This Tender Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

child. At four, he’d become a resident of Lincoln School. Because the boy couldn’t speak or write his name, the superintendent, in those days a man named Sparks, had given him a whole new name: Moses, because he was found in the reeds; and Washington, who happened to be Sparks’s favorite president. Mose could make sounds, scary guttural things, but not words, and so generally he just kept silent. Except when he laughed. He had a good, infectious laugh.
    Before Albert and I had come to Lincoln School, Mose had communicated in a kind of rudimentary sign language that got him by. He’d learned to read and write, but because of that missing tongue he never participated in class discussion and most teachers simply ignoredhim. After Albert and I arrived, we taught him to sign in the way we’d been taught. Our grandmother had contracted German measles while she was pregnant, and as a result, our mother had been born deaf. Our grandmother, who’d been a schoolteacher before marrying, learned American Sign Language and taught her daughter. That was how my mother communicated, so even before I could speak, I could sign. When Mrs. Frost saw this facility, she insisted that we teach her and her husband as well. Little Emmy soaked it up like a sponge. Once she could communicate with Mose, Mrs. Frost became his tutor and brought him up to speed in his education.
    There was something poetic in Mose’s soul. When I played and he signed, his hands danced gracefully in the air and those unspoken words took on a delicate weight and a kind of beauty that I thought no voice could possibly have given them.
    Just before the light died in the sky and the quiet room sank into utter darkness, Mose signed, Tell me a story.
    I told the story I’d thought up the night before when I was alone in the stone cell, except for Faria. This is what I said.
    This is a story about three kids on a dark night one Halloween One kid was named Moses, one was named Albert, and the last was Marshall . (Albert was never impressed when I put him in a story, but Mose loved it. Marshall Foote was another kid at Lincoln School, a Sioux from the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota, a kid in whom meanness ran deep.) Marshall was a bully He liked playing cruel jokes on the other two boys. That Halloween, while they were walking home late at night from a party at a friend’s house, Marshall told them about the Windigo. The Windigo, he said, was a terrible giant, a monster that had once been a man but some dark magic had turned him into a cannibal beast with a hunger for human flesh, a hunger that could never be satisfied. Just before it dropped on you from the sky, it called your name in a voice like some eerie night bird. Which did you no good, because there was nowhere you could run that the Windigo wouldn’t catch you and tear your heart out and eat it while you lay there dying and watching.
    The other two boys said he was crazy, there was no creature like that, but Marshall swore it was true. When they reached his house, he left them, warning them to watch out for the Windigo.
    Albert and Moses walked on, joking about the beast, but every sound they heard made them jump. And then, from somewhere ahead of them, came a high, thin voice calling their names.
    “Albert,” it cried. “Moses.”
    Mose grabbed my arm and signed into my hand, The monster?
    “Maybe,” I said. “Just listen.”
    The boys began to run, scared out of their minds. When they came to where the branch of a big elm tree hung over the sidewalk, a black shape dropped and landed in front of them. “I’ll eat your hearts!” it cried.
    The two boys screamed and nearly crapped their pants. Then the black shape began to laugh, and they realized it was Marshall. He called them girlies and sissies and told them to get on home so their mommas could protect them. He walked away, still laughing at his prank.
    The two boys went on in silence, ashamed, but also mad at Marshall, who, they decided, was