She came back to her physical body, bent down and picked up a small rock that was at her feet. She turned it over and over in her hand, her ears adjusting to the new-felt sounds and sensations that were coming to her. Without looking toward them, she put the stone in her pocket and turned and walked in that direction. There, around the front end of the boat, was a trampled path that led into the woods that lined the shore. Head down, hands in pockets, she followed the path.
The farther she walked along the path, the more silent the woods became. No birds. No insects. Only the soft whap-whap of the lake water hitting the shoreline in the distance.
And then, bam! Cash was tackled from behind. She didn’t have time to catch herself falling or strike back. Both arms were pulled behind her back. Then she was dragged by hands her size or smaller deeper into the woods and finally plopped against a tree.
It was from that vantage point that she was able to fully see her captors. Surrounding her were five children. She guessed they were somewhere between the ages of ten and fifteen or sixteen. Two looked like twins. Three boys. Two girls. All looked angry, sad, scared and determined. They looked at each other a number of times before the oldest girl said, “Who are you? Why were you bothering our ma?” One of the younger boys kicked Cash on her anklebone. Cash had to breathe deep to not yell out in pain or kick the kid right back.
She took her time. Looking each one in the eyes. They all had the same black eyes as their mom. Now even blacker with sorrow and rage. They were a motley crew. Some wearing pants too big, one of the boys wearing a shirt a size too small. No socks on any of their feet inside their shoes. Only two of them were wearing jackets. The others were layered with undershirts and shirts.
“Didn’t you hear me?” asked the girl. Her questions seemed to egg on her little brother, but Cash saw the kick coming this time and swung her legs out of the way before he could connect with bone again.
“I was there where your dad died,” she said.
“You hurt my dad?” one of the littler ones whispered.
“God, no!” said Cash. “I went out there after he died. After I heard about someone dying.”
Two of the kids had tears running down their cheeks. “So what?” asked the girl.
“Well, I talked with the county sheriff. Ater that, I decided to drive up this way and see if I could be of any help.”
“Some help. You got my mom drunk.”
“No, I did not! I did not! I tried to let her know easy about your dad. That’s all I did. And I held the baby when the white guys came to talk to her. She started drinking right after they left and before I even came out of the bedroom.”
“She’s dead too.”
They all crowded around Cash. Cash was having a hard time tracking who was who. The one who had just talked had tears running down her cheeks and she had her arms wrapped around her midriff, holding in her deepest grief.
“I’m sorry, kids,” said Cash in a soft voice. “I’m sorry.”
“What you got to be sorry about?” one of the boys asked belligerently. “Your folks aren’t dead, leaving you all alone. Our aunt already took the two little ones. Folks been tromping through these woods trying to find us. We aren’t going anywhere. I’m not going to any white foster home. I’ll die out here myself’fore I’ll let them take me.”
A chorus of me too’s echoed through the woods.
Cash listened as they told story after story of one cousin or another being taken by social workers and never being seen again. Of best friends going for a ride in the black county Buick and never returning. The kids repeating over and over that the social workers weren’t going to get them and split them up.
“Winter’s coming,” Cash said. “You can’t hide out in these woods forever.”
“Wanna bet? Our mom and dad were in boarding schools. They ran away and hid in the woods along the road, all the way from South Dakota until they made it home back here. They taught us what to do if anyone tries to take us. Further up is our maple sugar camp. When the sap runs, we camp out no matter how much snow is on the ground.”
Another kid added, “Our dad would take us deer hunting with him. We know these woods like the back of our hands.”
“We know how to take care of ourselves. And each other.” Another chorus of yeahs and yeps.
“What about the wake? Don’t you want to be there for the ceremony?”
The girl spoke this time. “They told my ma, the last time at the Indian Hospital, that if she drank again, she’d die. Like my brother said, we aren’t going in. The social workers will be waiting at the wake to scoop us up. If you’re out here to try and get us to go in, you can just leave the same way you came.”
“I’m not here to make you go to a foster home. I just came back up when I heard about your mom. I was worried about you all.”
“Worried?” one of the kids snorted.
“Yeah, and to see if there was something I could do to help you all. Must be something you need.”
“What happened to our dad?” asked the girl.
“Can I sit up and get a smoke? You all are making me nervous.”
“You should be nervous,” growled the kicker.
“You got cigarettes?” asked one of the older boys.
“Yeah. In my back pocket.”
“Go ahead, Googoosh,” the girl said. “Let her smoke.”
Cash thought, Well, at least I know one name. At that moment the kicker pulled back his leg to kick her again. His big sister grabbed his arm saying, “Come on, Geno. Give it a break.”
Two names.
“What happened to our dad?” said the girl again, still holding her brother. The hold had gone from one of control to comfort. He leaned into his sister, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs. “And give us a couple cigarettes.”
Cash dug in her back pocket and pulled out the crumpled pack. She straightened out two and handed them to the girl. Then she straightened out one for herself and lit it before handing the book of matches to the girl. Cash smoked, being careful where she dropped her ashes, using her hand to sweep the ground to bare dirt and using the scooped-out space as an ashtray. She watched the bigger boy light up one of the cigarettes and share it with the other boy about his size.
