As he stepped outside into the smoke-scented air, he had the frightening feeling that he-and all the others who called Tamarack County their home-were about to walk a bloody road again.
4
JOHN LEPERE HAD BEEN WAKING SOBER long enough that even when he had one of the bad dreams, he woke fresh and strong.
And that night, he’d had a dream.
He woke early, at first light, pulled on his Speedo and his goggles, and hit the lake. Every day he swam, every day a little farther. He started when dawn colored the water with a cold, gray light, and he moved steadily, stroking his way north, heading out into the center of Iron Lake where the water turned dark and fathomless beneath him. He never tracked his distance. He swam for another reason, a reason that led-twisting and turning-ultimately back to vengeance.
When he drew abreast of North Point that morning, he paused and saw that the sun had risen, a feverish red through the smoke in the sky. The lake around him had turned a bloody hue. The same moment that he noticed the color of the water, he heard an explosion from the direction of Aurora. Beyond the town, a black column climbed into the sky like a snake out of a charmer’s basket, but John LePere watched with only mild curiosity. Whatever the cause, it was the concern of other men. His only concern was keeping himself strong for the work that had become his life. As the siren in town sounded, calling the volunteer firefighters to their duty, LePere turned back and focused on cutting through the blood-colored water toward home.
He’d had the bad dreams so often over the years that he’d learned to keep himself from thinking about them by focusing on physical chores. By the time he’d showered and shaved that morning, he wasn’t thinking about the dream at all. He dressed in clean creased jeans, a crisp white shirt, blue canvas slip-ons. He fixed himself breakfast-oatmeal with raisins, a sliced banana, brown sugar and milk, whole-wheat toast, and a tall glass of orange juice. He ate slowly, alone in the quiet of his small cabin on the shore of a cove off Iron Lake. When he’d finished, he did up the dishes. Finally, he lifted his Leitz binoculars from where they hung on a steel spike hammered into the cabin wall near the back door, and he walked out onto his dock. He settled himself in a canvas chair and watched the big log home more than a quarter mile north across Grace Cove.
His own cabin was simple. His father had built it in the space of a single summer when John LePere was six years old. LePere remembered that summer well-the building of the cabin and the feel of working with his father, a serious man who spoke little but never raised his voice or his hand to his son. The cabin was meant as a retreat whenever LePere’s father tired of fishing Lake Superior for the herring and whitefish and lake trout that, for his living, he caught and sold to smokehouses along the North Shore. Fishing on Iron Lake, he didn’t care if he hung a line in the water all day and caught nothing. There, he fished for other reasons.
When his father bought the land in the late sixties, the price was cheap. The shore of Iron Lake was still quite empty, especially along the eastern side south of the Iron Lake Reservation. Much had changed in thirty years. To build the big log home-the only other dwelling on Grace Cove-Karl Lindstrom had had to pay a fortune for the land, LePere had heard. Lindstrom bought everything up to LePere’s property line. He even tried to buy LePere’s land, offering better than a good price, but John LePere had refused to sell. Between the cabin and the Lindstrom home lay woods full of birch and aspen and a few magnificent spruce. The property line ran along a little stream-all dirt and rock now in the long, dry summer-called Blueberry Creek. Before Lindstrom bought most of the cove, it had been called Sylvan. Lindstrom had changed the name to Grace Cove, after his wife. LePere didn’t know what sylvan meant, and although he liked the word grace attached to the beautiful inlet, he hated the ease with which money changed a thing that had been set on maps and in people’s thinking for over a hundred years.
The great home, built of yellow pine logs, lay in the long shadows of spruce and birch, and LePere, although he hated to admit it, liked the look of the place, especially on cool mornings when it seemed to rise out of the mist of the cove like something from a dream.
There was no mist on the lake that morning. As with every morning for weeks, the air was already warm. The water was a perfect mirror of the hazy blue sky, and across the real and the reflected ran a black smudge rising up from somewhere far across the lake, beyond Aurora.
When the woman came from the house with her boy, LePere lifted his field glasses to watch. She was dressed for sailing, in a white top, khaki shorts, canvas deck shoes, and a red visor pulled over her long, honeycolored hair. The boy wore a light blue polo shirt, jean cutoffs, and black Converse tennis shoes. A few feet out the back door, the woman stopped, smiled, and said something to the boy. They started racing toward the dock. The boy was awkward, a graceless runner. The woman, LePere could tell, let him win. There were never any other children about. The boy seemed to have no friends. Because of the time the boy’s mother spent with him, LePere guessed she understood this, too. Maybe she contributed to it. Sometimes the people you loved were the ones you most betrayed with your weakness, something LePere understood well.
They went to the dock where two boats were tied up-an expensive twenty-eight-foot sloop named Amazing Grace and a small dinghy with a sail. They stepped aboard the dinghy. The woman pointed toward the stern and began talking to the boy, giving him a sailing lesson, LePere guessed.
At that moment, LePere heard at his back the creak of the springy boards on his own ancient dock. He lowered the field glasses, but before he could turn, a nylon cord looped around his neck and drew taut.
“‘Round here,” the voice growled into his ear, “this is what we do to an Injun who stares at a white woman.”