Blood Hollow

43

Solemn’s wake lasted two days. It was held on the rez, in the community center in Alouette, with friends and relatives of Dorothy Winter Moon taking turns sitting with the body. The evening Cork paid his respects, he ran into George LeDuc, Eddie Kingbird, and old Waldo Pike standing outside the building, smoking.

“Boozhoo,” LeDuc said in greeting.

“Boozhoo,” Cork said to them all.

“Look at that.” Kingbird grinned. “Just in time for the food.”

Pike said, “Stick around awhile, Cork. Rhonda Fox is gonna sing. She don’t sing good, but she knows the old songs. Not many left who do.”

Waldo Pike had white hair, plenty of it. He stood with a slight stoop, not from infirmity, but from back muscles overdeveloped across a lifetime of wielding an ax and a chain saw, cutting timber for a living.

Cork said, “I’ll stick around.”

“Your grandmother used to sing,” Pike said.

“Yes.”

“I heard her once when I was a young man. It was when Virgil Lafleur passed on. Singers came from all over. A lot of people looked up to Virgil, came to pay their respects. Some all the way from Turtle Mountain. Your grandmother’s singing, that was something.”

Waldo Pike fell silent and smoked awhile. Cork waited respectfully. Pike was an elder who talked on Indian time, comfortable with long silences, and Cork didn’t want to show disrespect by leaving before he’d finished saying all he had to say.

“I’m hungry,” the old man finally said. “How about we eat?”

Inside, the largest of the meeting rooms had been set up for the visitation. The casket was situated in front of a window with a view of the playground behind the community center. Flowers and cards had been laid out on tables on either side. Folding chairs stood in a half dozen rows before the casket. Along the sides of the room, small tables had been arranged, with a few chairs at each so that visitors could sit and eat. The food, a potluck affair, had been placed on several long tables at the back. Among the other aromas Cork’s nose picked up were the good smells of fry bread, wild rice stew, and Tater Tot hot dish.

A couple of dozen people were in the room, some just getting into the food line, others sitting in the folding chairs, listening to Chet Gabriel, who stood at a microphone to the right of the casket. Gabriel was a poet of sorts, and he was reciting from a sheet of notebook paper he held in his hand. Cork knew most of those present, most of them Iron Lake band.

Dorothy Winter Moon was at one of the side tables. She wore a dress, plain blue. Cork couldn’t ever recall seeing her in anything so feminine. When she was alone for a moment, he walked to her.

“Evening, Dot.”

“Hi, Cork. Thanks for coming.” Despite the dress and the circumstances, she seemed strong as ever.

“Jo will be here in a bit. She had a late meeting with a client.” He glanced around. “Lot of folks.”

“It’s nice,” she said. “Thanks, Cork.”

“What for?”

“Doing all you did. Solemn thought a lot of you.”

“I wish I could have done more.”

“You couldn’t have saved him, if that’s what you mean. He knew what he was doing. He had his reasons.”

Cork was sure it helped her to think so, and so he said nothing. Others came to the table to speak with Dot, and Cork left her to them.

When the poet finished to polite applause, Cork went to the casket, which was open. Solemn lay on a bed of white satin, dressed in the kind of dark suit Cork had never seen him wear, his arms uncomfortably stiff at his sides. A new shirt and tie covered his chest, but Cork knew the violation hidden beneath the thin cotton fabric. Solemn’s face was a work of cosmetic art, given color with rouge and powder, like a wax figure in a museum. Whatever Solemn Winter Moon had actually been, reluctant saint or madman, this dressed and painted body was a million miles removed from that. Henry Meloux would have said that Solemn was already far along in his journey on the Path of Souls. Mal Thorne probably believed that Solemn had taken his place in purgatory, awaiting the day his sins would be purged and he could enter heaven. Cork had no idea where the spirit of Solemn now resided.

“I used to think he was a shame to the Ojibwe.”

Cork half-turned. Oliver Bledsoe stood beside him, staring down into the casket.

“Now?” Cork asked.

“Now I think The People will remember him with great respect.” He turned from the body. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Outside.”

On one of the tables that flanked the casket was a small dish full of cigarettes, and beside the dish sat a box of wooden kitchen matches. Cork took a cigarette and a match. Bledsoe did the same. Outside, they lit up. Cork had quit smoking a couple of years earlier. The cigarettes were part of the Anishinaabe reverence toward tobacco, biindaakoojige, and the old belief that the smoke carried prayers to the creator, Kitchimanidoo.

