“Wellington!” he screamed. “I will eat your heart!”
He didn’t sleep that night, knowing the white man was hoping for just such a chance. Nor did he build a fire that would give him away. By moonlight, he kept watch, his rifle on his lap.
Wellington didn’t come that night. In the morning, clouds swept in again, bringing more snow. All day as he struggled ahead, Henry could feel Wellington in the storm, a looming presence just beyond the limits of his eyes and ears.
He lost interest in the river, in the village there. He only wanted Wellington dead. He wanted to feed on Wellington’s heart.
The storm brought an early night. Henry didn’t look for a sheltered place. He simply stopped walking and sat down in the snow. Dark settled over him, dark so thick he could hold it in his hands. Time passed.
His eyes snapped open. He realized he’d fallen asleep. The storm had ended. The clouds had moved on. The wind had ceased. A half-moon had risen. The forest around him was bone white snow and tar black shadow, and the silence was stone solid.
He knew Wellington was near. He knew it in the way he understood what weather the wind would bring or the direction in which a deer would run. It wasn’t something he had to think about. The rifle lay across his knees. His finger rested inside the trigger guard.
A cracking of branches came from his left. His eyes swung toward a gap in the pines where the half-moon floated like a silver leaf on black water.
Henry was surprised. The silhouette that appeared was much larger than a man. It didn’t worry him. He stood to meet his enemy. He reached to his belt for the knife he’d used to kill his friend, but touched only matted hair. He looked down at himself, surprised to find that his belt was gone; in fact, all his clothing was gone. His body no longer looked pale and human. He’d become a hairy beast, massive as a bear. He felt empty inside, except for an icy ball where his heart should have been. He was ravenous, hungrier than he ever remembered, and he could not wait to rip out Wellington’s heart and feast on it.
He could smell his enemy, smell the odor of carnage, the stink of rotting flesh. Far from repulsing him, it made him hungrier.
He opened his mouth to spit out a taunt. What came instead was an inhuman roar. It was answered in kind by Wellington, who was no longer Wellington but a windigo. In the moonlight, they charged at each other, kicking up an explosion of powdered snow as they attacked.
They met like mountains colliding. Henry sank his teeth into the neck of the other and tasted icy blood. The bellow of the windigo shook the snow from the trees.
They battled savagely, filling their mouths with blood, tearing out chunks of hair-covered flesh. Hunger drove Henry to a frenzy, and at last he plunged his hand into the other’s chest, grasped its heart in his claws, and ripped it out. The windigo let fly a death cry that was as appetizing to Henry as the heart on which he began to feed. He gobbled up the organ while it still beat.
He stood over the lifeless form of the windigo that had once been Wellington. He lifted his bloody face to the black sky and gave an angry howl. He’d thought that eating the man’s heart would fill him, but it didn’t. He was hungrier than ever.
THIRTY-THREE
Henry woke to the smell of sage and cedar burning. He opened his eyes and found himself in a wiigiwam, wrapped in a bearskin. A few feet away a woman sat tending a small fire. She had long gray hair woven into a single thick braid that hung over the shoulder of the plaid wool shirt she wore. When Henry stirred, she looked up.
“Where am I?” Without thinking, he’d spoken in the language of his people.
“Some men from the village found you. They brought you here.” Henry understood her words, but she said them in a way he’d never heard before.
“Are you Ojibwe?” he asked.
She shook her head and added a cedar sprig to the fire. “Odawa.” The deerskin flap that hung across the doorway was drawn aside, and an old man entered. Bright sunlight slipped into the wiigiwam with him.
“Finally awake.” He sat next to Henry. His knee joints popped like walnuts cracking. “Who are you?”
Henry said, “Niibaa-waabii.” His Ojibwe name. It meant Sees At Night.
“I am Ziibi-aawi. This is my daughter, Maanaajii-ngamo. You have been sick a long time.”
“How long?”
“Seven days ago you were brought here.”
“Fever?”
“That and other things. You are not Odawa,” the old man said.
“Ojibwe.”
“A lost Ojibwe.”
“Not lost. I was looking for the village.”
“Where you were headed, you would not have found it. You were lucky the men stumbled onto you. They thought at first you were an old man gone out into the woods to die alone.”
“Old man?” Henry said.
Ziibi-aawi waved an age-spotted hand toward Henry’s head. “Your hair.”
Henry reached up and grasped a handful of the fine black hair, which he’d let grow long since he left the boarding school. When he looked at what he held, he didn’t understand. His hand was full of strands white as spider’s silk.
“My hair,” he said. “What happened to my hair?”
“You are young for hair so old.”
“It was black,” Henry said. “Black as crow feathers.”
Ziibi-aawi gazed at him with deep interest. “What a thing it must have been.”
“My hair?”
The old man shook his head. “Whatever turned it white. It is a story I would like to hear.”
Henry told him about his battle with the windigo. The old man listened, and his daughter, too.
