Dead Floating Lovers (29 page)

Harry and I worked for hours that morning. Straight on through lunch and up to the time Dolly called. Alfred’s sister was on her way from the airport in Traverse City.

We edged the beds and moved the bachelor buttons busily taking over the garden. Harry rototilled more of the creeping crap I didn’t have a name for. Already the stuff had rolled its way into the rose bed, up a small hill, and was nudging out the vinca. I worked on my herb garden, deciding to pull any herb I hadn’t used in a year. That meant all the mint and nameless, weedy things went. The chives stayed. They not only added to salads and meats, but if I let them go without trimming back, they sprouted pretty purple pompoms.

Harry pointed to slug damage and said I’d better get myself out there next time it rained. Carry a can of salt, pick off the slugs and drop them in. “Only way,” he assured me, though I was leaning toward the less violent methods of placing pans of beer or egg shells among the hostas.

At two o’clock I drove to Leetsville. Dolly’s patrol car was parked behind the station. I saw Lucky’s Chevy out front. Detective Brent had to be there too. A blue Michigan State Police car was pulled in crookedly next to the Chevy.

I smiled at the gaggle of cops inside the station. Brent frowned, but Dolly quickly told him she’d asked me to be there. “Been through everything else,” she said. “Brought in Alfred Naquma. She’s got a right.”

Christine hadn’t arrived yet. We sat around at the desks and at a small wooden table covered with old coffee cup rings and gouges made by pointed pencils. After a while, we speculated that maybe Christine Naquma was lost. We talked about somebody driving out to hunt for her, except nobody knew what she looked like or what she drove.

After another ten minutes, the door opened and a small woman walked in. She bowed to each of us, keeping her head turned away, hair almost hiding her face. She stood nervously with her brown purse clutched in front of her long dirndl skirt. When she looked up and pushed her dark hair away from her face, we all caught our breath. One side of Christine Naquma’s face was delicate and pretty. The other side was drawn up tight into a fixed stare. The eyelid on that side was gone, or frozen in place. The skin around her mouth was puckered. Across her cheek, shiny, unmoving burned skin held her face together.

“I’m Christine Naquma. I’m here to talk to my brother,” she said. Nervous fingers fluttered to the scarred side of her face, then down. Her lips were uneven, coming together between words into almost fish-like pouts. She wore a brown wool sweater which seemed much too heavy for a Michigan May, and that washed-out skirt hanging over soft brown boots.

“Thanks for coming,” Brent stood up, ready to take over.

“I’m here to see Deputy Dolly Wakowski,” she said to him, pulling back a little.

Dolly stepped forward and put out her hand.

Christine’s handshake was tentative and quick. “I’d like to talk to you after I see Alfred.”

Dolly nodded. “He’s back in a cell.”

Christine looked at Dolly, then at me. Dolly told her who I was. She nodded, but didn’t take the hand I held out to her.

Lucky led her back to the cells. The rest of us settled down to wait.

She wasn’t gone long. Lucky brought her back. Christine motioned to Dolly and then to me. She turned to include Lucky and Detective Brent.

“I’ll talk to all of you with Alfred. Back in his cell, if need be. Our attorneys are coming. I spoke to them before leaving Traverse. We won’t talk without attorneys again after this. Alfred made a mistake when he made a statement last night. He thought he must do that to protect me.”

Brent started to sputter. He wasn’t a man used to having the agenda set by a little wisp of an Indian woman. He’d already groused that this was a weak case. If the confession was rescinded, he’d have nothing to take to the district attorney.

Lucky and Dolly exchanged one quick glance. Lucky nodded.

Alfred sat on a lower bunk when we got back there. Christine sat beside him. Dolly and I went into the cell with Christine. The others stayed in the hall. Alfred was dressed in the clothes he’d had on the night before and not in jail garb. I supposed that Leetsville didn’t have a big budget for wardrobe and didn’t usually keep inmates for long.

Christine put a hand on Alfred’s knee, forcing him to turn toward her. She gave him a crooked smile that came from deep within her eyes. The half of her face that was burned didn’t move. Alfred, nervous, put a hand up to touch her face. She held that hand, and kissed it.

“I don’t want you here,” Alfred said to his sister. There wasn’t cruel rejection in his voice, only a sad plea for her not to become a part of this terrible thing. She shook her head a final time and began to speak.

