Purgatory Ridge

3

HISTORY, IN CORK’S OPINION, was a useless discipline, an assemblage of accounts and memories, often flawed, that in the end did the world no service. Math and science could be applied in concrete ways. Literature, if it didn’t enlighten, at least entertained. But history? History was simply a study in futility. Because people never learned. Century after century, they committed the same atrocities against one another or against the earth, and the only thing that changed was the magnitude of the slaughter.

Except for the particulars dictated by its geography, the history of Tamarack County was little different. The streams, clear and clean since the days of the great glaciers, ran red with the blood of the Dakota as the Anishinaabeg invaded from the east and forced out of the forests along Kitchigami all the people not their own. Although less bloody, the confinement of the Ojibwe Anishinaabeg to a very few reservations was accomplished through threat and deceit and with the complicity of educated people who considered themselves enlightened. The devastation of the land-the clearing of the magnificent white pine forests, the deep gouging of the mine pits on the Iron Range, the dumping of toxins into the crystal water of Lake Superior-was justified as the fulfillment of God’s plan, the “manifest destiny” of America.

Conscience was a devil that plagued the individual. Collectively, a people squashed it as easily as stepping on a daisy.

Or so it appeared to Corcoran O’Connor on that summer morning when smoke hazed the sky and Tamarack County seemed poised for war over the destruction of one of the last good stands of old-growth white pine left in the North Woods.

The Anishinaabe people called them Ninishoomisag, Our Grandfathers. There were more than two hundred acres of them, all over a hundred feet tall, their trunks better than four feet in diameter, some said to be at least three hundred years old. To the Anishinaabeg, they were sacred. For generations, the young men of the Iron Lake Ojibwe had sought out the shelter of Our Grandfathers, and under their watchful eyes had undergone giigwishimowin, the fasting ritual that brought to an adolescent the dream vision that would guide him into manhood. How the great trees had been spared from the rapacious saws of the crews who’d leveled the forests-most of them on a Lindstrom wage-was a bit of a mystery. Henry Meloux, an old Ojibwe medicine man, claimed the trees had been protected by manidoonsag, little spirits of the woods. Although Cork was ever respectful of Meloux’s vast wisdom, he’d heard another, less fantastic, explanation for the trees’ survival. In the days of the early logging boom, timber companies hired estimators to survey the forests and report probable lumber footage before a company bid on the right to log a particular section. For years, the man who’d worked in that capacity for the Lindstrom mill in Minnesota was Edward Olaf. He was mixed blood, half Swede, half Ojibwe. He knew how important Our Grandfathers were to the Anishinaabeg, and he simply lied in his reports about the area, ensuring the great white pines would be bypassed.

By the time extensive forest service surveys made the Lindstrom executives aware of Our Grandfathers, the trees had been included in an area of national forest no longer open to logging. The ban was in place for many decades until 1995 when President Clinton signed into law a bill creating the Energy Salvage Timber Sales Program. The law opened the door to public forest lands full of old-growth timber, among them Our Grandfathers. Karl Lindstrom’s company bid immediately for the right to cut the great white pines, and that bid had been accepted.

The plight of Our Grandfathers brought together an alliance of disparate groups bent on saving the trees. The Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, Earth First, the Iron Lake Ojibwe, and a handful of other organizations and unaffiliated individuals had descended on Aurora to protest the proposed logging. Court battles had thus far prevented any cutting from taking place. In the legal maneuvering, Jo O’Connor had been the major voice for the Anishinaabeg. Now, arguments had ended. A federal judge in St. Paul had promised a ruling soon. In the tense quiet, some of the environmentalists had issued statements indicating that a ruling in favor of the logging interests would not deter them from doing what had to be done to preserve Our Grandfathers. Aurora, Minnesota, had seemed on the eve of war. Now it looked like the body count had already begun.

“You didn’t do much talking back there,” Cork noted as he drove the road toward Aurora.

Jo stared out the window, lost in the familiar landscape of red pines and underbrush. “There wasn’t much to say. Because the Ojibwe are my clients, I thought restraint was best at this point.”

“You don’t think your clients did it?”

“Of course not. Do you?”

“No.”

Jo gave a disgusted little grunt and said, “Helm Hanover.”

“What about him?”

“Did you see the look on his face when he saw the body? Like a vulture.”

“Yeah, well, you know how I feel about old Hell.”

