Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) (39 page)

Eagle hated her constant tirades on this subject, and his face became hard as stone. He and Mona had gone around on the topic so many times over the course of Jacob's recovery that the exchange had long been chiseled into predetermined paths. Eagle was tired of the anger that resulted from it. She had helped save Jacob's life, it was true, and she had been loyal in the sense that, in order to build a new relationship with Eagle and Jacob, she followed through on her promise never to communicate with JW. But when she brought it up repeatedly at times like this, he couldn't help but be irritated.

“Mona—” His voice came out high and complaining.

“What?”

“He framed us. We've been over this.”

“He didn't.”

“He was a typical white boy, and he was doing everything in his power to stop this very bank. From day one. Now stop it. Please.”

He looked around for the next car to greet, but Mona stepped in front of him.

“‘White boy?' When did you get all racist, Mister Half-White Boy? He was good for your son, and you should stop saying that. You were nicer when he was around.”

“Good for him? He got him shot! Your nephew—”

“I remember that speech of yours the night before—”

“Look. I don't want to argue with you, especially not today,” he said. “Let's just forget about the whole thing. You have your opinions, I have mine. It's over. At least for now.” He laughed painfully at his own compromise offer. “Okay?”

After a moment she nodded.

“You guys cover the drive and the lot. I'll walk the highway,” he said, trudging off in an effort to shake the bad spirits, and to get away from her.

Vehicles idled on the two-lane highway, waiting to turn left into the lot. Eagle waved to Fladeboe and then worked his way down the row of cars and trucks, chatting up the drivers and their passengers, handing out flyers and raffle tickets, thanking them for coming.

As he worked his way along the row he noticed a Cadillac a few cars ahead. The driver was engrossed in an animated phone conversation, and as he got closer he saw that it was Frank Jorgenson. He handed a flyer to the car in front of him and moved forward, his heart ticking up. Jorgenson's window was down and he could hear a voice over the car's audio system.

“They're all pulling their money out,” he heard the caller on the other end saying in an alarmed tone. “Even the white people—”

“I can see that!” Jorgenson barked at the dashboard.

“What should I do?” Eagle heard the voice say, and he recognized it as Sam Schmeaker's.

He rapped on Jorgenson's hood, making him jump in his seat, his face washed white with panic.

Eagle laughed. “Mr. Jorgenson,” he said.

“You stay the fuck away from me.” Jorgenson fumbled at his arm rest and his window began to close. He tried to pull out onto the shoulder, but he was completely boxed in.

Eagle laughed again and shook his head. “You don't have to worry about that,” he said. “Just wanted to welcome you to the new bank.” Then he leaned in close to make sure Jorgenson could hear him through the glass. “Wenonah's bank,” he said.
“It was her dream.” He stared in at Jorgenson's pale face and saw his chin tremble.

The cars ahead moved forward a notch and traffic loosened momentarily. Jorgenson cranked the wheel of the Cadillac onto the gravel shoulder and sped away, kicking up a cloud of dust that settled over the other cars.

A horn honked and he turned to see one of the women from the tribal council grinning in the next car. “Give me a damn flyer!” she said. He grinned and resumed walking the line, feeling relieved.

The three of them—Eagle, Jacob, and Mona—spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of suspended joy, a lofted floating sensation that Eagle could only liken to what he had felt at his wedding to Wenonah, wrapped in the well-wishes of nearly everyone they knew, plus a hundred new friends. But this day also had a somewhat bittersweet quality, because of the circumstances surrounding its inception.

At four o'clock, Mona gave him the keys to the Bronco and the three of them piled in. The next big wave of customers consisted of people stopping by after work, but Eagle was confident the staff could handle it. They had been training for this day for a month. He had something important to do before it got too late.

