Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) by Shawn Lawrence Otto

this?”
    He was talking about JW’s mother. One day during thefirst summer his dad was mostly away on the road, JW’s mother was at the kitchen counter, bending over some pasties on the dough board, singing her special version of an old Finnish song:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Then the aged Väinämöinen
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Spoke aloud his songs of magic,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And a flower-crowned birch grew upward,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Crowned with flowers, and leaves all golden,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And its summit reached to heaven,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  To the very clouds uprising.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  You, my son, my Kalevala, my story of the north—
    And then, mid-verse, she stopped. She had always been a little artsy, and JW loved painting the lower cupboards with her, or making chalk masterpieces on the garage floor. But he sensed that this was different. She began seeing visions, and speaking to invisible gods.
    She never sang a word again, but she whispered day and night. JW thought she had gone crazy right then and there, and in a way she had. At the time there was no way to know that a small frog was growing inside her brain, extending its little webbed feet. Or that the tumor would eventually kill her when he was thirteen.
    JW was charged with taking care of her when his father was on the road and she was sick with the migraines, but she just lay there whispering verses, so he spent most of his time outdoors. In truth, she frightened him. It was as if some ghost spirit from the Finnish North had taken her, and when JW was around it made her upset, so he avoided her as much as he could.
    During the early stages of his mother’s illness, JW whiledaway most of the time with his friends, Craig and the twins, Keith and Kevin. They were outside from dawn until dusk, with only a few short breaks for meals or snacks at each other’s houses. They spent part of one summer exploring the dump, climbing into rusting cars, turning their steering wheels, the spice of dust, mold, and old tobacco smoke lifting from the seat stuffing. And they loved to play in the trees, climbing from one to another to avoid the sharks and lava below. But JW’s favorite game had always been cowboys and Indians.
    Craig’s mother said the game was crude, and she was surprised that Keith and Kevin, who were half Ojibwe, went along with it. But the game’s historical connotations never seemed to matter to the twins. In fact, JW usually played the Indian, while Keith and Kevin and Craig all pretended to be cowboys. They would share a root beer, pretend to get drunk, and then ride in a posse to hunt JW down.
    JW had always admired the Indian braves in TV shows, how they hopped on horses and rode bareback while shooting arrows at their enemies at a full gallop. Some days he even put on war paint and a headdress, and bet them each fifty cents they couldn’t find him before he could shoot them. They’d count to a hundred while he ran into the woods by the wetlands, where the cottonwoods and the buckthorn gave way to a green algae pond. He’d hide up in the trees and wait patiently, planning what he would do with the money.
    JW woke thick-headed and woozy in the wash light of mid-afternoon. It took him a moment to remember where he was, but the musty smell of the trailer brought him back. He heard the sound of a car door slamming, and then the sound of an engine turning over. He looked out and saw Johnny Eagle backing his Bronco out of the driveway. It headed slowly around the bend, toward the reservation road.He checked his watch. It was a little after two. The boy wouldn’t be home from school for another hour and ten minutes, if the pattern of the past few days held. He stood, took the little round bug from the table, and stepped out through the flimsy aluminum door.
    The wooden steps were catching a spot of sunlight. He could feel the warmth