This Tender Land (37 page)

“We heard dogs again a while ago,” Albert said. “In that shantytown across the river. What happened?”

“The cops came looking for me, tearing everything apart.”

“Not looking for you,” Forrest said. He’d made himself comfortable on a blanket on the ground.

“Who?” I asked.

“There’s a state hospital for the criminally insane downriver a few miles. Two days ago, some crazy man escaped. Pretty dangerous, they say.”

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“On the other side of the river, I kept my ear to the ground. But if they’d caught you instead, Mr. Kidnapper, that would still have been a fine feather in their caps.”

“And bad for us,” Emmy said and gave me another hug.

Mose was chewing on a long blade of wild grass, looking darkly ruminative.

“What’s up with him?” I asked Albert.

“He’s been like that since we found the skeleton.”

“He won’t even talk to us anymore,” Emmy said.

“Don’t be hard on him,” Forrest said. “There’s something he needs to do. Now that Buck isn’t a missing person anymore, I think it’s time he did it.”

“What?” I asked.

But Forrest wouldn’t say. He got up, walked to Mose, sat down, and spoke to him quietly for a long time. Mose listened and, when Forrest had said his piece, gave a single nod.

Forrest came back to where the rest of us were sitting. “We may be gone a while.”

“You want us along?” Albert asked.

“This is for Amdacha and me. You all just stay put until we return.”

Forrest started out of the trees, and Mose followed, not even bothering to glance our way. He was clearly deep into something troubling and personal, and I hoped that his normal affability was still with him somewhere.

When they’d gone, I said, “How’d you hook up with Forrest? Aren’t you afraid he’s going to turn us in?”

“He was waiting for us, Odie,” Emmy said. “When we came here on the river, he signaled us. Albert didn’t want to pull up, but Mose made it clear we were going to. Hawk Flies at Night said he was watching for us.”

“Just waiting here?”

Albert said, “He read about me and the snakebite, and he didn’t have anywhere he had to be. It was Mose he was really worried about.”

“Why Mose?”

“I guess because Mose is Sioux, like him.”

“We thought we heard you playing your harmonica last night,”
Emmy said. “But it was dark, and Forrest said we should wait until morning, and he would go looking for you. That way, we wouldn’t get caught. He’s nice, Odie.”

“What happened to you?” Albert asked.

I told them everything, except about Maybeth and me and the kisses. That was a gem of a memory all my own. After that, the day passed with excruciating slowness, mostly because, now that I was safe, all I could think about was Maybeth and the Schofields, and I was concerned about their safety. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“I have to go back,” I told Albert. “I have to make sure the Schofields are okay.”

“We’re not getting separated again.”

“I’ll come back, I swear, Albert.”

“No.” He tried for that voice of authority he’d always wielded, but the old iron-willed Albert was still missing.

“I’m going.” I stood up.

Albert stood up, too, but slowly. “You’re not.”

“Don’t fight,” Emmy said. “If he has to go, Albert, he should go. It’s not like last time, when he stomped off mad. This is important.”

Albert looked too tired to fight. But he said rather meanly, “If you don’t come back, we’re not looking for you.”

“I’ll be back before dark.”

I returned to Hopersville, and as I walked through the shantytown, I saw the destruction the police had left in their wake. Lean-tos had been knocked down, cardboard enclosures torn apart, the thin boards of piano-crate abodes splintered. Corrugated tin had been pulled off the sides of shacks, and doors torn from makeshift hinges. I figured the authorities had used the search as an excuse to try to shatter the spirit of the community and maybe disperse its unwanted inhabitants. When I reached the Schofields’ tepee, I found that it had been shoved down and lay like something dead on the ground. But folks were gathered around the little encampment, faces I recognized from the night before, when we’d shared food and music, and were at work
pulling the tarps free of the long poles as Mother Beal gave directions for the re-raising of the structure.

Maybeth came running. She threw her arms around me and clung to me as if I’d been lost forever. “Oh, Buck, I was so afraid for you.”

I stepped back and put my hand gently on her side, where she’d been kicked. “Are you all right?”

“A little sore, but I don’t care. You’re safe. That’s all that matters.”

“How’s your mother?”

Mrs. Schofield sat with the twins near the disemboweled pickup truck. She had her arms around them and was speaking in a low, soothing voice.

