LaRose (22 page)

Nobody got drunk. Nobody slashed her mother’s face and nose, ruining her. Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held your foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth. Another good thing she thought of while the other children wept was that the journey to the school had been arduous and far. Much too far for a head to roll.

WOLFRED TOLD THE
story of Mackinnon’s sudden illness and how he and the girl had plunged into the wilderness seeking help, which was dispatched. The Indians had already found Mackinnon scattered outside the trading post, and they reported that in his fever he’d sought cold snow, died there, and been torn apart by dogs. His head? Wolfred wanted to ask, but fear stopped his tongue. Wolfred was authorized to take up Mackinnon’s position, and so he left the settlement and traveled north. He left Mackinnon’s gold watch, wedding ring, and money in their hiding place. He did well at the post, though the heart of the trade had moved on. Sometimes at night perhaps he heard Mackinnon’s hoarse breath. Sometimes he whiffed the rank odor that used to swell from Mackinnon’s feet when he removed his boots. Wolfred kept beautifully detailed books of transactions. Often, he wrote to the girl in Michigan,
My Flower, Chère LaRose.
He was influenced by French and Metis descendants of the voyageurs he came to know. They tried to persuade him to forget her. He did not, at any rate, take a wife. Although he helped himself liberally to women’s charms, there was no forgetting her.

He kept writing letters so that she would remember her promise. He wrote of their experiences, for as they had traveled he had marveled at her skills and authority. Wolfred spent longer periods of time living with, hunting with, speaking with, and sharing ceremonies with her people. They gave him medicine to get rid of Mackinnon, which seemed to work. He stopped hearing the breath rasp at night, stopped smelling the feet. He was turning into an Indian while she was turning into a white woman. But how could he know.

THE DAY DID
come, the death day. One year had passed already. Landreaux and Emmaline had no idea how the Ravich family would spend that day. LaRose was with the Iron family, as Peter had planned. They did what they could the night before, gathering
the children for a pipe ceremony in the living room, and everyone talked. They passed the sacred pipe, one to another. The children turned the pipe to each direction when it came to them. They were careful. They knew to handle the pipe. Hollis said that because LaRose went over to the Raviches he saved them. Willard said he missed LaRose. Josette said both things her brothers said were true, and that she was glad he’d brought Maggie closer. Snow said LaRose had saved both families. He was a little healer. Emmaline could not speak. Landreaux said nothing, but a demonic sadness in him grew and grew.

On the very day of it, Landreaux found that he could not get out of bed. All strength and will had left his body. A black weight of sleep pressed down. The boys came to the door of their parents’ little bedroom right off the kitchen. Dad, they said. Dad?

He heard their feet shuffle at the foot of the bed. Then the girls came in. They touched his hair, his hands. He kept his eyes shut. When they left, tears leaked down the lines along his mouth, down his neck, and pooled along his collarbone. The heat of his body dried them. He was unusually hot, he found. To his joy, he had a fever. He was really ill. After the older children left on the school bus, Emmaline sat beside him.

She thought of lying down beside him, but something had gone out of her. She searched her heart, and found only weary calculation of the difficulties that his misery would make for her that day.

I have to go to work, she said. LaRose is here. Can you take him to school in an hour?

Yeah, the aspirin will kick in, said Landreaux. I’ll be okay.

Emmaline sat with him, stroked the hair back from his forehead. LaRose was eating oatmeal with raisins, leaving the raisins for last.

You’re sure you can do it?

I’m sure. I’ll just stay quiet here half an hour. Then I’ll get up.

He heard her tell LaRose good-bye, heard the door shut, the motor growling as she left the house.

Infinite Ride

THE BUCK KNEW,
Landreaux thought. Of course it knew. Last year it knew. Landreaux had been watching, with his gun sometimes and sometimes not. Many times he had found that the buck was also watching him. He would stop, feeling its gaze on the back of his head, and turn to see it motionless, its eyes deep and liquid. If he had listened, or understood, or cared to know what he understood, he would never have hunted that buck. Never. He would have known the animal was trying to tell him something of the gravest importance. The deer was no ordinary creature, but a bridge to another world. A place where Landreaux would never stop seeing his friend’s son in the leaves, never stop strange thoughts from visiting at the most inopportune moments.

How to explain that shot? He’d wish himself out of existence to take it or not take it over again. But the harder, the best, the only thing to do was to stay alive. Stay with the consequences, with his family. Take on the shame although its rank weight smothered him.

Sometimes he was afraid he’d crack and say suddenly that he’d been drinking that day, even though that was wrong. It was maybe worse. He’d not been thinking. He hadn’t waited, or maybe he’d been waiting so long for the buck that the actual moment seemed an afterthought. But it was a moment of stupidity, really, wasn’t it? Still, to Landreaux his crucial lack of attention at that moment was as bad as being drunk. Not a soul understood it was as bad, except Dusty. He knew, of course, or his spirit knew. He had told Landreaux in a dream.

Afterward, Zack Peace had given Landreaux that Breathalyzer test. He’d done it, routinely, after Landreaux had been taken in. Zack had glanced at the readout, then turned and looked steadily at Landreaux. People always suspected those who worked with terminal patients of taking their drugs. But he had been clean for weeks. Clean. He’d sworn off that anodyne. The number was normal, but
there was something about Landreaux, his reactions, alternating between raving fits and calm, his burp of laughter, once. Maybe high? But there was no sign of substance on him. And anyway, Zack knew that in the aftermath of an event like this, nothing seemed normal. Everyone was whacked-out on horror and adrenaline. He had looked up to Landreaux from childhood and he was Emmaline’s favorite cousin. Zack included the negative test in his report, which would help exonerate Landreaux. Yet, he was troubled. They hadn’t spoken of it since. They hadn’t spoken at all.

