Purgatory Ridge

  Near the end of the discussion that, in typical Ojibwe fashion, had gone on for hours, George LeDuc summed up the proposed position of the Iron Lake Ojibwe.

  “We will issue a statement.” He looked toward Jo, who, they all understood, would draft the wording. “We will say that we are not responsible for this violence. In no way do we condone it. We are, and always have been, committed to a solution based on the law. This Eco-Warrior doesn’t act for the Iron Lake Anishinaabeg.” His dark eyes moved around the table and were met with nods of approval. Until they fell on Isaiah Broom.

  “Bullshit,” Broom said.

  George LeDuc crossed his big arms. “You could’ve said that real easy before, Isaiah. Instead, this whole time you sat there all wood eyed like some kind of decoy duck.”

  “Wouldn’t have done any good to talk, George,” Broom said. “You knew the outcome before you called us here. We all did.” He stood up, all six feet four inches and two hundred sixty pounds of him. Although he was a logger, one of many independent Ojibwe contractors, he was a man deeply committed to observing and preserving Anishinaabe traditions. He’d run against George LeDuc for the position of council chairman, but his passionate—some said militant—rhetoric on many of the issues had ultimately worked against him. He was not yet forty, but his broad face was lined in such a way that he looked much older. He wore a black ball cap over long black hair that was pulled back in a braid. He had on a black T-shirt with HONOR TREATY RIGHTS printed in white across the chest. “What you’re all worried about but ashamed to admit is the casino,” he charged. “You’re worried about pissing off the white people who might decide not to come and throw away their money.”

  “We’re businesspeople, Isaiah,” LeDuc reminded him. “We’ve got to consider the impact of all this on the casino business. But that’s not our only concern, and you know it.”

  “You want to know what that casino is?” Broom took a moment for his eyes to encounter every face in the room. “A blanket with smallpox.”

  He shoved his chair back and slowly walked the length of the room. Through the long windows, a playground was visible. Half a dozen children were playing in the morning sunlight.

  “That casino kills us,” Isaiah Broom went on. “It makes us weak and afraid to fight like warriors for the things sacred to us. There is a warrior out there right now and he is doing what we should be doing. We should embrace him. We should honor him. But here we are, ready to condemn him. Once, we were a people not afraid to fight with our bodies. For too long now we have fought only with words. We’ve crouched like cowards behind the false shield of laws we didn’t make but must obey.” He leveled an unkind gaze on Jo. “We have become just like the enemy.”

  “There’s no enemy here,” Heidi Baudette said, “except foolish action.”

  “Foolish? To act like a warrior is foolish?”

  George LeDuc responded, “To call up the ghost of a time none of us remember and can’t bring back anyway is about as useful as offering us all an empty quiver, Isaiah. Things change. The People have changed. We’re still warriors in the sacred fight to protect Grandmother Earth, but we fight as modern Shinnobs with the weapons Kitchimanidoo has given us—our brains, our determination, and our friendship with those who understand and use the law on our behalf.”

  “The law,” Broom said coldly. “The white man’s law is like the Windigo. You all know the Windigo. A cannibal with a heart of ice that feeds on the Anishinaabe people. And you remember how to kill the Windigo? A man must become a Windigo, too. If it is one of the People who did this thing at Lindstrom’s, then I am proud, because it means we have a Windigo on our side.”

  Thomas Whitefeather shook his head. His face was dark and wrinkled as a dry tobacco leaf. In his early years, he’d been a trapper; later, he’d been a photographer who’d chronicled Ojibwe life until arthritis crippled him so badly he could barely walk. “Sometimes, Isaiah, you remind me of a cicada. A very big sound from a very small thing.” With a gnarled finger, he tapped his forehead.

  Broom saw that others in the room were smiling at the old man’s remark. He looked as if he were about to snap at Whitefeather, but respect restrained him. He returned to his chair and sat erect and silent as the council voted to issue a statement disassociating the Iron Lake Ojibwe from the action at Lindstrom’s. Although Broom’s was the only vote against, Jo could tell by the looks on the faces of some of the council members that they believed there was a good deal of truth in the words Broom had spoken. Broom held back as the other council members left. He looked across the table at Jo.

