“He knows that,” Larson said. He put a reassuring hand on Cork’s shoulder, then moved away to make radio contact with Morgan.
The bullhorn sat on the ground at Dross’s feet. She opened her hand toward it. “Your show, Cork.”
FIFTY-TWO
As if prisoners of war, they’d been marched to the cabin, an armed man leading and another bringing up the rear. Jenny and Stephen held the ice chest between them with Waaboo cradled inside. He was quiet, which because of all the activity and tension, Jenny thought was odd. But she knew him well enough now to understand that he was a child who, more often than not, was perfectly content to observe.
They came to the clearing on Crow Point, and as they crossed the meadow, Jenny saw an outline of flattened wild grass and then saw the body that lay there.
“Keep moving,” the man at her back ordered.
They approached the cabin, and everything inside her screamed not to enter. When they’d fled, Meloux had been alive. There’d been gunfire behind them, a lot of it, and then silence. Because these men had come for them despite Meloux’s intervention, Jenny believed the fine old man was dead. And his bullet-riddled body was something she did not want to see.
The door opened at their approach, and the woman Aaron had introduced as Abigail stepped out. She held a military-looking rifle, and seemed quite comfortable with it in her callused hands. She said to the man in the lead, “There was one more. Where is he?”
“Fish food,” came the reply.
The woman nodded and looked directly at Jenny, as if to gauge the effect of this exchange, and Jenny made her face stone. She was determined to give this woman nothing. As if she’d erected a shield, she wouldn’t even allow herself to think about Aaron now. For Waaboo, she held herself together. She had to be there, in each moment, be vigilant and alert. She had to watch for any opportunity to act, because if she didn’t find a way to change the direction everything was headed, they would, all of them—she and Waaboo and Stephen and Rainy—end up as outlines in the wild grass.
As to the why of it, she had no idea, and it didn’t matter. Someone was going to die, that was the only truth important at the moment. She would do her best to make sure that no one else she cared about was among them, even if it meant sacrificing her own life. She was fully prepared to act and to die.
“Bring them in.” The woman turned and disappeared inside.
Stephen hesitated. Jenny glanced at his face and saw his fear of what lay inside the cabin, a dread even greater than her own. Her brother’s love of Meloux ran deep and possessed mysterious qualities that Jenny sensed but couldn’t exactly give a name to. She understood only too well that the loss of the old man would be devastating to him. Rainy was ahead of them, and although Jenny couldn’t see her face, she could read in the body language of Meloux’s great-niece—the slump of her shoulders, the bow of her head, the deep breath she took before entering—that she, too, dreaded what she was about to see.
The tall man who’d led them stepped aside and ushered them in. He was about to follow when the woman turned back to him and said, “You stay outside, Gabriel. I want Joshua in here to see this.”
The willowy, brooding young man who’d brought up the rear looked at Abigail, as if confused and reluctant, but at last he obeyed. He stepped inside and stood beside the woman. The other man, the one the woman had called Gabriel, remained outside, as if to stand watch.
Jenny was surprised and overjoyed by what she discovered in the cabin: Meloux, still alive. He sat in one of his handmade birch-wood chairs, facing them but with his eyes on the woman, Abigail. Jenny could see, along his left cheekbone and jawline, the darkening from subcutaneous bleeding. Not exactly a bruise yet, but it promised to become one, huge and ugly. His hands were bound with duct tape.
“Henry!” Stephen cried with relief.
The old Mide glanced their way, and although he didn’t smile, there was a light in his brown eyes, evidence of his pleasure in seeing them all.
A little whine came from the other side of the room. Jenny saw a trail of blood across the floor. In the shadow under Meloux’s bunk lay Walleye, licking what looked like a long bullet graze across his haunch.
“Who are you?” Rainy demanded.
“Abigail Hornett,” the woman replied. “This is my son Joshua. My other son, Gabriel, is outside.”
“Church of the Seven Trumpets,” Stephen said.
“We almost met once,” she said to him with mock pleasantry, “but you were using the commode, as I recall.”
