Iron Lake co-1

by William Kent Krueger

  “What makes you think she’ll talk to me?”

  “Your blood,” Schanno said honestly. “You got a little Ojibwe running through you. That and the fact you don’t wear a badge anymore. What do you say?”

  “All right. And maybe you should have a look at the judge’s body while I’m out there.”

  A pinched look crossed Schanno’s face, as if his underwear had suddenly shrunk a couple sizes. “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sigurd already cremated it. Listen, Cork, next time you think you’ve found something, don’t wait to tell me, okay?”

  It was his grandmother Dilsey, who’d never been farther from Aurora and the Iron Lake Reservation than the Twin Cities, who had told him the story of how the Anishinaabe came to be a Great Lakes people.

  Long ago, the First People (for this was what the word Anishinaabe meant) had lived on the shores of the great salt water far to the east. They were happy there, hunting and fishing and living in peace with their brothers. Gitchie Manitou was good to them and showed his favor by lifting the Megis, a giant seashell, above the water. The rays of the sun reflected off the shiny surface of the shell, giving the Anishinaabe light and health and wisdom.

  But one day the shell sank beneath the salt water and a darkness came over the First People. Sickness and death moved among them like hungry animals, and they lived in fear. The Megis rose up again far to the west out of a great river at a place called Mo-ne-aung (Montreal), where the First People built new wigwams and for a long time lived again in the light and warmth of the Megis.

  Three more times the Megis disappeared from sight. Three more times it rose up, each time farther west. First on the shore of the great lake called Huron. Next at Bow-e-ting (Sault St. Marie), where the water empties out of Lake Superior. The last time the Megis rose it was at Mo-ning-wuna-kauning (La Pointe Island), where its rays reflected sunlight to even the farthest Anishinaabe villages, blessing them with light, life, and wisdom.

  Grandma Dilsey told him a lot of stories, but it wasn’t until he took a course in Ojibwe history and culture offered by the fledgling American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota that he learned facts. He was surprised to discover that the Anishinaabe were the largest Native American tribe north of Mexico. They had indeed migrated long ago from the Atlantic coastline, but the death that had descended upon them and forced them west wasn’t magic. It was war with the Iroquois nation. The war was old and the hostilities deep. The origin of the word Ojibwe meant “to roast until puckered,” for this was the fate that often befell captured enemies.

  He learned much about the history of his grandmother’s people, including the insidious treaties that had attempted to divide and disenfranchise them. Since their battles with the Iroquois, and later the Dakota, the First People had battled corruption in the BIA, poverty, alcoholism, the cruelty of government schools, and continued attempts by even well-meaning whites to eradicate their culture and their language. The Anishinaabe had survived, and solid populations were spread across Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Canada.

  But most of Cork’s heritage was white, and in his way of living he’d chosen the white man’s world. With his reddish hair and fair skin, he looked more Irish than he ever would Ojibwe. And life was difficult enough as it was. To live it as Indian would have made it that much harder.

  He headed out to the Iron Lake Reservation in the late afternoon, still buoyed by the warmth of spirit decorating the Christmas tree had given him. The sun was low, nestled into the bare branches of the trees like a fat red rooster.

  Iron Lake was not a large reservation. It comprised less than four hundred square miles of woods, lakes, and bogs with its small population of Anishinaabe living in the two villages of Allouette and Brandywine, and in small, isolated houses or shacks or trailers scattered throughout the woods. Except for State Highway 37, which cut through the reservation in a northwest-southeast line, the roads on the reservation were all bumpy, rutted gravel or dirt. Most winters the back roads were impassable for long periods, but as Cork turned off the highway at the gathering of HUD houses and the old government center that was Allouette and headed into the woods toward Nokomis House, he found the snow cleanly plowed right down to the washboard surface of the road.

  The casino, he knew.

