old man was trespassing. She wasn’t even dying to know what he thought he was doing or why he’d chosen her place. At the moment her thoughts were more practical and pressing. This old fellow looked as frail as parchment and he was obviously soaked to the bone. There was no telling how long he’d been here, but it took no genius to realize that he was in danger of getting pneumonia. She had to get him dried off and warmed up at once. And that meant she had to get him inside.
His eyes were open and he was more or less facing her way, but he showed no sign of seeing Renata. She wondered if he might be blind. She wondered if he might be crazy. She wondered how on earth he’d gotten here without a car. Surely nobody would have left this old man out here all alone!
She took a few steps forward, then crouched before him. The lawn was saturated now and the rain was lashing the ground again. She knew that if she didn’t move him soon, she’d end up drenched as well.
“Excuse me, sir,” Renata said quietly, afraid to startle the spooky old fellow. “I’m Renata Meyer. I live here. I’ve got warm blankets inside and I can have some hot coffee going in no time. Wouldn’t you like to come in and dry off?”
The chanting continued. His eyes showed no sign that he knew another person had joined him. Could he be deaf and blind? she wondered. Or was he in some sort of trance?
Uneasily, she moved closer and risked laying one hand on his arm. It was a thin arm, devoid of muscle, but it didn’t even twitch.
“Please, sir. Maybe you don’t care about the rain, but I do. I’m getting cold. Can’t we go inside and talk?”
The chanting changed pitch then—higher, more eerie. It occurred to Renata that maybe the old man didn’t speak English. She had heard that there were old Indians who still spoke their native tongue. And this one looked old enough to have ridden against Custer...or maybe Columbus.
Renata bit her lower lip and tried to decide what to do. She felt absolutely helpless. She still remembered her own dear grandfather, who’d died at the age of ninety-six but hadn’t recognized any of them at the end. If somebody had found him wandering around, befuddled and confused, she would have wanted them to take care of him.
She knelt in the mud right before the old fellow, put both hands on his shoulders and tried one more time. “Please, sir. I know this is important to you. But getting you warm and dry is important to me. Can’t we go inside now? Later, when the rain stops, you can come back and finish. Or you can even chant in my living room.”
This time his eyes flickered over her in what almost looked like sympathy. He brushed one hand in her direction, as if to say, “You go inside. Don’t worry about me.” But he did not stop chanting. And he did not rise.
It was pouring by now. Renata couldn’t see herself forcibly dragging the old man into the house even if she’d had the physical strength to do it. There was a dignity about him that made her feel awkward about calling some authority to take him away. But she’d rather have him mad at her than have him die of exposure right here on her lawn.
“Is there anybody I can call?” she asked. “Do you have family or friends near here?”
It occurred to Renata that Timberlake Lodge was a stone’s throw from the back of her property, and it was feasible that he’d hiked here from there. When the lodge had belonged to the Ingallses, Liza and Amanda had sometimes walked over to her place to visit, and since Edward Wocheck had turned it into a resort, she’d encountered a few tourists nosing around on their morning meanderings. But Edward’s resort catered to a ritzy crowd. Renata couldn’t see this wilted old guy as a typical guest or morning jogger. He seemed more like a candidate for Worthington House, the convalescent center in town.
Relieved that she’d finally thought of a few leads to check out, Renata said, “I’m going to try to find out where you belong, sir. If you change your mind while I’m gone, just come on in and I’ll fix you some breakfast. I’m going to put on some coffee.”
He kept on chanting as she turned and headed for the house, oblivious to the thunderous new cloudburst that nipped at her heels.
* * *
“COME IN, BRICK,” squawked the radio in the police car. “I’ve got a message from the captain.”
Under other circumstances, Michael Youngthunder would have grinned. He remembered when he’d first met Lieutenant Brick Bauer, a kind, decent man struggling to pretend he wasn’t madly in love with his female precinct captain. Beautiful Karen Keppler—they called her “Captain Killer” now—had ruled the station house with an iron hand, but she’d been kind to Michael and his elderly grandfather. Now she was married to Brick, publicly admitted she adored him and actually allowed her dispatcher to convey messages to her husband when he was on duty without using the complex county police code that was more trouble than it was worth in such a small town. Everybody knew everybody else’s business anyway.
Michael had no interest in Tyler’s business, and he would never have come to Tyler at all if his grandfather had not begged him. Last winter Grand Feather, as he’d affectionately called the old one since childhood, had heard about the proposed expansion of Timberlake Lodge near Tyler around the same time he’d heard that some Native Americans in other parts of the country were reclaiming sacred bones from white museums and preventing development on traditional burial grounds. Tyler, the old one insisted, had been built near the site where his ancestors were buried...on land “stolen” by white people 150 years ago.
Michael, the manager of a busy Katayama Computers retail outlet, had better things to do with his time than root through the countryside searching for nonexistent Indian bones. But the suit and tie he wore to work each day could not totally obliterate the part of him that was still Winnebago, and the nice paycheck he earned could never compete with his love for the old man who had raised him. So six months ago he’d come to Tyler, talked with Captain Keppler and Lieutenant Bauer, who’d been kind enough to spend a day driving Grand Feather to all possible sites for the burial ground, which allegedly could be identified by a horseshoe of oak trees. They hadn’t found anything and that had been the end of it.
Until last night. Until news of the scheduled ground breaking of the new wing of Timberlake Lodge Resort had been broadcast on the only Madison station that his grandfather’s puny television picked up in Wisconsin Dells. An hour later Michael had received a call from his uncle, who now owned a tiny remaining piece of allotment land near the old shack where Grand Feather still lived and where Michael himself had grown up. It broke Michael’s heart to see the old man live in such squalor, but Grand Feather would not be moved. He said he’d lived as a true Winnebago on that patch of land back when the old ones still taught ancient rituals that they’d learned from their foreparents before the arrival of the whites. He was born a Winnebago, he had lived a Winnebago, and he would be buried as a Winnebago when the time came. More than once he’d claimed that he was ready to die and could not rest until he knew he would not be buried among white strangers.
Although Michael lived in Sugar Creek, a good hour and a half from Wisconsin Dells, the family always called him when there was a problem with Grand Feather, partly because they knew that nobody loved the old one more and partly because Michael was the best equipped of all of them to deal with white people in the outside world. He was the only one with a college degree and a VCR, the only one who stood out like a sore thumb whenever he went home to visit. His cousins called him a half-breed, even though he wasn’t, and treated him like a white, even though his heart was still Winnebago. At least he thought it was; he knew he wanted it to be. Most of the time he was too busy to think about it, a condition that was easier to handle than was grappling with his tangled cultural roots.
This
