Let’s go, boys.”
They piled into LeDuc’s dusty, black Chevy pickup and headed east on an old logging road, which nature had almost entirely reclaimed. While they bounced along through high weeds and timothy grass that nearly hid the track, LeDuc explained to Jubal the importance of wild rice to The People. In the old times, he said, it was their primary source of food, and the gathering of rice, which he called manomin, was vital to their survival.
“We begin in August, manominigizis, the month of rice,” he told Jubal. “We’ll keep at it until probably November. Right now, the best place for ricing is going to be in shallow lakes with muddy bottoms. Later, we’ll harvest the big lakes. Today, we’re headed to Nagamowin. That’s what we call it on the rez anyway. It means ‘singing.’ On a map, you’ll find it called Mud Lake. We named it first, but white people make all the maps.”
They parked among tamaracks on the shore of the lake, which was a little over half a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, full of tall green stalks. LeDuc had Cork and Jubal help him pull the canoe from the back of the pickup. The frame-ribs and planking, rails and deck, thwarts and seats-was constructed of wood: white cedar, white spruce, and ash. The hull was khaki-colored marine canvas. They cradled it on their shoulders, carried it to the water, and waded in. Cork understood immediately why, on maps, the lake was called Mud. He sank to his calves in goo that sucked hard at his sneakers. LeDuc gave the signal, and they flipped the canoe onto the lake. He returned to the truck and came back with a long pole, forked at one end, and with four smoothed sticks, each about three feet in length. Cork knew that the pole was made from tamarack wood so that it would be strong and light. The sticks were made of cedar, for the same reason.
“Here,” LeDuc said and handed each boy a pair of the sticks. “Those are knockers, Jubal, for harvesting the rice. Cork’ll show you how. Let’s get started.”
LeDuc took the long pole and a place in the stern. Cork and Jubal spaced themselves out ahead of him. LeDuc began to pole them across the water and slid into the nearest patch of rice stalks, whose tops stood a couple of feet above the gunwales of the canoe.
“I use a forked push pole so I won’t hurt the roots of the plants,” LeDuc explained to Jubal. “Show him how to harvest, Cork.”
Jubal watched as Cork reached out to the right with one of the sticks and bent the stalks there quickly over the gunwale. With the other stick, he knocked the ripe grains free, and they scattered across the bottom of the canoe. He released the stalks, which sprang upright again, and he immediately turned to the left to repeat the process. LeDuc poled smoothly through the rice bed, while Cork swung his arms left and right, harvesting.
“It’s important not to harm the stalks,” Cork said. “And you’ve got to let some of the grains drop into the water to keep the beds growing. Now you try.”
As with everything Cork would ever see him attempt, Jubal was a natural.
They spent the day on Nagamowin, and it was clear to Cork why the Anishinaabeg of the Iron Lake Reservation had given the lake that name. The air was full of song. The calls of red-winged blackbirds, warblers, dark-eyed juncos, sparrows, and meadowlarks mixed with the music of the wind across the wild rice reeds and the drumbeat of the knock sticks. Cork loved harvesting because, under a blazing sun, atop the cool indigo water, within the pale jade walls of the rice beds, he forgot, for a while, all the cares of the world he’d left behind.
They weren’t the only ones ricing that day. In a small, wooden rowboat, three other Ojibwe worked the beds at the south end of the lake. A few times they came within hailing distance, but not a word passed between them. Cork could see who was in the boat: Winona Crane; her brother, Willie; and Willie’s best friend, Isaiah Broom. LeDuc had brought along a cooler full of sandwiches made of bologna-what folks on the rez called “Indian steak”- and lemonade in a big glass jar. At lunchtime, he signaled the three kids, who came and joined them on the shoreline. They’d brought their own meal, which was canned tuna, cheese, and crackers. And they’d brought something else. Beer. They didn’t pull out any cans or bottles, but Cork could smell the yeasty scent on Winona’s breath. If LeDuc noticed, he didn’t say anything.
