happy. Nothing from Stephen. No surprise. Stephen was too busy having fun being a cowboy.
At last he turned to the boxes from Millie Joseph, boxes that contained more ghosts. Ghosts, Cork would discover, that he could never have imagined on his own.
He began to read his mother’s journals.
July 22, 1946
I wasn’t excited about the reunion in Chicago. My father’s family are ruffians, for the most part, and I’m amazed that Mother seems to enjoy herself in their company. They call her “their darlin’ squaw.” If it were said by anyone else, Mother would lash them and not just with her able tongue. She calls them “ignorant Micks,” an epithet that would land most folks flat on their back with a bloodied lip. But the men laugh and toast her, and I have heard them say to my father that she’s the prettiest and smartest bit of skirt they’ve ever laid eyes on, and how the hell did a four-eyed bookworm covered in chalk dust ever manage to land such a prize?
Tonight at dinner a guy sat across from me. A little older than me, I suspect. His name is William, although he goes by Liam, and he’s an O’Connor, too, the grandson of my grandfather’s brother, I’ve learned. I’m still trying to figure out what iteration of relation that makes us. He said nothing to me during the meal—it would have been hard, anyway, to be heard above the hubbub—but his eyes kept finding me and later he caught me outside, alone, enjoying the dusk. He introduced himself and I was about to offer my name in return when he said it wasn’t necessary. He already knew all about me. Attending teacher’s college in Winona—on scholarship, he said. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of that or if it was something he saw as admirable. I told him he had me at a disadvantage. He said, rather pleased, “Then I’m a mystery to you.” And I said, “Not so much as you imagine.” I looked him up and down and said, “You’re a policeman. New to the force. You have very little money and you live with your parents. On Friday nights, you drink with your bachelor friends. On Saturday, you play baseball. And on Sunday, you go to Mass and pray that a pretty young colleen will be swept off her feet by your blarney and favor you with a kiss.” He laughed and said, “And, sure, you’re the answer to my prayer.”
He is a handsome man, much too sure of himself. But then, he got his kiss.
The books were covered in leather, black or brown or red or green, and the spaces between the printed lines were small, perfect for the tight, precise script that filled them. The dates that headed all the entries began the year his mother had entered Winona Teachers College in Winona, Minnesota. The first entry was simple:
September 14, 1943
Away from home, at last! I feel like Dorothy at the door to the farmhouse, with Oz awaiting me outside. Homesick? A little. But I know that will pass. My roommate is named Gloria O’Reilly. She’s from St. Paul. Big city girl. We’ll be the best of friends, I can already tell.
Mingled with the journal entries were poems, generally brief.
The river bends to the strength of the hill
But does not from the conflict resign.
It shapes the rock with persistent will.
In both forces, beauty. In both, the divine.
She had graduated in the spring of 1947 and taught sixth grade for a year in Kittson County, in far northwest Minnesota, one of the flattest places in the world. She’d been fond of saying that it may not have been the end of the earth, but you could see the end from there.
In 1948, her father had become ill, very ill, and she’d returned to Aurora to help with his care. In returning, she discovered that the place she’d fled had changed, or that she had, and what she saw in the North Country was both beautiful and divine. After her father passed away, she stayed on with her mother in the small house in Allouette, living with her mother’s people and teaching in the one-room schoolhouse on the reservation that her parents together had founded.
In all that time, she’d been courted by the cheeky policeman from Chicago named Liam O’Connor.
November 24, 1949 (Thanksgiving)
Liam is asleep on the living room sofa. As I lie in my own bed, I can hear his deep breathing. A gentle sound, but with just a little forcefulness. That is Liam, yes. He’s asked again for me to move to Chicago. How can I? I find it an odious place, full of noise and stockyard smells and too many people living too closely together. I ask him, What’s wrong with Aurora? And he laughs. Backwater, USA, he calls it. Hayseed City. But I know he likes it here. He gets on well with my mother’s people, my people. He adores their humor. They make light fun of him. “City boy,” they call him. He and Sam Winter Moon have become fast friends. They both share a passion for baseball. Liam has told Sam if he ever gets down to Chicago, they’ll see the Cubs play.
In the spring of 1950, Liam O’Connor got a job as a deputy with the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. He was one of a force of four. In August of that year, he married Cork’s mother. With the G.I. Bill and his savings from his years as a bachelor cop in Chicago living with his parents, he made a down payment on the house on Gooseberry Lane. A little over a year later, Cork was born.
January 30, 1952
Corcoran is a fussy baby, colicky. Liam’s mother has told me that Liam was that way, too. She advised putting him in a basket and setting the basket on top of our washing machine and letting the machine run. We did not have a washing machine, but Liam bought one, used. And his mother was right. It calms Corcoran immensely. Liam is a wonderful husband. And even when Corcoran has been screaming for hours, Liam doesn’t lose his patience. He says it’s the result of years of having drunks and street punks scream at him in Chicago. He says it reminds him of home. (Ha, ha.)
The journals were not in any order, and Cork spent a good deal of time organizing them chronologically. He’d meant to locate immediately the journal or journals written during the period of the Vanishings, but every time he opened one of the volumes, he discovered his parents and rediscovered his childhood.
November 16, 1956
Cork’s fifth birthday today. Mom baked Indian fry bread and Sam Winter Moon supplied a venison roast. Henry Meloux came and said that a naming ceremony was long overdue. Hattie Stillday clicked away on her camera. Maybe we’ll end up in National Geographic, alongside the giraffes and emus and other exotics. Lots of friends from the rez, and from town, too, though the two groups don’t mingle well. Liam, ever the grand host and proud father, was everywhere with Cork on his shoulders, telling stories that kept our guests in stitches. Everybody says that someday he should run for office. Cork is a quiet boy, thoughtful. He watches, sees everything, but he isn’t a talker like his father. Liam was called away in the middle of festivities. A bad accident on Highway 1 due to ice. I prayed for him and for those on the road.
There were photographs slipped into the pages with this entry, clearly the work of Hattie Stillday. They were black and white, but not like the Kodak box photos his parents shot. They were taken with an eye that understood the nuances of light and shadow, that divined the drama of a human look. Cork was in one, a small child off to the side, watching a group of adults who surrounded his father. His little face was turned upward, hopeful, it seemed. But hopeful of what, Cork could not now say. There was another, of his mother, a beautiful woman whose hair was long and black (though he remembered that in the proper light you could see the scarlet tint that was a bit of her father’s Irish red), caught leaning against a doorjamb with a cigarette in her hand and a laugh on her lips. Cork didn’t remember his fifth birthday at all.
He glanced at the clock on Jo’s desk—his desk now, he reminded himself—and was surprised to see that it was after midnight and he still hadn’t found the journal entries that were of particular interest to him. He opened volume after volume and finally found one whose dates were promising.
June 15, 1964
Mom told me that Hattie Stillday’s daughter, Abbie, has run off and Hattie is heartbroken. Alcohol, Mom says. Hattie tried to get her to Henry Meloux, but she refused to be helped. And now she’s gone. Where, no one knows. The Twin Cities probably. Hattie’s afraid Abbie will end up a prostitute on Hennepin Avenue. She’s called friends down in the Cities, asked them to keep an eye out for her daughter. So many are lost to us. So many.
June 26, 1964
Naomi Stonedeer has vanished. Simply vanished. Mom says she went to practice the Jingle Dance at the community center and never came home. Liam has begun an official investigation, though he believes she probably ran away, which is what some of the men on the reservation believe, too. I don’t believe this, nor does Mother, nor does Becky Stonedeer. Naomi’s only thirteen. She has no reason to run. Men are blind sometimes.
