William Krueger: Trickster's Point

“In prison. Deer Lodge. That’s in Montana.”

“What for?”

“Manslaughter.” With a grunt as if it pained him, Jubal wildly cast stone after stone, which the lake swallowed with barely a ripple.

“He killed someone?”

“That’s what manslaughter means, stupid.”

“I’m not stupid.” Cork waited a minute for Jubal to empty his hands, then asked cautiously, “Why?”

Jubal finally sat down on the shoreline, and Cork sat down beside him. The day was hot, but an easy wind blew out of the west and skated across the lake and cooled them. Jubal pulled a long blade of wild grass from the ground and viciously tore it apart, bit by bit, as he spoke.

“My dad’s Blackfeet, full blood. He’s a carpenter. Builds houses and stuff. Built houses,” Jubal corrected himself. “Four years ago my aunt Chrissy, that’s his sister, she was… well, she was raped.. by three white cowboys. It was in a town called Mosby way the hell out in the eastern part of the state. She was working in a bar there. The Mosby cops, they wouldn’t do anything about it. I guess the cowboys talked like it was some kind of joke. My dad went out there, and when he came back one of the cowboys was dead and the other two were in the hospital, beat up real bad. They arrested him, and at his trial, he said he was just doing what the law wouldn’t. What the white man’s law wouldn’t. There were lots of people in Mosby who swore Aunt Chrissy was drunk and acting slutty and asking for it. Me, I didn’t believe it for a minute. I never saw her like that. They were lying through their teeth. But that frigging jury, they convicted my father, and he’ll be in Deer Lodge until he’s an old man.”

Jubal finished torturing the blade of grass and pulled another.

“It was a big deal in Montana. Reporters crawling all over us all the time, even after the trial was done. We got letters and calls. Some of them were from people who thought my dad got a raw deal, but a lot of them were just stupid assholes saying dirty, hurtful things to my mom. We were living in Bozeman. Got to where we couldn’t walk down the street without being stared at, so Mom decided she had to do something. We moved to Denver for a while, and she changed her name. And mine. It was pretty hard for her, I guess, all alone, so we moved up here because we could live with my aunt. She made me promise never to talk about what happened in Montana.”

They were both quiet a long time. Jubal tore at the blade of wild grass until there was nothing left.

“I guess I understand why you told me he was dead.”

“I never actually said he was dead,” Jubal shot back defensively. “Whenever anybody asks, I just say I lost him and let them think what they want. But he’s as good as dead.”

“You don’t ever talk to him?”

“Why would I?”

“He’s your dad.”

“He should’ve thought about that before he went off and killed a man.”

“He probably didn’t plan on killing anybody.”

“What difference does that make? He should’ve stayed home where he belonged, and then he’d still be with us.” Jubal yanked a handful of wild grass and heaved it as if throwing another stone at the lake, but the blades went nowhere, just fluttered to the ground at his feet.

“So,” Cork said, trying to find slightly different ground to cover, to give Jubal room to move away from his anger. “Why Little? Why not your mom’s maiden name or something?”

Jubal finally cracked a smile. “Her maiden name’s Krupfelter. I told her I’d never be a Krupfelter. We compromised with Little.”

“Why not Wolf? That’s kind of cool.”

Jubal stood up, rose to his full height, and grinned down at Cork. “I like the look on people’s faces when I tell them my name is Little.”

Cork’s mother came to get them, and they rode back to Aurora. Although the sky stayed blue and Jubal had brightened, it still felt to Cork as if they were under a cloud the whole way. Jubal asked to be dropped off on Center Street, and there they separated, each kid heading toward a home where the sound of a man’s voice was a rare thing now.

That night, as he lay in bed, Cork thought about Jubal’s father and Jubal’s anger. The truth was that, after his own dad died, Cork was sometimes angry with him, too. There were still moments when, in his thinking, he held onto a little stone of bitterness, wondering uselessly why his father chose to have a job in which he wore a gun on his belt every day. But Jubal’s dad had worn a carpenter’s belt, and what had hung from it had been a hammer, and, in the end, this hadn’t made any difference. Jubal’s father had been lost, too.

Rainy held him. The wind had grown stronger, and the little cabin creaked around them as they huddled together under her quilt. They both smelled of sage and cedar, which Rainy had burned and blown over Cork to cleanse his spirit. Strands of her long hair lay fallen across his chest. Whenever she moved her head, Cork felt as if the lightest of fingers were trailing over his heart.

“Jubal was ashamed of being Blackfeet,” she said. “I understand. When we were growing up-you, me, him-if you were Indian, more often than not you were looked on as ignorant and savage. Or worse, someone to be pitied and condescended to.”

“He got over it,” Cork said.

He felt her sigh. “In a big way, I’d say.”

A gust of wind threw what sounded like a handful of sand against the window in the cabin’s western wall.

“Must be sleeting,” Cork said.

“I’m glad you didn’t try to drive home tonight.” She kissed his shoulder, then was quiet, listening. “Do you really think someone followed you here?”

“I could have sworn I heard a voice out there in the woods.”

“Traitor,” Rainy said. “What does it mean?”

“If it was real, I don’t know. If I only imagined it, then I’m probably crazy. Crazy with guilt, maybe.”

“Why? You didn’t kill him,” she said.

“Before he died, he told me things, things he swore he’d never told anyone. Secrets, Rainy. Some of them were about me and him. Some were about him and Winona. Some about Camilla. Jubal’s whole life seemed to be about secrets, things he knew but couldn’t share. Or was afraid to.”

“Why afraid?”

“Just too revealing for a man as powerful as Jubal, I guess.”

“Even the secrets about you and him?”

“That was maybe the weirdest thing of all. He said all his life he’d envied me. All his life, he’d tried to best me. And in the end, it was me who’d bested him.”

“He envied you?”

“I know. I don’t get it either.”

“What did he mean, that in the end you’d bested him?”

“Again, I don’t know, Rainy. Those three hours with Jubal were confusing. He rambled. He did a lot of reminiscing about when we were kids. He spilled his guts, all those transgressions and regrets. And then, at the last, he died with a smile on his lips.”

“Maybe you were his confessor.”

“Maybe. The oddest thing of all, though, came near the very end. He said a name he’d never mentioned to me before. Rhiannon.”

“Who’s Rhiannon?”

“Beats me, but she was clearly important to Jubal. By then, he was out of his head most of the time. These were his words as I heard them, which wasn’t very clear, because he was speaking barely above a whisper by then: ‘Rhiannon. The worst sin of all. God will send me to hell because of her. Pray for me. Oh, Jesus, pray for me.’”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’d pray for him, but that I didn’t believe in hell. He went quiet again and his eyes went unfocused. A few minutes later he said, clear as a bell, ‘I can see it. My God, it’s beautiful.’ He looked me in the eye, Rainy, and for that moment, he was there with me, I mean really there. He said, ‘This pain, all this pain. It’s nothing, Cork.’ Then he smiled. And then he died.”