“Mrs. Brickman, you said the point of the story was that being lazy is a terrible thing.”
“That’s true, Odie.”
“I thought the point of the story was that slow and steady wins the race.”
“I see no difference.” Her voice was stern, but not harsh, not yet.
“My father read that story to me, Mrs. Brickman. It’s one of Aesop’s fables. And he said—”
“He said?” Now there was something different in the way she spoke. As if she were struggling to cough up a fish bone caught in her throat. “He said?” She’d been sitting on a stool that raised her up so everyone in the dining hall could see her. She slid from the stool and walked between the long tables, girls on one side, boys on the other, toward where I sat with Albert. In the absolute silence of that great room, I could hear the squeak, squeak of her rubber heels on the old floorboards as she came. The boy next to me, whose name I didn’t yet know, edged away, as if trying to distance himself from a place where he knew lightning was about to strike. I glanced at Albert, and he shook his head, a sign that I should just clam up.
Mrs. Brickman stood over me. “He said?”
“Y-y-yes, ma’am,” I replied, stuttering but no less respectful.
“And where is he?”
“Y-y-you know, Mrs. Brickman.”
“Dead, that’s where. He is no longer present to read you stories. The stories you hear now are the ones I tell you. And they mean just what I say they mean. Do you understand me?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Yes or no?”
She leaned toward me. She was slender, her face a delicate oval the color of a pearl. Her eyes were as green and sharp as new thorns on a rosebush. She wore her black hair long, and kept it brushed as soft as cat fur. She smelled of talcum and faintly of whiskey, an aromatic mix I would come to know well over the years.
“Yes,” I said in the smallest voice I’d ever heard come from my own lips.
“He meant no disrespect, ma’am,” Albert said.
“Was I talking to you?” The green thorns of her eyes stabbed at my brother.
“No, ma’am.”
She straightened herself and scanned the room. “Any other questions?”
I’d thought—hoped, prayed—this was the end of it. But that night, Mr. Brickman came to the dormitory room and called me out, and Albert, too. The man was tall and lean, and also handsome, many of the women at the school said, but all I saw was the fact that his eyes were nothing but black pupils, and he reminded me of a snake with legs.
“You boys’ll be sleeping somewhere else tonight,” he said. “Come along.”
That first night in the quiet room, I barely slept a wink. It was April, and there was still a chill in the wind sweeping out of the empty Dakotas. Our father was less than a week dead. Our mother had passed away two years before that. We had no kin in Minnesota, no friends, no one who knew us or cared about us. We were the only white boys in a school for Indians. How could it get any worse? Then I’d heard the rat and had spent the rest of those long, dark hours until daylight pressed against Albert and the iron door, my knees drawn up to my chin, my eyes pouring out tears that only Albert could see and that no one but him would have cared about anyway.
* * *
FOUR YEARS HAD passed between that first night and the one I’d just spent in the quiet room. I’d grown some, changed some. The old, frightened Odie O’Banion was, like my mother and father, long dead. The Odie I was now had a penchant for rebellion.
When I heard the key turn in the lock, I sat up on the straw matting. The iron door swung open and morning light poured in, blinding me for a moment.
“Sentence is up, Odie.”
Although I couldn’t see the contours of the face yet, I recognized the voice easily: Herman Volz, the old German who oversaw the carpentry shop and was the assistant boys’ adviser. The man stood in the doorway, blocking for a moment the glare of the sun. He looked down at me through thick eyeglasses, his pale features soft and wistful.
“She wants to see you,” he said. “I have to take you.”
Volz spoke with a German accent, so his w’s sounded like v’s