This Tender Land (21 page)

“Mute?” the Indian asked.

“Somebody cut out his tongue,” Emmy said. “When he was real little. His name’s Mose.”

The Indian tipped back his cowboy hat and shook his head. “There’s no end to the cruelty in this world, and no matter how far down you reach, no bottom. But you got one thing going for you, Mose. You’re Sioux. There’s good, noble blood running through your veins. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

Forrest had salt and pepper in his burlap bag, and he seasoned the catfish when they were done cooking. With a pocketknife, he cut off pieces and gave some to each of us, cautioning us to watch for bones. We ate like there was no tomorrow, and Forrest seemed to take pleasure in that. In the end, I realized he’d eaten only a little himself, giving most of the meat to us.

“Mind playing that mouth organ some more, Buck?” he said.

I took out my harmonica and launched into “Buffalo Gals,” maybe because Forrest had from the very first reminded me of that great beast of the plains. Then I played “Comin’ Round the Mountain,” and the others, including Forrest, joined in. We were laughing, having ourselves a high time. I was considering what my third number might be when Forrest reached into his burlap bag and brought out a mason jar filled with clear liquid. He unscrewed
the lid and took a slug. Then he set the jar down on the ground beside him.

Hooch. It had never bothered me much before, but after our encounter with Jack, its sudden appearance was disconcerting. I could see a wariness come into the faces of the others as well.

“How about ‘Leaving Cheyenne’?” Forrest said. “Knew a cowpoke out of Oklahoma could play that on his guitar and sing it so it broke your heart.”

I put my harmonica to my lips, and Forrest put the mason jar to his.

He didn’t get drunk, didn’t turn mean, not the way Jack did. Mostly, he got more talkative. Finally, he dropped the bomb on us.

“You boys got a price on your heads, you know that? Five hundred dollars.”

He gauged our reactions, and whatever the look was on our faces, it seemed to amuse him. He laughed and reached into his burlap sack. I tensed and saw that Albert and Mose had both gone rigid, ready to launch themselves.

What Forrest brought out was that day’s issue of
The Minneapolis Star.
He handed it across the fire to Albert, and we looked over his shoulder. Emmy’s kidnapping had made the front page again, with another photograph of her. This time it was a story of the reward the Brickmans were offering for any information about the men who’d taken her. The information was to come directly to Thelma or Clyde Brickman, no questions asked.

“Yeah, I know who you are. But don’t worry. See this?” Forrest pointed toward the shaggy hair sticking out from under his cowboy hat. “When I was a child, there was a bounty on this, too, just cuz I was Sioux. I got to admit, when I read the stories, I was afraid for Emmaline there, just like everybody else. But I can see she’s in no danger. Newspapers,” he said with disgust. “Anything to sell a few copies.” He took another pull off the contents of the mason jar. “Got to hand it to you. You’ve sure made monkeys out of a lot of cops.”

“Billy the Kid,” I said.

“What’s that?” Forrest said.

“We’re just like Billy the Kid. Desperadoes.”

“Desperadoes,” Forrest agreed and toasted us.

Albert, who’d turned quiet and dark, said it was late; we needed sleep. Forrest screwed the lid back on the mason jar and returned the hooch to the burlap bag. He took out a rolled blanket and spread it on the far side of the fire. It wasn’t long before I could hear the deep, sonorous breathing of the Indian, mixed with an occasional snore.

Mose and Emmy bedded down together on a blanket, Mose with his arm over the little girl. I’d laid myself down beside Albert. I was bone tired but feeling pretty good. The tasty catfish. The music. And the fame. Just like Billy the Kid.

Before I went to sleep I glanced at my brother. Albert lay very still, his eyes wide open, staring up at the waning moon like a man long dead.

THE TOUCH ON
my arm woke me.

At Lincoln School, because we all knew about DiMarco’s proclivities where children were concerned, we slept lightly, and an unexpected touch in the night was an alarm. My eyes shot open and I tried to rise, but I found myself pinned to the ground. When I opened my mouth, a hand clamped itself there to stifle my scream.

