Carnival Lights

Chapter 5

South

In Ojibwe ways, in the south direction a person is no longer a child but not yet an adult. A person is wandering and searching.

In Ojibwe ways, in the south direction a person is no longer a child but not yet an adult. A person is wandering and searching. The girls arrived in the city with $12 and two empty stomachs, their grandfather’s World War II pack, two stainless steel cups, some face makeup, gum, and a lighter. The bus driver turned on his speaker and announced, “Minneapolis. Ten-forty p.m. Ten-minute layover. We’ll be in Saint Paul in twenty-five minutes.” He stretched his arms, yawned and stepped off the bus. Sher and Kristin stared at the seats in front of them and then looked at one another.

“This it?”

“Yah.” Kristin swallowed, but it turned into a gulp.

“Want to go on to Saint Paul?”

“Nah.”

“Okay then. Ready?”

Kristin picked up the pack and stepped into the aisle, setting the bag against the angled front of her thighs as she stood waiting for the people in front to move, her body contorted because of the narrowness of the space. Kristin moved forward a little and then had to wait for a man three rows up to pull a rolled-over, brown grocery bag off the rack above the seats. Sher stepped into the aisle taking up the space where Kristin had been, her body sore and cranky and locked from the long bus ride and the stress of the day and the lack of food.

Outside someone shrieked Johnny! The passengers moved forward a few steps, trapped like cattle in a marking chute. Their grandmother thought cows dull. Out of place. “The old ones hunted buffalo,” she said, tensing her neck the way she did when she talked of the old ones. “Back in the day. My grandparents. Some of us did.” And by this she meant not only the Sioux but some Ojibwe hunted buffalo too, those ones who lived half in the woods and half on the prairie hunted the intelligent, powerful buffalo who ran straight into oncoming storms instead of huddling away from them like cattle do. “Maybe that’s our problem,” their grandmother muttered. “Indians eating cows. Now we’re like them.”

Johnny!As Sher and Kristin stepped off the bus, the hounds of heat rustled beneath the bus, complacent and cooling, sweating out their tongues, waiting for their next run. Sher strode into the bus depot as if she had purpose and a plan so as not to appear weak. She moved like someone used to long hard hours of outdoor work—strong and quick on her feet. Years of chores and running through woods had increased her physical and spiritual strength. She moved like a boy. Kristin followed behind, letting Sher lead the way as she always had. Even when they were young, Sher was the one to push through the tall, lanky alfalfa crops or instigate jumping off the porch to see if the girls’ spirits would go up while their bodies descended to the earth, or climb into the doorless ‘39 Chevy vacated next to the barn. Once in the car the girls pretended to drive to Canada or North Dakota where their family lived—the Canadians on a government reserve and the North Dakota Ojibwe in tar shacks with no electricity, stuck there waiting for the government’s promises of running water and electricity and solid houses that eighty years after the treaty had not yet arrived.

In Antwatin, a thirty-minute drive over the roads or an hour walk through the woods, many Indians lived in tar-covered shacks, unlike the girls’ grandfather, Clarence, who learned a trade in the Army—mechanic—and then had a white army friend who acted as a cultural liaison between him and the white world to help Clarence use his GI Bill to buy the tools needed to fix automobiles and trucks as a side job on the farm, since they made no real money from the farm. Whoever heard of Indians owning a farm, Indians and whites said alike. Except for a few, the government’s goal of turning Indians into farmers had failed.

But the farm was how Clarence kept his family on their ancestors’ land. It was how they didn’t migrate to the city, become lost, unrecognizable to their people and their ways, to the old ones. The farm was the best choice he could make so as to not drift into whiteness like the snow across the fields where just a few generations before the mountainous trees were clear cut and the forest carved into hunks. Butchering the forest compromised, but did not wipe out, the immense white pines, jack pines, and birches; the exquisite pink lady slippers and the burdock, milk thistle, dandelion, and other plants deemed weeds by the white people; the insects—multiple varieties of spiders, ticks, and worms; and the animals—porcupine, wolverine, soft-nosed and sure-footed deer, and even grizzlies, years back, grizzlies roamed that area once, too.

Along with the outright destruction or the diminishment of the flora and creeping, crawling, flying creatures, a way of life was changed forever. Even so, despite the vast changes wrought by the whites, Clarence had been taught by his grandmother that Indians must stay on their land. Whether conscious of it or not, the loss and diminishment of the land was the grief they all carried. And grief, more so than any other emotion, is heat held inside, rising up and pushing out. Although the girls did not know it, grief was responsible for sending them to Minneapolis. Grief encompassed everything.

* * *

The girls stood at the entrance to the Greyhound bus depot and stared at the people sitting in row after row of pale-yellow plastic seats linked together, one after the other, by steel rods under the armrests. A clerk sold tickets from a window across from them. The only other door was to their right.

“I’m dry,” Kristin said.

Sher pushed Kris to the left toward a drinking fountain and a pay phone, the receiver hanging straight down to the floor like a weight on a fishing line.

Kristin pushed in the smooth steel button and drank water until she thought she would float away. Sher set the pack on the floor against the wall and pulled out a bent envelope, the red stamp half peeled off and curling like an October leaf. She opened the ragged top and took out a letter written on thin blue-lined paper. She glanced at it, refolded it, put it back in the envelope and slipped the envelope into the pack.

“Too late to call now.” Sher closed her eyes and leaned against the wall, squatting comfortably the way she always did at the farm when she took a break.

“Girls. Very, very pretty girls.”

Sher opened her eyes but did not move her body.

A white man leaned against the wall next to Sher but looked at Kristin.

Kristin moved so the water fountain was between her and Sher and the man, the look of a caught animal in her face and in the way her body stood under her clothes.

“Mm hmm.” The man stepped around Sher. He leaned over the water fountain and made a show of spreading his legs, sliding his brown shiny flat-bottom shoes out to the side and settling in slow to take a drink.

Kristin darted to the other side of Sher.

The man took a long drink. “Mm hmm,” he said. “Now that was some fine-tasting water.”

Sher pulled the pack to her but continued to squat. She knew that to get up right then would be a sign of fear and she knew, after years of working with cows and horses and pigs on the farm and hunting deer and watching her father deal with white people he did not trust, which was most, that one must never show fear. She must be steady.

“What’s your name, there?” the man asked, using his chin like a finger to point at Kris. His shoes splayed outward under dirty jeans that folded over in ridges around his knees and ankles.

“Kristin,” Kris blurted out of fear and anxiety.

“Kristin,” the man said like he was playing around with it in his mouth. “That’s a pretty name. Can I call you Krissy?”

Kristin froze. Her father called her Krissy when he was drunk.

“Sir.” Sher dangled her arms over her knees, using a particular language reserved for interacting with white people. “Excuse us, but we’ve had a long trip.”

“That so,” he said, leaning against the wall.

Sher stood and strapped on the pack. “C’mon, Kris, time to go.”

“This jackass bothering you?” Another white man appeared out of nowhere.

Sher jerked around, the pack to the wall. The water fountain was now between both men and the girls. The shiny shoe man stepped to the other side of Kristin.

“Get the hell out of here,” the new man said. He was older and dressed in navy pants and a clean white, button-down shirt.

“Go to hell yourself,” the first man said.

They shoved one another until the new man put his forearm over the other man’s neck, pinning him against the wall.

“All right,” the shiny shoe man rasped.

The new man hit him on the chest. “Get out.”

He walked out the door the girls came in through.

Sher nodded at the new man. “Time to go,” she said.

“Wait,” he said. “Are you meeting someone here?”

“No, yes,” Sher and Kristin said, their words coming out on top of the other.

“Aha,” the new man said. “I think you’ve got a problem.” He nodded toward the glass door at the far end of the room. Two cops stood on the street corner.

Kristin froze. When her father was drunk he used to threaten to call the sheriff on her grandparents.

The new man watched her. “Does someone hit you, honey?” he asked.

“No. No problems. Sir.” Sher grabbed Kristin’s arm. “C’mon. Grandma will be here any minute.”

“Ah uh yah.” Kris couldn’t think.

Sher pushed her toward the glass door, figuring it the best choice since the other man had gone out the other door.

The new man followed.

“Girls,” he hissed. “One word from me and you two will be in the pen tonight and headed for juvie jail in the morning.”

“No, please,” Kristin said, turning around. “We haven’t done anything.”

“One word,” and he nodded toward the cops outside at the corner, “and those two pigs will be over here waiting with you for your long-lost grandma.”

“We’ve got to catch our ride,” Sher pulled Kristin’s elbow.

