Carnival Lights

Chapter 4

East

In Ojibwe ways, the east direction is where the Ojibwe come from. It is the spiritual direction.

In Ojibwe ways, the east direction is where the Ojibwe come from. It is the spiritual direction.Pine Township, Minnesota on the Goodhue Reservation, August, 1969

Pine Township, Minnesota on the Goodhue Reservation, August, 1969The blazing red and blue light from the cruiser careened off the windows, utensils, and faces of the women and men eating at the truck stop diner. No one paid much attention. Sher Braun moved slowly, paid the cashier—a woman in her mid-twenties who looked ten years older—with one rumpled dollar and some change damp with perspiration. The woman nodded absently, turning her back to the girl and the carnival colors lighting up the inside of the truck stop diner like it was the Fourth of July. Sher took the hunk of homemade corn-bread wrapped in plastic with a red sticker on the side holding it together and put it in her pack along with two damp cans of Coke, some face makeup, a sky-blue Bic lighter, and a pack of gum. The important thing, she thought, was to not panic.

The important thing,was to not panicThe cop was not there for them. Moving slowly, methodically, she kept her face as impenetrable as those around her: deep caverns of darkness garishly lighted up by each cycle of lights. If they knew at all they thought they were on their way to Fargo. If the APBs were out on them, they would be looking north, northwest, and they were on the southern edge of the Goodhue Reservation zigzagging south, southwest headed to Minneapolis where she knew someone who knew someone, or they could camp out by the river until they found jobs or moved on. Whenever the girls had discussed leaving, Sher had always talked of returning by next spring in time to put the seeds in the ground, with the hope her brother, Jack, would have already left for the war. Kris listened to her cousin, older than her by two months and six days, but she did not reply. Kris was not going back.

Sher strapped the pack over her left shoulder and looked at the woman’s back. She glanced through the empty convenience store section and then again at the women and men eating Paul Bunyan-sized portions of mashed potatoes, peas, gravy, and roast beef and drinking iced tea and Cokes out of red, dimpled plastic tumblers half a foot tall. She walked in a long stride that belied the actual length of her legs, careful to set her heavy steel-toe boots down softly on the concrete floor so as to not draw attention to herself.

Sher saw the cop through the front pane of glass. He walked around to the entrance and opened the door, alarming the leftover brass Christmas bells swinging above the top, hanging down just far enough to be nicked every time someone came or went. She wiped her arm across her forehead and looked down at her nails short and thick after years of drinking fresh raw milk and baling hay and shoveling manure.

The cop stopped and stood in front of the door, blocking her exit. “Girl.”

Sher looked up. The cop met her eyes and looked from her sweatshirt to her jeans to her boots. She saw Injun on his face, in the way his eyes tightened and how his jaw set. She shifted the weight of the pack, nodded, stepped around him, leaned into the door, and walked out.

InjunIt was raining outside, a light drizzle, the kind that would be good for the crops right about now. They had enough rain that season to keep things green and growing. Too much rain would do in the crops with mildew and weaken the root systems, and too little rain combined with too much sun could still dry up the crops before harvest. She squinted her eyes to the flashing lights and headed off to the right.

Sher strode across the concrete to the other side of the diesel pumps until she reached some medium-length grass and sparse white weeds with heads as soft as the noses of the young cows back on the farm. She cut up under the dogwood and set foot down a slight hill. The moon hung full and ominous, low in the sky. Sher thought of her grandmother, Ethel Mae Braun, passed over nearly a year now. Ethel had told her granddaughter that “moon” and “grandmother” were the same word in Ojibwe—nokomis. “A bunch of bunk,” her grandmother said when the radio discussed the astronauts’ training schedules, or the date of their scheduled flight, July 20, 1969. She swatted the air with her hand. “Yah, sure. They’re on the moon now planting their flag. White people say anything and take everything.”

nokomis.* * *

“That you?”

“Yah.”

“Did you get it?”

“Sure did.”

Sher stepped into an old hunter’s shack, the gray boards all but stripped clean of the barn red paint. The door was off and lying on its side. Slivers of moonlight came in all around through the slat boards, warped and cracking apart from one another. She pulled off her pack and set down on an old wooden milk crate turned upside down as a chair. There were the remains of a fire made not too long ago, the circle of small stones and ashes still visible despite the dark.

“Guess someone else had the same idea as us.”

“Guess so.”

Sher unzipped the pack and dug around until she found the Cokes. She set them on the ground. Then she dug around for the corn-bread, pulled off the red sticker, and peeled off the plastic. She draped it like a picnic cloth over the dirt. She put her hand under Kristin’s chin and lifted it up until enough moonlight ran across her face for Sher to see.

“He popped you good this time.”

Kristin pulled her chin away. “Did you get it?”

Sher popped a piece of the corn-bread in her mouth, reached into the bag, and pulled out the face makeup.

“Uh huh,” she said. “These too.” She pulled out the lighter and Trident gum from the pack—a green, stained, army-issued World War II bag that had been their grandfather’s.

The day before they left, Sher had climbed into the barn loft one last time to pull the pack down from behind a rafter, where many times she’d witnessed her grandfather stash it along with a buttery smooth beech tree pipe nestled inside a brown leather and black velour pouch, a brittle turtle shell rattle with a frayed red ribbon braided in black horsehair tail, and faded black and white photographs of two young, dark-complected Indian boys. Sher left the photographs and pipe and rattle, knowing better than to disturb them, but took the government-issued pack.

As a child, up in the loft, when she knew her grandfather was out, Sher had fingered the curled, faded pictures many times over the years, always wondering who the other boy was. One boy was her grandfather—despite his obvious discomfort in both photographs, he still had that impish way about him—head c****d slightly, the left corner of his mouth wanting to pull up into a smile, despite his frown, as if it were running away from the thin slanted white scar that zipped up his chin. His eyes were set to unhappiness, but even in that faded black and white photograph Sher could see the dancing light behind his eyes. His aunties said the night he was born the Northern Lights traveled across the sky and left some of themselves in him.

In one photograph the boys sat on claw-foot chairs, a pedestal between them, and a black curtain draped behind them. Unsmiling, hair cut within an inch of their skulls, stiff gray uniforms that made their arms look like boards nailed to their sides, Sher would have believed it an image from World War II, but they were far too young to have been fighting any war. In the other photograph the same two boys were standing on a dirt road, one black leafless tree behind them, railroad tracks disappearing into the horizon, her grandfather with that frowning, half-c****d smile she’d seen him use a thousand times with white people on Goodhue. To her that look said, despite the unhappiness white people caused and despite his need to protect himself from them, he couldn’t help but shine. The Lights danced inside him.

* * *

“Cool man.” Kristin imitated the white hippie kids she saw on TV or those who showed up at their farm sometimes. Indians called them “wannabes” due to their long hair, factory-beaded headbands and talk of returning to nature where they could be free like the Indians. “Far out. Free as an eagle. Like your people, man,” they’d say. “Stupids,” Ethel would mutter, but she always fed and watered them when they showed up at the farmhouse high, half-starved, and dehydrated from some trippy wilderness hike in the adjacent state forest. Generous was the Indian way. Ethel would not lose her ways out of bitterness.

Kristin pretended to toke. But she did not need to smoke m*******a to escape. Soon her spirit was higher than the moon and the stars above her and freer than the light shining in through the hunter’s slat boards. As she pretended to smoke m*******a, holding the imaginary joint between her forefinger and thumb, she thought of the Mod Squad—the TV show about three hippie youth who escape jail by becoming undercover cops. She watched it if her dad was passed out when it aired. When sober he made her turn off “that damn degenerate hippie show.” Kris loved the trios’ clothes and hair—the white man and woman’s long hair and the black man’s afro—and their language. Outta sight! Foxy! Groovy! As Kris’s spirit meandered above the hunter’s shack, she imagined herself as Linc, the black man, chasing a r****t down an alley at night with the lights of the city behind him. Julie and Pete said, “Dig it, man,” as they caught up to her handcuffing the man she’d tackled. “Solid,” she said, just like Linc always said in the TV show.

Outta sight!Foxy! Groovy!As Sher rolled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, she watched as Kris went far away. Sher was used to it.

“Nah nah nah, nah nah,” Kris sang the opening theme song to Mod Squad.

Sher dragged the disengaged front door back to where it should have been. “Okay, Kris,” Sher said. “Let’s eat.”

The girls ate the cornbread and drank the Cokes and did not talk much at all. They slept on their sides, Kris with the pack under her head and Sher with her rolled sweatshirt under hers.

The morning sun woke them like pinpricks. The girls rolled over and over again. Then sat on the dirt floor Indian style and brushed out their long hair with their fingers. Kristin picked up her Coke can and put it to her lips to get one last drink and then crushed it and threw it into the corner. Sher moved the door back to its side lying position on the ground, slipped on the pack, and walked out of the shack. She moved to the west away from the truck stop diner because she did not want to make a second appearance and draw attention to herself. She walked for a few minutes, stepping over molehills and around dead tree branches and bushes until she reached the creek.

A short hike, for sure, but it transported her to the reservation where nearly every day, unless a blizzard or blistering cold or illness kept her indoors, she ran over her family’s farmland until she reached the railroad tracks that cut between the farmland and the Goodhue State Forest. The forest and the reservation were both named after Goodhue County, actually located in southeastern Minnesota, by a Washington, DC bureaucrat in 1892 who mistakenly thought Goodhue County was a chunk of land in north central Minnesota. The Goodhue State Forest, as described in a 1912 tourism pamphlet, was 111,680 acres of pristine woodland, with “bubbling brooks, the Grand Mississippi, Big Bear Falls, sixteen lakes, and a plentitude of ponds untouched by civilization except for the six primitive campsites constructed by the state for your family’s exceptional enjoyment!”

for your family’s exceptional enjoyment!”Originally, the land of the Goodhue State Forest had been set aside as part of the Goodhue Reservation. But when the Office of Indian Affairs opened the reservation to white settlement, the area of the reservation (the northwest quadrant shaped distinctly like a bear’s head, its snout pointed west) that would become Goodhue State Forest proved too difficult to farm.

