Between Earth and Sky(50)
Stewart’s patience was flagging. She saw it in his tight jaw and pinched lips. He’d taken to folding the sheet of paper with the witnesses’ names again and again after each failed encounter, until the list was so creased the names were nearly illegible. At last, someone admitted he knew one of the witnesses. He nodded toward the village center and suggested they try the cemetery.
In quiet shadow behind the Episcopal church lay four rows of crosses. The air smelled of newly trimmed grass and the wooden markers were freshly whitewashed. Drying bouquets of wildflowers—primrose, spurge, aster—dotted the graves. She’d known their Anishinaabemowin names once too. Offerings of corn and wild rice also lay beneath a few of the markers.
“I don’t see Mr.”—Stewart glanced down at the list—“Mr. Zhawaeshk. Or anyone else for that matter.” He pulled off his hat and blotted his brow with a hankie. SJM. She’d embroidered it in navy-blue stitching at one corner the first year they were married. He owned other handkerchiefs—ones she bought from Wanamaker’s with finer stitching and more elegant script—but he always carried this one.
“Perhaps he just left,” she said. “Or went to gather flowers.” Her voice lacked conviction. The one day of the year every Indian on the reservation came to town and they couldn’t find a single one to offer clues about Asku’s case.
A breeze stole through the cemetery, knocking askew one of the bouquets. Alma walked over and righted it. Several faded blue petals littered the ground. Another breeze and they tumbled away. DANIEL LITTLE SKY, the marker read, HUSBAND AND FATHER.
Alma stood and backed away. She hadn’t told Stewart, but she’d taken his advice and visited her father’s grave when she’d traveled to La Crosse. After calling on her mother and Miss Wells, she had a few spare minutes before her train departed for St. Paul and found herself wandering toward the old church. She passed a flower peddler along the way and bought a single white daisy. At the gravesite she stood dry-eyed and silent until the clock tower on Main Street struck quarter to four. Then she’d left, flower in hand.
At the time, she’d convinced herself that to weep would be a betrayal, that the sadness welling inside her was simply fatigue. But she knew now that was just another lie. The same lie she’d told herself for seven straight years, destroying every letter he sent, unopened. Even when her aunt had told her he was sick, dying, dead; even then she’d clung to the delusion that withholding her forgiveness hurt only him.
She wished now she’d waited in the foyer all those years before to hear his last words to her. She wished she’d read his letters and maybe even written one in return. She wished she’d cried for him, not just at his grave, but all those nights when her heart ached, cried for him when she heard the news of his death, instead of calmly sipping her tea and remarking about the weather. She wished she’d left the flower to decorate his grave.
“What’s etched here beneath the name?”
Stewart’s voice drew her back across the miles to White Earth. He was crouched down, studying another marker. She blinked and found her eyelashes clumped and sodden. For a moment she let the tears fall, one then another, hot and wet atop her skin. Then she fanned her cheeks and joined Stewart beside the grave. Carved just beneath the crossbar, clogged with beads of dried paint, was the image of an upside-down crane.
“It’s his totem. His clan.”
“They still follow all that?”
“Some.”
Stewart rose from his haunches and stretched his arms, his neck and shoulders undoubtedly sore from the long ride in. “Let’s get one of those new Franklin Roadsters when we return home.”
“They’re too loud.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her. “But they’re fast.”
Alma smiled, imagining them driving through the Pennsylvania countryside, engine rumbling, wind rushing at their faces, the smell of gasoline mingling with the scent of spring’s first flowers. But the image faded quickly.
She pulled away and glanced above the steeple at the wide October sky. Already the sun labored in its descent. They had an hour, maybe two, before they must return to Detroit Lakes.
“Could he have meant another cemetery?” Stewart asked.
She’d not seen another church when they drove through town. Perhaps the Catholics kept a small plot behind the mission school. They checked there without success. No cemetery. No Zhawaeshk.
Alma sat on the edge of a water well and dropped her head into her palms. Asku had described visiting a cemetery once. Here, near the agency. But he hadn’t spoken of crosses or headstones. She looked up and scoured their surroundings.
A spattering of trees skirted the schoolyard and beyond it a clearing bright with sunlight. Alma took Stewart’s hand and led him through the pines and cottonwoods. A host of miniature houses crowded the clearing, their pitched roofs rising above the sedge and switchgrass. They were long and narrow, stretching three, four, five feet or more. Each had a small opening—a window perhaps—no bigger than a playing card, with a sill or small ledge jutting out beneath.
Stewart ran a hand over the rough-hewn wood. “What are they?”
“Grave houses,” she whispered.
A belch startled her. There, a few paces off, sat a young man, leaning against one of the houses. Zhawaeshk. It must be him. Her hold about Stewart’s arm eased. At last, someone who could answer questions about the night of the murder, who could help prove Asku innocent. She forgot herself in her relief and started toward him, only to stop after a few steps. In his hand the man held a jar of brownish liquid, just like the ones Alma saw passed beneath the merchant stalls. He’d painted circles around his eyes—a sign of mourning. Recent tears had caused the paint to run, streaking his cheeks black.