  The Chippewa Grand Casino, owned and operated by the Iron Lake band of Ojibwe, had opened its doors only six months earlier, but already the revenue from the slots and blackjack tables and keno and mega-bingo had surpassed even the most optimistic projections. In those months alone, the casino had reported a gross income of almost six million dollars. The gamblers came by busloads from Milwaukee, Chicago, the Twin Cities, Winnipeg, and even as far as Kansas City on special junkets arranged by travel agencies; or they drove in from small cities and towns and farms for a taste of Vegas in their own backyard. The gambling had paid off big for the Anishinaabe of the reservation. Every household belonging to the Iron Lake band of Ojibwe received a monthly allotment of several thousand dollars from the casino profits. Any Native American wanting a job could find work at the casino. New road maintenance equipment had been purchased. There were plans for paving, for a new tribal council building, and for a school. Cork thought it was no wonder that the Dakota who ran casinos in southern Minnesota called gambling “the new buffalo.”

  Four miles out of Allouette, still on the washboard gravel road, Cork approached Mission Center. It was only a small clearing with a single, square, one-story building in the middle. The Catholic mission that had once served the reservation had been abandoned for more than a decade before Father Tom Griffin arrived in Aurora and set out almost single-handedly to bring it back to life. He spent a good deal of his free time there, refurbishing the old structure. Although the priest tried to enlist the parishioners of St. Agnes, white and red, Cork had heard that more often than not St. Kawasaki worked alone.

  By the time Cork reached Mission Center, the sun had set. Stars were emerging from the amethyst sky of the east. A planet like a small ember glowed above the trees. Mars, the angry god of another religion. Cork was surprised to see smoke rising from the stovepipe on the mission roof although there were no lights visible inside. He stopped and got out. The woods of birch and pine that pressed themselves against the clearing had grown dark. The evening light turned the snow a soft blue, and everything was still except for a slight wind that came out of the trees and across the snow, passing Cork with an icy whisper. He turned his collar up. The front door was locked. He peered in at a window. The first thing Father Tom Griffin had done in refurbishing the old mission was to replace the windows and put up shades, which were now drawn. Cork waded around to the back of the building.

  Behind the mission was a cemetery that, unlike the mission, had never been abandoned. It was marked by a black wrought-iron fence, waist high. The Catholics on the reservation had continued to use the cemetery to bury their dead, including most recently Vernon Blackwater, who’d passed away from cancer less than a week before. Many of the Anishinaabe buried in the cemetery had chosen traditional burial houses, small shelters of wood covering the graves. Most of the others were memorialized with a simple stone or a white cross. From what Cork understood, Vernon Blackwater had both. With his feet pointed west along Chebakunah, the Path of Souls, he’d been laid to rest in a grave house marked also by a tall granite cross. It was just like Blackwater to cover all his bases that way. During his illness, he’d been treated not only by the white man’s medicines, but also with the charms and the healing songs of Wanda Manydeeds. In the end, as he lay on his deathbed, Blackwater had requested both the priest-Father Tom Griffin-and Wanda Manydeeds to be present. One to give him extreme unction, the other to sing him along the path to the Land of Souls.

  Parked near the cemetery gate was St. Kawasaki’s old snowmobile, the machine he called Lazarus. The snow behind the mission was stained with black oil spots where Lazarus had leaked. Beside the snowmobile, le
aning against the wrought-iron fence around the cemetery, was the priest’s motorcycle. As Cork came around the rear corner of the building, the back door opened and St. Kawasaki stepped outside. He was wearing his leather jacket and red-masked stocking cap. He didn’t see Cork as he fumbled with the lock.

  “Hey, Tom,” Cork called.

  St. Kawasaki spun. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he cried hoarsely. He pulled off his stocking cap and mask. His good eye still looked startled. “You scared the piss out of me.”

  “Sorry, Tom.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m on my way to see Wanda Manydeeds. I want to talk to her about Joe John and Paul.”

  The priest scratched his cheek. Cork could hear the scrape of Tom Griffin’s fingernails across the grizzle of his five o’clock shadow. “If you think you can get anything out of her, I’d like to hear what she has to say. Mind if I come along?”

  “Fine by me. Why don’t you come in the Bronco? You can pick up your motorcycle on the way back.”

  “Sounds good,” the priest agreed.

  “No luck with Lazarus over there?”