“She said those billy clubs weren’t any worse than the hailstones in Kansas. She’s tough, my mom.”

The same couldn’t be said for her father, who was nowhere in sight. I didn’t ask, figuring I had a pretty good idea of what had become of him. Sooner or later, he’d return from his visit to the blind pig, and by then, the hard work would be done.

Mother Beal smiled at me when I joined in the effort to raise the tepee. “Wondered if you would be back. Good to see you, Buck.”

When it was up again, Mother Beal told everyone there, “I’m making stew and biscuits for supper. You’re all invited.”

“I can’t stay,” I told Maybeth.

“Why not?”

“I found them. My family. I have to get back.”

“Does that mean you’ll be moving on?”

“Not yet. I won’t go without saying goodbye, I promise.”

“Goodbye.” On her lips, it was like the toll of a soft, sad bell. “I don’t like that word.”

I didn’t either, and as I walked through the long shadows of late afternoon, I tried not to imagine the moment when it would have to be said.

Forrest had returned to camp, but he’d come alone.

“Where’s Mose?” I asked.

“Your friend has work to do,” Forrest said.

“Will he come back?”

“Maybe. When he’s ready.”

He’d brought food—bread and cheese and apples and a big hunk of bologna, and he’d refilled the water bag.

“How’d he get the food?” I asked Albert quietly.

“I gave him some of the money Sister Eve gave us.”

I stared wide-eyed at my brother. “You trusted him with our money?”

“Not much choice,” Albert said. “You were gone. I couldn’t leave Emmy alone. And he brought back the change, every last penny.”

Something was happening to us. When we’d begun our journey, Albert was distrustful to a fault, more likely to be crowned the king of England than put his faith in a man we barely knew. Mose, the most easygoing kid I’d ever known, had turned his back on us. Me, I was desperately in love. We’d been on the rivers only a month and already we were in places I couldn’t have begun to imagine at the Lincoln Indian Trading School.

MOSE DIDN’T COME
back the next day. Albert and Emmy and I were worried, but Forrest assured us he was all right. I wasn’t so certain. Even if he wasn’t in any danger, I’d never seen him in such a dark place. In the late morning, I returned to the Schofields’ camp, looking for Maybeth. She wasn’t there, her mother told me as she hung wet laundry, but would be along shortly. The twins were playing down by the big river, and Mr. Schofield was nowhere to be seen, but I could guess where he’d gone. Mother Beal invited me to sit with her while she smoked her corncob pipe.

“You look a little down in the mouth, Buck,” she observed. “Not usually the way a young man looks when he’s in love.”

“I’m not in love.”

She smiled around the stem of her pipe. “If you say. So, what’s the burr under your saddle?”

I told her about Mose, though I didn’t tell our whole, sordid history.

“I lived a long time among the Sioux,” Mother Beal said. “A people beset by all kinds of travail, but I found them to be good and kind and strong. That was especially true when they held to the practice of their old ways.”

She drew on her pipe and thought a bit.

“In the old days,” she continued, “when a Sioux boy was eleven or twelve, he would go out alone to seek a vision. They called it
hanblecheyapi,
which means, I believe, crying for a dream. It was a way of connecting with the spirit of the Creator, which they call Wakan Tanka. When I was a girl and the prairie grass was higher than a man’s head, I used to go way out and sit with it all around me so that I
couldn’t see anything but the blue sky above, and I’d close my eyes and try to feel Wakan Tanka and wait for a dream to come.”

“Did it?”

“I often felt a deep peace. Maybe that’s what God is, and Wakan Tanka, in the end, and maybe that’s what the search for a vision is all about. It seems to me, Buck, that if you can find peace in your heart, God’s not far away. This friend of yours, it sounds like his life hasn’t been an easy one. It’s possible what he’s looking for is peace in his heart, and maybe he needs to be alone to find it.”

Maybeth came into camp from the direction of the river. She wore a different shirt than I’d seen her wear before and different pants, not so patched up. Her hair was brushed, her face clean and tanned and smiling. And most notable, she didn’t smell of woodsmoke. In Hopersville, where everyone cooked over a campfire, clothing always gave off the heavy scent of burned wood and char. Because of our fires as we traveled the river, Albert and Mose and Emmy and I smelled the same way. Whenever the scent was all around you, you didn’t notice. But Maybeth smelled of Ivory soap, and it was like perfume.

“Hello, Buck,” she said, as if finding me there was a complete but delightful surprise.

“Buck’s lost a friend,” Mother Beal said. “I believe he could use some comfort.”

“Walk with me,” Maybeth offered.

We strolled through Hopersville, where folks were still putting things back together from the destruction of the day before, and although there was all kind of chaos around us, I barely noticed. We climbed a trail up the wooded hill above the shanty town and found a flat rock in the cooling shade of a tree with a view of the beautiful Minnesota River valley, and Maybeth held my hand, and we kissed.

Romeo never felt a deeper love for Juliet than the one I felt for Maybeth Schofield. On that summer day in 1932, with the police across southern Minnesota still beating the bushes for Emmy and
those of us who’d snatched her, and with the Schofields stranded far short of the new life they’d hoped for themselves in Chicago, and all around us the desperation brought on by a great Depression, I saw only Maybeth and she saw only me.

When we finally strolled back into the Schofields’ camp, Maybeth’s father had returned, unsteady on his feet, but with his head beneath the hood of the old pickup. He was mumbling, swearing under his breath, while Mother Beal looked on with impatience, and Mrs. Schofield offered periodic encouragement.

“Can you give him a hand, Buck?” she pleaded. “I’m afraid he might hurt himself.”

“I’m not sure I can help, ma’am. But I know someone who works miracles with engines.”

“Do you? Can you bring him here?”

“I’ll ask, but it’ll be up to him.”

“Oh do, Buck. Please.”

“I’ll try to be back this afternoon,” I said.

I left Maybeth with her family and returned to our camp. Forrest was gone, but Albert and Emmy were playing Go Fish with an old deck of cards, one of the things Albert had thrown into the pillowcase along with everything from the Brickmans’ safe. I explained the Schofields’ situation and asked for his help. But I could tell immediately from the stone look he gave me that it was going to be an uphill battle.

“Too risky,” he said, putting down the cards he held.

“We can’t go on afraid forever,” I said.

“It’s not forever. It’s just until we get to Saint Louis.”

“If we ever do.”

“You think it’s a mistake, trying to find Aunt Julia?”

That wasn’t the mistake. The mistake had been falling in love with Maybeth Schofield, which had changed everything.

“I just think we can’t hide forever. And I think these people really need our help. Your help.”

Emmy began to gather up the cards. “You have to help them, Albert,” she said, as if she were the adult and he the child.

“Why?”

“Because you know it’s the right thing to do.”

Albert looked to heaven and rolled his eyes. He shook his head, as if it were hopeless, then he finally gave a nod. “Okay, but just me. You two stay here. Less chance we’ll be spotted.”

“Thank you, Albert,” I said, thinking that my brother wasn’t such a bad egg, and thinking that Emmy was wise beyond her years, and thinking how grateful Maybeth would be. Thinking that most of all.

Albert limped off, his leg still paining him, and was gone all afternoon. So was Forrest. And God only knew where Mose had disappeared to. I began to worry. What if none of them came back? What if Emmy and I were alone? And that’s when I remembered the words Mose had signed again and again into Emmy’s palm when trying to comfort her near the outset of our journey:
Not alone.

He was right. We weren’t alone. We had each other, Emmy and me, and now we had the Schofields. Maybe Chicago would be a better place than Saint Louis. Better mostly because Maybeth and I would be together. And I thought that might be just fine with me.

“I miss Mose,” Emmy said.

I did, too. Not the Mose who was dark and moody, but the Mose who’d always had a ready smile and, although he couldn’t really sing, had always seemed as if there’d been a song in his heart. Then we’d found the skeleton of the dead Indian kid and everything had changed.

Emmy began building a little house of twigs, and I asked her, “Do you remember saying to me that they’re all dead?”

“Who?”

“When you had your last fit, you said, ‘They’re dead. They’re all dead.’ Do you remember that?”

“Unh-uh. It’s always like a fog.” She knocked down the twig house and, sounding bored, said, “Tell me a story, Odie.”

The sun was well to the west, the shadows among the poplars
growing long, birds settling in the branches as if preparing for the night.