Although they’d never been friends, never come near to anything like friendship, Cork had known Helmuth Hanover his whole life. Hanover’s father had been publisher and editor of the Aurora Sentinel, and Helm took over after his father’s death. The elder Hanover had been a cantankerous freethinker, a man of independent politics and social philosophy. He’d hated FDR, had revered Truman, made sport of Eisenhower, and was fond of saying-though never in print-that JFK stood for Just a Fucking Kid. Locally, his political endorsements meant little. He often threw his support to a candidate for reasons wholly unrelated to issues, such as a man’s ability as a deer hunter, and he withheld his approval for reasons equally ridiculous-a candidate’s noisy dog. Helm, his only child, had been a quiet, bright, thoughtful kid. In ‘68, he’d been drafted and sent to Vietnam. Like many veterans, he returned altered, darkly and forever. Physically, he came back with a right leg that was mostly a plastic prosthesis. Emotionally, he carried a bitterness that showed on his face and, ultimately, in his editorials. He deeply distrusted government in any form and harbored a particular animosity toward the federal government for the sacrifice of his own flesh and bone in a war he believed was utterly useless and the fault entirely of cowardly, stupid, and self-serving politicians. On the Iron Range, he wasn’t alone in his assessment of that conflict or of politicians in general. A wise publisher, he used the Sentinel well in reporting on the people and activities of Tamarack County, never misspelling a name and making every attempt to include even the smallest of events, from church socials to league softball games. The editorial page, however, he used like a howitzer. Hanover had blasted Cork many times during his tenure as sheriff, and Cork had long ago joined the legion of those who referred to the bitter newspaperman as Hell.

Nearly a year and a half earlier, Cork had uncovered a direct connection between Hanover and a militia group called the Minnesota Civilian Brigade. Although Cork was absolutely certain the group had been involved in the illegal procurement of arms, none of the brigade was ever charged. Partly this was because evidence had been lacking. The weapons were never found. But it was also partly because the political sentiment on the Iron Range was not entirely unsympathetic to the antigovernment ideology of the brigade. Nothing had been heard from the group for a long time. The official position of those law enforcement agencies concerned-mostly Tamarack County authorities at this point-was that such close legal scrutiny had forced the brigade to disband. Cork believed differently. He’d read about strains of plague that became active when archeologists dug too unwarily. That’s how he thought of the brigade. It was simply underground, waiting to surface, as deadly in its purpose as ever.

Cork’s stomach growled. “I don’t suppose you’re hungry?”

“Hungry?” She looked at him, appalled. “After what we just saw? How could anyone be hungry after that?”

“I don’t know. I just know I am.” He felt her edge away, as if repulsed. “Look, Jo, when I was a rookie cop in Chicago, my first partner-Duke Ranham, you remember him? — Duke told me that after I’d seen death, I’d have one of two reactions. I’d be hungry or I’d be horny. His theory was that it was a subconscious assertion of life. All I know is that he was right, and at the moment I’m hungry.”

“Well, thank God it’s that and not the other.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’ve never seen someone who’s been burned to death.”

Cork lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the bright low sun. “We don’t know for sure that was the cause of death. That’ll take an autopsy to determine.”

“I wonder who it is.”

“Who it was. According to Lindstrom and the night watchman, Harold Loomis, nobody should have been there. If I were Wally Schanno, I’d figure whoever it was, they were the victim of their own bombing, if it was a bombing.”

“If you were Schanno.” She looked at him, then quickly away. “I’ve heard a rumor. People are saying Wally Schanno won’t stand for reelection in the fall.”

“I’ve heard that, too.”

“Are you thinking of running?”

“I haven’t given it a lot of thought, Jo.”

They were approaching the town limits. Cars, lots of them, moved past on the other side, headed toward the mill. Some belonged to the men on the first shift. Others were driven by the curious.

“But you have thought about it?”

“Some.”

“Are you happy? Running Sam’s Place, I mean.”

They entered town on Center Street. Aurora was coming to life. People moved purposefully along the sidewalks and cars filled the streets. “The truth is, this morning I’m very glad I’m not in Wally Schanno’s shoes.”

They pulled into the drive of the house on Gooseberry Lane. Jo sat for a moment, then asked, “Would you tell me if you were thinking seriously of running?”

“We’d talk about it,” he promised.

“That’s all I ask.”

History.