Today, on this day, Landreaux had to tell someone the truth. His head was ringing. He was sick of hiding it. In the past year he’d realized that there wasn’t a right person. There were, of course, two people who were safe to tell, who could share the weight. Yet he did not want to lose Father Travis’s respect. He didn’t want to see Emmaline’s face after he released those words. So that left nobody. Zack, who knew, wouldn’t speak to him. He had to tell, and that is when LaRose came into the room.

Daddy. LaRose sat down on the bed. Get up!

I’m sick today.

LaRose felt Landreaux’s forehead, just like a grown-up, and made his father smile.

Little doctor, do I have a fever?

You need a sweat lodge, said LaRose, because he wanted to make all of the preparations.

Okay, said Landreaux, let’s do it. We’ll have a sweat lodge, just us two. You can skip a day of kindergarten, I guess, for a sweat lodge. Yeah?

Sure I can.

But first I gotta tell you something.

LaRose waited.

This is a secret, a big secret. We have to swear it is our secret, okay?

LaRose grew very serious. They shook hands four times.

Okay, I’m trusting you.

LaRose opened his eyes wide at his father and did not blink.

I wasn’t, ah, right in my head the day I killed Dusty. I didn’t mean to, but I don’t know, maybe my aim was off. The point is, I was clumsy that day.

LaRose frowned and his father’s heart stabbed.

Did you see Dusty there? LaRose asked. Did you see the dog?

What dog? said Landreaux.

Dusty fell from a tree branch, said LaRose. I saw the place. One night in my dream I saw the whole thing. Dusty followed the dog into the woods. The dog saw you. Ask the dog.

Landreaux’s brain began to hurt.

You always had a good aim before. My other Dad said so.

Peter.

Yeah. He said you would have hit the buck.

That’s true, said Landreaux. The buck is still there. I’ve seen it roaming in the woods.

Dusty told me you shot him on accident, said LaRose.

Landreaux opened his arms to his son, and LaRose crept close to lie against his chest. They breathed together. LaRose loosened, took a big sigh, fell asleep, but Landreaux stayed awake, staring at the ceiling. The sky fell, as it did each moment. Shame covered him. He saw that he was supposed to share LaRose all along because the boy was too good for a no-good like him. LaRose, again. LaRose had saved him before. On the day the bus left for boarding school, he had been only a few years older than his son was now. It seemed impossible that his parents had let him go. They didn’t tell him, but they were on their way to live, and die, in Minneapolis.

Landreaux’s parents had left him at the bus with his things and driven away in his grandfather’s car. He was nine years old. The school people took his sack of clothes and belongings as he got on and that was the last he saw of it. He was going to a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the U.S. government, said his parents. They’d both been to mission schools and didn’t like them. They thought the government school would be much better. Plus
they could visit him. They could take a different kind of bus if they moved to Minneapolis.

The seats of Landreaux’s bus were green and tough, hot because it was still August and the bus had been sitting in the parking lot. Halfway to the school there was supposed to be a lunch, and it was true. They got off at a park. The older kids ran around laughing. Waxed-paper parcels were handed out. The sandwich was soft white bread. There was butter and the cheese was orange. There was an apple. His stomach glowed. He asked for and got another sandwich, the same. He ate it all, drank iron-tasting water from a pump.

After he climbed back on the bus and was counted, he sank onto the floor. He crawled under the seat. The bus rumbled back onto the highway and Landreaux made himself comfortable there beneath the seat. He could make out a name emphatically formed many times on the metal inside of the bus there.

LaRose. LaRose. LaRose.

Girls behind him murmured, happy. Other children started crying, soft, in low hiccups. A four-year-old softly vomited. Some were staring out the window, mesmerized. Some kids laughed and chatted, expectant. Other children were going numb. Curled underneath the bus seat, Landreaux stared at that name. The letters were drawn in heavy pencil, traced over and over. LaRose. He dozed off and soon he was sleeping heavily on a full stomach. He did not wake when the bus stopped, when all of them got off. He did not wake when they shaved his head for lice and left him in the shower while they found him new clothes without bugs. Not even in bed that night, the next morning either, did he wake. He never woke up. He was still sleeping on that bus.

TAKE IT ALL

1967–1970

Romeo & Landreaux

THE DORMITORY BUILDING
was made of tightly mortised red bricks. It was a simple boxy building, the main entrance opening in the center. When Landreaux pushed the dull steel of the main doors, the inside pressure changed and a hoarse vibration of sound escaped. A low sigh, the ghost of Milbert Good Road. The floors were pale linoleum tiles polished to a gloss. In late afternoon, the heatless sun blazed down the central corridor. Little boys were on one side, big boys on the other. There were large divided barrackslike sleeping quarters to either side of the hallway. There were two bunk beds to a room, four boys. The bathrooms and showers were halfway down the hall and the matrons’ glass-fronted offices were set watchfully at either end. Down in the basement there was a laundry room with banks of washers and dryers chugging day and night.