LaRose

The Old One

IT WAS ANCIENT and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too. Sometimes it landed in a jailhouse of human tissue, walled off from the nourishing fronds of the body. Sometimes it bolted, ran free, tunneled through bones, or elaborated lungs into fancy lace. Sometimes it could go anywhere. Sometimes it came to nothing. Sometimes it made a home in a family, or commenced its restless touring in a school where children slept side by side.

One night after prayer at the mission school, where the first LaRose, the Flower, slept with other girls in rows, in a room coldly bitter except for their plumes of breath, tuberculosis flew suddenly from between a thin girl’s parted lips. In the icy wind that creaked through a bent window sash it drifted over Alice Anakwad. Hovered over her sister Mary. It dipped and spun toward the sloping bump of LaRose under a woolen blanket, but the current of air dropped it suddenly. The old being perished on the iron railing of her bed. Then a sister being tumbled explosively forward in a droplet of Alice’s cough, vaulted over the railing of LaRose’s bed, swooned downward in the intake of her breath.

WOLFRED WAS WAITING to greet her when she stepped off the wagon that brought her down to St. Anthony. She had left the missionary house for the mission school six years ago, wearing a shift and blanket.

Now behold!

A tight brown woolen traveling jacket, kid leather gloves, a swishing skirt, and underneath it stockings, pantaloons trimmed in lace she herself had knitted, bone corset, vest. She had been paid for years of hard labor with old clothes. She wore a shaped felt hat, also brown, decorated with a lilac bow and the iridescent wing of an indigo bunting. Her shoes had a fashionable curve to the heel that had nearly lamed the mistress of the house.

Exactly as she hoped, Wolfred did not recognize her. He gave her an appreciative glance, then looked down, disappointed. His gaze gradually returned to her. After a while, his look cleared to a stunned question and he stepped forward.

It is I, she said.

They smiled at each other, unnerved. His face reflected her glory with a satisfying humility. She stripped off a glove and extended her hand; he held it like a live bird. He hoisted her trunk on his shoulder. They walked the dusty margin of the road. Wolfred showed her the cart, his Red River cart, two-wheeled and hitched to a mottled ox. The cart was made entirely of wood, ingeniously pegged together. Wolfred put her trunk in back and helped her up onto the plank seat beside him. He snapped his whip over the bullock’s right ear and the beast drew the cart onto the road, which became a rutted trail. The wheels screeched like hell’s millions.

The trail led back to the trading center of the Great Plains, Pembina, then farther, out to where Wolfred had decided to try his hand at farming. As she rode in the disorienting noise, which made speaking useless, a melting pleasure stole up in her. First she unpinned her hat, puffed out the lilac bow and balanced it carefully upon her thighs. Her skin had yellowed from lack of sunshine. Now light struck her shoulders and burned along her throat. She closed her eyes. Behind her lids a blood-warmth beat, a shadowy red gold. She balanced herself with a hand on Wolfred’s arm. The mission teachers believed that educating women in the art of strictly keeping house and disciplining children was essential to eliminating savagery. A wedge should be placed between an Indian mother and daughter. New ways would eliminate all primitive teaching. But they hadn’t understood the power of sunlight on a woman’s throat.

The warmth revived in LaRose the golden time before her mother was destroyed. She looked critically at Wolfred. He seemed to have become an Indian, true. The teachers would have cut his hair off and relieved him of all he wore — a shirt of flowered red calico, fringed buckskin pants, a broad-brimmed hat, moccasins beaded with flowers and finished off with colored threads. Wolfred’s skin was tanned to a deep nutshell color and he’d lighted a pipe. The smoke was fragrant, the tobacco mixed with sage and red willow bark. He winked when he felt her sidelong gaze. She tried to laugh but her stays were too tight. Why not laugh? She reached beneath her shirtwaist and loosened her corset, right there. She kicked her shoes off, plucked the pins from her hair. The corset and shoes had been the worst — never to take a deep breath, and each step a stabbing pain. Who was looking? Who to care now if she wore moccasins, burned her corset, gambled with the fifty buttons that closed the back of her dress? She would eat fresh meat and no more turnips. Wolfred’s teeth flashed. How long he’d waited — in a manner of speaking. Anyway, he hadn’t married any of those women. Was he now too rough for her? Excited, he wondered. He slowed the ox. He stopped the cart. The wind boomed yet there was silence on the earth.

