Red knife

NINE

Will returned in the late afternoon. Lucinda had finally been able to get the baby to nap, and when her husband came in the front door, she put her finger to her lips.

“She’s sleeping,” she whispered and waved him to the kitchen.

He looked dumbfounded at the plates and pans of food that filled the counters-casseroles, salads, breads, desserts.

“What’s all this?”

“People have been bringing things all afternoon so I don’t have to worry about cooking. It’s been kind of them, but it’s also been hard to get the baby quieted.”

He sat at the table while she made coffee. The whole while he stared at the window above the sink and said nothing.

She’d been numb all day, focused both on the baby, who’d cried most of the time, and on being cordial to the good-hearted people who dropped by with food. She thought the grieving would come when she wasn’t so busy, so tired, and when she was alone. The grieving for Rayette anyway. The grieving for her boy Alejandro had been done long ago. The man who called himself Kakaik-what a horrid sound, like a hungry bird-she didn’t really know. In so many ways, he had become like his father: a stranger to her. Who knew what was in their heads or in their hearts? Frightening, if you thought about it too much, that you could live with a man for twenty-six years and not truly know him. Was she alone in this?

“They’ll release the bodies tomorrow,” Will said when she brought his coffee. “I talked to Nelson at the funeral home. He’ll take care of things. The visitation will be Tuesday evening. The service will be on Wednesday.”

“Thank you for taking care of things,” she said.

He sipped his coffee and stared out the window.

Rayette had told her that Alejandro was a warm, loving man but that she didn’t always know what was going on with him. He would sit for long periods and stare, and where his mind was he wouldn’t share with her. Rayette suspected that in those times he was somewhere in the past, because often he would clench his teeth and his jaw would go rigid. He didn’t talk about the past, she said, except in generalities, and she thought there were a lot of things that had hurt him. Lucinda knew what some of those things were. There had always been tension between Alejandro and Will, often open hostility. Will said it was natural. Sons always challenged their fathers, and it was a father’s duty to prepare his son for the challenges of life. If that was true, then Will was perfect for the job. He was a hard man, a hard father.

“Where’s Ulysses?” Will asked.

She began to wipe the counter. “He left a while ago. He took his guitar. You know how he is. He needed to get away by himself and play his music and think.”

“I wanted to talk to him.”

Good, she thought, with a brief sense of hope. Uly needs to talk.

“He left the damn garage door open again,” Will said.

She turned and glared at her husband. “Did you love him?” The words came out before she’d even thought them; if she’d thought first, she might not have spoken. She stared into his eyes, those dark Ojibwe windows that he never let her see through.

“What?”

“Did you love Alejandro?”

“He was my son.”

“You barely spoke to him in the last two years.”

“We said what needed saying. We understood each other.”

“Do you think he loved you?”

“He respected me. That’s more important. Why talk about this now, today?”

Yes, why? The worst possible time to talk about what could not be changed.

But she pressed on. “He came to me once when he was twelve. It was when you were stationed at Lejeune. He asked me, ‘Mama, does God love me?’ And I said of course he loves you. And he asked, ‘Does God love Uly?’ And I said yes, very much. And he asked, ‘Does God love Papa?’ And I said God loves everybody. And he looked at me with such disappointment in his young eyes and he said, ‘Then it doesn’t mean anything, does it.’ And he walked away.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know. He never brought it up again.”

“Why would you think of that now?”

“It’s not just now. I’ve thought about it from time to time. I always intended to ask him someday what he meant. Now it’s too late.” She hadn’t looked away from his face. She almost never focused on him this way. It made him uncomfortable to be watched. “Will, who killed them?”

“Who do you think? Buck Reinhardt, that’s who.”

“What do we do?”

“We wait to see what the sheriff does.”

“And then?”

He got up and rinsed his cup at the sink. “I’m hungry, Luci.”

He was finished talking about this. She knew that no matter what she said now, the discussion was over.

“Come back and sit down,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll fix you something.”

He kept his back to her. “You’ll eat, too?”

She took his cup and put it in the dishwasher. “It’s not good to eat alone,” she said and turned her mind to the meal.