“Juvenile runaways,” the new man said. “You’ve done plenty on that count alone.” He moved quicker than he looked capable of, and put his hand on Kristin’s other elbow, sidling up to her so it would not be obvious he was holding her.

“Where are you going, Krissy?” he whispered in her ear. “Have you figured that out yet?” He squeezed her elbow. “Why don’t you come with me? I’ll take good care of you.”

“Get your hands off her.” Sher hacked his arm and kicked his kneecap with the sole of her boot.

The man yelped, grabbing his knee.

The clerk yelled, “Hey!”

“Run, Kris!”

Kristin bolted out the glass door, the parking lot to her right quiet now, filled with the Greyhound buses resting in the dark. In front of her was a busy street. The cops were across it. She took two steps to the right and then turned left. Sher pushed out the door and the two girls ran into each other, their feet tangling together. They fell, banging their knees and elbows on the cement.

Sher jumped up, pulled Kris to her feet, and the girls ran to the left alongside the bus depot, hoping the cops hadn’t noticed. A middle-aged couple stepped out a door into their path, forcing them to stop and then start again. Sher looked back. The couple stood apart, watching the girls run. Between them, Sher saw the well-dressed man on the sidewalk, looking to his right.

The girls ran. The pack slapped against Sher’s back.

“In here.” Sher yanked Kris down a narrow brick alley. A cat ran off. Sher cut behind some garbage cans, lost her footing and slid into a pile of bulky garbage bags. Kristin tumbled behind her. The girls froze like the statue game they used to play. The alley smelled like fish and sour milk.

Footsteps approached. Sher peered between the cans and reached back reflexively to touch Kristin’s lips. The well-dressed man stopped at the alley, and then continued down the sidewalk, away from the depot. Sher watched the street and Kristin watched her, keeping her head low. The girls did not move. A man trotted by, coming from the direction of the bus depot. Sher thought, but could not be sure, that it was the first man, the one with the shiny shoes, half-running because he could not lift his feet up high enough or fast enough without slipping. After he passed the alley Sher looked at Kristin and lifted her eyebrows as if to say who knows.

who knowsWhen the girls were babies, their grandmother had pinched their lips to teach them silence. The girls knew how to be still, not make any sound, thoughtful even of their breathing, until their grandmother found them flat on the floor beneath the homemade, horsehair-stuffed mattress or under the work shelf in the basement over which their grandmother had draped an old wool blanket to hide them from the white lady social workers who came looking to steal Indian children.

When older, if the girls were out in the yard and heard a car different than the rattle of their grandparents’ truck they’d run to the house or barn or shed. If in the fields, the girls stood stock still in line with the corn rows or dove into an indentation in the earth where they stayed until the bell on the porch rang four times. Their grandmother only dyed their homespun clothes earth colors, leaving behind the brightly beaded and dyed regalia of the Ojibwe to make sure her babies did not pop out of the browns and greens like red chokecherries, before they ripened into a purple mass hanging heavy off a branch. If in the house when a car drove up unannounced, their grandmother commanded, “Down!” The girls ran, slid, and ducked into their hiding holes, listening, breathing without sound, always waiting for the bell, four times.

Ethel’s granddaughters were not going to disappear into the white world as she had, stolen from her family and placed in a Catholic boarding school and then sold to work as a domestic on a farm outside Fargo. Two months after being dropped off by the nuns, and daily beatings by the farm wife with a broomstick and rolling pin, she ran away, finally escaping for good down unknown back roads.

* * *

The girls stayed in the alley for some time, occasionally glancing behind them where the alley doglegged to the right. A silence rose up around them, split by sirens and the squeals of wheels. No bell rang four times so they could come out of hiding, bury themselves in their grandmother’s belly and fleshy arms. Sher glanced from the street to the alley behind them, and then back again. Her knee and shin swelled from the crash into the bags. Anxiety surfaced in Kris, popping like welts over her body. She rested her head on Sher’s calf. Sher smoothed her cousin’s hair and kept watch, breathing through her mouth to minimize the smell, wanting to spit, but afraid of the noise that would make.

Time stilled. The moon edged west. Sher thought of the story about how time was brought to Indians by a big clock. She could see her grandfather telling the story again, his skinny brown legs jutting out of his shorts and off the upside-down bucket he sat on. “Since then,” he said, his eyes shining with that light that popped when he told stories, “Indians have been weighted down.” He pulled on an imaginary chain around his neck. “Just like the white man, by that tick-tock time machine.”

The number of cars on the street lessened. Muffled voices, sirens, and laughing drifted down the alley. Sher shifted, found another c***k she could peer through, and then locked her body in that position. Kris moved with her. Two men’s voices neared. The depot men stopped and looked down the alley.

“Look down there?”

“No need,” the well-dressed man said. “I would of seen them turn into it.”

The man with the shiny shoes stared down the alley. “They’re gone. For now.”

“One’s Indian. Maybe both.”

“We’ll find them. Can’t hide on these streets forever.”

The two men continued toward the bus depot.

Ice water trickled down Sher’s spine. She put her finger to Kris’s lips just in case the men were still in earshot. She felt down her knee, tender to the touch on the inside, to a wide flat bump on her shin.

After twenty minutes, hearing nothing, Sher tapped Kris. The girls stood. Sher shook her leg out in an effort to get the blood flowing. She dared not loosen the laces. The girls turned right down the alley that slammed into the one they were in. They walked past ripped garbage bags with chewed out halves of squash and fish bones and milk cartons and butter wrappers strewn about.

“Must be cats and coons.”

“Yah. Or rats.”

“Yah.”

They scanned for their droppings or the animals themselves, hiding out behind bags or scurrying off or looking up from a feast of rotted food, their sharp eyes picking out everything in the dark. But Sher and Kristin saw none. The girls reached a narrow street with no curbs, just wide enough for one car to pass through. No people and no cars, only tall dark buildings rising up around them. Sher motioned for Kristin to follow her away from the street she had last seen the two men on.

“The one who chased us came back looking for us.”

“Yah?”

Sher did not see any reason to tell Kristin that the two men had tried to work them over as a team in the depot. It would frighten her too much. Sher’s hair flung down over her back and shoulders and onto her chest. The right side of her body had a black dirt streak from the cuff of her jeans all the way up to her shoulder. She walked with a bad limp, but her face showed nothing, not the tiredness nor the hunger nor the fear.

Kristin wondered if Sher was afraid. She was so afraid she thought she would throw up. “Sher?”

“Yah.”

They reached a main road and turned east, away from the bus depot.

“We look like quite a pair.” Kristin’s face makeup had disappeared somewhere between the bus ride and lying in the alley. The bruise was prominent even under the inconsistent lights of the city but the hickies remained hidden by her shirt and hair.

“We sure do.” Sher smiled, and then stepped on her foot wrong. She grimaced from the pain in her ankle shooting up the side of her calf. “Wait.” Sher bent over and undid the laces on her hurt ankle and then slid out a pocket knife. The knife had been her grandmother’s. Her fingers expertly laced up her boot as she stood on one leg.

Kristin looked up and down the street but saw only parked cars at meters. One of the meter heads had been ripped off. All that was left was a jagged steel neckline.

Sher released the blade. It was thick and strong and well kept up. The knife could be used to cut just about anything, including the throat of an animal, if need be. She pushed the blade back inside itself and wiped off a smudge on the steel handle inlaid with a turquoise and yellow, beaded flower her grandmother had appliqued herself. Her grandmother said her beading looked like a child’s, but Sher thought it beautiful. Through the knife she felt her grandmother with her. She slid it in her jean pocket.

“Dad had Grandma stitch a pocket on the inside of my boot.” She ran her finger over the pocket, right behind the ankle bone. “He said every Indian should carry a knife. Especially a girl.” Sher pushed the knife deeper in her pocket and looked around at nothing specific but took in all of it. “Dad got these boots at the state fair. On sale. At a country western stand.” She stared at the top of her boot—the black leather scratched and faded to brown in areas. “They sold everything,” she said, remembering how grateful and special she felt when he bought the boots for her, instead of having her wear her brother’s hand-me-downs as she’d done all her life. She didn’t mind. Boys’ clothes suited her well. But it was still special to have something brand new.

The girls walked west.

“You wouldn’t believe it, Kris. How big it is. Fifty. A hundred times bigger than the county fair.”

