She studied him and made no move to comply.
“Untie me, and we will test the strength of your faith against the strength of mine. Unless you are afraid that the spirit at the center of this old, beat-up body may be stronger than the spirit at the center of yours.”
“It’s a trick, Abigail,” Joshua Hornett said.
“You have the rifles,” Meloux pointed out. “If you believe it is a trick, you can shoot me any time you want.”
Still the woman didn’t move.
“You have killed in the name of what you call God,” Meloux said. “Is it possible that the reason for your killing had nothing to do with God but simply a hatred that burns inside of you? Is that why you are afraid to test the strength of your spirit and of your belief? Is it possible that inside of you there is only ash and no spirit fire?”
The woman’s face moved as if something under her skin was alive. Her eyebrows twitched, and her temples pulsed, and her jaw clenched and unclenched. Finally she said, “Cut him loose, Joshua.” She leaned toward Meloux, and when she spoke, it was pure poison. “When this is finished, I will, myself, cut out your heart.”
“We need to think about this, Abigail,” her son pleaded.
“I said cut him loose, Joshua. Do it! I’ll keep the others covered.”
Reluctantly, Hornett set his rifle against the door, snapped open the pouch on his belt, and brought out a folded knife. He opened the blade and crossed to where Meloux sat. The old man held up his hands, and Hornett cut the tape that bound the wrists. He stepped back quickly, as if afraid Meloux might spring at him. He put his knife away, returned to the door, and again took up his rifle.
“Watch the others,” the woman told him. She set her own firearm against the cabin wall and said to Meloux, “What now?”
Meloux rose slowly. He walked to the stove in the middle of the room, where the light through the western window was strongest. He stood on one side and nodded for the woman to stand on the other. Rainy’s pot of stew still simmered where it sat near the edge of the hot stove top.
Meloux said, “In the old days, in order to test the strength of their spirits, two warriors would face off over the glowing coals of a great fire. Each would hold a hand over the coals until one of them could no longer stand the heat. The last to take his hand away was the stronger spirit. And the longer his hand remained over the coals even after the other had withdrawn, the greater that spirit and the greater his name.”
The woman looked down at the hot stove top, then up at Meloux. Without hesitation, she said, “Any time you’re ready.”
Meloux put out his hand and held it over the center of the stove, a quarter of an inch above the searing metal. The woman did the same.
It seemed to Jenny as if the cabin became a vacuum. There was no air, no movement, no sound, not even from little Waaboo. Her eyes were riveted to the stove and to the two people on either side of it, illuminated in the fiery glow of sunset. She saw that the woman trembled and her jaw was drawn taut, but her eyes were locked on the face of the old Mide, and her hand didn’t waver from the place she held it. Jenny was surprised that the woman’s belief, dark and angry and vengeful though it was, seemed to be the equal of Meloux’s. They both stood with open palms above the stove, immobile, as if they were forged from the same insensate iron.
Then a smell assaulted Jenny’s nose. The alarming and sweet aroma of scorched flesh.
In that same moment, the glass of the window in the western wall of the cabin shattered, and the woman collapsed where she stood. From beneath her on the cabin floor spread a glistening crimson pool fed by the dark red lake of her heart.
Waaboo began to wail.
Meloux lifted his hand from the stove top.
Joshua Hornett stood frozen, staring in horror and disbelief at his mother’s body.
Stephen and Rainy, acting with a single mind, leaped on this last reluctant soldier from the Church of the Seven Trumpets. They tumbled onto the floor in a squirming heap. Hornett struggled to throw them off, but they fought against him fiercely.
Then Meloux was standing above them, the woman’s rifle in his hands. He spoke in a voice of such clear authority that all motion stopped instantly.
“Enough. It is finished. Be still.” When he saw that his words had been heeded, Meloux said, “Take his rifle, Stephen, and hand it to me.”
Stephen, who already had a firm grip on the firearm, yanked it from Hornett’s grasp and delivered it to Meloux. The old man opened the cabin door and stood at the threshold. He flung first one rifle then the other far out into the meadow grass. After that, he lifted his arms and crossed and uncrossed them several times above his head in a sign that all was now safe.
Through the doorway, Jenny saw figures in blue Kevlar emerge from the woods and begin to cross the meadow. Waaboo screamed, and she held him against her and spoke to him quietly. “Don’t cry, little rabbit. Don’t cry. It’s all over. We’re safe now.”
Stephen stood poised above Hornett, prepared to battle him again should he rise. It wasn’t necessary. The man lay on the floor and stared upward, dazed and dumb in defeat.
“Uncle Henry, let me see your hand,” Rainy said. She went to Meloux and looked at the palm he’d held over the stove.
“We need to get you to a hospital,” she said firmly.
