“Get some rest?”
“Yes. I was tired.”
“No wonder. Long, hard day. Hungry?”
“The morning will come soon enough. I will eat then.”
I put my hands in my pockets and stared up at the stars the moonlight hadn’t swallowed. “I’m sorry, Henry.”
“Why?”
“I hoped, I don’t know, that Wellington would be the son you wanted.”
“How do you know he is not?”
“He hasn’t been what I would call enthusiastic about seeing you.”
“He has also not turned me away.”
“Forgive me for saying so, Henry, but you set your sights awfully low.”
Meloux didn’t reply.
“What do you want to do now?” I said.
“I want you to smoke with me,” he said.
He took a pouch from his shirt pocket and sprinkled a bit to the four points of the compass, acknowledging the spirits that governed each, then he sprinkled some in the center. We sat down on the dock. He took papers and, in the moonlight that bleached his old hands white, he expertly rolled a cigarette. He lit it with a wood match that he struck to flame on his thumbnail. For the next few minutes, we smoked in silence. On the lake, two loons called back and forth, but I couldn’t see them. In the woods on either side, tree frogs and crickets chirred. The surface of the water was so still and shiny that it could have been made of polished steel. All this felt little different from any lake I’d ever sat beside on a Minnesota night, and I was aware that the vast wilderness, which began near the border of Canada, still ran relatively unbroken to the other side of the Arctic Circle. We were in the middle of a great, enduring beauty, and despite the danger and confusion involved in our being there, I couldn’t help but feel a profound sense of gratitude. Probably, that was exactly what the old Mide had hoped I might feel when he asked me to share the tobacco and the moment.
I heard the deck door open and close. I saw Meloux cock his head slightly, as if he’d heard, too, but he didn’t turn. Half a minute later, I felt the dock shiver under an added weight.
“I have seen you,” Wellington said at our backs. “In visions. I’ve had them all my life. I never understood them or understood why they came to me.”
Meloux spoke toward the lake. “You are my son. You have a gift.”
“I isolated myself here years ago to try finally to understand that gift. It’s been lonely and difficult. I was about to give up.”
“Perhaps that is why I’m here.”
“Mother never told me about you. She believed you were dead.”
“Why?”
“She came back with Leonard the next spring and went to Maurice’s cabin. She found the remains of two bodies, which the scavengers had cleaned to mostly bone. She thought one was Maurice and the other was you.”
“She married Leonard Wellington.”
“That was part of the bargain she struck with him. When her father died, she agreed to marry Leonard and give him access to her father’s money. In return, he promised not to tell the police about your part in the death. She had no idea he’d already been here or what he’d done.”
“How do you know these things? Did she tell you?”
“She wrote them in her journals.”
Wellington walked to where we sat. He held out a book bound in soft leather. Meloux took it and opened it. Glancing, I saw that it was written in thin, precise script that would be difficult to read by moon-light.
“There are more than a dozen like it,” Wellington said. “She left them to me, in the care of her attorney, not to be read until I turned twenty-one. I was a fighter pilot in Korea when I turned twenty-one and had no interest in reading them. I didn’t get around to it until after Leonard died.”
“He was a good father?” Meloux asked.
“We fought all the time. I could never please him. He was a man too absorbed in his own affairs. Finally I gave up trying. Poor Rupert, though, he worked so hard to be noticed. The man treated him badly, but Rupert just kept coming back for more. When I read the journals and finally understood that Rupert was his real son, it made me sad. Me, I just came with the contract, but my brother was truly his son, and Leonard still treated him like a dog.”
In front of us, a small fish jumped, creating a circle of ripples that widened until they captured the reflection of the moon.
“I used to come here with her, just the two of us, and she would tell me stories about an Ojibwe hunter, very brave and handsome and noble. She called him Niibaa-waabii. She said it meant Sees At Night. She died when I was ten. After that, whenever I felt alone, whenever I felt that Leonard was a dense, unfathomable fog, I would imagine that the hunter was my father and that he was pleased with me.”
Meloux said, “I am pleased.”
He sat beside the old Mide. “After all these years, why did you come looking for me now?”
“My heart told me it was time.” The old man laughed. “It gave me a good kick in the ass.” He went quiet again, then asked a question that must have been heavy on his mind for seventy years. “Leonard Wellington said it was your mother who told him about Maurice and the gold. I never wanted to believe it.” He turned his head and looked to his son. “Do you know the truth?”
“No,” Wellington said. “I’m sorry.”
I stood up. “I think I’ll call it a night.”
I left them on the dock. Inside, I looked back through the clear glass of the sliding deck door, toward the lake. Against the reflection of moonlight off the water, the two men stood talking. It had taken seven decades for this to happen. For a lot of people, that was more than a lifetime. I had the feeling that for Meloux and his son, a new and remarkable kind of life had just begun.
I went up to bed and lay there thinking that sometimes stories did have happy endings.
The problem was that this story wasn’t over.
FORTY-EIGHT
I woke to Schanno pounding at my door. The sun was up, already high. A cool breeze lifted the curtains on the window. I figured I’d opened my eyes to a good day.
“We’re waiting for you downstairs,” Schanno said when I swung the door wide. He was dressed in clean khakis and a white short-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar. He looked very Ivy League and refreshed.
“We? Meloux’s up, too?”
“He says he never went back to sleep after you left him alone with Wellington. He spent the night talking with his son, then reading Maria’s journals.” Schanno’s face held a look of warm affection. “He’s something, that guy. Wellington’s brother is here, by the way.”
“Rupert?”
“Does he have another I don’t know about? Yeah, Rupert. And Benning’s fixing us up some breakfast, so get your ass down there, son. Time’s a wasting.”
I splashed my face with cold water, ran a toothbrush across my teeth, threw on the clothes I’d worn the night before, and joined the others downstairs. They were gathered in the shade of the umbrella table on the rear deck, drinking coffee that smelled like it came from caffeine heaven.
“Mr. Wellington,” I greeted Rupert, who accepted the hand I offered. “This is a surprise.”
“Mr. O’Connor,” he responded cordially. He wore jeans, a light blue polo shirt, and expensive Gore-Tex hiking boots. He appeared tired, especially around the eyes.
Meloux sat next to his son. I thought he’d look happy, but in the Ojibwe way, his face betrayed no
