graveyard filled with dead Germans.
I walked to school alone for a week, missing Aunt Hazel and her stories. When Mr. Simons saw my long face he gave me a book to read during lunch hour, Journey to the Center of the Earth , which took my mind off some of my troubles. At night Aunt Hazel stayed behind her curtain. I will tell you what bothered me worst. Her eyes had a flatness, a glazed-over expression that I’d seen on bullheads when I pulled them from the river and smashed them against a rock. All the light had gone out of her eyes as surely as a wick being turned down. What August Schilling had said in that store was terrible, but the mention of the name seemed to bother her worst. Inkpaduta . Her emotions seemed to surge between such heights and pure depths that I was afraid for her.
“Give me time,” she told me one night.
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to brush your hair?”
She turned away from me.
The next Saturday it rained all day again and turned the barren fields into a hog wallow that sucked away my boots when I went to collect eggs from the hens. It was a cold rain for late July, beating like hail against the shingles, coursing down the eaves and overflowing the rain barrels where the women washed their hair and clothes. The root cellar filled with enough water that when I opened the heavy doors I heard the rats calling to one another as they climbed the shelves among the lard and onions for higher ground. It was the kind of rain that would have done us good a few months ago when we still hoped for a crop, but now just made a mess of things.
The only good thing it did was wake up Aunt Hazel from her daze. After I shucked off my muddy boots and jacket and climbed, wet and shivering, to the loft, I found her humming under her breath and rearranging things on the bed. She smoothed out her dress and smiled at me. “I’ve always loved the sound of rain,” she said.
I nodded. There were lights in her green eyes again. Cat’s eyes, that’s what she had when she was happy. A feline, mysterious intelligence. On her bed, the scrapbook was open to a page of torn and yellowed newsprint. I thought it might be one of the newspapers she had somehow saved from Missouri, the ones grandpa Jakob wrote that caused everybody to hate him, but this was something different. PRAIRIE MASSACRE, read the headline. Closer, I saw that the article came from the Saint Peter Tribune, 1869. Studying it, I realized it was reprint commemorating something that happened a decade earlier on the prairies, 1859, the season the Senger family arrived in the valley. The subtitle read BLOODSHED FORETELLS GREATER WAR. I wondered why she had kept such a grim thing.
Aunt Hazel pointed at the illustration of Inkpaduta near the head- line. The artist had rendered his face with a jack-o-lantern’s crudeness, heavily pockmarked, with a long goblin’s nose shadowing canine jaws. A necklace of wolf claws encircled the troll-man’s squat throat, and below the drawing his translated name was printed: The Red End.
“A monster,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “But we made him so.”
Beside him there was an illustration of a young girl, her dark hair in a bun, showing her profile as she turned away from the artist. Her lips parted ever so slightly as though she were about to whisper something terrible and true. Abbie Gardner , it read below her drawing, sole survivor of the massacre .
“Don’t you know,” she was saying as she turned the page of her scrapbook, “that the children of darkness have always been more shrewd than the children of light? But how do you know which are which?”
Outside the rain continued to clatter on the shingles. The window was a blurred pane that reflected back the candle’s pale flame and my own dark features. Somewhere the river was rising. Somewhere horsemen rode toward us on the narrow road, men in long dusters, oily with
I walked to school alone for a week, missing Aunt Hazel and her stories. When Mr. Simons saw my long face he gave me a book to read during lunch hour, Journey to the Center of the Earth , which took my mind off some of my troubles. At night Aunt Hazel stayed behind her curtain. I will tell you what bothered me worst. Her eyes had a flatness, a glazed-over expression that I’d seen on bullheads when I pulled them from the river and smashed them against a rock. All the light had gone out of her eyes as surely as a wick being turned down. What August Schilling had said in that store was terrible, but the mention of the name seemed to bother her worst. Inkpaduta . Her emotions seemed to surge between such heights and pure depths that I was afraid for her.
“Give me time,” she told me one night.
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to brush your hair?”
She turned away from me.
The next Saturday it rained all day again and turned the barren fields into a hog wallow that sucked away my boots when I went to collect eggs from the hens. It was a cold rain for late July, beating like hail against the shingles, coursing down the eaves and overflowing the rain barrels where the women washed their hair and clothes. The root cellar filled with enough water that when I opened the heavy doors I heard the rats calling to one another as they climbed the shelves among the lard and onions for higher ground. It was the kind of rain that would have done us good a few months ago when we still hoped for a crop, but now just made a mess of things.
The only good thing it did was wake up Aunt Hazel from her daze. After I shucked off my muddy boots and jacket and climbed, wet and shivering, to the loft, I found her humming under her breath and rearranging things on the bed. She smoothed out her dress and smiled at me. “I’ve always loved the sound of rain,” she said.
I nodded. There were lights in her green eyes again. Cat’s eyes, that’s what she had when she was happy. A feline, mysterious intelligence. On her bed, the scrapbook was open to a page of torn and yellowed newsprint. I thought it might be one of the newspapers she had somehow saved from Missouri, the ones grandpa Jakob wrote that caused everybody to hate him, but this was something different. PRAIRIE MASSACRE, read the headline. Closer, I saw that the article came from the Saint Peter Tribune, 1869. Studying it, I realized it was reprint commemorating something that happened a decade earlier on the prairies, 1859, the season the Senger family arrived in the valley. The subtitle read BLOODSHED FORETELLS GREATER WAR. I wondered why she had kept such a grim thing.
Aunt Hazel pointed at the illustration of Inkpaduta near the head- line. The artist had rendered his face with a jack-o-lantern’s crudeness, heavily pockmarked, with a long goblin’s nose shadowing canine jaws. A necklace of wolf claws encircled the troll-man’s squat throat, and below the drawing his translated name was printed: The Red End.
“A monster,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “But we made him so.”
Beside him there was an illustration of a young girl, her dark hair in a bun, showing her profile as she turned away from the artist. Her lips parted ever so slightly as though she were about to whisper something terrible and true. Abbie Gardner , it read below her drawing, sole survivor of the massacre .
“Don’t you know,” she was saying as she turned the page of her scrapbook, “that the children of darkness have always been more shrewd than the children of light? But how do you know which are which?”
Outside the rain continued to clatter on the shingles. The window was a blurred pane that reflected back the candle’s pale flame and my own dark features. Somewhere the river was rising. Somewhere horsemen rode toward us on the narrow road, men in long dusters, oily with
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