“Jubal wants me to marry him,” she replied.
Cork looked down to where Jubal lay, his eyes glazed from the blow and the alcohol. “But you won’t?”
“I can’t,” Winona said.
“Why not?”
“He has a different destiny, a great one, and he needs a different kind of wife for that.”
“A great destiny?” Cork said.
“He’s going to stand on the mountaintop. He’s going to shape nations,” Winona replied.
“And you’re not good enough to be there with him?” Willie said. He was angry, and Cork couldn’t tell if his ire was directed at Winona or Jubal.
She smiled indulgently at her brother and explained, as if to a child, “I was a wild kid. A runaway. Raped at sixteen. Living on the streets of San Francisco at seventeen, doing whatever I had to do for drugs, food, a place to crash. And let’s not forget the whole McMurphy enterprise. And, as any Shinnob on the rez will tell you, I’m now a witch. What kind of wife is that for a man on his way to the mountaintop?”
“What you did isn’t who you are,” Willie fired back, but the meaning was so twisted in his speech that Cork had to spend a moment untangling the garble.
Willie seemed to give up on the argument, his anger quickly spent. He walked to his sister, put his arm around her shoulders, leaned to her, and kissed her hair. “I was afraid he really might kill you.”
“He wouldn’t,” she said. “I knew that. As his wife, I’m no use to him. To go where he’s going, he’ll have to rid himself of me. He doesn’t understand it now, but someday he will. That day will be his beginning,” she said with a sad glance at the man prone and miserable on the floor, “and my end.”
Later, Cork sat with Jubal on the porch steps in the full light of the morning sun. They each had a cup of the coffee Winona had brewed. She and Willie had gone for a swim in Iron Lake and left the two men together to talk.
“She’s always insisted on being so damn discreet,” Jubal said. “I come across on the lake or come at night and park in her garage so no one’ll see. She never comes to my place. She insists on absolute secrecy. For my sake, she says. She still believes I’m destined for great things, and she’ll only hold me back. She’s seen my future, and she’s not in it. She says when I marry Camilla we’re through. Finished. It’s not anger or jealousy, she says. It was just always meant to be this way. Bullshit, we’re through,” he finished angrily.
A dragonfly darted in front of them, held a moment, vibrating in the sunlight, then was gone.
“Let me ask you something, Jubal. Camilla Jaeger, do you love her?”
Jubal stared at the sun, stared without blinking. “I suppose. But she’s not Winona. Nobody’s Winona.”
Then, maybe it was because of the booze that still flooded his system, or the intimacy of the history he shared with Cork, or an unguarded impulse that would become rare for Jubal after he stepped into the political arena, or maybe the result of all of these things together, he confessed, “I killed for her, Cork. I killed for her, but she still won’t marry me.”
“Killed for her?” Cork lowered the cup he was just about to sip from. “Who did you kill?”
Jubal took his eyes from the sun, and his pupils had become black pinpoints. “You were there.”
It took Cork a couple of seconds to put it together. Although decades had passed, he felt an electric jolt, as if the whole incident had only just happened, or had just happened again. “Donner Bigby?” he said. “But I thought-”
“Jesus, Cork. You always knew. You just didn’t want to see.”
That wasn’t true. Was it? He’d believed the story Jubal had told him about what happened on top of Trickster’s Point. Hadn’t he?
“You killed him? In cold blood?”
“I knew the moment I started climbing Trickster’s Point that only one of us would come down. That’s why I went up and not you. You couldn’t have done what needed doing.”
“What needed doing? Jubal, we didn’t go out there to kill Donner Bigby.”
“Didn’t we? Then why were we there? You wanted him dead as much as I did. We both wanted him dead for what he did to Winona. Don’t go all sanctimonious on me. I just did what I knew you couldn’t.”
Long before the sun had risen, the birds had begun to sing, but it seemed to Cork that he was only just now hearing their songs. In the early light, there’d been clouds the color of fuzzy peaches, but he saw that they’d evaporated or moved on, and the sky was a clear blue. An innocent blue, he thought. The smell of the coffee in his cup rose up, a good aroma that filled his senses every time he breathed. This was life, he understood. This was life, and this was what, according to Jubal, he’d had a hand in taking from Donner Bigby.
But was Jubal right? When they’d stood together at the bottom of Trickster’s Point, Cork had wanted to be the one to climb up after Bigby. He remembered that. And he remembered the rage that had filled his heart. But was it a rage so intense that it was murderous? Had the real reason he wanted to climb up after Bigby been to ensure that the brute never came back down? And, as had so often been the case in those days, had it simply fallen to Jubal to do what Cork could not?
Finally Jubal said, “Winona’s always known what’s in my heart, Cork. And I’ve always known what’s in yours.”
Cork let a moment pass, a moment of further dark consideration, then said simply, “Bullshit.”
He put his cup down hard, and coffee sloshed on the porch boards, and he left Jubal sitting alone in the sunlight and he didn’t look back.
CHAPTER 30
Camilla Little stood looking at one of the framed photographs on the wall of Willie Crane’s cabin, a shot of a lynx alert in an arrow of gold light in the middle of a stand of winter birch. The shaft of sunlight, the animal’s thick coat and great paws, the soft snow, the pillars of birch, all of the elements were lustrous, as if imbued with some holy spirit. Willie was at the front window, staring into the dark, watching for Winona to arrive.
“These photographs are stunning,” Camilla said. “How do you…?” She stopped herself.
“How do I shoot them with this twisted body of mine?” Willie said without turning.
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“It was what you were thinking.” Willie finally turned and spoke to her directly. He didn’t seem bothered in the least by what he assumed she thought. “Do you know the story ‘The Bound Man’?”
“No.”
“By Ilse Aichinger, an Austrian writer. A man is set on by thieves. They beat him, rob him, bind him with rope, leave him for dead. When he wakes, he finds that the rope isn’t tight enough to keep him from moving, just tight enough that he can’t move like a normal person. He discovers that, if he accepts the limitations imposed by the rope, he can do things that amaze people. He becomes a circus performer. The Bound Man. He’s famous. One day he’s attacked by a wolf, and because he understands his own predicament so well, understands the capabilities of his body, even bound, he defeats the animal. No one believes him, so he enters the circus ring, tied up in his rope, to fight another wolf. But a woman who loves him and is afraid for him cuts him loose. The Bound Man is forced to shoot the wolf. His circumstances become normal again, and he does everything like everyone else. He’s no longer special.”
Camilla listened politely and, when Willie had finished, said, “That’s a lovely story, and I understand, honestly. But really what I was wondering was how it is that you’re able to capture on film the soul of nature.”
“The soul of nature?” Willie laughed easily, as if genuinely and pleasantly surprised. “The spirit of the Great Mystery is how I think of it. It’s something we can’t name or even comprehend. We can only allow ourselves to be a part of it and, in that way, know it. I’m never so happy as when I’m out on a shoot. It’s just me and the woods and the Great Mystery. John Muir said, ‘In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.’ That’s how I’ve always felt.” Willie held his hand toward the dark window glass. “When I die, I want to be left out there in the woods, not buried in a grave or cremated. I want the forest to consume me completely, so that I can give back something in return for all that I’ve received.”
Cork finished his beer. “It’s been a long wait, Willie. Maybe she isn’t coming.”
