This Tender Land (41 page)

He took a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil from his shirt pocket, scribbled something, and gave it to my brother. He shook Albert’s hand, then mine, then tousled Emmy’s hair.

He turned to Mose, Amdacha now, and put his hand on his shoulder
. “Wakan Tanka kici un.”

Emmy whispered to me, “May the Creator bless you.”

Amdacha held the stern while Albert climbed into the bow and Emmy and I took our place in the center of the canoe. Amdacha stepped in, lifted his paddle, and Forrest shoved us into the current.

IT HAD BEEN
a month since we’d fled Lincoln School, and I was tired of the running. All that morning, I sat in the canoe and brooded in silence. The others were quiet, too, even Emmy and Peter Rabbit. There was nothing about the landscape to lift our spirits. All along the river lay the evidence of cataclysm. Debris, dry and rotting, hung in the low branches of the trees on either side, and wherever the river curved, driftwood lay piled against the high banks. The bleached limbs of whole, submerged cottonwoods that had been ripped from the valley floor long ago and become anchored on sandbars rose up midstream like the bones of dinosaurs. Maybe it was the effect of all this evidence of destruction that kept us silent, or maybe the others, like me, simply felt as misplaced and hopeless as those uprooted trees.

Around noon, we pulled to a sandy beach shaded by the branches of a great elm. We ate some lunch from our dwindling stock of food.

“Look,” Emmy said, pointing toward a cottonwood across the river whose trunk was split ten feet above the ground. A mattress, stained and decomposing, lay caught in the fork of the divide. “How did it get up there?”

“A flood,” Albert said.

“That big?”

“This river was born in flood, Emmy,” Albert said. “Ten thousand years ago there was a lake in the north, larger than any lake that exists anywhere today. It was called Agassiz. One day, the earth and rubble wall that held it back broke, and all the water came rushing out, a gigantic flood that was called the River Warren. It carved a valley
miles wide across Minnesota all the way to the Mississippi. This river we’re on is all that’s left of that great flood of water.”

My brother was always showing off what he knew from his reading. Even though I found it pretty interesting, I wasn’t about to tell him so.

“Will it flood while we’re on it?”

“It might, if it rains enough.”

Please don’t let it rain, I thought to myself.

But Emmy’s eyes grew huge with wonder. “I would like to see that.”

Mose—I was still trying to get used to thinking of him as Amdacha—sat apart from us, not far but enough that it felt like a separation.

“Odie, you never told me if the imp and the princess got married.” When Emmy saw my look of incomprehension, she said, “The imp and princess in your story. Did they get married?”

While I considered my reply, a long piece of driftwood came into view, got caught in an eddy, and began to spin.

I hadn’t told any of them about Maybeth and me, not a word. When Albert had gone to help Mr. Schofield fix his broken truck, I’d let on that it was just a family I’d come to know, a family in need. I wasn’t sure why I’d kept my true relationship with the Schofields a secret or my deep feelings for their daughter. I tried to tell myself it was because I wanted Maybeth—even if it was just the memory of Maybeth—all to myself, unsullied by the need to explain anything, protected from the jabs Albert might take at this first love of mine.

But as I watched that piece of driftwood going round and round, I finally accepted the truth, which was that I’d already sensed the cracks threatening to divide Albert and Emmy and Mose and me, and I was afraid that we were falling apart. In that terrible moment, I couldn’t help wondering, much to my own dismay, if I’d chosen to stay with the wrong family.

“The imp and princess didn’t get married,” I finally said to Emmy.
“The princess stayed to help her people and the imp went his own way.”

“Oh,” she said, her face sad.

“Love doesn’t always work out,” I told her and threw a rock at the river.

We canoed until dusk, when we reached the outskirts of a town.

Albert said, “Forrest gave me a general idea of the river. That must be Le Sueur ahead. Let’s pull in for the night.”

We made camp in a little cove. As we settled in for the evening, we heard what sounded like gunshots coming from the town.

“Who’s shooting?” Emmy asked.

“And who are they shooting at?” I added.