  The priest grinned and shook his head hopelessly. “I believe this time it’s going to take a real miracle to get it running again.”

  18

  Like most reservations in Minnesota, the Iron Lake Reservation was a crazy quilt of landholdings. Land held in trust by the tribe, land allotted to tribal members, land that had been sold or leased to non-Indians for such purposes as lumbering and recreation, and land belonging to the county or state or forest service were all patched together within reservation boundaries. Nokomis House stood on land that at one time had been leased out, but had long since reverted to the tribal trust. Large, rustic, and isolated, it had been an old hunting lodge, unused for many years, before Wanda Manydeeds turned it into a shelter for Native American women. The lodge stood at the edge of a small lake called Five Pines because five massive white pines, each ten feet in circumference, stood together along the shoreline near the building. How they’d been missed in the early logging that cleared the area of the great giants long before the turn of the century, Cork didn’t know, but there they stood, watching over Nokomis House like a cadre of mute, powerful guardians.

  As he drove up, Cork saw Wanda Manydeeds at work in the turnaround that had been plowed beside the lodge. She held a chainsaw and was cutting wood. She wore jeans, hiking boots, and a red down vest over a blue denim shirt. Her son Amik, a small boy bundled heavily in a wool-lined jean jacket, sat on a stump watching.

  A yellow Allis-Chalmers bulldozer sat idle and snow-covered beside the turnaround. Behind the bulldozer a quarter acre of trees had been razed, and the ragged ends of uprooted stumps jutted through the snow like the claws of great beasts thrust up from the frozen ground. Even with the soft snow blanketing it all, the scene had a desolate, destroyed look about it. As he parked the Bronco and stepped out, Cork smelled the chainsaw’s oily exhaust hanging in the air.

  Wanda Manydeeds put down the saw and watched, expressionless, as the two men came toward her.

  “Evening, Wanda,” Cork said.

  The woman tilted her head slightly in a silent greeting.

  St. Kawasaki knelt down and, in the language of the Ojibwe, greeted the boy on the stump. “ Anin, Amik.”

  The boy smiled shyly. “Anin, Father,” he answered quietly.

  “What’s going on back there?” Cork asked, indicating the area of the razed trees.

  “Expansion,” Wanda Manydeeds said. “Everything gets bigger now. Courtesy of the casino.”

  “Don’t plan on touching the pines, do you?”

  “The pines will be here long after you and I are gone. What do you want?”

  “Just to talk a while if I could.”

  “About what?”

  Before Cork could answer, the door of Nokomis House opened and a young woman stepped out. “Amik! Oondass!” she called to the boy. Come here.

  The boy looked at his mother. Wanda nodded and Amik slipped off the stump and ran to the old lodge. The young woman put her arm protectively around Amik, looked suspiciously at Cork, and ushered the boy inside.

  “About your brother,” Cork finally replied. “I want to talk about Joe John.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “I heard he’s back.”

  “I heard that, too. Please don’t smoke. It’s a rule at Nokomis House.”

  Cork knelt and extinguished his cigarette in the snow. The door to Nokomis House opened again, and a gray-haired woman whom Cork recognized as Tilly Favre, Wanda Manydeeds’ aunt, poked her head outside. From within the old lodge came the sound of a baby’s incessant crying.

  “Makwa!” Tilly Favre called to Wanda. “He’s hungry.”

  Wanda Manydeeds eyed her guests unhappily, but she said, “Come inside.”

  There was a sitting room just inside the door. A young girl, perhaps twelve, sat on a green sofa with a baby in her arms. As soon as Wanda had hung up her down vest, the girl handed her the baby.

  “ Migwech, Susan,” Wanda Manydeeds said.

  Although the baby was red-faced, squirming, and crying, the girl seemed sorry to have to give him up. She lingered a moment, as if hoping Wanda would return him to her. As soon as the baby was in his mother’s arms, he stopped crying. Wanda nodded toward the doorway and the girl drifted away.

