William Krueger: Trickster's Point

Which was the Ojibwe name Meloux had long ago given to Jubal Little. It meant “coyote.”

“You’ve already heard?” Cork said. He looked to Rainy, who’d given no indication she knew about the trouble that day. Then he said with understanding, “The rez telegraph.”

Rainy said, “Isaiah Broom came to tell us.”

“News he didn’t mind bringing, I’m sure,” Cork said.

“A lot of Ojibwe were disappointed in Jubal Little, but that doesn’t mean we’re happy the man’s dead.”

“You were with him.” Meloux set the pipe on the table. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He did, of course. Unburdening was part of what had brought him. He told them about the day, told them how he’d stayed those long hours in the shadow of Trickster’s Point as, ragged breath by ragged breath, Jubal Little had lost his hold on life.

“Three hours?” Rainy said. “With an arrow in his heart? Oh, Cork, that had to be awful.”

She put her hand over his on the tabletop, the calluses of her palms across his knuckles. He took comfort in that familiar roughness.

“Three hours.” Meloux squinted so that he considered Cork through dark slits. “That is a long time to watch a man die.”

“I didn’t have a choice, Henry.”

“There is always a choice.”

“He asked me to stay.”

“You could still have chosen to go.”

“He would have been alone.”

“But he might now be alive.”

“You don’t know that, Henry.” He spoke harshly but understood it wasn’t Meloux he was angry at. In all the questioning by Dross and Larson, Cork had firmly maintained that he’d stayed because it was what Jubal wanted and because the wound was so terrible he couldn’t imagine the man would live long. In his own mind, however, he wasn’t at all certain of the soundness of his thinking or the truth of his motive.

“And that is something you can never know either, Corcoran O’Connor.” The old man’s face relaxed, and in Meloux’s warm almond eyes, Cork saw great compassion. “Your going or your staying is not what killed Wiisigamaiingan. That was the arrow. There is no way to know what the outcome might have been if you had made a different choice. Shake hands with your decision and move on.”

“Was it an accident of some kind?” Rainy asked.

“No accident,” Cork said. “Someone meant to kill him, I’m sure.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it was planned. They stole one of my arrows and used it to murder Jubal. Either that or they made an arrow in the same way I do so that it would look like I’d killed him.”

“Who would do that?”

“I have no idea. They were pretty crafty with the arrow, so I’m thinking there may be other evidence they’ve arranged to point in my direction.”

“You didn’t see who shot the arrow?”

“No.” Cork looked to Meloux. “Sam Winter Moon taught me to hunt in the old way, Henry. He taught a lot of men to hunt that way.”

Meloux was clearly already ahead of Cork. “You are a good hunter. You read the ground, and you listen to the air. Yet you did not see the man who shot the arrow. So you want to know who else Sam Winter Moon taught to hunt in the old way. You want to know who could hide himself from you so good.”

“If Sam were here, I’d ask him. But he’s not, so I’m hoping you might know.”

The room was lit with light from a kerosene lantern in the center of the table. The shadows of Cork and Rainy and Meloux fell against the walls, and when Meloux shook his head, his shadow self did the same.

“Sam Winter Moon taught many,” he said.

“Some of them have already walked the Path of Souls, Henry. And some have grown too old to hunt that way. And some no longer live on the rez. I want to know who’s still here. And of those, I want to know who’s good enough to hide from me.”

Meloux had made his chairs long ago. They were sturdy pieces, but so old that they creaked easily under the weight of those who sat in them. Meloux’s chair complained as he leaned back and studied Cork’s face and gave the issue long, patient thought.

“It would not necessarily take such an expert to hide from you,” Meloux said at last. “A hunter is only as good as his mind will let him be. You were distracted today.”

Cork realized that the old Mide, in his mysterious way, had divined an important concern. “Jubal and I had kind of a falling-out, and we were both pretty upset.”

“Over what?” Rainy asked.

“It doesn’t matter. But Henry’s right. I was distracted.”

“So maybe it was not such a good hunter you did not see,” Meloux said.

Cork was disappointed. He’d believed he might have a way of narrowing the field of suspects, but Meloux’s insight cast a deep shadow of doubt over the possibility.

Then Cork thought of something else.

“I believe somebody followed me here, Henry. They were pretty good because most of the way I only had the sense of their presence, nothing really solid to give them away.”

“Most of the way?” Rainy said.

“At the end, when I came onto Crow Point, I’m almost certain I heard a voice say something to me from the woods.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No.”

In the lantern light, Meloux’s dark eyes burned with a little flame of intrigue. “And what did this voice without a body say, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“Just one word, Henry.”

Meloux blinked and waited patiently.

“Traitor,” Cork finally replied.

After he first met Jubal Little that day in Grant Park with Winona and Willie Crane, Cork had almost nothing to do with the new kid in town. Jubal was a grade ahead, and their paths seldom crossed in a way that allowed the kind of interaction that might have led to friendship. Whenever the opportunity did arise, Jubal seemed completely uninterested in pursuing it. That was fine with Cork; he had plenty of friends. Still, Jubal Little, in his size and the assuredness of his bearing, stood out in a way that couldn’t be ignored. And whenever Cork was with Winona and Willie Crane and they spotted Jubal, he couldn’t miss how Winona’s gaze fixed on the big, distant figure.

In a small town, people talked, and he knew a few things about Jubal. He knew that the older boy had come with his mother from the West, though from where exactly seemed a bit of a mystery. Although there was clearly Indian in Jubal’s blood, his mother didn’t look Indian at all. And while Cork knew that looks alone didn’t tell the whole genetic story, he figured that it was probably Jubal’s father from whom the son had inherited his appearance. But Jubal had arrived in Aurora without a father, and no one, as far as Cork knew, understood the why of that situation.

Jubal’s mother worked as a waitress at Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler. She was pleasant and pretty, a slender blonde with a ready smile but with eyes that always seemed a little sad. On Friday nights, Cork’s family often ate at the Broiler, taking advantage of the best all-you-can-eat fish fry in the whole North Country. Whenever Jubal’s mother waited on them, Cork found her immensely likable. His father said she lived with her widowed sister on the west side of town, and his mother said that she often ran into her in the library. Jubal’s mom was, apparently, a voracious reader. One evening at the Broiler, Cork told her that he knew Jubal, and she seemed oddly pleased, as if happy to hear that Jubal might have a friend. Cork didn’t tell her that they weren’t close.

But for tragedy, he and Jubal might have gone their whole lives living in the same town with no real relationship. In the fall of Cork’s seventh-grade year, however, his father was killed, shot down in the line of duty. And that changed everything.