Unknown - The_Growing_589064

“And your second finding, Mr. Chairperson?” asks Harcourt.

“Our second supplementary finding,” Wang replies, still referring to the notepad, “is as follows. In the absence of any duly constituted legislative body of the State of South Dakota, this panel affirms the present laws which protect species determined to be either threatened or endangered, and the laws which prohibit the use of the leghold trap or any other device legally defined as cruel.”

“So say you one, so say you all?”

One by one the jurors confirm their votes, and the Judge adjourns the court sine die. As the audience begins to file out, all but a few who form a tight knot about Dietrich’s family, Tacoma makes his way to the back of the room. He walks unsteadily, both crutches held in one hand, their rubber feet stumping against the floor tiles like a freeform walking staff.

Wanblee Wapka looks from his eldest son to his nephew and back again. “You two are a mess,” he says equably. “What does the other guy look like?”

“Little metal slivers,” Tacoma answers, grinning. “Lots of ‘em.”

Koda smiles at Kirsten as Wanblee Wapka embraces Tacoma. This is your family, too. But that is not something to be said with strangers crowding past them, and so she only holds the tighter to Kirsten’s hand, not caring who may notice.

Fifteen minutes later, they pile into Wanblee Wapka’s big double-cab pickup, Koda’s own truck entrusted to one of the enlisted men. When they are settled, Manny looks back through the slide window into the camper-topped truckbed and frowns. “What are all those boxes back there? You moving in with us, Leksi?”

“Afraid not,” Wanblee Wapka says, maneuvering the heavy truck expertly out of the narrow space and out onto the street. “Those are just a few things your aunt sent: some home-canned peaches, corn, beans, frybread, and such.”

“There’s a couple chickens and some roasts at the house, too,” Kirsten adds. “And a side of beef at the mess—everyone’s going to have a full stomach tonight.”

“Thanks, Até,” Koda says quietly, and receives a smile in return.

It is nothing, however, to the beatific expression on Manny’s face, framed in the rear-view mirror. “Good bread, good meat,” he says reverently. “Good God, let’s eat.”

*

Koda stands in a white fog of condensate billowing out of the refrigerator, the blast of air chilling her face. “You call that a couple chickens and a roast or two?”

“I admit I wasn’t as—precise—as I might have been.” Kirsten’s voice is dryly factual, but Koda has known her long enough now to recognize the hint of laughter running underneath.

“How unscientific of you,” Dakota murmurs, taking in the packed space before her. There are chickens and roasts, to be sure. There is also a ham, a slab of bacon, a couple gallons of fresh milk, butter, several dozen eggs, and an assortment of parcels tantalizingly shaped like porkchops and T-bones. Above them, the freezer compartment bulges with more of the same. A string bag of potatoes leans against the door of the under-counter cabinets, accompanied by a second of large golden onions and yet another of carrots.

“Your mother,” says Wanblee Wapka with a self-deprecating shrug, “is convinced you’re on the brink of starvation.”

“Oh, we are!” Manny chimes in from his seat at the kitchen table. “Don’t let her tell you otherwise!”

“Well, not quite.” Dakota closes the fridge door and gives her father a brief but fierce hug, then leans back to smile at him. “We’re down to ‘nourishing but unappetizing,’ though.”

“Rubber cheese,” says Kirsten, with a wrinkle of her nose.

Wanblee Wapka motions toward the driveway with a tilt of his head. “I’ll bring in the rest.”

“The rest” is two boxes of home canned fruits and vegetables, everything from wild grape jam to pickled okra. Koda unpacks the Mason jars while a pair of chickens soak in salt water in the sink. “Até?” she says hesitantly, a quart of stewed tomatoes still in her hand. “You’re sure you can spare all this?”

The sudden fall of Manny’s face is almost comical, “Leksi, we can’t take things you and Themunga might need.”

Wanblee Wapka sets down a third box, larger but lighter, and studies Dakota and her cousin for a long moment. Finally he says, “We’re not just a family ranch anymore. We’ve turned into a village. These last weeks we’ve plowed an extra five hundred acres for garden vegetables and an extra thousand for hay and feed corn. The Goetzes have brought their sheep down and settled on the Hurley place. Brenda Eagle Bear has set up her spinning wheel and loom in one of their outbuildings, and her husband Jack is making hoes and mending bent harrows, not just shoeing horses. Barring a miracle, next spring we’ll be plowing behind some of those horses. The world has changed, Dakota. We have to change with it.”

Koda sets the jar on a shelf with a rueful smile. “I know. It’s just that I never expected home to change, too.” Wanblee Wapka gives her shoulder a gentle squeeze, then goes out for more of Themunga’s ample care package.

Half an hour later, dinner preparations are in full swing. Maggie, returned home in the midst of stowing the new supplies, dragoons Kirsten into helping her wrestle the unused middle leaf of her table down from the cramped attic storage space while Wanblee Wapka coaxes the recalcitrant ends apart. His uniform tie and jacket hung on the hall tree, Tacoma peels potatoes into a large earthenware bowl set between his feet. Manny, odd man out because of his injured hands, offers encouragement to all and sundry. “Hey, cuz,” he observes as Koda sets to cutting up the chickens, “I didn’t know you were a domestic goddess.”

Deftly Koda severs a thigh from a drumstick.. “I’m not. I’m a surgeon.”

‘Watch your mouth there, bro,” Tacoma says with a grin. “She’s good with that thing.”

As they sit down to a dinner of fried chicken and gravy, mashed potatoes and biscuits, Koda glances around the table. Nostalgia runs along the edges of her consciousness, memory of a thousand evenings like this one, her father or grandfather at one end of the table, her mother at the other, the ever-increasing Rivers clan ranged in between. The family has long since outgrown the dinner table of her childhood; at Solstice this past December, they had added a pair of card tables at the end, and a third, separate, where the youngest cousins could mash their peas into their potatoes to their hearts’ content. Glancing at the woman at her side, it comes to Dakota that she may never bring Kirsten home to her mother, may never again return to a family untouched by loss. They have escaped the odds so far; but the attack that has injured Manny and Tacoma only emphasizes how tenuous their position is.

A chill passes down her spine, a shadow of premonition. There is a finality to this meal; it lies, somehow, on a point dividing past and future. Something said, something done, this night will alter the course of all their lives to come. Over the circulating dishes, she meets her father’s eyes and knows that he feels it, too.

Everything happens precisely as it should. Precisely.

It is the second time this day that the thought has come to her. Foresight is familiar to her; so is dream; so is prophecy. This is none of those things. It is a sense of pattern, of a path marked out to be trodden again and again, life after death after life through endless cycles.

It fades, gradually, and her attention returns to those at the table about her. Her father, her brother and cousin; Maggie, who is her friend; Kirsten, who is her heart.

And death sits at the table with them, bone-faced and inexorable.