William Krueger - Vermilion Drift

“His father needs the lie,” LeDuc says. “But tell his mother to come to Dilsey’s place. She’ll understand.”

Winter Moon asks, “What about the bodies Broom said they stuffed in the mine? We can’t just leave them there.”

“Their spirits have already walked the Path of Souls,” Meloux says. “Moving them would be a dangerous thing. Broom told us what was done to them. For those who loved them, to look now on what is left, I think that would be too hard. The earth will take the bodies back. For that, one hole is as good as another.”

“We just leave them?”

“We will honor their memory. But, yes, we will leave them.”

“That doesn’t seem right, Henry.”

“In this business, what does?”

LeDuc says, “Cork said the woman will be coming here tonight. What do we do? Just wait?”

Meloux looks at the cabin and the shed and seems to listen to the dead silence of that evil place. “We burn,” he says.

She holds him a long time, and then she looks into his eyes, and her own eyes are brown flowers dripping dew.

“Oh, God,” she says. “What he might have done to you.”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

“He killed Fawn, and he killed Naomi,” he tells her.

“We’ve been to the mine tunnel,” LeDuc says. “He killed more than just them.”

His mother stands fully erect in his grandmother’s living room and turns to the men. “Who else?”

“Hattie’s girl Abbie. And Leonora Broom. Hell, we all thought they just ran off. Indigo Broom, that man was a monster. Christ. Him and the Cavanaugh woman.”

“Windigos,” Winter Moon says.

“We know how to deal with Windigos,” LeDuc says.

Grandma Dilsey, who has seen much in her life, offers, “What we do, we must do carefully. There are laws not our own to consider.”

They all look at his mother. It’s clear they’re thinking about his father.

“Liam can’t know,” she says. “What we’ve done, he won’t understand.”

“Or what we still have to do,” LeDuc says.

She turns to her son. “What I have to ask, Cork, there’s no way I can justify it. But it’s the most important thing I’ve ever asked of you. You can’t tell your father what happened at Indigo Broom’s cabin. You can’t tell him ever. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he says. And he absolutely does and has absolutely no intention of ever saying anything to his father.

“Good,” she says. “It would be a disaster on so many levels.” She turns to the others. “Where’s Henry?”

“With Hattie Stillday. He wanted to talk to her himself,” Winter Moon replies.

“What about tonight?” she asks.

“We have a plan,” says LeDuc.

He came out of the dream on his own.

“You do not want to go on?” Meloux asked.

“The truth is I’m afraid,” Cork replied.

“The truth is you have always been afraid. That is why long ago I helped you not remember.”

“You?”

“I cannot explain. If you are to understand completely, you must remember.”

“I have to go back?”

“You have to go back.”

“Will you be there, Henry?”

“I have always been there.”

It is night. He is at his grandmother’s house with the others: Meloux, Winter Moon, LeDuc, Becky Stonedeer, Grandma Dilsey, Aunt Ellie, Hattie Stillday, his mother. The men have rifles. His mother is armed as well. She has brought his father’s revolver, the.38 Police Special, which she took from the lockbox in their bedroom closet and has filled with cartridges. The firearm looks awkward in her hand. When Grandma Dilsey saw it, she’d questioned, “Do you need that?”

“I don’t know what I need to kill a monster, but this is what I have.”

She holds the gun at her side, so weighty that it seems to throw her body off balance.

He is in the back bedroom, where they made him go before they began their discussion. They closed the door. He’s opened it a crack so that he can see and hear.

“I’ve checked,” Winter Moon says. “This thing she’s at in Duluth is supposed to finish up around ten. A couple of hours to get back here, and she should hit Broom’s cabin around midnight.”

“The remains of Broom’s cabin, you mean,” LeDuc says.

“We should be there early,” Winter Moon advises.

“She comes,” Hattie says bitterly, “and then what?”

“And then justice,” LeDuc says.

“We just kill her?” Grandma Dilsey asks.

“She didn’t just kill our children,” Hattie says with acid bitterness. “She tortured them first.”

“You’re saying we should torture her, Hattie?”

“If you can’t, I’ll be more than happy to do it for you, Dilsey,” Hattie replies.

Meloux says, “To end her life isn’t a cruelty. Her life is an unnatural thing. But to drag out that end would be cruel.”

“I’m just fine with that, Henry.”

“Now, maybe. But your life will be long, Hattie, and someday you will regret your cruelty to this creature.”

“I’m willing to live with it.”

“Me, too,” LeDuc throws in.

Meloux considers them, and his voice, when he replies, is a placid pool. “We must think with one mind, speak with one voice, act with one heart. If we are not together, we will crumble.”

“I want her dead,” Aunt Ellie says quietly, “as much as anyone here. But I don’t want her to suffer. I don’t want to become a Windigo, like her.”

“To kill a Windigo, you must become a Windigo,” LeDuc throws at her.

“And feed on her heart, George?” Grandma Dilsey replies. “There will be no satisfaction. That’s the thing about a Windigo. It’s always hungry.”

“One heart, one voice, one mind,” Meloux reminds them.

They stand in a loose circle. From where he watches through the crack in the door, he can see them eye one another, and although they don’t speak, it’s as if they’re talking.

LeDuc finally says, “All right. We end it quickly. And do what with her body?”

“We put it with the bodies of those she’s killed,” Meloux says.

“No!” Hattie cries. “I don’t want her anywhere near my Abbie.”

“It will not be her. It will be only her flesh and her bone,” Meloux replies. “Her deformed spirit will be on the Path of Souls.”

Aunt Ellie offers, “Hattie, our girls will be like guardians. They won’t let that monster harm anyone else.”

“And she won’t be found there,” LeDuc adds.

Hattie lowers her head, considers, and says at last, “All right.”

“We should go,” Meloux tells them. “Prepare.”

“Someone needs to stay with Cork,” his mother says.

“I’ll stay,” Grandma Dilsey tells her. “But I won’t let you leave with that gun, Colleen.” She reaches out her hand. “There are guns enough already to do what must be done.”

Into Grandma Dilsey’s hand, his mother delivers the firearm. Grandma Dilsey walks to an old rolltop desk, slides open a drawer, and puts the gun inside.

Grandma Dilsey is outside watching night push across the sky. She has been quiet and tense. He sits beside her on the porch steps, looking where she looks, but probably not thinking what she’s thinking. He’s thinking something else, he’s pretty sure. When night has settled fully on both earth and sky, he says, “I’m tired. I’m going to lie down in the bedroom.”

She puts her arm around him. Her face, dark from the blood of The People that runs through her body and darker still from the night, comes near his own. Her eyes are soft and full of pain. “I’m sorry, Mishiikens.” She uses the Ojibwe word for “little turtle,” an affectionate name by which she sometimes calls him. “These things, you should have been spared.”