“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.