“Looked worse than it was. Head wounds are like that.”
“Two boys? He was fighting with two boys?”
“The principal couldn’t get a straight story from anybody, so what really happened is still unclear. They were all suspended. Including Anne O’Connor.”
“Annie? What did she have to do with it?”
“Not sure. Like I said, the kids were all pretty tight-lipped.” He opened the refrigerator and peered inside. “How about heating up some of that leftover lasagna?”
“You told Uly you’d let him know what you decided. Decided about what?”
“Appropriate punishment.”
“Punishment? He’s been suspended, isn’t that punishment enough? And I know Uly. Whatever happened, he didn’t start it.”
He spoke with his head deep in the refrigerator. “There are rules, Luci. One of the rules is that you don’t get into trouble at school.”
“But you’re happy he fought back.”
“Of course I am. Someone attacks, you have to respond. If you don’t, you lose respect and it’s important that the enemy respect you.”
“Enemy? Will, these are just high school kids. And this isn’t a war.”
He pulled out the pan of lasagna, folded back the aluminum foil that covered it, and sniffed. “Life is war, Lucinda.” He held out the pan for her to deal with.
TWENTY-TWO
Cork drove across the rez to the old mission, a small one-room building in the middle of a large clearing. The mission, nearly a hundred years old, had fallen into disrepair, but several years earlier a priest known affectionately as St. Kawasaki had spent a lot of his own time and resources to restore the structure in order to celebrate Mass there periodically. Most Shinnobs on the rez who were Catholic were used to driving to St. Agnes, in Aurora. They always appreciated, however, a service in their own community.
Behind the mission, bordered by a wrought-iron fence, was a cemetery begun when the mission was first built. It was an assortment of gravestones, chiseled markers, crudely wood-burned plaques, and crosses. There were also a number of grave houses, which were low wooden structures built over the burial plots, an old Ojibwe tradition. Two open graves lay waiting to be filled. On the following afternoon, the bodies of Alexander and Rayette Kingbird would do the filling.
Cork leaned against the fence. The afternoon was sunny and warm. He wrapped his hands around the top rail and felt all the heat the black iron had absorbed. It was from the sun, of course, but he knew it could just as well have come from the fire of the collective anger contained in the burial ground. So much death dealt out so unfairly, betrayal in every form-hunger, disease, outright murder. His grandmother’s people were interred here, and their blood ran hot in his veins. Still, he was more Irish than Ojibwe, and he observed that his own shadow lay outside the fence. It was only because of the angle of the sun, but in that convergence of circumstance, he saw the accusation that had dogged him all his life. In Tamarack County, a place where history was a litany of lies and a long saga of distrust, he was considered neither Ojibwe nor really white. He understood that he would always stand outside the fence.
He left the mission, drove a quarter mile east, and turned onto an old logging road overgrown with timothy grass and wild oats. The road cut along a ridge that overlooked the clearing. He pulled to the side, parked, and grabbed his binoculars from the back of the Bronco. He climbed to the top of the ridge, which was thick with second-growth jack pines. The mission was clearly visible, a small white box in the middle of a field of green. A single road-Mission Road-bisected the clearing. West, the direction from which Cork had come, the road led toward Allouette. East, it headed toward the back side of the Sawbill Mountains, where it dead-ended in difficult bog country. He lifted his field glasses and was able easily to follow the gravel road west about a mile, where it curved out of sight among the pines. The dust kicked up by his Bronco still hung, ghostlike, in the corridor that ran between the distant trees. East, the road ran straight and he could see even farther. He swung the lenses toward the mission. The open graves of the cemetery were like black eyes staring back.
The clearing was empty now, but tomorrow it would be filled with people from the rez. Cork wouldn’t be among them. He’d be up there on that ridge with his binoculars.
Take a hawk’s-eye view, Meloux had advised.
White men didn’t have a name for the ridge, but the Ojibwe did. They called it Kakaik after the great war chief. It was the name Alexander Kingbird had taken when he formed the Red Boyz, a name with a simple meaning: Hawk.
Jo poured water into the coffeemaker on the counter. She kept her back to Cork.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was on the rez, out of cell phone range, otherwise I’d have been there, you know that.”
“I didn’t need you there, Cork. I told you last night I’d take Stevie to Dr. Barron.” Her spine was an iron pole. “That’s not the point, anyway. The point is that I worried myself sick when I couldn’t get hold of you to tell you what the doctor said. I saw you lying dead out there somewhere with your back torn open just like the Kingbirds.”
“I’m sorry, Jo.”
“But not sorry enough to step back from this whole Kingbird mess, huh?” She turned and gave him a look that could have frozen fire. “How’d you sleep last night?”
“Restless.”
“Restless?” She almost laughed. “I don’t think I slept at all.”
They stared across a silence that lay between them. Finally Cork said, “Where’s Annie?”
“Upstairs.”
“What did she have to say?”
“Not a lot. She shoved the Shaw boy. He hit his head and bled all over everything. She’s been suspended from school and from softball.”
“Ouch. What did the Shaw kid do that made her shove him?”
“Why don’t you go up and get the story from her yourself.”
He walked out of the kitchen.
“Would you like some coffee when it’s ready?” Jo called to him.
“Yeah, save me a cup, thanks.”
“I’ll be glad to bring it up.”
He paused in the dining room and turned back. Through the doorway, he could see her standing at the counter. The offer to bring his coffee to him upstairs was, he understood, a small bridge across the chasm that had been her anger.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’d like that.”
He found Annie in her room, lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her leather ball glove was on her left hand. In her right was an old softball, scuffed and dirty. She didn’t see her father at first. Cork stood in the hallway just outside her room, watching her toss the softball and catch it in her mitt. She was a slender young woman, with red hair that was often untamed and a face that freckled significantly in summer.
“Hey, slugger. Hear you did some damage today,” he said.
She took the glove off, nestled the softball in its palm, and set it on the bed beside her. “It was an accident.”
“The damage maybe. How about the shove?”
“What did Mom tell you?”
“Not much. I’m mostly in the dark.”
He strolled in and sat next to her. She stared at her left hand, which looked so much smaller now that her big glove was gone.
“What’s the story?” he said.