In a place like Aurora, where a man could spend his whole life, cradle to grave, his history was all around him, slapping against him like old newspapers in a wind.

Cork had a strong sense of that as he stepped into Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler to get himself some breakfast. Breathing in the hot griddle scent was like breathing in the air of another time in his life.

“Well, I’ll be.” Johnny Pap smiled as Cork took a stool at the counter.

Johnny Pap was first-generation Greek and had run the Broiler since Cork was old enough to pay for milkshakes with the money he’d earned delivering newspapers. For most of Cork’s life, a stop at the Broiler was part of his daily routine. A year and a half before, his routine had dramatically changed.

“Christ,” Johnny said, leaning against the counter. “I haven’t seen you in here since-well, must be since Molly died.” As soon as the words escaped his lips, Johnny’s face showed that he regretted them.

“Not since Molly died,” Cork confirmed.

The moment seemed awkward for Johnny, considering the current state of Cork’s marriage. But Johnny handled it well. He simply nodded toward the distant sky outside the Broiler and said, “Hell of a bang this morning. Heard those tree huggers really did a number at Lindstrom’s. You know anything?”

“I was just out there.”

“Yeah? Was it bad?”

Talk in the Broiler quieted as other customers turned to listen to what Cork had to say.

“To the mill, no significant damage. But someone died.”

“No.” Johnny pushed back in surprise. “Who?”

“They haven’t ID’ed the body yet.”

“One of us, you think?”

“Us?”

“Locals.”

“As opposed to those outside agitators, you mean.”

“Bingo.”

“Like I said, Johnny, nobody knows. Say, what does a guy have to do to get some coffee and a short stack around here?”

Johnny shook his head slowly in puzzlement and dismay at this deadly turn the world around him was taking and he headed toward the kitchen.

The talk of the Broiler regulars-the county work crews, the shop owners, the locals-resumed, and most of it was about the incident at Lindstrom’s. The talk Cork heard sided with the loggers. That didn’t surprise him at all. In a town surrounded by and dependent in so many ways on national forest land, the federal regulations restricting the use of that resource were like slivers under the skin. Snowmobiles and SUVs were severely limited to marked trails. Game wardens packing firearms strictly regulated hunting and fishing. Felling timber, harvesting wild rice, even taking a goddamn crap in the forest was controlled by law.

Unless you happened to be Indian.

History.

The conflict between red and white was old and deep. Cork left the Broiler feeling a heaviness that weighed on him from the past. Because Tamarack County had been down this road before, and not that long ago. The last flareup had occurred only two years earlier. It had been about fishing rights, an issue over which the two cultures had been skirmishing for more than a decade. Jo had argued successfully before a federal judge on behalf of the Ojibwe, asserting that the Iron Lake Treaty of 1873 gave the Anishinaabeg the right to fish that lake and any other in the state without restraint. The judge had decreed that Ojibwe fishermen had the right to take, if they desired, the full limit of fish set by the Department of Natural Resources for the whole lake over the entire season, leaving nothing for other anglers. Resort owners had panicked. Much of the citizenry of Tamarack County, whose economic welfare relied heavily on the money from weekend fishermen, rallied round the resort owners, and threats of violence arose. Cork had been sheriff then and charged with the duty of ensuring the safety of those Ojibwe who chose to gillnet and spearfish. The conflict came to a deadly head one cold, drizzly spring morning at a place called Burke’s Landing. Cork was escorting a group of Indian fishermen to their boats, down a corridor lined with angry whites. Jo was with the fishermen, as was Cork’s oldest friend Sam Winter Moon. He’d brought them safely almost to the landing when a scared little man named Arnold Stanley, a resort owner driven to desperation by the fear of losing everything he had, stepped in front of Cork with a rifle in his hand. He fired once before Cork cleared his revolver from its holster and pumped six bullets into the little man, the final three while Stanley lay on the wet ground. Although Arnold Stanley’s single shot had torn open Sam Winter Moon’s heart, killing him almost instantly, the people of Tamarack County, incited in large measure by Hell Hanover’s raging editorials, raised a hue and cry over the excessive nature of Cork’s response. In a recall election, Cork lost his job as sheriff. His self-respect pretty much followed. And just about everything else in his life had unraveled from there.

As he stepped outside into the smoke-scented air, he had the frightening feeling that he-and all the others who called Tamarack County their home-were about to walk a bloody road again.