In This Light (20 page)

A man appeared, walking out of the snow, a ghost at first, then human. He’d seen it all, before it happened. The stranger had a gun in his glove box to put Didi and the deer out of their misery. The blast of the bullet through the doe’s skull made Didi’s bones vibrate. She felt snowflakes melting on her cheeks and was amazed again: this mercy in the midst of sorrow.

The man dragged the limp animal toward the woods, then knelt to wipe his hands in the snow. She would have gone anywhere with him. That January night, Didi Kinkaid considered Daniel Lute her personal savior.
Heading to town
, he said.
Need some medicine.

She ditched the Apache less than a mile from the trailer, and slid into Daniel’s El Camino. She told him:
One drink, that’s all, three kids home alone;
and Daniel said,
No problem.

If Didi learned to work with love, nothing like this could ever happen again. She had small hands and a good eye for the eye of the needle, a mother’s gifts, both curse and blessing. Self-pity led to betrayal. Any work done with dignity might become holy. Sometimes, as you sewed a frail woman into her favorite lavender dress, as you stitched the seams to fit close where she’d shrunken, you touched her skin and felt all the hands of all the people who had ever loved her.

After Didi Kinkaid came home to the children she’d abandoned, she saw every filthy, furious, half-starved stray who rose out of The Child Dump as her own. Their mothers had failed to love them enough, and now they hated themselves with bitter vengeance.

Mine
, she thought,
each one. I was that careless.

When she cut gum out of Holly’s hair, or bandaged Meribeth’s thin wrist, or touched the sharp blades of Evan’s narrow shoulders, she couldn’t believe she’d done what she had done; she didn’t know how she’d survived one day without them. No man could save her now. No tub was deep enough to tempt her. She sewed with faith. She loved her children. She never stayed out till dawn. She kept these promises. She offered herself to the strays, and the ritual of love made her really love them.

VII.  THE ROAD TO PRISON

Between March 1989 and early April 1990, Didi borrowed her cousin Harlan Dekker’s white van three times to deliver bicycles to Beau Cryder, who agreed to meet her just south of Evaro. For testimony against her, Beau walked free.
Flesh peddling
, the lawyers called it, not in court but to each other.

Nobody wanted Cryder, twenty-five and still a kid, a bad-luck boy, out of work seven months, with a pregnant eighteen-year-old wife and a two-year-old son. Nobody wanted to trace the bikes to Liam Jolley, Beau’s uncle, a once-upon-a-time hero in Vietnam and now just a crippled ex-cop in Missoula. Nobody ever wanted to hear how Liam’s devoted daughter Gwyneth had ferried the bikes— sometimes whole and sometimes in pieces—to dealers in Butte, Boise, Anaconda, and Bozeman.

They were the victims of Didi’s crimes. Her body could be exchanged for theirs, her breath for their freedom. Nobody in or out of court objected.

When Didi learned the value of Merle Tremble’s bikes, she understood she’d been both betrayed and cheated. Beau paid 200 the set, 320 for the load: at the time, it seemed a fortune. Didi planned to stop in Kalispell on her way home. She wanted to buy her raggedy band of thieves two buckets of fried chicken and a tub of buttery mashed potatoes. They needed brushes and toothpaste, calamine for poison ivy, gauze to wrap their cuts and burns, arnica for bruises. She intended to bring gallons of ice cream:
Fudge Ecstasy, Banana Blast, Strawberry Heaven.
She wanted the children to know there was enough: They could eat themselves sick tonight and still eat again tomorrow. Sooner or later, she’d spend everything she’d earned on them. She didn’t care about her profit.

Didi took Evan on her last trip, to help her load the bikes, to help her deal with Cryder. She promised to pay him fifty.
My best boyfriend
, she said,
my partner.
in truth, she’d made him her accomplice.

They might have gone free for lack of evidence, but Beau Cryder refused to take Angel Donner’s Dynamo and a cheap BMx with popped spokes and a bent axle. Didi headed back across reservation land, through Ravalli, Dixon, Perma. She thought she was safe here, outside whiteman’s law, protected by the Kootenai and Salish. She planned to dump the bikes before she got to Elmo.

They stopped at Wild Horse Hot Springs,
to celebrate
, she said, and they left the bikes in the van while they soaked for an hour, naked together in one room, immersed in hot mineral water.

