This Tender Land (40 page)

I sat beside Emmy, and her look said it all, her little face pinched with concern. She glanced at me, gave the slightest nod in Mose’s direction, and lifted her shoulders in a faint shrug of incomprehension. Albert pretended to busy himself with some kind of metal pot that came in two pieces and had a swivel handle.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“Military mess kit. Bought it yesterday—when we still had money—in a mercantile in North Mankato so we wouldn’t have to cook with old tin cans anymore.” He fit the two metal pieces together, swung the handle over them, screwed it in place, and held it up for me to admire.

“Big deal,” I said.

“At least when I used our money, it was for us.”

“What a big heart you have, Grandma.”

“The better to take care of us all,” he said.

“I can take care of myself.”

“Fine. And what about Emmy?”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“Because you have us,” Albert said.

He was mad at me, but in his anger, he’d lashed out at Emmy and her face went sad.

A rock hit the ground between Albert and me, thrown with such force that it bounced away into the trees. We looked up to see Mose on his feet, staring daggers at us, his whole body tensed as if he were preparing to fight us both.

You are so small,
he signed.
Your spirits so selfish.

I looked to Forrest, but he seemed not surprised in the least by this sudden outburst.

All you see is what’s in front of your eyes. All you care about is yourselves.

I could have argued that I’d just helped a whole family or pointed
out that we were doing our best to keep Emmy safe or reminded him that because we’d helped her there was a price on our heads and we were only one step away from prison or worse. But there were other rocks at his feet, and I wasn’t all that sure he wouldn’t be inclined to throw another, maybe this one right at me, and he’d already brought down a man that way. This was a Mose I didn’t know; I had no idea what he was or wasn’t capable of.

“What is it you see now, Mose?” Emmy asked, not out of fear, I could tell, but from a deep concern.

History,
he signed.
I see who I am.

I wanted to ask him who that was, but I was honestly too afraid. It was Emmy who ventured, “Tell us.”

Mose considered this, his face still a mask of anger. Then he relaxed, stood tall, and signed,
Follow me.

We trooped after him, all of us except Forrest, who simply watched us go. I felt a conspiracy between him and Mose, though to what end I had no idea. At that moment, because I didn’t know this new Mose, and a good deal of Forrest was still a significant mystery, I found myself wary of what we might be walking into. I could sense the same from Albert, who kept glancing at me and Emmy over his shoulder in a watchful way.

Since we’d stumbled upon the skeleton on the island, nothing had been the same. I wondered if we were cursed. I’d read of such things in stories, people disturbing the dead and paying a terrible price. Or maybe because of his Sioux heritage, Mose had been possessed by a vengeful spirit. Whatever the truth, I wanted to go back. Back to the river. Back in time. Back to that place beneath the sycamore tree on the Gilead, where the fireflies had been like a million stars, and beside me, Emmy had held my hand, and for the briefest of moments, I’d felt completely free and deeply happy.

“They’re all dead,” Emmy said.

Which brought Mose to a halt. He turned slowly and nailed her with his dark eyes. Then he signed,
Thirty-eight.
He looked at me and
Albert, as if we ought to understand, but saw clearly that we didn’t and turned and continued walking.

Mose led us to a place I’d been before with Maybeth, a small patch of grass enclosed by the rails of an iron fence and, rising from the center, a granite slab like a headstone. Mose stood unmoving before the slab, as if he, too, were cut from granite, and gazed at the words chiseled there:

HERE

WERE HANGED

38

SIOUX INDIANS

DEC. 26TH 1862

“All dead,” I said, repeating the words Emmy had spoken, not only minutes before but also days before, when she’d come out of her fit on the island.

“Is this where you’ve been all the time?” Albert asked.

Mose shook his head and signed,
Alone, thinking. And at the library.

“Library?” I said. “What for?”

Learning who I am
.

Emmy said, “Who are you?”

Mose,
he signed.
And not Mose.
Then he spelled out
A-m-d-a-c-h-a. Broken to Pieces.

“Did Forrest bring you here?” I asked.

