Trickster's Point Read Online Free PDF

There was also, tacked to the wall, a page from an old Skelly gas calendar, July 1957, with a photo of a fine-figured woman in very tight shorts bending over the engine of a Packard to check the oil. It had been there as long as Cork had been coming to Meloux’s cabin. What it meant to the old man, why he’dheld on to it all these years, Cork had no idea. It was just another of the mysteries, large and small, that were Meloux.
    Meloux sat at the old birchwood table. In his youth, he’d stood nearly six feet tall, but he was smaller now, or looked it. His hair hung long and white over his bony shoulders. His face was like a parched desert floor, sunbaked and fractured by countless lines. His eyes were enigmas. They were dark brown, and there was in them the look of ancient wisdom; yet at the same time they seemed to hold an impish glint, suggesting that the old man, at any moment now, was going to spring on you an unexpected and delightful surprise. He’d brought out one of his pipes, this one a simple thing decades old, carved from a small stone block that had been quarried at Pipestone in southwestern Minnesota. From a leather pouch he took a pinch of tobacco, sprinkled a bit on the tabletop as an offering to the spirits, filled the pipe bowl, and they smoked together in silence. Cork was eager to speak with his old friend, but he was also cognizant of tradition and waited patiently until, at last, Meloux said, “Wiisigamaiingan.”
    Which was the Ojibwe name Meloux had long ago given to Jubal Little. It meant “coyote.”
    “You’ve already heard?” Cork said. He looked to Rainy, who’d given no indication she knew about the trouble that day. Then he said with understanding, “The rez telegraph.”
    Rainy said, “Isaiah Broom came to tell us.”
    “News he didn’t mind bringing, I’m sure,” Cork said.
    “A lot of Ojibwe were disappointed in Jubal Little, but that doesn’t mean we’re happy the man’s dead.”
    “You were with him.” Meloux set the pipe on the table. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    He did, of course. Unburdening was part of what had brought him. He told them about the day, told them how he’d stayed those long hours in the shadow of Trickster’s Point as, ragged breath by ragged breath, Jubal Little had lost his hold on life.
    “Three hours?” Rainy said. “With an arrow in his heart? Oh, Cork, that had to be awful.”
    She put her hand over his on the tabletop, the calluses of her palms across his knuckles. He took comfort in that familiar roughness.
    “Three hours.” Meloux squinted so that he considered Cork through dark slits. “That is a long time to watch a man die.”
    “I didn’t have a choice, Henry.”
    “There is always a choice.”
    “He asked me to stay.”
    “You could still have chosen to go.”
    “He would have been alone.”
    “But he might now be alive.”
    “You don’t know that, Henry.” He spoke harshly but understood it wasn’t Meloux he was angry at. In all the questioning by Dross and Larson, Cork had firmly maintained that he’d stayed because it was what Jubal wanted and because the wound was so terrible he couldn’t imagine the man would live long. In his own mind, however, he wasn’t at all certain of the soundness of his thinking or the truth of his motive.
    “And that is something you can never know either, Corcoran O’Connor.” The old man’s face relaxed, and in Meloux’s warm almond eyes, Cork saw great compassion. “Your going or your staying is not what killed Wiisigamaiingan. That was the arrow. There is no way to know what the outcome might have been if you had made a different choice. Shake hands with your decision and move on.”
    “Was it an accident of some kind?” Rainy asked.
    “No accident,” Cork said. “Someone meant to kill him, I’m sure.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because it was planned. They stole one of my arrows and used it to murder Jubal. Either that or they made an arrow in the same