Vermilion Drift

TWENTY

On his way to the rez to see Hattie Stillday, Cork made one stop first, at St. Agnes Catholic Church. He found the young priest in his office there, reading a baseball book, The Boys of Summer.

“When I was a kid,” Father Ted Green said, marking his place with a strip torn from an old Sunday bulletin, “I wanted two things: to pitch for the Detroit Tigers and to win the Cy Young Award.”

“What happened?”

The priest touched his collar. “Got called to play for another team with a manager you can’t say no to. That, and I never could deliver a fastball worth squat. What can I do for you, Cork?”

Ted Green was a lanky kid, half a dozen years out of seminary. He’d taken a while to get his feet firmly on the ground with the parishioners of St. Agnes but had proven to be an able administrator, preached a pretty good homily, and represented the Church well in a time when much of the non-Catholic world was suspicious of the Vatican and its clergy. Cork quite liked the guy.

“I’m wondering how difficult it might be to track down one of the priests assigned to St. Agnes years ago, Ted.”

“If he’s still a priest, not hard.”

“If he isn’t?”

“More difficult but not impossible. Care to tell me who?” The priest arched an eyebrow and added, “And I wouldn’t mind knowing why.”

Hattie Stillday was famous and could have been wealthy, except that all her life she’d held to one of the most basic values of the Anishinaabeg: What one possessed, one shared. Hattie was a generous woman. Long before there was a Chippewa Grand Casino bringing in money to underwrite education for kids on the rez, she’d established the Red Schoolhouse Foundation, which helped Shinnob high school grads pay for college. She’d helped build the Nokomis Home and had begun the Iron Lake Indian Arts Council. She lived with her granddaughter, Ophelia, in the same small house in which she’d resided when her alcoholic daughter, Abigail, had run away four decades earlier and had never come home. Except that Abbie hadn’t run away. Or if that had truly been her intention, she hadn’t gone far.

Hattie had decorated her yard and home with artwork by other Indian artists, which she’d acquired over the years. On her lawn, never well kept and chronically crowded with dandelions, stood a tall, rusting iron sculpture meant to represent a quiver full of arrows. There was a chain saw carving, a great section of honey-colored maple topped with a huge bust of makwa, a bear. There were odds and ends that dangled and glittered and made music in the wind.

Cork knocked on the door and got no answer.

“Hey! Cork!”

He turned and spied old Jessup Bliss crossing the street. Because of his arthritic knees, Bliss walked slowly and with a cane.

“Lookin’ for Hattie?” Bliss called out.

“I am, Jess.”

Bliss walked up Hattie’s cracked sidewalk.

“Sheriff’s car was here earlier, looking for her, too, I guess.”

“You tell them anything?”

“Cops? You kiddin’?”

“Know where she is?”

“Sure. Went over to see Henry Meloux, way early this morning. Ain’t come back. Say, true what I heard? Buncha bones in that mine over to the south end of the rez? Buncha dead Shinnobs buried there?”

“It’s true.”

“Son of a bitch.” Bliss spit a fountain of brown tobacco juice into the profusion of dandelions that yellowed Hattie’s yard. “When’ll white folks learn?”

“Learn what, Jess?”

“Us Indians are like them dandelions there. Don’t matter what you do to get rid of us, we just keep comin’ back.”

Cork cut across the rez on back roads and parked at the double-trunk birch that marked the trail to Meloux’s cabin on Crow Point. Hattie Stillday’s dusty pickup was parked there, too. He locked the Land Rover and began a hike through the pines. He’d been down this path so often and was, at the moment, so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t see the beauty of that place. Thin reeds of sunlight plunged through the canopy of evergreen, and if Cork had taken even a moment to see, he would have realized they were like stalks whose flowers blossomed high above the trees. A moment to listen and he’d have heard the saw of insect wings and the cry of birds and the susurrus of wind, which was the music of unspoiled wilderness. A moment to feel and he’d have been aware of the soft welcome of the deep bed of pine needles beneath his feet. But all the confusion, the bizarre nature of the puzzle he was trying to solve, made him deaf and blind.

Then he stopped, brought up suddenly in the middle of a stand of aspens by the intoxicating fragrance of wild lily of the valley, a scent that reached beyond his thinking. In the mysterious and immediate way that smell connects to memory, he was suddenly transported to a summer day nearly fifty years in the past.

He was walking the trail with his father, headed toward Meloux’s cabin, feeling happy and safe. He recalled his father’s long, steady stride. He remembered watching that tall, wonderful man float through shafts of sunlight, illuminated in moments of gold. And he remembered how his father had stopped and waited and lifted him effortlessly onto his broad shoulders, and they’d moved together among the trees like one tall being.

As quickly as it had come, the moment passed, and Cork found himself once again a man older than his father had ever been, alone on the trail. He stood paralyzed, wracked by terrible uncertainty. How could the man in that moment of golden memory have been the same man who knew about the hidden entrance to Vermilion One, whose sidearm had been a murder weapon, and yet who’d claimed bafflement at the Vanishings? How could he be the same man whom Cork, in his nightmares, had pushed again and again to his death?

Meloux wasn’t at his cabin, but Rainy Bisonette was. She came to the door holding a book in her hand. She didn’t seem particularly happy to see him. Meloux, she said, was with someone at the moment and couldn’t be disturbed. Cork looked toward the rock outcroppings near the shoreline of Iron Lake and saw smoke rising beyond them. Without another word, he started in the direction of the smoke.

“Wait!” Rainy called. “Damn it, come back.”

He found Hattie Stillday and Meloux sitting at the fire ring, burning sage and cedar. At his approach, they looked up, but neither of them showed any emotion.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Henry,” Rainy said at Cork’s back. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“Let him come,” Meloux said. “What is it that cannot wait, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“I have something I need to tell Hattie.”

“Then tell her.”

Cork walked forward and knelt before the old woman. “Hattie, they’ve been able to identify most of the remains found in the Vermilion Drift. They’re certain one of the victims is your daughter, Abbie.”

Her look didn’t change, not in the least. No surprise, no shock, not even the specter of sadness. And Cork realized that she already knew. How? Had Meloux, in that inexplicable way of knowing, understood the truth and revealed it to her? Had the news somehow reached the rez telegraph and traveled, as it often did, with unbelievable speed? Or-and this came to Cork in a sudden rush that nearly knocked him over-had she known from the beginning? Had Meloux?

“What’s going on, Hattie?” She didn’t answer and Cork addressed Meloux. “What the hell is going on, Henry?”

“You are intruding here, Corcoran O’Connor.”

“I need answers.”

“No, you want answers,” Meloux said. “Need is a different animal.”

“What are you hiding? What are you all hiding?”

Their eyes lay on Cork like winter stones.

“I’ll find the truth, Henry, wherever it’s hidden.”

“The truth is not hidden, Corcoran O’Connor. It has never been hidden. You simply are not yet ready to see it.”

“Jesus Christ. For once, can you cut all the mystic bullshit, Henry, and just tell me straight-out what’s going on?”

“Leave,” Meloux said, firmly but without harshness. “Your anger disturbs this place.”

“Anger, Henry? You haven’t seen my anger yet.” Cork turned and began to march away.

“I have seen your anger,” Meloux said at his back. “More than forty years ago I saw it in another man who was not yet ready to understand the truth.”

Because he didn’t care what Meloux had to say, Cork gave no sign that he’d heard. He walked away from the circle of stones, from the fire at its heart, from the cleansing smoke of the cedar and sage, and from the man who held to the truth like a miser to his money.