Albert cocked his head and listened, then a smile came to his lips. “Not gunshots. Firecrackers. Today’s the Fourth of July.”

ALTHOUGH AT THE
Lincoln School we were never allowed fireworks, every year on Independence Day, we were paraded into town, where we joined other citizens gathered near Ulysses S. Grant Park to watch the Jaycees shoot off their skyrockets and artillery shells and booming mortars. I think now how unfitting it was to force children who had no freedom, whose freedom had, in fact, been ripped from their people decades before, to take part in this observance. But the truth was we all loved these mesmerizing displays of aerial splendor, and after the lights had gone out in our dormitories, we whispered among ourselves, replaying the best moments and recalling especially the magnificence of the finale.

The fireworks in Le Sueur began not long after dusk. The park must not have been far from the river, because the explosions in the sky and the sound of their reports came very close together, the booms shaking the air around us.

“Oh, look,” Emmy cried when a huge chrysanthemum of magenta sparks blossomed amid a shower of gold. In her excitement, she grabbed Amdacha’s hand. I saw him flinch, then relax and, to my
great amazement and relief, smile, the first smile I’d seen on his lips in what seemed like forever.

“Play something, Odie,” Emmy begged when the night grew quiet again.

My heart was beginning to feel light but not particularly patriotic, so I put my Hohner harmonica to my lips and blew the notes for “Down by the Riverside,” a song Emmy’s mother had taught me and whose tune and lyrics always lifted my spirits.

Emmy picked up on it right away, throwing her little heart into singing, “Gonna lay down my sleepy head, down by the riverside . . .”

Albert joined in a few bars later, “Ain’t gonna study war no more, ain’t gonna study war no more . . .”

At the third stanza, Amdacha began to sign the words.

We risked a fire that night and sat together, talking quietly around the flames, as we had on many nights since we’d taken to the rivers. It began to feel to me as if what had been broken was coming together again, but I knew it would never be exactly the same. With every turn of the river, we were changing, becoming different people, and for the first time I understood that the journey we were on wasn’t just about getting to Saint Louis.

Emmy lay her head against my shoulder and nodded off. I put her on her blanket, but she woke for a moment and held to me, so I lay down to keep her company.

Albert and Amdacha stayed at the dying fire, their faces dimly lit by the last of the flames.

“I’m sorry,” Albert said.

What for?
Amdacha signed.

“I knew my mother and father. I know where I came from.” He’d been staring into the coals of the fire, but now he looked up. “I never thought how hard that must be for you.”

What’s most important is who I am now.

Albert picked up a stick and stirred the coals, so that a few more flames sprang to life. “I was scared you wouldn’t come with us.”

I’ll go back. Someday.

“Because you’re Amdacha now?”

Broken to Pieces, I thought.

Amdacha lifted his eyes to the night sky, thought about this for a moment, gave his shoulders a faint shrug and signed,
Ah, hell, you can still call me Mose.

IT WAS ANOTHER
two days before Saint Paul came into sight. Our first real glimpse of what lay ahead was the imposing stone of Fort Snelling, whose gray ramparts dominated the bluff above the confluence of the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers.

As we passed beneath the great fortress, Mose stared up, his eyes filled with hatred.
That’s where the soldiers who killed my people came from,
he signed. He looked at the river bottoms, scanning the trees and shadows as if searching for something.
They built a stockade here and shoved nearly two thousand women and children and old men into it. Hundreds died in the winter that followed.

For Mose, everything that had occurred since we’d left New Bremen had torn open his soul. Across the days on the river as we canoed toward Saint Paul, I’d watched him struggle with the terrible pain of that rending, and at night, I’d listened as he cried out unintelligibly in his sleep. So I thought I understood his rage when we passed beneath those stone walls, which were a symbol of all that had been cut out of his life.

We entered the Mississippi at sunset, the surface broad and mirror smooth, the river bluffs aflame with the last light of day. Albert guided us to the riverbank for the night. We emptied the canoe, lifted it from the water, settled ourselves among the trees, and began gathering driftwood to build a fire, which was only for the comfort of the light it would give because we had no food left to cook. We’d had nothing to eat for more than a day. I’d considered the five-dollar bills in my boot, using them to buy food, but Emmy had told me that I’d know when the time was right, and I just didn’t feel it yet.

