then, separating me from who I was, say, when I’d dug those seedlings out of the foundation, when I had wept outside my mother’s bedroom door, when I had watched the angel, my doodem, cross the sun-grazed walls of my bedroom. I knelt down with my arm around Pearl’s neck and disregarded my parents’ endless stare. I stayed across the room hoping that they would not smell me, but I felt my mother look at my father.
Where were you? asked my mother.
Running.
All day?
At Whitey’s, too.
Some small thing eased between them.
Doing what?
Just hanging around. Whitey fed us lunch. Me and Cappy.
They wanted to believe me so much that I saw they’d make every effort to believe. All I had to do was stay plausible. Not break. Not puke.
Sit down, son, said my father. But although I drew a step closer, I did not take a chair. He told me Lark was dead. I let all my feelings cross my face.
That’s good, I finally said.
Joe, said my father, his hand on his chin, his eyes on me, the weight intolerable. Joe, do you know anything, even the slightest thing, about this?
This? This what?
He was murdered, Joe.
But I’d used the word before. I’d hardened myself. I’d used it with Cappy and I’d used it in my head. I had prepared to answer this question and to answer it the way the old Joe from before this summer would answer. I spoke childishly, in a sudden fury of excitement that wasn’t fake.
Dead? I wanted him dead, okay? In my thoughts. If you’re telling me he’s murdered, then I’m happy. He deserved it. Mom is free now. You’re free. The guy who killed him should get a medal.
All right, my father said. Enough. He pushed back his chair. My mother’s eyes did not leave my face. She was intent on believing anything I said. But she shuddered all over, suddenly. A ripple passed over her body. The shock of it reached me.
She sees the murderer in me, I thought.
Dizzy, I reached down for Pearl, but she had crept to my father’s leg. I sat back up.
I won’t lie. I’m glad he’s dead. Can I go now?
I walked past them and continued until I reached the stairs. I carefully took the steps. As I went up, drawn in my weariness as if by a rope, I felt their eyes on me. I recalled this happening before at some time and me watching. I was halfway to my room before I remembered my mother climbing to that place of loneliness from which we feared she never would descend.
No, I thought, as I crept into my bed, I’ve got Cappy and the others. I’ve done what I had to do. There is no going back. And whatever happens, I can take.
I was down. I was sick for real now, with the summer flu, just as I had pretended. Whitey vouched for us. When first Vince Madwesin, then another tribal police officer, then finally Agent Bjerke, pressed him, Whitey gave up that we’d gotten into his booze stash and passed out behind the station. He showed them our hideout in the weeds, the bottle, which was fingerprinted, and my shirt. My mother identified it as the one she’d washed for me to wear that day. But the rifle. Doe’s 30.06. I was running a fever of alternating sweats and chills and my sheets were sodden. While I was ill, I watched the golden light pass across my walls. I could feel nothing, but my thoughts ran wild. Always I kept going back to the day I dug the trees out of the foundation of our house. How tough those roots had clung. Maybe they had pulled out the blocks that held our house up. And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas. Dad’s case law, the Cohen, and then that hot dish. I’d think of the black noodles. The noodles became a carcass—the human, the buffalo, the body subject to the laws. I’d wonder how my mother got her spirit to return to her body, and if it had returned, and if mine was fleeing now because of what I’d done. Would I become a wiindigoo? Infected by Lark? And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring. I hadn’t been touched yet. Thinking