She never figured on a raid. Never contemplated the possibility that Travis Poole might become a snitch, might want to go home, might tell his father, who would tell the police, who would tip bounty hunters—two trackers who lived outside the laws of any nation, who were free to bust down the door of a private room and drag a kicking woman and her biting boy from sacred water. The men shoved Didi and Evan out the door barefoot and naked, wrapped them in stiff wool blankets, bound them, gagged them, and stuffed them facedown in the backseat of their beat-to-hell black Cadillac.

At precisely 3:26, back on whiteman’s time, the fearless hunters delivered two fugitives and their stolen bicycles to the proper authorities in Kalispell.

VIII.  THE KINGDOM ON EARTH

Didi never caught a break for good behavior. If a guard spat words, she spat back. She was disrespectful. She stashed contraband: twenty-seven unauthorized aspirin, ten nips of tequila, and one shiny gold tube of coral lamé lipstick. Lipstick inspired vanity and theft, dangerous trades and retribution. Twice denied parole, Didi Kinkaid served every minute of her 3,653-day sentence.

Now, four years free, she sews clothes for the living and the dead in Helena. She could start a new life with a new name and a grateful lover in vermont or Texas. But she stays here, close enough to visit Evan once a week in Deer Lodge. Her boy lives in a cell, down for fifty-five, hard time, attempted murder.

Evan was twenty years old and out of the Pine Hills School for Boys just thirteen months when he hit the headlines. A weird tale: hunting with a forbidden friend, Gil Ransom, thirty-nine and on parole, a known felon— dusk, out of season—Gil’s idea,
just a little adventure.
They fired from the windows of the car—dumb beyond dumb and highly illegal. Any shadow that moved was fair game: deer, dog, rat, chicken. They smoked some weed. They split a six-pack. Evan saw trees walk like men through the forest.

An off-duty cop who recognized the roar of Gil’s Wrangler followed them up a logging road, bumped them into the ditch, and tried to arrest them. Gil shot Tobias Revell three times:
Just to slow him down, nothing serious.
They left him crawling in the snow, wounded in the leg and neck and shoulder. He could have bled to death. He could have died of shock or hypothermia. But he was too pissed off to die. He lived to speak. He lived to bring those men to justice.

Justice?
Evan learned that it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger. For the abandonment of Tobias Revell, for the failure to send someone out that night to save him, Evan Kinkaid shared Gil’s crime: the gun, the hand, the thought, the bullets.

Meribeth does not visit her brother. She teaches in a three-room school and lives without husband or children in a two-room shack up a canyon west of Lolo. I picture her as she was: flat-chested and gangly. She speaks softly. She walks swiftly. She never looks anybody straight in the eyes, but she never looks away either. She seems humble and kind, dignified even when she wears a dress sewn from an old checkered tablecloth. Meribeth Kinkaid, a princess in rags, mysteriously moving among peasants who scorn her.

Meribeth’s worst fear is that one day her mother and brother and sister will knock at the door of her secret cottage in the canyon. Meribeth’s deepest desire is that Evan and Holly and Didi will one day sit at her table to share a meal of bread and fish and wine and olives, that they will all sleep that night and every night thereafter in one bed in the living room, on three mattresses laid out on the floor and pushed close together, breathing as one body breathes, heart inside of heart, holy and whole, miraculously healed.

Eight months after she was adopted, Holly Kinkaid escaped Reverend Cassolay and his good wife, Alicia. She didn’t want to be saved. She’d been baptized by fire. If she couldn’t live with her brother and sister, if the trailer was burned to rubble and gone forever, Holly wanted to live alone in a junked car or a tree or a culvert.

I am a mother now, an orphan, and a widow.

Sometimes in the early dark of winter I feel Holly at my window watching my daughters and me as we eat our dinner. She won’t come in. The cold no longer feels cold to her. The cold to her is familiar.

This morning—a deep gray November morning, woods full of damp snow, light drizzle falling—I followed the school bus to town, twenty-three miles. My daughters Lilla and Faye, nine and six, sat in the far backseat of the bus to flap their hands and wave furiously, to smash their lips and noses flat against smudged glass. Their terrible faces scared me.

Isabelle, my youngest, my baby, slept in her car seat. I heard every wet sound: wipers in the rain, melting snow, dripping trees, the murmuring woods closing around us.

I saw flowers in the rain: boys in blue and girls in yellow, a tiny child in a pink fur coat, and another dressed in bright red stockings—all the pretty children waiting for the bus in bright pairs and shimmering clusters. Sometimes a mother stood in the center to shelter them beneath her wide umbrella.