“Difficult to farm” was the official reason given by government officials about why all the homesteaders had left. While on the surface true, it was not the whole tale behind the Europeans moving off the land. Anyone within forty miles of what would become the Goodhue State Forest had heard the widespread stories told by homesteaders that the land was haunted by ghosts who harangued them by tapping on their window panes for hours day and night, week after week, and year after year. One German man, with the lettered assistance of his wife, wrote the mayor, governor, congressmen, police, vicar, pope (although he was Protestant) and Office of Indian Affairs repeatedly until they finally sent the sheriff to take a report, hoping this would end his complaints. When the reluctant officer paid a visit to his farmstead, the husband stated that the tapping was a perverse version of “Fünfmal Hundert Tausend Teufel” aka “500,000 Devils”. Then he sang a stanza, rapping his knuckles upon the plank board table he’d crafted with his own hands from the oaks that once covered the farm. At the top of his lungs, in slow, broken English with a heavy German accent he sang for the officer:

Tho’ the door is locked and bolted,

Should it cause us to refrain!

Has yet lock a demon halted,

When the keyhole did remain,

the keyhole did remain.

This well pleased the thirsty demons,

who forthwith leaped thro’ the hole

And at once in demon fashion,

wine by thousand bottles stole,

And at once in demon fashion,

Wine by thousand bottles stole

sang their songs in wildest chorus;

Shouting praise to love and wine!

“Is infernal Indian devils. Dem deliver to us insanity in this godsaken land,” the man’s wife blurted out in broken English slathered with such a thick German accent the Swede had to repeat her words three times in his head to understand her. As abruptly as she spoke, she shut her mouth and receded into a corner near the stone hearth. He was a good man, she told herself, didn’t beat her like so many of the others treated their wives, but still, she should watch herself lest she intrude too much into the men’s conversation. Head down, she watched her husband. Despite her twelve years of education compared to his four, and her being a High German, and he a Low German, she still deferred to him. He was the man of the house, the king. “Koenig,” he’d say after proving himself physically—his way of making him more than his wife.

He was a good mandidn’t beat her like so many of the others treated their wives, but still, she should watch herself lest she intrude too much into the men’s conversation.Koenig,The Koenig stared at the knots in the table, nodded slow. “Ja,” he said. “It’s dem fine. Dem Indian devils.” The presiding officer, a first-generation Swede, wondered how the Indians, with or without their devils, would know the lyrics to some song sung by Krauts, that he, himself, had never heard. The German man glanced at the Swede’s face, the German’s eyes slitted and hard. His cheeks ruddy. The officer thought them insane drunkards, noting the empty jugs behind the barn, once full with distilled spirits. Upon further investigation, he jotted in his report, he believed the jugs had held homemade whiskey, although two smelled of lager. He ended the report by noting that the only spirits at the farm were the ones the husband and perhaps wife had drunk themselves, most likely permanently addling their perceptions.

KoenigTwo weeks after the Swede’s visit, feeling unheard and disbelieved, the family set loose their two pigs and six one-week-old piglets, two Holsteins, eight chickens, rooster, and three dogs in a frenzy of screaming and clapping. Figuring the animals were tainted by devils, they left shortly after sunrise after yet another evening of terror at the hands of “dem Indian devils.” The only ones who believed them, as their wagon rattled down the rutted dirt back roads toward Bemidji, their long hair flying loose (the husband had stopped cutting his and his wife had not the time to bonnet hers), the reins snapping the back of their horse, and three iron pots clanking, were the Indians they passed.

The Indians knew of such spirits, but only Indians living in bad ways who also had spiritual gifts could summon them. As the Indians watched the Germans—yet another white family fleeing—they argued among themselves about whether it was those bad Indian spirits, summoned or acting on their own, or whether it was the land ridding itself of the intruders, or whether it was the bad spirits those English brought over with them. Only two Indians, up to the point when the German family fled, had been bothered by bad spirits. Wavering between the old and the new religions, and confronted with such terror, they’d returned to the Old Ways, gifted the old Indian doctors, followed their orders, and cleared the curses put on them and their families. What the Indians did agree on was that whatever was happening was happening mostly to the English.

In a twist of fate, the husband’s descent into madness did not end in Bemidji. He spent the remainder of his life in the Fergus Falls State Hospital, hair forcibly shorn by staff and fingernails clipped short so he wouldn’t scratch at his face and neck. Forgotten by his family upon his wife’s immediate remarriage, she and her second husband, a second-generation Swede who owned a dry goods store, raised the two young sons as the biological children of the Swede. Thereafter, the family believed its line to be half Swedish until one hundred and eighteen years later a descendent discovered, upon taking a DNA test, that in fact they were 89 percent German, calling into question the adoptive Swedish father as he was the first in their lineage to claim “Swede.” The widow’s first husband heard she remarried a Swede, and on evenings when his pills hit him just so, causing the shadows to jump at him, he ranted about Swedes, as he’d come to hate them all. The staff tied him down during his Swedish rants, but they knew he’d farmed, and when he was lucid they hoped he would help run the insane asylum’s five-hundred-acre farm that fed the inmates and staff. However, upon bringing him into the fields with the idea he would drive a team of plow horses, he’d begin to rock and then sing in German, grasping wildly at the air around his head as if his hair were long as it was when admitted to the hospital or as if he were battling a horde of bees. After a few minutes of this terror, he’d run. The staff grew weary of chasing him and stopped coaxing him to farm. Never again did his former wife set foot in the countryside. She made sure she and her Swedish husband’s burial plots were in a cemetery in town. And, she hated all Indians.

Other official reports along with widespread stories about the hauntings also discussed banging on doors, turning of doorknobs, dropping squirrels and birds down chimneys, sucking dry milk cows, sticking pitch-forks clear through barn roofs, and mangled and half-eaten livestock. The white homesteaders believed it was the Indians, demons summoned by Indians, a punishment from their Christian God for excessive drinking and/or merriment, and explainable natural disasters such as the locust plagues of the 1870s in southern Minnesota. Thus, after the last white homesteader left the area in 1899 and the railroad built through the area failed, former Governor of Minnesota, US Secretary of War, and Head of the Minnesota State Historical Society, Alexander Ramsey suggested, in 1902, it be turned into a state forest. He wrote in an editorial in the St. Paul Globe about the need to turn the area into a state forest. This was a turn of events from Ramsey’s typical newspaper of choice, The St. Paul Pioneer Press. Ramsey made a back room deal with James J. Hill, the lumber and railroad tycoon, the Empire Builder, to humiliate the owner of The St. Paul Pioneer Press on Hill’s urging. The men had bonded after Hill sold two men to Ramsey to satiate Ramsey’s lechery, and therefore, in that manner, created an allegiance of secrets between the two powerful men that no one else knew of beside the two men who had lain on their bellies while Ramsey mounted them from behind, thrusting into the men as if they were women.

St. Paul Globe The St. Paul Pioneer Press.The St. Paul Pioneer PressHill wanted Ramsey’s statement in the Globe, which he owned, for the simple purpose of rubbing salt into the wounds of Gerald T. Buckley, whose first and last attempt to build a railroad had failed on that acreage near the Braun’s land, and who was Hill’s former confidant and now mortal enemy. Ramsey thought, If this were the old country, we would settle this with a duel. His grandfather had told him stories of gentlemen quick-drawing pistols on one another and how the Crown ended the practice by making legislation that declared anyone present—onlookers and medical doctors—would also be charged with murder. Instead, Ramsey wrote, “This great swath of virgin land has sat entirely unused and languid for three years now. While there is an element of truth to the statements made by some in positions to know that the land has proven to be difficult to irrigate, any growth in population of the area was stymied by the failure of the Buckley railroad built alongside the western edge only to cross east, rather than continue north, through the aforementioned acreage. The failure to establish townships is largely due to the ill-timed pursuit of this venture and the ill-fated course chosen by Gerald T. Buckley, against the advice of James J. Hill.” Ramsey had agreed to focus on the railroad and not on the difficulty of farming the area for Hill’s political purposes, which included humiliating Buckley, who had attempted to undermine Hill’s railroad monopoly. Ramsey concluded, “Our great state must render this area useful by turning the land into a State Forest. It will take but a generation to return the cleared areas to a forested area, as it has been for millennia. This is the most prudent and wise use of this acreage.”

GlobeIf this were the old country, we would settle this with a duelThe state forest’s immense body began on the eastern edge of the Braun’s farm. The campsites that were eventually built were on the far eastern edge of the state forest, nowhere near the reservation. The board of Goodhue State Forest, in 1911, nine years after the land was set aside by the Minnesota State Legislature and the official entity of Goodhue State Forest was founded, believed it would still be too dangerous for white families to camp that close to Indian Territory, as some of them jokingly called the reservation at that time. “Not only would it be undesirable, it would also be unrealistic,” Alexander Ramsey boomed across the Minnesota State Senate floor, “to expect the fine citizens of Minneapolis and St. Paul to come within such close proximity to the uncivilized savages.” He doffed his hat and died one year later from congenital heart disease.

* * *

Sher knelt by the creek, unzipped the pack and dug around until she found a small stainless-steel cup. She splashed water on her face, took off her sweatshirt and tank top and washed her breasts and under her arms. Then Sher filled the cup with water and drank. She sat by the creek to dry off under the sun, now around 8:00 a.m. in the sky. After a while she put on her tank top, stuffed her sweatshirt into the large compartment of the pack, and filled the cup with water again. On the walk back to the hunter’s shack she passed over some buried, pink-veined gray rocks set there years ago to form a walkway of sorts. She adjusted her gait to fit the spread of the rocks, as she’d done when walking and running the train tracks back home. She found a sole surviving wild blueberry bush and plucked some blueberries, most of which were small and still hard. The birds had already picked through them. Sher put them in the other battered tin cup.

“That you?”

“Yah.” Sher walked into the hunter’s shack and handed the cup of water to Kristin. She set the cup of blueberries on the ground as their grandparents had done for the girls countless times before.

“Thanks.” Kris drained the water.

Sher nodded. She took off the pack, unzipped the small compartment on the front, and pulled out a wad of bills.

“The depot isn’t far from here,” she said as she sorted the bills with all the presidents’ faces lined up the same way like her father had done when he got the money from a butchered steer or a crop.

“How far?” Kris picked up the cup and stood next to Sher.

Sher looked up at the ceiling mentally mapping their path from her memory of the times she and her pops had traveled the roads on their horses. “I’d say about two hours if we go along the back roads.”

