forks, all the fighting and bloodshed and trickery and grief. It makes a man do crazy things, this place. Not a land to live on, but a land to pass through. They decided to leave, for good this time. But the medicine man would not go.
“After his people left, he gathered up his amulets and rattles and threw them far out into the river. Then he sat down beside his daughter.”
Lathias stopped then, stubbed the butt of his cigarette into the dust.
“Winter came,” he said. “And the wolves. That spring a small hunting party from the medicine man’s tribe returned, looking for buffalo. There was no sign of him, or of his daughter, either. They searched for them both, coming down to the fort, but no one there knew anything. Soon they stopped searching. It would be only their bodies they would find. Maybe not even that. And they said, ‘It is better. He was gone the way of bad spirits.’
“And soon they realized, too, that no buffalo came. The land was bad, the river, the circle of stones on the lip of the valley, the sky above and around it. And so they left.
“After that, there was no more trade here, not much. More traders, different traders, opened the fort again a few years later. Blackfoot were here, then. Blood, too. And others. Hundreds. Thousands. But everything had gone bad. The Indians would not trade. They were angry. They fought, with the white men and with the Assiniboine and Cree. With the Gros Ventre and Sioux who sometimes raided from across the medicine line. It was a bad time. They refused to bring fresh meat to the fort, and everyone inside was afraid to leave. The fort was abandoned in the spring, as soon as the ice was out. People came and went for a while, Indian, white. Nobody stayed long.”
“Except the bone people,” said the boy. “Your grandmother’s people.”
“Yes, they stayed, and some of these were killed, too. They built the old village that used to be there. Set up trading posts across and up from the Bull’s Forehead, by the fording place. But there was no more buffalo. There was only bones, then. So they gathered up the bones, and they sold them. Then, when the bones were gone, they were poor, starving.”
“And that is how it will always be,” the boy whispered.
Lathias shrugged. “That is what my great-grandmother said. She said the land is cursed. That is what she told my grandmother, when she was a girl. Then, when my grandmother married my grandfather, a German from Russia with a bit of money in his pocket, her mother thought, Things will be better now for them. They will have food. Their children will not starve. And, for a while, it was good. Then drought, then influenza, then hail, then cutworms. And then my grandmother told my grandfather, ‘We should leave.’ But he just laughed. He did not want to go. He was from the old country. He was used to ghosts. They can’t let go of them, they bring them with, across the ocean.”
“So now,” the boy said, anticipating him, “there are twice as many ghosts on this land.”
Lathias nodded. “The ghosts born here, the ghosts brought over.”
“But they did leave,” the boy said. “In the end.”
“Yes. If my grandmother knew I came back, she would say I was crazy.”
He would always end the story the same way, every time. He would laugh a little humourless laugh and light another cigarette and sit staring at the gathering dark, and he would say, “Maybe I am, a little bit.”
And the boy would sit and watch him.
“Is that true?” he would ask.
And Lathias would say, “Is what true?”
“Any of it.”
And, after a long silence, Lathias would say what he always said: “Does it matter?”
THE HILLS
ONE
No one standing outside the hardware that Saturday morning, five weeks to the day since they’d seen Leo ride wordlessly out of town, could have said they were surprised to see his wagon roll back in. They were all—Mike Weiser and the Schneider brothers and Art Reis and Stolanus and Lathias and the boy and a few others—standing there listening to Joe Schuling tell how one of his heifers was struck by lightning, struck dead right where she stood, by Jesus, how he’d found her blackened and belly-up in the field, stinking like nothing he’d ever smelled before. And all of them listening, trying to decide was he pulling their legs or not, when somebody said, “Well, by God, look there.”
For down the street came Leo in his wagon. He looked just as he had when he’d left, there was no perceptible change in either his appearance or demeanour; but on one side of him was seated a big, dark-haired, dough-faced woman of thirty or so, though it was hard to tell for sure, and on the other side a girl of maybe fifteen, though it was hard to tell that, too, with long, wild hair of the dus
kiest red any of them had ever seen, and all three of them sunburnt and dirty and grave-faced, rolling past as if there were not some dozen men standing there staring at them go.
Mike lifted a hand and might have called out a greeting but for the looks on all three faces and the way they stared straight ahead as if there was nothing and no one that could interest them on either side. Then, when the wagon had almost rolled past, the red-haired girl turned her eyes upon them and stared as if she knew those men for exactly what they were, and that gave every last one of them a strange kind of feeling.
(Kind of like the willies, they told their wives later—except for the Schneider brothers, who had only each other to tell—but not quite like that either. Why don’t you make some sense, the wives said, like what, then? And the husbands shrugged and shook their heads and said, I don’t know.)
After they’d disappeared down the road, Joe Schuling finally said, “Kee-rist Almighty.”
And that was enough to break the strange half-spell they all seemed to be under, of disconcerted and dumbfounded amazement, and so to convince themselves that the girl had not given them the willies, they said, “You think that’s a wife he’s got there?” and “Which one?” and “With Leo, who knows.”
At first, little was known of the two women (or the woman and the girl, depending on how you looked at it), who they were or where they’d come from. For the first few days, no one saw them. But things and people being as they are, it didn’t take long for word to get around, about the fact that they were there at all and where they’d come from in the first place. Marian Weiser’s people, Dunhauers, down in North Dakota, had written to Marian that Leo—though that is not what they called him in the letter, nor to each other, when he lurched his wagon into their yard and said, outrageously, “My wife is dead. Cecilia is. I need another.”—had been to see them.
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