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skirts around to the other side. It’s there he sees her, the girl. She holds her kewpie doll up in front of her eyes. They are face to face.
    “Leave my sister alone!”
    It’s the ballplayer, and he wields an axe above his head like he’s waiting for a home-run pitch. Mac swings down with his picket, striking him on his shoulder. The next instant, Pete comes from behind and strikes the Indian on the top of his head. Mac hears the crunching sound.
    He slumps, but stays on his feet, staggering off in the direction of the campfire, only to collapse on it. An old Indian woman rushes in to pull the body from the fire, and she pats at sparks smouldering on the flannel shirt. Mac can smell the burning cloth.
    Jeepers yells again, “Let’s get the hell out of here.” The car horn honks.
    “Get in!” Nick shouts. Both Mac and Pete drop their pickets, the blood dripping from Pete’s hand. They scurry into the car. For a moment, the tires spin in the loose dirt. Then the car lurches forward and it’s gone from the camp.

• Chapter 2 •
    T he least Roseanna can do is visit her brother Thomas’s grave. It seems that is all she has ever done for him, year after year. She’s an old lady already, and nothing has been done. But now that she has a daughter grown-up and educated, they can plan something together.
    “Fifty-seven years since Thomas died.” Roseanna gasps for breath. She tugs at Angela’s sleeve, sits down on the seat of her walker and takes two puffs on her inhaler. They are stopped halfway up the hill to the cemetery.
    Roseanna sorts through her jumbled thoughts, trying to remember the long-ago night…the dance music, Kokum’s stories at the campfire, the car lights…. The next morning she chopped up her kewpie doll with Thomas’s axe.
    Her brother Thomas had been her only solace at the residential school. Going back there in the fall had been like going to hell, she was so lonely. Only after, in Regina, had she learned to use alcohol for her loneliness, and to let any man use her...red man, or white man, it didn’t matter. He could shove her down in the back seat of his car, and she might as well have been split in half like her kewpie doll. Some time in the middle of the mess of those years of her life, she had given birth to a son. If it hadn’t been for Kokum to raise him, who knows what would have happened to her Glen. And only much later came Angela. How this baby survived her birth, healthy and without mental impairments stemming from an alcohol-soaked mother, had to be a miracle. Roseanna had thought she was already too old to have babies, so when Angela was born she took it as a message from the Great Spirit to clean up what was left of her life and do whatever she could to make a decent life for her daughter. And now she is so proud of her Angela; how her daughter can walk so straight and tall and look at other people face to face. Fifty-seven years ago Roseanna had stared at her feet, as if hiding her eyes would keep white people away from the secret wishes that they might laugh at.
    “Ready to try and walk some more?” Angela asks.
    “A hard climb. It didn’t used to be a hard climb.”
    “Kokum’s funeral was a few years ago,” Angela says. “You didn’t need a walker then, or an inhaler.”
    Roseanna wants to see the new marker that Glen has placed on her brother Thomas’s grave. In those years there wasn’t money to mark graves, but it is different now, and was different even when Kokum died. Angela was already going to high school when Kokum died. Her funeral was a big celebration. Kokum lived to be a hundred.
    Angela follows behind, her hands on her mother’s hips in case she tips over.
    “Was Uncle Thomas’s wake the same as Kokum’s?” Angela asks. Her mother breaks into a cough, and Angela has to sit her down on the walker.
    “Do you need your inhaler?”
    “Too many puffs, no good,” Roseanna gasps. “The doctor said. I’ll just rest here awhile.”
    The climb