Bledsoe said, “I heard the sheriff’s department is dropping the investigation of Charlotte Kane’s murder. I heard that unofficially they’re still pinning it on Solemn.”

“Yeah.”

“You think that’s what happened? Solemn did it?”

“No,” Cork said.

“Leaving it that way, it’s not good,” Bledsoe said. “Indian kid kills a white girl. You know how often that’ll be thrown at us around here?”

“I know.”

Bledsoe smoked for a while. People kept arriving, nodding or waving as they went inside.

Bledsoe said, “I talked with the tribal council. They want to hire you to clear Solemn’s name.”

Cork watched the cigarette smoke drift upward toward a clear, cornflower sky.

“All right,” he said.

“Good.”

“I was going to do it anyway, you know.”

Bledsoe laughed quietly. “That’s what George LeDuc said.”

“That’s why he’s chairman of the tribal council.”

Inside the building, a woman began to sing. The notes weren’t pure, but the words were Ojibwe.

“Rhonda Fox,” Cork said.

“Going back inside?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

The day Solemn Winter Moon was buried, a sun dog appeared in the sky. Not many people had ever witnessed this phenomenon, a rare occurrence in which sunlight, refracted off ice crystals in the atmosphere, created the illusion of a second sun. Cork had seen it only once, and then in winter, and had no idea why it was called a sun dog. He and Jo and the others who’d gathered for the burial stood at the graveside in the cemetery behind the old mission building deep in the reservation, staring east, marveling at the two suns in the morning heaven. The sun dog stayed until the casket was lowered, and the dark mouth that was the open grave had swallowed the body of Solemn Winter Moon. Then, as those who’d gathered to pay their final respects silently scattered, the false sun faded away.

That same day, Cork watched another man’s body being lowered into the earth.

It was late in the afternoon. The air had turned hot and sultry. Cork parked his Bronco in the shade of a burr oak inside the cemetery with a good view of the road that wound up the hill from town. He could feel a storm in the air, forming somewhere beyond the western horizon, the thunderheads just now rising above the distant trees.

As he waited, he thought about Fletcher Kane. He’d been wrong about Kane in important ways, wrong because he’d blinded himself. He’d wanted Kane to be the kind of man capable of abusing his daughter. Kane wasn’t, although the rumors about him persisted. Was it any wonder he’d gone over the edge? In the end, what did Kane have to lose? His life had already been destroyed. He’d lost what he most loved-twice-and in the end had even been robbed of the respect of the community.

What had been Cork’s part in this? He had voiced suspicions, and they’d become rumors as a result of Borkmann’s loose tongue. But Cork knew Borkmann and was well aware of the man’s weakness where confidentiality was concerned. Was there a dark place inside him that had calculated this and used the sheriff to ruin Kane? How well did he know himself? Cork wondered. Christ, he thought, how well did anyone?

After a thirty-minute wait, he saw the line of cars, only a half dozen strong, making its way up the hill, led by a shiny hearse. Directly behind the hearse was Randy Gooding’s Tracker. As the abbreviated procession came through the gate, Cork saw that Gooding was serving as driver to the priest, and he also saw that the priest wasn’t Mal Thorne but old Father Kelsey instead. The cars followed along the narrow lanes to the place that had been prepared, a plot of ground far from Charlotte’s grave.

During the service, the doddering priest bent toward Fletcher Kane’s coffin. Cork couldn’t hear what the priest said. The old priest was too far away, and his voice was a whisper that died in the heavy air. The service was blessedly short. As things came to an end, Gooding stepped to Donny Pugmire, one of the pallbearers, and the two men exchanged words. Then Pugmire took the old priest’s arm and led him to his own car, while Gooding walked up the hill toward Cork.

“Didn’t know you were that fond of Fletcher Kane,” Cork said.

“Father Mal called me. He said they didn’t have enough pallbearers, asked if I’d lend a hand. I didn’t mind.”

“Where is Mal?”

“Sick.” Gooding watched the cars leave the cemetery. “You know, I thought that when I quit the big city, I’d seen the last of hard things.”