“What do you want with us?” Jenny asked.
“Nothing with you. I just want the baby.”
Waaboo began to cry, perhaps in response to the arctic chill in the woman’s voice but also, perhaps, because he was hungry.
“Shut him up,” the woman said.
Jenny lifted Waaboo from the ice chest.
“Take a look at your spawn,” the woman said to her son. “Another disgusting, misshapen creature from your loins.”
Joshua Hornett glanced at the child, then looked away, as if ashamed.
“I said shut him up,” the woman lashed at Jenny.
Jenny held Waaboo against her breast and rocked him and cooed to him, but he wouldn’t be calmed. She could see the Hornett woman’s growing irritation and was afraid of what she might do to Waaboo. She was about to try offering him her breast when Meloux spoke for the first time since they’d entered the cabin. He began to sing, an Ojibwe chant whose words Jenny didn’t understand. In a few moments, Waaboo had quieted.
“What were you singing?” the Hornett woman asked.
“I told him that he is a gift to us from the Great Mystery, and that he is loved, and that there is nothing he has to be afraid of.”
“The Great Mystery?” the woman responded coldly. “You mean God.”
“I have heard it called that name,” Meloux replied.
“How did you find us?” Stephen broke in. His tone was angry, threatening. Which was dangerous, Jenny thought. They all needed to be clearheaded.
“Maybe it was God that led us to you,” Joshua Hornett said in a mocking tone.
Abigail shot her son a killing glare, and he lost his smirk and looked away.
“Are you all right, Uncle Henry?” Rainy asked.
“It was only a pistol whipping,” the woman said dismissively.
Jenny saw Meloux’s old Winchester leaning against the wall. On the floor around it, she spotted three cartridges that were still whole and the brass from three spent cartridges. Half the rounds had fired. And, apparently, two of those had found their targets. Meloux had done a remarkable job in covering their backs.
“You want the child,” Rainy said. “Why?”
With a brooding look, Joshua Hornett said, “For the same reason she killed Lily. Our little freak there is the key to something Noah Smalldog stole from us.”
“That’s enough,” Abigail snapped. “We have what we came for. It’s time to end this and be gone. Call your brother in, Joshua.”
Before Joshua could move, the cabin door opened, and Gabriel Hornett stepped quickly in.
“Abigail?”
“What is it?”
“Someone in the trees out there. Have a look.” He handed her a pair of field glasses. “On the trail back to the county road.”
The Hornett woman stepped into the doorway and directed the field glasses across the meadow.
“What is it?” Joshua asked.
“A cop,” she said.
“Just one?”
“Where there’s one, there are others,” she replied. “Joshua, take a position in those rocks to the west. We’ll give them a cross fire, if it comes to that.”
The youngest Hornett studied the shadowy woods on the far side of the meadow. “If they’re already in position out there, they’ll cut me down before I get halfway to those rocks.”
“Then go out the back window, like these people did, and stay in the trees along the shoreline.”
&
nbsp; “And then what?”
“Open fire if you have to,” his mother replied.
“And when they fire back?”
“Die, if that’s what God asks of you. Are you afraid to die? Is your soul unprepared?” She gave him a stern look. “Jesus knows your heart. If there’s doubt, he sees it. Do you doubt, Joshua?”
“You, inside the cabin! This is the Tamarack County sheriff. You are surrounded. Put down your weapons and come outside with your hands up.”
The words, amplified by a bullhorn, came from the woods across the meadow. Jenny recognized the voice of Sheriff Marsha Dross, and her heart leaped at this glimmer of hope.
The woman didn’t take her eyes off the son she’d ordered into the rocks around Meloux’s fire ring. “Do you doubt, Joshua?” she demanded.
His face glistened with sweat. He stared into her unblinking blue eyes. “Hell, yes, I doubt. And I’m not going out there.”
“I’ll go, Abigail,” the other son said.
The woman lifted the rifle that she held, fitted the butt against her shoulder, and aimed the barrel at her son’s heart. “Either you do as I’ve told you, Joshua, or I’ll send you to hell myself.”
