Gooding had been conspicuously quiet. He leaned against one of the big stone pillars of the porch and stared down at his feet. Every once in a while, he shook his head, as if he were having a conversation with himself.
“Dot Winter Moon still at your house, Cork?” Borkmann asked.
“Probably. She thinks I went out to Henry Meloux’s place. She’s waiting for me to come back with word about Solemn.”
Borkmann looked like he had bad indigestion. “Guess I better head on over and break the news.”
“I’ll do it, Cy.”
“Part of the job, whether I like it or not.”
“I think it’ll be easier coming from me.”
Gooding said, “It wouldn’t be good for her to see you like that, all covered in blood.”
“I’ll stop by Sam’s Place and clean up. I keep a change of clothing there.”
Borkmann said, “All right. But come on down to the office afterward. We’ll get a formal statement from you there, okay?”
“Fine.”
Borkmann went back into the house. Gooding stayed a minute longer.
“Dorothy Winter Moon called the office this evening,” he said. “I took the call. I went out to Sam Winter Moon’s old cabin first. I should have come here, Cork. I might have stopped this.”
“You didn’t know, Randy.”
Gooding looked down at a Bible in his hand. “This was in the living room. It’s the one Winter Moon had with him in jail. I thought maybe his mother might want it.” He gave it to Cork. “We don’t see any way that it’s relevant to the investigation.”
Gooding turned away and returned to his duties inside the house.
Cork stared at the book. A small, New American Bible, white cover. A simple thing, really, but weighty enough in Solemn’s thinking that he’d brought it to the scene of his death.
Why had Solemn come here? Did he hope he could ease Kane’s suffering, take away his hate? Did he really believe that he could offer the peace he himself had found in Blood Hollow? If so, Cork wished he could think of it as something courageous, but in his grief, he could only think how tragic and useless a gesture it had been.
He lifted himself from the steps and started toward home, carrying the burden of the news that would destroy Dorothy Winter Moon’s world.
43
Solemn’s wake lasted two days. It was held on the rez, in the community center in Alouette, with friends and relatives of Dorothy Winter Moon taking turns sitting with the body. The evening Cork paid his respects, he ran into George LeDuc, Eddie Kingbird, and old Waldo Pike standing outside the building, smoking.
“Boozhoo,” LeDuc said in greeting.
“Boozhoo,” Cork said to them all.
“Look at that.” Kingbird grinned. “Just in time for the food.”
Pike said, “Stick around awhile, Cork. Rhonda Fox is gonna sing. She don’t sing good, but she knows the old songs. Not many left who do.”
Waldo Pike had white hair, plenty of it. He stood with a slight stoop, not from infirmity, but from back muscles overdeveloped across a lifetime of wielding an ax and a chain saw, cutting timber for a living.
Cork said, “I’ll stick around.”
“Your grandmother used to sing,” Pike said.
“Yes.”
“I heard her once when I was a young man. It was when Virgil Lafleur passed on. Singers came from all over. A lot of people looked up to Virgil, came to pay their respects. Some all the way from Turtle Mountain. Your grandmother’s singing, that was something.”
Waldo Pike fell silent and smoked awhile. Cork waited respectfully. Pike was an elder who talked on Indian time, comfortable with long silences, and Cork didn’t want to show disrespect by leaving before he’d finished saying all he had to say.
“I’m hungry,” the old man finally said. “How about we eat?”
Inside, the largest of the meeting rooms had been set up for the visitation. The casket was situated in front of a window with a view of the playground behind the community center. Flowers and cards had been laid out on tables on either side. Folding chairs stood in a half dozen rows before the casket. Along the sides of the room, small tables had been arranged, with a few chairs at each so that visitors could sit and eat. The food, a potluck affair, had been placed on several long tables at the back. Among the other aromas Cork’s nose picked up were the good smells of fry bread, wild rice stew, and Tater Tot hot dish.
A couple of dozen people were in the room, some just getting into the food line, others sitting in the folding chairs, listening to Chet Gabriel, who stood at a microphone to the right of the casket. Gabriel was a poet of sorts, and he was reciting from a sheet of notebook paper he held in his hand. Cork knew most of those present, most of them Iron Lake band.
Dorothy Winter Moon was at one of the side tables. She wore a dress, plain blue. Cork couldn’t ever recall seeing her in anything so feminine. When she was alone for a moment, he walked to her.
“Evening, Dot.”
“Hi, Cork. Thanks for coming.” Despite the dress and the circumstances, she seemed strong as ever.
“Jo will be here in a bit. She had a late meeting with a client.” He glanced around. “Lot of folks.”
“It’s nice,” she said. “Thanks, Cork.”
“What for?”
“Doing all you did. Solemn thought a lot of you.”
“I wish I could have done more.”
“You couldn’t have saved him, if that’s what you mean. He knew what he was doing. He had his reasons.”
Cork was sure it helped her to think so, and so he said nothing. Others came to the table to speak with Dot, and Cork left her to them.
When the poet finished to polite applause, Cork went to the casket, which was open. Solemn lay on a bed of white satin, dressed in the kind of dark suit Cork had never seen him wear, his arms uncomfortably stiff at his sides. A new shirt and tie covered his chest, but Cork knew the violation hidden beneath the thin cotton fabric. Solemn’s face was a work of cosmetic art, given color with rouge and powder, like a wax figure in a museum. Whatever Solemn Winter Moon had actually been, reluctant saint or madman, this dressed and painted body was a million miles removed from that. Henry Meloux would have said that Solemn was already far along in his journey on the Path of Souls. Mal Thorne probably believed that Solemn had taken his place in purgatory, awaiting the day his sins would be purged and he could enter heaven. Cork had no idea where the spirit of Solemn now resided.
“I used to think he was a shame to the Ojibwe.”
Cork half-turned. Oliver Bledsoe stood beside him, staring down into the casket.
“Now?” Cork asked.
“Now I think The People will remember him with great respect.” He turned from the body. “Got a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Outside.”
On one of the tables that flanked the casket was a small dish full of cigarettes, and beside the dish sat a box of wooden kitchen matches. Cork took a cigarette and a match. Bledsoe did the same. Outside, they lit up. Cork had quit smoking a couple of years earlier. The cigarettes were part of the Anishinaabe reverence toward tobacco, biindaakoojige, and the old belief that the smoke carried prayers to the creator, Kitchimanidoo.
Bledsoe said, “I heard the sheriff’s department is dropping the investigation of Charlotte Kane’s murder. I heard that unofficially they’re still pinning it on Solemn.”
“Yeah.”
“You think that’s what happened? Solemn did it?”
“No,” Cork said.
“Leaving it that way, it’s not good,” Bledsoe said. “Indian kid kills a white girl. You know how often that’ll be thrown at us around here?”
“I know.”
Bledsoe smoked for a while. People kept arriving, nodding or waving as they went inside.
Bledsoe said, “I talked with the tribal council. They want to hire you to clear Solemn’s name.”
Cork watched the cigarette smoke drift upward toward a clear, cornflower sky.