Vermilion Drift

TWENTY-SIX

In October 1964, the Summer Olympics were held in Tokyo. In that same month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize. The St. Louis Cardinals became World Champions, beating the heavily favored New York Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. China detonated its first nuclear weapon. The Star of India was stolen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Nikita Krushchev was removed as leader of the Soviet Union.

And in October 1964, Cork O’Connor lost his father.

In his memory, his life until then had been happy. But one cool fall day, when the oak leaves were a stunning russet against a startling blue sky, when the cry of migrating Canada geese chorused over Iron Lake, when the evening air was full of the scent of woodsmoke curling from the chimneys of Aurora, everything changed. Changed over the course of a few hours. Changed, in fact, in a single instant. Changed forever with the final beat of his father’s heart.

It had begun with a shoot-out. Cork’s father and a deputy had responded to an alarm at the First Citizen’s Bank, where three inmates who’d escaped from Stillwater Prison were attempting a robbery as they fled toward Canada. During the exchange of gunfire that erupted, a deaf old lady, a cantankerous woman notorious for yelling at children trespassing on her precious lawn, wandered into the line of fire outside the bank. Cork’s father left the cover of the Buick that shielded him to pull the old woman to safety. In those few moments of exposure, a bullet from a stolen deer rifle pierced his heart.

He didn’t die immediately. He lingered for several hours, unconscious, with his wife and son at the side of his hospital bed. The doctor, a good man named Congreve, didn’t have the ability to mend a heart torn by a bullet designed to bring down a deer and gave them no hope. Cork’s mother had prayed, prayed desperately. Although Cork had said prayers with her, they were empty words. As soon as the doctor had proclaimed that there was no hope, young Cork O’Connor had closed his heart in the way he might have closed a door to an empty room.

It took him a while to absorb the full impact of his father’s death. He was numb for days, numb during the funeral, numb at the site of the open grave, numb to the words of consolation, numb to his mother’s grief. For a long time he felt nothing, neither joy nor sadness nor fear nor hope.

That year in mid-November, he helped Sam Winter Moon close up Sam’s Place. The trees by then were bare things, wet, black skeletons in the drizzle of the bleak season. Sam had been his father’s good friend, and as he and Cork put plywood over the serving windows of the Quonset hut, he talked about Liam O’Connor.

“You know,” Sam said around a nail gripped in his teeth, “that man could outfart a draft horse. Hold your side up a little higher, Cork.” He took the nail from between his teeth and positioned it.

Cork thought it a little unseemly, speaking of his father that way, but he held his tongue.

“We were canoeing once up on Angle Lake. Came around a point, headed for the next portage. There not five feet away was a bull moose, munching on lakeweed. We startled him as much as he startled us. That animal lowered his head and was about to do real damage to our canoe and probably to us in the bargain. Your father, he farts and it’s like cannon fire. Echoes off the trees. Sends a tidal wave across the lake. Scares the crap out of that bull moose. The critter turns and hightails it.” Sam was laughing hard enough that he couldn’t hammer. He leaned against the Quonset hut for support and finished, breathless, “And then your father, he says, ‘I just hope we don’t run into a bear, Sam. I’m clean outta ammo.’”

Cork stood holding up his side of the plywood, watching Sam Winter Moon laugh heartily.

“It’s okay, Cork,” Sam said. “It’s okay to laugh. It was something your father loved to do.”

And Cork did laugh. He laughed so hard tears began to squeeze from his eyes, and before he knew it, he was crying. Sam Winter Moon laid his hammer down and took Cork’s hands from the plywood, wrapped his big arms around the weeping boy, and held him.

December 24, 1964

Christmas Eve. We went to the candlelight Mass at St. Agnes. A lovely service. Walking home, snow began to fall. I took Cork’s hand and he let me. He’s a somber young man these days. He misses his father. As I do. Henry Meloux says that what we feel, this incredible emptiness, is like a held breath. He says the heart is wise, and if we listen to it, we will understand how to breathe again. I hope Meloux is right.

Cork put down the journal he was holding and thought about that dark time. He’d grieved for a year, and in the fall of 1965 he’d hunted a bear with Sam Winter Moon, an enormous black bear that Sam had tried to capture with a log trap. The log was heavy enough that it should have broken the back of any normal black bear, but the animal had shrugged it off. Sam, fearing the great creature might be injured and suffering, had gone after it, and Cork had gone with him. It was a journey far different from anything either of them had imagined, a journey that involved a brush with a Windigo and that resulted in the largest black bear pelt anyone in Tamarack County had ever seen, a journey that finally brought Cork out of his grieving.

January 1, 1965

We didn’t celebrate the beginning of this new year. We have no reason to celebrate. My husband is dead. My niece is dead, killed by a madwoman and an Ojibwe majimanidoo. And we who are left abide with our guilt, an uncomfortable companion in all our hours. I miss Liam so much. I will miss him forever.

Cork paused and reread.

My niece is dead, killed by a madwoman and an Ojibwe majimanidoo.

Majimanidoo. Evil spirit, Cork translated. Devil. Indigo Broom.

A madwoman? Monique Cavanaugh?

His mother had known.

We abide with our guilt.

What the hell did that mean?

The summer solstice was only a couple of days away, and as Cork headed to Sam’s Place that night to close up, a narrow strip of sky along the western horizon was still lit with a pale yellow glow. Jodi Bollendorf and Kate Buker had shut the serving windows. They looked beat, and Cork told them to go on home, he’d take care of the cleaning and would close up himself. They agreed without argument.

He emptied the deep-fry well, scraped the grill, wiped the prep surfaces clean with a mix of water and bleach, washed the serving utensils, and mopped the floor. He took the cash from the register and went to the rear half of the Quonset hut to do the daily count.

All the while his brain was working on the mystery of the Vermilion Drift.

His mother knew about Monique Cavanaugh and about Indigo Broom. Probably his father had known, too. If so, why hadn’t he arrested them, done his duty as an officer of the law? Was it possible that, in the extraordinary circumstances of forty years ago, he’d seen his duty differently, and that was why a bullet from his revolver had ended up lodged in Monique Cavanaugh’s spine?

The more Cork thought about that last consideration, the more he thought about the image of Liam O’Connor which had emerged from his mother’s journals. A man, at the end, dark and distant and brooding. What had happened to make him so? What had been done that was so difficult for him to accept that it ate at him constantly?

Cork had finished the daily count and was preparing for a night deposit when his cell phone rang.

“O’Connor,” he said in answer.

“Cork, it’s Rainy. You’ve got to come out to my uncle’s place. You’ve got to come out now.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“It’s Isaiah Broom. He’s going to kill Henry.”