In the dim moonlight above me, I saw Albert and Mose. Albert had a finger to his lips, warning me to be quiet. When it was clear that I was fully awake, Mose let me go. Albert signaled for me to get up. He grabbed the blanket I’d been sleeping on and signed,
Follow us
. Mose handed me my boots.

Red coals still glowed among the ashes of the fire, and on the far side, the Indian still lay breathing deeply. We crept past him down to the river, where the canoe was already in the water and Emmy was waiting. Albert folded the blanket we’d slept on and put it with the other in the center of the canoe. The pillowcase and canvas water bag were there, too. Mose held the canoe while the rest of us got in, then he stepped into the stern, shoved us off, and we arrowed down the Gilead.

I didn’t know the why of it. As Mose and Albert dipped the paddles, I tried to figure what it was that had motivated my brother to sneak us off that way. I liked Forrest. He’d been decent and had seemed not that different from us, a man drifting before the wind of circumstance. Was it the hooch? Was Albert afraid of a repeat of Jack?

I waited until we were well away from our night’s camp to risk speaking.

“What are we doing, Albert?” I kept my voice low.

“Putting distance between us and Hawk Flies at Night.”

“Why?”

“He was going to turn us in.”

“How do you know?”

“That mason jar full of bootlegged liquor.”

“What about it?”

“It was square.”

“So?”

“You ever seen a square mason jar?”

It wasn’t something I’d thought much about, but I did now. “I guess not.”

“Me neither, until Brickman strong-armed me and Herman Volz into cooking mash for him. He bought special square mason jars to put the hooch in. Said they packed better if they were square.”

“Forrest got his booze from Brickman?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“And he was going to turn us in for the reward?”

“What do you think? Would you throw away five hundred dollars?”

Emmy curled herself up and went to sleep. Mose and Albert paddled through the night. Occasionally in the distance, I could see an isolated glimmer, maybe the yard light of a farmhouse. I figured Albert was right. Five hundred dollars was a lot of money, but I’d have given every cent of it to be safe in one of those houses. To be in a place I called home.

In the late afternoon, we stopped. We’d put a lot of distance between us and Forrest. Mose and Albert were beat. We sat on a little hill above the river, where a great, solitary sycamore provided shade. The hill rose out of prairie and afforded a view of the whole area. The railroad bed had veered away from the river. There were no farmhouses near, no barns, no fences, nothing tainted by a clumsy human hand. For as far as the eye could see there was only high grass and wildflowers, bending like dancers to some tune they heard in the wind, and above us a stately canopy of white sycamore branches and green leaves.

Beautiful,
Mose signed languidly.
Let’s stay here awhile.

“How about forever?” I said.

“We could build a house,” Emmy said. “We could live in it together.”

Mose signed,
Albert could build it. Albert can build anything.

“We’re not staying here,” Albert said. “We’re going to Saint Louis.”

I remembered Saint Louis, but only barely. We’d visited there once after my mother died, but we never went back.

Mose signed,
What’s in Saint Louis?

“Home,” Albert said. “Maybe.”

He reached into the pillowcase and brought out one of the stacks of letters that he’d thrown in with everything else. They were still bound with twine, but not tied with the simple shoestring knot that Brickman had used. It was a slippery eight loop, a complicated knot, which could be easily loosened or tightened without untying, one we’d learned in Boy Scouts. I didn’t know when he’d done it, but Albert had gone through the letters. He loosened the knot, slipped out the top letter, and handed it to me. It was addressed to Superintendent, Lincoln Indian Training School.

“Read it,” Albert said.

I pulled the letter from its envelope.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I have recently become aware that there are two boys in your care at the Lincoln Indian Training School whose surname is O’Banion. The older is Albert, who has attained his fourteenth birthday. The other boy generally goes by Odie and is four years younger than his brother. I haven’t the means to care for these boys, but I would like from time to time to send some money. These amounts should be used to supply the boys with whatever they need, items for which the school is not responsible but that may make their time in your care a little easier.

For reasons of my own, I don’t want the boys to know the source of this money. Enclosed you will find $20.

God bless you for the good work you are doing on behalf of all the children in your care.

