Boundary waters

4

Although it was the best fall anyone could remember in years, the town of Aurora was prepared for the worst. In that far north country, winter was always on the mind. Cords of split wood were stacked against garages and porch walls. In the evening, the air was heavily scented with the smell of wood smoke. A sign in the window of Mayfair’s Clothing on Center Street warned, DON’T BE FOOLED! IT’S COMING. WINTER COATS 20% OFF! Rows of snowblowers flanked the bin of Halloween pumpkins outside Nelson’s Hardware Hank. Heading down Oak Street as he took Annie home, Cork spotted Ned Overby up on his extension ladder affixing Christmas lights to his gutters.

Cork pulled onto Gooseberry Lane and into the driveway of the two-story house where he’d been raised. Stepping from his Bronco, he considered the porch swing, empty now in the shadows. For Cork, the approach of winter wasn’t palpable until he’d taken down the swing and stored it in the garage for the season. He stood on the lawn, considered the brilliant red of the maple tree against the clear blue afternoon sky, and took in with long, deep breaths the warm autumn air. He decided that despite Charlie Aalto’s warning of heavy snow by Halloween, it would still be a long time before he put that swing away.

Annie sprinted through the side door into the kitchen. Cork followed and found himself in a house that, except for Annie and him, seemed empty.

He hadn’t lived in the house on Gooseberry Lane for nearly a year and a half. He’d grown used to living alone at Sam’s Place, but it wasn’t the way he’d choose to live if the choice were his alone.

Annie had the television on, tuned to highlights of the Notre Dame game. Cork passed through the living room and called up the stairs, “Anybody home?”

“In here.” Jo’s voice came from her office just down the hall.

Nancy Jo O’Connor sat at her desk, papers spread out before her, a pen in her hand. She was dressed in faded jeans and a denim blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Her blond hair was short and a little disheveled as if she’d run her hand through it in frustration. She wore her glasses, which made her ice-blue eyes big and startled looking. She smiled at her husband as he stepped in.

Jo wasn’t alone. Near her at the desk sat a tall man with the black hair, almond eyes, and light bronze skin of the Ojibwe Anishinaabe. He sat back a little from Jo as soon as Cork stepped in.

Jo took off her glasses. Her eyes grew smaller but no less blue. “I didn’t expect anyone for a while.”

“No customers,” Cork explained. “We shut down early.” He nodded toward the tall Shinnob. “Afternoon, Dan.”

“Hello, Cork.” Daniel Wadena offered him a cordial smile. Wadena was the manager of the Chippewa Grand Casino, an enterprise operated by the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe. He wore a red T-shirt that read CASH IN AT THE GRAND across the front in black letters.

“Business on Saturday?” Cork shook his head.

“We’re trying to get the contracts together so we can actually break ground for the casino hotel before winter sets in,” Jo said. She’d been counsel for Iron Lake Anishinaabe for years.

“Better hurry,” Cork cautioned. “Word is, snow by Halloween.”

Wadena glanced outside. “Did you get that from the weather service?”

“Muskrats,” Cork said.

Jo stretched. “I think that’s it for me today, Dan.”

“A good day’s work,” Wadena concluded and stood up. He carefully placed a number of documents in his briefcase, clicked the latch, and stepped away from the desk. “Monday?” he asked Jo.

“I’m in court most of the morning. After lunch?” she suggested.

“Fine. I’ll see myself out. Take ’er easy, Cork,” he said as he exited.

Cork walked to the chair Wadena had vacated and plopped himself down. He watched Jo as she arranged the papers on her desk.

“He’s taken with you, you know.”

“I know.” She opened her desk drawer and put away her pens. “I don’t encourage him.”

“He’s what I believe they call a catch.”

“Like a mackerel?” She looked at him directly. “The last thing I need in my life right now is another man.” She put her glasses back on and made a notation on her calendar.

Cork heard the front door open, and a moment later, his sister-in-law Rose slumped against the doorway of Jo’s office, a small sack of groceries in her arms. Rose was a large, plain woman with hair the color of road dust and a heart as big as Gibraltar. She was unlike her sister Jo in almost all respects except for the way she loved the children. She’d helped raise them from the beginning, and although they hadn’t come from her body, a great deal of who they were had been born from the goodness of her spirit. Cork had never felt anything but love and an overwhelming gratitude toward the lumbering woman who stood puffing in the doorway.

