So I was surprised when I approached his cabin, which was situated in a stand of poplars on the lakeshore just south of Allouette, and the old VW pulled out of his drive and swung wide, directly into the path of my Bronco. I swerved. The VW jerked back toward the proper lane and rolled on down the road. I watched the taillights in my rearview mirror. The brake lights flashed a good deal. Whoever was driving was riding the brake pedal. I was concerned they were drunk, but I wasn’t a cop anymore, and chasing down a DUI wasn’t my responsibility.
Champoux’s vehicles were parked in a neat row next to the garage where he did all his own maintenance and mechanic work. I saw that there were a couple of gaps, like missing teeth, in the row. Gone were one of Ernie’s pickups and the VW. I thought about the Bug I’d narrowly missed and figured a relative of Ernie’s had taken it. On the rez, property was loaned and borrowed freely. Lights were on in the cabin, and I hoped Meloux was still up, though it was late for an old man, especially an old man who lit his own place with a kerosene lamp. I wore my knuckles out on the door. Finally I tried the knob.
“Henry!” I called and poked my head inside. “Ernie! It’s Cork O’Connor.”
Ernie Champoux kept his vehicles in better shape than he did his home. There was clutter everywhere and the sour smell of a dishcloth gone too long without washing. I checked the place briefly. No one was home.
Then I thought about the VW driven by someone who’d been drinking. Not a drunk, I realized, but an old man who never drove.
I caught up with him near the south end of the lake. He’d stopped dead in the road and was standing in front of the VW, staring toward the woods. I pulled up behind the Bug, got out.
“I hit a deer,” he said sadly. “It ran off into the woods, but it is hurt.”
“We can’t follow it in this dark.”
The old man nodded.
“Where were you going, Henry?”
Meloux turned his gaze toward the road ahead, lit for fifty yards by headlights. His own shadow created a long, dark emptiness there. His voice held no trace of apology. “Canada.”
What I’d figured.
“You don’t have a driver’s license, do you, Henry?”
“No.”
“How did you intend to get across the border?”
“I was going to think about that on the way. For a man who knows what he wants, there is always a way.”
“Let’s park the VW and pick it up tomorrow. Then we can go back to your nephew’s place and talk. I’d like to know the whole story, Henry, how you came to have a son you’ve never seen.”
He drew himself up. In the glare of the headlights, his eyes were like fire. “These things I will tell you, but secrets come at a price.”
“What price, Henry?”
“You will take me to Manitou Island. You will take me to my son.”
“I can’t promise.”
“Then, Corcoran O’Connor, we cannot talk.”
“Wait here.”
I slid into the VW, which was still running, and parked it on the gravel shoulder.
“Let’s go back to Ernie’s,” I said, walking to the Bronco. “I’ll think about your offer.”
I drove slowly, watching carefully for deer and rolling around in my mind the deal the old Mide had laid out. It was clear he was determined, one way or another, to see his son. The truth was that I wanted to be there when he did. Based on my own recent experience, I knew he’d need someone to watch his back. Also, the story Meloux had kept to himself for more than seven decades was one I wanted very much to hear.
The old man had me. That was all there was to it.
I parked at the cabin, and we went inside.
“Where’s Ernie?” I asked. “He told me he’d taken a couple of days off.”
“A man is sick. They called. My nephew went.”
Considering the attack on Meloux that morning, the choice Ernie had made didn’t seem a good one. On the other hand, in all this, I’d miscalculated a lot myself, so who was I to criticize?
“All right, Henry. You’ve got a deal,” I said. “Tell me your story, and we’ll go to Thunder Bay together.”
He looked around at the clutter in the cabin. “Not here. We will sit by the lake. We will smoke. Then I will talk, and you will listen.”
I took a pack of Marlboros from a carton Ernie kept on top of his refrigerator, and I found a box of wooden matches in a kitchen drawer. We left the cabin and walked across the backyard, through the poplars to the lake. The moon had just risen, and its reflection cut a path across the black water solid enough to walk on. We sat on a bench Ernie had fashioned from a split log set on a couple of stumps. I handed Meloux the pack of cigarettes. He took one out, tore the paper, crumbled the tobacco into his hand, and made an offering. Then he tapped out a cigarette for each of us. We smoked a few minutes in silence. For Henry, as for many Shinnobs, tobacco is a sacred element, and smoking has nothing to do with habit.
“You have always thought of me as old, Corcoran O’Connor.”
“You are old, Henry. God only knows how old.”
“When you were born, I was in my forty-third year.”
“That’s pretty old to a kid. Besides, as long as I’ve known you, your hair’s been white as a bleached sheet.”
“It was not always that color. In my nineteenth year, it turned white overnight.”
“What happened?”
“It was something I saw, Corcoran O’Connor. And something I did.”
Meloux studied the moon, and I waited.
PART II
NINETEEN
He didn’t keep track of years by numbers, but it was the same year President Harding died and Calvin Coolidge took his place in the White House. Sometime in the early ’20s, probably. He remembered Coolidge because in a certain way the man was like the Ojibwe. He didn’t speak much, but when he did he was worth listening to.
That day Henry watched the farmer’s son coming across the field of low corn. Under the brim of a straw hat, the kid’s face was dark with shadow. He was taller than Henry and, at seventeen, older by two years. He looked like the farmer, right down to the mean little eyes.
It was late June, hot in South Dakota, and Henry worked in overalls without a shirt. His shoes, supplied by the government boarding school in Flandreau, were falling apart. Although he’d tried to line the shoes with straw to block the holes, dirt and pebbles still found their way inside. Periodically, he stopped his work to remove the shoes and dump them clean. He was sitting at the edge of a dry irrigation ditch with his left shoe off when he spotted the farmer’s son approaching.
“My old man don’t pay you to sit on your ass,” the kid said when he got to Henry.
“Your old man doesn’t pay me at all,” Henry pointed out. He put on his left shoe and began to remove the other.
“You eat his food, sleep under his roof,” the kid threw back.
Henry could have pointed out that this choice was not his. The Flandreau school had a policy called “outing” that placed the Indian students in jobs during the summer months. The girls typically became domestics, the boys
