CHAPTER 23

Wisconsin, 1890

 

The Christmas ball dominated conversation well into the new year. With each retelling, the evergreen in the foyer grew taller, the mayor’s mansion larger, the food and festivities grander.

Routine had just begun to dull the excitement when a cry—shrill and urgent as the steamboat horns that blared from the Mississippi—split the January air.

Standing on the top stair of the root cellar, Alma’s head whipped toward the sound. Mr. Simms rushed from the workshop across the yard, bearing a large sagging mass in his arms. George raced next to him, cradling the other half of the lanky object.

The jug of molasses slipped from Alma’s hand. It crashed through the crust of snow and shattered on the frozen ground beneath. Alma’s eyes flashed down to the dark liquid oozing between the shards of broken clay, then back up. Mrs. Simms shouted up from the cellar, but her words did not register. The men carried not an object, but a boy, his body limp, his head lolling like a marionette lost of its strings.

The breath in Alma’s lungs froze. Her stomach twisted and tightened. The cook’s heavy footfalls echoed behind her, ascending the cellar steps. “Heavens above, child, whatever is the—my God.”

The woman’s ruddy face went white. She stood rooted beside Alma as the men approached.

“Clear the counter, Martha,” Mr. Simms shouted. “Then go fetch Mr. Blanchard. This boy needs a doctor!”

Her husband’s electric words seemed to shock the life back into her. She bustled past Alma and rushed toward the kitchen, taking the icy steps to the back door two at a time. The men passed in a blur of red. It showed in their cheeks and frost-nipped noses. It colored the fronts of their shirts and stained their forearms. It dripped on the white snow beneath them.

Alma came to life and hurried behind them into the kitchen. Pots and pans lay scattered on the floor where Mrs. Simms had swept them. George and Mr. Simms laid the body down on the wooden counter. The boy’s face was slack and ashen—Charles. He was a Mohican a few years younger than Alma. His stories by the bonfire silenced the night wind, and he stole apples even more deftly than Alice.

Her eyes moved from his face down his torso. When they lit on the twisted, mangled flesh that had once been an arm, she gasped and stumbled backward. Three fingers were missing from his swollen hand. Lacerations crisscrossed his arm, extending well above the elbow, exposing bright-red muscle and splintered bone. Blood was everywhere, spurting in some places, oozing slowly in others.

“Rags, Miss Alma, fetch some rags.”

She heard Mr. Simms’s voice like a distant echo. Her legs moved of their own volition to the cupboard. She grabbed a thick stack of fresh towels and staggered back.

The older man’s burlap hands guided her fingers to the crushed arm. “Keep pressure there now.” He tossed a few rags across the table at George. “You too.”

Her hands trembled as the white linen bloomed scarlet. Warm liquid seeped between her fingers. Her stomach heaved and the room began to spin.

“Breathe, Azaadiins,” George whispered. He moved his hands so the tips of his fingers overlapped with hers. He too trembled.

A few inches above their hands, Mr. Simms tied a thick strip of leather around Charles’s arm. “Keep on the pressure until the bleeding stops.”

Footsteps clamored in the hall and her father bounded into the room. “What’s happened?”

“Accident with the lathe,” the groundskeeper said.

Her father stepped closer to the table, then reeled back. “My Lord! Is he dead?”

“No, sir, but he’s lost a lot of blood. Best we fetch a doctor and quick.”

“Yes . . . yes . . . go saddle the horses. I’ll fetch my cloak and be out presently.”

Mr. Simms flew from the room, parting the cluster of gaping boys who huddled at the back door.

“Off with you,” her father said to them. “Close down the workshop and retire to your dormitory. Prayer is what the boy needs now.”

They shuffled outside with wide eyes and anxious, thin-lipped expressions. A group of girls had gathered in the hallway at the opposite door. Her father shooed them away in similar fashion, sending the newly arrived Miss Wells to keep them upstairs.

“You’ll be okay, won’t you?” he said to Alma and George. “Mrs. Simms is here.”

