Vermilion Drift (16 page)

He is a handsome man, much too sure of himself. But then, he got his kiss
.

The books were covered in leather, black or brown or red or green, and the spaces between the printed lines were small, perfect for the tight, precise script that filled them. The dates that headed all the entries began the year his mother had entered Winona Teachers College in Winona, Minnesota. The first entry was simple:

September 14, 1943

Away from home, at last! I feel like Dorothy at the door to the farmhouse, with Oz awaiting me outside. Homesick? A little. But I know that will pass. My roommate is named Gloria O’Reilly. She’s from St. Paul. Big city girl. We’ll be the best of friends, I can already tell
.

Mingled with the journal entries were poems, generally brief.

The river bends to the strength of the hill

But does not from the conflict resign
.

It shapes the rock with persistent will
.

In both forces, beauty. In both, the divine
.

She had graduated in the spring of 1947 and taught sixth grade for a year in Kittson County, in far northwest Minnesota, one of the flattest places in the world. She’d been fond of saying that it may not have been the end of the earth, but you could see the end from there.

In 1948, her father had become ill, very ill, and she’d returned to Aurora to help with his care. In returning, she discovered that the place she’d fled had changed, or that she had, and what she saw in the North Country was both beautiful and divine. After her father passed away, she stayed on with her mother in the small house in Allouette, living with her mother’s people and teaching in the one-room schoolhouse on the reservation that her parents together had founded.

In all that time, she’d been courted by the cheeky policeman from Chicago named Liam O’Connor.

November 24, 1949 (Thanksgiving)

Liam is asleep on the living room sofa. As I lie in my own bed, I can hear his deep breathing. A gentle sound, but with just a little forcefulness. That is Liam, yes. He’s asked again for me to move to Chicago. How can I? I find it an odious place, full of noise and stockyard smells and too many people living too closely together. I ask him, What’s wrong with Aurora? And he laughs. Backwater, USA, he calls it. Hayseed City. But I know he likes it here. He gets on well
with my mother’s people, my people. He adores their humor. They make light fun of him. “City boy,” they call him. He and Sam Winter Moon have become fast friends. They both share a passion for baseball. Liam has told Sam if he ever gets down to Chicago, they’ll see the Cubs play
.

In the spring of 1950, Liam O’Connor got a job as a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He was one of a force of four. In August of that year, he married Cork’s mother. With the G.I. Bill and his savings from his years as a bachelor cop in Chicago living with his parents, he made a down payment on the house on Gooseberry Lane. A little over a year later, Cork was born.

January 30, 1952

Corcoran is a fussy baby, colicky. Liam’s mother has told me that Liam was that way, too. She advised putting him in a basket and setting the basket on top of our washing machine and letting the machine run. We did not have a washing machine, but Liam bought one, used. And his mother was right. It calms Corcoran immensely. Liam is a wonderful husband. And even when Corcoran has been screaming for hours, Liam doesn’t lose his patience. He says it’s the result of years of having drunks and street punks scream at him in Chicago. He says it reminds him of home. (Ha, ha.)

The journals were not in any order, and Cork spent a good deal of time organizing them chronologically. He’d meant to locate immediately the journal or journals written during the period of the Vanishings, but every time he opened one of the volumes, he discovered his parents and rediscovered his childhood.

November 16, 1956

Cork’s fifth birthday today. Mom baked Indian fry bread and Sam Winter Moon supplied a venison roast. Henry Meloux came and said that a naming ceremony was long overdue. Hattie Stillday clicked away on her camera. Maybe
we’ll end up in
National Geographic,
alongside the giraffes and emus and other exotics. Lots of friends from the rez, and from town, too, though the two groups don’t mingle well. Liam, ever the grand host and proud father, was everywhere with Cork on his shoulders, telling stories that kept our guests in stitches. Everybody says that someday he should run for office. Cork is a quiet boy, thoughtful. He watches, sees everything, but he isn’t a talker like his father. Liam was called away in the middle of festivities. A bad accident on Highway 1 due to ice. I prayed for him and for those on the road
.