  “You know the law, but you don’t understand war,” he told her.

  “What I understand about war,” Jo said, “is that usually a lot of innocent people end up hurt. I don’t think anyone wants this to become a war, Isaiah.”

  “This is already a war. The innocent are already dying. The problem is that you close your eyes to the reality. Trees are slaughtered every day. The water is poisoned. Our food kills us. And instead of fighting back like warriors, we cringe behind laws you claim will protect us.”

  “The law does protect.” But even as she said it, she knew the truth was not that easy. The law often failed those who needed it most. In the history of the Ojibwe Anishinaabe people, the law had more often been their enemy than it had been their friend.

  Broom threw his hands up as if he were arguing with a child. He rose and headed toward the door, where George LeDuc stood watching. As he passed LeDuc, Broom said, “The council doesn’t speak for all the Shinnobs on the rez. If Charlie Warren had been here, his voice would have been loud, and the others, they would have listened. He’s a man who understands what it is to be Anishinaabe, understands our sacred duty to Grandmother Earth.”

  “Charlie Warren wasn’t here,” George LeDuc pointed out. “But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. We would have listened to him with great respect, and we would have done what we did, because it was the right thing.”

  “One way or another,” Broom declared, “Our Grandfathers will be protected.”

  “Isaiah,” Jo called to him.

  He turned back.

  “Be careful who you say that to. Advice from someone who knows the law.”

  He only stared at her, and she knew that to Isaiah Broom her counsel was useless.

  By late afternoon, Jo and George LeDuc had agreed on the wording of the statement, which LeDuc issued to the press on behalf of the Iron Lake Ojibwe. The sun in the western sky was copper colored as Jo headed home, and everything around her was cast in a hard copper hue. She switched on the radio and listened to the five-o’clock news. Forest fires burned out of control. The blaze near Saganaga Lake was worsening. Firefighters from as far away as Montana and Maine were prepared to fly in to help if requested. Jo had never seen a summer like this. She wondered if anyone had.

  The house felt empty when she stepped inside. The window air conditioners were on, and the cool of the living room was a relief. She set her briefcase beside the door.

  “Hello!” she called. “Anybody home? Rose?”

  “In here!”

  Jo headed to the kitchen.

  Rose stood at the sink washing fruit. She wore white shorts and a sleeveless white blouse. Her feet were bare. A glass of iced tea sat on the counter beside her, dewy drops trickling down the sides.

  “Too hot to cook, so I’m just going to fix up a big fruit salad for dinner.” When she saw Jo, she stopped preparing the fruit and wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “You look absolutely beat. How about some iced tea?”

  “Milk and cookies is what I need.”

  “Sit down. I’ll get it.”

  Rose pulled a couple of her homemade cookies from a cookie jar shaped like Sesame Street’s Ernie. She took out a half gallon of Meadowgold from the refrigerator and poured milk into a blue plastic glass. She brought them to the kitchen table and sat down with Jo. “Talk to me,” she said.

  Jo knew that on the outside, it probably appeared to folks i
n Aurora that Rose had given up her life for others—first for their mother during the seven years between the stroke that left her paralyzed on her left side and the stroke that killed her, and then for Jo and Cork and the children. Sometimes Jo felt guilty because the presence of Rose in the house made her own professional life so much easier. But in truth, she’d never felt any bitterness from her sister, never any regret. Rose seemed to be the robust embodiment of an enviable and endearing goodwill, a personal grace that was certainly deepened by her spirituality but had, in fact, always been there. Rose never seemed empty, never unable to give. To the church, to the community, to Jenny and Annie and Stevie, whom she hadn’t birthed but had certainly nurtured. With the children, Rose had a special bond. Often Jo came into a room—usually the kitchen—and found her sister in quiet conference with one of them. The talk ceased the moment Jo entered, and she understood that Rose was a confidant to the children in a way that she, as their parent, could never be. And Jo knew there was no one Cork admired more than Rose.