“They’re worse here in some ways,” Cork said. “Here, when tragedy visits, it knocks on the door of people you know.”

Gooding nodded toward the new grave. “I hope this puts the lid on tragedy for a while.”

“You think it’s over?”

“Borkmann wants the Kane girl’s murder to go in the cold case files. I think that’s a good place for it.”

“You believe Solemn did it?”

Gooding was quiet for a while. He looked toward the cemetery gate where, as the last of the funeral procession exited, an old, tan station wagon entered and stopped. A man got out and stared across the field of gravestones. He shielded his eyes against the sun with his hand.

Gooding said, “I think in the end he came to see the world differently, but before that he was certainly capable of murder. I know the Ojibwe don’t want to believe that, and for the peace of this community, which I care about a lot, I’m willing to let sleeping dogs lie.”

The man near the gate got back into the rusted station wagon and began to maneuver along the lanes between the rows of the dead. As the vehicle drew nearer, Cork saw that there were two other people in the car.

“What if it wasn’t Solemn?” he said. “What if some monster is still out there?”

“No homicides since January, Cork.” Gooding shook his head. “No more monsters. My money is on the man who was buried on the rez today.”

“Any objection if I were to take a look at the case file?”

“None from me. You’ll have to clear it with Borkmann. Or maybe just be patient a couple of weeks.” Gooding smiled. “I hear the board of commissioners is thinking of offering you the sheriff’s job until they can put together a special election. You wouldn’t need any permission then.”

The tan wagon pulled to a stop a few yards from where the two men stood. Three people got out, a man, a woman, and a boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. They looked familiar to Cork.

The man approached hesitantly. “Sorry to bother you people, but I’m wondering if you could help us.”

“Be glad to,” Gooding said.

The woman wore a white dress with daisies on it. She held her hands folded in front of her, in a way that seemed to bespeak great peace. The boy hung back and stood a little hunched, as if he were tired.

The man said, “We’re looking for the grave of someone who was buried today.”

“Right down there.” Gooding pointed toward the open hole into which Kane’s coffin had just been lowered.

“Thank you,” the man said.

“Did you know Fletcher Kane?” Cork asked.

The man turned back. “Fletcher Kane?”

Cork gestured down the hill. “The guy they buried today.”

The man looked confused. “I thought it was Solemn Winter Moon.”

“Winter Moon?” Gooding said. “He was buried out on the reservation this morning.”

“Oh.” The man looked back at the woman and the boy.

Cork suddenly realized who they were. “You’re from Warroad.”

“That’s right. How’d you know?”

Cork’s attention was suddenly focused on the boy standing beside his mother. “What happened to the wheelchair?”

The boy didn’t reply.

“Go on, Jamie. Tell the man.”

The boy stammered, as if words were new to him. “He healed me.”

“Solemn?”

The boy nodded.

The woman hugged her son and looked deeply into his eyes. “That good man healed him.”

“Just a minute,” Gooding said. He walked toward the boy, who stepped back at his approach. “I’m not going to hurt you, son. I just want a closer look. I’m a policeman.” Gooding knelt in front of the boy. “Show me your hands.”

The boy slowly lifted his arms, and the fingers that had been curled into claws opened toward the deputy.

“Can you walk for me?”

The boy took a few steps. They weren’t perfect.

“Tell me your name.”

“Jamie Witherspoon.”

“How old are you, Jamie?”

“Thirteen.”

“You’ve always been sick?”

“Yes.”

“Always in a wheelchair?”

“Yes.”

“Your parents didn’t put you up to this?”

“No.”

Gooding stood up. “I apologize for that last question,” he said to the boy’s mother. “It’s just that it’s all a little hard to believe.”

In the face of Gooding’s doubt, her own face reflected nothing but love. “Believing is what it’s all about.”

Cork directed them to George LeDuc’s store on the reservation, told them to tell LeDuc their story, and he would escort them to Solemn’s grave. He also told them to ask George to guide them to the home of Solemn’s mother. She would want to hear what they had to say.

As the old station wagon rattled out of the cemetery, Cork said, “You told me once that you’re a man inclined to believe in miracles. So what do you think, Randy?”

For a long time, Gooding simply stared beyond the cemetery fence where the wagon had gone. Finally he shook his head. “I don’t,” he said. “Honest to God, I just don’t know.”