Willie had grown taller but was thin as a sapling. His muscles still seemed at odds with his brain’s attempt to control them, and his speech was still difficult to catch. Isaiah Broom was a kid every bit as huge as Jubal Little, but clumsy as a big-shoed circus clown, something he would never outgrow. He was clearly love-addled. Every time he looked at Winona, his brown eyes went dopey and hopeless. Cork understood. He was still hopelessly in love with Winona, too. She didn’t pay any particular attention to either of them. At this point in her life, she was working on acquiring the wrong kind of reputation. She and Willie had continued to be passed from one relative to another, and she was growing into a beautiful young woman with a wild streak that stood out in neon. “Just like her mother” was what a lot of people on the rez said. She was in and out of trouble, nothing serious yet, but Cork feared that bad things might be on the horizon for her.
There was a powerful energy at work during the shoreline lunch that day, something unspoken but palpable, and it flowed between Winona Crane and Jubal Little. They barely looked at each other, and that, in itself, was a dead giveaway to Cork. They were two of the most striking people he knew-Winona with her flowing black hair and soft, tawny skin and fawn eyes; and Jubal with his big, chiseled body and good looks and easy grace-yet it was as if, over that long hour of lunch, they didn’t exist for each other.
When they separated to return to their work, Cork watched closely. Jubal, though he did his best to fight it, couldn’t help looking over his shoulder at Winona Crane, who was eyeing him from a safer distance.
That Winona preferred Jubal-hell, what girl wouldn’t? — stung Cork, and he found himself envying his friend. It was something that he often felt and that he fought against, but there it was. Jubal had been blessed in so many ways, with good looks and an incredible build and an easy way with people that won them over instantly. Compared to him, Cork felt small and unimportant. But where Winona was concerned, Cork thought maybe there was hope. He could see clearly that neither Jubal nor Winona was prepared to acknowledge how they felt, so he held to the naive belief that as long as it went unspoken, the attraction might pass, and Winona’s eyes would someday open to what Cork had to offer, smaller offerings maybe, but given with a full heart.
Late that afternoon, they returned to LeDuc’s store. From the bed of the pickup, Cork, Jubal, and George unloaded burlap sacks filled with the wild rice that would eventually be dried, parched, hulled, winnowed, and shared. George gave them Big Chief grape sodas, and Cork called his mother to come and get them. While they waited, Cork and Jubal strolled through Allouette toward the shoreline, where the broad, sparkling blue of Iron Lake stretched away to the west.
“Winona’s something,” Cork said. “But if she doesn’t watch herself, she’s headed for trouble.” It was a warning to Jubal, whose own reputation in Aurora was sterling. But Cork didn’t fool himself. A good part of his motivation was to plant a kernel of doubt in Jubal’s mind that might keep him from turning his attention to Winona.
Jubal stared absently at the sky. “I guess.”
“We worry about her.”
“We?” Jubal said.
“Those of us who are Shinnobs.”
“Shinnobs?”
“It’s short for Anishinaabeg.” Cork said it as if being Ojibwe set him and Winona apart from Jubal, put Jubal on the outside of an intimate connection that he and Winona shared but Jubal never could.
Jubal suddenly broke away and stomped angrily to the edge of the water.
Cork caught up quickly and said to his friend’s back, “You okay?”
“What is it with you and being Indian?”
“What do you mean?”
“Jesus, just look at this place.” Jubal pointed toward the gathering of mostly BIA-built homes and trailers that was Allouette, where many of the streets were still unpaved and a lot of the yards were covered with skeletal dandelion stalks that stood in grass long unmowed, and where rusting cars, tireless, sat up on cinder blocks. “Who’d want to live in a place like this? And look at you. You don’t even look Indian.” Jubal picked up a rock and flung it at the water as if the lake had insulted him.
“I’m only a quarter Ojibwe,” Cork said. “But look at you. You could pass for Indian in a heartbeat.”
“That’s because I am, stupid.”
The admission hit Cork like the rock Jubal had thrown at the lake. “What?”
“My name’s not Little. It’s Littlewolf. Jubal Littlewolf. My mother changed it after we left Montana. She didn’t want anyone to know.”
“I don’t get it.”