Wolfred turned to her, held her face gently.

Giimiikawaadiz, he said.

Suddenly, clearly, she saw them naked on a river rock in sunshine, eating berries until the juice stained their tongues, their lips, until it ran down her chin and pooled along her collarbone. She saw their life. She saw it happen. She yanked Wolfred close. He carried her through tall grass and they lay down where it hid their nakedness. They rolled in berries, smashing them like blood, like childbirth. Everything would happen to them. They’d be one. They’d be everyone.

I want a wedding dress like this, she said to Wolfred, and showed him a picture that was used to raise money for the school. Her friend was in it. All the clothes were borrowed, but her hair was real. LaRose had combed her friend’s hair out and arranged it to cascade down her shoulders. Later, she had pulled it up into a bridal knot.

I think she died of tuberculosis, she said. Like everybody else I knew. I never heard from her after she went back home.

A cough boiled up in her own chest, but she breathed calmly and tapped her sternum until the tightness released. She was getting well. She could feel her strength casting the weakness out.

Wolfred built the cabin that would eventually be boarded into the center of the house containing the lives of his descendants. The cabin was made of hewn oak, mudded between with tan clay. There was a woodstove, a cast-iron skillet, oiled paper windows, and a good plank floor. Wolfred made a rope bed and LaRose stuffed a mattress with oak leaves and pillows with cattail down. The stove in winter glowed red-hot. They made love beneath a buffalo robe.

After, LaRose washed in icy water by the light of the moon. She stretched out her arms in the silver light. Her body was ready to absorb wanton, ripe, ever avid life. She crept back into bed. As she drowsed in the pleasant heat of Wolfred’s body, she felt herself lifting away. When she opened her eyes to look down, she’d already drifted up through the roof. She fanned herself through the air, checking the area all around their little cabin for spirit lights. Far away, the stars hissed. One dropped a speck of fire. It wavered, wobbled, then shot straight into LaRose. She bobbed back down and lay next to Wolfred.

And so they brought a being into the world.

She cut up her fancy clothes for baby quilts. She took apart her corset and examined the strange, flexible bones. Wolfred fashioned them into head guards for the cradleboard. The shoes were bartered to a settler’s wife for seed. The stockings and hat were given to a medicine man who dreamed the child a name.

The next three children arrived during thunderstorms. LaRose howled when the thunder cracked. Energy boiled up in her and the births were easier. Each child was born strong and exceptionally well-formed. They were named Patrice, Cuthbert, Cleophile, and LaRose. It was clear they would all possess the energy and sleek purpose of their mother, the steady capability and curiosity of their father, variations of the two combined.

She scoured the floorboards of her house, sewed muslin curtains. Her children learned how to read and write in English and spoke English and Ojibwe. She corrected their grammar in both languages. In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships. She made a map of the world on a whitewashed board, from memory. Everybody factored, copying their father’s numbers. They all sewed and beaded, especially once the snow came down and isolated them. The children chopped wood and kept the stove stoked. Wolfred taught them the mystery of dough making, the wonder of capturing invisible wild yeasts to raise the bread, the pleasant joy of baking loaves in wood ash and over fire. The oiled paper windows were replaced by glass. The land would become reservation land, but Wolfred had homesteaded it and the agents and priest left them alone.

When her youngest child was a year old, LaRose’s urgent cough exploded past her strength and pain shot through her bones. Wolfred made her drink the butter off the top of the milk. He made her rest. He wrapped her up carefully and set hot stones in the bed. She improved and grew strong. She was herself for years. Then one spring day she collapsed again, spilling a bucket of cold water, and lay wet in the cold grass, wracked, furious, foaming bright arterial blood. Yet again, though, she recovered, grew strong. She fooled the ancient being and wrested from it ten more years.

