This Tender Land: A Novel

- PART ONE -

GOD IS A TORNADO

PROLOGUE

IN THE BEGINNING, after he labored over the heavens and the earth, the light and the dark, the land and sea and all living things that dwell therein, after he created man and woman and before he rested, I believe God gave us one final gift. Lest we forget the divine source of all that beauty, he gave us stories.

I am a storyteller. I live in a house in the shade of a sycamore tree on the banks of the Gilead River. My great-grandchildren, when they visit me here, call me old.

Old is a cliché, I tell them, with mock disappointment. A terrible trivializing. An insult. I was born along with the sun and earth and moon and planets and all the stars. Every atom of my being was there at the very beginning.

You’re a liar. They scowl, but playfully.

Not a liar. A storyteller, I remind them.

Then tell us a story, they plead.

I need no goading. Stories are the sweet fruit of my existence and I share them gladly.

The events I’m about to share with you began on the banks of the Gilead. Even if you grew up in the heartland, you may not remember these things. What happened in the summer of 1932 is most important to those who experienced it, and there are not many of us left.

The Gilead is a lovely river, lined with cottonwoods already ancient when I was a boy.

Things were different then. Not simpler or better, just different. We didn’t travel the way we do now, and for most folks in Fremont County, Minnesota, the world was limited to the piece of it they could see before the horizon cut off the land. They wouldn’t have understood any more than I did that if you kill a man, you are changed forever. If that man comes back to life, you are transformed. I have witnessed this and other miracles with my own eyes. So, among the many pieces of wisdom life has offered me over all these years is this: Open yourself to every possibility, for there is nothing your heart can imagine that is not so.

The tale I’m going to tell is of a summer long ago. Of killing and kidnapping and children pursued by demons of a thousand names. There will be courage in this story and cowardice. There will be love and betrayal. And, of course, there will be hope. In the end, isn’t that what every good story is about?

CHAPTER ONE

ALBERT NAMED THE rat. He called it Faria.

It was an old creature, a mottle of gray and white fur. Almost always, it kept to the edges of the tiny cell, scurrying along the wall to a corner where I’d put a few crumbs of the hard biscuit that had been my meal. At night, I generally couldn’t see it but could still hear the soft rustle as it moved from the wide crack between the corner blocks, across the straw on the floor, grabbed the crumbs, and returned the way it had come. Whenever the moon was just right and bright beams streamed through the high, narrow slit that was the only window, illuminating the stones of the eastern wall, I was sometimes able to glimpse in the reflected light the slender oval of Faria’s body, its fur a dim silver blur, its thin tail roping behind like an afterthought of the animal’s creation.

The first time I got thrown into what the Brickmans called the quiet room, they tossed my older brother, Albert, in with me. The night was moonless, the tiny cell as black as pitch, our bed a thin matting of straw laid on the dirt floor, the door a great rectangle of rusted iron with a slot at the bottom for the delivery of a food plate that never held more than that one hard biscuit. I was scared to death. Later, Benny Blackwell, a Sioux from Rosebud, told us that when the Lincoln Indian Training School had been a military outpost called Fort Sibley, the quiet room had been used for solitary confinement. In those days, it had held warriors. By the time Albert and I got there, it held only children.

I didn’t know anything about rats then, except for the story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who’d rid the town of the vermin. I thought they were filthy creatures and would eat anything and maybe would even eat us. Albert, who was four years older and a whole lot wiser, told me that people are most afraid of things they don’t understand, and if something frightened you, you should get closer to it. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t still be an awful thing, but the awful you knew was easier to handle than the awful you imagined. So Albert had named the rat, because a name made it not just any rat. When I asked why Faria, he said it was from a book, The Count of Monte Cristo. Albert loved to read. Me, I liked to make up my own stories. Whenever I was thrown into the quiet room, I fed Faria crumbs and imagined tales about him. I looked up rats in the worn Encyclopaedia Britannica on the school library shelf and discovered that they were smart and social. Across the years and the many nights I spent in the isolation of the quiet room, I came to think of the little creature as a friend. Faria. Rat extraordinaire. Companion to misfits. A fellow captive in the dark prison of the Brickmans.