“Niece,” Meloux replied, “have I taught you nothing about healing?” Then he smiled. “Two hours ago, I thought I was dead. Yet here I am alive. What is a little puckered flesh to me?”
“Mishomis,” Stephen said. “I never heard of that warrior’s test.”
“Until the words came from my mouth,” the old man said, “neither had I.”
Jenny heard her father call from outside. A moment later, he was in the doorway, standing next to Henry and Rainy, with the sheriff’s officers pressing in at his back.
“Thank God you knew what I meant, Henry,” he said.
“What did you mean, Dad?” Stephen asked.
First his father gave him a powerful hug, then explained. “Ishkode, one kind of fire, the kind that burns in Henry’s fire ring. Baashkiz, another kind of fire. To fire a gun.”
“Your Ojibwe needs work, Corcoran O’Connor,” Meloux said. “But I understood.” He lowered his eyes to the woman dead on his floor. “It is good for us that she did not.”
Her father came at last to where Jenny sat with Waaboo crying in her arms.
“You and our little guy, you’re both okay?”
“Our little guy?” she said.
“Whatever it takes, Jenny, we’ll give this child a home, I promise.” He looked the cabin over, then asked, “Aaron?”
“He tried to lead them away from us. He didn’t have to, but he did.” She shook her head and said at last the words that, because of the circumstances and her own need to stay focused, she hadn’t even allowed herself to think. “He’s dead. They killed him, Dad.”
Tears spilled from her eyes so suddenly that she was caught by surprise. She couldn’t tell if it was grief for Aaron. Or relief at being saved. Or her deep fear, despite her father’s assurance, that now that the danger was past, she might very soon have to give up this child whom she loved as if he were her own.
She cried so hard that she couldn’t speak. She held so tightly to her baby that no one could have taken him from her.
EPILOGUE
November arrived, and there was not yet snow in Tamarack County or in any part of northern Minnesota or across the border in southern Manitoba and Ontario. This was unusual, though not unheard of, and it greatly simplified the travel of those who’d come from Lake of the Woods for the Naming Ceremony.
Crow Point that afternoon lay under a sky completely covered by low clouds the color of an old nickel. There was no precipitation in the forecast, however, and hardly a breath of wind. Although the temperature hovered just below fifty degrees, there was a festive feel among those gathered in the meadow in front of Meloux’s cabin. The air was redolent with the aromas of fry bread and savory
meats and hot dish made from wild rice. Rose and Rainy had been cooking on the woodstove all morning, and many of the guests had brought food to share as well. Tables had been set in the meadow and were already filled with casserole dishes and salads and desserts waiting to be served onto paper plates.
Smoke drifted up from beyond the outcropping of rock near the end of the point, and at a given signal everyone who milled about the meadow made their way in that direction. Rose walked with Mal and Rainy and Tom Kretsch, who was still recovering from a bullet wound to his right leg and used a cane. Stephen and Jenny and Anne and Cork were already at the fire, along with Henry Meloux. Amos Powassin was with them, standing next to his old friend, smiling blindly.
For nearly two months, Jenny and Cork had dealt with the bureaucracies on both sides of the border. Because it was impossible to prove the baby’s true birthplace, and because the mother’s last known residence had been Stump Island, the Canadian authorities finally agreed that they had no authority over or responsibility for Lily Smalldog’s child. At which point, it fell to the Tamarack County social services to deal fully with the disposition of the baby. At first, there’d been some question whether things would be complicated by the Indian Child Welfare Act. But Lily Smalldog’s tribal affiliation would have been with the Reserve 37 Ojibwe, where she’d never actually been an enrolled member, and so the court chose to treat her case as a routine adoption. The baby’s father, Joshua Hornett, was sitting in the maximum security facility at St. Cloud awaiting trial on a number of federal charges. He’d been more than cooperative in signing the consent to adoption, in which he gave up all parental rights. A dozen members of the Church of the Seven Trumpets were there with him, also awaiting trial. Seth Bascombe was being held separately, locked away in the correctional facility in Oak Park Heights, mostly for his own safety, because in exchange for leniency, he’d agreed to testify against his former cohorts.
Most fortunate was that, from the beginning, Tamarack County Judge Randalyn Nickelsen had overseen Waaboo’s welfare. She’d known Cork and his family forever, and when she understood the whole story of what they’d all risked for the child, she’d done her best to expedite the adoption process. She’d signed the county’s petition for protective services for Waaboo and had placed him temporarily in Jenny’s care. She saw to it that the requisite home study was completed with due haste and, in the end, had been the one to grant Jenny’s petition for adoption. Within two months of her return to Tamarack County, Jenny had, legally, become a mother.
The Sunday before the gathering on Crow Point, the child had been baptized at St. Agnes in Aurora. In the christening, Father Green had used the boy’s legal name, Aaron Smalldog O’Connor. The Naming Ceremony on Crow Point was an important Ojibwe ritual, one that would complete the process of bringing the baby into a family that embraced and celebrated its mixed heritage.
