Red Knife

  Behind the mission, bordered by a wrought-iron fence, was a cemetery begun when the mission was first built. It was an assortment of gravestones, chiseled markers, crudely wood-burned plaques, and crosses. There were also a number of grave houses, which were low wooden structures built over the burial plots, an old Ojibwe tradition. Two open graves lay waiting to be filled. On the following afternoon, the bodies of Alexander and Rayette Kingbird would do the filling.

  Cork leaned against the fence. The afternoon was sunny and warm. He wrapped his hands around the top rail and felt all the heat the black iron had absorbed. It was from the sun, of course, but he knew it could just as well have come from the fire of the collective anger contained in the burial ground. So much death dealt out so unfairly, betrayal in every form—hunger, disease, outright murder. His grandmother’s people were interred here, and their blood ran hot in his veins. Still, he was more Irish than Ojibwe, and he observed that his own shadow lay outside the fence. It was only because of the angle of the sun, but in that convergence of circumstance, he saw the accusation that had dogged him all his life. In Tamarack County, a place where history was a litany of lies and a long saga of distrust, he was considered neither Ojibwe nor really white. He understood that he would always stand outside the fence.

  He left the mission, drove a quarter mile east, and turned onto an old logging road overgrown with timothy grass and wild oats. The road cut along a ridge that overlooked the clearing. He pulled to the side, parked, and grabbed his binoculars from the back of the Bronco. He climbed to the top of the ridge, which was thick with second-growth jack pines. The mission was clearly visible, a small white box in the middle of a field of green. A single road—Mission Road—bisected the clearing. West, the direction from which Cork had come, the road led toward Allouette. East, it headed toward the back side of the Sawbill Mountains, where it dead-ended in difficult bog country. He lifted his field glasses and was able easily to follow the gravel road west about a mile, where it curved out of sight among the pines. The dust kicked up by his Bronco still hung, ghostlike, in the corridor that ran between the distant trees. East, the road ran straight and he could see even farther. He swung the lenses toward the mission. The open graves of the cemetery were like black eyes staring back.

  The clearing was empty now, but tomorrow it would be filled with people from the rez. Cork wouldn’t be among them. He’d be up there on that ridge with his binoculars.

  Take a hawk’s-eye view, Meloux had advised.

  White men didn’t have a name for the ridge, but the Ojibwe did. They called it Kakaik after the great war chief. It was the name Alexander Kingbird had taken when he formed the Red Boyz, a name with a simple meaning: Hawk.

  Jo poured water into the coffeemaker on the counter. She kept her back to Cork.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was on the rez, out of cell phone range, otherwise I’d have been there, you know that.”

  “I didn’t need you there, Cork. I told you last night I’d take Stevie to Dr. Barron.” Her spine was an iron pole. “That’s not the point, anyway. The point is that I worried myself sick when I couldn’t get hold of you to tell you what the doctor said. I saw you lying dead out there somewhere with your back torn open just like the Kingbirds.”

  “I’m sorry, Jo.”

  “But not sorry enough to step back from this whole Kingbird mess, huh?” She turned and gave him a look that could have frozen fire. “How’d you sleep last night?”

  “Restless.”

  “Restless?” She almost laughed. “I don’t think I slept at all.”

  They stared across a silence that lay between them. Finally Cork said, “Where’s Annie?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “What did she have to say?”

  “Not a lot. She shoved the Shaw boy. He hit his head and bled all over everything. She’s been suspended from school and from softball.”

  “Ouch. What did the Shaw kid do that made her shove him?”

  “Why don’t you go up and get the story from her yourself.”

  He walked out of the kitchen.

  “Would you like some coffee when it’s ready?” Jo called to him.

  “Yeah, save me a cup, thanks.”

  “I’ll be glad to bring it up.”

  He paused in the dining room and turned back. Through the doorway, he could see her standing at the counter. The offer to bring his coffee to him upstairs was, he understood, a small bridge across the chasm that had been her anger.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’d like that.”

