The woman finally speaks, and he hears it as if across a great distance. “All right. We have a deal.”
The knife slides from his mother’s throat, and the woman steps away toward her car, still facing his father. So fast that it must be a part of the dream he’s sure he’s dreaming, his father’s hand clears the gun from his holster and he fires once. The woman drops immediately in a heap, and, in the brittle light, the dirt on the road turns black with her blood.
In that same moment, he is in the dirt, too, staring up at sky whose stars he cannot see.
His mother kneels at his side.
“Cork?”
He hears but can’t make himself reply, can’t make himself turn his eyes to look into her face.
“Dead,” LeDuc says, from where the woman lies.
“Henry, what’s wrong with him?” his mother cries.
“Corcoran O’Connor?” The voice of Henry Meloux. It is a rope trying to pull him from the place where he can’t move.
“Cork, are you all right? Why won’t he answer me, Henry?”
“What do we do now?” Sam Winter Moon asks.
“What you were going to do all along,” his father replies. His words are empty of feeling, his voice a ghost of a voice. “Put her where she’ll never be found.”
“What about Cork, Henry?” his mother pleads.
“I will talk with him,” Meloux replies. “I will guide him.”
“Where?”
“To a place where he won’t remember.”
“You can do that, Henry?”
“I can try.”
“What about you, Liam?” Hattie says.
He stands above his son, but he isn’t looking at his son. He’s looking at the gun that is still in his hand. “I guess I’ll have to live with this.”
“What about Cork?” Hattie says. “He’s just a child, and children don’t keep secrets well.”
“Henry, can you really make him forget?” his mother asks. She lowers herself and cups his face in her hands and speaks to him. It is like a mother in a dream speaking, a dream from which he would love not to wake. “Oh, Cork, can you ever forgive me? Can you understand?”
He doesn’t. Not now. But his mind on some level is recording everything, though he’s too numb to process or to respond.
“I don’t want him to remember this, Henry.” His father’s voice is no longer empty. What fills it now is something like loathing. “I don’t want him ever to know what I’ve done.”
“Please make him all right, Henry,” his mother pleads, holding him tightly. “Oh, please, Henry.”
Meloux replies, “I will do my best.”
It is dark and hot, and he is naked. His small body drips sweat. The air is pungent with the scent of sage and cedar. He can hear Meloux’s voice chanting a prayer, a long invocation, which he doesn’t understand. The Mide’s voice rises and falls.
There is something inside his chest. It feels like a fist pressing against his breastbone. His ears take in the prayer and the old Mide’s voice; his body absorbs the heat; his nose and mouth draw in the healing aromas. Ever so slowly, the fist opens. Ever so gradually, his eyes close against the dark. Ever so gently, he is drawn away from memory.
“He killed her.”
“Yes,” Meloux said.
It wasn’t a hard thing to accept. Now.
“He saved my mother, but it went against everything he believed,” Cork said.
“It was a sacrifice he made for those he loved. But it was also a wound, and it hurt him deep. It came between him and everything he believed and everyone he cared about. You, your mother, your grandmother, Sam Winter Moon, The People. If he had not been killed, the wound he felt would have healed eventually. He died too soon. It was left open.”
“Left open in us all, Henry.”
“Do you feel wounded now, Corcoran O’Connor?”
“No.”
“Then it is finished.”
The old man sounded exhausted. Cork helped him from the sweat lodge, and together they went to the lake and cooled and cleaned themselves there. Rainy had towels waiting, and they dried and dressed and walked slowly back to Meloux’s cabin, where Walleye had been patiently waiting. The old dog rose to his feet and greeted them with a lazy wag of his tail.
“I need to rest,” Meloux said. His hands shook worse than Cork had seen before.
They helped him to his bunk, where he lay down.
“Migwech, Henry,” Cork said.
“I have something for you, Corcoran O’Connor. Niece?”
From the table, Rainy brought a small cedar box, opened it, and held it out to Meloux, who took from it an intricately beaded bracelet. He gave it to Cork, saying, “Your grandmother made this. She gave it to me when I thought I loved her.”
Cork knew that long ago, when they were both very young, Meloux had courted Dilsey.
“I give it to you now.”
“Thank you, Henry. But why?”
“To remind you. Like the beads of that bracelet, all things are connected. The past, the present, the future. One long, beautiful work from the hand of Kitchimanidoo. You, me, those who have gone before us, and those who come after, we are all connected in that creation. No one is ever truly lost to us.” The old man lifted an arm weakly and waved him away. “Now go. It is finished.” Meloux closed his eyes.
“One more question, Henry.”
The old man’s eyelids fluttered open. “With you, it is always one more question.”
“The vision I had on Iron Lake? The two wolves fighting?”
“What about it?”
“You never told me which one wins. Love or fear?”
“It is the one you feed, Corcoran O’Connor. Always the one you feed.” The old man closed his eyes again. In another moment, he was sleeping.
Outside, Cork stood with Rainy in the late afternoon sun. The wind blew across the meadow grass, bringing the scent of wildflowers and evergreen.
“This was hard on Uncle Henry,” she said.
“You’ll take care of him?”
“Of course.” She smiled. Smiled beautifully. “I say that, but somehow I always end up feeling it’s the other way around.” She gave him an unreadable look. “I don’t know what occurred in the sweat lodge, but you seem different. Better. Healed.”
“The blessing of that old man in there.” He looked away where the meadow grass rolled gently under the hand of the wind, then back at Rainy. “If that’s one of the reasons you’re here with him, I hope he passes his special gift on to you.”
“That’s one of the reasons.” Rainy looked down for a moment.
“I’m sorry I was so hard on you at first.”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
Cork studied the bracelet Meloux had given him. All things connected. Of course.
“Could I tell you something?” he said. “It’s something I would have told Jo if she were alive, something I need to share with someone.”
“I’d be happy to listen.”
“Ever since Jo died, I’ve been having nightmares about my father’s death. I haven’t understood why, but maybe I do now. A very wise woman recently suggested that the nightmares might have something to do with some essential quality in my father that I’ve felt was missing in me. I believe that’s true. I believe that at some level I remembered what my father did in order to save my mother’s life and to protect his friends. The behavior of The People during the Vanishings went against everything that as a lawman he embraced. But in the end, he did what was necessary for the woman he loved and for the people he cared about; it was a sacrifice, one that wounded him deeply, but he did it. I think maybe…” Cork faltered.
“You’ve been wondering if maybe you could have done something that would have saved her, some sacrifice you weren’t willing to make?”
Cork looked into the warm brown of her eyes. “Yeah.”
“You’ve been blaming yourself for your wife’s death.”
“I think maybe I have.”
“And do you think it’s time you didn’t?”
“That might take some work.”