Kristin rocked back on her heels. “It’s only a matter of time before they find out I’m not at your house and you’re not at mine.”

“I’d say another day—tops—if we’re real lucky.”

Kristin nodded and ate some blueberries, picking through them, leaving the hardest ones in the cup.

“I figure,” said Sher, “they’ll look for us on the back roads from Goodhue to Fargo, if they look for us at all, and when they don’t find us there, they’ll put out a statewide APB. On you and me cousin.” Sher smiled, but it was empty.

“They think we’re criminals,” Kris said, as fear of the police and being off the rez rippled through her. The girls were leaving all they knew.

“Some do,” Sher replied.

“Plenty,” Kris said, and leaned into her cousin’s shoulder.

“Yah,” Sher agreed, leaning into Kris.

The girls knew no cop would put out an APB on two Indian girls, but they might do other things to two runaway Indian girls. They had heard the stories, whisperings among the Indian teens, and indirectly addressed by the adults through warnings and behavior. Stay away from the police was rarely directly stated, for Indian children learned to fear them based on the beatings and disappearances and upon what Indians did and did not do: adult Indians and teens’ words ran silent in police presence. Eyes dropped. Indians never called the police, and they avoided the police in town as if they still carried the white man’s plague that had killed so many Indians.

Kristin handed Sher the bottle of face makeup. The girls sat next to each other. Sher pinned the bills under a rock. She smeared the foundation under Kristin’s right eye and across her cheek and then down her jawline to her neck where he held her down and left small red marks. Good thing she’s got light skin, Sher thought with some bitterness regarding all the times white kids and sometimes other Indian kids hassled Kristin over her looks.

Good thing she’s got light skin,“The bruise is hard to cover.”

Kristin pulled back. “Good thing it’s not you. You’d just have white blotches all over.”

“Yah,” Sher said. “Sit still. It needs more.”

When they finished with that, Sher gave Kristin her hooded sweatshirt to cover the marks on her neck. Kristin gathered their things and put them in the pack while Sher slipped the bills from under the rock and counted them.

“Thirty-four dollars.” Sher put the bills in the small compartment of the pack and picked up the empty Coke can Kristin threw in the corner. “Just to be on the safe side,” Sher stuffed it in the pack.

The two girls jogged a jagged line north, northeast to get around the truck stop and then headed south until they hit a dirt road and followed that as it wound about toward the southeast. They walked along the ditch through knee high grass, sharp and green and spear-like, and waist-high weeds poking their wheat-like heads up toward the sun. An occasional frog burped, bellying out its call to its mate. Crickets spoke and grasshoppers flung themselves out from under the girls’ feet at the last moment.

The land was wide open and free, pretty as a picture book. Sher wanted to save it like this, save herself like this forever. The rolling grasses and weeds bent their necks in the wind like the swans and pelicans and black cormorants that graced the ponds on the rez every summer. That, and the flatness of the fields covered with the dainty clusters of yellow and purple flowers crouching beneath the spear-like grasses and nuzzling soft weeds, made Sher feel an eternity inside of herself every time she looked out at the grass and weeds billowing like waves under a pale blue sky.

A car drove by. A brand-new blue ‘69 Mustang with a white C stripe. Not the kind of car they saw on the reservation. The kind Jack, who had moved out with their mother for a few years as a boy when she left the family for long-lost white relatives in New Ulm, wanted except he was half a year away from eighteen and saving whatever little money he could for technical college in Fergus Falls to avoid the draft. It was a losing proposition. Everyone knew he could not make enough to go to college. White boys went to college, at least some of them. But not Indian kids. Sher wondered if the people in the car noticed them, and if they did, would they shoot at the girls the way whites shot at Indians on the interior part of the reservation? Were they close enough to being off rez to not get shot at? What did they think about them trudging through the tall grasses? Probably, she decided, they wouldn’t care about two teenage Indian girls who ran away from home.

“Sure we shouldn’t walk further off the road,” Kristin said, mindful of the practice of whites and their guns.

Sher handed the pack to Kristin.

“Yep. If we cut off it could take a couple of days. Or more. We could get lost and we don’t have food left. This way we get on the bus and as long as nobody questions us when we buy the tickets, we’re in Minneapolis by midnight.” Sher rubbed her neck. She looked at Kris for her thoughts.

“I suppose.”

“This is what I’m thinking,” Sher continued. “Two Indian girls riding a Greyhound into the big city look like we’re going to visit Grandma.”

Sher had watched her share of Westerns with her grandparents and sometimes her dad, when he couldn’t find anything else to do as an excuse to avoid the TV. From the movies she’d picked up a certain cadence and vocabulary which, at times, she unconsciously incorporated into her own such that her style of speaking became a mish mash of long-voweled, lilting Indian-accented English, Minnesota Canadian border white, TV Western, and then, of course, English-accented Indian—what she remembered from listening to her grandparents and other elders talk Indian.

Even though her family watched Westerns, because it was the only place they could see Indians, the TV Indians weren’t much like them, seeming stupid and wooden and unjoking, and not at all like the girls’ grandparents or great-grandparents who’d grown up in the backwoods, real Indians who only spoke Indian and never learned English or Finnish or German or French—the languages of those who took their land. Not like how so many Indians were now, staying put in one place all year long and living off canned rations and government cheese. “We used to be,” the girls’ grandmother, Ethel, would say during the Westerns, tapping her knuckles on the chair’s curved wooden arm. “Not like this, not like this, so,” and she would stare out the window. “In a corner,” she would finish, her gaze returning to the living room. Then she muttered in Indian, and stood up to putter in the kitchen or smoke her stumpy pipe out on the porch overlooking the flat, cleared land that opened into verdant rolling hills and the wide skies of the farm and beyond.

The Westerns were the only time Ethel saw Indians on the little black-and-white Zenith her husband had found in the town’s dump and fixed up himself, using some wire scrap to create a beat-up-antennae that lopped over like a dog ear. She never missed a Lone Ranger episode and thought Tonto good-looking in his fringed buckskin and his thin headband. When teased about that, she turned crimson. “Ehhh,” she said, laughing behind her hand. Disappointed when it went off the air in ‘57, she swore she’d never watch another Western because there could never be another Indian as good-looking as Tonto, but she did watch them on occasion, right up to the night before her and her husband’s old white Chevy truck, which her husband called “Scout” after Tonto’s white horse as a way to tease her, spun off a gravel road into the woods. Whenever he cranked the powerful engine he’d rebuilt, he would yell, “Get ‘em up, Scout,” like Tonto said to his horse, as he thwacked the outside of the door before driving off. “I’m as good looking, eh,” he would say and pose so his wife could see his profile. “Look at that chin. I shoulda been in the movies.” To which his wife would say, “You’ve always been my Tonto, old man,” and then they would laugh, each in her and his own space, chests and bellies rising up and down, laughing at this old joke between the two of them as if it were the first time they’d heard it.

Lone RangerOne night the year before the girls hit the road, their grandparents’ truck drove off Highway 212 right at the bend near Point Creek, flipping over four times before it burned upside down, its rear landing on the fork of a pine tree, its cab flattened, crushed into the ground. None but her grandparents, the white men in the truck behind them, the stars, trees, earth, and moon knew what really happened that night. To the rest, it appeared as if an old man lost control, colliding with a single tree with four trunks growing up and outward from its base, spread out like fingers on a hand, as if they’d grown that way just for that night—to catch an old Indian man and woman in full flight. To give them a resting place.

* * *

“I guess so,” Kris said.

“We ain’t gonna get caught.”

“I’m not going back.”

They walked another twenty minutes until they approached a paved road that hit up against the dirt road making a dog leg that would take them south. Sher paid attention to what was around them—the way the tan gravel spread out across the pavement like a fan from car tires kicking it there, the angle the sun beat down on the girls and roads and the cluster of shimmering cottonwoods in front of them, the shiny silky tassels of the corn field to their left, and the way a lone leaf on a sumac bush to their right knocked about as if a strong wind were about to whip it off its stem, even though the other leaves around it were still. When Sher saw the sumac leaf, she thought of times back on Goodhue when she’d been running and noticed a leaf waving about, sometimes quite violently, despite no wind and no movement of any other leaves. She didn’t know if it meant something, and if it did mean something, she didn’t know what. She just paid attention. Even as a young girl, Sher always paid attention.

Sher loved the old stories, especially the ones about the runners who went from camp to camp to call gatherings or warn or ask for help. The first time Sher heard stories about the runners was from her uncle Mo. She didn’t know if they were biologically related, as in Indian ways those called “uncles” and “aunties” could be biologically related uncles and aunties, great-uncles and aunties, or not biologically related at all. “Them old Indians,” Mo said at night when everyone was gathered together, “they had runners who could run faster and farther than any of these...these ah Olympians in their fancy shoes with the little pokers out the bottoms. Yes. Ey. And this one time a little unarmed group of women and children and old, old men out near Porcupine Creek was camping one night, just minding their own ways as the younger men were off hunting, and along comes those who don’t get named and ambushed them, those women and old, old men and little children. And then,” he smacked his palms together, “they ran every which way and the unnamed massacred them even though we had a peace treaty, they did it anyway. They didn’t care about our agreement. That’s what they did. Yes. Ey. But a few escaped and off the runner went, see, always ready to run. That was his job, not to fight, he always had his running shoes, those moccasins, no little poles on them.” He leaned over and waved his hand over the bottom of his foot. “And off he’d go like the wind. Always ready in just a second and he ran up that way toward Gitchi Gami,” and he waved behind him toward Lake Superior, “to our relatives and told them of the deeds and brought back warriors with him to save any who had hidden and to track the group who’d massacred our people, those Indians, they call them a different name now, those white men do, but we called them something else and they tracked them, easy enough to do, and snuck up on them real quiet and got back our people because, you see, they’d taken a few as,” he searched for the word as English was not his first language “as captives and then that there was how the old time runners, they were important to our survival, back then, in the day. Yes. Ey. Yes. Them old Indians didn’t run in circles,” and he waved his hand about and chuckled, “like they do now for no reason except the clock.” He stopped and lit up his pipe and smoked a little. “Things were hard then, but they are hard now too. You see, that is how it was. That is all. Miiw.”

