Page 107 of The River We Remember

Wicklow said, “What do you mean?”

“After the army brought the war to an end,” Bluestone explained, “they rounded up every Dakota they could and marched them to Fort Snelling, up at Saint Paul. A military commission tried those accused of killing white settlers. They were mostly warriors. They weren’t allowed defense counsel or witnesses to testify in their behalf. The trials were shams that resulted in the death sentence for over three hundred men. Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentence of all but thirty-nine. At the last minute, one of these warriors was granted a reprieve.

“So, at ten o’clock in the morning on December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Dakota men stood together on an enormous scaffolding constructed for the occasion, the largest legally sanctioned mass execution in American history. At a given signal, the warriors dropped to their deaths at the same moment. A crowd of spectators estimated at four thousand had gathered to watch and to cheer.”

Although Bluestone recounted this tragic history in almost a monotone, to Charlie it felt as if a great stone had been laid on all their hearts, and a long silence followed.

At last, Bluestone went on. “After the executions in Mankato, Takoda’s family was shipped off to North Dakota. Years later, they made their way back, but the soil they’d broken and the house and barn they’d built, all that had been taken over by Quinn’s ancestors, documents filed legally. So my great-grandfather settled on a small parcel of land too wet and too rocky to be attractive to white farmers. He made a life there, where the house I live in sits. It’s not an unusual story. Most Dakota in Minnesota lost everything.”

Wicklow said, “Did you ever wonder if it might have been Quinn’s great-great-grandfather who killed yours?”

“That speculation has been made from time to time by lots of folks here. To me it’s never much mattered.”

Charlie had been silent, but now she spoke, addressing an issue that had been puzzling her no end. “You told Scott Madison that a good man died on Inkpaduta Bend, a man worthy of respect. Frankly, it surprises me that you’d think about Jimmy Quinn in that way.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then why did you say it?”

“I wasn’t talking about Quinn.”

“Who then?”

“Takoda.”

“I don’t understand. You said he went away to warn the settlers and never came back.”

“I didn’t say he was never found, Charlie. Word reached his wife that she would find his body on what was even then called Inkpaduta Bend. She went with her children, my great-grandfather and his sister. They found his body hanging from a cottonwood tree. He’d been tortured, mutilated. They cut him down and took him home and buried him. Then they were taken themselves. It was never clear who’d killed him, the whites or his own people.”

“His own people?” Wicklow was clearly surprised.

“It was a divisive conflict, even among the Dakota. To this day, there’s often bad blood between the families of those whose ancestors fought the whites and those whose ancestors befriended them. People in Black Earth County swear that you can hear a woman crying out on the Bend. They say it’s the ghost of a white woman killed there by Inkpaduta’s band. I’ve heard that crying myself. My family, we’ve always believed it’s the sound of my great-great-grandmother weeping for her dead husband. Want to know something strange? It’s a sound I’ve heard in a lot of the places I’ve been where people were killed.”

“You’ve seen a lot of war,” Wicklow said. “When did you leave Black Earth County to join the Marines?”

“Nineteen thirty-nine. I was twenty.”

“If your father needed you to help earn money for your mother’s treatments, why did you take off?”

“My mother died. Doesn’t surprise me that you don’t remember. Never any mention of it in the Clarion.”

“I’m sorry,” Wicklow said.

Bluestone shrugged off the apology. “Water under the bridge. After that, there was nothing holding me here.”

“What brought you back, Noah?” Charlie asked.

He thought about this, and while he did, his dark eyes studied that patch of blue sky at the end of the cellblock. “It was time to come home,” he finally said. “That’s all. It was time.”

“To a place where people hate you?”

“This county’s got no monopoly on hate, Charlie. I came back because of the land, because of my good memories of it, because it’s in my blood, I suppose.”

Brody stepped into the cellblock and said, “I’ve got a call to go out on. Sam, Charlie, I need you both to leave.”

Wicklow had been taking notes on a little pad. He closed it and put it in his shirt pocket, along with the pencil he’d been using. “I’d like to talk with you some more, Noah, if you’re willing.”

“I’m not going anywhere soon,” Bluestone said. “And as long as we stick with the past.”