"I just couldn't see lettin 'm have it. So I put the furniture back in and did it. There's room in the Quonset now."
There was no bitterness in his words. No blame. Marie understood this was no act of revenge, no childish calling for attention, no protest or message.
"You just burned 'er down," Charles said. He was staring at the ashes, anger in his voice. Disbelief and anger.
"Yeah," Carson said. "A bit a gasoline, and there it was."
"All their furniture, too?"
"It, too."
"Christ!" Charles looked at his feet, raised his hand to the top of his head, ran it down to his neck as if trying to press something out of his skin, or hold something in. "You just..."
He stopped, shook his head, his hand still on his neck.
"Just burned 'er down," he said, his anger suddenly and completely gone, only wonder left, some sadness. "Well, hell. I guess that's one way a doin it."
Marie couldn't speak. Charles and Carson agreed. But didn't understand each other. Did and didn't. Those years ago Charles had been going to take the house down, nail by nail, saving what could be saved, but he'd never got around to it. Now Carson had simply started a fire. The two of them finally agreed the old house had to go. Agreed it was best gone. But Marie understood, though vaguely and without words, that its going was Carson's way of keeping the past and Charles's way of leaving it. Charles's sudden anger had come from being forced to confront, without preparation, that leaving. Being forced to recognize what it meant. And he had turned his head to the ground and thought, and then accepted what had to be. He was a relatively rich man now. And he wasn't going to regret it, or what it meant. But Marie wondered if he should.
To divert her mind from thoughts that she couldn't, at the moment, get clear, Marie asked, "How did you get that furniture in there by yourself?"
"I didn't. Had some friends come out 'n help."
The way he said it, and the way he didn't name the friends, echoed in Marie's head. She'd heard some rumors about Magnus Yarborough mistreating horses and about how some local men had taken care of the problem. Vague things. Hard to know what stock to put in such stories. But Louise Rafferty, a friend of Marie's, had just a couple of days ago asked her, as if she should know, what had really happened. Marie had stared at her blankly.
"I have no idea," she said.
"Oh. I thought Carson—"
Then Louise had clammed up. "Nothing," she said. "I don't know what I was thinking."
That incident echoed now. "What friends?" Marie asked.
"Doesn't matter. Just friends."
She knew he wouldn't tell her. No sense pursuing it. If she had guesses, they would have to remain that way. Guesses and wonders—sometimes it seemed that was what her relationship with her son was. More wonder, perhaps, than guess. But both.
She stood alone in the kitchen now and stared at where the old house had stood, at the section of horizon it had hidden, this new, empty thing in her view, and she remembered it all and was able, she thought, to make sense of many things but not all of them. She remembered her way back to a time that seemed not that long ago but was. Or maybe wasn't that long ago. She felt she could no longer tell near from far.
Carson was five years old. He was with her outside, in a blowing wind, and she was trying to tie sapling oaks to steel posts to keep them from breaking. Carson wouldn't stay close. There were horses watching them, their faces sticking over the top rail of the corral. The corral was too far away, and she didn't want Carson going down there by himself. But he kept moving toward the horses. She would call him back, and he would stop and then take several more steps away, and she would finally have to leave the saplings and the posts and twine and go across the yard to retrieve him and bring him back. And the whole process would start over again.
Charles came out of the machine shed. He'd been working on the starting motor on the Case. He had the old motor out and was going into Twisted Tree for a new one. He came out of the Quonset and stood watching them. Now, standing in the kitchen, listening to the wind blowing outside—the way it picked the ashes up, how black they were at first, black air, and then they simply disappeared—Marie imagined what Charles had watched. She saw herself as he had seen her: her hands tying baler twine around the trees, which even as she tied them blew back and forth as if to flee her help, her hair whipping around her face, her calls to her meandering son—calls like the calls of small birds that Charles often told her of, flocks of them held stationary in the wind as they tried to fly against it, crying to each other until they suddenly all gave up and were swept away so swiftly in the direction they were trying not to go that they seemed, like that ash out there, to simply vanish. Every time Charles saw such a flock, he told of it. "They keep callin to each other," he would always say, every time. "Call until they're gone."
Carson drifted away again, down toward the horses, and Marie looked up from the tree she was tying, and the wind swept her hair into her eyes, and when she reached up to peel the hair away so that she might see her rebel son, the knot she was tying around the sapling unraveled, and the sapling bowed forty-five degrees to the ground, and the twine sailed away like the tail of a mythical animal. Marie let the tree bend. Let the twine sail. She gathered her hair in her hand and held it like a rope and called, "Carson. Come back now."
He turned and looked at her. Then turned back to the horses. And walked toward them.
And she knew, standing in the new house now, how her patience and calm and her call, and Carson's ignoring of them all, had ignited Charles's rage. She felt it whump inside her as he must have felt it: like a propane furnace flame. And she knew what he had thought, though he would not speak it, would not let her ears hear it:
The goddamn tree, the goddamn wind, the goddamn place, her goddamn hair, why in hell doesn't she wear a goddamn cap to hold it anyway in this goddamn windi Everything flying away from her, everything her hands tried to do out here disturbed, deferred, diffracted. This goddamn country. And the kid, not even caring about any of it, not even noticing what his mother has to deal with, just interested in those goddamn horses.
"Carson," Charles called, stepping toward the boy. "Obey your mother."
The boy turned and looked back. He faced directly into the wind and looked at his father. Had he been older, the gaze might have seemed disdainful, but he was too young for that. It was merely a gaze that took in all before him and judged in favor of the horses.
He turned back to them.