“Abigail,” Gabriel Hornett said softly but firmly. “We need to be together in this. We need Josh right now. I’ll go to the rocks. It’ll be all right. If shooting begins, I’ll keep the police occupied, and you two take the baby and go out the back way.”
Abigail didn’t respond to her elder son, and Jenny thought she would surely blow Joshua’s heart right out of his chest. Finally the woman lowered her rifle. “You’re right, Gabriel.” She lifted her hand, palm open, in a kind of benediction. “Go with God’s blessing and God’s strength.”
Gabriel Hornett slipped through the back window. He dashed to the cover of the aspens that lined the shore of Crow Point and disappeared among the foliage there.
The woman turned back to the others in the cabin. Jenny had expected to see a look of regret or, at the very least, deep concern for the safety of her son. Instead, what she saw was a passionate fire that seemed to light every feature of her hard, sharp face.
“And so it begins,” Abigail Hornett said.
She spoke as if this was not at all an unexpected turn of events, or one that frightened her in the least.
FIFTY-THREE
Bullhorn in hand, Cork walked to the edge of the trees. In the shadow of the forest, beneath a fiery sunset sky, he took a position behind the trunk of a large red pine. Flanking him on either side were deputies who’d found their own protected positions and had their firearms trained on the cabin. Cork leaned enough to one side of the pine so that he could see Meloux’s place without presenting a good target to anyone who might be sighting a rifle from there. He put the bullhorn to his lips. Before he spoke, he said a silent prayer: Please, God, let this work. Please, God, let Meloux understand.
He took a breath.
“Meloux!” he called into the bullhorn. “Ishkode! Baashkiz!”
He waited a moment, then spoke again.
“Ishkode! Baashkiz! Do you hear, Meloux? Ishkode! Baashkiz!”
He lowered the bullhorn, and there was nothing to do then but wait.
“What’s he saying?” the woman demanded of Meloux. “What’s this ‘ish co-day’ stuff?”
There were high clouds in the west. The sunset sky was a brilliant red-orange blaze, and the clouds were on fire. The light of that conflagration poured into the cabin, burned across the floor, and lit Meloux as if he were a torch.
“It means ‘fire,’ ” the old man replied.
“Fire? What’s he talking about?”
Meloux looked calmly into her intense face. “Do you know the name our people are sometimes called by? Ojibwe. It means ‘to pucker.’ I have heard it said that the name was given to us by our enemies, because when we captured them and roasted their flesh, it puckered. That may be what he is talking about. He may be saying that, before this is finished, he will be roasting your flesh over a fire.”
She gave him a frigid look of disbelief and impatience.
“Or,” the old Mide went on, “it could be he is reminding me that inside each of us is a fire, which we call spirit or soul, that is a small spark of the fire that burns at the heart of the Great Mystery.”
“The fire that is the wrath of God,” the woman said, as if correcting him.
Meloux shook his head gently. “The Great Mystery or the Creator or Kitchimanidoo or God, or whatever name it is known by, is not a fire of anger or a fire that consumes. It is the fire of life. It is the heart whose burning sends out every spark that becomes the possibility of a living thing, great or small, good or evil.”
The woman spoke, and each word was one hard stone laid against the next. “There is only one God, and he is not the God of heathens like you. He is a vengeful God, make no mistake. It’s you, and all those like you, whose flesh will pucker in the fires of hell.”
The old man appeared to think this over, then he shrugged. “There is another possibility. It may be that Corcoran O’Connor is simply speaking of the warrior’s trial by fire.”
“What’s that?”
“A test of a warrior’s spirit. A test of the strength given him by Kitchimanidoo.” The old man smiled. “It would be a good test, the strength of your God against mine.”
“What is this test?”
“Untie me, and I will show you.”
She studied him and made no move to comply.
“Untie me, and we will test the strength of your faith against the strength of mine. Unless you are afraid that the spirit at the center of this old, beat-up body may be stronger than the spirit at the center of yours.”
