you’ll go with me. I think that if I make it home, I’m safe.”
“As far as I’m concerned, Monique, you’re safe now. I won’t let anyone harm you, I promise.”
His mother’s eyes are wide and he can feel her fear and it hurts him as if the slash across her throat is already a real thing. He’s paralyzed. He absolutely cannot move.
The woman edges her way toward her car, forcing his mother with her, foot by foot.
“This is the deal, Monique,” his father says, matching her retreat with his own advance, foot by foot. “You release her unharmed, and I’ll let you go. No one will touch you. You have my word.” His hands are in front of him, held away from his gun belt in a way that makes it clear they’re empty of both firearm and intention. “Not another step, Monique, until we have a deal.”
“I have all the cards,” she points out.
“You cut her throat and I kill you. I kill you here or kill you in your house or I kill you on the street, I still kill you. You let her go and I swear you go free. As you say, we have every reason to keep all this quiet.”
“I’ll keep her with me until I’m away, then I’ll let her go.”
“That’s not the deal because I don’t believe you.”
“How can I believe you?”
“Because I’ve never broken a promise.”
His father has said it, and the truth of it would be clear even to the worst lying snake that ever lived. He believes his father absolutely, and he prays the woman will, too.
Her eyes move past his father to the men at his back.
“I won’t let them touch you, I promise. Let her go, return to your house, then leave this town forever. That’s the deal.”
“I can leave?”
“If you ever come back to Aurora, it will be your death, and that’s a promise, too.”
She considers, considers a long time. And in that time, which seems now to stretch into forever, something in him snaps. He is released from the moment. He can feel himself floating, drifting away, numbed, mercifully removed from the reality of what is occurring. The incredible brightness of all the headlights. The knife blade glinting fire against the skin of his mother’s throat. His mother’s face not her face but a mask unreal because he can’t comprehend anymore what he sees there. It’s all a dream. But even in that dream he is aware, vaguely, that he’s wetting his pants.
The woman finally speaks, and he hears it as if across a great distance. “All right. We have a deal.”
The knife slides from his mother’s throat, and the woman steps away toward her car, still facing his father. So fast that it must be a part of the dream he’s sure he’s dreaming, his father’s hand clears the gun from his holster and he fires once. The woman drops immediately in a heap, and, in the brittle light, the dirt on the road turns black with her blood.
In that same moment, he is in the dirt, too, staring up at sky whose stars he cannot see.
His mother kneels at his side.
“Cork?”
He hears but can’t make himself reply, can’t make himself turn his eyes to look into her face.
“Dead,” LeDuc says, from where the woman lies.
“Henry, what’s wrong with him?” his mother cries.
“Corcoran O’Connor?” The voice of Henry Meloux. It is a rope trying to pull him from the place where he can’t move.
“Cork, are you all right? Why won’t he answer me, Henry?”
“What do we do now?” Sam Winter Moon asks.
“What you were going to do all along,” his father replies. His words are empty of feeling, his voice a ghost of a voice. “Put her where she’ll never be found.”
“What about Cork, Henry?” his mother pleads.
“I will talk with him,” Meloux replies. “I will guide him.”
“Where?”
“To a place where he won’t remember.”
“You can do that, Henry?”
“I can try.”
“What about you, Liam?” Hattie says.
He stands above his son, but he isn’t looking at his son. He’s looking at the gun that is still in his hand. “I guess I’ll have to live with this.”
“What about Cork?” Hattie says. “He’s just a child, and children don’t keep secrets well.”
“Henry, can you really make him forget?” his mother asks. She lowers herself and cups his face in her hands and speaks to him. It is like a mother in a dream speaking, a dream from which he would love not to wake. “Oh, Cork, can you ever forgive me? Can you understand?”
He doesn’t. Not now. But his mind on some level is recording everything, though he’s too numb to process or to respond.
“I don’t want him to remember this, Henry.” His father’s voice is no longer empty. What fills it now is something like loathing. “I don’t want him ever to know what I’ve done.”
“Please make him all right, Henry,” his mother pleads, holding him tightly. “Oh, please, Henry.”
Meloux replies, “I will do my best.”
It is dark and hot, and he is naked. His small body drips sweat. The air is pungent with the scent of sage and cedar. He can hear Meloux’s voice chanting a prayer, a long invocation, which he doesn’t understand. The Mide’s voice rises and falls.
There is something inside his chest. It feels like a fist pressing against his breastbone. His ears take in the prayer and the old Mide’s voice; his body absorbs the heat; his nose and mouth draw in the healing aromas. Ever so slowly, the fist opens. Ever so gradually, his eyes close against the dark. Ever so gently, he is drawn away from memory.
“He killed her.”
“Yes,” Meloux said.
It wasn’t a hard thing to accept. Now.
“He saved my mother, but it went against everything he believed,” Cork said.
“It was a sacrifice he made for those he loved. But it was also a wound, and it hurt him deep. It came between him and everything he believed and everyone he cared about. You, your mother, your grandmother, Sam Winter Moon, The People. If he had not been killed, the wound he felt would have healed eventually. He died too soon. It was left open.”
“Left open in us all, Henry.”
“Do you feel wounded now, Corcoran O’Connor?”
“No.”
“Then it is finished.”
The old man sounded exhausted. Cork helped him from the sweat lodge, and together they went to the lake and cooled and cleaned themselves there. Rainy had towels waiting, and they dried and dressed and walked slowly back to Meloux’s cabin, where Walleye had been patiently waiting. The old dog rose to his feet and greeted them with a lazy wag of his tail.
“I need to rest,” Meloux said. His hands shook worse than Cork had seen before.
They helped him to his bunk, where he lay down.
“
“I have something for you, Corcoran O’Connor. Niece?”
From the table, Rainy brought a small cedar box, opened it, and held it out to Meloux, who took from it an intricately beaded bracelet. He gave it to Cork, saying, “Your grandmother made this. She gave it to me when I thought I loved her.”
Cork knew that long ago, when they were both very young, Meloux had courted Dilsey.
“I give it to you now.”
“Thank you, Henry. But why?”
“To remind you. Like the beads of that bracelet, all things are connected. The past, the present, the future.