“Stevie ran practically the whole way,” Rose said, breathless. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead and temples and followed the plump contours of her cheeks. “This weather has him crazy.”

“Where is he?” Cork asked.

“I’m right here!” Six-year-old Stevie squeezed through the doorway past his aunt. Of Cork’s children, Stevie most clearly carried the signs of his Anishinaabe heritage. His hair was straight and dark, his cheeks high, his eyes thick lidded. He smiled eagerly at his father. “Annie said she’d play some football with me if you will. Will you?”

“Sure,” Cork agreed. “For a little while. Meet you guys in the front yard.”

Stevie cried, “Yippee!” and vanished back through the doorway.

“I’m going to start dinner,” Rose said. “Cork, will you join us? Just burgers on the grill.”

“Thanks, but I haven’t had a chance to shower after my run this afternoon. I’ll just toss the ball a bit with Stevie then head back to Sam’s Place and get myself cleaned up.”

“We’ve rented a video,” she tried again. “ The Lion King. Stevie’s favorite, you know.”

He glanced at Jo, who gave him a nod. “Maybe I’ll make it for that. But don’t wait for me.”

Rose turned and carried the groceries away.

“Didn’t Jenny come home with you?” Jo asked.

Cork shook his head. “Went for a walk; never came back.”

“She went to see Sean, I’ll bet,” Jo said.

“Speak of the devil.”

Jo’s eyes shifted to the window where Cork’s attention had been drawn. Jenny and a teenaged boy had stepped into the backyard from the alley. They stood together near the end of the lilac hedge and they kissed. Cork moved closer to the screen.

“Don’t spy,” Jo said.

“I’m not spying. I’m assessing the quality of their relationship.”

Every year. Jenny grew to resemble her mother more: slender, blond, bright, independent. At fourteen, she’d been keen on piercing her nose, had dyed her hair purple, and had chosen most of her wardrobe from the Salvation Army. Now almost sixteen, she spoke no more of nose studs, had washed the dye from her hair, and bought her clothing at mall shops. She’d stumbled onto The Diary of Ana’s Nin and was saving all her money to move to Paris just as soon as she graduated from high school. Jo said she’d change her mind about that, but Cork wasn’t so sure. Like Jo, once Jenny had decided a thing, it was as good as done. The boy with her, Sean Murray, was a tall, lanky kid with long black hair and a lot of dark fuzz along his cheekbones. Whenever Cork saw him, Sean was dressed entirely in black.

“What does she see in him?” Cork asked. “He looks like a burned matchstick.”

“He writes her poetry. And he’s a nice kid.”

Cork leaned to the screen. “Jenny,” he called. “Could I talk to you a moment?”

Jo gasped. “Cork, get away from there.”

“That nice kid’s hand was on her butt,” Cork said.

When he returned to Sam’s Place, the first thing he did was to head for the basement.

Cork shared Sam’s Place with a monster he called Godzilla, an ancient oil-burning furnace that occupied a good deal of the space beneath the old Quonset hut. Godzilla had a temperamental disposition that generally required giving the burner a kick now and then. Whenever the old furnace rumbled on in the winter, a shudder ran through the pipes above that often gave Cork’s visitors a start. He’d hoped to have enough money from the season’s profit to replace Godzilla with something new and quiet that burned clean natural gas instead of smelly heating oil; but employing Annie and Jenny all summer had eaten whatever savings he might have put away. Considering how much he’d enjoyed the company of his daughters in those months, he felt it was a trade that was more than fair.

Cork pulled the cord on the overhead light and stepped around Godzilla. He went to a black trunk shoved against a wall beneath a couple of shelves of jars. The jars were gifts from Rose. They contained tomato preserves, chokecherry jelly, sweet corn relish, pickled watermelon rind. Despite the fact that Cork was separated from her sister Jo, Rose continued in her own ways to take care of Cork with a vengeance.