Finally, in its ecstasy to live, the being seized her. It sank hot iron knives into her bones. Snipped her lungs into paper valentines. Wolfred spooned into her mouth the warmed fat of any game he brought down. He still made her rest, wrapped her carefully every night, and set hot lake rocks around her feet. Every night she said good-bye, tried to die before morning, was disappointed to awaken. He arranged a plaster of boiled mashed nettles between strips of canvas, and lowered it onto her chest. She improved, gained strength, but was herself for only a month. On a cool late summer day with insects loud in the hay field, tangled song in the birch trees, she folded herself again into the grass. Staring up into a swirl of brilliant sky, she saw an ominous bird. Wolfred wrapped LaRose in quilts and laid her on a bed of cut reeds in the wagon bed. The children had piled the bed thick and high. They had covered the boards with two heavy horse blankets, then with their quilts. LaRose saw this bed they had made for her and stroked their faces.

Take back your blankets, she said, in a horror that she would spread what ate her.

Air them out, she cried. Air out the house. For a time, sleep in the barn.

They touched her, tried to calm her.

I am warm, she smiled, though she wasn’t.

Wolfred heard there was a doctor in newly built St. Paul who had a treatment for the disease. He took LaRose overland in the wagon. There, after a two-week journey that nearly killed her, she met Dr. Haniford Ames.

In an immaculate examining room, the mild, pale doctor took her pulse with calm fingers, listened to her breathe, and explained what he’d learned from a southerner, Dr. John Croghan. In a great cavern in Kentucky, he had originated cave therapy for consumption, or phthisis. The purity and mineral health of the air in caves was curative. Dr. Haniford Ames had hollowed out and built four stone huts in the Wabasha caves of St. Paul, and there he kept his patients, feeding them well and making certain that their surroundings were clean and beneficial. When he met LaRose, the doctor was at first opposed to bringing her into the treatment regimen. Because she was an Indian, he was certain she could not be cured, but Wolfred was adamant. They waited eight days. A patient died and Wolfred handed over all the money they possessed. She was admitted. Her whitewashed stone room was tiny, with space just for a pallet and washstand. The front opened onto an expansive rock ledge where she would lie all day watching the untamed, torrential Mississippi River. LaRose smiled when Wolfred set her on the soft, fresh mattress. From the bed she could see across the river to the horizon, to the east, where bold pink clouds urgently massed.

Her brain seethed with fever; she was excited, alert. She asked for paper, quills, and ink. For two nights Wolfred slept at the foot of her bed, rolled in a blanket. All patients slept on this long stone outcrop of a porch because Ames believed that night air, also, strengthened the lungs. LaRose wrote and wrote. When he went home, Wolfred took the papers, which were stories, admonitions, letters to her children.

They had messages from her whenever there was a post rider. She was eating. She was resting. Dr. Haniford Ames was using the latest science to govern her treatment. He was judicious with the laudanum, was considering surgery. The doctor had lost a sister and a brother to the white plague. Though he’d been ill right along with them, he was now recovered. If he could have dissected himself to find out what had caused him to live, he would have. When he found the eastern doctors too conservative in their thinking, he packed his entire laboratory and headed west. There, he would have the freedom to pursue a cure. He would find out what had saved him while his loved ones wrackingly died. As far as he could tell, there was nothing unusual about him. He was not robust. His only exercise was walking, in all weathers, to set his thoughts at peace. His diet was slothful — he ate whatever he could, gorged on sweets. He even smoked. No, there was nothing outwardly special. Everything about him was uncolorful, unprepossessing. There must be something inside of himself that he could not quantify. His brother had been a mountain climber, ropey and long limbed. His sister had been a great beauty, who swam in the Atlantic waters off Cape Cod and rode intractable horses. She had had a mystical belief in herself and it had surprised her very much to die. It had surprised Haniford as well, and because of it he had been resigned to his own death. To be alive still startled him.

When he met LaRose, he met another conundrum that would shape his life. Disease was rampant among her people, and nearly every disease was lethal. He believed in science, not this idea of manifest destiny, which kept appearing in the newspapers. He was upset when pious land-grabbers declared that the Will of God was somehow involved in so effectively destroying Indians who squatted in the path of progress.

Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.

Some found him offensive. He did not care. He had ability, he had life, he would put both to use.

Because no Indians were ever cured of the disease, he doubted that LaRose would survive. Because as he came to know her, LaRose reminded him of his sister, he decided that he would cure her anyway, and threw himself into her case.