That first night in the quiet room, Albert and I were being punished for contradicting Mrs. Thelma Brickman, the school’s superintendent. Albert was twelve and I was eight. We were both new to Lincoln School. After the evening meal, which had been a watery, tasteless stew containing only a few bits of carrot, potato, something green and slimy, and a little ham gristle, Mrs. Brickman had sat at the front of the great dining hall and told all the children a story. Most dinner meals were followed by one of Mrs. Brickman’s stories. They usually contained some moral lesson she believed was important. Afterward, she would ask if there were any questions. This was a conceit, I came to understand, to make it seem as if there were an actual opportunity for dialogue with her, for the kind of conversation that might exist between a reasonable adult and a reasonable child. That evening, she’d related the story of the race between the tortoise and the hare. When she asked if there were any questions, I’d raised my hand. She’d smiled and had called on me.

Yes, Odie?

She knew my name. I’d been thrilled at that. Amid the sea of children, so many that I didn’t believe I would ever be able to learn all their names, she’d remembered mine. I’d wondered if maybe this was because we were so new or if it was because we were the whitest faces in a vast room full of Indian children.

Mrs. Brickman, you said the point of the story was that being lazy is a terrible thing.

That’s true, Odie.

I thought the point of the story was that slow and steady wins the race.

I see no difference. Her voice was stern, but not harsh, not yet.

My father read that story to me, Mrs. Brickman. It’s one of Aesop’s fables. And he said—

"He said? Now there was something different in the way she spoke. As if she were struggling to cough up a fish bone caught in her throat. He said?" She’d been sitting on a stool that raised her up so everyone in the dining hall could see her. She slid from the stool and walked between the long tables, girls on one side, boys on the other, toward where I sat with Albert. In the absolute silence of that great room, I could hear the squeak, squeak of her rubber heels on the old floorboards as she came. The boy next to me, whose name I didn’t yet know, edged away, as if trying to distance himself from a place where he knew lightning was about to strike. I glanced at Albert, and he shook his head, a sign that I should just clam up.

Mrs. Brickman stood over me. "He said?"

Y-y-yes, ma’am, I replied, stuttering but no less respectful.

"And where is he?"

Y-y-you know, Mrs. Brickman.

"Dead, that’s where. He is no longer present to read you stories. The stories you hear now are the ones I tell you. And they mean just what I say they mean. Do you understand me?"

I… I…

Yes or no?

She leaned toward me. She was slender, her face a delicate oval the color of a pearl. Her eyes were as green and sharp as new thorns on a rosebush. She wore her black hair long, and kept it brushed as soft as cat fur. She smelled of talcum and faintly of whiskey, an aromatic mix I would come to know well over the years.

Yes, I said in the smallest voice I’d ever heard come from my own lips.

He meant no disrespect, ma’am, Albert said.

Was I talking to you? The green thorns of her eyes stabbed at my brother.

No, ma’am.

She straightened herself and scanned the room. Any other questions?

I’d thought—hoped, prayed—this was the end of it. But that night, Mr. Brickman came to the dormitory room and called me out, and Albert, too. The man was tall and lean, and also handsome, many of the women at the school said, but all I saw was the fact that his eyes were nothing but black pupils, and he reminded me of a snake with legs.

You boys’ll be sleeping somewhere else tonight, he said. Come along.

That first night in the quiet room, I barely slept a wink. It was April, and there was still a chill in the wind sweeping out of the empty Dakotas. Our father was less than a week dead. Our mother had passed away two years before that. We had no kin in Minnesota, no friends, no one who knew us or cared about us. We were the only white boys in a school for Indians. How could it get any worse? Then I’d heard the rat and had spent the rest of those long, dark hours until daylight pressed against Albert and the iron door, my knees drawn up to my chin, my eyes pouring out tears that only Albert could see and that no one but him would have cared about anyway.

FOUR YEARS HAD passed between that first night and the one I’d just spent in the quiet room. I’d grown some, changed some. The old, frightened Odie O’Banion was, like my mother and father, long dead. The Odie I was now had a penchant for rebellion.