Kristin said nothing. She always remained quiet when Sher talked about her father. She missed him too. She’d always wished Thaddeus was her pops. Thinking about her uncle made Kristin remember all the evenings spent at her grandparents’ farm after her dad went on a bender and Kris ran. The fourth time she ran away she had just turned five and her father had showed up at the farm with the sheriff. Clarence saw them coming up the drive, pulled off his shirt, tied it around Kris’s eyes, and carried her into the basement. He opened a hidden hatch and set her in the tunnel that ran between the house and barn. “Don’t make a noise, my girl,” he said and pinched her lips. “Don’t never tell no one.” He knew, of course, she could figure he’d taken her in the basement, but not being able to see would help her forget, feel unsure about where he took her. Lives depended on no one knowing about the tunnel. Kris didn’t make a sound as the sheriff and her father searched the farm house, barn, and fields for over an hour.

“I know she’s here, old man,” her father said to Clarence in the kitchen. “Morgan,” the sheriff said. “I gotta head out. I don’t know where your girl is, but she ain’t here.” Morgan glared at Clarence. “I’ll be back,” he said as he left with the sheriff. As soon as they reached the bottom of the drive, Clarence pointed his lips toward where the men disappeared and Sher’s dad took off running to make sure Kris’s dad didn’t double back to the farm. Ninety minutes later, he returned breathing hard. “He’s sitting in front of his TV,” he said. “Passed out.” Clarence retrieved Kris.

“We have to keep her,” Ethel said, as she and Clarence sat on the porch watching the girls play tag in the yard. “White men are no good. They have disease in their heart.” Clarence kept his eyes on Sher and Kris as they darted across the dirt, remembering that for a week after their daughter had disappeared Morgan had stood at the end of the drive at dusk, the fire from his cigarettes burning through the evening air, his rifle on his hip. Kris stood a foot away from him, frozen, tall as his knees. The first night Clarence approached him, Clarence asked, “Where is she, Morgan?” Morgan took a long drag, crushed his cigarette in the dirt, and stepped to the side so his rifle pointed at Kris’s head. “Don’t know, old man. Probably ran off with one of those Black bucks that been seen around here.” Clarence caught his breath. Morgan continued, “Be a shame if Sheriff Fink found out about them n*****s someone been hiding.” Clarence glanced at his granddaughter’s eyes, but they were vacant. “Know what I’m sayin’ old man?” Clarence took one last look at the rifle, the absence of his granddaughter’s spirit, and turned and walked up the drive. The rest of the week, every so often, Morgan returned and yelled, “Old man, I’ll take her from you too,” and pointed his rifle at his toddler’s head.

Clarence and Ethel knew Morgan had killed their daughter, Josie. But they didn’t know how and didn’t know where her body was. They’d asked an old Indian doctor, the proper way with tobacco and gifts and food. He said she was in water, somewhere nearby, but that they would never find her. He told them to burn a fire for four days to help her spirit. Then he cast his eyes downward and said the manidoog showed him a white man with a fire stick with bright lights spinning around him. One day he’d take Kris away. “One day,” he said to emphasize that time did not exist in the spirit world and one day could mean tomorrow or many years.

manidoogIn effort to avoid or delay that fate, Clarence disagreed with his wife that they shouldn’t allow her to return to Morgan once he sobered up, fearful that if they didn’t return their granddaughter, he would kill her. They told no one about what the Indian doctor said. Kris went home two days after the sheriff searched for her. After that, when her dad went on a drunken spree, she would run to her grandparents until he sobered up, drove out to the farm, and stood at the end of the drive. Then Kris ran out to him, afraid to make him wait, as her grandparents watched from the porch. She never looked back, afraid somehow it would cause him to kill them.

Through all this was her mother’s absence. No one spoke of her mother. Her mind didn’t remember what happened to her mother, but her spirit would never forget. The r**e, the bed springs, the drive to the swamp with the burlap sacks all buried themselves inside her, erupting in fits of rage and frustration or fits during which she seemed younger than her biological age.

On the girls’ first day of kindergarten, the teacher had asked each student to stand and tell the class something they loved about their moms. When it was Kris’s turn, she stared at the wall covered in construction paper masks the children had drawn of their faces and then taped to the wall. “Kris?” the teacher asked. Kris’s eyes automatically defocused. She stood staring at fuzzy blobs of color. “Kris!” The teacher was losing her patience. Another retarded Indian kid, she thought and pushed the girl into her chair. “Too much booze in the belly, if you know what I mean,” was a common refrain from the teacher, who grew up in Antwatin, the daughter of a Goodhue County judge.

Another retarded Indian kidAs Ethel fixed dinner in the kitchen to celebrate the girls’ first day of kindergarten, Sher asked, “Grandma, where’s Kris’s mom?” Ethel’s pain flared. She turned toward Sher with a hot frying pan of bacon grease. “Never again will you ask that question!” she snapped. Sher stepped back, absorbing her grandmother’s anger and grief. The hot lard popping and spitting in the pan, a foot in front of Sher’s face, lit fear in Sher. Sher never asked again. Ethel had not meant to frighten her granddaughter, but her rage and grief escaped, abruptly and violently taking over the kitchen. The family could not survive discussing Josie’s disappearance, or any of the others over the generations since the English arrived. Therefore, the absence of Kris’s mom was never discussed. Unseen yet palpable, her disappearance filled them all with a grief that could turn into popping, spitting rage at any moment but could never be directly voiced, if they were to survive.

* * *

“This way.” Sher pointed straight ahead. “We can swing around the depot and get something to eat.” Sher smiled. “Before we end up back in that alley fighting for food with the coons.”

“Or rats.”

“Yah. Rats.”

The girls continued under blinking yellow stoplights. They crossed Second Avenue to Nicollet, passing an occasional bum huddled up against a wall or flung out across some stairs, still clutching a bottle in his sleep.

Kristin feared she would become one of them.

“Come on.” Sher grabbed her arm. “Remember how we used to skip around the chicken coop when we were little, making up songs, scaring all the chickens until they practically flew?” Sher’s ankle hurt.

“Yah, and your brother.” Kristin laughed. “He was so mad. So mad. Slipped and fell in chicken crap. And your dad laughing so hard. He didn’t even get mad about the chickens, just laughed at your brother all covered in chicken poop and feathers and dirt.”

“Told him his Indian name was Chicken Legs.”

The girls hooted.

“He never liked to see us have fun.” Sher wiped her eyes from laughter that in the past year seemed to mix up with grief and sadness fast. Often, she had not liked how her brother acted, but she loved him and missed him in his boyhood, before his anger transformed into shame and the shame transformed him into an Indian who did not want to be Indian.

They stepped around a man muttering to himself.

“We’re gonna end up like that, aren’t we?” Kristin stopped laughing. “Oh, shoot, oh crap, aren’t we, Sher? We’re gonna end up just crazy like these men.” She thought they never should have left the reservation, never should have come to this foreign place where drunks slept outside. Even on the rez, that whites said was so bad, drunks slept inside. Their grandparents had let them crash in the barn, warm, in the hay, until they’d slept it off. Do some work in the fields for food once they sobered up. They’d never leave a drunk on the sidewalk like they did here.

Kristin squatted against a boarded-up building. She dug her heels into a patch of bone-dry dirt.

“We’re gonna be okay,” Sher said. She sat next to Kris, stretching her bad leg out in front of her.

“Solid?”

“Solid.”

They set there like that for a while.

“What about the war?”

“What about it?”

“All those people. On the TV. Dying.” Kris sobbed.

She had never seen Kris like this before. She figured it was from her dad. He hurt her bad last time. And Kris had become more concerned with the war shortly after their grandparents died, but not like this, like the war was destroying Kris, too.

“I don’t know, Kris.” Sher looked at her nails. She wished her dad was alive. She believed he would have taken Kris in, stood up to Kris’s dad, kept the farm steady, not sold Patsy to pay off a mismanagement of the cows.

“Sher,” Kris cried. “What’s going to happen?”

“Kris. Kristin. It’ll be okay.” She looked away from Kris. Their grandma always said the spirits took four.

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. I just believe it.”

“What about the war?”

Sher shrugged.

“Someone has to stop it.”

“Yah.” Sher put her arm around Kristin like she used to do when they were little and posed for the black and white pictures of themselves with strawberry jam smeared across their T-shirts or sitting on the rocks down at the water, their skinny brown legs dangling over a pond on the farm. “We’ll figure a way.”