From her bed on the stone promontory, LaRose watched the weather change. Dr. Ames had eaten fish in cream sauce when he was ill. LaRose ate fish in cream sauce. He had walked, so she walked, though up and down the cave’s short stone corridor was all she could manage. When Wolfred left, she was already improved. Dr. Ames wrote to say that she was responding well to the experimental collapse of one lung — he had some hope. Her letters told Wolfred that she was stronger, that she was allowed to walk twice a day now, that she was still eating fish in cream sauce. Then a letter arrived in which she told Wolfred she had seen Mackinnon.

Wolfred fixed food for the children in a manic rush and saddled his horse.

Mackinnon’s head appeared at dawn, across the great river, a speck, tumping gently in place all day, preparing. Every sunrise, day after day, she woke to see that the head was waiting, greedy, steam boiling around it in a cloud. One afternoon, the head lurched into the water. Sometimes it disappeared for days. But always, it surfaced again. The tattered ears, like oars, pulled Mackinnon laboriously against treacherous currents that surged in eddies and rapids. When the river upended or sucked the head down a pool, she took heart. But it always spun back. Her eyes sharpened and she saw clearly over the distances.

The head bobbed in circles, the nose snuffling and twitching until it stopped, sensing her. If she fell asleep, the head moved closer. So she tried to stay awake. Inevitably, sleep took her. Every time she woke, the head was closer still. Soon she could see that over the years it had deteriorated; one eye was white and blinded, fire had scarred and puckered the skin, blacked the pocked nose. Hair bristled in the paddle ears and vacuum nostrils. As night came on the hairs burned like straw. Gentian light flashed in the waves. She caught its scent — not of decay but strong brine. Mackinnon had pickled his head long ago in salts and alcohol, and could not be killed.

The nurse came and bound LaRose in sheets, covered her with heavy blankets warmed with bricks, strapped her safely in to sleep. Weak as water, strong as dirt. It was taking so long to die that she had become strengthened by the effort. She was ready. The head climbed, grunting its way up the rock cliff. She couldn’t flee the bed, but she used her mother’s teaching. She thrashed out of her body, unsticking her spirit. Mackinnon’s head worried at the stones with its teeth, lashing back and forth. Gurgling with eagerness, it gnashed itself over the brim of the ledge, and was upon her. Too late. She broke out of her body and spun up through the rushing air, just as Mackinnon sank his pig tusks into her heart.

Wolfred arrived later that day. All the way there, he had felt her arms, and the weight of her behind him in the saddle. He had talked to her, told her to stay in her body. But the scent of bergamot and her warm breath between his shoulders persisted — these things made him despair. There was a tiny waiting room. He was brought there to learn the news, which was told to him by a plump, florid nurse. Indeed, his wife was sadly departed. The nurse did not have time for details. She patted his hand, and left him to bear the news in private.

Wolfred had prepared his mind for this by picturing the actions he would take. He would wrap her body tightly, carry her to his big horse. He would ride home with the reins in one hand, her on the saddle before him. Her head would rest on his chest and her hair would absorb the tears that melted down his throat. He couldn’t get Mackinnon’s head out of his thoughts. But she would at last be safe now, beyond reach. Her children would never have to endure what she had suffered. He would care for them with his life. In his thoughts, he told this to her, his words warm in the air, searching out her spirit.

He saw himself turning down the road home. He would slow to a hopeless walk. He dreaded telling their children, although they might know for she would have visited them, he thought, in their dreams. He would dismount, he decided, turn his wife across the saddle, lay her to rest upon the earth.

Then he would bring the children to address her. When he’d left, it had rained the night before and the ground was still wet in places. He closed his eyes, saw himself mixing a little mud up with his fingers. He would touch her face, smear the mud across her cheeks, down her nose, across her forehead, the blunt tip of her chin. If he’d owned a bronze shield, he’d have thrust that into the earth at the head of her grave. After she was buried, he would wander the woods, drinking from the hives of wild bees the bitter honey that had driven Xenophon’s soldiers insane.

LaRose, he said out loud in the stuffy waiting room.

Where was that nurse?

He didn’t want his beloved to be hurt in the next life, by men, the way she had been in this life. Later, he would burn all her things to send them with her.

Walk to the edge and wait for me, he said into the air. Wear your hat with the feather.

Where was that nurse?