The oldest girl smoked a cigarette by herself. Cash herself had started sneaking cigarettes from a foster father’s pack when she was just a kid. And she certainly wasn’t going to try and reprimand this crew.
Instead she asked, “What have folks told you?”
“That he was shot and they don’t know who did it,” Googoosh answered.
Another chorus of voices—
“Dumped in a field.”
“Killed by a white guy.”
“They don’t know who shot him.”
“Took all his money.”
“Money was supposed to get us a Christmas this year.”
“That’s what Mama said.”
“So, you say you were there. What happened?” asked the girl.
“I heard it on the news when I was getting ready to go to work. I work the fields down there full-time. When I heard it, I knew right where it was ’cause I’ve worked that field, driving combine. The county sheriff was already there.”
One of the younger kids said, “She talks like the white girls in Bemidji town.”
“Sh!” said one of the other kids.
“She does,” said Geno. “She sounds like that snooty white girl at Woolworth’s who’s always accusing someone of having stolen candy in their pockets.”
“How come you talk like a white girl?” asked the girl.
Cash shrugged. “’Cause I live and work with them,” she said.
“So where you from?” asked the tallest boy.
“White Earth. But I ended up in foster homes.”
“See.”
“That’s what happens to everyone.”
“They’re not going to get me.”
“So, our dad…?” repeated the girl over the voices.
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“When I got there, to the field, the feds were already talking to the sheriff. When I saw the man was Indian like me, I decided to drive up this way, try to talk with your mom, break it easy to her. That’s what I tried to do. He had a Red Lake baseball program in his pocket so I knew he was from up here,” Cash said. She looked around at the children. They were determined in their resistance. Clearly they knew how the system worked, knew what was in their future.
“There’s nothing easy about folks dying,” Cash said.
There was a round of nodded heads. Sad looks. Cash’s butt was getting damp from sitting on the ground. “Hey, kids, why don’t we go back to your house?”
A round of no way’s went up.
Cash held up a hand. “Look. The tribal police have already been by, right? The feds and social workers too, right? Your mom told the feds I was her cousin, so if someone comes to the door, you all can just hide and I’ll answer.”
“Why?”
“’Cause my butt is getting cold. And come on, you need to eat. You need some rest. The best place to get that is at home.”
“We don’t have a home any more,” one of the kids said. “You just want the social workers to come get us.”
“No, I’m not going to turn you in.” She saw the distrust in their eyes. “I was in foster homes myself. You don’t want to go, I won’t be the one to make you go. Come on now, help me up.”
The oldest girl leaned down, her long black braid whapping Cash’s face as she helped her up from the ground. Cash pulled her jeans down over her ankles and stood up, brushing the dirt and leaves off her backside.
“Let’s go,” said the girl. “But be quiet. Geno and Googoosh, run up ahead and see if anyone’s around the place. We’ll come in slower. If you see anyone, run back, don’t holler.”
The two kids took off. Silent. If you didn’t know they were out there, you would never hear them. The rest of the group walked slowly and quietly down a barely perceptible trail. The two younger ones were back shortly, waving their hands. Come on. They turned and ran back towards the house. The girl picked up speed and Cash and the other two big kids matched her. Within minutes they could see the house from the tree line. Nothing was moving. The two younger children darted up the wooden steps. Cash heard the door squeak, then saw their two faces in the kitchen window. All clear.
The quartet stepped out of the woods and walked up to the house. Cash could feel their bodies strung on high alert, their eyes scanning all directions at once, looking for a trap, listening for any human sound. It wasn’t until they were in the house, with the front door shut and a wooden chair propped under the door handle as a lock, that they relaxed a tiny bit.
“Can you tell me your names? So I’m not saying, hey you,” Cash asked.
The girl pointed at herself, “Mary Jane. Junior (pointing to the tallest boy), Geno (next tallest boy) and this is Squirrel.” She pulled the smallest boy close to her.
Cash figured Mary Jane had mothered this one for many years.
“And she’s Googoosh,” Mary Jane said, pointing at the smallest girl.
“Don’t turn on the lights,” Mary Jane said. “And one of you go open the back bedroom window.” Looking at Cash, she said, “If anyone comes down the driveway or up from the lake, we’re jumping out that window and heading back into the woods.”
Cash shrugged her shoulders. She walked over to the fridge and opened it. The inside was spotless, the walls and shelves scrubbed clean. Not much food, but some. Jelly, smoked fish, an open tin can of government surplus commodity chicken, with the lid left on top. With the door opened, she turned and looked at Mary Jane. “I can’t cook,” she said.
Mary Jane walked over to stand beside her. “We could have the fish. I’ll mix up some frybread. Just dump that chicken in a pan and heat it up.” With that she got busy. She became a mini-Josie, scooping flour into a bowl, throwing in some baking soda, salt, some milk. Mixing it into a ball of dough.