When I heard the key turn in the lock, I sat up on the straw matting. The iron door swung open and morning light poured in, blinding me for a moment.

Sentence is up, Odie.

Although I couldn’t see the contours of the face yet, I recognized the voice easily: Herman Volz, the old German who oversaw the carpentry shop and was the assistant boys’ adviser. The man stood in the doorway, blocking for a moment the glare of the sun. He looked down at me through thick eyeglasses, his pale features soft and wistful.

She wants to see you, he said. I have to take you.

Volz spoke with a German accent, so his w’s sounded like v’s and his v’s like f’s. What he’d said came out, She vants to see you. I haf to take you.

I stood, folded the thin blanket, and hung it across a rod attached to the wall so that it would be available for the next child who occupied the room, knowing that, like as not, it would be me again.

Volz shut the door behind us. Did you sleep okay? How is your back?

Often a strapping preceded time in the quiet room, and last night had been no exception. My back ached from the welts, but it did no good to talk about it.

I dreamed about my mother, I said.

Did you now?

The quiet room was the last in a row of rooms in a long building that had once been the outpost stockade. The other rooms—all originally cells—had been turned into storage spaces. Volz and I walked along the old stockade and across the yard toward the administration building, a two-story structure of red stone set among stately elms that had been planted by the first commandant of Fort Sibley. The trees provided the building with constant shade, which always made it a dark place.

Pleasant dream, then? Volz said.

She was in a rowboat on a river. I was in a boat, too, trying to catch up with her, trying to see her face. But no matter how hard I rowed, she was always too far ahead.

Don’t sound like a good dream, Volz said. He was wearing clean bib overalls over a blue work shirt. His huge hands, nicked and scarred from his carpentry, hung at his sides. Half of the little finger on his right hand was missing, the result of an accident with a band saw. Behind his back, some of the kids called him Old Four-and-a-Half, but not me or Albert. The German carpenter had always been kind to us.

We entered the building and went immediately to Mrs. Brickman’s office, where she was seated behind her big desk, a stone fireplace at her back. I was a little surprised to see Albert there. He stood straight and tall beside her like a soldier at attention. His face was blank, but his eyes spoke to me. They said, Careful, Odie.

Thank you, Mr. Volz, the superintendent said. You may wait outside.

As he turned to leave, Volz put a hand on my shoulder, the briefest of gestures, but I appreciated what it meant.

Mrs. Brickman said, I’m concerned about you, Odie. I’m beginning to believe that your time at Lincoln School is almost at an end.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing.

The superintendent wore a black dress, which seemed to be her favorite color. I’d overheard Miss Stratton, who taught music, tell another teacher once that it was because Mrs. Brickman was obsessed with her appearance and thought black was slimming. It worked pretty well, because the superintendent reminded me of nothing so much as the long, slender handle of a fireplace poker. Her penchant for the color gave rise to a nickname we all used, well out of her hearing, of course: the Black Witch.

Do you know what I’m saying, Odie?

I’m not sure, ma’am.

Even though you’re not Indian, the sheriff asked us to accept you and your brother because there was no room at the state orphanage. And we did, out of the goodness of our hearts. But there’s another option for a boy like you, Odie. Reformatory. Do you know what that is?

I do, ma’am.

And is that where you would like to be sent?

No, ma’am.

I thought not. Then, Odie, what will you do?

Nothing, ma’am.

Nothing?

I will do nothing that will get me sent there, ma’am.

She put her hands on her desk, one atop the other, and spread her fingers wide so that they formed a kind of web over the polished wood. She smiled at me as if she were a spider who’d just snagged a fly. Good, she said. Good. She nodded toward Albert. You should be more like your brother.

Yes, ma’am. I’ll try. May I have my harmonica back?

It’s very special to you, isn’t it?

Not really. Just an old harmonica. I like to play. It keeps me out of trouble.

A gift from your father, I believe.

No, ma’am. I just picked it up somewhere. I don’t even remember where now.

That’s funny, she said. Albert told me it was a gift from your father.

See? I said, shrugging my shoulders. Not even special enough to remember where I got it.