“It’s a trick, Abigail,” Joshua Hornett said.
“You have the rifles,” Meloux pointed out. “If you believe it is a trick, you can shoot me any time you want.”
Still the woman didn’t move.
“You have killed in the name of what you call God,” Meloux said. “Is it possible that the reason for your killing had nothing to do with God but simply a hatred that burns inside of you? Is that why you are afraid to test the strength of your spirit and of your belief? Is it possible that inside of you there is only ash and no spirit fire?”
The woman’s face moved as if something under her skin was alive. Her eyebrows twitched, and her temples pulsed, and her jaw clenched and unclenched. Finally she said, “Cut him loose, Joshua.” She leaned toward Meloux, and when she spoke, it was pure poison. “When this is finished, I will, myself, cut out your heart.”
“We need to think about this, Abigail,” her son pleaded.
“I said cut him loose, Joshua. Do it! I’ll keep the others covered.”
Reluctantly, Hornett set his rifle against the door, snapped open the pouch on his belt, and brought out a folded knife. He opened the blade and crossed to where Meloux sat. The old man held up his hands, and Hornett cut the tape that bound the wrists. He stepped back quickly, as if afraid Meloux might spring at him. He put his knife away, returned to the door, and again took up his rifle.
“Watch the others,” the woman told him. She set her own firearm against the cabin wall and said to Meloux, “What now?”
Meloux rose slowly. He walked to the stove in the middle of the room, where the light through the western window was strongest. He stood on one side and nodded for the woman to stand on the other. Rainy’s pot of stew still simmered where it sat near the edge of the hot stove top.
Meloux said, “In the old days, in order to test the strength of their spirits, two warriors would face off over the glowing coals of a great fire. Each would hold a hand over the coals until one of them could no longer stand the heat. The last to take his hand away was the stronger spirit. And the longer his hand remained over the coals even after the other had withdrawn, the greater that spirit and the greater his name.”
The woman looked down at the hot stove top, then up at Meloux. Without hesitation, she said, “Any time you’re rea
dy.”
Meloux put out his hand and held it over the center of the stove, a quarter of an inch above the searing metal. The woman did the same.
It seemed to Jenny as if the cabin became a vacuum. There was no air, no movement, no sound, not even from little Waaboo. Her eyes were riveted to the stove and to the two people on either side of it, illuminated in the fiery glow of sunset. She saw that the woman trembled and her jaw was drawn taut, but her eyes were locked on the face of the old Mide, and her hand didn’t waver from the place she held it. Jenny was surprised that the woman’s belief, dark and angry and vengeful though it was, seemed to be the equal of Meloux’s. They both stood with open palms above the stove, immobile, as if they were forged from the same insensate iron.
Then a smell assaulted Jenny’s nose. The alarming and sweet aroma of scorched flesh.
In that same moment, the glass of the window in the western wall of the cabin shattered, and the woman collapsed where she stood. From beneath her on the cabin floor spread a glistening crimson pool fed by the dark red lake of her heart.
Waaboo began to wail.
Meloux lifted his hand from the stove top.
Joshua Hornett stood frozen, staring in horror and disbelief at his mother’s body.
Stephen and Rainy, acting with a single mind, leaped on this last reluctant soldier from the Church of the Seven Trumpets. They tumbled onto the floor in a squirming heap. Hornett struggled to throw them off, but they fought against him fiercely.
Then Meloux was standing above them, the woman’s rifle in his hands. He spoke in a voice of such clear authority that all motion stopped instantly.
“Enough. It is finished. Be still.” When he saw that his words had been heeded, Meloux said, “Take his rifle, Stephen, and hand it to me.”
Stephen, who already had a firm grip on the firearm, yanked it from Hornett’s grasp and delivered it to Meloux. The old man opened the cabin door and stood at the threshold. He flung first one rifle then the other far out into the meadow grass. After that, he lifted his arms and crossed and uncrossed them several times above his head in a sign that all was now safe.
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