William Krueger: Blood Hollow

“Dad, you don’t think she might be, like, trying to kill herself?”

He put his arm around her. “I’d hate to think so.”

They watched the storm a while together, then Jenny said, “I’m going to bed.”

Cork kissed the crown of her hair. “ ’Night, sweetheart.”

He called John O’Loughlin to find out if there were some emergency, and if so, some way he could help. O’Loughlin said it wasn’t an emergency, really. He was completely out of coffee, and the idea of facing a morning of shoveling without a cup of java was frightening. Cork said he always had a pot ready by six, and told his neighbor to come on over.

He started toward the front door to secure it for the night. But he imagined Charlotte Kane struggling to get in out of the cold only to find every door locked against her. He couldn’t bring himself to throw the bolt.

Jo was waiting for him in the bedroom, her book closed on the nightstand. Cork put on his flannel pajamas and slipped under the covers beside her. She put a hand softly on his chest. “Are you all right?”

Cork stared up at the ceiling, as Stevie had done earlier. “I saw something out there today.” He told her about his experience in the whiteout.

“If it was so vague, why do you think it was Charlotte?”

“Crazy, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I felt it was Charlotte, that’s all. At the same time, it wasn’t. She was different somehow.”

“One of the manidoog taking her shape?” She was speaking of the spirits the Ojibwe, whose blood ran through Cork’s veins, believed resided in the forests, and she was not speaking lightly.

“I just can’t help feeling she was trying…” He thought about it. “It’s hard to explain, but I think she reached out somehow, you know?”

“You believe she’s dead?”

“Yes.”

Jo studied his profile. Cork could feel her eyes on him.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” she said.

“Yeah.” Cork took a deep breath. “Children do stupid things, Jo. Dangerous things. Even the best of them. Sometimes I wonder if we really know our children.”

“We know them, Cork.”

“It could be Jenny out there. Or Annie. God knows we’ve had our share of close calls. I think about Fletcher and Glory, what they’ve got to face, and the truth is, I’m so damned relieved it’s not us. Isn’t that awful?”

“I’d say it’s only human.” She kissed his forehead lightly. “You’re a good man. You’ve done your best. We all have. So much is out of our hands, out of anyone’s hands.” She reached to the lamp on the nightstand and turned out the light. Then she put her arms around her husband. “Sleep,” she told him. “Just sleep now. You’ve earned it.”

He believed he’d no more earned his sleep than Fletcher and his sister had earned their worry. But his own children were safe in bed. And his wife’s warm arms cradled him. And although these were things that every day he took for granted, that night they felt like the rarest of treasures.

“Sleep,” Jo whispered. “Sleep.”

And Cork decided he could.

April

When he was twenty-one years old and wild, before he settled down to study law, Oliver Bledsoe cut off half his right foot. He did it with a McCullough chain saw. He was employed at the time on one of Hutch Gunnar’s logging crews operating out of Babbitt, hired to limb and buck, which meant that he carefully walked the felled trees, trimming off their branches and cutting the trunks into sections to be hauled to the mill. In those days, he often showed up for work nursing a hangover. That morning, he showed up drunk. It was late autumn, and a light snow had fallen the night before. A hunter’s snow. Bledsoe, as he mounted the first downed tree, was amazed at the dreamy beauty of the woods around him. He was amazed, too, at his own agility as he scampered down the trunk, cutting to the right and to the left, swinging his McCullough nimbly as if he were some kind of dancer in some kind of dream. So deeply enraptured was he, and numbed from the alcohol, that he didn’t feel at all the cut of the chain saw as it sliced through the steel toe of his Wolverine boots. He didn’t even realize he’d carved off a good chunk of his own flesh and bone until he saw his blood staining the sheet of snow on the ground below him.

The accident turned out to be a wake-up call for Bledsoe, who exchanged his chain saw for a stack of law books and became a damn fine lawyer.

Although he liked to claim he’d cut off half his foot, in truth, it was maybe a tenth-his two smallest toes and a couple of inches north of that. And while he always made it known to his opponents on the basketball court that they were playing against a cripple, he still had the best outside jump shot Cork O’Connor had ever seen.

Cork and Bledsoe sat in the men’s steam room of the Aurora YMCA. Father Mal Thorne was with them, and Randy Gooding, too. They were part of the team officially known as the St. Agnes Saints, but usually they referred to themselves as the Old Martyrs, because on Saturday mornings during basketball season, week after week in the name of the church, they sacrificed themselves on the court. Although Cork’s faith had lapsed, playing with the Old Martyrs was one of the few ties he maintained with St. Agnes. It was something he did for his body; his soul was not an issue. He enjoyed the company of the men, liked how the games brought them together in an easy fellowship. Afterward, the team generally gathered in the steam room to let the wet heat melt the ache out of their weary muscles.

“More steam?” Mal Thorne asked. He got up from his bench and poured a bit of cool water from a bucket over the thermal mechanism mounted on the wall.

Father Mal Thorne’s nose followed a crooked line. It had been broken more times than he could remember during his Golden Gloves boxing days, and later when he was the middleweight intramural champ at Notre Dame. A thin braid of scar tissue crowned his left eyebrow, but there were also two long scars across his chest clearly unrelated to boxing. How they’d happened, no one knew. The priest refused to talk about it. As a cop, Cork had seen a lot of men in holding cells or on their way to prison with similar scars, usually the result of a knife slash. He knew that Mal had run a homeless shelter on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, a tough territory. He’d heard rumors that the scars had been delivered by hoodlums trying to rob the shelter and that Mal had used his pugilist’s skills to dis-abuse them of the notion. Cork had never pushed the priest for an explanation. A man’s past was his own affair, and he dealt with his scars in his own way. Mal Thorne wasn’t tall, but he was fast and aggressive, and a natural leader on the court, so usually he played point guard.

The wall vents began to hiss hot vapor, and Mal sat down.

“Heard you on the radio yesterday, Cork, tearing into Randy’s boss,” Bledsoe said.

He was talking about Sheriff Arne Soderberg who’d taken over the office from Wally Schanno in January.

“Tearing into Arne Soderberg?” Mal laughed. “I’d have loved to hear that. What did you do, Cork?”

It had been during Olaf Gregerson’s weekly call-in radio program All Around Aurora. Sheriff Soderberg was the guest. He’d spent most of the initial interview crowing about his accomplishments in just the few weeks he’d been in office. Once the phone line opened up for calls, Cork seized the opportunity to call and point out some of the cold realities that underlay the sheriff’s glowing assertions.

“I’ll tell you what he did,” Bledsoe said. “Old Arne claims that in the couple months he’s been sheriff, crime in Tamarack County has declined thirty percent over the preceding seven-month period.”