Goodhue Reservation, 1934

Goodhue Reservation, 1934The girls’ paternal great-grandparents, their thirteen-year-old grandfather, a great-auntie and great-uncle and their five children lived together in a tar-paper-covered wigwam on the northern edge of the farm farthest from the road, under the boughs of the state forest. Layered headlines from the late 1910s, ‘20s, and ‘30s insulated and decorated the walls in the wigwam. Some were from the Finns in the farmhouse as their relative was editor of Duluth’s most prosperous Finnish newspaper, The Industrialisti. The girls’ great-grandparents had also dragged home bundles of other newspapers whenever they found them—an alley in Antwatin, behind the Knights of Columbus in Duluth, and a coup—ten fresh bundles of Minneapolis Star in the weeds at the end of a path off 23 that fell off a Sunday delivery truck early one morning. Layer after layer turned the interior of their wigwam into a collage of partial headlines from Minneapolis, Duluth, and International Falls, blending into text from a Canadian or Virginia or Aitkin newspaper along with occasional pictures of white, fat-bellied men in dark, three-piece suits, baseball players in baggy, knee-length pants sliding cleats up, and thin-waisted white ladies in dresses down to their feet smiling over steel cast cooking stoves.

The Industrialisti. Minneapolis Star The girls’ great-grandmother, when sewing or cutting onions for porcupine stew or scraping leather, made up story after story based on the pictures inside her house until she had enough vignettes to fill many books. She spoke in Indian with a smattering of English to keep up with the language she learned a bit of in the boarding school and to stay connected with her children, who were learning English at the day boarding school in Antwatin. Her stories from the newspapers nearly always ended with Indians getting their land back. “My boy,” she would say, “stories have power. It matters, the words that come out of our mouths. My girl,” she would say. “Words have power. Our thoughts have power. Our prayers have power.” Indeed, every day since they’d been kicked off their land and allowed to live at the edge of the Finn’s farm and the government’s forest, which meant that to the white world they legally lived nowhere, she put down asema, tobacco, at the base of the oldest white pine she could find, and asked the manidoog and Gitchi Manidoo for the return of the land her people had lived on and their bones buried in for generations. “One day,” she would tell her family, “the land will be returned to us. The land wants us back.” They said, “Mmmmm,” to show they believed her. She had never lied. She refused many offers to move into town, or St. Paul, or another reservation. “One day,” she would say, “one day. Minogizhigad. That is the day it will be when we return to the land. A good day.”

asemamanidoogGitchi Manidoo Minogizhigad. One time, a visiting English friend who spoke some Indian said, “You could put those stories in a book.” The girls’ great-grandmother handed her a needle, sinew, and rabbit skin. “Mitten,” she directed. “Miigwetch. Gawiin. Thank you. No,” she said. “Stories are circles.” She finished the sentence in Indian because she was unsure of the English translation. “How to say that?” she asked her friend while making a downward twirling motion with her hand. “Spirals,” the white friend. “Eya. Yes. Circles. Spirals. The way a vine grows down the stem of another plant. Yes. That’s how stories are twisting around. But English think stories travel like an arrow. Gawiin. Stories fly like the bee. Amoog. Stories twist and twirl around each other like vines. To the English, everything is separate. And square. Indian stories don’t fit in their square books. Stories are not to be sold. That would be like selling our children. Or the trees.” All the adult Indians in the wigwam said, “Mmmm,” in agreement and in thought over her words. “Indian houses are round. Indian stories are round. Eya,” she said, and fit her hand into the partially sewn mitten and examined it from all sides. “Miiw.”

“” “Miigwetch. Gawiin. Eya. Gawiin.AmoogEyaMiiwWhen she was five, the Antwatin sheriff grabbed her and other Indian children off the reservation and brought them in a wagon 189 miles to the Sisters of Mercy Morris Industrial School for Indians in west-central Minnesota. Gone for one year, her parent had not been told where she was or why she’d been taken. She had not been allowed to go home. Forced to kneel on rocks and pray for hours every day, her spirit simply floated up and out the top of her head, wandered over to the forest, and sat in tree branches until the nuns released the Indian children for their midday gruel. Why she was only gone a year, her family did not know. They also did not know the nuns had sold her to a farm in Fargo, which she ran from, and got a ride from a farmer back to Antwatin. One day, she ran down the path through the woods to their camp, the very day they’d begun boiling sap. “Protected,” her elders said, about the six-year-old who, a year after disappearing, reappeared in a gray dress with her hair cut short, and immediately began picking up sticks to keep the fire burning.

Years later, the girls’ great-grandmother sat cross-legged on the floor, stitching the right-hand rabbit mitten as her white friend stitched the left hand. She pointed her lips at Clarence, her youngest son, who sat on a blanket, carving short-stunted white men pipes they sold during summer tourist season. Her white friend said, “It’s a pity they have your land and that fine house. I wish you could live in that house! It should be yours!” Her white friend tied off the end of sinew. “Had to once, not again,” the girls’ great-grandmother said about the time she lived in a square building at the Catholic boarding school and then the Fargo farmhouse. She thought of stories elders told her when she was a girl, out in the bush, learning to build round houses, wigwams, with willow branches and how if you didn’t tie off the willow branch crossbars in a good way, they could fall on your head. That was how the beaver got its flat tail, from not listening good to directions and then its house fell on it, smashing its tail into the mud and flattening all beavers’ tails thereafter as a reminder to listen.

Her eyes crinkled. She laughed, covering her mouth with her hand as she still sometimes did from being punished at the Catholic school for laughing or talking Indian. “Gawain,” she said, and pressed down the seams on her cotton dress as if her palm were an iron, that hot, heavy pointed thing they had taught her to use at the white school so the nuns and priests looked like straight black lines, hanging heavy to the floor—the way she thought of their spirits, dour and strict and cruel. Not a one of them had given her reason to think of them in any other manner. “No. Gawiin geyaabe. I won’t live in one of them white houses,” she said, mixing English and Indian, her mind jagging between Indian ways and white ways. “I will die out here, in trees and Indian house. Fine,” she said in English, about the wigwam, thinking how her white friend described the farmhouse. “Wigwam. Fine. Eya!”

Gawain,”.Gawiin geyaabe * * *

The girls walked a long loop east, then south, then west until they made their way back to Hennepin Avenue where Sher had seen the restaurants. They ate at The Broiler Cafe, sliding into the mammoth, cracked, pink vinyl booths as if they were the slick red fiberglass seats on a Tilt-A-Whirl ride. The girls devoured eggs and hash browns and thin white toast soaked in butter with loads of jam and ketchup smeared about on their plates like paint. As they ate, they glanced at the bums and dealers just long enough to be sure it was not the two men from the depot.

Sher pointed her fork at a white man with long curly brown side-burns, around twenty, she guessed, on the corner with his hands stuffed deep in a thick army green winter parka. “Anyone standing around in this heat in that is up to something,” she said.

Kristin glanced at him. “He looks like one of those hippies from the farm. Remember them? The ones that used to come around in the summer asking for spare eggs and milk.” She mopped up the rest of her eggs and ketchup and jam with the last piece of crust. Her back muscles twinged at the memory. Her uncle and grandparents gone. Em gone even longer. She couldn’t name her emotions—just that at her core, she felt at times her life over. She would never again go to her grandparents’ farm and listen to them talk around the kitchen table, their cigarette smoke turning the air into bluish oil rings. Or help her grandmother make red willow baskets to sell off the back of their rust bucket truck in the parking lot of the county fair. Or stay up half the night birthing calves with her uncle and grandfather and cousins, pulling blood and pus covered calves from inside their mothers and then wiping their eyes and noses and mouths as their mothers licked clean their bodies with gravelly tongues wide and thick as the rock bass they caught in the pond. Or have Em sneak her a cigarette. Gone. Since their deaths, she’d vacillated between caring about the war, smog killing the birds in Los Angeles, and the acid rain pouring down on cities. Kris imagined, while lying in bed in the dark, the acid rain dissolving houses and people and trees in the cities like water dissolving salt. Other times, she stared at the moon. A man on the moon! Who could imagine that?

“Maybe,” Sher said, her mouth full, not thinking about tomorrow.

Sher wiped the plate clean with her finger and wished for another. Her stomach rumbled at the rush of food. She flashed to the time she and Auntie Em and Kris had been in town on an errand for their grandfather. The girls were five, waiting on the sidewalk for Em, who was inside Johnson’s Meats delivering a note from her father asking for a few pounds of ground beef as payment for some work he’d done on their truck. They had not eaten in two days. Three white boys with brown crew cuts, including the oldest Johnson boy, fourteen at the time, appeared from behind the store. “Hey, girls,” he said, wagging a white, grease-stained bag at Kris and Sher. “Hungry?” Sher and Kris didn’t move. They stared at the bag, so hungry they felt they would faint.

