The next three children arrived during thunderstorms. LaRose howled when the thunder cracked. Energy boiled up in her and the births were easier. Each child was born strong and exceptionally well-formed. They were named Patrice, Cuthbert, Cleophile, and LaRose. It was clear they would all possess the energy and sleek purpose of their mother, the steady capability and curiosity of their father, variations of the two combined.
She scoured the floorboards of her house, sewed muslin curtains. Her children learned how to read and write in English and spoke English and Ojibwe. She corrected their grammar in both languages. In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships. She made a map of the world on a whitewashed board, from memory. Everybody factored, copying their father’s numbers. They all sewed and beaded, especially once the snow came down and isolated them. The children chopped wood and kept the stove stoked. Wolfred taught them the mystery of dough making, the wonder of capturing invisible wild yeasts to raise the bread, the pleasant joy of baking loaves in wood ash and over fire. The oiled paper windows were replaced by glass. The land would become reservation land, but Wolfred had homesteaded it and the agents and priest left them alone.
When her youngest child was a year old, LaRose’s urgent cough exploded past her strength and pain shot through her bones. Wolfred made her drink the butter off the top of the milk. He made her rest. He wrapped her up carefully and set hot stones in the bed. She improved and grew strong. She was herself for years. Then one spring day she collapsed again, spilling a bucket of cold water, and lay wet in the cold grass, wracked, furious, foaming bright arterial blood. Yet again, though, she recovered, grew strong. She fooled the ancient being and wrested from it ten more years.
Finally, in its ecstasy to live, the being seized her. It sank hot iron knives into her bones. Snipped her lungs into paper valentines. Wolfred spooned into her mouth the warmed fat of any game he brought down. He still made her rest, wrapped her carefully every night, and set hot lake rocks around her feet. Every night she said good-bye, tried to die before morning, was disappointed to awaken. He arranged a plaster of boiled mashed nettles between strips of canvas, and lowered it onto her chest. She improved, gained strength, but was herself for only a month. On a cool late summer day with insects loud in the hay field, tangled song in the birch trees, she folded herself again into the grass. Staring up into a swirl of brilliant sky, she saw an ominous bird. Wolfred wrapped LaRose in quilts and laid her on a bed of cut reeds in the wagon bed. The children had piled the bed thick and high. They had covered the boards with two heavy horse blankets, then with their quilts. LaRose saw this bed they had made for her and stroked their faces.
Take back your blankets, she said, in a horror that she would spread what ate her.
Air them out, she cried. Air out the house. For a time, sleep in the barn.
They touched her, tried to calm her.
I am warm, she smiled, though she wasn’t.
Wolfred heard there was a doctor in newly built St. Paul who had a treatment for the disease. He took LaRose overland in the wagon. There, after a two-week journey that nearly killed her, she met Dr. Haniford Ames.
In an immaculate examining room, the mild, pale doctor took her pulse with calm fingers, listened to her breathe, and explained what he’d learned from a southerner, Dr. John Croghan. In a great cavern in Kentucky, he had originated cave therapy for consumption, or phthisis. The purity and mineral health of the air in caves was curative. Dr. Haniford Ames had hollowed out and built four stone huts in the Wabasha caves of St. Paul, and there he kept his patients, feeding them well and making certain that their surroundings were clean and beneficial. When he met LaRose, the doctor was at first opposed to bringing her into the treatment regimen. Because she was an Indian, he was certain she could not be cured, but Wolfred was adamant. They waited eight days. A patient died and Wolfred handed over all the money they possessed. She was admitted. Her whitewashed stone room was tiny, with space just for a pallet and washstand. The front opened onto an expansive rock ledge where she would lie all day watching the untamed, torrential Mississippi River. LaRose smiled when Wolfred set her on the soft, fresh mattress. From the bed she could see across the river to the horizon, to the east, where bold pink clouds urgently massed.