Page 3 of God’s Country

“A vision,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Let me guess. A wolf eating my heart.”

He looked at me, his surprise obvious, then the light of understanding came into his eyes. “Waaboo’s had the same vision.”

They don’t always see the same things. When they do, it’s best to take the vision seriously.

“My heart’s fine,” I said.

“Maybe it’s about something else, Dad.”

Having two members of my family, both gifted in this unusual way, I’ve come to learn that visions are a tricky business, their meanings seldom clear on the surface. Sometimes, you need to have them interpreted.

As if reading my mind, Stephen said, “We should talk to Henry.”

“We’ll talk to Henry tomorrow,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m going to have a beer. Anybody else want a Leinie’s?”

After dinner, while the rest of the folks gathered around the dining room table for a rousing game of Uno, I went to check on Sam’s Place. It’s a burger joint on the shore of Iron Lake that I’ve owned for twenty years or so. It was left to me by Sam Winter Moon, a Shinnob who’d been my father’s good friend, and then mine. As they grew up, all my children spent time working there. The first employment for lots of young people in Tamarack County has been at Sam’s Place. They’ve gone on to college, some of them, established their own lives, and now they often bring their children back for a Sam’s Special or a Waaboo burger, fries, and a shake.

That evening Brittany Pennington was in charge and would close up. She’d finished high school only days before—I’d gone to her graduation ceremony and the party afterward—and would be entering Macalester College in St. Paul come fall. She was bright and reliable, and her father had worked for me in his youth.

We weren’t far from the summer solstice. At nine o’clock the sun had just set, and the sky in the west looked as if it was lit by orange flames from a fire below the horizon. When I parked in the gravel lot, I could see the surface of Iron Lake backing the old Quonset hut that Sam Winter Moon had repurposed long ago and that I have altered yet again to include an office for the business of my investigative services. The surface of the water was the color I imagined molten lava to be, but I knew that if I were to dive in, that lake water would chill my bones.

I checked in with Brittany and her crew, all fine kids. It had been a busy evening, she reported, pretty typical for a Saturday night, but she didn’t need my help in closing up. I left her to the job I knew she and the others would do well, and I wandered along the shoreline.

Except for a few years in Chicago after I trained as a cop and worked the South Side there, I’ve lived in Aurora all my life. In a way, it is my life. All that I’ve ever held dear is tied to this place, memories that play in my head like scenes from a comforting old movie. Many of those I’ve loved with all my heart have been laid to rest in this pine-scented Eden. My grandparents, my folks, my first wife, one of my children. I can’t imagine ever leaving Tamarack County. Except in death, which eventually sets us all on the Path of Souls.

As I stood on that familiar shoreline, with the streetlights of town starting to flicker and glow at my back, the sky above me and the lake before me both beginning to turn deep amethyst, and a soft breeze warm with the promise of summer kissing my cheek, my heart gave a sudden flutter. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before, lasting only a few moments, then gone. It wasn’t something born of emotion but was very much physical. As the day became dusk, the light fading, I found myself thinking, with just the slightest bit of alarm, of the vision that had been visited upon Waaboo and Stephen, the nightmare of a monstrous wolf feeding on my heart.

CHAPTER 3

Of course, I said nothing to anyone about the fluttering in my chest. Heartburn, I told myself. Indigestion. It was there and then gone. Nothing really to worry about.

The next morning, Sunday morning, we all went to church.

St. Agnes has been my home parish from birth. I was baptized and confirmed there, as were all my children. I was an altar boy, member of CYO, a Boy Scout whose troop was sponsored by the church, and now I usher one Sunday a month, count the take from the offering plates, and head up the Buildings and Grounds Committee.

St. Agnes is also where Mal served as priest for a while before he voluntarily defrocked himself. Although there were a lot of other underlying reasons for his decision, because he married Rose, there are still some in our parish, mostly older, unduly pious folks, who carry a bit of enmity in their hearts toward Mal and Rose. They’re both aware of this, and whenever they visit over a Sunday and attend mass with us, they suffer a few scowls of disapproval. They claim it doesn’t bother them. But my own guess is that there’s still some sting, especially when those scowls are turned on little Luke, who is completely innocent in all that occurred before he was born.

But Mal and Rose always insist on attending mass with us, and that Sunday was no exception. Nothing untoward occurred, and they were both welcomed warmly by the great majority of those in attendance. Afterward, when we all had changed out of our Sunday best, we had dinner—pot roast, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and tossed salad—courtesy of the women of our family, who prepared things while the men played workup softball in the backyard with the two boys. Following dinner cleanup, which was the responsibility of the males, boys included, we made our pilgrimage to the cemetery, the purpose at the heart of our gathering that weekend.

It’s always a bittersweet experience standing among all those silent headstones with so many unspoken stories buried beneath. My daughter, Annie, and my wife, Jo, are buried side by side there. I sometimes visit their graves alone. Alone, because I talk to them and tears are often the result. I don’t know about other guys, but I don’t want people gawking at me when I cry. My parents are also buried in that cemetery, and my grandfather. But not my grandmother Dilsey. She was laid to rest beneath a small spirit house in the Ojibwe cemetery behind the old mission on the Iron Lake Reservation, which is where most of my Anishinaabe relatives are buried.

Whenever I gather with my family in the cemetery and we share memories, it feels to me as if, for a brief while, we’ve brought our lost loved ones back to us.

We stood around Jo’s grave and Annie’s and told stories and embraced memories. The day was perfect for such. The sky was a vault of blue and the air warm and the tall linden tree whose boughs arch overhead gave us plenty of cool shade. There was a good deal of laughter, and a lot of tears, mine included. But I was the only one whose heart began to act up in a scary way.

I clutched my chest.

“You okay, Dad?” Stephen asked.

“Something’s wrong,” I said.

Rainy, public health nurse and Mide, lifted my chin and looked into my face. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“My heart. It feels like a galloping horse.”