“Could be a lot of explanations for that, Aunt Rainy,” Daniel said. Calm counsel. One of the reasons I liked him.
“We’re flying down first thing in the morning,” Rainy said. “But right now, I want to talk to Uncle Henry.”
I could see that Jenny and Daniel understood. The old man might not be able to advise on specifics, but Rainy needed grounding, and at one time or another we’d all gone to Meloux for the solace of his company.
“It’s late,” Daniel offered cautiously. “Dark.”
“I can find Crow Point blindfolded,” Rainy said, no idle boast.
“Can I go?” Waaboo pleaded.
“The only place you’re going is to bed,” Jenny said and kissed the top of his head.
We left them to the nighttime rituals and drove north out of Aurora.
*
If you have never been outside a city at night when there is no moon, then you don’t know darkness. Without streetlamps and neon and all the ambient glow in any town or city, night can be impenetrably black. Even a million stars won’t illuminate a path through a forest. We drove the county road along the shore of Iron Lake and saw the occasional porch light of a cabin or the dull luminescence from behind a curtained window as we passed, but without the headlights on my Expedition, we’d have been stone blind. Rainy stared ahead and held to silence, deep in her anxious thinking, her own terrible imaginings. I could have tried to ease her worry, but it would have done no good. She needed Henry Meloux.
I parked off the gravel road beside the double-trunk birch that marks the beginning of the trail to Crow Point. The path cuts through thick woods of pine and spruce mixed with stands of poplars. It’s well worn. For most of his hundred years, Henry Meloux has lived in virtual isolation. To my knowledge, he’s never discouraged anyone from visiting him, but because he’s a hell of a lot more difficult to get to than your family physician, you have to want his help pretty bad. That well-worn path was a clear indication that a lot of people did.
By flashlight, we made our way two miles through the woods, crossing at some point onto land that belonged to the Iron Lake Ojibwe. When we broke from the trees onto Crow Point, the whole sky opened before us, and against the haze of a billion stars, I could see the dark shapes of two cabins. The older was Meloux’s, which he and his uncle had built more than eighty years before. The other had been Rainy’s once, and I’d helped build that one. Rainy’s aunt, Leah Duling, lived under its roof now.
There has never been electricity on Crow Point, but I could see light in both cabins, kerosene lamps. I’d expected to have to wake Meloux, but in his mysterious way, he was probably already expecting us. My suspicion was confirmed when, just before we knocked, I heard his melodious old voice call out, “Leah, they are here.”
Rainy’s aunt opened the door and welcomed us both with a hug. Leah was just into her seventies, and most folks would have called her old, but compared to Henry Meloux, she was a spring chicken. She’d spent her life in difficult places all over the world, the wife of a missionary. She maintained that until she came to Crow Point, she’d never known a place where she felt she belonged. But in Meloux’s cabin, which smelled of tea, blackberry, and sage, she seemed beautifully at home.
Meloux sat at the table, one he’d made himself so long ago that he claimed even he couldn’t remember exactly when. The walls of his cabin held mementos from his past—a deer-prong pipe, a bear skin, a bow whose string was made of snapping turtle sinew. The old man sat straight and tall, his hair a long fall of white over his shoulders, his face more lined than the shell of a map turtle, his brown eyes bright even at that late hour. Though it was a hot night, a steaming mug sat in front of him.
“He told me a storm is coming,” Leah said as she handed us each a mug of tea.
“But not from the sky.” Meloux’s eyes settled on Rainy. “What troubles you, Niece?”
How the old Mide always knew when turmoil was coming was only one of the many mysteries in the puzzle that was Henry Meloux.
We sat at the table.
“I got a call from my son, Uncle Henry, a desperate call.” Rainy gave him the details, and the old man sipped his tea as he listened.
“And you are afraid,” Meloux said at the end.
“Yes.” Which was something she hadn’t admitted to, not even with me.
“What is there to be afraid of?” Meloux asked.
“He’s in trouble.”
“What is there to be afraid of?” the old man asked again.
“That he’ll be arrested, that he’ll be charged with murder, that he’s alone in all this.”
“And are these things really so?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you do not know what there is to be afraid of. There is only what you imagine.”
“I can guess how these things usually go, Uncle Henry.”
“Suppose,” Meloux said, “you imagined something different.”
“Like what?”
“What would give you comfort?”
“To believe that it’s all some terrible mistake.”
“Then why not imagine that?”
“Because he was so afraid.”
“That is his fear. It does not have to be yours. If you feed his fear with your own, what do you have?”
“It’s hard, Uncle Henry.”
“I did not say it was easy.” He eyed her with great compassion. “You have helped others do this.” A gentle reminder of her own training and work as a Mide.
Rainy took a deep, calming breath.
“Leah,” the old man said. “Light sage and smudge this room, cleanse the air and cleanse our spirits.” He reached across the table and took Rainy’s hands in his own callused, wrinkled palms. “You have work ahead of you, Niece. It will probably be hard work, work that will test you. That is one of the things love does. It tests us in difficult ways. But love is also fear’s worst enemy. In what is ahead of you, hold to your love and not your fear. And when you imagine, imagine the best of what might be.” He smiled and offered a little shrug. “What harm can it do?”
*
As we walked the long path back, I could tell that Rainy was comforted, and I marveled, as I often did, at the wisdom of Henry Meloux. What had he told her, really, that she didn’t already know? This was one of the old Mide’s greatest gifts, I thought, his ability to guide people to the place of their own wisdom, helping them see the truths they already knew but had lost sight of. He’d been right. With what little we knew about Peter’s situation, what could we do but imagine, and so why not imagine the best? That it was all some great misunderstanding, some terrible mistake. When everything was revealed to us and we knew all the facts, if the situation turned out to be different, we could deal with that. In the meantime, I thought, we would hold to love and to love’s companion, which is hope.
Rainy took my hand as we walked, following the light our flashlights threw on the ground.
“Migwech,” she said, which is the Ojibwe word for “thank you.”
“What for?”