The boys smiled. Sher thought their teeth big, like a horse’s, and as white as their pressed T-shirts. “Come here.” They motioned for the girls to go with them into the narrow space between the butcher shop and the firehouse. The girls stood stock still, knowing better than to trust white boys, but hunger overtook them. They wavered. Just as Kris jumped toward the boys and their bag like a startled calf, Em pushed through the front door, empty-handed. She saw the white waxy bag from the tavern, yellow grease stains swelling up the sides, took four steps and socked the Johnson boy in the face. He dropped the bag, blood dripping down his chin and splattering across his white shirt. “Piss!” he yelled, leaned over and spit out a line of blood. “She broke my nose.” “Who’s next?” Em asked, raising her fist. The boys ran. “Jeeesus H,” one of the boys yelled, as they disappeared down a narrow alley. Em snatched the bag, grabbed the girls’ hands, and cut east through town toward the farm, the three of them feasting on greasy salty fries and cheeseburgers with pickles the boys had meant to keep for themselves after they’d had their way with the girls.

. Em knew what the bag meant because boys had done it to her. Alone and hungry at the jungle gym, at recess during her second day of sixth grade, a group of ninth grade white boys had lured her with a lard and sugar sandwich to a wooded area of the playground. They circled around her while taking turns shoving their fingers and a stick inside her. She shut her eyes. She did not cry out. “Tell anyone and we’ll scalp you and your whole family, you stinking Indian,” the boys threatened. Her fear and pain and confusion mixed with the threats until it became brackish and undrinkable. She buried it in a deep well and her silence became equivalent with her family’s survival. There and then Em learned to hate.

Thad was playing with the Indian boys in the vacant lot on the other side of the school. Josie had left home to live with an older white farmer named Morgan. No one had been there to protect Em from the boys or the hate that took hold on her. Her anger settled on her older sister, Josie, who had always watched over her. Em felt abandoned. As Em hovered above her young body, her long black lashes like butterfly wings pressed together as the insect settles on a branch, she promised herself that she would never let this happen to anyone else. Never, she thought as she floated above it. To anyone. She would stop it.

Never, To anyone. She would stop it.* * *

“Bring an Indian girl a burger,” was a common saying among white boys on the reservation (More than 80 percent of the Goodhue reservation was owned by whites). Some of the boys thought it just talk, but others used their allowance money so that some Indian girls, half-starved, knew to meet them behind White’s Pharmacy at seven in the summer and in the first recessed doorway in the alley between Fourth and Main right after school let out in the winter. At the rectory after Saturday morning prayers—in a turn of events, the priest who reigned for five decades listened to the boys and girls from behind a basement door, and then—miraculously—met the boys of his choice at the back door or in the hallway just after he’d dumped his greasy bag on a girl.

“Young man, imagine meeting you here on this fine day. Perhaps you could help me for a moment,” the priest would say, never calling the boys by their names, although he’d known them their entire lives, having baptized them and their parents, and their parents’ parents. Using their names made them too personal, too human-like. After a few weeks or months of manipulations (helping clean the boiler, reading the priest’s favorite poems out loud, offering advice to the priest about one of the other boys, needing “special” altar boy training), the boys of his choosing were hand-jacking and going down on the priest in his office, at the altar, in the boiler room, and in the pews where the priest sat upright, his black robed arms spread on each side of him along the top of the pew, the robe hanging down like huge bat wings while the boys’ heads bounced up and down beneath his robe as the priest’s lips spread into a thin, pleasant smile.

The Indian girls found out what the priest was doing, or already knew, as he went after Indian boys too. Depending on their temperaments, some of the girls felt bad for the boys, others didn’t care, and some were glad the boys who hurt them got what was coming to them. The girls and boys lived in a part of the world most adults did not see, or refused to see, or had been a part of, but now that they escaped it, they ignored it. Hunger is what it all boiled down to—the girls’ stomachs folding into themselves like curling fetuses, releasing bone weakening, mind-erasing hunger while the white boys’ spiritual starvation twisted them into rapists, or as Ojibwe elders said—cannibals. And then, at the rectory, fate twisted the white boys into being both the eater and the eaten. Consumed by their leader, the mouth of their God on earth—a man none of them could ever challenge—and never did. The priest’s funeral, years later, was attended by over 1500 in a town with a population that never rose above 397. His page-and-a-half obituary made an unprecedented appearance just above the fold in the Antwatin News Journal and the commemoration of his life on WJJO 1400 AM Northwoods call-in show resulted in caller after caller avowing to his saintliness, his honor, his selflessness, his pure heart, his piety, his Godliness.

Antwatin News JournalDespite five decades of the priest strutting about the town of Antwatin, and the rest of the reservation, like a bird pecking gravel on a road, few thought to look inside God’s House for the black-winged creatures that swept across the sea with the ships to unite with their cannibal spiritual kin on Turtle Island, tilting the scale to the side of the Destroyers. The cannibals. The Old Time Indians knew. And those the priest diddled. And those who survived, who stayed alive despite their pain, so their bodies could go on, so the people would live on, so the next generation would curl where it should, in utero.

in utero* * *

Sher and Kristin slept two streets over from Hennepin in the stairwell of The Holy Redeemer, a one-story brick church squatting on two blocks. The sun rose pink over the buildings as rain splattered pavement, thudded on canvas overhangs, and pinged off metal gutters. Sher woke. The earthy smell of the rain hit her. We need this rain, she thought, forgetting that she was over 200 miles away from the farm and corn crops and cows and the wooded pathways of her childhood. She fell back to sleep.

We need this rain,In her sleep, Sher hovered over a young girl. Sher did not know who the girl was, until, like a TV channel flipping to a new picture, her grandmother stood as an adult covering her mouth as she laughed, as so many Indians who’d gone through the boarding schools did. The girl reappeared. Sher stood next to her, protecttively, as the girl looked behind Sher, beyond her, as if Sher were not present. The girl’s face froze in fear. As Sher turned to see what threatened the girl, her feet were kicked from under her. She landed on her elbows and knees, and was unable to see. Pain as big and hot as the fire inside the earth ripped into Sher’s anus. She screamed, on her belly, blinded. The broom her grandmother had used, that still sat in the corner of the farmhouse, flipped into her field of vision. As Sher wailed, she heard her grandmother saying “poopchute,” the only word Sher had ever heard her use to refer to one’s anus. Black, women’s shoes without heels stood in Sher’s face. “We shall teach you,” a woman said, stern and clipped. The pain ripped a searing hole through Sher to her father to her grandmother. An open hole of pain that, if Sher had children, would pass to them like a marble bouncing down the steps of a spiral staircase.

Sher woke an hour later to the early morning noises of the city. She blinked in shock to be lying at the bottom of a block cement stairway. One of her boots was flipped on its side in the corner. How it got there, she did not know. She’d always done strange things in her sleep—waking to find herself stretched across her auntie’s neck or in the corner of the hall closet wrapped in her grandmother’s towel. Each family member had one towel apiece, worn through in places. When Sher sleep-walked at night or during a daytime nap, she always snatched her grandmother’s towel, rolled up in it, and crawled into the closet. “My girl,” her grandfather would say, patting her foot until she woke. “Bring her here,” his wife would say, so she could rock the girl, both arms tight around her as if warding off something—her husband did not know what. “What’s this about?” he’d ask Sher, just a babe the first time she’d done this. She simply looked at him, her braids fuzzy from the damp towel.

. Her grandmother, for her part, knew exactly what it was about, as at night, when she was a girl, after the bad things happened at school, she would drag her sheet into a closet, spin herself in it like a cocoon so she could sleep, so she could regenerate herself for the morning chores which always began with Indian children kneeling on broomsticks up and down the hallways while the headmaster led them in the Lord’s Prayer. Their bones on wood poles hurt so intensely their spirits rose into the air. For those who could see the others flying above the bodies, it was a sort of gathering. For those who could not see, their vision went dark. They felt even more lost and alone.

Whenever her husband raised his eyebrows about her granddaughter’s curious behavior, Ethel avoided his looks, busying herself with the task at hand—washing, cleaning, sorting, cooking, or simply stepping onto the porch to smoke, to forget the brooms, to forget the spirit gatherings, to forget the rest. She did not speak of her past. But as life is wont to do, experience—a form of knowledge—trickles down generations and then courses back into the world to become the next generation’s behavior—unexplained, unrealized, unknown—unless someone followed it back through time to unravel themselves and the generations before them.

* * *

Sher stood up silently so as not to disturb Kristin. Birds sang morning greetings. Maybe being here would be okay. For a while. Sher stretched like a cat, reaching up toward the green and white striped awning that covered the stairwell. She cracked her knuckles. She stepped up onto the sidewalk and crouched on her haunches to watch the city wake itself under the low morning light like a dog shaking off water.