Wolfred came clomping down the road, numb. His children ran to him. They had been keeping watch. Seeing their ever rational father disoriented confused them. They immediately became needy, loud, insistent. Wolfred rolled off the horse and put his hand across his face. They did not ask if their mother lived, they asked where she was. It took until he was inside the cabin, seated in a chair by the stove, until the fire was built up, the horse brushed down. It took a long time for him to say any word. His silence fueled their anxiety to such a pitch that they went still. Into that stillness, at last, his words struck.

Your mother has died. She is buried. Buried far away.

He held them, petted them, allowed them to weep against his vest, his arms, until they were exhausted and crept in misery into their bed. Only the youngest, LaRose, her mother’s namesake, stayed curled near him. At one point, staring into the coals, her father shook himself. LaRose heard his whisper-rasp.

Stolen. Your mother was stolen.

UNTIL THE SECOND LaRose was grown, she sometimes imagined that her mother, although stolen, perhaps by God, might actually be living somewhere. She knew it wasn’t true, of course, but the thought nagged at her. When at last she questioned her father about it, he became upset and got the whiskey bottle down off the top shelf. Wolfred only drank a spot from time to time. He never became a drunk, so his drinking of the whiskey only meant he was preparing to speak of something difficult.

You’re the only one who ever asked, he said.

You told me she was stolen, said LaRose.

Did I?

Wolfred had never remarried, though women threw themselves his way. For many years, he had talked of their mother incessantly, which had kept her alive to the children. He hadn’t spoken of her now for perhaps a year. This daughter, this LaRose, had been recruited by a man named Richard H. Pratt, who had passed through the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara reservation and traveled through North Dakota as well as through South Dakota. He’d started a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She wanted to go because she knew that her mother had gone to a boarding school. It was a way of being like her mother, who had vividly and with desperate insistence taught her daughter everything she knew.

What She Learned

BEFORE THE FIRST LaRose died, she had taught her daughter how to find guardian spirits in each place they walked, how to heal people with songs, with plants, what lichens to eat in an extremity of hunger, how to set snares, jig fish, tie nets, net fish, create fire out of sticks and curls of birchbark. How to sew, how to boil food with hot stones, how to weave reed mats and make birchbark pots. She taught her how to poison fish with plants, how to make arrows, a bow, shoot a rifle, how to use the wind when hunting, make a digging stick, dig certain roots, carve a flute, play it, bead a bandolier bag. She taught her how to tell from the calls of birds what animal had entered the woods, how to tell from the calls of birds which direction and what type of weather was approaching, how to tell from the calls of birds if you were going to die or if an enemy was on your trail. She learned how to keep a newborn from crying, how to amuse an older child, what to feed a child of each age, how to catch an eagle to take a feather, knock a partridge from a tree. How to carve a pipe bowl, burn the center of a sumac branch for the stem, how to make tobacco, make pemmican, how to harvest wild rice, dance, winnow, parch, and store it, and make tobacco for your pipe. How to carve tree taps, tap maples, collect sap, how to make syrup, sugar, how to soak a hide, scrape down a hide, how to grease it and cure it with the animal’s brains, how to make it soft and silky, how to smoke it, what to use it for. She taught her to make mittens, leggings, makazinan, a dress, a drum, a coat, a carry sack from the stomach of an elk, a caribou, a woods buffalo. She taught her how to leave behind her body when half awake or in sleep and fly around to investigate what was happening on the earth. She taught her how to dream, how to return from a dream, change the dream, or stay in the dream in order to save her life.

CARLISLE INDIAN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was overseen by a tall hatchet-beaked former captain of the Tenth Cavalry. Having succeeded in educating prisoners at Marion, Illinois, and having worked with young Sioux men and women at Hampton Institute, having in effect foiled those whose ideas were identical to Frank Baum’s, Richard Pratt promoted his students to sympathetic reformers, writing that the hope and salvation of the race was immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.

The second LaRose was saturated. She was smart. After the agony of getting used to her corsets she pulled them tight and wore gloves — because her mother had on special occasions worn gloves. She learned to clean white people’s houses during Carlisle’s outing program, gouging congealed dust from corners with a knife. Polishing the gray veins of marble floors. She made the woodwork glow. Sparkled up the copper boilers. Also, she wrote in lovely script and factored into the thousands. She knew the rivers of the world and the wars the Greeks fought, the Romans fought, the Americans fought, beating the British and then the savages. A list of races she had to memorize placed white the highest, then yellow, black, and finally savage. According to the curriculum, her people were on the bottom.