The cemetery was a quarter mile from Waterfowl Lake. Interspersed in the tall grasses were a haphazard mixture of spirit houses, crooked whitewashed crosses, and homemade tombstones hung with wreaths. The graves were set at odd angles to one another, placed on the edges of hillsides or tucked in stands of birch trees. The stones and crosses bore the names of his people. Stella Two Bulls. Eddie Musher Arnason. George Bigwolf.

The spirit houses were the spookiest for him—low-slung
mausoleums with shingled or birchbark roofs, moss-covered and creepy. Their wooden-slat walls covered the aboveground bodies and possessions of the dead, all of which were visible through the slats. The glimpses of clothing and hair still gave him the willies. Feathers hung from nearby trees.

Wenonah's grave had a conventional tombstone; he had seen to that. She had never expressed a wish one way or another—death had always seemed to be decades away—but he knew he would not be able to handle the thought of her rotting there on the ground in the wind. Her grave was on a hill with a view of the lake, just as she would have liked. He remembered her joy in leading Jacob by the hand along its watershed when he was a little boy. They would wind along the edges of the wetlands, following the scat trails of animals and the tracks of pheasants, and she would point to the different kinds of dung and tell him stories about the deer and the fox, the rabbit and the bear.

The gravesite had a view of a corner of the community center, far in the distance. It wasn't the corner with the bank, but that didn't matter. She had a piece of it just the same. And the bank was named after her greatest passion.

He stood by while Jacob approached the grave, carrying a fall bouquet of purple asters and green hydrangea blossoms that glowed with a pale aquatic light in the long afternoon sun. This was Eagle's first time back here with him since the funeral, and he saw that the boy's face was puffy around the eyes. He squatted down and placed the bouquet in a short metal holder that Eagle had put there for that purpose in the first weeks following her burial, when neighbors and friends in Minneapolis were still bringing them meals or taking Jacob for the weekend. He would drive up and spend Saturday afternoons with Wenonah, bringing her fresh bouquets of purple hyacinths and daisies. He would sit next to her in the seedling grasses and look out over the
lake, wondering what to do now that all his shortcomings were clarified in the sharp inner mirror of anger and grief.

Now the grass was long and dotted with yellow dandelions, clover, and the curled violet remnants of alfalfa blossoms. Jacob knelt in them and put a hand on the headstone as if it were her shoulder. He leaned in close and Eagle heard him whisper, “I love you, Mom.” Eagle knew how much he needed this.

Mona had been to the grave many times herself. At first Eagle would see her in passing, or hovering on weekends, but more recently she had taken to coming during the week, while he worked. He would find her flowers and other offerings when he came up. Now, when Jacob stood away from the headstone, she moved in and squatted next to it. She unbuttoned her top and took something shiny from around her neck. It spun in the sun on a blue silken ribbon. She draped it over the rounded stone and walked away without looking back. When Eagle knelt close he saw that it was her one-year Alcoholics Anonymous medallion.

He kissed the headstone. He ran his hand over it and felt its cool granite smoothness. He thought of her skin, of her warbled laugh, of lying next to her cool naked body and running a hand over her hips as she told him stories of the Anishinaabeg and their search for the land where food grew on water, reconnecting him to a past he had never known and a future he was eager to explore. He thought of her fiery eyes, too quick to anger, and even quicker to laugh. How could he not have moved back up here? he wondered. How could he not have left his life in Minneapolis, with all its compromises and lost moments? And before that, how could he have spent so much time away from her and their son?

He stood then, feeling right in this place for the first time. Then he brushed the dirt off his hands and they walked away.

37

It was ricing time. Eagle looked up from the winnowing machine and saw Mona struggling to lift a large black lawn-and-leaf bag onto the industrial scale.

“I can get that,” offered Jacob.

“Thank you,” she replied.

Jacob recorded the weight in a notepad and paid the ricer. They shook hands and the man headed to his car, past Ernie and Supersize Me, who were turning rice in the smoke of the parching fire.

Watching Jacob, Eagle felt a sudden blossoming of pride. His boy was becoming a young man.