“Look at yourself.” Ziibi-aawi pulled away the bearskin.
Except for the wounds on his leg, which were healing, Henry saw no marks on his naked body.
“It was a vision,” the old man explained. “The windigo is a beast of the spirit. It feeds on hate, and it is never full. There is only one way to kill a windigo. You must become a windigo, too. But when the beast is dead, there is a great danger that you will stay a windigo forever. You must be fed something warm to melt the ice inside you, to melt you down to the size of other men.”
Henry looked toward Maanaajii-ngamo, who fed cleansing sage and cedar to the fire.
“I am Mide,” Ziibi-aawi said. “Maanaajii-ngamo is also Mide. You know the Grand Medicine Society?”
Henry knew of it. Healers of the body and spirit. Since the coming of the white men, those among the Ojibwe who understood the healing secrets had become few.
“This is an important vision. You have had visions before?”
Henry thought about the dream in which he was flown north by a snake with wings to a lake where a golden fire burned under the water. He thought about the kind of man Wellington was and the gold that had brought him far north, to the lake.
“Yes,” he said.
“Kitchimanidoo has guided you here. You understand?”
Henry said, “What if the windigo had eaten my heart instead?”
“You would be a different man with a different destiny.”
“Or you would be dead,” Maanaajii-ngamo said.
“You have been marked. You have been given the gift of visions,” the old man said. “You are welcome to stay with us as long as you need in order to understand this gift.”
Henry felt as if he’d already traveled to the end of the earth, but he realized he still had a very long way to go before his journey was finished.
“Migwech,” he said, and closed his eyes to rest.
PART III
THE LAKE OF FIRE
THIRTY-FOUR
By the time Meloux finished his story, it was well after midnight. We sat beside the lake, and I could see Henry clearly in the bright moon glow. He was an old man; it had been a long, hard day; he was tired. Hell, I was tired, but there were still questions left unanswered, things I needed to know.
“How long did you stay with the Mides?” I asked.
“In the
spring, Ziibi-aawi traveled the Path of Souls. That summer, Maanaajii-ngamo took me down the river. We stayed with another of the Midewiwin, a good man named Waagosh. For seven years I learned from him. When I left, I was Mide, too.”
“You came back to Iron Lake?”
“Two more summers, I journeyed.”
“You were gone for almost ten years?”
Meloux looked up at the moon. The light washed over his face and made me think of a man gazing up through silver water. “When I came back, people on the rez did not recognize me. When they learned I was one of the Midewiwin, they were suspicious of me. They looked at my hair and thought of me in the way white men think of witches. Some Shinnobs still do.”
“You never talked to the police about what Wellington had done?”
“I was a man who had killed three times. I have never told anyone these things until now.”
“And you never tried to find Maria?”
“For half a moon I knew Maria. I loved her. I have never loved another woman. My life, Corcoran O’Connor, has been about something different from that kind of love. For many years, I did not think about her.”
“But you knew you had a son. How?”
“From visions. They began soon after Maria left me.”
“You weren’t curious about your son?”
“I am fortunate. I have often felt guided. If I was not meant to see my son, that was the way of it.”
“Then why this sudden heaviness of heart over him? Why the rush to find him?”
Something splashed in the water a dozen yards out. A fish jumping, maybe, or a muskrat diving. In the moonlight, the place was marked with a circle of black ripples edged with silver.
“I have had visions,” Meloux said. “They have told me my son needs me.”
“Henry, I don’t mean any disrespect, but from the way he looked the last time I saw him, he could have used your help a long time ago. I think it’s too late now.”
“There is a reason for the visions.”
“Well, I’ll be goddamned if I know what that is, Henry.”
“They are not your visions, Corcoran O’Connor. They are not for you to understand. I will talk to him, then I will know.”
“Henry, there’s no way this man is going to talk to you. Christ, he tried to have you killed.”
“I do not believe my son would do that.”
“There’s sure a lot of evidence to the contrary.”
“I will see my son. I will see him with or without your help.”
“You can be exasperating, you know that, Henry?”
“Which is stronger,” the old man said, “the rock or the water? In the end, the rock always washes away.”
“Stow it, Henry. You’ve won. I’ll take you, okay?”
“Migwech,” the old man said.
“We both need rest, Henry. We’ll leave in the morning.”
I heard a car turn off the road, and headlights swept the trees around us.
“Your nephew’s home from the casino,” I said. “Let’s break the news to him.”
Ernie Champoux wasn’t happy, but what could he do? He was just another rock, and Meloux, as always, was the damn water.
* * *
When I pulled onto Gooseberry Lane I could see lights on inside my house. I parked in the driveway and went in through the side door. A couple of plates full of crumbs sat on the kitchen table. On the counter were two glasses filmed with white residue. Cookies and milk. Jo and Jenny had probably enjoyed a little comfort food while they waited for me. The house was quiet. I walked to the living room and found Jo asleep on the sofa. Jenny wasn’t there.