So what. She wore hats and buttoned up her shoes. She knew the Declaration of Independence by heart and Captain Pratt himself had spoken to her of the Civil War and why it was fought. She gave recitations including a poem about the angel in the kitchen. She learned mathematics and memorized the shape of the countries on the globe. She learned American history and the levels of civilization ancient to modern, which culminated in men like Captain Richard Pratt. She learned how to survive on bread and water, then coffee, gravy, and bread. Mostly she learned how to do menial labor — how to use a mangle, starch, an iron. She worked ten-hour days in 120 degree heat. She learned how to sew with a machine. How to imagine her own mouth sewed shut. For speaking Anishinaabe. She learned how to endure being beaten with a board. How to eat with a fork, a spoon, how to lard bread correctly with a knife, how to grow vegetables, how to steal them, how to make soap, scrub floors, scrub walls, scrub pots, scrub the body, scrub the head, scrape a floor clean, a commode, a pantry shelf by shelf, what rats were and how to kill them, how to supplement her diet by stealing from the surrounding farms or gathering nuts and acorns, hiding them in her bosom. During those early years, Carlisle sold its farm produce and fed the students oatmeal, oatmeal, oatmeal.

She learned how to stand correctly, shake hands firmly, pull on gloves and take them off finger by finger. How to walk like a white woman on hard shoes. How to use and wash out stinking menstrual rags when Ojibwe women never stunk of old blood as they used and discarded moss and cattail down, bathed twice a day. She learned to stink, learned to itch, learned to boil her underwear for lice and wash only once a week, once every two weeks, three. She learned to sleep on cold floors, endure the smell of white people, and set a proper table. She learned how to watch her friends die quickly from measles or chokingly from pneumonia or shrieking from the agony of encephalitic meningitis. She learned how to sing funeral hymns, and she sang them for a Sioux boy named Amos LaFromboise, for a Cheyenne boy named Abe Lincoln, for Herbert Littlehawk, Ernest White Thunder, Kate Smiley, and for a suicide whose name she carefully brushed from her mind. She learned how to go hungry and how to stay full even if she had to eat bark — the innermost layers of birch. She learned, like her mother, how to hide that she had tuberculosis.

Pratt also said: A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with this sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

They hadn’t started the killing early enough with this LaRose, though. She knew “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and yet her mother had taught her how to use fierce and subtle Ojibwe poisons. She knew how to catch and skin any animal she saw. Her mother had snared the head of a demon white man and burnt its eyes out. Her mother had called for her mother’s drum and cured a man who wandered in black vertigo. Her mother had made a new drum for her daughter. Nobody took it because she left it with her father. Now this LaRose had seen the ocean. Now her work out east was done. Her mother had taught her to put her spirit away for safekeeping when that was necessary. Out of the treetops, she brought back and absorbed her many selves. She was complete. She could go. Beneath the bobbing plume on the cast-off hat she was given for a month’s wages cleaning pots, she moved demurely along the railway platform, in her purse a ticket home.

She wanted to change everything about everything when she got home. She was able to amend a few things in small ways. She lived with her father, Wolfred. She married a cousin. She was a teacher and the mother of a teacher. Her namesake daughter became the mother of Mrs. Peace. All of them learned two languages, four levels of math, the uses of plants, and to fly above the earth.

HER FATHER SIPPED his whiskey. He still hadn’t spoken, but now a pile of papers rested under the hand that didn’t hold the whiskey cup.

Will you tell me, at least, where she is buried? asked LaRose.

I can’t tell you that, said Wolfred.

Why? She came close, touched his shoulder.

Because I don’t know.

In spite of her conflicting thoughts, LaRose had always tried to be realistic, to imagine a grave, a stone with her mother’s name on it, a place she could eventually go to visit. What her father said made no sense.

That can’t be, she said.

It is true, he said. Then he repeated the words she had forgotten and remembered many times since she was young.

She was stolen.

He patted the pile of papers, looked straight at her.

Daughter, it is all right here.