  He found Annie in her room, lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Her leather ball glove was on her left hand. In her right was an old softball, scuffed and dirty. She didn’t see her father at first. Cork stood in the hallway just outside her room, watching her toss the softball and catch it in her mitt. She was a slender young woman, with red hair that was often untamed and a face that freckled significantly in summer.

  “Hey, slugger. Hear you did some damage today,” he said.

  She took the glove off, nestled the softball in its palm, and set it on the bed beside her. “It was an accident.”

  “The damage maybe. How about the shove?”

  “What did Mom tell you?”

  “Not much. I’m mostly in the dark.”

  He strolled in and sat next to her. She stared at her left hand, which looked so much smaller now that her big glove was gone.

  “What’s the story?” he said.

  “Allan Richards started giving Uly Kingbird a lot of crap. You know, about his brother and all. It was pretty hurtful stuff. Uly finally lit into him. Richards is way bigger, so I went over to, I don’t know, try to help somehow. A couple of other guys stepped in to stop me. Shaw was one of them. I tried to get around him. He shoved me. I shoved him back and he went down. That’s about all there is to it.”

  “Except for the gallon of blood he lost.”

  “Yeah, except for that.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Huh?”

  “About the whole situation,” he said.

  “I probably shouldn’t have shoved him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess you shouldn’t respond to violence with violence?”

  “That’s a question.”

  Annie dumped the softball out and slid her glove back onto her hand. She gave the leather palm a couple of hard thumps with her fist.

  “The truth is, I don’t know that I’d do anything different,” she finally said. “Those guys were total jerks.”

  “Okay. As long as you’re willing to accept the consequences. Your mother told me you’ve been suspended from school and from the softball team.”

  Her eyes narrowed in anger. “That part’s unfair.”

  “School or the softball team?”

  “Softball.”

  “Are you suspended permanently?”

  “I can’t play in the game on Friday. Winning the conference depends on this one. So if we lose, it’s as good as permanent.”

  “I’m sorry, kiddo. That’s hard, but under the circumstances, understandable.”

  She didn’t respond for a minute. Finally she said grudgingly, “I suppose it’s like you said. If I think it was the right thing to do, I need to accept the consequences.” She picked up the softball and slapped it into her glove. “I just wish I’d done some damage to Allan Richards while I was at it.”

  Cork couldn’t help smiling. “So how did Uly do with the Richards kid?”

  “He had him for a while, but Allan’s a lot bigger. Kind of a David and Goliath thing, only Uly didn’t have a slingshot. Am I, like, grounded or anything?”

  “I’ll talk to your mom, but I think missing the playoff game is enough.” He stood up. “Your mom and I are going to the visitation for the Kingbirds tonight. You want to come?”

  “Yes, thanks. Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When I was a kid and I had to take the garbage out at
night, I was scared sometimes that there were things hiding in the bushes. You know, monsters and stuff. I was always sure they were going to jump out and get me.”

  “What about it?”

  “That’s how I feel right now. Not about me specifically, but about everybody and everything here. It feels like there’s something scary hiding in the bushes, you know what I mean? I keep thinking that any moment it’s going to leap out and . . . I don’t know what exactly, but I’m kind of afraid.”

  She looked up at him as if she expected her father to put her fear to rest.

  Cork gave her the only thing he had, which was company in her concern. “Hell, Annie, I’d be a liar if I said I wasn’t scared, too.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The visitation was held at Nelson’s Funeral Home. Annie had been there over the years for other visitations and memorial services. Also, when she was a sophomore, she’d gone on a field trip organized by her biology teacher, Mr. Dexter, an odd man, short and balding, full of gruesome stories about the strange parasites he’d seen inhabit people’s bodies when he was a Peace Corps worker somewhere in Indonesia. The mortician had taken the class on a tour of the prep room, explaining how he prepared a body for burial and showing them the instruments and the bottles of chemicals. It had seemed alien and cruel and unnecessary to Annie. Why not simply let go of the body in the same way the spirit did?