A garbage truck roared toward the girls, a Black man with an afro the size of the sun drove it. A brown man, straight hair down to his shoulders, hung off the back bumper. They worked together, dumping the cans—splattering bags, papers, milk cartons, broken records into the truck’s maw—and then replacing the cans, and jumping back onto the truck. The men sang along to a radio duct-taped to the side of the truck.

The radio crackled “Maggie’s Farm” by Bob Dylan, a singer from Hibbing, Minnesota who was making it big. “I’m not gonna work for Minneapolis no more,” the men yelled, changing the words. The brown man grabbed the ears of the metal cans next to Sher, tossed garbage into the truck, and threw the bent can to the sidewalk. “Peace, sister,” the Black driver saluted Sher. The dump truck screeched forward. She nodded as they drove off.

“Morning,” Kristin popped up next to Sher. “Was that that singer from the Iron Range your brother likes?”

“Yah.” Sher said.

“Yah.” Kristin squinted down the street, watching the men run back and forth and listening to them yelling along to the radio. She combed her hair straight down over her face with her fingers. “Down with the man.”

Goodhue Reservation, April 1956

Goodhue Reservation, April 1956The day Clarence’s mother began her journey across the Milky Way to the Old Ones, Clarence, Ethel, their three children—Thaddeus, Jossetta, and Em—and various other relatives all lived in the wigwam on the edge of their land, now inhabited by the Finns. A week later the Finnish family in the farmhouse boarded their hay wagon, hitched up one of the three farm horses, and drove down the long drive they’d cleared decades earlier, their white straw heads bobbing out of sight of the Indian family living on the edge of the farm. Among the straw heads was an infant with a mop of black hair, black eyes, and chestnut-colored skin, the son of the eldest, unmarried girl. She held the baby tight to her chest. On their way to Duluth, no one would discuss the color in the family. Ever.

The Finns also took their clothes, two pots, the ornate plate and trunk they brought from Finland, two pails filled with food and covered with cheese cloth, and a horse and wagon. They left everything else—a complete working farm and farmhouse stocked with furniture, canning jars, blankets, pillows, seeded gardens, butter churner, and a full pantry. Most in the area thought it was the shame of the Indian baby that sent away the family. Others thought it the death of the patriarch a few months prior. Some thought they wished to return to their motherland—after all, why else would a family leave everything behind if not because they could not take it on a ship? Only Clarence knew the truth. Eventually, he would tell his wife and son, but otherwise, he took it to the grave as the true story imperiled many, including his family.

He did not have loose lips about how the patriarch’s eldest grown son, Jalo, inherited the farm upon the death of his father. As a radical Socialist, and editor of Duluth’s Socialist Finnish newspaper The Industrialisti, written in Finnish with a sizeable readership in Canada (and thus many contacts), and from a country occupied by others for centuries, he felt a kinship to the Ojibwe. Jalo was a friend of Olli Kinkkonen, who in 1918 had been tarred, feathered, and hung from a tree in Duluth by the Knights for Liberty for refusing to fight in World War I. Olli wished to return to his motherland, which had just won independence from Sweden the year before.

The IndustrialistiJalo was the second on the scene to find his friend covered in black tar and crow feathers, his head lolling over his chest from when the rope snapped his neck. “Olli!” he had cried as he cut him down. Jalo felt such guilt and pain over the death of his fine, kind friend who wasn’t even a Socialist, who just didn’t want to fight. “He wanted to return to Finland,” Jalo yelled in Finnish. He swore to the memory of Olli that he would work all his life to make things right in a devilish country filled with such hatred and lies. Two years later, Jalo witnessed three n***o carnival workers lynched in Duluth. “Stop! Stop!” he screamed, trapped in a sea of Russian and Swedish men, men from the very countries who had occupied Finland for centuries! “Seis! Seis!” he yelled, his ancestors’ suffering and rage erupting through him. Unable to stop those brutish men from hanging the n*****s, and pressed in on all sides by thousands, his eyes rolled back in his head as he was overcome by his fear and hatred for Russian and Swedish men, the guilt he carried that his political work may have been the cause of Olli’s lynching, and the terror and chaos of the mob as they were about to lynch three n*****s. Jalo was terrified he could be next, caught and hung by the same men who’d lynched a Finn for being a Finn, as they looped the ropes around the n*****s’ necks, laughing and chanting, “String up the n*****s!”

Seis! SeisTwo days after his father’s death, Jalo made a deal with Clarence. He’d return the land, along with everything they’d need to operate the farm, as long as the Indians moved into the farmhouse, kept up the barn and gardens and a few crops and animals so it appeared as a working farm to outsiders and to the corrupt and contemptable government! Jalo’s clincher was that Clarence become part of the underground network Jalo had joined after Olli’s murder that hid people in barns across the Midwest as they made their way toward freedom in Canada. In his uncertain English, Jalo said to Clarence, “Finns are outsiders here like you Ojibwe are on your land. Finns. n*****s, Indians. We must work together to overthrow the capitalist state that robs its workers of life and liberty and wages. We must assist those who must leave for their own liberty, like Olli. Long live his memory. Olli! And the n*****s! All innocents of this diabolical capitalist state that must be overthrown!”

Clarence, a World War II vet, didn’t think too much about overthrowing anything, but he thought this could be the fulfillment of his mother’s prayers. He knew some white ways now, after his few years at the boarding school in Carlisle, the day boarding school in Antwatin—not to mention the years he worked the farm alongside the Finns and fought in the army. He wished for the return of the land.

“What do you say? I will give you the papers,” Jalo asked. Clarence nodded. “I show you the doors to the tunnel. We built it in case of too much snow. Now you hide people there.” Clarence nodded. Now he understood all those years of watching the Finns enter the barn and then exit the house without ever leaving the barn. “Kylla. Yes?” Jalo said. “Sorry my English bad. I very happy you do this. The Swedes and Russians had tried to kill our language to conquer us just as the US government did to Indians. We are brothers. You and me.” The men shook hands and the paper burned by Clarence’s relatives so long ago, returned. And with it, the land. And with that, the trees as the Brauns would allow the forest to grow back across most of the fields, foot by foot. The Standing People returned, just as Clarence’s mother said they would.

Kylla* * *

Across the street from the girls an old white man opened a steel cart, popped up a large red umbrella that said Hotdogs! Pretzels! Pop! in white cursive around the top. A siren swept through the streets.

Hotdogs! Pretzels! Pop!“Sher,” Kristin said, jolted by the siren.

“Yah.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Eat.”

“What?”

“What do you want?”

“Eggs. Bacon.”

“Again?”

“Yah.”

“Okay.”

“Then what?”

“Call Carla. Got her number right here.” Sher touched her pocket.

The old man arranged his items. Sher kept her eyes on him in between the cars and buses and cabs that drove by.

“We’ve got to get washed up,” Sher said, as she watched the old man set a cooler next to the stand and pulled out long-neck bottles of pop. “Kris, get me twenty cents.”

Kristin dug around at the bottom of the pack and handed Sher two dimes. She tossed the crushed Coke can from the hunter’s shack onto the sidewalk.

Sher crossed the street.

The old man narrowed his eyes. “Ain nothin’ here for you.”

Sher figured he acted that way because they were Indian. “How much for a pop, sir?”

“You got money?”

“Yes, sir. How much?”

“Twenty cents for the pop. Only Coke and Nehi today. Grape. Twenty-five cents a pretzel. Thirty for a dog.”

The old man took her money, and handed her a Coke.

Sher crossed the street and gave the Coke to Kristin.

“Don’t you want it?”

“Nope.”

“Why’d you get it?”

“Wished to get us jobs.”

Kristin drained the Coke.

Sher took the empty bottle from her and stuck her middle finger in the mouth to carry it. “Come on, Kris,” she said, slinging the pack over one shoulder.

The old man was lacing a hot dog with mustard. He handed the hot dog to a man in a business suit. “Never too early to be eatin’ a dog.”

The man raised the dog in the air like a salute and walked north.

“Want it back?” Sher held the bottle toward him. “For the deposit.”

The old man looked at the girls. “What are ya a couple of hippie kids?”

“No sir,” Sher had to keep from laughing never having had anyone ask if she were a hippie. She leaned on her good foot. “In town. Visiting.”

“Uh huh.” The old man tilted his head toward the sun. “I see.” He took the bottle.

“Sher. This here’s Kris.”

“You’re not hippies?” He squinted at Sher.