"You stop right there!" Charles yelled. He was suddenly moving so swiftly that to Marie watching he seemed to be reeling Carson backwards toward him. The horses in the corral flared in alarm. Still the boy kept walking. Charles called again, neared him, raised his hand.
Then Carson turned around again and looked up at his father standing above him. There was no fear in his face at all. There was nothing but curiosity. To see what new thing the world held.
Marie saw Charles's whole body go limp. His hand dropped out of the air, and he stumbled in stopping himself, and Marie knew that he recognized that he was pregnant with violence toward his son. But Charles would not let that violence be born.
He bowed his head, and she saw how he felt defeated. She saw how he didn't want her to see it. But she couldn't turn away her eyes. He couldn't look at her, though she wanted him to. She knew he was ashamed of his upraised hand, and more than that, ashamed of the wind he could not stop and how it bent the sapling she so wanted to grow nearly parallel to the ground, like she herself when she washed her hair in the kitchen sink of the old house. She knew how he stood behind her and watched her when she washed her hair, how he looked at her neck, the water making the tiniest piano music against the sink, and how he wanted to come to her and kiss her vertebrae and yet was so angry at himself that he couldn't afford to put a shower in the house that all he could do was set his coffee cup down on the counter and go outside to the work his father had long ago given him to do.
Marie held her hair in her fist, motionless, while the sapling's leaves beside her threw themselves straight out, whitely, before the wind, and made ragged, incessant noise. She stood motionless and gazed at her husband and couldn't believe the fullness of her love.
She'd watched him stride toward Carson. She hadn't called out to stop him. She'd felt no need. She'd seen him raise his hand. But even then she knew he would lower it slowly. Knew it when he didn't. Before he did.
Charles couldn't meet her eyes. She saw him look down at his hand. Saw his expression change—a look of disgust: that gnarled, knuckly thing he'd just tried to make an extension of her voice. She knew he thought his hand was ugly. He thought she thought so, too.
"Goddamn, Charles, no," she wanted to say. "You've got it all wrong."
But everything except for the wind seemed frozen. She couldn't make her voice work. And he wouldn't meet her eyes.
He looked down at his son.
"You got to listen to your mother," he said. "She's got reasons. You understand?"
The boy nodded: the steady eyes, the bald face, the serious expression.
'But you just gotta go to those horses, don't you?"
The solemn nod again.
"I'll take you, then."
Charles put his hand down to where Carson could reach it, and Carson put his hand up and into his father's, and they walked together across the gravel to the bowed heads of the horses, and Charles lifted Carson up so that the boy could touch those velvet noses.
D
OROTHY DEDMON, A STUDENT OF MINE
, provided the initial inspiration for this story.
Black Hills State University supported me in numerous ways: with sabbatical leave time that allowed me to travel to Germany for research, with a monetary award from the Black Hills State University Foundation that helped pay for that travel, and with class-release time.
The South Dakota Arts Council provided me with a Project Grant that allowed me to take an entire summer off and to reduce my teaching load during one fall semester.
Along with being a source of constant support, Noah Lukeman, my agent, made a crucial comment concerning the fourth draft that forced me to resee much of the story. Kati Steele Hesford, my editor at Harcourt, read the novel the way it was supposed to be read. A conversation I had with her about an early draft allowed me to continue working at a time when the book seemed intractable. My copy editor, Lee Titus Elliott, clarified the book and allowed me to make final changes.
Gene and Marion BlueArm helped me understand why many Europeans, Germans especially, feel connected to the American West and the Lakota people specifically. Jens Doerner and Hilke Schubring, as well as Michael Schlottner, made me welcome in Germany and shared their lives and ideas with me. I have never known more generous and hospitable people.
Gitta Sereny's
The Healing Wound,
Richard Rhodes's
Masters of Death,
Stephan and Norbert Lebert's
My Father's Keeper,
Gerald Posner's
Hitler's Children,
Peter Sichrovsky's
Born Guilty,
Dan Bar-On's
Legacy of Silence,
and Catrine Clay and Michael Leapman's
Master Race: The Lebensborn Experiment in Nazi Germany
were all instrumental in helping me understand either the
Lebensborn
program or the Nazi legacy and its lasting effects on society and individual families. James Walker's
Lakota Belief and Ritual
clarified Lakota ideas for me. These are only a few of the authors who have helped me shape this novel.
John Nelson, Al Masarik, Scott Simpson, David Cremean, and Bill Kamowski all read early drafts and provided both encouragement and insights that helped shape the novel's final form.
Jace DeCory and Ronnie Theisz gave me invaluable advice concerning Lakota ways, spirituality, ideas, and symbolism. They corrected my errors and misperceptions and gave me new ways to see the material.
Every time I write anything, Wendy Mendoza says one or two perfect things that reveal what I really could be doing instead of what I am. She did that again with this book.
No one has influenced the shape, texture, and meaning of the novel more than Vince King and Amy Fuqua. They read not one but several drafts. They have been involved almost from the beginning and believed in this book when there was little evidence it deserved that faith. If the novel has clarity, much of that clarity I owe to them.
My wife, Zindie, and my children sustain me.
Tom Herbeck and Stewart Bellman, to whom the book is dedicated, were close friends. Both died recently. They were sources of inspiration, wisdom, and ideas. They constantly challenged me to think and to see beyond my abilities. I owe them, and this novel owes them, in myriad ways, many so deep I cannot even recognize them myself.
Finally, a fourth-grade class in Mission, South Dakota, introduced me to Goat Man when I was conducting an Artist-in-the-Schools residency there several years ago. I will never forget the stories they told of Goat Man, and the picture of him one of them drew. Turning from the chalkboard, this young artist asked me, "You don't believe us, do you? You don't believe he's real." Perhaps this novel is my answer to that question.