EyEyGitchi Gami,”, Ey.Miiw.Sher listened. It was like she could see it all when he told the story such that when Sher ran along the railroad tracks and through the narrow forest paths on Goodhue, she imagined herself as a runner in the old days, her people’s lives dependent on her speed and endurance over many miles all alone, and her sure-footed sprinting through snow and ice and heat. And her courage, the courage it would take for her to complete that journey. Yes, that was one thing she liked to think of.

* * *

“Your dad sure is going to be mad when he finds out you’re gone and so’s his drinking money.”

“He sure is,” Kristin agreed.

The girls laughed.

“Imagine him calling my mom and finding out you ain’t been at my house all weekend, then getting mad and going to his Wayne Newton album to buy himself some whiskey and finding out all that cash disappeared, too.”

They laughed harder until they bent over and their eyes teared from laughing and the sun and not having any water. Sher’s long black hair hung nearly touched the ground as she leaned over. Kristin held her brown hair off her face up in a ball behind her head. After a while of laughing like that, doubled over, Kristin threw up.

“Where,” Kris asked as she wiped her face clean with leaves, “is Em?”

Goodhue Reservation, March 1893

Goodhue Reservation, March 1893The girls’ paternal great-great-grandparents, who spoke only Ojibwe, lost their eighty-acre allotment two years and five months after the passage of the Nelson Act. The Nelson Act turned the tribally-owned Goodhue Reservation into eighty-acre individually-owned allotments. The idea behind it was to force Indians to farm and to force the tribe to sell off the surplus land to settlers. The Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) agent at Goodhue found another way to steal the allotment from the Indians by demanding each family with an allotment show their deed to the allotment. The girls’ great-great-grandparents had not been told to hold the papers, at least not in Indian, and burned the deed in a cooking fire the day after they received it. The map that hung in the Office of Indian Affairs, clearly showed their family as the owners of that parcel, but that did not matter. The OIA agent rose his horse out to the girls’ ancestors’ land. Through a translator, he told their family that due to poor record keeping at the OIA, without papers—no matter the map—nothing could be proven and parcel 84 had been auctioned. All thirty-two living on the land had to be gone by the following day. If not, the Great White Father would bring in the military. That was the official line from Washington, DC; however, the OIA agent knew that before the military were summoned from Fort Snelling, packed their bags and rations, and rode their horses on mud roads 213 miles to the Goodhue Reservation, the nearby settlers would have run off the Indians, shooting any who did not leave. The agent had even heard of a few hangings of Indians down at the St. Croix River, on the shoreline across from Taylors Falls. The white men had let the bodies hang for weeks. After they’d been picked over by crows and turkey vultures, they tossed their bodies on top of the logs floating down the river on their way to Stillwater where the logs were sorted, loaded onto rafts, and sent to sawmills. When the river pigs saw the mangled Indian men, they parted the debarked tree trunks so that the currents would carry the bodies downstream.

Shocked and confused, as this land had been promised to the girls’ great-great-grandparents in perpetuity only a few years earlier, the Ojibwe disappeared into the woods to discuss what they would do without being threatened by the agent or settlers. A week later two young Finnish brothers with hair lighter than straw, their words long and lyrical, not unlike the Ojibwe, arrived and set up camp under the trees. A runner from the Ojibwe camp watched them, and reported back to his family deep in the woods.

The Finns moved onto the land, pushing the Indians to the edge of the allotment, but unlike the other settlers, they did not threaten them with violence and force them to leave altogether. The Indians wondered if maybe they let them stay on the edge because both languages sounded like music, swirling and tinkling like water over bits of ice along the shore of Lake Superior. Their languages were unlike the language of the Indians to the south and west whose words sounded like chewed rocks, hard and guttural, rising from their throat in grunts like the words of the pinched, red-faced men born in Germany, who’d built their new lives on Indian land but still spoke in their old way, many more loyal to the Kaiser than the American leader. The Indians could only guess why they were kinder than the other white people. Despite the land passing legally from one lyrical band of humans to another, they co-existed, uneasily at first, in the woods of northern Minnesota, despite the laws created in that faraway land known as the District of Columbia.

The Finns used g**g saws fourteen-feet long that needed two or more men to pull the steel teeth through the ten-foot-wide tree trunks. Then they removed the branches and leaves and hauled the eighty-feet-long stripped trunks on a wagon to the Mississippi. The spines of the trees floated down the Mississippi to the Pine Tree Lumber Company in Little Falls, where the Standing People were cut into perfect straight lines to build square houses. The owners of Pine Tree Lumber Company, Richard Musser, and German immigrant and burgeoning lumber baron Frederic Weyerhauser, who two years later constructed another mansion next door to James J. Hill in St. Paul, built mansions next to each other in Little Falls, overlooking the Mississippi, a stone’s throw from Charles Lindbergh’s home. Unknown to all involved at that time, Musser’s mansion would one day become a museum housing memorabilia from The Wizard of Oz thanks to family friend Margaret Hamilton who played the Wicked Witch of the West and was a frequent guest at the mansion.

TheWizard of OzAfter cutting down the white pines, the Finns ripped out the stumps and roots with an oxen team, leaving the roots lying on their sides to dry like twenty-foot spiders, their enormous root-limbs twisted and frozen in time. Once the spider roots dried, they piled them in the middle of the ever-widening clearing and burned them. The massive orange flames licked the ceiling of the sky, garishly lighting up the charcoal night skies for months.

At first, the girls’ family watched the strange English people cut down the trees and rip out the roots. While they were grateful to not be forced off the edge of their land, now owned by the Finns, their grief and sadness over the destruction of the trees and animals who had lived there threatened to overtake them. The Indians began to be sick, like their family at Thatcher’s Trail, who, they learned by a letter meant for them but delivered to the Finns, had all died from “the disease,” including the great-great-grandmother’s brother and wife, or disappeared like the eldest grandson, Leonard. Four months after Leonard disappeared, his mother married a white man from Bemidji so she and her nine young children didn’t starve as they could not survive on their own. The white man took pity, wrote a letter in English, and sent it to “The Brauns, Indians in Antwatin, Minnesota, on the Goodhue Reservation.” The Antwatin postmaster, who was more congenial toward Indians than his predecessor, rode his horse out to the land and handed it off to the Finns, who had one among them who spoke English, who relayed the letter to the one Indian teenager who knew enough English to understand their family had mostly died and those remaining now lived in a city that was the Ojibwe word for a lake with crossing waters.

Vomiting and developing fevers and lacking in energy, the Indians watched entire families of Standing People die until one day the girls’ great-great-grandmother prayed and received instructions for medicines to give to her family. After searching the woods for the medicines, preparing and giving them to her family as instructed, she said, “Sit here. On this side.” So that their family faced the untouched woods, that in twenty-one years would become the Goodhue State Forest. The great-great-grandmother continued to snare rabbits for her family and conduct ceremonies deep in the woods, where no English would see or hear, until her family all returned to health. In these ways, death was not allowed to take up residence in their bodies. As they returned to health, she said, “Look out here. At the forest. Talk with the Standing People. Pray for them. And the animals. And maamaa akii, the land. Pray for your relatives. Don’t give up, my girl. Don’t give up, my boy.”

maamaa akiiThe flaxen-headed Finns worked hard and slow, as they were accustomed, until they cleared the forest and built a farmhouse, cavernous barn, and chicken coop. For allowing her family to stay on the edge of the land, the girls’ great-great-grandmother instructed her grandson, who’d just returned from boarding school, to walk over one morning to help the Finns. “To keep things balanced,” she said. His work was exchanged in gratitude for allowing the Indian family to stay. In this way, Clarence learned how to run a farm, and learned some Finnish too. The Finns gladly accepted the help but otherwise paid the Indians no mind, going about their business, singing songs in Finnish, the only language they knew. Although in foreign lands themselves, they sang their favorites from back home such as Wäinämöinen from the Kalevala, a song expressing their people’s desire for independence and simplicity over greed, values they retained from their homeland that were the reasons they did not chase off or murder the Indians huddled on the edge of the land formerly theirs that the Finns were now turning into a farm:

WäinämöinenKalevala, Better dwell in one’s own country

There to drink its healthful waters

From the simple cups of birchwood,

Than in foreign lands to wander,

There to drink the rarest liquors

From the golden bowls of strangers.

* * *

The bus depot was just a couple of chairs and a round, chipped, red metal table setting outside a one-room drugstore. The girls bought two, one-way tickets to LaCrosse, Wisconsin figuring it was worth the extra $5 to cover their tracks. In all, they parted with seventeen dollars, including money for a Sunkist and a Coke and four hard boiled eggs to keep up their strength. After they bought the goods Kristin washed out her mouth in the bathroom. Sher set out front in one of the chairs peeling the eggs and drinking her Coke. She craved the taste of fresh milk back on the farm, but she needed the extra pop of the Coke to keep her alert. Kristin joined Sher but ate and drank nothing, pushing instead at the places on the table where the paint had chipped, exposing the dull metal beneath.

They sat there for forty odd minutes, watching trucks with hay bales drive by slow and a tottering brown dog sniff around in a parking lot with grass sprouting through the irregular cracks in the pavement. The ancient white man in the faded sky-blue Twins hat who sold them the tickets came out once and leaned against the door frame but did not say anything. His pa had built the place back in the ‘20s, sure a town would grow there. But none did and the drugstore sat alone along the road, right on the edge of the reservation. His ma said, “Stupid place to build a*****e. You could toss a stone south and it would land off rez. No one wants to live on the edge of a reservation. Not Indians and not whites.” And she was right. The old man went back inside and puttered around. He turned on the radio, an AM station with talking voices the girls could hear but not discern. At last, the bus came, the heat from the black pavement blazing up around it in shimmering clouds. The driver parked the bus in the vacant parking lot where the dog had sniffed earlier and the blazing heat settled under the bus like a pack of dogs lying down to get out of the sun.