  Nelson’s was one of the nicest of the old houses in Aurora. Bigger, more luxurious homes had been built on Iron Lake, but Nelson’s, with its gingerbread trim, its wraparound porch, and its cupola, seemed elegant in a way that suggested there was some sort of etiquette to the aftermath of dying. The biological stuff of body preparation Annie could do without, but some of the traditions that accompanied death felt right, like the visitation. Gathering to offer comfort and to remember the life that had gone before the death seemed fundamental and natural to a transition that Annie thought was probably more difficult for the living than for the dead.

  Annie and her family paused at the door to the room where the visitation was in progress. On the tour she’d taken, the mortician said that it had once been a grand dining room and held a table that could have easily seated twenty. Now it contained two dark-wood caskets placed side by side, a number of flower arrangements, several photographic memorials that had been created on poster boards and positioned on display tripods in the corners of the room, and a lot of people talking quietly. Her mother signed the guest register while her father wrote a check to the St. Agnes Early Education Fund, which the Kingbirds had designated for memorial contributions.

  Annie went on ahead. Across the room, Uly stood peering at one of the poster memorials. She wandered over, but he was so intent he didn’t notice her. He seemed to be focused on a photograph of him and Alexander standing together on a white diving raft in the middle of a lake. Uly was short and skinny; Alexander was much taller, much older, a young teenager with a developing physique. He wore a broad smile. Uly stared warily at the camera, as if he was on a raft drifting out to sea.

  “Where was it taken?” Annie asked.

  “North Carolina, I think. Lejeune,” Uly said. “Probably just after we moved there.”

  “Alexander looks happy. You look like you just lost your pet turtle.”

  “Alex liked moving. He was good at it. Dad would get a new posting, we’d hit a new base, a new town, and Alex was out the door getting to know the place, the people. Charisma. He had it in spades.”

  “You didn’t like moving?”

  Uly shook his head. “Staying in one place seemed better. Safer. Till we moved here.” He thought a moment, then smiled. “Alex got us kicked out of base housing once.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not sure exactly. It involved a cherry bomb, a bag of dog crap, and the base commander. Alex was never much impressed by authority. It was the only time Dad ever hit him. Slapped him across the face.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “That part I remember.” He turned to her. “Sorry about today.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. I really like the way you lit into Allan Richards. He’s such an asshole.”

  “I wanted to kill him,” Uly said. “If I’d had a gun, he’d be dead.”

  The pupils of Uly’s eyes were a swirl of green, and what Annie saw in them made her think of the threatening look of the sky before a hailstorm. She struggled to find a way to help him out of the dark hole into which he seemed to be sliding. “I’ve been thinking. What if we did another piece for church? Everyone loved what we did last Sunday.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t have to give me an answer right away.”

  “He just did.”

  Annie turned and found Darrell Gallagher at her shoulder. He was dressed, as usual, entirely in black, which should have been appropriate for the occasion, but somehow felt instead like an insult. The sly smile on his face made everything about him feel off.

  “You have an annoying habit, Gallagher, of butting in on other people’s conversations.”

  “And you have an annoying habit, O’Connor, of breathing,” he shot back.

  “Think about it, Uly,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. He turned away in Gallagher’s company and drifted off. Why did Uly hang with someone like Gallagher? she wondered. But she knew the answer: Being alone was worse.

  “Are they in there?” Stevie asked. He nodded toward the polished, closed caskets at the other end of the room. His black eyes and the bandage over his nose made him look like he’d gone through hell, which he had. Jo had taken him to see Dr. Barron that morning, and the repair procedure had been scheduled for Thursday. At the moment, Stevie didn’t seem much bothered by his broken nose.

  “Not them,” Cork said. “Only their bodies.”

  “I know that. Their souls are gone and stuff. I meant are their bodies really in there? It’s not just for show?”

  “They’re really in there. Why wouldn’t they be?”

  “They were pretty messed up, right?”