Mose nodded.

“Did he tell you about the hanged Sioux?”

Some. I learned the whole story on my own, at the library.

“What is the whole story?” Albert said.

Mose signed,
Sit.

I WON’T GIVE
you the full, sad, eloquently signed account that Mose delivered, but here’s what he told us in a nutshell.

By the late summer of 1862, most of the land on which the Sioux in southern Minnesota had lived for generations had been stolen from them by treaties poorly explained or blatantly ignored. Because of the greed of the white men who’d been appointed as Indian agents, the allotments of money and supplies that had been promised to the Sioux hadn’t materialized. Starving women and children finally begged one of the agents for food.

Do you know what the agent told them
? Mose signed. He dropped his hands, and because of the tortured look on his face, I wasn’t sure he was going to continue.
He told them to eat grass,
he finally went on.

Ill-fed and ill-clothed, angry and desperate, some of the Sioux of southern Minnesota went to war. The conflict lasted only a few weeks but with hundreds dead on both sides. The soldiers rounded up almost all the Indians in that part of the state, even those who’d had nothing to do with the war, and put them into concentration camps. In the winter that followed, deaths from disease rose into the hundreds. Those who survived were dispersed among reservations and settlements as far away as Montana.

Nearly four hundred Sioux men were put on trial for their part, real or conjectured, in the bloody conflict. The trials were a sham. None of the Sioux were allowed legal representation. They had no chance to defend themselves against the charges, a great many of which were false. Some hearings lasted only minutes. In the end, more than three hundred were condemned to be executed. President Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but thirty-nine, who’d been found guilty of the most egregious acts. On December 26, 1862—
the day after Christmas,
Mose signed, and his bitterness was obvious—thirty-eight of those condemned men were marched to a scaffold ingeniously constructed in the shape of a square to execute them all at the same moment.

Their hands had been tied behind their backs and hoods had been placed over their heads,
Mose signed.
They couldn’t see one another, so they shouted out their names in order to let the others know they were all there, all together
in body and in spirit. They were condemned but not broken. Amdacha was one of these men.

Mose lifted his face, tearstained, to the sky and for a moment could not go on.

Then:
An enormous crowd of white people had gathered to watch. At the appointed hour, with one stroke from an ax blade, all thirty-eight men dropped to their deaths. And that crowd, that crowd of eager white spectators, cheered.

As Mose told the story, tears coursed down my cheeks, too. All this—this gross inhumanity, this unconscionable miscarriage of justice—had taken place in the area where I’d spent the last four years of my life, yet not once, in any lesson taught at the Lincoln Indian Training School, had I learned of it. To this day, I can’t tell you if I wept for those wronged people or for Mose, whose pain I could feel powerfully, or if I wept because of the guilt that weighed so heavily on my heart. I’d come from different people than Mose. My skin was the same color as that of the people who’d cheered when Amdacha died, the same color as those who’d done horrible things to a whole tribal nation, and I felt the taint of their crimes in my blood.

A cop car approached and slowed down.

“We should go,” Albert said quietly, eyeing the patrol car as it passed.

He started away, and Emmy and I came after him. But Mose lingered, his head bowed as he watered the grass around that headstone with his tears.

AT DUSK, I
headed back to Hopersville. Among the trees, charcoal-colored in the dim of approaching night, fires burned, little oases of light, islands of welcome. I was thinking about the Schofields, about how, from the moment they’d laid eyes on a kid who was no kin to them, they’d taken me in, showed me kindness, generosity. Love. I wanted to hold on to that, and the only way I could think of was to return to their camp. In a way, like going home.

As I came along the river, a figure rushed to greet me in the near dark. My heart leapt at the hope that it would, by some miracle, be Maybeth. But after a moment, the man’s limp told me exactly who it was.

“Buck,” Captain Gray said, a little out of breath. “I figured you might wander back. You need to leave. Right now.”

“Why?”

“Some people came looking for you today. One of them was a cop, a county sheriff.”

“Warford? Big red-faced man?”

“That was him.”

