He smoothed his hand over her fingers and touched her wedding ring.
She won’t let me go alone, he said, looking at her. Oh, Geraldine!
They were both thinner and the lines along the side of their mouths had deepened. But the knifelike mark between my mother’s eyebrows was gone now. I had stopped them from living in the fear cloud. I should have felt happy watching them across the table, but instead I was angered by their ignorance. Like I was the grown-up and the two of them holding hands were the oblivious children. They had no idea what I had gone through for them. Or Cappy. Me and Cappy. I stubbed my foot sullenly against the table leg.
Something’s fighting in me, Joe, my father said.
My foot stopped kicking.
Maybe you’ll understand if I talk to you about it?
Okay, I said, though I was jumping out of my skin. I didn’t want to listen.
I feel relief at Lark’s death, my father said. Just like you said when you first heard, I feel that way too. Your mother is safe from him, he will not show up in the grocery store or at Whitey’s. We can go on now, can’t we?
Yeah, I said. I tried to get up, but he spoke.
Yet the question of who killed Lark must be asked. There was no justice for your mother, his victim, or for Mayla, and yet justice exists.
Unevenly applied, Dad. But he got what he deserved. My voice was flat. My heart sickly pounding.
My mother had dropped my father’s hand. She did not want to listen to us argue.
I feel that way too, said my father. Bjerke will interview us tomorrow—it’s routine. But nothing is routine. He’ll want to know where each of us was when Lark was killed. Here is my fight, Joe. I ask myself in this situation, as one sworn to uphold the law in every case, what I would do if I had any information that could lead to the identity of the killer. Last time I talked to your mother about this, I wasn’t sure what I would do.
I looked at Mom and her lips were pressed together in a straight dark line.
But I’ve decided that I would do nothing. I would offer up no information. Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. It was no lynching. There was no question of his guilt. He may have even wanted to get caught and punished. We can’t know his mind. Lark’s killing is a wrong thing which serves an ideal justice. It settles a legal enigma. It threads that unfair maze of land title law by which Lark could not be prosecuted. His death was the exit. I would say nothing, do nothing, to muddy the resolution. Yet—
My father stopped and tried to give me that old look he used to fix on me, and others, from the bench. I could feel it, but I would not meet his gaze.
—yet, he said gently, this too is an abandonment of my own responsibility. That person who killed Lark will live with the human consequences of having taken a life. As I did not kill Lark, but wanted to, I must at least protect the person who took on that task. And I would, even to the extent of attempting to argue a legal precedent.
What?
Traditional precedent. It could be argued that Lark met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law.
I felt my mother’s attention on me keenly.
I just wanted you to know that, my father prodded.
Lots of people had it in for Lark, I said.
I looked from one of my parents to the other. Behind them in the next room the shelves of old books stood mellow in the dip of shadow at twilight. The scuffed brown leather. Meditations. Plato. The Iliad. Shakespeare in sober dark red and the essays of Montaigne. Then below, a matching Great Books collection they subscribed to by mail. There was a free Book of Mormon from a passing LDS missionary. There was William Warren, Basil Johnston, The Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, and everything by Vine Deloria Jr. There were the novels they read together—fat paperbacks thumbed and stacked. I looked at the books as if they could help us. But we had moved