LaRose(62)

Pratt also said: A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with this sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

They hadn’t started the killing early enough with this LaRose, though. She knew “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and yet her mother had taught her how to use fierce and subtle Ojibwe poisons. She knew how to catch and skin any animal she saw. Her mother had snared the head of a demon white man and burnt its eyes out. Her mother had called for her mother’s drum and cured a man who wandered in black vertigo. Her mother had made a new drum for her daughter. Nobody took it because she left it with her father. Now this LaRose had seen the ocean. Now her work out east was done. Her mother had taught her to put her spirit away for safekeeping when that was necessary. Out of the treetops, she brought back and absorbed her many selves. She was complete. She could go. Beneath the bobbing plume on the cast-off hat she was given for a month’s wages cleaning pots, she moved demurely along the railway platform, in her purse a ticket home.

She wanted to change everything about everything when she got home. She was able to amend a few things in small ways. She lived with her father, Wolfred. She married a cousin. She was a teacher and the mother of a teacher. Her namesake daughter became the mother of Mrs. Peace. All of them learned two languages, four levels of math, the uses of plants, and to fly above the earth.



HER FATHER SIPPED his whiskey. He still hadn’t spoken, but now a pile of papers rested under the hand that didn’t hold the whiskey cup.

Will you tell me, at least, where she is buried? asked LaRose.

I can’t tell you that, said Wolfred.

Why? She came close, touched his shoulder.

Because I don’t know.

In spite of her conflicting thoughts, LaRose had always tried to be realistic, to imagine a grave, a stone with her mother’s name on it, a place she could eventually go to visit. What her father said made no sense.

That can’t be, she said.

It is true, he said. Then he repeated the words she had forgotten and remembered many times since she was young.

She was stolen.

He patted the pile of papers, looked straight at her.

Daughter, it is all right here.





1,000 KILLS

2002–2003





The Letters




MRS. PEACE AT her sparkle-chrome kitchen table. The lacquered surface covered with beading trays, cigar boxes of beads, stacked papers. Snow and Josette carefully slipped very old letters into page protectors. Most of the paper that Wolfred Roberts had written on through the 1860s, then 1870s, was still thick and supple. Some was more brittle, lined, torn from ledgers.

That old-time paper was made so well, said Mrs. Peace. Stuff nowadays crumbles in a few years.

It’s the acid, said Snow. There’s acid in most paper now.

Wolfred Roberts had written fair copies of the letters he had sent in order to recover his stolen wife, fiercely building an archive in his quest. The dates were on the letters, and there was a record of the dates they were mailed, and dates upon which he received replies, if there were replies.

The original backup plan, said Josette.

He used his training as a fur trade clerk, said Mrs. Peace. Keeping track of every transaction. My aunt told me that he kept these letters in a metal box, locked. She was young when he died, but she remembered that little key. It was kept in an old sugar jar, the handles broken off. He worried that kids would mess around with these papers. This here was all he had of her, proof he looked for her.

Mrs. Peace locked the plastic pages into a ring binder. The first letters were addressed to Dr. Haniford Ames. Each of the letters from Wolfred, later from a lawyer also, requested the remains of LaRose Roberts. Her chipped incisor, fractured and knit skull, injuries from the vicious kick of a dissolute fur trader, as well as her tubercular bones, would make her distinctive. His letters searched after her, then the letters went on. Wolfred’s daughter, the second LaRose, kept them going. There were also letters from her time in Carlisle. And then the letter writing passed on to her daughter and then to Mrs. Peace. For well over a century these letters had searched after the bones of Mirage, the Flower, LaRose.

LaRose had some use, first of all, in Dr. Haniford Ames’s research. Letters from Dr. Ames politely refusing Wolfred’s requests attested to the value of her body in the name of science. Her bones demonstrated the unique susceptibility of Indians to this disease, and also how long she’d fought it. Over and over, her body had walled off and contained the disease. She had been, said the doctor, a remarkable specimen of humanity. For a time, also, LaRose had become an ambassador to the curious. Ames, according to the lawyer, had no right to take LaRose on the road as an illustration for his scientific lectures on the progress of tuberculosis. Ames had willed all of the human remains in his possession to the Ames County Historical Society in Maryland, where he spent his old age. The bones went on display.

After the letters from Wolfred, the bones were kept in a drawer next to the bones of other Indians—some taken from burial scaffolds, some dug out of burial mounds, some turned up when fields were plowed, highways constructed, the foundations of houses or banks or hospitals or hotels and swimming pools dug and built. For many years the historical society refused to return the bones because, wrote the president, the bones of Wolfred’s wife were an important part of the history of Ames County.