“My brother has told you lies,” she said, turning to us. I heard Brent groan behind me. “Not about our grandfather. He was a terrible man and never should have taken us away from the reservation after our parents died. He killed my sister, as Alfred told you. He killed the man she’d brought home with her as protection. He would have killed any of us, anytime he felt justified. Sooner or later he would have sent me to the lake bottom, too. And then Alfred.”

I heard the whir of the tape recorder Lucky had set up.

“What he is lying about is how our grandfather died. Alfred wasn’t there alone that day. I came home early from school. I watched as our grandfather murdered the man who stood up to him, arguing for Mary. I watched as he shot Mary in the head after he shot the man. I watched as he took the bodies out on the lake. I hid in the woods, afraid I would be next. When I saw Alfred, I had to warn him. We went into the house together. Alfred told him we knew, and that we would go to the police. Our grandfather laughed at us. He mimicked Mary pleading for her life and said that we would be next. He thought it was funny. Grandfather thought he’d had an afternoon of great entertainment.

“Alfred and I sat across from each other in that house of hell until he passed out with his drinking. It was then that Alfred got up and went outside. I thought he was leaving me to go for the authorities and went out of my mind with fear that Grandfather would wake up and shoot me. But he came back with a gas can and poured gas over our grandfather and around his chair. I watched what he did and didn’t understand until we went to the door. Alfred had a box of matches in his hands. He tried again and again to light one of the matches but couldn’t. I took the gas can. I threw more gas in that cabin. Then I took the box of matches from Alfred. It was I who struck the match. I threw the match into the room. When the first one ignited, nothing happened. I struck a second match and there was an explosion.” She hesitated, putting a hand to her face. “So, you see, I am the one who murdered our grandfather. Not Alfred.”

Alfred protested but she stopped him with a hand up in front of her. “Please Alfred, I have enough to be ashamed of.”

Nobody moved. As though the words she’d spoken came from a dark place where tremendous evil existed, I shuddered and wrapped my arms around my body. Dolly’s head was down. Lucky and Brent studied their shoe tops.

“I will go to jail instead of Alfred.”

“No,” Alfred said. “You can’t, because you’re lying.”

She shrugged. “My face doesn’t lie. People know.”

“You’re lying,” he said again, tears standing in his dark eyes. “Your face happened years before, when you were in the car accident with our parents.”

She smiled and touched one of Alfred’s hands. “My dear brother, if you keep lying, how will the police know who to believe?”

They looked at each other, sitting that way until two attorneys from the tribal council arrived, making noise out in the hall, demanding to see their clients.

A long, private discussion followed. First the Naqumas spoke to their attorneys, and then Brent, Lucky, Dolly, Christine, Alfred, and the attorneys went into a small side room and closed the door behind them. If they thought I was leaving, they were dead wrong.

I could see them gathered closely around a small table in earnest conversation. After a time the door opened and they came out together. They shook hands and nodded affably. Not what I’d expected.

“We’ll wait here …,” the younger of the two attorneys said to Lucky.

Lucky nodded and went around toward the back. He returned with papers. Alfred and Christine were leaving. Whatever had been decided, it seemed to please the entire group. I asked if I could take a photo for the paper and was told I could not but that they would speak to me later.

“Christine will be leaving soon, but we will gladly talk to you before she goes,” Alfred said, and took my hand briefly.

After they left, it was Brent who told me they’d been turned over to the Odawa.

“This is a matter for their people to decide,” he said, shrugging his wide shoulders. “Not enough evidence of anything to go to trial. And with the sister’s story … well, what can we do?”

He was out of there fast. He’d gotten a call, he said. “Bar fight.”

I wrote down a quote from Detective Brent, and a quote from Lucky, on his way out, about how old murders come back to haunt people. “Not that I believe in ghosts,” he quickly added. “Just that secrets don’t stay secrets forever.”

When it was me and Dolly, settling in behind the desk with the telephone, I asked her, “You mean we’ll never know for sure who killed the old man?”

“Looks that way,” Dolly said.

“What about the law?” I asked her.

She reddened. “What’s the law got to do with this?”

“Oh, come on. You mean nobody goes to jail?”

“You want to put the sister away?”

“Well, no, but her face proves …”

“Not according to him.”

“There’s that aunt of theirs in Peshawbestown. She’ll know.”