  She ate her cookies and sipped her milk and told Rose everything—the bombing, the body, the council meeting. Finally she confessed to Rose her concern that Cork might consider running for sheriff again.

  “What are you afraid of?” Rose asked. “Really?”

  Jo stared at the crumbs on her plate. “I like things the way they are right now. I don’t want anything to change. We seem to be heading toward happiness again.”

  Rose waited, her wide, freckled face full of calm.

  “I feel like we’re all still wounded,” Jo stumbled on. “I think we need more time to heal.”

  “Does Cork know how you feel?”

  Jo got up and carried her glass to the sink.

  “You haven’t told him,” Rose surmised.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  They heard the front door open and the sound of Stevie’s laughter. A moment later Cork and Stevie came into the kitchen, Stevie holding up proudly a string full of sunnies.

  “Look what I caught.”

  “Wonderful,” Rose said. “Where are you going with them?”

  “To clean them,” Stevie replied.

  “Not in my kitchen. Downstairs to the basement. You can use the laundry sink.”

  “Come on, buddy.” Cork opened the basement door and followed Stevie down.

  Rose smiled after them, then turned to her sister. “This family means too much to him. He wouldn’t do anything that would jeopardize it. Just talk to him.” Rose returned to washing the fruit.

  Jo headed upstairs to change her clothes. In a few minutes, Cork stepped in. She could smell the fish on him all the way across the room.

  “How’d it go on the rez?” he asked. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it into a wicker hamper near the closet.

  Jo sat on the bed and bent down to buckle her sandals. “We put together a statement denying any connection with the Army of the Earth or any knowledge about Eco-Warrior. We criticized the action. And we did our best to distance the Iron Lake Ojibwe from any threat of violence over Our Grandfathers.”

  “How’d Charlie Warren take that?”

  “He wasn’t there. But Isaiah Broom had a huge problem with it.”

  “That’s because he probably is this Eco-Warrior.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “Who’s joking?” Cork dropped his jeans and reached into the dresser for some shorts.

  “You wouldn’t be saying that if you were sheriff.”

  “No?”

  Jo stood up. “You’d be reserving judgment until you had more facts. Even then you’d say it was up to the court to decide guilt or innocence.”

  “But I’m not the sheriff anymore.” He grabbed a red T-shirt and tugged it on.

  They were at the edge of a subject they never talked about—the events that surrounded Cork’s fall from grace in Aurora. To talk would risk opening old wounds, discussing events that had hurt them terribly, that had nearly torn them apart. Although Jo felt all these things constantly between them, dark and restless, she was afraid that to look at the past straight-on might be deadly to her marriage. Cork had never seemed eager to talk either, and Jo believed his own silence on the subject of their past indiscretions meant a mutual—though unspoken—agreement not to dwell on hurtful history.

  “I’m going to go down and give Rose a hand with dinner,” she said. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Annie came in the front door. “Where’s Jenny?” Jo asked.

  “Sean showed up at Sam’s Place. He said he’d help her close and then bring her home.”

  Sean was Jenny’s boyfriend. Jo knew Cork had a grudging liking for the boy and didn’t mind his dropping by to give Jenny a hand.

  “Mom,” Annie asked, “did Dad tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “We almost had a fight at Sam’s Place today. Dad broke it up, and some people there asked Dad to run for sheriff.”

  “People?”

  “Yeah, like party bigwigs or something.”

  “They want your father to run for sheriff?”

  “Yeah. Pretty cool, huh? Where’s Aunt Rose?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  Annie made a beeline in that direction.

  Jo was waiting at the bottom of the stairs when Cork came down. “Could we talk? In my office?”

  Although Jo practiced out of an office in the Aurora Professional Building, she maintained a casual office at home as well. Cork followed down the hallway and looked at her with apprehension when she closed the door behind them.