There were photographs slipped into the pages with this entry, clearly the work of Hattie Stillday. They were black and white, but not like the Kodak box photos his parents shot. They were taken with an eye that understood the nuances of light and shadow, that divined the drama of a human look. Cork was in one, a small child off to the side, watching a group of adults who surrounded his father. His little face was turned upward, hopeful, it seemed. But hopeful of what, Cork could not now say. There was another, of his mother, a beautiful woman whose hair was long and black (though he remembered that in the proper light you could see the scarlet tint that was a bit of her father’s Irish red), caught leaning against a doorjamb with a cigarette in her hand and a laugh on her lips. Cork didn’t remember his fifth birthday at all.

He glanced at the clock on Jo’s desk—his desk now, he reminded himself—and was surprised to see that it was after midnight and he still hadn’t found the journal entries that were of particular interest to him. He opened volume after volume and finally found one whose dates were promising.

June 15, 1964

Mom told me that Hattie Stillday’s daughter, Abbie, has run off and Hattie is heartbroken. Alcohol, Mom says. Hattie tried to get her to Henry Meloux, but she refused to be helped. And now she’s gone. Where, no one knows. The Twin Cities probably. Hattie’s afraid Abbie will end up a prostitute on Hennepin Avenue. She’s called friends down in the Cities
,
asked them to keep an eye out for her daughter. So many are lost to us. So many
.

June 26, 1964

Naomi Stonedeer has vanished. Simply vanished. Mom says she went to practice the Jingle Dance at the community center and never came home. Liam has begun an official investigation, though he believes she probably ran away, which is what some of the men on the reservation believe, too. I don’t believe this, nor does Mother, nor does Becky Stonedeer. Naomi’s only seventeen. She has no reason to run. Men are blind sometimes. Worse, they’re stupid. And even worse, they don’t listen to their hearts. In my heart, I know that Naomi is in grave danger. Cork is sick with worry. He’s so fond of Naomi. And he’s angry with Liam for suggesting the girl has run away. He’s vowed that if Liam doesn’t find her, he will
.

July 10, 1964

It’s been two weeks and Naomi is still missing. Liam has called authorities in the adjacent counties and in the Twin Cities. He’s gone to Crosby to question Naomi’s father, Corbett, whom we all called Fisheye when he was a kid because of his bulgy eyeballs. He’s turned into a hard-drinking man, and he claims ignorance and innocence. Liam doesn’t trust him, but he can’t break Fisheye’s story. I think Liam still believes that Naomi simply ran away, but he’s doing his best, what he calls “due diligence,” to make sure he’s covered every possibility. A lot of white folks in Tamarack County think he’s on a wild-goose chase and wasting both his time and public funds. He may be blind sometimes and stupid in the way of men, but he does listen to his heart. And in his heart he’s committed to being a good and fair officer of the law, and that means doing everything he can to give Naomi Stonedeer a chance to be found
.

Cork remembered that time. He remembered it differently, though. In his own recollection, his father was too cautious, too lax. Cork
wanted him to crack someone’s head, Corbett Stonedeer’s for sure, to get answers. He recalled that, when his father finally brought an official end to the search, there’d been an angry confrontation. It was in the evening, on the front porch, when, long after dinner had gone cold, his father returned from the last day of that futile effort. Cork didn’t recall now his exact words, but in no uncertain terms, he’d called his father a fraud. Liam O’Connor had stood there, taller by two heads than his son, and heard him out. And when Cork’s frenzied sputtering had come to an end, his father had said—this, Cork remembered icy word for icy word—“I’ve done my level best. That’s all I ask of anyone. That’s all I expect anyone to ask of me.” He’d moved toward the door, but Cork had blocked his way. His father had reached out, firmly threw his son aside, and gone in. For days after, they barely spoke to one another.

July 17, 1964

It hurts them both, I know, this silence. They walk past each other like strangers. Worse, like enemies. I’ve tried to mediate, but they hold to their anger fiercely. Liam refuses to discuss it with me. Cork listens but doesn’t really hear. He’s still a child, and his silence is understandable. Liam’s refusal, that’s just plain stubbornness. But, oh, he cares about his son’s opinion of him. He loves Cork so much
.

Cork put down the journal and stared at the far wall. Of course his father loved him. He knew that. And he’d loved his father. Their anger had passed eventually. Hadn’t it?

