Alone, John Sailor LePere continued down. As the boat swiftly descended, he felt his chest tighten, as if he were now in the grip of something enormous and overpowering, something that had always been waiting to embrace him. His lungs seemed ready to explode, and he became afraid, suddenly desperate not to release his hold on life. He reached down, fumbled with the buckle on his belt, but it was much too late. As the water pressure crushed his ribs, he opened his mouth to cry out. In that instant, Kitchigami filled him and took him into itself.
Cork was inside something thick, something that dulled his thinking, something he could not crawl out of. Even so, he knew what John LePere had done. He understood the sacrifice.
And he understood that now he was alone.
He felt the boat slip from under him. For a moment, the suck of it as it went under tried to pull him down, but the vest lifted him. His hands and his feet were cold. His face was cold. Sometimes when he tried to breathe, he swallowed water and coughed. The coughing hurt. He kept his eyes closed against the surge of the waves. That was easy. He had no strength to open them.
He sank into darkness often, and for long periods he was aware of nothing. Then he was suddenly staring up at a sky full of stars and a moon. The lake didn’t feel angry anymore. He was tired. It was night. He wanted to sleep.
He dreamed. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he went someplace where he could always have gone if he’d known the way; then he came back.
He opened his eyes and stared into the brightest light he’d ever seen, so bright it blinded him, yet he could not look away. Somewhere in the thick of his thinking, he remembered death came as a bright light, and he wondered, Am I dead?
A dark shape eclipsed the light. Cork saw that it was Jo’s face. She was so beautiful with the light behind her like a halo. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her, but he could not speak. So he smiled. The smallest of smiles. All he could muster before he felt himself begin to yield to darkness, to the sweet pull of oblivion, thinking his wife’s face was a good last vision, a good final gift to take with him into forever.
JO O’CONNOR STOOD in ash that covered the ground like snow. Around her as far as she could see, the bare, blackened trunks of pine trees rose up and scraped against an empty sky.
The rain had helped firefighters control and eventually extinguish the multitude of blazes that, for weeks, had been burning large areas of the North Woods. The old-growth white pines known as Our Grandfathers, sacred to the Ojibwe Anishinaabeg of the Iron Lake Reservation, had not been spared. With every breath, Jo took in the smell of char, of senseless destruction. She felt, as she had so often lately, a deep sense of loss and grieving.
“What a tragedy,” she said, then sighed.
Henry Meloux, who was among those who’d accompanied her to view the devastation, looked where she looked. His old face was soft and wrinkled. His brown eyes seemed amazingly calm. “Who can say what Kitchimanidoo is all about? We see little and understand less.”
Grace Fitzgerald had walked ahead of them with Scott and Stevie. Stevie looked back often to make certain his mother was still there. At a fallen pine, he stopped and bent down. Scott stooped beside him, and they peered intently at something on the ground.
“Mommy.” Stevie waved for Jo to come. “Look,” he said. “A flower.”
It was true. A small flower had thrust its yellow blossom up through the scorched earth and the ash.
“It’s like magic,” Stevie said.
“Not magic,” Meloux told him. “The way of Grandmother Earth. Come with me, Makadewagosh. I’ll show you other ways Grandmother Earth reveals her heart.”
Stevie grinned proudly at the name the old man now called him by. Meloux had kept a promise he’d made several weeks before when the boy and his father visited Crow Point. He’d bestowed upon Stevie another name, an Anishinaabe name. He called him Makadewagosh, which meant “silver fox,” for that was the name Meloux had dreamed. To Jo, who remembered her small son bathed in silver moonlight and slipping through the dark at Purgatory Cove to save them all, the name rang so true. Meloux led the two boys away a distance, pointing out things and talking softly as they walked.
“How is Stevie doing?” Grace asked.
“He wakes almost every night with nightmares. He wets the bed. He has trouble being separated from me. The psychologist says that in cases of post-traumatic stress, it often takes a long time to recover. But he’s very optimistic about Stevie. How about Scott?”
Grace watched her son. Her face was gentle, touched with concern. “He seems to be doing all right. He talks about it pretty openly. I wonder if the loss of his father so early has made him stronger somehow. I guess only time will tell.”