The only egregious absence at the gathering was that of Noah Smalldog, who’d been killed in the exchange of gunfire on Oak Island. The O’Connors and Rose and Mal had been present at his burial on Windigo Island and had watched as the Ojibwe there put tobacco between his fingers and placed a spirit dish in the coffin and closed the lid and lowered it into the earth. Now, on this overcast November day, as she gathered with the others around Meloux’s fire ring, Rose couldn’t help thinking about the observation Amos Powassin had made weeks earlier amid all the destruction on Lake of the Woods. He’d said that in everything good was the potential for evil, and in everything evil the potential for good. She had known Noah Smalldog for only a very short time. He’d held a knife to her throat and drawn her blood, and she’d been certain that he would have killed her without hesitation if doing so would have served his purpose. He was a man filled with anger, who had no use for chimooks, yet he’d willingly sacrificed himself for her and the others. And she thought about the terrible storm that had begun it all, the derecho. It had been a great destroyer, but it had also, in the end, been responsible for beautiful little Waaboo entering their lives. And last, she thought about Abigail Hornett and the Church of the Seven Trumpets, who’d taken the words of a man of peace and found in them justification for horrible violence.
It was just as Amos Powassin had said: Kitchimanidoo, the Great Creator, God—they were all different names for the same thing, which was creation in all its aspects and all its possibility.
The smoke from Meloux’s fire smelled of sage and cedar. A hush fell over those gathered on Crow Point, and the old Mide began the ceremony, offering tobacco to the four corners of the sky, speaking in each direction the Ojibwe name of Jenny’s boy: Waaboozoons.
In a whisper, Rainy explained to Rose and Mal and Tom Kretsch that the Naming Ceremony honored First Man, who’d named everything in this world. Speaking the child’s name in the four directions allowed the spirit world to recognize this new person and accept him.
When that was done, Meloux addressed the gathering. His words were Ojibwe, and Rainy gave her companions a rough translation of what he said:
“I am an old man. In my life, I have been asked to name many children. The names have always come to me after fasting and dreaming, which is the old way. This child’s name came in another way. A strange way. Maybe it is the new way. It was delivered to Silver Fox, Stephen O’Connor, in a diner in Koochiching”—which Rainy explained was the Ojibwe name for International Falls—”and he has told me that there was, most definitely, no fasting involved.” Meloux grinned at Stephen, and those gathered around the fire laughed.
Meloux grew solemn again. “In the beginning of the journey of this child, or any child, is the understanding that each foot will fall into a different track. Happiness on one side, sadness on the other. Pleasure and pain. Wisdom and folly. With each step, this child will learn that there is in him the possibility of great good and also great evil. It is a serious matter, guiding this child along the path of right living.
“Jennifer O’Connor.” Meloux now spoke in English. “Will you instruct Waaboozoons in ninoododadiwin, which is the way of harmony, the path between the two worlds of possibility—good and evil—created by the Great Mystery?”
“I will do my best,” Jenny promised.
“Have you chosen we-ehs for Waaboozoons?”
We-ehs, Rainy explained, were like godparents, responsible for the child’s upbringing in many ways.
“I have,” Jenny said. “Anne O’Connor and Stephen O’Connor.”
Meloux nodded, as if satisfied.
Jenny handed her baby to Anne, who kissed the child and said, “Waaboozoons.” She handed the baby to Stephen, who did the same and then returned Waaboo to his mother.
“This child,” Meloux said to the whole gathering, “this little rabbit, came into the world and survives because of the great sacrifice of others. But he owes them no debt. In his time, in his turn, he, too, will be asked to sacrifice. We live by the grace of Kitchimanidoo and the goodness of one human being toward another. That is all I have to say.”
Under the old-nickel sky, they filed through the rocks and returned to the meadow, and the feasting began.
Rose lingered near Meloux’s cabin, watching her family and the guests celebrate. Jenny stood in the meadow holding Waaboo, with Anne and Stephen beside her, all of them beaming. Cork and Rainy Bisonette walked together, involved in a lively conversation, and Cork was smiling, as if the happiest of men. Rose knew Jo would have been fine with all of this. The Great Empty that had come with her sister’s death would never quite be filled, but all around it lay the possibility of peace for those she’d left behind.
Mal came to her with a filled plate in his hand.
“Happy?” he asked.
“Immensely,” she answered.
He scanned the gathering. “You’ve got a great family, Rose, wonderful children.”
“I know.”
He smiled and looked up at the thick clouds and said, as if caught by surprise, “A beautiful day.”
“A beautiful life,” she replied.
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And she kissed him, boundless in her appreciation and her love.
William Kent Krueger, Northwest Angle
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