  Although Wanda didn’t invite him past the sitting room, Cork knew beyond it was a large common room with a huge stone fireplace. The lodge smelled of burning pine, and every once in a while the pop of sap from the next room told Cork there was a good fire going. The second floor of the lodge held bedrooms. Above him, Cork could hear the old boards squeak, shifting under the weight of unseen guests in their wanderings.

  Wanda Manydeeds was a tall, stolid woman in her mid-forties, with long black hair parted in the middle so that it lay against her head like the folded wings of a raven. On one wrist was an ornate, beaded bracelet, and beaded earrings swung from her earlobes. As a much younger woman, she’d been part of the takeover of the BIA office in Minneapolis and had been arrested and briefly jailed. More recently, she’d been elected as a member of the tribal council. She had two children and no husband. The boy, Amik, Ojibwe for “beaver,” was six. His father, Warren Manydeeds, had been killed in a logging accident just two weeks before Amik was born. Wanda Manydeeds had never remarried. The infant, Makwa, was only four months old, and Wanda had never said a word about the father. Because the priest and Wanda Manydeeds worked closely together, the worst of the rumor mill in Aurora had it that Father Tom Griffin was responsible. Cork didn’t believe it for an instant. In their two cultures, they were the guides along the path of upright living, and Cork had never known two people more dedicated to their callings.

  Wanda walked to a cane rocker, sat down, and began to rock the squirming baby. “How is the burger business?” she asked.

  “In winter, closed,” Cork said. “It smells good in here. Bear.”

  “Yes.”

  The baby began to whimper.

  “Where’d you get bear meat?”

  She looked at him as if the question were stupid. “I shot a bear.”

  “I didn’t know you hunted.”

  “There are lots of things about me you don’t know. Why should you? You never lived on the reservation.”

  The girl who’d held the baby peeked through the doorway. Wanda Manydeeds glanced at her. “Susan, go watch television for a little while.”

  The girl frowned, but did as she was told.

  “Her mother’s in the rehab center on the Red Lake rez,” Wanda explained. “Susan wants a baby. Someone to love her. She’ll make a good mother if I can get her to wait until she’s twenty and married.” She shifted the fussing baby to her shoulder and patted his back. “You didn’t come here to talk about hunting bears. You want to know the same thing the sheriff’s man wanted to know. You want to know where Joe John is.”

  “Yes
,” Cork said.

  “And I’m supposed to tell you? Because you have a little of The People’s blood flowing through you? Why do you even care? You’re not the sheriff anymore.”

  “Joe John’s my friend.”

  “Then leave him be.”

  The baby began to cry in earnest again. Wanda Manydeeds undid the top buttons of her denim blouse, unsnapped her feeding bra. The upper slope of her breast bore an elaborate tattoo that Cork easily recognized as the Wisdom Tree. The Wisdom Tree was an ancient, isolated white cedar-normally a swamp tree-that grew on the very tip of a point of rocky land jutting into Lake Superior. The whites called it the Witch Tree because it grew out of solid rock and had no visible means of sustenance. It was said to be as old as The People themselves and was sacred. Like Henry Meloux, Wanda Manydeeds was of the Cormorant clan, the clan of teachers and the Midewiwin. The baby’s mouth clasped Wanda’s nipple greedily just below the roots of the tree and the baby settled into quiet sucking.

  “Have you seen Joe John?” Cork asked.

  “No.”

  “Is he back?”

  “He’s around.”

  “Here on the reservation?”

  “In Tamarack County.”

  “Do you know where?”

  Wanda’s nipple slipped from the baby’s lips. The baby whimpered and she guided the searching mouth back.

  “He has Paul?”

  She considered a moment before answering. “Paul’s safe.”

  “Why are they hiding?”

  “Why does anyone hide?”

  “What’s Darla afraid of?” Cork pressed. “What’s everybody so afraid of? Why won’t anyone talk?”

  She looked at him, and her almond eyes were hard with contempt. “You look at my silence and Darla’s with a man’s perception. You believe silence comes only from fear. Silence often comes from strength and from wisdom.” She looked down at the baby. “That’s all I have to say to you.”

  The priest, who until that moment had been silent himself, said respectfully, “Thank you, Wanda.”