She considered me, then said, Very well. She took a key from a pocket of her dress, unlocked a drawer of the desk, and pulled out the harmonica.

I reached for it, but she drew it back.

Odie?

Yes, ma’am?

Next time, I keep it for good. Do you understand?

Yes, ma’am. I do.

She gave it over and her spindly fingers touched my hand. When I returned to the dormitory, I intended to use the lye soap in the lavatory there to scrub that hand until it bled.

CHAPTER TWO

REFORMATORY, ODIE, ALBERT said. She wasn’t joking.

Did I break a law?

That woman, she gets what she wants, Odie, Volz said.

The hell with the Black Witch, I said.

We left the shadow of the elms and headed toward the great yard, which had once been the parade ground for Fort Sibley. Directly south across the huge, grassy rectangle were the kitchen and dining hall. Spaced along the rest of the perimeter were most of the other school buildings: the dormitories for the youngest children, the laundry and maintenance facility, and the woodworking and carpentry shops, one above the other. Set back a bit were the dormitories for the older children and the general classroom building, which were newer constructions. Everything had been built of red stone from a local quarry. Beyond these lay the athletic field, the water tower, the garage where the big pieces of heavy equipment and the school bus were parked, a warehouse, and the old stockade. Edging the whole property to the north ran the Gilead River.

The morning was sunny and warm. The boys who’d drawn grounds duty that day were already at work mowing the grass and trimming along the walkways. Some of the girls knelt on the sidewalks with buckets and brushes, scrubbing the concrete clean. Who cleaned sidewalks that way? It was a useless chore, one we all knew was meant to drive home to the girls their complete dependence and the school’s absolute control. They glanced up from their work when we passed, but none risked conversation, because the watchful eye of the groundskeeper, a sloppy, sullen man named DiMarco, was always on them. DiMarco was responsible for the welts on my back. When a boy required a beating at Lincoln School, it was usually DiMarco who delivered it, and he enjoyed every swing of that leather strap. It was late May and school no longer in session. A lot of the kids at Lincoln had gone home for the summer to their families on reservations in Minnesota or the Dakotas or Nebraska or even farther. Children like Albert and me, who had no family or whose families were too poor or too broken to take them back, lived at the school year-round.

At the dormitory, Albert cleaned the welts on my back, and Volz gingerly applied the witch hazel he kept on hand for just such occasions. I washed up, then we headed toward the dining hall. In the stone above the entrance was still chiseled MESS HALL from the old days when soldiers had been fed there. Under the stern command of Mrs. Peterson, who was responsible for feeding all the kids, nothing could have been further from the truth. The floor of the great hall, though terribly scuffed, was always swept clean of every crumb. After each meal, the rows of tables were wiped down with water and a bit of bleach. The kitchen and bakery were run with a rigid hand. I’d heard that Mrs. Peterson complained there was never enough money to buy proper food, but she managed to stretch whatever she had. True, the soups contained more water than solids and often tasted like something ladled from a ditch, and the breads were hard and heavy enough that they could have been used to break rock (she claimed yeast was too expensive), and the meat, when there was some, was mostly gristle, but every child ate three meals a day.

When we stepped inside the dining hall, Herman Volz said, I have bad news for you, Odie. But also some good. First, the bad. You have been assigned to work in Bledsoe’s hayfields today.

I looked at Albert and saw it was true. Bad news, indeed. It almost made me wish I was back in the quiet room.

And also, you have missed breakfast. But you already know this.

Breakfast was served promptly at seven. Volz hadn’t sprung me from the stockade until eight. Not his fault, but Mrs. Brickman’s doing. One last punishment. No breakfast that day.

This in advance of one of the hardest work assignments a kid at Lincoln School could draw. I wondered what the good news was.

Almost immediately, I understood. Donna High Hawk appeared from the kitchen, wearing a white apron and a white headwrap, and carrying a chipped, white bowl filled with Cream of Wheat. Donna High Hawk, like me, was twelve years old. She was a member of the Winnebago tribe from Nebraska. When she’d come to Lincoln School, two years earlier, she’d been scrawny and quiet, her hair long and worn in two braids. They’d cut the braids and run a nit comb through what hair was left to her. As they did with so many of the new kids, they’d stripped off her shabby clothing and washed her all over with kerosene and put her in the uniform dress of the school. She hadn’t spoken much English then and had hardly ever smiled. In my years at Lincoln, I’d come to understand that this was not unusual for kids straight off the reservation.