We’d encountered towboats pushing loads on the Minnesota, but
the first two we saw on the mighty Mississippi were twice as long, ten barges in one tow and eight in the other. The waves from their passing battered the shoreline, and I thought how easily our canoe might be swamped if we found ourselves caught in the wake of one of those flotillas.

When we’d begun our journey, the moon had been nearing fullness, and that night it was full again. I lay under the trees on the river bottoms and stared up at the man in the moon, whose face, through the branches, was cracked and broken. I couldn’t sleep. We were finally on the Mississippi River, which would take us to Saint Louis. But how far that was, how many more full moons ahead of us, I had no idea.

I heard Mose rise and watched him slip away. I thought he was just getting up to relieve himself, but when he didn’t return for a long time, I became worried. I tugged my boots on, left my blanket, and followed where he’d gone, deeper into the bottomlands. I found him in a small clearing, sitting with his legs crossed, his face lifted to the night sky, cast in white from the moonglow. He was chanting in a low voice, no words because he lacked a tongue, but it was clear to me that he knew what he was saying. I wondered if it was some sacred prayer that Forrest had taught him, or if he was simply giving voice to what was inside him now. The sound that came from him rose and fell, gentle waves on the sea of night. He lifted his hands as if in supplication. Or perhaps celebration. What did I know? I felt as if I were trespassing, witness to something never meant to be shared, and I quietly retreated.

In the morning, we loaded the canoe and prepared to enter Saint Paul. We could see homes crowning the bluffs upriver, some of which looked huge and magnificent.

“Do you think princes and princesses live there?” Emmy asked, gazing up at the mansions.

“Rich people, for sure,” Albert said. “Rich people always find the places where they can look down on everyone else.”

“I want to be rich someday,” Emmy said. “And live in a big house like that.”

Albert said, “Do you know what a house like that costs?”

Emmy shook her head.

“Your soul,” he said. “Come on, let’s hit the river.”

We paddled a good part of the morning. The face of the river changed. Trees gave way to industry, and rows of neat little houses marched up the hills, and then a cluster of stone towers came into view, the tallest buildings I thought I’d ever seen, crowded shoulder to shoulder, and atop one of the hills that backed them rose the dome of a great cathedral. We slid under the span of a bridge that seemed impossibly high overhead, and finally Albert guided us into a narrow channel between a long island and the south bank, and we drew the canoe up on the opposite side of the river from all the imposing architecture of the great downtown.

Once we’d disembarked, Albert pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, and I recognized it as the scrap on which Forrest had written the name of the person he said would help us. I wasn’t sure that we needed any real help, except we could all use a good bath. We hadn’t cleaned ourselves well since we’d left Sister Eve, and even to one another we were beginning to smell like things dying or already dead.

“ ‘West Side Flats, Gertie Hellmann,’ ” Albert read. “ ‘Ask anybody.’ ”

I looked over his shoulder and saw that, in addition to the name, Forrest had drawn a crude map of the river with an
X
marking where we would find the West Side Flats, which was, I figured, exactly where we were.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m going to find Gertie.”

“What do we do with the canoe?”

“You stay with it, all of you. I’m going alone.” He looked to Mose. “Don’t let anything happen.”

Mose gave a solemn nod, and my brother climbed the riverbank and disappeared.

In my experience, railroad tracks and rivers are like brothers. They follow each other everywhere. Above the spot where we’d landed our
canoe ran a couple of sets of rails, and while we waited for Albert to return, a slow-moving freight train rolled past, heading downriver. The cars were empty and some of the doors had been left open. Occasionally, we caught sight of a man or two sitting idly inside. We stared at them as they passed, and they stared vacantly back. I wondered where they were going, or if they knew or even cared.

When the last car had gone by, three figures revealed themselves on the far side of the tracks, kids, like us, hands stuffed in their pockets, looking down with great interest at where we stood beside our canoe.