Grandma Dilsey, who has seen much in her life, offers, “What we do, we must do carefully. There are laws not our own to consider.”
They all look at his mother. It’s clear they’re thinking about his father.
“Liam can’t know,” she says. “What we’ve done, he won’t understand.”
“Or what we still have to do,” LeDuc says.
She turns to her son. “What I have to ask, Cork, there’s no way I can justify it. But it’s the most important thing I’ve ever asked of you. You can’t tell your father what happened at Indigo Broom’s cabin. You can’t tell him ever. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he says. And he absolutely does and has absolutely no intention of ever saying anything to his father.
“Good,” she says. “It would be a disaster on so many levels.” She turns to the others. “Where’s Henry?”
“With Hattie Stillday. He wanted to talk to her himself,” Winter Moon replies.
“What about tonight?” she asks.
“We have a plan,” says LeDuc.
He came out of the dream on his own.
“You do not want to go on?” Meloux asked.
“The truth is I’m afraid,” Cork replied.
“The truth is you have always been afraid. That is why long ago I helped you not remember.”
“You?”
“I cannot explain. If you are to understand completely, you must remember.”
“I have to go back?”
“You have to go back.”
“Will you be there, Henry?”
“I have always been there.”
It is night. He is at his grandmother’s house with the others: Meloux, Winter Moon, LeDuc, Becky Stonedeer, Grandma Dilsey, Aunt Ellie, Hattie Stillday, his mother. The men have rifles. His mother is armed as well. She has brought his father’s revolver, the.38 Police Special, which she took from the lockbox in their bedroom closet and has filled with cartridges. The firearm looks awkward in her hand. When Grandma Dilsey saw it, she’d questioned, “Do you need that?”
“I don’t know what I need to kill a monster, but this is what I have.”
She holds the gun at her side, so weighty that it seems to throw her body off balance.
He is in the back bedroom, where they made him go before they began their discussion. They closed the door. He’s opened it a crack so that he can see and hear.
“I’ve checked,” Winter Moon says. “This thing she’s at in Duluth is supposed to finish up around ten. A couple of hours to get back here, and she should hit Broom’s cabin around midnight.”
“The remains of Broom’s cabin, you mean,” LeDuc says.
“We should be there early,” Winter Moon advises.
“She comes,” Hattie says bitterly, “and then what?”
“And then justice,” LeDuc says.
“We just kill her?” Grandma Dilsey asks.
“She didn’t just kill our children,” Hattie says with acid bitterness. “She tortured them first.”
“You’re saying we should torture her, Hattie?”
“If you can’t, I’ll be more than happy to do it for you, Dilsey,” Hattie replies.
Meloux says, “To end her life isn’t a cruelty. Her life is an unnatural thing. But to drag out that end would be cruel.”
“I’m just fine with that, Henry.”
“Now, maybe. But your life will be long, Hattie, and someday you will regret your cruelty to this creature.”
“I’m willing to live with it.”
“Me, too,” LeDuc throws in.
Meloux considers them, and his voice, when he replies, is a placid pool. “We must think with one mind, speak with one voice, act with one heart. If we are not together, we will crumble.”
“I want her dead,” Aunt Ellie says quietly, “as much as anyone here. But I don’t want her to suffer. I don’t want to become a Windigo, like her.”
“To kill a Windigo, you must become a Windigo,” LeDuc throws at her.
“And feed on her heart, George?” Grandma Dilsey replies. “There will be no satisfaction. That’s the thing about a Windigo. It’s always hungry.”
“One heart, one voice, one mind,” Meloux reminds them.
They stand in a loose circle. From where he watches through the crack in the door, he can see them eye one another, and although they don’t speak, it’s as if they’re talking.
LeDuc finally says, “All right. We end it quickly. And do what with her body?”
“We put it with the bodies of those she’s killed,” Meloux says.
“No!” Hattie cries. “I don’t want her anywhere near my Abbie.”
“It will not be her. It will be only her flesh and her bone,” Meloux replies. “Her deformed spirit will be on the Path of Souls.”
Aunt Ellie offers, “Hattie, our girls will be like guardians. They won’t let that monster harm anyone else.”
“And she won’t be found there,” LeDuc adds.
Hattie lowers her head, considers, and says at last, “All right.”
“We should go,” Meloux tells them. “Prepare.”
“Someone needs to stay with Cork,” his mother says.
“I’ll stay,” Grandma Dilsey tells her. “But I won’t let you leave with that gun, Colleen.” She reaches out her hand. “There are guns enough already to do what must be done.”
Into Grandma Dilsey’s hand, his mother delivers the firearm. Grandma Dilsey walks to an old rolltop desk, slides open a drawer, and puts the gun inside.
FORTY-NINE
Grandma Dilsey is outside watching night push across the sky. She has been quiet and tense. He sits beside her on the porch steps, looking where she looks, but probably not thinking what she’s thinking. He’s thinking something else, he’s pretty sure. When night has settled fully on both earth and sky, he says, “I’m tired. I’m going to lie down in the bedroom.”
She puts her arm around him. Her face, dark from the blood of The People that runs through her body and darker still from the night, comes near his own. Her eyes are soft and full of pain. “I’m sorry, Mishiikens.” She uses the Ojibwe word for “little turtle,” an affectionate name by which she sometimes calls him. “These things, you should have been spared.”
“I’m all right, Nokomis,” he replies, using the Ojibwe word for “grandmother.” “Just tired. I think I should rest for a while.”
“Go,” she says. “Lie down.”
Inside the house he walks to the desk where Grandma Dilsey has put his father’s handgun. Soundlessly, he slides the drawer open and removes the weapon. He goes into the bedroom and closes the door behind him. At the window, he takes off the screen. He’s just about to ease himself through the opening when the door opens at his back and his father enters the room. Grandma Dilsey is with him. Her face is defiant and at the same time afraid.
“Where are you going, Cork?”
His father’s voice is colder than he has ever heard.
“Nowhere,” he replies.
“Give me the gun.”
He walks to his father and holds the heavy firearm out to him. His father takes the weight from the small hand and fills the empty holster on his own belt.
“Where have they gone?” his father asks, his voice still like something frozen in winter.
He looks at his Grandma Dilsey and understands that she hasn’t told. He wants to be like her, to hold his tongue even against the frigid power of his father. He says nothing.
His father reaches out and grabs his arm. His fingers are like the iron of the manacles in Mr. Windigo’s shed. “You’ll tell me what’s happening. You’ll tell me where they’ve gone. And you’ll tell me now.”
“Liam,” Grandma Dilsey cries. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Then you tell me,” he says, turning on the old woman.
“All right, all right. Just let him go.”
The grip is released. And Liam O’Connor listens stone-faced as Grandma Dilsey tells him everything.
He stands there ashamed, knowing that, but for him, his grandmother would never have told. He hates himself and he hates his father and even when his father turns and something different is in his face now, something afraid, he goes on hating him.
“Stay here,” his father says to him. His voice is stern but softer.