She opened the oven and pulled out a cast-iron frying pan that was half-filled with solidified lard. She put it on the front burner, turned it on. After a few minutes, she reached behind her and got her hand wet under the kitchen sink. She flicked some water into the grease. Waited a bit more. Tried again. This time the grease sizzled. At that point, she broke off a ball of dough, formed it into a squat round mass with a finger hole in the middle and dropped it in the grease.
And another, and another, until seven pieces of frybread were floating and frying in the skillet. She reached behind her again, the kitchen as familiar to her as the woods had been, opened a drawer and got a dinner fork. She used the fork to lift the frybread to check its color. When it was the right shade of golden brown, she flipped each one over and watched them fry, left hand on her hip, occasionally using her forearm to swipe back the strands of hair that fell across her face.
While she was doing that, Cash looked through the cupboards. The lower ones were filled with the commodity food the government distributed to reservation families. Canned chicken, beef, tomato juice, dried milk, dried white beans.
Ah, there were canned plums and peaches. Cash pulled out a can of plums, then dug around some more to find a saucepan. She dumped the open can of commod chicken from the fridge into the pan and set it on the stove to simmer. She knew she couldn’t handle eating it. It looked like the dog food Wheaton fed his dog Skip. So she pulled out the smoked fish. When the food was set out on the table—warm frybread, steaming chicken, the commod plums—the kids and Cash all sat down to eat.
Initially there was silence as they all chowed down. As their hunger eased, they started to talk, one after the other telling stories about their mom and dad. The time they both got drunk one Christmas and knocked over the Christmas tree ’cause they were kissing and lost their balance. The time they were out fishing and their mom got all excited ’cause she saw a walleye jump and she stood up to point and tipped the whole boat over. How every time she had a baby, their dad was there to get a ride for her into the Indian Health Services hospital even though she always swore he was going to miss the delivery.
Cash felt her own sadness. Felt her own loss for her family. The kids laughed. Sometimes tears slid down their cheeks. How their dad had made the winning home run at the Indian baseball tournament. How their mom beaded tiny moccasins and sold them at the store in the town of Red Lake.
As they talked, the sun dropped in the sky. They still didn’t turn on any lights. Just sat around the kitchen table in the coming darkness. They talked about how they would look out for each other. How Mary Jane would send the younger ones to school. How they’d sell pinecones to the summer tourists and how they’d use their dad’s boat to fish and the traps hanging in the trees to run a trapline this winter.
Everyone jumped when headlights turned down the driveway. Cash whisper-yelled, “Get down! They’ll see your heads through the window.”
All the kids turtle-walked or belly-crawled to the back bedroom. Cash heard them scrambling and lifting each other out the window. Heard the soft thuds as their bodies hit the ground out back. She waited by the kitchen table until she heard a knock on the door. When she opened it, there stood the two federal agents who had been by the day she had driven up to talk with Josie.
They stood on the top stoop, the taller of the two peering around and behind her trying to get a good look into the house.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
“Are you the cousin that was here the other day?” one of the men asked.
“Yeah.”
“What’s your name?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah, you got a last name?”
“Day Dodge.”
“We need to come in.”
“Why?”
“We’re investigating a man’s death.”
“He’s dead. So’s my cousin,” said Cash.
“We need to talk to their children.”
“They haven’t come back from the wake yet.”
&nb
sp; “We were just there. Relatives said they didn’t see them.”
“Maybe they’re walking home then.”
“We need to come in.” The one guy stepped forward. Cash backed up and walked to stand behind the couch that faced the picture window. The guy flipped on the light switch by the door. Both of them looked around and then walked to the kitchen table.
Damn, thought Cash.
“Looks like more than just you were eating.”
Cash just looked at him. The other fed walked to the back bedrooms, poking his head into each room before entering. Cash could tell from the screech of bedsprings that he was leaning on the beds and looking under them, poking through the closets in each room.
When he reached the back bedroom, Cash heard the silence after he walked into the room and stood still. She could picture him staring at the open window. When he walked back down the hallway, he walked right up to her.
“When did they leave?”
“About two hours ago, when their other aunt said the wake was starting at the community center.”
“Two hours ago, huh? You don’t say. Are you staying here?”
“Nah, I gotta get back home. Just wanted to go to the wake for one night.”
“What do you mean one night? How many nights you all pray?”
“Four,” answered Cash. “I came by to make sure the kids were all ok. Looks like they left a mess after eating so I was just gonna clean up the supper stuff here and head into town myself.”
She knew the whole situation wasn’t making sense. These same two guys had seen her once before in Halstad, and then up here the other day with Josie. You would think they would remember her and be more curious about how and why she was in both places. But if you went in to Bemidji, all the Indians, dark-skinned and dark-haired, wore the same uniform—blue jeans, a t-shirt and long braids—men and women. Unless it was a soldier back from ’Nam, then his hair was short, growing out. To white folks, they looked alike.
She walked over to the kitchen table and started stacking plates and putting them in the kitchen sink. She ran some hot water and looked under the cupboard for some dish soap. She washed the plates, stacking them on a dishtowel on the counter. The two men stood by the picture window looking out, and then they went outside. Cash could hear them walking around the house, talking in low voices.
Murder on the Red River Page 10