In this rain, in this dark becoming light, I began to see the ones who won’t come out of the woods.
Griffin, Bix, Wanda, Wendy.
They wear olive green and brown and khaki, coats the color of fallen leaves, jeans stained with blood, boots always muddy. They steal the skins of wolves and wings of falcons. The red fur of the fox swirls down Tianna’s spine, and her teeth are long but broken.

Hansel, Heidi, Micah, LaFlora.
They never grow up or old. They starve forever. Cleo Kruse, who vanished without a trace, who could never be just one thing or another, has the body of a lynx and the eyes of a hoot owl, the legs of a mule deer, and the hands of a child.

Faith, Bliss, Trevor, Nova.

Vince Lavadour, who betrayed Didi Kinkaid, who testified against her, has lost his arms and legs, has found instead his fins and tail. The boy slips free at last, a rainbow trout, gloriously striped and speckled.

Nate, Ray, Grace, Laurel.

Angel’s skin bursts with thirty thousand barbed quills. Bold in his new body, Angel says,
Only fire will kill me.

Dustin, Rose, Lulu, Chloë—Georgia, Sheree, Travis, Devon.

Rooster knows that if he eats as the coyote eats, he will live forever. And so he does eat: snakes, eggs, plastic, rubber, sheep, tomatoes, rusted metal, dead horses by the road, dead salmon at the river.

Simone, Nuke, Duncan, Daisy.

Last summer, Sufi flung herself fifty feet into the air at twilight. Flying heart, vesper sparrow, she sang as if one ecstatic cry could save the world. Now she lies broken under dead leaves. She smells only of the woods—pine under snow, damp moss, a swirl of gold tamarack needles. Her wish comes true at last: she is one with God, one with mud and air and water. But if Didi called her name tonight, from death to life she might recover.

Naomi, Quinn, Madeleine, Skeeter—Rhonda, JoJo, Neville, Ezekiel—Finn, Scarla, Luke, Jewell.

How quickly the night comes!

I am home at dusk, so many hours later, my three girls safe this night in the house their father built before he left us. Birds cry from the yard, and I go to them, a mother alone in the gathering dark. A flock of crows whirls into the gray sky.
Didi, there must be ninety-nine, there must be three hundred dark birds rising on their dark wings.
When they land, the crows fill a single tree, every branch of a stripped maple.

Your children are my children. They are dangerous. They are in danger.

One by one, each black-eyed bird falls to the ground, brittle and breakable, terrible and human.

Oh, my children, all my little children, I knew you before you were in the womb. Love is the Kingdom on Earth. As we fall to earth this day, let us love, let us love one another.

RAYMOND, I REMEMBER EVERYTHING
about the day: the heat, the rain, the cold wind after. I remember Danny was sick, bloated up like a toad and moaning on the cot, so I took the call alone, which never happens on TV, but can happen twice a week out on Rocky Boy Reservation.

The situation didn’t sound extreme: one forty-four-year-old man down on the floor in his sister’s kitchen. Drunk, I thought. Heat and alcohol, a bad combination. I was simple that way, prejudiced against my own people.

I figured I’d cool you down with rags and ice, take you to the river for a reservation baptism. It was Fourth of July, almost. People had been celebrating or mourning three days now. If things were worse than I thought, we’d have a rough ride, the rocky roads of Rocky Boy to the hospital in Havre, where the medicine men use masks, but not the kind we know.

Doctors in town never appear as Owl or Coyote. They don’t chant or smoke to heal your heart or sing the spirit back to your body. They carry drills and knives: they want to look inside; they need to open you. Doctors in green cut and cleave, suture and staple—they have miles of gauze to bind your wounds, respirators to help you breathe, electric paddles to jump you off the table.

If you swallow twenty-seven Darvocets with a pint of gin like Arla Blue Cloud, they pump your stomach dry, but they won’t love you back to life—that’s not part of the treaty. No hospital doctor ever pressed his ear to the flesh of Arla’s womb to hear the bones of her lost children shatter.

Three months later, Arla chopped a hole in the ice and went down naked. In a dream, I’m swimming after her, and I can’t breathe, and I’m so cold I’m cold forever, but I don’t care because Arla Blue Cloud is quick as a pike and laughing like an otter; Arla is blue and green, beautiful as ice and water, and I think I can see—but I can’t see—straight through her.