Sheriff Shoot First And Ask Questions Later, I thought to myself.

“What did the others look like?” I asked.

“There was another man—tall, slender, black hair, dark eyes.”

“Clyde Brickman. And was the other one a woman?”

“Yes, his wife, I believe. You know them?”

“Yeah, and they’re all bad news.”

“They said they’d heard about a kid with a harmonica staying in camp. Wanted information. About him and a little girl he might be with.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. But they were offering money, and desperate as we all are, I’m sure they had some takers. You need to make yourself scarce.”

“Thanks,” I said. Then I said, “When you get to D.C., give ’em hell.”

“That I will,” Captain Gray said with a solemn nod.

I quickly returned to camp. In the time we’d been on the outskirts of Mankato, because we’d seen no one anywhere near our little copse of poplars, we’d grown a bit careless, and I found that Albert had built a fire. He had the pans from his military mess kit over the flames, and I smelled hamburger frying.

“Put out the fire,” I said.

He looked up, the features of his face all drawn taut, ready to argue. “Why?”

“The Brickmans are here and Sheriff Warford’s with them.”

Emmy had been sitting cross-legged watching Albert cook. I heard her catch her breath. Mose was on the far side of the fire, where, whenever he was in our company, he’d been keeping himself separate from the rest of us. He’d been hunched over, staring thoughtfully into the flames, but at the mention of Brickman and Warford, he sat upright, rigid.

Forrest said calmly, “I believe I hear the river calling you again.”

Albert doused the flames and we ate our hamburgers very rare on white bread and in sullen silence. I don’t know about the others, but I’d begun to hope that maybe we had outrun the Brickmans or at least had outlasted their anger, and they’d returned to Lincoln School, content to resume their reign of terror over all those we’d left behind. Now, in the dark around the dead campfire, I was afraid that we would never be free of them, that there was nowhere we could run that they wouldn’t follow.

“First light, we’re on the river,” Albert said. “We’ll be out of here before anybody’s stirring.” Then he said something that hit me like a rock. “Will you come, Mose?”

I couldn’t see Mose’s face clearly in the dark, but I could see his hands as he lifted them and signed,
Don’t know.

I didn’t sleep much that night. It wasn’t just my usual insomnia. It was the world I knew breaking apart. I got up and walked to the river’s edge, sat on a big rock, and stared up at the two connected stars, Maybeth’s and mine, which would always point north. That’s where the river would take us next. The moon hadn’t risen yet and the river was a dark flow, and although I’d once thought of it as a current that carried with it the promise of freedom, now it seemed to offer only disappointment.

Then I had a thought so black that I could taste its bitterness: Why had we ever left Lincoln School? It was a hard life, sure, but it was also, in its way, predictable. The police weren’t after us there. The Brickmans were demons, but I knew how to deal with them. Albert and Mose were almost finished with their schooling and would be free to do as they chose, and as for me, I could manage the years I had left. Here, on the river, there was no certainty except that the Brickmans and the police would hound us until we were caught. I was sure a night in the quiet room would seem like a picnic compared to what awaited us after that.

IN THE RAT
gray light before dawn, we rose and quietly loaded our canoe. Mose helped, though he gave no indication whether he’d continue with us. I was worried about his answer, so I didn’t ask. It was Emmy who finally broached the subject.

“Please come, Amdacha,” she said, using his Sioux name. “We’re family.”

Mose looked at her a long time, then a long time at the river. Finally he signed,
Until I know you’re safe.

I understood that it was only for Emmy he was agreeing to come, not Albert or me. Family? Dead as the hope with which we’d begun our journey.

“What are you going to do, Forrest?” Albert asked as we prepared to shove off.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“You could come with us,” Emmy offered.

Forrest gave her a grateful smile but shook his head. “No room for me in that canoe of yours. Besides, this is my home. I’ve got family here. Time I visited them.” He looked to Albert. “You’re on your way to Saint Louis, but you’ll have to visit another saint first. Saint Paul. I know folks there, good folks, who’ll be happy to help you.”