“No, sir,” Sher said, confused, as she expected white people to distrust her for being Indian, not a hippie.

“You homeless kids?”

“No, sir. We have a home.”

“You look plenty dirty.”

“No, sir.”

“Yes, ya do.”

“No, sir, what I mean is we’re out looking around for jobs and we’ve been sitting around waiting to talk to certain people.”

“I see. Those hippie kids always takin from me.”

“No, sir. We don’t steal,” Kristin said and bit her lip to be talking so nice to a man who insulted them.

“We’re just looking for some work and we’d be glad if you would consider—”

“No, no, no. Git on outta here. I know what you kids are all about. Now git.”

The girls crossed the street.

“Hey!” His papery voice followed them as they crossed the street. “You girls Indians?”

“Yah. Yah,” they said, their voices layering over each other. They did not look back.

The girls cut to the left, heading south toward nowhere they knew.

When they reached Second Avenue they cut to west until they hit Third where Sher called Carla from a pay phone next to a pawnshop. No one answered. They walked the outskirts of Loring Park, poking their heads in the back doors of bars and restaurants asking for work as dishwashers and busboys, but they could not find anyone willing to employ two teenage Indian girls on the run. They found bread still wrapped in plastic in the trash of Moby’s Tavern, walked to Loring Park, and sat on a bench overlooking a pond. They shared the bread.

“I’m thirsty,” Kris said. “Think we could drink from the pond?”

“Best not,” Sher said. “It’s pretty green.” Her ankle hurt. She could barely put any weight on it.

Kristin balled up the bread bag. “Be right back.”

Sher nodded. She picked up an acorn beneath the bench, popped the hat off it, and ate the nut, showing no outward sign when the bitterness of the nut hit her tongue. She’d grown eating roasted acorns, and ate a few unroasted ones as a young girl.

A squirrel ran the base of a gnarled oak. Sher removed her boots and socks and lay on the bench. The sun rode the tops of the trees and roofs of the buildings. Sher wondered what would become of her and Kris. They could always move on, Sher thought, and watched the squirrel chase itself around the tree, expending precious energy as it ran from predators Sher could not see.

“Nice boots.”

Sher swung herself upright. A tawny-colored boy about her age in jeans and a tie-dye T-shirt stood with his back to the setting sun. His body was thin and angular as if it wanted to go in every direction at once.

The boy squatted. “Jacob. Nice to meet you.” He ran a hand through his twiggy brown afro. His speech was quick and clipped, unlike the people Sher and Kristin spent their lives around.

Sher studied the boy from top to bottom. “Sher,” she nodded.

The boy picked up a stick and drew a half circle in front of him. “Sher. That’s a nice name,” he said. “What are you? Where you from?” He looked off to the right where some other boys stood.

Sher studied the boys.

The boy grew impatient. “What are you?”

“Indian.”

“Really?” the boy asked. His eyes flitted toward the boys, at Sher, and then behind her. “Like teepees and cowboys and stuff?”

Sher did not respond.

The boy became increasingly nervous, drawing more and more half circles and circles in the dirt. The squirrel was nowhere in sight. Sher edged closer to her boots in case the boy tried to run off with them.

“Me? Since you asked. I’m from Chicago,” the boy said unable to bear the silence. He stood and stretched his arms behind his back, popping his small, bony shoulders forward like baseballs. He turned his back to Sher. The tallest boy with shaggy, strawberry blonde hair motioned at him. Jacob turned to Sher.

“Indian, huh. Where you from?” He moved his hands in circles.

“Your friends?” Sher placed her palms on the bench on either side of her hips.

“Yeah. Yeah. Sort of,” the boy said. He stepped forward toward Sher. “You’ve got a hurt foot,” he said tenderly as if he had just seen a wounded bird hidden in someone’s sweatshirt.

“Ankle.”

“Oh, wow. Man. Sorry.” The boy began dancing on his feet like a boxer. “Sorry, that looks bad.” He bent down next to Sher’s ankle. He reached out to touch it.

“Don’t touch me.”

The boy jumped up. “Sorry, right. Don’t touch you. Sorry.”

Sher pushed her boots under her legs. “What do they want?” she asked, nodding toward the boys.

“Who? Them?” the boy ran his hand through his hair again and twirled the end of a curl. “Those guys,” he turned his back to them and jerked his thumb at them. “Good. Guys. Nothing.” He moved again, imitating Muhammed Ali.

“What do you want?” Sher tried to get a good look at his face in between his bobbing and the shade cast across his face.

“Me?” He sounded surprised. “I don’t want a thing.”

“What do they want?”

“They’re wondering, um, where you’re from.”

“What do they want?”

“Nothing. Just said ‘Jacob go find out where those girls are from.’ So here I am.” The boy stopped moving. “It isn’t like they’re going to beat me up if I don’t do what they say.” He struck a boxing pose, fists up.

Sher looked at the boy and no longer saw the softness she had seen a minute before when he was concerned about her ankle. “Tell them I’m not interested.”

“I can’t do that.” Jacob slipped out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “Got a light.”

Sher shook her head no. “Sure you can.”

“No.” Jacob tugged at his pocket and pulled out a lighter. “No. I can’t.” His hands shook.

“Why not?”

“No reason.”

“Sher?” Kristin stood behind Sher, staring at the funny-looking white boy with an afro. She raised her eyebrows as if to say who is this guy.

who is this guySher nodded at her cousin.

Kris handed the bread bag filled with ice and water. “Drink.”

Jacob lit his cigarette again, rounding his shoulders as if he were protecting the flame from the wind, even though there was no wind.

Sher drank water from the bag and then placed the ice on her raw skin. “Did you get it lit?” she said to Jacob.

“Damn. No.”

“Give it to me,” Sher said.

Jacob handed her the cigarette—an Embassy Filter—and lighter.

Sher lit Jacob’s cigarette.

Jacob held it like a joint and inhaled. He turned his back to the girls and waved at the strawberry blonde boy. The boy nodded and walked to the west, away from Jacob and the girls.

“Got another one?” Kristin asked.

Jacob slipped out a cigarette and handed the tip to her graciously like he was a gentleman pulling out a sword. “My name is Jacob, since you asked.”

“Thanks. But I didn’t. Embassy Filter,” Kris said as she lit the cigarette.

“Best ciggies around.” Jacob puffed from his and then blew a cloud of smoke toward Kris. “You like?”

“Em smoked Camel.” A burst of grief came over Kris. “What do they want?” She pointed her cigarette at the group of white boys pushing each other and sprawling in the grass in jeans and white T-shirts.

“Not me,” the boy said. “You, they want you, not me.” Jacob tried to laugh as if what Kristin said was ridiculous.

“Why?” Kristin asked.

Jacob let out two quick sharp laughs to sound tough. Then he coughed into his armpit. “I’m here to bring you over to them.” The boy glanced at the group of boys and turned back to the girls. “Come over to talk with them. They just want to talk. I swear. Please.”

“We’re leaving.” Sher pulled on a sock.

“Nah, come on. Be cool, man. Just come over for one minute. One minute, that’s it. C’mon man. I promise nothing will happen.” The boy put his thumbs up. “Not one thing, man. It’s cool.”

“Doubt it,” Kris said, ashing her cigarette.

“I think you need to come with us,” Sher said.

The boy’s face moved in a strange way.

Sher laced up her boots. Kristin strapped on their grandfather’s pack and the girls walked east toward the heart of downtown.

“Dumb chicks!” the boys yelled. “C’mon ya kike!” One of them ran a ways and threw something at them that wavered in the air before dropping to the ground like a bird shot out of the sky.

A stick, Sher guessed, but was not sure because the fading light turned everything a pale yellow or dark black. When the girls reached the street around the edge of the park, Sher glanced back as the boys circled Jacob.

“Guess he got an F,” Sher said.

“What’s ‘kike’?” Kris asked.

“Don’t know.”

The girls tromped off, carrying the pack and the half-melted bag of ice.

“He should have come with us instead,” Kristin said.

“Yah,” Sher said. “He’d a been better off.”

After walking a block, the girls had to wait at an intersection for two cop cars as they wailed by, their red and blue lights swinging in a wide arch over the pedestrians’ heads like cowboys swinging their ropes at a round up.

“Want to go back?”

“Yah.”

The girls looped around to the west until they ended up on the other side of the park where they had last seen the boy. The group of boys milled about where the girls had been sitting.

“See him?”

“Nah.”

The girls walked farther west, passing a woman pushing a stroller draped with a sky-blue blanket. The girls cut behind one of the apartment buildings and dropped down a short, steep hill to the alley. The boy sat on the concrete steps of a four-story brick apartment building.