But now she did smile, shyly, as she set the bowl on a table for me, then brought out a spoon.

Thanks, Donna, I said.

Thank Mr. Volz, she said. He argued with Mrs. Peterson. Told her it was a crime to make you work without food in your belly.

Volz laughed. I had to promise to make her a new rolling pin in my carpentry shop.

Mrs. Brickman won’t like this, I said.

What Mrs. Brickman don’t know won’t hurt her. Eat, Volz said. Then I take you out to Bledsoe.

Donna? It was a woman’s voice calling from the kitchen. No dawdling.

You better go, Volz advised.

The girl shot me one last enigmatic look, then vanished into the kitchen.

Volz said, You eat, Odie. I’ll go make nice with Mrs. Peterson.

When we were alone, Albert said, What the hell were you thinking? A snake?

I began to eat my hot cereal. I didn’t do it.

Right, he said. It’s never you. Christ, Odie, you just took a step closer to leaving Lincoln.

And wouldn’t that be terrible.

You think reformatory would be better?

Couldn’t be any worse.

He gave me a steely-eyed glare. Where’d you get the snake?

I told you, it wasn’t me.

You can tell me the truth, Odie. I’m not Mrs. Brickman.

Only her servant.

That one got to him and I thought he was going to slug me. Instead he said, She takes her singing seriously.

She’s the only one who does. I smiled, remembering her wild dance when the snake had slithered over her foot. It was a black racer, harmless. If it had been a prank, it would have been a bold one because of the beating that would surely result. Even I would have thought twice about it. I suspected the creature had simply found its way in from outside the dining hall by accident. I bet she wet her bloomers. Everybody thought it was funny.

But you’re the one who got the strapping and spent the night with Faria. And now you’ll be working Bledsoe’s fields today.

The look on her face was worth it. That wasn’t exactly true. I knew that by sundown I’d regret being blamed for the snake. The welts on my back from the beating DiMarco had given me were still tender, and the hay dust and the salt from my own sweat would make the wounds hurt even worse. But I didn’t want Albert, that smug know-it-all, to see me worry.

My brother was sixteen then. He’d grown tall and lanky at Lincoln School. He had dull red hair that was plagued by a perpetual cowlick in back, and like most redheaded people, he freckled easily. In summer, his face was a rash of splotches. He was self-conscious about his appearance and thought of himself as odd-looking. He tried to make up for it with his intellect. Albert was the smartest kid I knew, the smartest kid anybody at Lincoln School knew. He wasn’t particularly athletic, but he was respected for his brains. And he was honorable to a fault. It wasn’t something in his genes, because me, I didn’t give a crap about what Albert called ethics, and our father had been a bit of a con man. But my brother was stone hard when it came to doing the right thing. Or what he saw as the right thing. I didn’t always agree with him on that point.

Where are you working today? I asked between spoonfuls of cereal.

Helping Conrad with some machinery.

That was another thing about Albert. He was handy. He possessed a mind that could wrap itself around a technical problem that had others scratching their heads. His work assignment was often with Bud Conrad, who was in charge of facility maintenance at Lincoln School. As a result, Albert knew about boilers and pumps and motors. I figured he’d grow up to be an engineer or something. I didn’t know what I wanted to be yet. I just knew whatever it was it would be far away from Lincoln School.

I’d almost finished my meal when I heard a child’s voice call out, Odie! Albert!

Little Emmy Frost ran toward us across the dining hall, followed by her mother. Cora Frost taught homemaking skills—cooking, sewing, ironing, decorating, cleaning—to the girls at the school, as well as teaching reading to all of us. She was plain and slender. Her hair was reddish blond, but to this day, I can’t recall clearly the color of her eyes. Her nose was long, bent at the end. I always wondered if it had been broken when she was younger and badly set. She was kind, compassionate, and although not what most guys would have called a looker, to me she was as lovely as any angel. I’ve always thought of her in the way I think of a precious gem: The beauty isn’t in the jewel itself, but in the way the light shines through it.

