William Krueger - Thunder Bay

Henry woke to the smell of sage and cedar burning. He opened his eyes and found himself in a wiigiwam, wrapped in a bearskin. A few feet away a woman sat tending a small fire. She had long gray hair woven into a single thick braid that hung over the shoulder of the plaid wool shirt she wore. When Henry stirred, she looked up.

“Where am I?” Without thinking, he’d spoken in the language of his people.

“Some men from the village found you. They brought you here.” Henry understood her words, but she said them in a way he’d never heard before.

“Are you Ojibwe?” he asked.

She shook her head and added a cedar sprig to the fire. “Odawa.” The deerskin flap that hung across the doorway was drawn aside, and an old man entered. Bright sunlight slipped into the wiigiwam with him.

“Finally awake.” He sat next to Henry. His knee joints popped like walnuts cracking. “Who are you?”

Henry said, “Niibaa-waabii.” His Ojibwe name. It meant Sees At Night.

“I am Ziibi-aawi. This is my daughter, Maanaajii-ngamo. You have been sick a long time.”

“How long?”

“Seven days ago you were brought here.”

“Fever?”

“That and other things. You are not Odawa,” the old man said.

“Ojibwe.”

“A lost Ojibwe.”

“Not lost. I was looking for the village.”

“Where you were headed, you would not have found it. You were lucky the men stumbled onto you. They thought at first you were an old man gone out into the woods to die alone.”

“Old man?” Henry said.

Ziibi-aawi waved an age-spotted hand toward Henry’s head. “Your hair.”

Henry reached up and grasped a handful of the fine black hair, which he’d let grow long since he left the boarding school. When he looked at what he held, he didn’t understand. His hand was full of strands white as spider’s silk.

“My hair,” he said. “What happened to my hair?”

“You are young for hair so old.”

“It was black,” Henry said. “Black as crow feathers.”

Ziibi-aawi gazed at him with deep interest. “What a thing it must have been.”

“My hair?”

The old man shook his head. “Whatever turned it white. It is a story I would like to hear.”

Henry told him about his battle with the windigo. The old man listened, and his daughter, too.

“Look at yourself.” Ziibi-aawi pulled away the bearskin.

Except for the wounds on his leg, which were healing, Henry saw no marks on his naked body.

“It was a vision,” the old man explained. “The windigo is a beast of the spirit. It feeds on hate, and it is never full. There is only one way to kill a windigo. You must become a windigo, too. But when the beast is dead, there is a great danger that you will stay a windigo forever. You must be fed something warm to melt the ice inside you, to melt you down to the size of other men.”

Henry looked toward Maanaajii-ngamo, who fed cleansing sage and cedar to the fire.

“I am Mide,” Ziibi-aawi said. “Maanaajii-ngamo is also Mide. You know the Grand Medicine Society?”

Henry knew of it. Healers of the body and spirit. Since the coming of the white men, those among the Ojibwe who understood the healing secrets had become few.

“This is an important vision. You have had visions before?”

Henry thought about the dream in which he was flown north by a snake with wings to a lake where a golden fire burned under the water. He thought about the kind of man Wellington was and the gold that had brought him far north, to the lake.

“Yes,” he said.

“Kitchimanidoo has guided you here. You understand?”

Henry said, “What if the windigo had eaten my heart instead?”

“You would be a different man with a different destiny.”

“Or you would be dead,” Maanaajii-ngamo said.

“You have been marked. You have been given the gift of visions,” the old man said. “You are welcome to stay with us as long as you need in order to understand this gift.”

Henry felt as if he’d already traveled to the end of the earth, but he realized he still had a very long way to go before his journey was finished.

“Migwech,” he said, and closed his eyes to rest.

By the time Meloux finished his story, it was well after midnight. We sat beside the lake, and I could see Henry clearly in the bright moon glow. He was an old man; it had been a long, hard day; he was tired. Hell, I was tired, but there were still questions left unanswered, things I needed to know.

“How long did you stay with the Mides?” I asked.

“In the spring, Ziibi-aawi traveled the Path of Souls. That summer, Maanaajii-ngamo took me down the river. We stayed with another of the Midewiwin, a good man named Waagosh. For seven years I learned from him. When I left, I was Mide, too.”

“You came back to Iron Lake?”

“Two more summers, I journeyed.”

“You were gone for almost ten years?”

Meloux looked up at the moon. The light washed over his face and made me think of a man gazing up through silver water. “When I came back, people on the rez did not recognize me. When they learned I was one of the Midewiwin, they were suspicious of me. They looked at my hair and thought of me in the way white men think of witches. Some Shinnobs still do.”

“You never talked to the police about what Wellington had done?”

“I was a man who had killed three times. I have never told anyone these things until now.”

“And you never tried to find Maria?”

“For half a moon I knew Maria. I loved her. I have never loved another woman. My life, Corcoran O’Connor, has been about something different from that kind of love. For many years, I did not think about her.”

“But you knew you had a son. How?”

“From visions. They began soon after Maria left me.”

“You weren’t curious about your son?”

“I am fortunate. I have often felt guided. If I was not meant to see my son, that was the way of it.”

“Then why this sudden heaviness of heart over him? Why the rush to find him?”

Something splashed in the water a dozen yards out. A fish jumping, maybe, or a muskrat diving. In the moonlight, the place was marked with a circle of black ripples edged with silver.

“I have had visions,” Meloux said. “They have told me my son needs me.”

“Henry, I don’t mean any disrespect, but from the way he looked the last time I saw him, he could have used your help a long time ago. I think it’s too late now.”

“There is a reason for the visions.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned if I know what that is, Henry.”

“They are not your visions, Corcoran O’Connor. They are not for you to understand. I will talk to him, then I will know.”

“Henry, there’s no way this man is going to talk to you. Christ, he tried to have you killed.”

“I do not believe my son would do that.”

“There’s sure a lot of evidence to the contrary.”

“I will see my son. I will see him with or without your help.”

“You can be exasperating, you know that, Henry?”

“Which is stronger,” the old man said, “the rock or the water? In the end, the rock always washes away.”

“Stow it, Henry. You’ve won. I’ll take you, okay?”

“Migwech,” the old man said.

“We both need rest, Henry. We’ll leave in the morning.”

I heard a car turn off the road, and headlights swept the trees around us.

“Your nephew’s home from the casino,” I said. “Let’s break the news to him.”

Ernie Champoux wasn’t happy, but what could he do? He was just another rock, and Meloux, as always, was the damn water.