“I’m all right, Nokomis,” he replies, using the Ojibwe word for “grandmother.” “Just tired. I think I should rest for a while.”
“Go,” she says. “Lie down.”
Inside the house he walks to the desk where Grandma Dilsey has put his father’s handgun. Soundlessly, he slides the drawer open and removes the weapon. He goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind him. At the window, he takes off the screen. He’s just about to ease himself through the opening when the door opens at his back and his father enters the room. Grandma Dilsey is with him. Her face is defiant and at the same time afraid.
“Where are you going, Cork?”
His father’s voice is colder than he has ever heard.
“Nowhere,” he replies.
“Give me the gun.”
He walks to his father and holds the heavy firearm out to him. His father takes the weight from the small hand and fills the empty holster on his own belt.
“Where have they gone?” his father asks, his voice still like something frozen in winter.
He looks at his Grandma Dilsey and understands that she hasn’t told. He wants to be like her, to hold his tongue even against the frigid power of his father. He says nothing.
His father reaches out and grabs his arm. His fingers are like the iron of the manacles in Mr. Windigo’s shed. “You’ll tell me what’s happening. You’ll tell me where they’ve gone. And you’ll tell me now.”
“Liam,” Grandma Dilsey cries. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Then you tell me,” he says, turning on the old woman.
“All right, all right. Just let him go.”
The grip is released. And Liam O’Connor listens stone-faced as Grandma Dilsey tells him everything.
He stands there ashamed, knowing that, but for him, his grandmother would never have told. He hates himself and he hates his father and even when his father turns and something different is in his face now, something afraid, he goes on hating him.
“Stay here,” his father says to him. His voice is stern but softer.
Grandma Dilsey stands barring the door. “Liam, it has to be done.”
“Not this way, Dilsey. Not if I have anything to say about it.” He shoves her aside, and his boots shake the floorboards as he leaves.
Grandma Dilsey follows, and he can hear her calling from the porch, “Liam, please understand.”
He is alone and takes the opportunity to slip through the screenless window and drop to the ground, and as he sees the headlights of his father’s car barrel into the dark, he lopes to a stand of paper birch thirty yards away and makes his way silently among the trees. He reaches the highway well out of sight of the house and heads south following where his father has gone, following toward Waagikomaan, toward the road the Cavanaugh woman must take that night to get to the place where Indigo Broom’s cabin stands in smoldering ruin.
It’s several miles, and he alternates between a brisk walk and a run. The night is quiet. The road is practically empty. Whenever he hears the approach of a vehicle and sees headlights, he slips among the trees and underbrush that edge the old potholed asphalt.
He is thinking:
He’s not thinking what he will do when he gets there. He’s simply thinking that it is because of him that his mother’s people are in jeopardy now and he has a responsibility to them. And because of what happened to him in Mr. Windigo’s shed, he has a right to be a part of whatever may occur.
He comes to the juncture, the place where the dirt and gravel of Waagikomaan branch off from the highway. The moon has risen by then. It’s like a great hole in the dark sky that lets the light of some brighter place shine through.
He turns toward the full moon and has walked a hundred yards, heading in the direction he believes the others will be hiding and waiting, when a car whose engine is huge and quiet glides from the highway onto Waagikomaan and headlights brighter and harsher than the moon illuminate him.
He spins. The car stops in a little spray of dust. The headlights remain on. For a long moment, he’s facing a beast with two glaring eyes and a low growl of a voice. Then the headlights blink out and the engine dies. The dark and the quiet of the night return. The door opens. She steps out.
She walks toward him in a way that makes him think of a sleek animal—a panther maybe—or maybe it’s because she’s wearing a sleek black dress. In the moonlight, her face is silver, and her hair, yellow in daylight, is now like a spill of angry white water. She stops two feet from where he stands. And she smiles.
“What are you doing here?” she asks in a friendly tone that suggests everything he believes about her is wrong. “Did you get away from Indigo? You naughty boy.”
She reaches out a silver hand and ruffs his hair. Then her fingers become talons and her grip becomes a torture. She pulls as if to rip away his scalp.
“You goddamned little snot,” she says through clenched teeth, bone white. “You could have spoiled everything.”
“Let him go!”
It is his mother’s voice, coming from the dark at the side of the road. She steps into the glare of the headlights and confronts the woman. Winter Moon is with her. Only those two. The others, he realizes, must be at the place where the road to Broom’s branches off. Winter Moon is holding a rifle, which is pointed at the woman’s breast.
The woman releases her hold.
Winter Moon lifts his rifle and fires a single shot into the air.
“Cork.” His mother waves him to her side, and he obeys. His head hurts from the viciousness of the woman’s grip.
The woman doesn’t seem to be afraid. Instead what he sees in her face is anger. “What now?” she asks.
“We wait for the others.”
The sound of vehicles comes from the direction of Broom’s cabin, and she looks past them down the moonlit road at their backs.
“Indigo?”
“He won’t be coming to your rescue,” Winter Moon replies.
“Ah,” she says. “Dead?” No one replies, and she gives a nod. “A little native justice? Is that what’s in store for me?” She changes in an instant. Her body changes, becomes smaller somehow, fragile and vulnerable. Her face changes, becomes suffused with terror. And her voice changes, becomes such a desperate cry for pity that it’s hard not to be moved. “Please, I haven’t done anything, I swear. Please, don’t hurt me.”
She moves toward his mother, her hands out in supplication. “Oh, God, please. I’m a mother like you. I have children that I love and who need me.” Tears run down her cheeks. “Please, just let me go back to my children.”
The vehicles are close now, pulling to a stop not far behind him, their own headlights adding to the surreal brilliance in which he stands with Winter Moon and his mother and the woman who is suddenly too near. Her arm is like a whip, fast and deadly, and wraps itself around his mother and pulls her from his side. In the same instant, he sees the silver flash of a knife blade that has materialized in the woman’s hand and is poised at his mother’s throat. She draws back, pulling his mother with her and using her as a shield against Winter Moon’s rifle.
“I’ll kill her,” she says calmly.
Doors slam behind him, and he hears the thud of boots on the packed dirt of Waagikomaan. The woman’s eyes move there.
“I’ll kill her,” she repeats.
His father is suddenly, magically at his side. He steps toward the woman with the knife.
“If you kill her, you will yourself die,” he says, matching her incredible calm. “What is it you want?”
“To go home.”
“I’ll come for you there.”
“I think not,” she replies slyly. “What I think is that you’ve all murdered Indigo and if I go to the gas chamber,