“Yeah. You think she’ll testify?”

“Crap, Dolly. How am I going to write this? There’s no resolution.”

She shrugged. “Sure there is. Those two can put it behind them finally. Write that there was a tragedy out at Sandy Lake thirteen years ago and nobody knows for sure what happened.”

“You’re satisfied with that? What about Chet? You happy with nobody paying for his murder?”

“Who would you have pay, Emily?” She stood tall, adjusted her gun belt, sat back down, and put on her lecturing face. “This was about family. And who knows family better than me. If I could put that evil old man in prison, I’d do it in a flash. He’s in a greater jail. The Odawa don’t want his bones. They’ll leave ’em where they are. That’s as bad a punishment as any of us can come up with.”

“What about Mary?” I asked.

“She’s part of the deal. Brent agreed to release her body right away. Alfred and Christine invited us all to the ceremony out at Dark Forest in the morning.”

“Then this is your idea of justice.” I couldn’t help but turn the screw a little.

“Bigger justice. Sometimes you just got to wash your hands and figure things are too far beyond you.”

Under the old council trees, the dark men opened the grave.

As they lowered the small, plain coffin holding Mary Naquma into its final resting place, three crows, sitting high in the oak above, cawed mournful caws. They cawed again as the drumming began, and then flew off.

To one side of the small grave, a mound of sandy dirt stood waiting. It didn’t feel unnatural to me—the heap of dirt beside the hole in the ground. No artificial grass covered over what it was and no barriers hid where the mouth of Mother Earth lay open, ready to accept her dead.

Around all of us, gathered to witness that she had lived, the beat of the drummers played a quadruple cadence along my bloodstream. As though my arteries and capillaries carried sound, my heart picked up the beat. Up through my shoes, my feet, my legs; up through my body, into my neck, my head, my ears—the beat played until my body was a drum.

Alfred Naquma, in full Indian dress, began his own beat around his sister’s grave, bending and dancing and bending and dancing around the grave. Soon the gimoa followed. Lewis George, with no hesitation, no doubt at his footing, in his own world, joined the man he thought of as his son in mourning for one of their family.

Behind the others—all the Indian women and men and the white women and men, behind a Catholic priest who said prayers and sprinkled incense on the wooden box holding the bones of Mary Naquma—Christine, small in her plain leather dancer’s dress reaching down to her moccasins, began a sweet lament. Her voice followed the drum then rose above it and deepened into dark places the drums had opened.

I could hardly breathe. Dolly, beside me, stood with her head bowed and her hands crossed in front of her. She was here, she had told me on the way from town that morning, because the Indians had come for Chet. And more than that. When you know the sad story of a life that should have been happier, she had said, you owe that person not mourning but a celebration. She stood next to me, celebrating in her own way. We didn’t dance. We didn’t sing. We didn’t have real prayers to recite. But we had our bodies as witness. So we were there.

After a time the drums stopped, though the beat echoed on over the ridge of white crosses. An old woman stepped from the crowd and sang a song so sad I didn’t need words to know her heart was breaking.

At the end, Lewis George tore tobacco to pieces and let it sift down on Mary’s final resting place. Alfred picked up a shovel and threw shovelfuls of dirt onto the box. Christine took the shovel next. Then Lewis George. Then the singing woman who, I had been told, was an old aunt of the Naqumas. Then Lena Smith. The others followed. Christine came to where Dolly and I hung back and led us forward, seeing that we each shoveled dirt into the grave. I could barely see. My eyes burned. I let the tears run down my face. I had never felt so much a part of ceremony, of a true seeing to the other side.

When the grave was covered, women came forward to pat the earth into place the way they might care for a baby, almost with soothing motions, giving no offense to the earth, to Mary, to the people who loved her.

A group of young women then picked up drums again and began an intense drumming with long spaces between the beats as Alfred lifted Mary’s white cross in his large hands and pushed it straight, and firm, into the ground.

Christine stepped forward holding a small brown doll she carried, first above her head, then down to her lips. She set the worn child’s doll, dressed in beaded leather, beneath the cross, straightening the doll’s skirt and propping her better to sit upright.

People began to leave silently. Dolly and I exchanged a glance then tiptoed away with the others, leaving brother and sister behind us, feet planted on either side of their sister’s grave, hands entwined across it, all three together for a last time.