Alma glanced over at the cook. The woman sat in the corner on an upended pail, her face the color of the whitewashed walls, her eyes glazed and vacant.

Without waiting for a response, her father left the room, his heavy steps muffled by the hallway rug.

Alma looked at George, the sight beneath her hands too gruesome to regard. Sweat beaded across his forehead. His disheveled hair fell forward, shielding his downturned eyes. She could hear Charles’s raspy breath, uneven and urgent, as if he were drowning beneath a current of invisible water. She felt the spasms of his body, his skin cool while his blood ran hot. Her eyes remained anchored on George, not looking as much as clinging, desperate for refuge.

“How did this happen, George?”

He looked up. A glossy sheen covered his eyes. Taut jaw muscles bulged beneath his tawny skin. His breath quivered with each inhale. “I was . . .” He stopped, raked back his hair with a bloodstained hand, and then continued. “I was sanding wood. At the lathe. A leg. For to make a table. Charles came. The end of his shirt—by his hand—”

“His sleeve?”

George nodded. “It caught in the spindle, pulling him. And his arm. The belt ate his arm. Chewed and twisted and spit it out. I stopped. Took my foot away from the treadle. Too late.” He lowered his head, shielding his face from her.

“This wasn’t your fault. I’ve been in the wood shop before. It’s too crowded. So much is going on all at once. Just last week Frederick cut himself on a saw blade and needed stitches.”

“Plenty more than stitches is needed here.”

“I know, but—”

Charles gasped. His eyes opened, wide and frantic. Alma took one hand off the wound and laid the back of it on his cheek. His clammy skin was cool against her fingers. “It’s okay, Charles. The doctor shall arrive any minute. Shh, now. Be still.”

She stroked his cheek and his breathing steadied. When his eyes fluttered shut, she looked back at George. “He’s so cold.”

George cleared his throat, regaining his composure. “Mrs. Simms, do you keep any blanket in the kitchen?”

The cook’s frazzled-haired head popped up. “What, dear? No . . . no, I don’t need a blanket, thank you. I’m just resting here a bit before I start dinner is all.”

Laughter slipped through Alma’s lips while tears mounted at the rims of her eyes. “I’ll go fetch one from the trunk in the hall. I think the bleeding has stopped a bit since Mr. Simms put on that tourniquet.”

Alma returned with a thick wool blanket and tucked it around Charles’s body. Blood wicked into its fuzzy fibers.

“Like ink,” she said aloud. “Mother will be irate over the stains.”

Again, she wanted to laugh. What did it matter what her mother thought at a time like this? A smile twitched at the corner of her lips. She glanced at George. What must he think of her? But a crooked grin sprang to his lips as well. A fleeting moment and their smiles faded. Their eyes strayed away.

Through the silence, Alma listened, begging of each passing moment the sound of horse hooves. The angst of her younger self, waiting, listening for a similar sound, flashed in her memory. She had never dreamed the arrival of the Indians would lead her here: standing beside a broken body, across the table from the boy who called her enemy, her ears once again straining to hear the cry of wagon wheels through the empty air.

When the sound did come—snow crunching, hooves pounding like a frantic drumbeat—Alma released a heavy sigh. Her father rushed in, followed by Dr. Austin and Mr. Simms.

The middle-aged physician shooed Alma from the table. His alert, beady eyes scanned Charles from head to toe. He lifted the saturated towels from the wound. “If there’s any hope of him living, I’ll have to amputate. Open my bag, Mr. Blanchard, and retrieve my saw. We’ll need water set to boil and fresh linen too.” He flung the soiled rags on the floor. Blood spattered across the kitchen.

Alma’s stomach turned. The glint of the long metal handsaw caught her eye; the room blurred and spun. She pushed through the back door and raced down the steps to the yard. Falling to her hands and knees, convulsions overtook her and she vomited in the white snow.

The sun had sunk behind the trees, but rays of light knifed through empty boughs, casting a barbed-wire pattern of light and dark across the ground. From inside came an arresting shriek. The kitchen windows rattled. Alma’s stomach heaved again.