The rice committee had declared the season open unusually late this year. Many of the migratory waterfowl had already spent a few days bobbing around amid the rice stalks, but finding them green, they lifted off and flew south without eating much. Then an Alberta clipper blew in, the great northwest wind that heralds the onslaught of winter in the Northland. The waves lashed at the rice stalks in a cold fury, swamping them and sending them to the lake bed. When the surviving stalks were finally ready to harvest, the crop was half what it had been. The biologist told Eagle that it was only on account of the long cool spring and summer that some of the rice was still green and strong enough to withstand the storm.

Ernie and Supersize Me were back for the season, but
Caulfield's Guard unit had been called up for duty in Afghanistan, so Mona and Jacob pitched in to fill the gap. Jacob was fifteen now, and Eagle noticed his developing muscles and emerging confidence, though he still had an air of fragility.

Supersize Me had taken Jacob under his wing. He was teaching him how to navigate the finicky moods of the thrasher, a special responsibility that was the next best thing to driving. Jacob assumed the role with careful attention to detail, monitoring the revolutions per minute in the dashboard tachometer and timing the operation for exactly forty-five seconds, unless they were running harder-hulled rice from farther north. He even volunteered to change the engine oil as the season got underway, and Supersize Me assisted, handing him box wrenches, oil-filter wrenches, and shop towels.

Eagle pulled a full white woven poly bag of clean rice out from the winnower chute. He tied it off and replaced it with an empty bag, then got the winnower going again, its frenetic conveyor squeaking and clacking over the pneumatic howl of the blower. Last year so much had revolved around JW in one way or another, and he was glad to have him gone. They had kept the horse; Jacob still rode him daily and was worlds beyond where he had come with JW. Over the summer, they had taken Pride to horse shows nearly every weekend, and they had begun accumulating blue ribbons and nine-hundred-dollar stud fees.

Mona came over as he finished shoveling a last load of rice from the wheelbarrow into the winnower. “I need to take a break and cover my tomatoes. It's supposed to frost tonight.” She wiped the sweat off her face with her upper arm.

“That's fine,” he said. “I need to enter today's deliveries in the ledger anyway.” He left the guys to continue spreading and parching, and walked with her back up toward the house.

In the spring, he had finally finished the living room. But he didn't yet have any furniture for it, except for a large flat-screen TV and a Playstation that he and Jacob used to play games. Two controllers lay on the floor near a pair of beanbag chairs. He washed his hands in the kitchen, filled a glass with water, and headed down the hall to his office, where he counted his remaining cash and put it back in the safe.

The safe and house had stood open for days in the commotion following the visit by the FBI, and somehow the Chief Onepapa note had disappeared. He took a moment and searched through the safe for the fourth or fifth time, still unable to accept its loss. One of the police officers or perhaps even one of his own employees must have taken it; when he came home from the hospital, the safe was still open and the bill was gone. He had heard that Grossman was suspected of stealing a shotgun from another house on the reservation, but after all the statements and trauma he was too tired and bitter to pursue a complaint that seemed minor in comparison to what had happened.

He closed the safe door, sat at his desk, and pulled out his ledger book. The wooden blinds cast dark stripes over its wide pages, enriching them in an old-world fashion. He still kept the wild rice books by hand as a symbolic act, recalling the nearly half of Minnesota that his people had sold and never really gotten paid for. He took a notepad and several signed scraps of paper out of his pocket and picked up his special fountain pen, in order to record the weights of raw rice deliveries and the monies paid for them.

Ed Two Horses had brought in thirty-five pounds and Springer Watson fifteen. As he wrote down the entries, his special pen ran dry. He shook it and tried again, but the ink was gone. He unscrewed the back and pulled out the cartridge,
then opened the top desk drawer and began to rummage around inside for a replacement. He couldn't find one initially, so he slid the chair back and pulled the drawer wide open, reaching all the way to the back, where his hand fumbled over an unfamiliar round object.