August 12, 1964

Fawn is missing. We’re all frantic. God, what’s happening here?

That was the final entry of that particular journal volume. One line on the page, and when Cork turned that page, there was nothing more. But at one time, something more had been there. There’d been more pages. It was clear from the neat slivers left attached to the binding that someone had, very carefully, cut those pages out.

C
ork rummaged through the journals until he found one that began with the earliest date following the final entry of the volume whose pages had been removed.

September 17, 1964

Fall is here and everywhere I look I see blood. It’s in the color of the sumac and the maple leaves and the sky at sunset and at dawn. Henry Meloux is helping Hattie and Ellie and Mom and me. Liam walks like a man made of stone, cold and hard. Cork, ever the quiet, watchful child, sees and wonders but does not ask. Thank God
.

Cork scanned the other entries for September of that year. No mention of the missing five weeks between August 12 and September 17. No indication of what had occurred in that time, though he knew of two things from his own recollection and from the collective recollection of Tamarack County. The search for Fawn Grand was futile. And another woman had vanished, a white woman: Monique Cavanaugh.

It was nearly 2:00
A.M.,
and he was tired and confused. He turned out the lamp on the desk and headed for the door. Trixie rose from the carpet where she’d been sleeping and followed him upstairs. He readied himself for bed, laid himself down, and stared at the ceiling where light from the streetlamp outside, shattered by the leaves of the elm on his front lawn, lay scattered like shards of broken glass. His mind was a muddy swirl of too little information and too many questions.
He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to sleep. But before he knew it he was dreaming.

His father stands at the edge of the flat rock, and behind him is the thunder of water. It seems familiar, this landscape
. Mercy Falls,
Cork thinks, watching from only a few feet away. There’s laughter at his back. A party perhaps. He considers turning to see, but he can’t take his eyes off his father, whose own eyes are locked on Cork. Is it anger in them? Disappointment? Confusion? Cork can’t tell. His father opens his mouth as if to speak and at the same moment steps backward, losing his balance. He flails his arms, fighting to right himself, and Cork, in a terrible panic, reaches out for him, but his arm is not long enough, and his father plummets, vanishing into the gray mists of the falls
.

And then it happens again. The whole scene replays. Only this time Cork stands outside the dream, watching himself in it as it unfolds. He sees, as he always does in this nightmare revisited, that his father does not simply lose his balance. He sees that it is his own small hand, reaching out, that pushes his father backward, sending him—surprised? disappointed? angry?—stumbling over the edge into oblivion
.

The next morning, he was waiting at the door to the Aurora Public Library when it opened at 9:00
A.M.
Maggie Nelson swung the door wide and greeted him with a smile. He went immediately to the cabinets that contained the microfilm archives of the
Aurora Sentinel
, which was the town’s weekly newspaper. They also contained archived material from the
Duluth News Tribune
and several newspapers from the Twin Cities. He spent the morning reading every account about the investigation of what the reporters had dubbed “the Vanishings.”

The reportage was basically the same in all of them. The Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department was stumped. They’d asked for assistance from the BCA and later the FBI. The authorities believed—were certain—that foul play was involved, but they couldn’t find any evidence.
The victims had simply vanished, as if into thin air. There was no mention of the priest at St. Agnes and, except for Corbett Stonedeer, no indication of any suspects or persons of interest. The families were interviewed extensively, and their pain came through. Until Monique Cavanaugh disappeared, the white community of Tamarack County had been concerned mostly about the money and resources the sheriff’s department was expending on the search for the two Ojibwe girls. The predominant white sentiment seemed to be that most likely the girls had simply fled the abominable conditions of the Iron Lake Reservation. The Ojibwe community was more tight-lipped, but those who spoke for the record had nothing good to say about Cork’s father, whom they accused of being less than diligent in his investigation of the missing girls. Cork recognized the names of those quoted. Percy Baptiste. Bob Fairbanks. Arthur Skinaway. Shinnobs for whom, no matter what a
chimook
did, it was no good. The way the news stories were structured, however, made it sound as if the whole of the Anishinaabe people were aligned against Cork’s father.