Emmy, on the other hand, was a cutie, with a thick mop of curls just like Little Orphan Annie in the funny papers, and we all loved her.

I’m happy they’ve fed you, Mrs. Frost said. You have a very busy day ahead.

I reached out to tickle Emmy. She stepped back, giggling. I looked up at her mother and shook my head sadly. Mr. Volz told me. I’m working Bledsoe’s hayfields.

"You were going to work for Mr. Bledsoe. I’ve managed to get your assignment changed. You’ll be working for me today. You and Albert and Moses. My garden and orchard need seeing to. Mr. Brickman just gave me approval to use all three of you. Finish your breakfast and we’ll be off."

I gulped down what was left and took my bowl to the kitchen, where I explained to Mr. Volz what was up. He followed me back to the table.

You got Brickman to change his mind? the German said, clearly impressed.

A little flutter of the eyelashes, Mr. Volz, and that man melts like butter on a griddle.

Which might have been true if she’d been a beauty. I suspected it was the goodness of her heart that had won him over.

Volz said, Odie, that don’t mean you don’t work hard today.

I’ll work extra hard, I promised.

Albert said, I’ll see to that.

At mealtime, the children entered the dining hall through different doors, the girls from the east, the boys from the west. That morning, Mrs. Frost led us out through the boys’ entrance, which could not be seen from the administration building. I figured this was because she didn’t want Thelma Brickman to spot us and maybe countermand her husband’s decision. Everyone knew that although Mr. Brickman wore the pants, it was his wife who had the balls.

MRS. FROST DROVE her dusty Model T pickup down the road that followed the Gilead River into the town of Lincoln, half a mile east of the school. Emmy sat up front with her. Albert and I sat on the open flatbed. We passed the square where the Fremont County courthouse stood, along with the band shell and two cannons that had been fired by the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Civil War. A number of automobiles were parked around the square, but this was 1932 and not every farmer could afford a vehicle, so there were a few wagons with horse teams tied to hitching posts. We passed Hartman’s Bakery, and I could smell warm bread, the kind with yeast, so it didn’t break your teeth when you bit into it. Even though I’d already had cereal, the aroma made me hungry again. We passed the city police station, where an officer on the sidewalk tipped his hat to Mrs. Frost. He eyed Albert and me, and his hard look brought to my mind Mrs. Brickman’s threat of the reformatory, which I’d pretended to shrug off, but which in truth scared me a lot.

Beyond Lincoln, all the land had been turned with plows. The dirt road we followed ran between fields where green corn sprouted in straight rows out of the black earth. I’d read in a book that this had all been prairie once, the grass higher than a man’s head, and that the rich, black soil went fifty feet deep. To the west rose Buffalo Ridge, a long stretch of low, untillable hills, and beyond that lay South Dakota. East, where we were headed, the land was flat, and long before we reached them, I could see the big hayfields that belonged to Hector Bledsoe.

At the Lincoln Indian Training School, boys were fair game for Bledsoe, or most any other farmer in the area who wanted free labor. It was justified as the training part of the school. We didn’t learn anything except that we’d rather be dead than farmers. It was always grueling, dirty work—mucking out cattle yards or slopping hogs or detasseling corn or cutting out jimsonweed, all of it under an unrelenting sun—but haying for Bledsoe was the absolute worst. You spent the whole day bucking those big bales, sweating bullets, covered in hay dust that made you itch like you were being chewed on by a million fleas. You got no break except for lunch, which was usually a dry sandwich and water warmed by the sun. The kids assigned to Bledsoe were the bigger, older ones or, like me, those who’d created a problem for the staff at Lincoln School. Because I wasn’t as strong as the older boys, it wasn’t just Bledsoe giving me crap. It was also the other kids, who complained that I didn’t pull my weight. When Albert was there, he stood between me and trouble, but Albert was a favorite of the Black Witch and seldom worked for Bledsoe.