Sher swung her boots off the table where she had been resting them. She picked up the pack, handed one ticket to Kristin, and clicked her tongue as if to say this is it. Sher thought about when they were young and her dad was still alive and running the farm and Kristin’s old man did not seem to slap her around as much. At least that she knew of. Those days, their grandparents kept Kris for days during the summer out on the Goodhue Reservation. Chores, always, but also fishing. Berry picking. Swimming. Stories. Gathering certain plants, the girls were not told the names of—just told find this one that grew around the base of trees with dark green, jagged leaves and don’t be fooled by the ones like that with the smooth edges. And then, when the girls returned with the right plant, their grandmother gave them a leaf to chew and the girls s**t black for two days. “Clean you out,” their grandmother said, smiling and patting their braids. When gathering plants, they were taught to pinch out some tobacco from a cigarette, or if money were low, then shredded willow bark their grandparents gave to them so that they could leave the brown and red flecks next to the plants before they picked them. “To thank them. Never take without giving tobacco,” Ethel told her granddaughters. And in the fall, they spent weekends visiting aunties and uncles and cousins from Antwatin—some of whom were related by blood and others who were not blood-related but still considered family. Those relatives still riced full-time, something Sher’s dad and the girls’ grandparents could only do part-time, and in certain years if the crops were late not at all, because of the farm.

this is it. Things were good then. The girls played in the barn, sliding down bales of hay stacked from the loft to the floor as if it were a giant prickly ride at the Goodhue County Fair. They played with the baby pigs so soft and pink, and they dyed eggs bright green and purple like the glass beads their great-grandmother turned into elaborate floral designs on leather and velour bandolier bags which were, in turn, traded with tourists for cloth and fish and needles and more glass beads and needles. The girls searched for the eggs when Grandma hid them around the house and yard—one ritual she retained from her boarding school days because it was one of the few brightly colored activities to come out of the black, drab church.

And some nights, after the dinner dishes were washed and chores done, they played dice and moccasin games and Quist as taught to them by Jorgen, their tall, fiddle-playing Norwegian neighbor two farms down, one of only a handful of white farmers friendly to their family. He and Harald, his bachelor friend who lived with him and helped run the farm, would come over for an evening with a tin of herring their people in the old country sent. They’d play games at the kitchen table and then, as the night wore down, Jorgen would remove the small instrument he’d made himself from its pine box and play, until the sun rose pink and the girls slept in their grandparents’ arms or sprawled out on a sheet, the two odd white men who’d never married, and an Indian farming family, sometimes six and sometimes numbering in the twenties with cousins and friends of friends, making stringed music and jigging in the dark. As the night wore on and the Indians felt safer and looser, the jigging Indians transformed into two steppers and side dancers until it seemed the room was filled with hundreds of dancers and drumming—the spirits of the old ones joining in.

The girls’ grandparents and other older Indians no longer concerned themselves with a priest knocking on the door, as their grandparents did when they were babies. This was white music, and they were not in the bush. Times had changed. The priests believed most Indians had adopted white ways now, although every once in a while they heard rumors of Indian drums pounding deep in the woods or seeming to come from under the ground, spurring the priests to dust off an old sermon reminding the Indians in the congregation of their savage past, a road that if followed again would lead them straight to eternal damnation, where they would burn in the bowels of hell for all time, where, if they went back to the old ways, they would suffer eternal death and damnation in a pit of fire for the sins of their ancestors and for their sin of reviving the demon ways.

But that was all over now and the girls could never go back to it. Their grandparents gone just over a year in a freak car accident, and Sher’s father passed over eight months now. Sher strapped on the pack. She and Kristin walked over to the Greyhound bus and gave their tickets to the bored, road-stunned driver, weaving their way through the exiting passenger until they sat down in the middle of the bus. They set there for a while as the other passengers got off and peed in the drugstore’s bathroom and bought various sundries for the rest of the trip.

The girls said nothing to each other, waiting to see if anyone would call them out at the last minute. Hey, where you from? Hey, Indians can’t leave the reservation. Hey, where you going? Hey, you’re runaways. But no one said anything to them. The last errant passenger filed onto the bus and sat down and the driver pulled the door shut in a wide, arching circle. The bus hacked and coughed and then rolled out of the parking lot with the hounds of heat gathering strength underneath.

Hey, where you from? Hey, Indians can’t leave the reservation. Hey, where you going? Hey, you’re runaways. Thatcher’s Trail, April 1891

Thatcher’s Trail, April 1891Leonard cut through the waist high ferns in the forest. Three new white men down at the clearing were talking about two more wigwams and an abandoned log house that had burned the day before. He didn’t want to hear more and didn’t want them to see him, so he cut a wide swath around them until he reached the swell in the forest floor on the northeast side of the clearing. Then he could trot upright beyond the clearing to the ferns that, if stretched upright, were taller than he. As his legs whispered through the ferns—still and silent as far as he could see—Leonard swept the horror of the bloated, pus and blood covered faces and arms out of his mind. The lolling heads and rigid limbs that had no one to bury them. Occasionally, he, on his own, had found wigwams and tar paper shacks burned to the ground, the charred shrunken bodies like burned out tree stumps and fallen trunks after fire crumpled the forest into ash, leaving behind limbless, black trees stark against a charcoal sky. In the end, all returned to the earth. Leonard knew that was what the white man’s religion taught too, but he didn’t understand their irreverence, their greed.

Some said it was white men sent by the doctors in town who set fire to the burned Indians, some said Indians were doing it. Leonard did not know who set the fires. Maybe both were right—he knew some Indians did for the white men, worked with them to get English clothes and the land for themselves. Leonard watched, and he waited, and he prayed they wouldn’t all die like that—the people disappearing, without proper ceremonies. What would happen to their spirits?

Indian ways were disintegrating like the white man’s papers they burned. “Useless,” the old ones said, except for fire starting. Some Indians didn’t know what the papers were about; they’d never seen them before. Who would think a piece of paper would equal the earth? What sort of person could believe that? Others knew the papers were about the land and the dead and dying Indians that the white men and some mixed Indians leered over, their cannibal words buzzing over the wires strung through the trees between Antwatin and St. Paul. The lumber barons on Summit wouldn’t live in such an uncivilized place, but they had their emissaries among the Indians, some of whom were breeds. The lumber barons tapped out their directives that traveled year-round at great speed across wires, among shimmering leaves, and over barren, snow-swept fields.

As Leonard stepped over a fallen tree, he wondered how a piece of paper could have anything to do with the land—the trees and the animals and the earth. There was no equation between the land and a sheet of paper with the black markings of crow’s feet. He and his grandfather had walked this fern forest many times, the fronds long and wide, like great arms waving in the winds. Green as, Leonard thought, but here Leonard’s mind stumbled for there was a specific Indian word for this late spring color of the fronds. A bright green like that auto sign he’d seen in town the other day, but not quite. His grandfather had used the Indian word for “green forest ferns at this time of the spring” with him many times as they made their way to the bay. Already he could not remember it. A woodpecker knocked a hole above him, the sound a rat tat tat. The word meant a specific green, longer and more complicated than “bright” or “forest” or “mint” or any other way green was used in English. It was a word that came up from the land, not from a manmade object that was then transferred to describe the land.

Green as,His thighs brushed the fronds in his path. How could “forest” mean one green? One glance and his eyes captured many greens. The Indian word also told of the time of year, and the specific plant, and the shape its leaves took at that time, and the place. And growth. Green is life. Leonard remembered his grandfather saying, “My boy. Look. See the tips of these branches at this time of spring?” and he pointed to the tips of a pine branch that were bright light green, against the dark green of the older growth. “The trees grow their fingernails and toe nails now.” But even one Indian word for green, Leonard could not recall. Not one.

Leonard pushed aside a small maple with leaves as big as a child’s palm that had sprouted up among the ferns. He looked at the back of his hand, just like his grandfather’s—same long fingers, bony knuckles, and the same deep brown skin with the rusted shine of dried pine needles. His grandfather lived in him, yet already, Leonard did not have his words or always have the kinnikinick to offer during sunrise and sundown prayers or when he took life as his grandfather had taught him. Sometimes, he felt too overwhelmed to fetch willow branches. Other times he went to where his family had been harvesting willow for generations, but they were gone—plowed over, plucked out of the earth like whiskers to make way for yet another path or garden or clearing for a flat wood house, as his grandfather, who hadn’t learned any English until his forties and never learned the white man’s language well, had called the white man’s clapboard houses.

kinnikinickLeonard leapt over a moss-covered trunk and ran up a hill. Just over this ridge of ferns was their favorite fishing spot in Hook Bay. Seeing the water sparkle through the fronds shot panic and fear through his body, as no men were alive in his family to guide him. He nearly dropped to the ground, but his legs held. He must go on. His family depended on him. Their survival was not just for them, but for those to come.

As he surveyed the water for white men, memories of his grandfather’s instructions held him up. “Do not mourn the first year,” his grandfather had said. “You must go on. Always. Then when it is a year, the pain will be less. No one will go hungry because you mourn too much.”

Leonard’s moccasins sprang off the ground onto a black boulder pushed by a machine off the recently cut road. He wanted to see if any white men fished in the bay ahead. He wished to be alone. A wide white scrape slashed across the face of the boulder reminded Leonard of a scar on an old man’s cheekbone. His mind reeled. “Grandfather,” he called out. Grief slashed his chest, despite his best efforts to not allow it.

The day he and his father had found his grandfather in his wigwam flashed into his mind. He saw again, as if he were reliving it, his grandfather’s open eyes, the whites yellowing, the pupils fixed like pebbles, the white scar down his cheekbone from a quarrel he’d had as a boy, and the cloud of green-headed flies lifting off his grandfather. “Awas,” his father had commanded. “Leave!” Just as his feet pushed into the soft sandy earth of the wigwam floor, he saw his father’s hand reach out to cover his grandfather’s eyes. He’d died seated on the earth with his back against the strong curved willow branch, like a rib. The fern mats hung down from the curved branches like feathers, tied there just days earlier by his wife even as she coughed from the white man’s disease. Leonard’s grandfather’s hand still grasped his staff, white eagle feathers hanging from its tip. His father fell forward across the old man—”Noos,” he wept. The feathers shook. Those left behind were not to cry like that. It disrupted the dead’s journey. Leonard turned, pushed off the dry earth, knowing his father’s weakness might have brought back his grandfather’s spirit, kept it from walking its path across the sky to return to the old ones. Leonard ran.