“Hey,” Kris said.

“You okay?” Sher asked.

“Real cool,” Jacob said, his head down.

“They beat you?” Sher asked.

“Sure. Probably.” He rocked.

A white man in a dark blue suit walked down the alley. He did not look at them, as if by not looking perhaps they would not actually be there.

The girls watched him, his pant legs flapping against his wing tip shoes. The boy studied the pebbles in the concrete.

“Got somewhere to go?” Sher looked at Kristin as if to ask her is it okay to bring him along.

is it okay to bring him along.Kris shrugged and nodded.

“No,” he said.

“Want to go with us?” Sher asked.

The boy fiddled in his pocket, slipped out a cigarette, and lit it. He shrugged.

“Come on.’

The boy took a drag on the cigarette. His face was swollen and b****y.

“You’re going to need our face makeup,” Sher said.

“Wash up.” Kristin held the bag of water with a golf ball size chunk of ice.

“We’re all in good shape,” Sher said, propping her foot on a step.

Jacob splashed the water on his face and then held the ice over his eye.

After a while like that, the girls and the boy walked toward the heart of the city.

“Sorry about that,” he said, flipping his hand. “What I did. I’m coming down. Acid.”

“Acid,” Kris said, her eyes as big and round as the moon. She felt the same way she did the times she’d heard Sasquatch stories—from her grandfather, uncles, and cousins about sightings on the reservation and in Canada. “I didn’t believe it until I seen it,” one of her cousins said. He’d seen Sasquatch on Antwatin as a boy, right before moving to the city. “Twice as big as a moose. All hairy. Little beady red eyes.” His father said it was bull, just some old time Indian superstitions that modern Indians need to leave behind. His mother kept her mouth shut. She watched her boy. She’d heard the stories as a little girl, and believed them, but they were moving to the city the next day and she’d been told by her friends who were already there that it would be best for the children to leave the old ways on the reservation. “My boy,” she’d said. “Come over here and help me with this box.” When he stood next to her, she squeezed his shoulder to let him know she loved him. She didn’t say I believe you. She wanted him to survive.

* * *

The girls and boy avoided the road next to the park and the main streets where there was a higher chance of running into cops or the boys.

“What are we going to do tomorrow?” Kristin asked as they turned down an alley whose sides angled down toward the middle, creating a gulley for runoff.

“Same as we did today,” Sher said. She put her arm over Kristin’s shoulder.

The boy wrapped his arms around his ribs as if he were in a straitjacket.

The sun disappeared over the girls and the boy, blanketing them in the gray down of dusk.

Virginia, Minnesota, July 1969

Virginia, Minnesota, July 1969Em faced the door from which she heard the scratching. At first the scratching sounds confused and unnerved her. But after a while, it was hard to tell time in her condition, she realized the sound came from something small and desperate, but persistent. Like a secret language. Initially, she imagined a rodent, or baby raccoon, or even kitten, but what must have been hours later, she no longer imagined the sounds were being made by an animal. Another human? But who? What could she do? She would not talk. She’d learned that lesson on the drive here—had a cheek that looked like a burst tomato. The right side of her face was still burning and throbbing—to remind her that silence is golden, as the whites say, embroidered on their doilies and brass-framed wall hangings with spinning, curling metal flowers decorating the edges. Everything so hard and sharp. Who else, but the English, as Em’s grandparents had called all whites, could take the softness of a flower and make it so hard and pointed?

Em knew—she’d watched white people plenty—that if silence were broken at the English dinner table or in the classroom, it would be followed by a fist or a palm or a snap of a ruler. Theirs was not the silence of respect but of fear. Of punishment. They hit their children. She’d seen it! No wonder their children were so afraid of them, so shut down and filled with shame or, on occasion, eruptive and openly defiant. And now this. She fought the fear in her belly. She could not birth that emotion, or she would not survive. Tied at her wrists and ankles, feet spread and belly down, she could not move her hands to talk back at whomever was making the noises. Her low back hurt and she had to keep her face to one side because of her cheek. How long had she been there, in that enormous gold house with carved wooden ornamentation hanging down from the eaves like stiff lace frozen in a winter storm and more rooms than Em could have imagined possible in one dwelling? Hours? Days?

Em was no fool. No Indian woman was. None could afford to be. She did not know the specifics of the garish gold house on the western edge of town, one and three quarters of a mile from an open mine pit. A Queen Anne built in 1894 by fifty-seven-year-old Giuseppe De Luca, an immigrant Italian mine owner who originally made his money in the garment district in New York City. The three-story house had once been referred to as The Grand Old Lady. Eighteen rooms, two sets of staircase (one for the servants—orphaned Indian girls and poor white girls De Luca purchased from the St. Scholastica Priory convent in Duluth), six fireplaces, a pantry, a formal dining room, two bathing rooms (one for each of the two bottom floors), a library made of imported African mahogany (even though De Luca was illiterate, he’d stood stroking with the tip of his pinky finger the spines of the books he could not read in his library), three sitting rooms, plain servants quarters in the attic, a wrap-around porch, and a root cellar. Oak and maple trim sawed, stripped, and dragged from the surrounding forest lined the floors, windows, door frames, baseboards, crown moldings, and fireplaces. In the ground-level sitting room two magnificent, hand-carved oaks sprang forth on each side of the main fireplace in bas relief, the mouth of the fireplace constructed of inlaid turquoise square one inch tile, the acorns tumbling from the trees’ branches with such detail that their caps revealed each miniscule bump, the smooth meat of the nut, still shiny and bright beneath the lacquer.

Now no longer grand, largely unoccupied, the original cooking stove barely usable due to rust, mice nesting in the walls—their dead stacked in walls, ceilings stained with brown and yellow rings that bled outward like watercolor warts, wallpaper split down seams, Victorian pullout bathtub covered in mold, and grimy floors, the house’s story included thirty years of neglect on the outer edge of a small northern Minnesota mining town. Virginia, Minnesota, where it regularly reached thirty below during the winter season. Virginia, Minnesota, one hour from Canada, dubbed the “Queen City,” was a town no one in 1969 would suspect was a holding place for those who bought and sold Indians. No one needed to tell Em anything about the De Luca house’s peculiar history. She knew the story. It was as old as America—the story writ in her ancestors’ blood, the trees, and the land. The bones of the houses were, after all, trees. And trees, whether alive or dead, hold stories, as her father had always said.

Her mind, groggy, reached back, behind her to the time when she was small, her hair in two tight shining black bear-greased braids, listening, ear to the floor of her and her siblings’ bedroom door, the iciness of the pocked wood floor against her cheek. That the farmhouse was theirs—an Indian family—was a miracle unto itself. Or a curse, depending on whom you asked. Her brother, the middle child. Thaddeus. Thad for short. A worker. Quiet. Good-natured. Funny. He did not seek out the stories not meant for young ears that his grandparents discussed at night, after the children had been sent to sleep, as Em did. But when stories were presented to him, each one as if it were a gift being unwrapped every time it was told, he listened and he remembered. Her sister Josetta, Josie for short, was the oldest, tough as moose hide, but also dreamy, easily airborne like the magpies that feast ticks off moose, which was why she did not get out from under the covers at night to listen. She disliked the night air that cracked like sheets of ice until the sun had been in the morning sky long enough, warming even the coldest, most remote room in her parents’ farmhouse. Both girls were tough, their family Sturgeon Clan, but something in Josie’s constitution made her flighty, made her not seek out and settle into the depths the way Em did. The unwillingness to hear the full truth made Josie more vulnerable, not less.

The afternoon the Finns left, the Brauns abruptly moved into the farmhouse. No reason was given to young Em, so she believed the move was due to her grandmother’s passing. Although she would never know the true reason, the move turned Em’s grief and loss over her grandmother into anger and then resentment. Then with the happenings at school, being taken from her family for months, her emotions turned to hatred and eventually rage and revenge. But at the core of all that were the girl’s emotions over the loss of her beloved grandmother, an old timer who had no interest in white ways, especially their hard, cold, four-cornered dwellings with rooms that separated families. “Every room for something different. Eat. s*x. Sleep. Sitting. Making food. No wonder why they are the way they are,” she said in Ojibwe. “They can’t help it. In houses like that, it’s how they grow.” Em viewed their move into the farmhouse as a betrayal and dismissal of her and the old-time ways. Her unresolved grief was the seed that sprouted her bitterness and anger that propelled her away from her family, away from her teachings, and into the coldest and hardest aspects of the English house.