How long she remained there, hands and knees buried in the snow, Alma did not know. Eventually, the door behind her swung open and closed. Footfalls descended the stairs toward her. She covered her vomit with snow and wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

George offered her a hand and helped her up. The warmth of his skin made her entire body crave his touch. He sandwiched her frozen fingers between his own and brought them to his mouth. His hot breath began to thaw her.

On any other occasion, Alma would have pulled away. But it was not just her hands that were numb. Her entire body felt shrouded in fog.

Her mother’s voice from within the kitchen startled her back to reality. “Great heavens! What’s happened here? Where’s Alma?”

She slipped her hands from George’s grasp just as the back door whined open.

“Alma, come inside this instant.”

She turned around and her mother gasped. “You’re covered in blood. That’s not your silk gown, is it?”

This time, Alma found no humor in the absurd exchange. “No, Mother, just my cotton work dress. I was helping Mrs. Simms in the cellar when . . . when the accident happened. I’ll wash up at the well and be in presently.”

Her mother frowned. “Very well. You too, George. You’re absolutely gruesome.”

The two of them plodded to the well. The air had cooled with the sun’s retreat, creating a frozen crust atop the snow that crunched beneath their feet. Alma’s legs felt heavy, each step a chore. She sank onto the lip of the well while George cast and reeled the bucket. They washed their hands in the frigid water without a word. Alma scrubbed hers frantically, rubbing the skin raw. George smoothed his together in slow, circular motions, his eyes fixed, distant.

She dried her hands on a patch of skirt not soiled with blood, vomit, or melted snow and started back to the schoolhouse. George did not follow.

“George—”

“Tε·h!” His voice bellowed across the open yard. He backhanded the water pail, sending it careening through the air. The pink-tinged liquid spattered over the snow. “The white man and his white man ways. This never would have happened if not for that!”

Alma staggered backward. “Accidents happen. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

His dark eyes, made even darker by dusk’s dim light, raked over her like talons. “No? The Menominee never made machines that eat boys’ arms.”

The blood flared in her veins. “You don’t have doctors like Dr. Austin who can heal such injuries either.”

“You know nothing of our .”

“I know Charles would lose a lot more than his arm if not for Dr. Austin.”

George crossed the distance between them in two heavy strides. He stood so close the hot cloud of his breath engulfed her face. He pointed toward a lonely break in the trees. “If white medicine is so great and powerful, what happened to them?”

Even before her eyes followed the trajectory of his arm, Alma knew to what he pointed. At the far end of the yard, like a deep pockmark in the otherwise smooth line of trees, stood a small cemetery. Eleven headstones jutted from the earth. Each was identical in form, plainly wrought and inscribed.

Alma hugged her arms against her chest, her fingers pressed to bone. The first death had happened quickly, only a few months into Stover’s first term. Pneumonia. ROBERT, JANUARY 1882, was the only epitaph. The boy’s true name, his Indian name, had faded from her memory, but his copper face lingered. Death had come every winter since. She remembered every face.

When she spoke, her voice came thin, wavering, equal parts anger and sorrow. “And children don’t die on the reservations? Death, I suppose, is also the white man’s invention?”

“They die. They die in the arms of their mothers and fathers. Tshipe’kaino is performed in their honor. Here is a lonely death.”

Alma blinked back the tears that returned to her eyes. “The Lord is always with us. We never die alone.” But the words sounded like her father’s.

“Whose Lord? The Indian does not want your God any more than he want your killer machines.” He glared down at her a second more, then stormed back toward the house.

The cold twilight closed in around her, but Alma did not move. Her hands trembled and her chest heaved. She hated George—his arrogance, his pride, his refusal to cede even the smallest ground.

After several deep breaths, she mustered a semblance of poise and turned back to the house. Her eyes caught on the meager cemetery, pale headstones like ghosts at the edge of the woods. Their memory ripped through her, and though her feet moved toward the warm, gaslit rooms of the grand brick schoolhouse, her heart questioned their direction.