AwasNoos The week after his grandparents’ deaths, Leonard had trekked up the logging road cut through the forest a month earlier, when the company showed up with the sheriff to throw off an entire family plus six others who had been living on the plot. The company didn’t wait for the Indians to clear off. The sheriff and a company man rode up on horses pulling a giant machine—an enormous metal, log-like thing at its front with spikes as long as a man’s forearms. Leonard had been there, visiting, preparing to fish with two other boys. They put their shredded willow bark down at the base of a bulky fir, as instructed. Said their prayers. If they had a good catch, they would be able to feed everyone. Day after day, as more Indians died from this pox, a few straggled onto the survivors’ land. Some just babies, barely walking, led by a five-or-six-year-old cousin down a footpath or road a dying parent had pointed out to them. Down to there. Right at the pond. Up the big hill. That week, a white doctor who spoke Indian came, and told Leonard’s mother and father to turn them away. That was how the pox spread. Leonard’s parents kept their eyes on the ground, on their hands, on the white doctor’s black boots. Nodded. Said yes in Indian when the white doctor asked if they’d heard him, if they’d understood. He mistook their avoidance as stupidity. They waited for him to go. How could they turn away children? Their relatives? They never would. “We will die first,” his father had said. And then he did.

Down to there. Right at the pond. Up the big hill.On the rock, Leonard shook his head to blur the death images. In a matter of weeks, his grandparents and father died. He could not see the water. He caught the dart of a shiny black crow between the trees and the whip of a green grass snake beneath fallen gray oak leaves so old their skins had thinned, reminding Leonard of an old person’s hands—the leaves’ veins popping higher than the mottled sunken skin. Trees. People. Birds. Snakes. All were related. Leonard dropped down off the rock and ran up the hill toward the river bend, where he hoped he would not find the company men.

Goodhue Reservation, Minnesota 1955

Goodhue Reservation, Minnesota 1955The girls’ auntie, Em, stayed awake at night when she was young to listen to the adults’ stories, even as her siblings faded into their dreams at their grandparents’ wigwam. Em’s only movement was the flutter of her eyelashes, stark as spider legs against the shining whites of her eyes. Em knew how to be still. Her mother and grandmother had pinched her lips as a baby to teach her quiet, like their mothers and grandmothers had pinched their babies’ lips to keep them silent in the forests and marshes so their cries would not alert enemies lurking nearby. Em knew how to breathe so shallow that one would have to look for a long, hard time before realizing her belly and chest moved with life. She’d practiced as a girl, hiding from the white social workers. Her fluttering eyelashes were the only thing that could make her grandmother say, “The little one watches,” from the other side of the wigwam. The army-issued wool blanket separated the wigwam in two when needed, pinned back to let the heat from the fire creep into the second room where the children slept. Then the stories were told softer, all in Indian—no mixing of English and Indian words, which the girl could figure out—her mind bending in two languages. Or the stories simply ended altogether, the talk moving on to jokes and teasing and gossiping such that Em lost the thread of that which she was not to hear—Indians dying from tuberculosis and influenza and the pock disease. Entire families gone, no one able to bury them—the animals and insects consuming their bodies. Or one left, a child, found alone without food or water for days, snatched up by the English and given or sold to foster homes, farmers, boarding schools, men on ships, or the state where they’d be fed just enough to be kept alive. Many were sexually violated, girls and boys.

. When Em did manage to hear the stories, the ones not intended for her young spirit, the ones her grandparents wanted to protect her from, the most alarming of all were how Indians were captured and sold the way white men sell cattle and pigs. And how Indians were taken across the water, Gitchi Gami, never to return. Indian bloodlines were spread all across the world now, sold into s*****y like the people with wool on their heads.

, Gitchi Gami“The children,” her mother sometimes cried when these stories were told. “The children.” Em knew her mother had been one of those children and Em, even at that tender age, like most Indian children, knew Indian children were still in danger from the welfare ladies who came in their clippety clop shoes and with clip boards checking off boxes on their papers, looking for Indian children, searching for any little thing to take them away. And sometimes for nothing, sometimes, just making it all up, stealing the children when their mother was at the neighbor’s, trading wild rice for eggs, or at the tavern on a three-day bender—the kids left with relatives. Didn’t matter the mother sent her children to their grandmother’s. The social work lady stole the kids anyway and sold them to a white couple in Sacramento or Dubuque or Philadelphia where no one would tell them who they really were, where they’d grow up never feeling quite right, never at home in their skin. Where one day when they were nine-years-old they would see their shadow on a sidewalk during a game of hopscotch and know. They were Indian.

know* * *

Sher pulled the thin bluish-green thread around the neck of the pack of wintergreen gum and then slid out a silver-wrapped stick for herself. She leaned toward Kristin sitting next to her, looking out the far side of the bus as it drove away from her past. Kris watched the tall weeds and lone surviving trees scattered along the prairie’s edge waving in the occasional breezes of a merciless August sun.

“Gum?”

Kristin unwrapped a stick and let the wrapping flutter to the floor. She put the gum in her mouth and walked to the back, jogging to the right and left as the bus caught its balance and settled into a cruising speed. Kris clicked open the bathroom door and squeezed inside.

Sher heard the door click. She chewed her gum slowly, pounding it into shape between her back teeth while she watched the sky and prairie roll away, a perfect picture framed by the bus window. She glanced at the man across the aisle sleeping with his tan cowboy hat pulled down over his face. Through the cracks of the seats in front of her, she saw an older woman, probably in her fifties, reading a thick paperback book. Kristin appeared next to Sher and sat. Kristin had applied a fresh coat of face makeup to her lean angular countenance in the bus bathroom.

They rode like that for a while neither of them saying anything or doing much at all other than looking out the windows at the passing landscape and the occasional grove of pine trees clustered together against the wind and snow that would soon blow, turning the green landscape white. Sher fell asleep, the gum lodged between her teeth and cheek for safe keeping, but Kristin stayed awake, sensitive to the scraping of feet or loud coughs from the other passengers. When Sher awoke, Kristin had a small pad of unlined paper and a pencil with a chewed off eraser.

“Where’d you get that?” Sher resurrected her gum.

“Some lady in the back. She’s got a whole bag of stuff packed for her kid.” Kristin shrugged. “He’s in Moose Lake visiting his godmother.” Kristin opened the notepad and drew a horizontal line and then a vertical line that made an upside-down T and a smaller horizontal line at the top of the vertical line with a little one coming down off that. Sher yawned and stretched her arms above her head while Kristin marked four slashes off, then left a space, then marked three more slashes.

“Guess.”

“A.”

“Yah.” Kristin marked “a” on the third s***h in the first group and on the middle s***h in the second group.

“E.”

“Yah.” Kristin marked “e” on the second s***h.

“F.”

“Nah.”

“B.”

“Nah.”

“How about D.” Sher’s mind shifted and she tried to remember how to say “Dad” in Indian but couldn’t.

“Yah.” Kristin marked off the first and fourth slashes in the first set.

“I know what it says,” Sher said and took the pad and pencil away from Kristin to make up her own hidden words. “You can’t kill him.”

They played hangman and other word games until it was dark outside. The moon rose, blooming like an onion over the prairie and the thin line of black trees on the horizon. Small yellow lights popped on inside the bus, running from the front to the back like clean crisp stitching from a sewing machine. Two perfect lines of light above each set of chairs but not enough for the girls to see by for their word games.

Sher set the notepad and the pencil on the floor.

“You can’t just kill him, you know.” Sher sucked on her gum. “Think about what Grandma and Papa would say.” She caught a white flash of headlights in the window next to her and felt a burst of confusion.

Kristin turned sideways in her chair with her back to Sher. “Grandma would probably tell me to do it.” The pack set between them. “If it were the old times, someone would set him out, someone would kill him. Grandma told me so once.”

Sher knew she was right. Grandma said that. Sometimes in front of Papa. Sometimes after Papa had left the room. Their grandparents had disagreed over issues of vengeance. Papa said let it go. Don’t hate. Don’t become one of them. Grandma held to her anger. Said he didn’t understand. Hadn’t happened to him. And the old ways, for that kind of hurt, said you could. Her voice would trail off. After a few minutes, their grandfather said, “It’s not the old days anymore.” And he’d duck out, onto the farm, the way of life that had replaced his grandparents’ life. Sometimes, he was not sure he’d done the right thing. Putting his family here. Hoping to set seeds in them, keep the old ways alive, even if latent, so that one day, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be alive to bring back the old ways. Regrow the forest.

“They’d send you away to jail or foster care or an insane asylum. Take you away like they did to Auntie Em,” Sher said and shut down her sadness over Em. Sher didn’t remember it, being just an infant at the time, but they’d taken Em for two months, when she was six, right out of school with no explanation, and she returned to her family a different child, an angry and erratic girl. “He’s white. You’re not,” Sher whispered, her words turning into a hiss that rose above the constant flap flap of the tires as they rolled over the moonlit black pavement, shiny as obsidian.

Kristin jutted her right hip out and turned her pelvic bone and then her whole upper body farther away from Sher. “She wouldn’t say no,” she said. “Like you did.”

Sher did not know if Kris meant their grandmother or Em. Both, she realized, would probably agree with Kristin.

“You don’t know either,” Kris said, her voice tight and low.

“Sorry,” Sher said after a minute. “Kris, I’m sorry.” She touched her back lightly. Kristin flinched and Sher pulled her hand away. She’d let her fear of losing all she had left—her cousin Kris—guide her words. “I just miss them. Sometimes. I don’t know what to do without them.”

Sher watched nothing out the window until she fell asleep. She dreamed of disembodied hands, white as parchment paper, moving toward her. As they opened, reaching for her throat, she felt paralyzing terror. The moment they grasped her throat she woke. In the dream, she knew they belonged to a teacher, but not hers. Whose, she did not know.

* * *

The squealing brakes and the lurching of the bus woke up both girls. They looked out the window next to Sher, the strips of black rubber around the outside of the window moist with condensation left over from the heat of the day. They could see very little, only shadows in the dark punctuated by occasional yellow kaleidoscope lights.

“Hinkley,” the bus driver’s voice came over the PA system. “Diner on the left. We’ll be here for thirty minutes, folks. Everyone back on in thirty.” The bus driver clicked off the mouthpiece.

“Want anything.” Kristin pursed her lips and pushed them toward the diner outside until she realized that she was pointing with her lips, an Indian thing the white kids at school chided her for. She quickly stopped.

