I had made my home in this village once, during a hiatus in my service as a game warden. I had worked briefly as a commercial fishing guide, taking “sports” out onto Big Lake and the St. Croix River to catch salmon, trout, and smallmouth bass. I had not been unhappy. It was in Grand Lake Stream that I had asked Stacey out on our first date. And she had said yes.
But the general store had changed owners twice since I had been away, old-time residents had died, houses had been sold to people whose names I didn’t recognize.
I kept driving until I had entered Indian Township. According to the most recent census, just six hundred or so people lived there now. They and three thousand of their relatives, scattered about the state, were all that was left of the great Passamaquoddy Nation.
The Passamaquoddy were one of five Native American tribes in Maine, the others being the Penobscots, the Maliseets, the Abenaki, and the Micmacs. Like American Indians elsewhere, they had not prospered during the centuries since Europeans built their first blockhouses on the continent. I couldn’t help but think of my visit to the Miccosukee restaurant. In a single day, I had left one pocket of Indian country for another.
Peter Dana Point, named for one of their most venerated leaders, jutted into the narrows between Long and Big Lakes. The road passed through unbroken forest for a half mile before it transformed into a strip of identical houses. These were all brick, all one-story, and most had cluttered yards. Near the tip of the point was a ball field and a school and some buildings designed by architects who specialize in post offices and other nondescript governmental structures.
Every person I passed—every child playing in a yard, every middle-aged man riding a bicycle, every group of women smoking on a porch—watched me drive past with interest. The reservation drew few non-Indian sightseers. What was there to see?
Nick Francis lived on Pit Row, a road named for its defining feature: a gravel excavation at the terminus. I pulled into his dooryard and turned off the engine. The home boasted a fantastic flower garden, bright with still-blooming purple lupines, orange poppies, pink azaleas, and white peonies. Someone in the Francis household had a wicked green thumb.
Nick’s property also had its share of “yard art”: the term Mainers use for the random items that can accumulate outside houses. In addition to the usual ATVs, snowmobiles, and old appliances, there were half a dozen canoes, including several made by the owner of the house. Nick’s birchbark designs were not works of art or faithful renditions of his people’s historic watercraft, but they were impressive canoes, nonetheless.
I didn’t know Francis well. Our only interactions had been through Charley, but I knew that Nick had been a tribal game warden during the same period when my friend had patrolled the forests around the rez. Later, he had become police chief and, later still, tribal governor before some sort of scandal—there had been the suggestion of self-dealing—had led to crushing electoral defeat.
“If Nick Francis was padding his pocket, then I am the Queen of Sheba,” Charley had remarked when the news broke.
The two men were what Wheelwright and Fixico should have been, it occurred to me. Men from different cultures who had walked through fire for each other and would do so again. There was something infinitely hopeful in their unbreakable friendship.
That said, I was unsure how I would be received by the retired tribal governor. White people rarely drove out to the point, and not all who did came with friendly intentions. Like the rest of Down East Maine, the reservation was in the grip of the opioid epidemic. Most of the worst dealers were whites, or at least they had been when I was stationed in the area.
The front door opened as I mounted the stairs.
A girl stood before me. Nick’s granddaughter? He was a longtime widower who had lost his wife when she was young and had never remarried. Charley told me he had raised his son and daughters himself.
I guessed the girl to be around thirteen, although I am a poor judge of children’s ages. She was pencil thin with a round face, wide-set eyes, and hair shaved on one side of her head and long on the other. She was wearing a hoodie, denim cutoffs, and flip-flops.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Yeah?” she said, forming the word around a mouthful of chewing gum.
“I’m hoping to speak with Governor Francis. Is he at home?”
“Governor! He ain’t been that in a while. What you want him for?”
“I’m a friend of a friend—Charley Stevens. My name’s Mike Bowditch.”
“I’m Molly.” Her mobile eyes narrowed in recognition. “Wait a second! I know you. You used to be the warden out on the lake. You checked our boat for life vests once—wrote my pa a ticket. He tore it up and spat in your face.”
The man in question was Nick’s son and namesake, a troubled soul whose temper only worsened with every alcoholic beverage he consumed, and it wasn’t unusual for him to drink a dozen Twisted Teas a day. He had claimed not to recognize my authority to write him a citation, even though I had stopped his pontoon party boat in Musquash Bay, outside Passamaquoddy waters.
“I remember that day well.”
She cracked her gum. “My pa’s an asshole. I’m surprised you didn’t shoot him when he ripped up that ticket and threw it into the lake.”
“We try to avoid using lethal force in littering cases.”
She smiled wide enough for me to identify the color of her gum as purple. “It
