Between Earth and Sky(55)
She dried her hands on a patch of skirt not soiled with blood, vomit, or melted snow and started back to the schoolhouse. George did not follow.
“George—”
“Tε·h!” His voice bellowed across the open yard. He backhanded the water pail, sending it careening through the air. The pink-tinged liquid spattered over the snow. “The white man and his white man ways. This never would have happened if not for that!”
Alma staggered backward. “Accidents happen. It’s not anyone’s fault.”
His dark eyes, made even darker by dusk’s dim light, raked over her like talons. “No? The Menominee never made machines that eat boys’ arms.”
The blood flared in her veins. “You don’t have doctors like Dr. Austin who can heal such injuries either.”
“You know nothing of our .”
“I know Charles would lose a lot more than his arm if not for Dr. Austin.”
George crossed the distance between them in two heavy strides. He stood so close the hot cloud of his breath engulfed her face. He pointed toward a lonely break in the trees. “If white medicine is so great and powerful, what happened to them?”
Even before her eyes followed the trajectory of his arm, Alma knew to what he pointed. At the far end of the yard, like a deep pockmark in the otherwise smooth line of trees, stood a small cemetery. Eleven headstones jutted from the earth. Each was identical in form, plainly wrought and inscribed.
Alma hugged her arms against her chest, her fingers pressed to bone. The first death had happened quickly, only a few months into Stover’s first term. Pneumonia. ROBERT, JANUARY 1882, was the only epitaph. The boy’s true name, his Indian name, had faded from her memory, but his copper face lingered. Death had come every winter since. She remembered every face.
When she spoke, her voice came thin, wavering, equal parts anger and sorrow. “And children don’t die on the reservations? Death, I suppose, is also the white man’s invention?”
“They die. They die in the arms of their mothers and fathers. Tshipe’kaino is performed in their honor. Here is a lonely death.”
Alma blinked back the tears that returned to her eyes. “The Lord is always with us. We never die alone.” But the words sounded like her father’s.
“Whose Lord? The Indian does not want your God any more than he want your killer machines.” He glared down at her a second more, then stormed back toward the house.
The cold twilight closed in around her, but Alma did not move. Her hands trembled and her chest heaved. She hated George—his arrogance, his pride, his refusal to cede even the smallest ground.
After several deep breaths, she mustered a semblance of poise and turned back to the house. Her eyes caught on the meager cemetery, pale headstones like ghosts at the edge of the woods. Their memory ripped through her, and though her feet moved toward the warm, gaslit rooms of the grand brick schoolhouse, her heart questioned their direction.
CHAPTER 24
Minnesota, 1906
Alma looked back at the wide field beyond the agency as she and Stewart rode from town. A large group of men squatted around a blanket, whipping long sticks at shoe-shaped patches of buckskin. The moccasin game. Asku had explained it to her once. A good player could win a new shirt, headdress, or pony; a poor player leave in want of the same. The men laughed and hollered. The hider shuffled bullets beneath the moccasins and a new round commenced. Nearby, several women chatted beside a crackling cook fire. Children romped and dallied.
Then drums sounded—deep, resonant, staccato. The kind of beat that captured the heart and overrode its rhythm. The sound was more rich and commanding than the music made from hollow logs and upturned pails Alma remembered from her youth. But the effect was the same, the yearning immediate. The Indians would dance tonight, sing and celebrate in firelight until dawn lit the sky. Alma imagined herself among them—her body moving in time with the song, her feet striking the hard ground, her lungs stinging from the smoke and exertion. This life could have been hers, too. Yet when she closed her eyes, the vision was hazy, blinking, like the lantern of a steamboat obscured in fog.
Alma clutched the wagon’s splintery sideboard and refused another look back. Her free hand found Stewart and nestled into the crook of his arm. Here, beside him, was where she belonged.
Onward they drove, and the drumbeat loosed its grip, fading behind leaf chatter and birdsong. Though the sun had dipped westward, it promised enough daylight to see them back to Detroit Lakes. She recounted the day’s events and, for the first time since their arrival in Minnesota, felt a sense of victory. They’d found only one witness, but Zhawaeshk’s account of the murder seemed definitive. He’d come upon the body less than a minute after the shooting and had seen no one else on the road. From his telling, the others—the shopkeeper, the sheriff’s deputy, the Indians who’d been gambling in the nearby woods—all arrived at staggering intervals afterward. None of them had actually witnessed the killing.
She turned to Stewart and smoothed his coat lapel, letting her hand linger a moment on his chest. His poor lip had doubled in size. She’d fix it up tonight with iodine and ice if the hotel could come by it. He’d been amazing today, surprising her at every turn. “How do you know so much about guns? Don’t tell me you read all that in a book.”