  “Annie told me there was some trouble at Sam’s Place,” she said.

  Cork sat on the edge of her desk. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  “She also said some people talked to you about running for sheriff.”

  “Yes.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “After I’d thought about it some.”

  “This morning, you promised me we’d think through something like this together.” She could feel the anger rising, her voice growing taut. She didn’t want to be that way, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself.

  Cork’s response was edged with anger, too. “I told you we’d talk before I decided anything, and I haven’t decided anything.”

  “Cork—” she began, but before she could finish the phone rang. They both looked at it. It stopped immediately, which meant someone else in the house had answered.

  She moved away from the door, her eyes scanning the shelves of law books that lined the walls. No answer there, she knew. She wanted to walk toward Cork, to put herself nearer to him, but there was something unyielding inside her that kept her from it.

  “I just…” She faltered, tried again. “I’m just afraid—”

  A knock at the door interrupted her. “Mom.” It was Annie, speaking from the other side. “The phone’s for you.”

  “Can you take a message?” Jo called back.

  “It’s Sheriff Schanno. It sounds important.”

  “I’ll take it in here, honey.”

  Jo headed to the desk. Cork moved himself out of the way.

  “Yes, Wally?” She listened a moment. “You’re sure?” A moment more. She closed her eyes. “I understand. And thanks.” She hung up.

  “What is it?” Cork asked.

  “They’ve positively identified the body at Lind-strom’s.”

  “Who is it?”

  Jo took a deep breath. “Charlie Warren.”

  7

  DURING SUMMER IN THE NORTH COUNTRY, the sun seemed to linger forever. The light near dusk was like one final exhalation that breathed gold onto the pines and tamaracks, the birch and aspen, and everything seemed to hold very still as the sun let out its long last breath. Cork loved summer evenings in Tamarack County, loved those moments when the earth itself seemed to pause in its turning. Yet, as he drove to the Lindstrom mill and saw the light on the trees and heard the hush of the woods, inside he felt none of the serenity these things normally broug
ht to him.

  Jo hadn’t wanted him to come, but he’d made her understand there was no way she could keep him from it. She hadn’t said a word the whole way. Outside the gates of the mill, a few protestors still lingered. They sat comfortably on canvas chairs and talked, their protest signs lying in the long rye grass beside them. Cork recognized the kid who’d been at Sam’s Place and the woman with the cane who’d accompanied him. Isaiah Broom was there, too. They stopped their talk as Cork drove by, and they eyed him as if he were the enemy.

  Gil Singer, the deputy at the gate, let them through easily. As he had earlier that day, Cork parked beside the Land Cruiser Wally Schanno drove. There were a few other vehicles, mostly county sheriff’s cars. The mill seemed pretty much deserted. Schanno stood near the burned-out cab of the logging rig. He was leaning a bit, and he reminded Cork of a stiff old tree in a hard wind. As Cork approached with Jo, he saw that, in fact, Schanno was bent to listen. From beneath the blackened chassis, two legs protruded.

  Cork started toward the rig, but a voice behind him called him back.

  “Can’t go there, O’Connor.” Karl Lindstrom was wearing the same clothes he’d worn that morning. He looked beat. His eyes were deep-sunk in their sockets. His stiff, military bearing had wilted visibly. “Nobody goes beyond this point except the police.”

  Schanno looked up and, seeing the small gathering, came over. “Cork, Jo.”

  “Long day, Wally,” Cork said.

  “Yeah.” Schanno looked over the burned area in back of him. “Had my men out here most of it, and Alf Murray’s volunteers, doing a quadrant search.”

  “Did you find anything?” Jo asked.

  “Lots of pieces of things.”

  “No other explosive devices?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God for that,” Lindstrom said. “But I’ve still got to shut the mill down for a couple of days at least until they’ve finished with the investigation and we can get this mess cleaned up.”

  Cork turned back toward Schanno. “Quick ID on the body, Wally.”