“No,” Sher said, even though she was hungry. She didn’t want to go through their money so soon.

Kristin grabbed the pack near the top, strangling it like a goose, feeling a wisp of guilt, as if her inability to keep the two worlds separate—how she acted around her grandparents and cousins versus how she acted around her white dad and white school kids and white teachers—would lead to her cousins or grandparents being hurt. When alone, with his only child who was a nearly 50 percent enrolled Ojibwe Indian, Kristin’s dad called Indians savages, saying the only thing that could save them was an infusion of white blood until it flushed out all the red. He’d done Kris a favor, he said, he’d given her hope she could achieve something, be something other than their superstitious fears and lack of civilization. When drunk, he would go on for hours. “Civilized. See,” and he’d pick up one of her school books or point at the place the TV used to sit, before he kicked it in one night. “Higher thought processes,” he’d slur. “Now you have ‘em.” “Thanks to yer old man.” It didn’t matter Kris’s grandparents owned a farm-a coup for sure that any Indian still owned any land on the reservation as most of it had been bought by whites-because he knew, even if they hid it, that they still believed in the old Indian ways. When he spoke ill of Indians, Kris never responded.

His hatred was tangible, heated. His hatred was the burn of fire. The dog skulked out of the room, tail tucked, and Kris went blank, receding inside her body, her skull a barrier between her own thoughts and his words, until she could leave his physical presence and then sort through the pain and confusion and guilt, as if she were responsible for her dad’s words, even though she disagreed, even though it was she he hated. At the core of her confusion was her fear that she was responsible for what he did to her mom.

One morning, when she wasn’t yet three, Kris was playing with a sock under her parents’ bed. She heard feet scuffling as her father pushed her mother into the bedroom, threw her down, and pinned her to the bed. “Quiet,” he whispered. “Do you want the girl to hear?” The wood slats holding up the mattress creaked and bent over Kris’s head. A glass of white daisies Kris had picked for her mom fell off the side table, their white heads landed like one large white flower next to the baby under the bed. Fearing the bed would collapse on top of her, her body curled. “Stop. I won’t leave you,” her mom cried. “Shut it,” her father commanded and commenced to strangle her to death a foot above their toddler, curled in terror and holding her breath as her mother rasped for hers, pounded her fists on the bed, clawed his back and face. There was one last gasp and then Kris’s father said, “Dumb squaw.” He pushed inside her one last time, ejaculated, and then pulled out of her, dismounted, and set off to make himself an early lunch. To the little girl under the bed, it felt as if the world collapsed on her, burying her in the hatred and pain above her. It was then the violence entered her, planting itself there, twisting inside her, waiting to bloom, waiting to take vengeance.

After a turkey sandwich and glass of milk, Morgan dragged his wife’s corpse to the wood shed. And then, the next morning, he wrapped and tied her corpse in burlap corn seed sacks from Jacques Corn Seed—the hybrid corn seed seller he sowed on his farm—and drove his toddler and his wife’s body to a fourteen-acre swamp where he dumped the body with stones from his farm in the bags for the fish and turtles to feast on. No one’ll find her here, he thought, as he watched the logo of the seed company—a drawing of Jacques’s daughter, a young white girl with blond curls—and listened to his motherless toddler scream from his ‘47 Chevy truck.

No one’ll find her here,* * *

“You sure?” Kris asked when she stopped a few seats ahead to wait for the passengers in front of her.

“Yah.”

“All right.”

Kristin moved off and was lost in the mix of passengers emerging from their seats to stretch their legs and gather food items and pee in Hinckley. Ivan’s, a former stopover for mobsters on their way up from St. Paul to Duluth and Two Harbors, served the dual purpose as a Greyhound bus depot and the only late-night diner between there and the Cities.

Sher stared at the red and brown fabric on the seat in front of her and then into the shadows that made up the town of Hinckley. Her eyesight was raggy and dull from lack of sleep and stress and the dim lights inside the bus. The streetlights illuminated the backyards of the small white houses built after World War II for the returning GIs and their new brides. Monster oak and pine and maple overshadowed the houses that glowed in the dark like teeth.

Much time went by, too much time, and the bus driver did not return nor did any of the passengers except a young woman with big eyes and a small child. Sher looked out the window at the houses shadowed by the trees stitched together by waist high white picket fences, glimpsing what looked to be a child standing by a fence. She blinked and looked again at nothing. Her eyes were playing tricks. She wondered if she had lost track of time in the dark shadows that played off the houses, jumping from a second-story window to a back step down to a tricycle left on its side, or if she had lost track of time because she was disoriented from sleeping on a rolling bus with no food. She strained her neck to the left and saw that most of the scattered passengers on the bus were looking toward Ivan’s diner. She could see nothing other than the lit up red sign that should have read Ivan’s Diner but because of burned out bulbs merely read van’s Dine.

van’s DineSher stepped sideways into the aisle, careful not to bump the seat in front of her where the woman reading the paperback dozed with the small book laid flat out over her lap. The woman resembled her white great-great-auntie. Sher thought of her and her other distant relatives on her mother’s side who lived in New Ulm. More people spoke German than English in New Ulm. She remembered once attending a huge wedding held in a barn where everyone spoke German and talked about the German-American politics she knew nothing of and the boiling tubs of kielbasa and sauerkraut and the thick pies made with sour cream. And the town square in the very center of town where couples were frequently married inside the imported German bunkers from World War II, which were displayed alongside an old canon from the Civil War and other memorabilia.

And how they didn’t much like Sher or her father or her brother, or really even her mother, 5/8 Indian, according to the rolls. But according to her family’s count, more like 7/8. There’d been some white man who decided Sher’s mom’s ancestors’ skulls were the wrong shape—too European according to their charts—to be full Indians, and so he changed the trajectory of their family by categorizing them as less than full-bloods, and therefore unable to receive a full allotment.

And then, like a snake winding sideways through grass, Sher’s mother’s grandmother had married a half-breed, and the numbers fell like an acorn bouncing through branches and leaves until it landed on the unlikely fraction of 5/8. Still, any Indian was too much Indian for Sher’s mother’s German side of the family, down in New Ulm. Some of her white family was polite but awkward in their presence. They were the ones who felt obliged to save Sher’s mother from being Indian. Others made pains not to touch them, while others stared with hard eyes or looked away as if they never saw them. Sher and Jack were of them, although just a small fraction, but the Indian made them something else, something Germans, especially from that part of the state, could not tolerate. Indians were Indians, they thought, and it didn’t matter that Sher, her father, mother, and brother’s people had nothing to do with the Indian wars a century ago that bloodied that part of the land with Dakota and settler blood. Some of the Germans hated Sher and her father and brother on the spot. It didn’t matter to them that part of her bloodline was of theirs, nor did it matter to Sher. After her mother left her white foster parents and joined some sort of different Christian denomination Ethel called a cult, Sher’s mother moved to southern Minnesota in an attempt to belong to some long-lost white relatives and a place she could not be part of. History had made that impossible.

Sher stepped as discreetly as possible in her work boots past the sleeping woman to the steps that dropped her abruptly onto the pavement. She caught her legs as they buckled when her feet hit the pavement. Sher turned and walked around the front of the bus toward the late-night diner, the steam still rising off the flat front while the hounds lay cooling under the bus.

She stepped inside the all-night diner, catching the screen door out of habit behind her back before it snapped shut. As she let the screen door slip from the tips of her fingers gently into the frame, she faced a crowd gathered around Kristin and two employees in white aprons. Sher felt out of place, like a crust of cold air coming off the prairie hitting hard in the face. Her black hair and eyes, round face with flat cheeks, and brown skin set her apart from the blonde, long-faced people in the restaurant.

People were yelling and pointing fingers and shaking thick arms. Kristin stood in the middle, getting heat from the man and the woman in the apron who was a waitress there. Kristin said nothing, her gray eyes darting from the man to the crowd and back again. She did not look at the waitress who stood with her hands on her hips, her white-blonde hair lifted up off her face into a beehive by a white scarf. The crowd shouted we have to leave her, call the Sheriff and get it over with and let the girl talk. An old woman, her back bent over like a question mark, sat at a table ignoring the commotion, picking at her plate.

we have to leave her, call the Sheriff and get it over with let the girl talk“Kris, did you order my food?” Sher said as she strode forward, breaking into the din of the crowd.

Kristin looked up, a flash of relief running across her face and then hiding itself like the bruise on her face covered over by the makeup. “I told you I thought my cousin was going to pay for it,” she said to the man.

The crowd continued to talk, but the man and the waitress in the apron and a few others looked at Sher walking toward them in her tank top and jeans and heavy work boots.

“Cousin?” a teenager asked, visiting from Ames, Iowa, incredulous that white and brown skin could be related.

The waitress shook her head and folded her arms across her chest. Dirty thieving Indian trickled from her thoughts to her face.

Dirty thieving Indian“Leave her be,” the old woman said from the back. “She’s just a girl.”

“She’s one a them,” another woman said and jutted her jaw toward Sher.

“All right, break it up,” the man said. He looked at Kristin. “You can go.”

Kristin bolted toward Sher.

The bus driver emerged from the side of the crowd and said, “Everybody back on. Five minutes.” He waved his arm over his head toward the door.

“Did you order my food yet?” Sher asked again, for effect.

Kristin shook her head no and handed Sher the pack. The crowd dispersed, mostly going out toward the bus. The waitress picked up a sea-blue plate with a half-eaten hamburger and the stub of a pickle and left-over coleslaw. She turned her back, disgusted, and the man began straightening the chairs shoved around the room by the crowd.

“Anything I can get to go real fast?” Sher asked the man straightening the chairs.

“Look,” he leaned over and placed his hands flat on the table. “I gave you girls a break. Get on outta here and don’t come back.”

“Just keep going through,” the waitress said, lifting up her chin. “We don’t need your types round here.”

Sher and Kristin knew what the woman meant. Plenty of whites in the towns around the reservation said things like that. Kristin turned beet red. Sher stepped aside and let Kristin pass. She nodded at the man and then the waitress and turned and walked out behind Kristin.

The girls said nothing. They walked to the bus and stepped single file down the aisle, avoiding the faces of the other passengers. The girls felt a bouquet of shame and anger and fear.

“You girls caught a break,” a gray-haired white man said. He fluttered his hand at them like a moth.