Mrs. Frost drove into the field where the alfalfa, cut and dried, lay in rows that seemed to stretch to the horizon. Bledsoe was on his tractor, pulling the baler. Some of the boys were throwing hay into the machine with pitchforks; others followed behind, lifting the bales from the ground and loading them onto a flatbed truck driven by Bledsoe’s son, a big kid named Ralph, every bit as mean as his old man. Mrs. Frost parked ahead of the tractor and waited for Bledsoe to reach her. He cut the engine and climbed down from the seat. I glanced at the guys from the school, shirts off, sweating like pack mules, black hair turned gold from all that hay dust. On their faces, I saw a look I understood—partly relief that they could rest for a few minutes, and partly hatred because Albert and I weren’t suffering along with them.

Good morning, Hector, Mrs. Frost said cheerfully. Is the work going well?

Was, Bledsoe said. He didn’t take his big straw hat off in the woman’s presence, which most men did. You want something?

One of your young men. Mr. Brickman promised him to me.

Whoever it is, Brickman promised him to me first.

And then changed his mind, she said.

Never called me to say so.

And how would he have reached you out here in your fields?

Could’ve called the missus.

Would you like to take a nice long break, and we’ll go to your farmhouse and ask Rosalind?

Which would have eaten up a good half hour. I saw the Lincoln kids, slumped against the baler, looking hopeful at that prospect.

Or would you be willing to accept my word as a lady?

I could see Bledsoe’s brain going over the rough ground of the question. Unless he was willing to call her a liar, he had to give in. Everything in his black, shriveled, little heart was dead set against it, but he couldn’t challenge the word of this woman, this schoolteacher, this widow. It was easy to see how much he hated her for that.

Who is it? he demanded.

Moses Washington.

Son of a bitch! Now he took off his straw hat and threw it to the ground in utter disgust. Hell, he’s the best of the lot.

And now he’s part of my lot, Hector. She looked to a kid who’d been standing on the baler, feeding it hay. Moses, she called to him. Put your shirt on and come with me.

Mose grabbed his shirt and jumped nimbly from the machinery. He trotted to the Model T, easily hopped aboard the flatbed, and joined Albert and me where we sat with our backs against the cab. He signed, Hello, and I signed back, Lucky you, Mose. He responded with Lucky us, and drew a circle in the air that indicated me and Albert and him.

Mrs. Frost said, Well then, I guess I have what I came for.

Guess you have, Bledsoe said and leaned down to retrieve his hat.

Oh, and if you’d like, here’s the note of permission Mr. Brickman wrote for me. She held out the paper to Bledsoe.

You could’ve given me that at the beginning.

Just as easily as you could have accepted my word. Good day.

We drove from the field and watched as Bledsoe remounted his tractor and began again moving down the long row of dried alfalfa while the boys from Lincoln School bent again to their miserable labor.

Beside me, Mose made a grand gesture of gratitude toward the morning sun and signed again, Lucky us.

CHAPTER THREE

CORA FROST’S PROPERTY lay two miles east of Lincoln, on the south bank of the Gilead River. There was an old farmhouse, a small apple orchard, an enormous garden, a barn and some outbuildings. When her husband had been alive, they’d planted a good acreage in corn. She and Andrew Frost had both worked at Lincoln School, Mr. Frost as our sports coach. We’d all liked Mr. Frost. He was half Sioux and half Scotch-Irish and was a terrific athlete. He’d been sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and knew Jim Thorpe personally. When he was eleven, he’d been in the stands the day that sports great had helped his team of Indian kids shock the hell out of the world by beating Harvard’s football elite. Mr. Frost had been killed in a farming accident. He’d been sitting atop his disc harrow with little Emmy in his lap, guiding Big George, the Frosts’ enormous draft horse, across the plowed field, breaking up the newly turned clods of black soil. As he approached the end of the field and turned the horse, Big George disturbed a nest of hornets in the grass along the fence line. The horse reared and took off in a panicked gallop. Little Emmy was bounced from her father’s lap and thrown clear of the machinery. Andrew Frost, reaching for her as she flew, fell from his seat into the path of the sharp, eighteen-inch blades of the harrow, which sliced right through him. In her fall, Emmy hit her head on a fence post and was in a coma for two days.

