He used his training as a fur trade clerk, said Mrs. Peace. Keeping track of every transaction. My aunt told me that he kept these letters in a metal box, locked. She was young when he died, but she remembered that little key. It was kept in an old sugar jar, the handles broken off. He worried that kids would mess around with these papers. This here was all he had of her, proof he looked for her.
Mrs. Peace locked the plastic pages into a ring binder. The first letters were addressed to Dr. Haniford Ames. Each of the letters from Wolfred, later from a lawyer also, requested the remains of LaRose Roberts. Her chipped incisor, fractured and knit skull, injuries from the vicious kick of a dissolute fur trader, as well as her tubercular bones, would make her distinctive. His letters searched after her, then the letters went on. Wolfred’s daughter, the second LaRose, kept them going. There were also letters from her time in Carlisle. And then the letter writing passed on to her daughter and then to Mrs. Peace. For well over a century these letters had searched after the bones of Mirage, the Flower, LaRose.
LaRose had some use, first of all, in Dr. Haniford Ames’s research. Letters from Dr. Ames politely refusing Wolfred’s requests attested to the value of her body in the name of science. Her bones demonstrated the unique susceptibility of Indians to this disease, and also how long she’d fought it. Over and over, her body had walled off and contained the disease. She had been, said the doctor, a remarkable specimen of humanity. For a time, also, LaRose had become an ambassador to the curious. Ames, according to the lawyer, had no right to take LaRose on the road as an illustration for his scientific lectures on the progress of tuberculosis. Ames had willed all of the human remains in his possession to the Ames County Historical Society in Maryland, where he spent his old age. The bones went on display.
After the letters from Wolfred, the bones were kept in a drawer next to the bones of other Indians—some taken from burial scaffolds, some dug out of burial mounds, some turned up when fields were plowed, highways constructed, the foundations of houses or banks or hospitals or hotels and swimming pools dug and built. For many years the historical society refused to return the bones because, wrote the president, the bones of Wolfred’s wife were an important part of the history of Ames County.
LaRose’s bones went on display once again and were abruptly removed after an unsolved break-in. Later still, the human remains of the first LaRose, who had known the secrets of plants, who could find food in any place, who had battled a rolling head and memorized Bible verses, that LaRose who had been marked out for her intelligence and decorated with ribbons every year, and marked out also as incorrigible by two of her teachers at the mission, that LaRose who had flung off her corsets and laughed when she walked again in moccasins, not heeled shoes, that LaRose attended to by pale-blue spirits and thunder beings during the births of her children, the LaRose who loved the thin scar next to Wolfred’s smile, that LaRose, what remained of her on earth, was, to the president of the historical society’s great regret, somehow lost.
AUGUST LIGHT POURED long through the trees. The ticks were dead. The grasses flowed in the ditches and LaRose could not stop his thoughts. He was compelled to sleep on the spot of ground where the boy he replaced had died. This inner directive was so strong that LaRose lied for the first time in his life in order to accomplish it. He told Emmaline that he was supposed to go to Peter and Nola’s over the weekend. He invented a friend from school because they didn’t know kids from Pluto, he talked about a birthday party, and he made it sound plausible. He felt a flicker of wonder that his lie was so easily delivered and so instantly believed. Peter would pick him up while she was at work, he said. Emmaline was disappointed. She often brought LaRose to work with her on weekends and he helped in her office, in the classrooms. At noon they went to Whitey’s and bought mozzarella sticks or a petrified-tasting fish sandwich from Josette.
No, said Emmaline at first. No, you can’t go.
LaRose looked into her eyes and said, Please? That look got him things. He was learning to use it. Maggie had taught him.
Emmaline took a deep breath, let it out. She frowned but gave in. LaRose hugged his mother good-bye and kissed her cheek. How long would that last, Emmaline thought, pushing back the flop of hair he now affected. The dark wing hung to his eye.
See you next week, Mom. He gave her an extra hug, extra-sweet. There was something in that hug that made her step back. Holding him by his shoulders at arm’s length, she scanned him.
You okay?
He nodded. Already caught.