and began to spray her garden, the water splattering softly back and forth.
We’ll get him anyway, I said. Won’t we, Dad.
But he was staring at his desk as if he saw through the oak top into the file beneath it and through the manila cover to the photograph and from the photograph perhaps to some other photograph or record of old brutality that hadn’t yet bled itself out.
After his mother died, Linden Lark had kept her farmhouse at the edge of Hoopdance. He had been staying in the house, a rickety, peeling two-story that once had flower beds and big vegetable gardens. Now, of course, the whole place had gone to weeds and was cut off by crime tape. Dogs had searched and double-searched the premises, the fields and woods surrounding the house and found nothing.
No Mayla, I said.
Dad was talking with me later on that day—the house was quiet. I’d been playing my game. He’d walked in. This time he told me things. The governor of South Dakota had stated that the child he wished to adopt came from a Rapid City social service agency and that claim was confirmed. The people there said that about a month ago someone, a man it was believed, had left the baby asleep in her car seat, in the furniture section at Goodwill. There had been a note pinned on the baby’s jacket informing the finder that her parents were dead.
Is it Mayla’s baby?
My father nodded.
Your mother was shown a picture. She identified the baby.
Where is Mom now? I asked.
My father raised his brows, still surprised.
I just dropped her off at work.
A few days after my mother identified the baby, she began regular hours at her office. There was a backlog, blood quantum to parse, genealogy hopefuls curious about their possible romantic Indian Princess grandmothers. There were children returning as adults, adopted-out people cut off from their tribe, basically stolen by the state welfare agencies, and there were also those who had given up on being an Indian but whose children longed for the connection and designed a meaningful family vacation to the reservation to explore their heritage. She had a lot to do, and this was even before casino money roped wannabes in droves. She could apparently work as long as Lark was in custody. As long as the baby was safe. There were a few days when things were normal—but it was holding-your-breath normal. We heard the baby was with her grandparents, George and Aurora Wolfskin. She was placed there permanently or at least until Mayla returned. If she did return. Then on about the fourth day, my mother told my father that she had to talk to Gabir Olson and Special Agent Bjerke because, now that the baby’s safety was no longer an issue, she’d suddenly remembered the whereabouts of that missing file.
All right, my father said. Where?
Where I left it, underneath the front seat of the car.
My father went outside and came back with the manila folder in his hands.
They went to Bismarck again, and I stayed with Clemence and Edward. The birthday banners were all down. The beer cans crushed. The leaves were dried out in the arbor. Things again were quiet at Clemence and Edward’s house, but a sort of cheerful quiet as there were always people coming around to visit. Not only relations and friends, but people who came just for Mooshum, students or professors. They would set up a tape recorder and tape him talking about the old days or speaking Michif, or Ojibwe or Cree, or all three languages together. But he really didn’t tell them much. All his real stories came at night. I slept in Evey’s room with him. About an hour or two into the night I woke to hear him talking.
The Round House
When he was told to kill his mother, said Nanapush, a great rift opened in his heart. There was a crack so deep it went down forever. On the before side his love for his father, and belief in all that his father did, lay crumpled and discarded. And not only that one belief, but others as well. It was true that there could be wiindigoog—people who lost all human compunctions in hungry times and craved the flesh of others. But people could also be falsely accused. The cure for a wiindigoo was often simple: large quantities of hot soup. No one had tried the soup on Akii. No one had consulted the old and wise. The