He opened the trunk. On top lay a rolled bearskin. He lifted the skin, felt the weight of it that was in large part due to the Smith amp; Wesson. 38 Model 10 military and police special wrapped in oilcloth inside. Both the bearskin and the gun were ties to the two most important men in his past. The gun had been his father’s when he was sheriff of Tamarack County, and Cork had worn it during his own tenure in that office. The bearskin had been left to him by Sam Winter Moon and was a constant reminder of how the man had saved his life-in so many ways-after Cork’s father was killed. They were violent symbols, to be sure. Yet upon the memories they represented rested much of the foundation for Cork’s understanding of what it was to be a man.

Underneath the rolled bearskin was folded a yellowed wedding dress, his mother’s. The trunk, before it had come into his possession, had held mostly his mother’s treasures. When, at his wife’s insistence, he’d left the house on Gooseberry Lane, the house he’d grown up in, the trunk was one of the few nonessentials he took with him. He’d failed in so many duties that keeping safe the things his mother had valued was one he would not forsake. Cork lifted the wedding dress and laid it gently on the bearskin. A great deal of the space remaining in the trunk was taken up by boxes of old photographs. When she was alive, his mother was always planning to sort through the photos, organize them, place them in the pages of albums. It never happened. What she left behind was a jumble of lives seen in scattered moments. Cork began to sift through a box. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at the collection, and if he hadn’t been so focused in his mission, he’d have lingered over photographs, puzzle pieces that formed his history. It took him almost an hour and three boxes to find the photo he was looking for. It was black-and-white and taken with an old Kodak box camera that Cork remembered well. The photograph showed the O’Connor house on Gooseberry Lane circa 1961. In the front yard, squinting into the sun, wearing calflength print dresses, were his mother, his mother’s cousin Ellie Grand, and Ellie’s twelve-year-old daughter Marais. They’d come that year from the Twin Cities to live in Aurora after Ellie had finally given up trying to live as an urban Indian. No one seemed to know about Marais’s father, or if they did, they never spoke of him. For reasons Cork never really knew, Ellie Grand hadn’t been welcome on the Iron Lake Reservation, so Cork’s mother had offered her sanctuary in the house on Gooseberry Lane. For almost a year, Ellie Grand slept in the guest room and Marais, in the sewing room.

Marais Grand had not been like any girl Cork had known. She reminded him of an East Indian princess-long black hair; gold-dust eyes; soft, fine features; and skin a darker hue than that of any Ojibwe he’d ever seen. He loved her immediately. Marais, nearly three years older than he, had found him amusing. At first, she called him Odjib, which meant “shadow” or “ghost,” for he followed her everywhere. Later, she’d dubbed him Nishiime, “little brother.”

He dug some more in that same box and came up with a shot of Ellie’s Pie Shop, the old house on the edge of town that Cork’s mother loaned the money for and that Ellie Grand turned into an enterprise much favored by the summer tourists. He found a photograph he recalled taking himself at the Windom Bluegrass Festival the year Marais took first place. She was sixteen, beautiful, happy. All the tragedy was still far ahead.

Cork was tired by the time he came across several articles clipped together. They’d come from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and were a series that reported on the murder of Marais Grand at her home in Palm Springs. He skimmed the articles, refreshing his memory. The primary suspect had been a man named Vincent Benedetti, owner of a Vegas casino called The Purple Parrot and reputed to have had connections with organized crime. In the rumor mill, he’d been linked romantically with Marais. The articles followed the investigation until it was ultimately dropped, officially leaving unanswered the question of who’d killed Marais Grand.

Cork carefully placed everything back in the trunk except the early photo of Marais on the front lawn, and the bearskin. The photo he slipped into his pocket. The bearskin he held a while, considering the weight of what it concealed. Sam Winter Moon had once told him that all things created by Kitchimanidoo, the Great Spirit, had many purposes. A birch tree supplied shelter for animals, bark for canoes, sticks for cooking fires. A lake was a home for fish, water for drinking, a cool place on a hot day.

But a gun. What purpose did a gun serve except to kill?

Cork put the bearskin back, closed the trunk, and turned away from one more unanswered question.