By the summer of 1932, Andrew Frost had been dead a year. His widow had mustered on. She’d leased the arable land to another farmer, but there was still the orchard to see to and the garden. The old farmhouse was always in need of repair, as were the barn and outbuildings. Sometimes Mose and Albert and I were asked to help with that, which I didn’t mind. I figured it couldn’t be easy raising Emmy alone, trying to see to the farm chores while continuing her work at Lincoln School. Although Mrs. Frost was a kind woman, she always seemed under the shadow of a great cloud, and her smile seemed less bright than it had once been.

When we arrived at her place, we piled off the back of the truck, and she put us to work immediately. She hadn’t freed me and Mose from Bledsoe’s hayfields just out of the goodness of her heart. She gave Mose a scythe and instructed him to cut the grass that had grown high between the trees of her orchard. She set Albert and me to building a rabbit fence around her garden. Because the pay she received at Lincoln School was barely enough to live on, the garden and orchard were important to her. To supplement her diet and Emmy’s during the long winter, she canned the vegetables and preserved the fruit. While we worked, she and Emmy hoed the garden.

You’re lucky you got your harmonica back, Albert said.

We’d just finished digging a hole, and I was holding up the fence post we’d put in while Albert backfilled around it and tamped the dirt down firmly.

She always threatens to keep it for good.

She carries through with her threats.

If she kept my harmonica, she wouldn’t have anything to threaten me with. I don’t mind the quiet room.

She could order DiMarco to give you more strappings. He’d like that.

It only hurts awhile, then the hurt goes away.

Albert had never been on the receiving end of a strapping, so he wouldn’t know. DiMarco’s beatings hurt like hell, and afterward a kid usually moved gingerly for a day. But it was true; that kind of pain passed.

If she knew how much the harmonica really means to you, she’d break it while you watched.

So she better never find out. I said this with some menace.

You think I’d tell her?

These days I don’t know what you’d do.

Albert grabbed a handful of my shirt, and pulled me close. He’d already freckled a lot, and his face looked like a bowl of soggy cornflakes.

I’m all that stands between you and reformatory, goddamn it.

Albert almost never swore. Although he’d spoken quietly, Mrs. Frost heard him.

She straightened up from her hoeing and said, Albert.

He let me go with a little shove. Someday you’re going to do something I can’t save you from.

It sounded to me like that was a day he might be looking forward to.

We took a break for lunch. Mrs. Frost gave us ham salad sandwiches, which were wonderful, and applesauce and lemonade, and we ate together under a big cottonwood on the bank of the Gilead.

Mose signed, Where does the river go?

Mrs. Frost said, It joins the Minnesota, which joins the Mississippi, which flows fifteen hundred miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

Long way, Mose signed, then gave a low whistle.

I’m going down it someday, Albert said.

Like Huck Finn? Mrs. Frost asked.

Like Mark Twain. I’m going to work on a riverboat.

I’m afraid that era has passed, Albert, Mrs. Frost said.

Can we go canoeing, Mama? Emmy asked.

When the work is done. And maybe we’ll swim, too.

Will you play something, Odie? Emmy pleaded.

I never had to be asked twice. I pulled the little harmonica out of my shirt pocket and tapped it against my palm to clear the dust. Then I launched into one of my favorites, Shenandoah. It was a beautiful tune, but in a minor key, so there was a sadness to it that settled on us all. As I played on the bank of the Gilead, the sun glancing off water the color of weak tea, the shadows of the tree branches lying shattered all around us, I saw tears come into Mrs. Frost’s eyes, and I realized I was playing a song that had been one of her husband’s favorites, too. I didn’t finish.

Why’d you stop, Odie? Emmy asked.

I forgot the rest of it, I lied. Immediately, I launched into something more rousing, a tune I’d heard on the radio, played by Red Nichols and His Five Pennies called I Got Rhythm. I’d been working on it but hadn’t played it for anybody yet. Our spirits picked up right away, and Mrs. Frost started singing along, which surprised me because I didn’t know there were words.

Gershwin, she said when I finished.

What?

"Not what, Odie. Who. The man who wrote that song.