The girls dropped into their seats. The woman in front of them muttered in her sleep and the engine roared and the headlights burst on, two straight beams cutting through the night. The bus sighed, moving at the pace of a turtle as passengers settled in. The white houses flickered like candlelight fighting shadows.

“I won’t do that again.”

“Best not.”

The bus stopped in three more towns but the girls did not get off. They stayed awake staring out at the flat farms along the highway or at the small towns as they passed through to pick up passengers, or drop them off outside closed buildings that served as bus depots and pharmacies and diners and once—a feed store. As they passed over the land, Sher saw shadows of small children standing alongside the roads that turned into large birds of prey on second look and then on third look were gone.

* * *

“Minneapolis, twenty minutes,” the driver said as the bus neared the outskirts of the city. Passengers leaned to the left or right and pressed their noses to the windows to get a better view of the buildings and the lights so different from what they lived. Sher pressed her temple and cheekbone against the window so she could see the cascading street lights and the roads arching and intersecting one another like bike tire marks down a dirt road after school let out. She wondered if the city had changed much since she saw it last.

Four years ago, her father and she had left Jack to travel to the city in their ‘49 Ford, pulling behind them a borrowed trailer with two liver-colored cattle, Sher’s 18 hand thoroughbred Patsy Cline, a 297-pound hog, and a rooster in a wire cage. Thaddeus and Jack had little in common. It was Sher and her father who were so alike in looks and temperament that her mother called them “two peas in a pod. Just alike you two.” She’d contemplate Sher for a moment, as if considering whether Sher had come from her. “Youse nothing like me.” Sher’s father was tall and slight with hair so dark it shined blue under certain lights and his skin a deep auburn acorn and eyes black as rabbit holes. He had a quiet, steady demeanor, except when he teased or played practical jokes. Then he would burst into laughter.

When Sher was young her father had called her a papoose, her shock of thick black hair on her newborn head made it seem she was born older than her actual age. He liked to tell her stories, stories that Jack had no interest in, like the one about when he was a boy and his grandfather chased off a Bureau of Indian Affairs man with a shotgun who’d come out into the woods looking to put the family on the dole. “Didn’t want nothing to do with the US government,” Thaddeus said. He smoothed his daughter’s hair and kissed her forehead. “And holay man was he mad when his son, your papa, went and joined the Airforce.” Thaddeus whistled through his front teeth, making a sound like a bomb dropping. He shook his head, leaving Sher to imagine wide-eyed what had occurred between her papa and her papa’s pops.

* * *

“Minneapolis in ten,” the driver announced.

Sher pressed her cheekbone harder into the cool glass thinking about what her pops had said to her as they sat in traffic on their way home after the fair all those years ago. “This city eats people up,” he’d said, one arm hanging out the driver’s window. “Nothing to mess with.” Sher would have stayed on the farm and reservation if her grandparents and father had not died. Then, to make matters worse, after they’d died, her mother returned and allowed Jack to take over the farm. He’d cut Sher out of the farm work and into the house as he never could stand it that their father treated his boy and girl the same. Sher was built for men’s work. When Kris came to her about needing to leave, Sher left.

As the bus looped south on 94, Kris twisted in her seat for a better view of the freeways swooping and arching over one another sixty feet in the air like enormous versions of the rollercoaster ride at the county fair. Skyscrapers huddled together on the otherwise flat horizon. “Holay,” Kris said, wide-eyed.

“Foshay” lit up the tallest skyscraper. Built in 1929 by Wilbur Foshay, who at the time of construction was assembling his third utility empire stretching from Alaska to Nicaragua, the tower was designed to imitate the Washington Monument with each successive floor sloping slightly toward the interior. It was the tallest building west of the Mississippi, and featured African Mahogany, Italian marble, three commissioned busts of George Washington, gold doorknobs and Indiana limestone on the exterior. Foshay invited 25,000 people to the 1929 dedication, including cabinet members, senators, and congressman. He commissioned John Phillip Sousa to create a march for the opening titled “Foshay Tower-Washington Memorial March.” Six weeks after the opening Foshay lost everything in the Great Depression and never paid Sousa for the march; in response Sousa never allowed the “Foshay Tower-Washington Memorial March” to be played again.

Excitement coursed through Kris. She’d never been in a city before. Red taillights streamed around the bus and bright headlights flashed through the windows from the opposite direction. The city lights shone into the night sky, creating a glow seen for miles that obscured the stars from the city dwellers’ vision. The bus rumbled off the freeway and cut east on Hennepin into the heart of Minneapolis.

“That a church?” Kris asked as they passed the marble basilica—the first basilica in the country—that took up an entire block and looked twenty times bigger than the wooden churches in Antwatin.

“Looks it,” Sher said.

The bus passed Loring Park on the right, blocks of apartment buildings, and a four-story, red stone Masonic temple squatting on half a city block. Sher noted the Ionic columns and thought of her art and social science teacher, Mrs. Luckstrim, a thirty-seven-year-old white woman who’d moved to Antwatin from Ames, Iowa shortly after her husband died from the flu. Every fall Mrs. Luckstrim related her personal history to her class. Married just three months, her husband was one of the thirty-eight staff and students to die from a tuberculosis outbreak at Iowa State College that took nearly as many from the college as did the 1918 influenza pandemic. Mired in grief, Mrs. Luckstrim completed her Bachelor of Arts in Teaching and took the first job she could find on some “godforsaken reservation” where she whiled away long winter nights in “the middle of nowhere” reading everything she could get from the county library, especially about the “Ancients and their Arts.” Sher had been one of her finest students, ever. White or Indian. Sher applied her lessons to the world around her, Mrs. Luckstrim was fond of saying.

appliedShe had never resolved her husband’s sudden death—never dating even once. The thought of his once robust body lying motionless as his lungs ate themselves from the inside out, filling with blood and fluid until he drowned, haunted her. She dreamt of his young, sturdy, smiling face suddenly blue and gasping and spitting up blood. At times, she glimpsed him just around a corner, beckoning her. Or his face condensed in the steam emitted from a pot as she cooked. Or his voice whispered her name—Vera, Vera—when the lamp she read by burned alone at night. At first, she told her parents. They said to stop thinking of him. She could not. The more she tried not to think of him, the more he showed up in her daily life, so she tried to counteract the haunting by keeping him alive in her memory, never cutting and tying off the cord between them. His pressed white cotton shirt and black wool trousers hung in her closet, his undergraduate photograph in profile on her wall (they’d not had the money to pay a photographer when they married), his shoes at the front door, and the coins in the pocket of the pair of pants he did not wear the day he died in her drawer.

Vera, VeraFor this, other white people shunned her, her family visited but once, and so, isolated and outcast, she imagined herself to be like the Indians. Aligned with them. Except, of course, better. That was a given, she told herself—look at what her people had accomplished—stone sculptures detailing the body’s every flexed muscle and vein, permanent dwellings and places of worship that did not blow over or rot away, and the vanishing point that created the ability to render the world in three-dimensional images, not like the childish pictographs the Indians had painted on rocks a few hours north of the reservation. Being full-blooded Irish didn’t stop her from claiming greatness with the Greeks. Oh, she thought, how she wished to travel to the land of her ancestors—the ancient Greeks and Romans!

Oh,how she wished to travel to the land of her ancestors—the ancient Greeks and Romans!Sher was one of two or three Indians whom Mrs. Luckstrim believed smart enough for a university. Sher was the exception that proved the rule, she told herself, why the Indian girl had largely mastered foreground, mid-ground, and background. She’d drawn a white farmhouse with two red rocking chairs, whose Mrs. Luckstrim did not know, in nearly perfect line from a bird’s eye view. And her drawings of mammals were rather astounding in their detail. The sketch of a wolf or hound dog, Mrs. Luckstrim was not sure which and did not ask, was rather realistic except for the right front leg that was too short and lost all dimension, as if it returned to the childish sketchings of primitive people with no regard for how the actual dog—or wolf—leg would appear bent in that way. This cemented Mrs. Luckstrim’s view that the girl needed her, one had to watch over the promising Indians as they were always susceptible to going back to their ways.

Thoughts of Sher often murmured through Mrs. Luckstrim’s head, so much more like a boy than a girl, yet astonishingly none of the Indians teased or shunned her. Sher’s even temperament, confidence, quick mind, and much to Mrs. Luckstrim’s delight, her particular interest in Greek and Roman architecture made Mrs. Luckstrim almost consider her family. Almost, but not quite. At times, Sher appeared in her dreams, caring for Mrs. Luckstrim the way a husband would, the way hers would have. She allowed those thoughts to trail off, thereby never taking responsibility for her life, never forcing herself to think: my husband is gone for good or in my dreams this Indian girl and I kiss and touch the way a man and wife do. Mrs. Luckstrim thought of Sher from the perspective of the young woman she’d never grown out of, the one still longing for a man, even if that man was in the shape of an Indian teenage girl, which did not seem strange or wrong or abnormal to her, as long as she did not think of it.

* * *

As the bus circled downtown Minneapolis, Kristin stared wide-eyed at the all-night, seemingly never-ending street carnival that went on block after block. Tall buildings and huge signs lighting the night sky with bright, flashing lights—Moby d***s; The Sconce Lounge; Hamm’s Beer from the land of sky blue waters; Orpheum, Park Here!; Adam Hats; Aster Theater; Shinders 25c Readers Digest! Coca Cola! Pipes, Cigars, Tobacco! Magazines, Lunch, Candy!; Gopher Theatre; Bridgemans Ice Cream; Williams Bar; Millie Owens Wigs and Things; Adonis Tie Shop $1.50!; The Depot featuring Joe Cocker Live! The streets were packed with white and n***o men and women milling shoulder to shoulder, laughing and smoking and shouting at friends and strangers alike. The girls had never seen such a ruckus.

The bus turned north one block onto First Avenue into the new Greyhound bus depot’s parking lot. As the bus rolled to a stop the hounds of heat settled in, lying in wait under the rows upon rows of Greyhound buses.

Kris could not have imagined so many people all in one place. Excitement bordering on mania with a shot of fear hit her bloodstream. “Dang,” she said, breathless.

“Well,” her cousin said. “Here we are.” After seeing the night-time display of lights and crowds, Sher doubted leaving the reservation. Here things would be different. Maybe too different.