  “That’s probably one of the reasons the caskets are closed.”

  Stevie stared at the two coffins as if trying to imagine Alexander and Rayette Kingbird lying inside on the soft satin, their bodies ripped apart by buckshot.

  Lucinda Kingbird stood near the caskets talking with a constant stream of people. Cork spotted Will Kingbird standing alone a good distance from his wife, his hands clasped behind him, looking like a soldier at parade rest. Although he’d been born and raised on the Iron Lake Reservation, he hadn’t made an effort to reconnect with his Ojibwe roots when he returned to Tamarack County. The Shinnobs who’d come to the visitation, Rayette’s relatives mostly, spoke to him only a moment before moving on. It was the same with the others who’d come, many of whom were parishioners from St. Agnes. Kingbird wasn’t the kind of man who invited long conversations.

  “See Annie by the poster board over there?” Cork said to his son. “Why don’t you go keep her company for a few minutes?”

  Once Stevie had gone, Cork headed toward Kingbird.

  “Will,” he said in greeting.

  They shook hands, firmly and briefly.

  “I just want to say how sorry I am about Alexander and Rayette.”

  Kingbird’s eyes were dark—his Anishinaabe heritage—and they were difficult to read. Also an Anishinaabe trait. But there was something that made Kingbird’s eyes different from other Shinnobs. The Anishinaabeg loved to laugh, and in their eyes there was always a spark of humor. Not in Kingbird’s eyes.

  “You know,” Kingbird said, “you were probably the last person to see Alex alive.”

  “No, that would have been whoever killed him.”

  “I can tell you who killed him. Buck Reinhardt.”

  “A lot of good law enforcement people are looking hard at that possibility, Will, and they’re not finding any evidence.”

  “Looking hard? An investigator name of Rutledge came to my shop yesterday. I told him about the customized Ro
bar shotgun I sold Reinhardt. He said there wasn’t much they could do with that. Said you can’t prove anything with buckshot the way you can with a bullet. He told me Elise Reinhardt swears her husband was home when Alex was killed. Know what I told him? Give me an hour with Reinhardt and I’d get the truth out of the son of a bitch.”

  “This isn’t that kind of war.”

  “Once the shooting starts, there’s only one kind of war.”

  Cork kept his voice low, not wanting to disturb the others at the visitation, and said, “Will, I’m sorry about what’s happened, I really am, but I don’t think it helps to think of any of this in military absolutes.”

  “I’ll tell you about the military. When I was a kid, didn’t matter if I did a thing right. If my old man had it in his head to hit me, he’d hit me. The corps, you do a thing right, it means something and they remember. You think I’m rigid. I think I’m consistent. I see the world in terms of consistency. Reinhardt killing my son is entirely consistent with the man Buck Reinhardt has always been.”

  “I’m not going to disagree with you, Will, but your thinking seems a little narrow to me. Reinhardt wasn’t Alex’s only enemy.”

  “He’s had enemies for a long time. It wasn’t until Buck Reinhardt lost his daughter that somebody killed him. You’re going to tell me that doesn’t prove anything. That’s because you see yourself as a reasonable man and reasonable men don’t rush to judgment. You have any idea how many times I’ve seen reasonable men stand by and do nothing while the worst shit you can imagine goes down?”

  Cork didn’t reply. His attention had been grabbed by a contingent of the Red Boyz who’d appeared in the hallway outside the viewing room. He knew them all: Tom Blessing, Daniel Hart, Elgin Many-penny, Rennie Decouteau, Jessie Hanks, and Bobby Oakgrove. Most were young, eighteen or nineteen. They’d dressed neatly, in clean dark pants, white shirts, some colorful vests. They all wore their hair long. Some had braided it, others let it fall loose beneath a leather band or a folded bandanna bound about their heads and adorned with an eagle feather. In the Ojibwe culture of long ago, the eagle feather signified that a warrior had killed another in battle. What it meant to the Red Boyz, Cork didn’t know.