“Jo.” I spoke softly.
Her eyes fluttered open. “Cork?” She sat up. “What time is it?”
“A little after one. Jenny gone to bed?”
She nodded and yawned. Her hair was wild on the side where her head had rested, and there was a red line, from her nose almost to her ear, where her cheek had pressed against the seam of the sofa pillow. It looked like a battle scar. The look she gave me was a little warlike as well.
“Sorry I’m so late,” I said.
“You said you’d be home so we could all talk.”
“Henry had a lot to tell me.”
Despite her irritation, it was clear she was curious about Meloux’s story. “What exactly did he say?”
I told her a briefer version of the story Meloux had told me. Even though the hour was late and she was tired, she listened closely.
“So all this might be about keeping an old crime from coming to light?” she said.
“It could be much larger than that. I’ve been thinking about the mining claim. From what I gathered on the Internet, the wealth of Northern Mining and Manufacturing is based on what came out of that first mine in northwestern Ontario. Could be that a lot of the wealth rightfully belongs to someone else.”
“Any living relatives of the man named Maurice?”
“It’s a possibility. It would sure be a reason to keep Henry from telling his story.”
“What are you going to do?”
I wasn’t looking forward to this part. With all that was going on with Jenny, I knew I needed to be home.
I said, “In the morning, I’m taking Meloux to Thunder Bay to see his son.”
I thought maybe it was because she was tired that Jo didn’t hit me. She weighed the information and nodded. “Before you go, though, we need to sit down and talk with Jenny.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Struggling. Trying to figure this thing out. It’s huge.”
“Jesus, I don’t want it to crush her.”
“She’s strong, Cork.”
“What if she decides to have an abortion?”
“I don’t think she will.”
“And if she decides to keep the baby and raise it alone?”
“She won’t have to do it alone.”
“Oh God, Jo, what if they decide to get married?”
“Then they’ll march down the aisle with all our love behind them.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“None of her choices is easy, but there’s not one of them that’s impossible.”
“Have I told you lately that you’re amazing?”
“Not lately.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want it to go to your head. Should we talk to her now or wait until morning?”
“Morning. She’s pregnant. She needs her sleep.”
“And I’m old,” I said, “and need mine.”
I got up and began to turn out the lights. Another uncomfortable thought occurred to me.
“Have you talked to Sean’s folks?”
“To Virginia. Sean told her everything. Lane doesn’t know yet.”
I could understand. Lane wasn’t an ogre, but I had the feeling he could be unpleasant in a confrontation. Still, he was the father of the young man whose destiny was supposed to have been transforming Pflugleman’s Rexall Drugs into Pflugleman and Son, and it seemed to me he had a right to know what was happening.
When I’d switched off the last of the lights, I put my arm around Jo, and we started up the stairs to bed.
“Cork, I don’t think you and Henry should go to Thunder Bay alone.”
“Don’t worry. I plan on taking backup.”
She didn’t ask who. It may have been because she was too tired. It was more likely that she already knew.
THIRTY-FIVE
Except for Sundays, Johnny Papp opens the door of his Pinewood Broiler in the morning at six sharp.
At five fifty A.M., I found Wally Schanno waiting out front in the cool blue of that summer morning. Those days he was always at the Broiler first thing, waiting for the doors to swing wide and offer him the company of the regulars. His back was to me. He was staring down Oak Street past the dark, locked shops as if he was waiting for something to arrive along that empty pavement.
For better or worse, I was it.
I startled him with a tap on his shou
lder.
He spun around. “Jesus.”
Schanno was a devout Lutheran, Missouri Synod. I’d never heard him say Jesus in quite that way. Arietta’s death continued to work changes in him.
“Sorry, Wally. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. You looked deep in thought.”
“I was just thinking it’s a pretty town. I’ll miss it.”
“Miss it? You’re leaving?”
He was wearing a white-knit golf shirt. He had several more at home in various pastel shades. In their last years together, Arietta had been after him to take up the game as a way of relaxing. The shirts had been just the beginning. She gave him clubs and a bag. He was an atrocious golfer, and he hated the game, but he went out on the links once a week or so anyway because Arietta had done these things for him and he wanted her to know he was grateful. He never told me this. It’s just my interpretation of events.
His big shoulders hunched together, and his huge right hand went to rubbing the back of his neck above the collar of the golf shirt. “I tossed and turned most of last night. My daughter’s been trying to convince me to move to Maryland to be closer to my grandkids. ’Bout three A.M. I decided she was right. Nothing for me here.”
Inside the Broiler the lights went on. I saw Johnny Papp chalking the breakfast special on the blackboard behind the register.
“Not leaving right away are you?” I asked.
Schanno picked up on something in my voice and squinted at me. His eyebrows were nearly white as milkweed fluff.
“What’s up?”
“I’m taking Henry Meloux to Thunder Bay today. I could use your help, if you’re willing.”