The letter wasn’t signed. I read it again, then stared at Albert. “Aunt Julia?”

He nodded. “Aunt Julia.”

“The Brickmans told us she was dead.”

“Look at the postmark.”

There was no return address, but I studied the printing of the faded red cancellation stamp. I made out
SAINT LOUIS
and a date. “She sent it two years ago.”

“A long time after the Brickmans told us she died.”

I reached eagerly for the stack of letters. “Are there others?”

“Just that one.”

“What happened to them? She said she’d send money from time to time.”

“I don’t know,” Albert said. “But this one’s enough for me. I wasn’t sure where we were going when we started out. Now I know.”

Mose signed,
Home for all of us?

Albert said, “We’re family, aren’t we?”

We decided to stay the night on the hill, that little island of peace rising out of an ocean of prairie, safe under the wide-spread boughs of the sycamore.

I’d begun to have trouble sleeping. It had started after I shot Jack. Sometimes I couldn’t go to sleep, or if I did, I woke from nightmares set in the prison that had been Jack’s barn. In those terrible dreams, he would open his one good eye and stare up at me accusingly from the dirt of the barn floor. I would try to tell him I was sorry, so very sorry, but it was as if my mouth was wired shut, and in my struggle to sleep, I woke myself.

That night I hadn’t been able to fall asleep. I lay staring up at the sycamore branches, which formed a kind of roof above us, my stomach empty, complaining, and I kept thinking,
Home.
Which was something
I’d never known, not really. Before Lincoln School, we’d lived on the road, and before that in the upstairs of a house that belonged to an old woman with many cats and that I recalled only in small, disconnected pieces. Lincoln School had housed me, but it wasn’t home. I tried not to get excited about Saint Louis and Aunt Julia, but that was like asking a starving kid not to salivate at the smell of hot food.

I left the others sleeping and stepped away from the sycamore tree. What I saw then was a thing of such beauty that I have never, across the eight decades of my life, forgotten it. The meadow that rolled away from the hill was alive with fireflies. For as far as I could see, the land was lit by millions of tiny, luminescing lanterns. They winked on and off and drifted in random currents, a sea of stars, an earthbound Milky Way. I have been to the top of the Eiffel Tower at night and gazed across the City of Light, but all that man-made brilliance didn’t hold a candle to the miracle I witnessed on a June night along the bank of the Gilead River when I was a boy.

I felt a hand slipped into my own, and I looked down to see Emmy standing with me. Even in the dark, I could see the shine of her eyes. “I want to come back here someday, Odie.”

“We will,” I promised.

We stood together for a long while, hand in hand, in the midst of that miracle, and although my stomach was empty, my heart was full.

NEXT MORNING, AFTER
we loaded the canoe, my brother looked to the west and gave a low whistle.

“Red sky at morning,” he said.

All along the western horizon, the sky looked like a strip of inflamed skin. Mose and Albert paddled like crazy to try to stay ahead of the weather, but they hadn’t eaten since the catfish Forrest had shared nearly two days earlier, and they tired quickly. Although the clouds moved sluggishly, by late afternoon they’d overtaken us. A wind rose at our backs, and just before the storm hit, we reached
the confluence of the Gilead and the much larger Minnesota River. Rain fell heavily, but we kept going, looking for a good place to pull up against the riverbank. Finally, we spotted a long spit of sand covered with bulrushes. We drew up and unloaded the canoe. Mose and Albert tipped it against a tree on the bank and hung one of the blankets as cover, and we gathered, wet and tired, under its protection.

The Minnesota was a broad river with a much faster current than the Gilead. We watched huge tree limbs carried swiftly past, only to be caught in places where the water eddied in angry, brown swirls. Wet and tired and hungry and intimidated by the fast water, I began to wonder about the advisability of Albert’s plan to follow rivers all the way to Saint Louis.

The rain continued to fall and our spirits continued to plummet. I could see weariness on the others’ faces, and I felt it myself right down to my bones. Not even the promise of home could lift me up.

Night descended, and the rain finally ceased, and from somewhere out in the darkness came music and the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard.