OUTSIDE AN ISOLATED Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink continued the incessant racket. She wanted trader’s milk, rum, a mixture of raw distilled spirits, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at the trader’s nerves, but Mackinnon wouldn’t beat her into silence. Mink was from a mysterious and violent family who were also powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Shingobii, a supplier of rich furs. She had also been the beautiful wife of Mashkiig, until he destroyed her face and stabbed her younger brothers to death. Their young daughter huddled with her in the greasy blanket, trying to hide herself. Inside the post, Mackinnon’s clerk, Wolfred Roberts, had swathed his head in a fox pelt to muffle the sound. He had fastened the desiccated paws beneath his chin. He wrote an elegant, sloping hand, three items between lines. Out there in the bush, they were always afraid of running out of paper.
Wolfred had left his family behind in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because he was the youngest of four brothers and there was no room for him in the family business—a bakery. His mother was the daughter of a schoolteacher, and she had educated him. He missed her and he missed the books—he had taken only two with him when he was sent to clerk with Mackinnon: a pocket dictionary and Xenophon’s Anabasis, which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his mother hadn’t known contained lewd descriptions. He was just seventeen.
Even with the fox on his head, the screeching rattled him. He tried to clean up around the fireplace, and threw a pile of scraps out for the dogs. As soon as he walked back inside, there was pandemonium. Mink and her daughter were fighting the dogs off. The noise was hideous.
Don’t go out there. I forbid you, said Mackinnon. If the dogs kill and eat them, there will be less trouble.
The humans eventually won the fight, but the noise continued into darkness.
Mink started hollering again before sunup. Her high-pitched wailing screech was even louder now. The men were scratchy-eyed and tired. Mackinnon viciously kicked her, or kicked one of them, as he passed. She went hoarse that afternoon, which only made her voice more irritating. Something in it had changed, Wolfred thought. He didn’t understand the language very well.
The rough old bitch wants to sell me her daughter, said Mackinnon.
Mink’s voice was horrid—intimate with filth—as she described the things the girl could do if Mackinnon would only give over the milk. She was directing the full force of her shrieks at the closed door. Part of Wolfred’s job was to catch and clean fish if Mackinnon asked. Wolfred walked out, heading down to the river, where he kept a hole open in the ice. He could tell how bad it was and crossed himself. Although of course he wasn’t Catholic, the gesture had cachet where Jesuits had been. When he returned, Mink was gone and the girl was inside the post, slumped in the corner underneath a new blanket, head down, so still she seemed dead.
I couldn’t stand it another minute, Mackinnon said.
THAT NIGHT, LAROSE slept between his mother and his father. He remembered that night. He remembered the next night. He did not remember what happened in between.
They burned the rifle, buried the ammunition. The next day, they decided to take the same path the deer had taken. The land between the two houses was dense with wild raspberry in an area cleared by the fire of lightning that had struck an oak. The heat had moved beneath the bark of the tree, flowing from the twigs and branches down into the roots, until the tree could not contain it all and burst. The fire in the roots had killed the smaller trees in a circle but the rain had contained the fire after that. About a mile outside the mark of that tree, Emmaline’s mother had been raised. In the old time, people had protected the land by pulling up survey stakes. A surveying man had even gone missing. Although the lake at the center, deep and silent, had been dragged and searched, his body was never found. Many tribal descendants had inherited bits of land, but no one person had enough to put up a house. So the land stayed wild and fractionated, except for 160 acres, an original allotment owned by Emmaline’s mother, who had signed it over intact to her daughter. The woods were still considered uncanny. Few people besides Landreaux and Peter hunted there.
The trees were vivid, the sumac scarlet, the birch bright yellow. Sometimes Landreaux carried his son, sometimes he handed LaRose over to Emmaline. They didn’t speak or answer LaRose with words. They held him close, stroked his hair, kissed him with dry, trembling lips.
Nola saw them cross the yard with the boy.
What are they doing here, what, what, why are they, why are they bringing . . .
She ran from the kitchen and shoved Peter in the chest. It had been a calm morning. But that was over now. She told him to make them get the hell off their property and he told her that he would. He stroked her shoulder. She pulled violently away. The black crack between them seemed to reach down forever now. He had not found the bottom yet. He was afraid of what was happening to her, but it wasn’t in him to be angry when he answered the door—anger was too small—besides, he and Landreaux were friends, better friends than the two half sisters, and the instinct of that friendship was still with him. Landreaux and Emmaline had their boy with them, completely unlike but like Dusty because of the way a five-year-old is—that inquisitiveness, that confidence, that trust.
Landreaux slowly set the boy down and asked if they could come in.
Don’t, said Nola.
But Peter opened the door. Immediately LaRose looked up at Peter, then peered eagerly into the front room.
Where’s Dusty?