This Tender Land

Stories are the sweet fruit of my existence, and I share them gladly. The events I'm about to share with you began on the banks of the Gilead. Even if you grew up in the heartland, you may not remember these things. What happened in the summer of 1932 is most important to those who experienced it, and there are not many of us left. The Gilead is a lovely river, lined with cottonwoods already ancient when I was a boy. Things were different then. Not simpler or better, just different. We didn't travel the way we do now, and for most folks in Fremont County, Minnesota, the world was limited to the piece of it they could see before the horizon cut off the land. They wouldn't have understood any more than I did that if you kill a man, you are changed forever. If that man comes back to life, you are transformed. I have witnessed this and other miracles with my own eyes. So, among the many pieces of wisdom life has offered me over all these years is this. Open yourself to every possibility, for there is nothing your heart can imagine that is not so. The tale I'm going to tell is of a summer long ago, of killing and kidnapping and children pursued by demons of a thousand names. There will be courage in this story, and cowardice. There will be love, and betrayal, and of course, there will be hope. In the end, isn't that what every good story is about? Chapter One Albert named the rat. He called it Fareeha. It was an old creature, a model of gray and white fur. Almost always, it kept to the edges of the tiny cell, scurrying along the wall to a corner where I'd put a few crumbs of the hard biscuit that had been my meal. At night, I generally couldn't see it, but could still hear the soft rustle as it moved from the wide crack between the corner blocks, across the straw on the floor, grabbed the crumbs, and returned the way it had come. Whenever the moon was just right, and bright beams streamed through the high, narrow slit that was the only window, illuminating the stones of the eastern wall, I was sometimes able to glimpse in the reflected light the slender oval of the wall. The slender oval of Fareeha's body, its fur a dim silver blur, its thin tail roping behind like an afterthought of the animal's creation. The first time I got thrown into what the Brickmans called the Quiet Room, they tossed my older brother Albert in with me. The night was moonless, the tiny cell as black as pitch, our bed a thin matting of straw laid on the dirt floor, the door a great rectangle of rusted iron with a slot at the bottom for the delivery of a food plate that never held more than that one hard biscuit. I was scared to death. Later, Benny Blackwell, a Sioux from Rosebud, told us that when the Lincoln Indian Training School had been a military outpost called Fort Sibley, the Quiet Room had been used for solitary confinement. In those days, it had held warriors. By the time Albert and I got there, it held only children. I didn't know anything about rats then, except for the story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who'd rid the town of the vermin. I thought they were filthy creatures and would eat anything, and maybe would even eat us. Albert, who was four years older and a whole lot wiser, told me that people are most afraid of things they don't understand, and if something frightened you, you should get closer to it. That didn't mean it wouldn't still be an awful thing, but the awful you knew was easier to handle than the awful you imagined. So Albert had named the rat, because a name made it not just any rat. When I asked why for real, he said it was from a book, The Count of Monte Cristo. Albert loved to read. Me? I liked to make up my own stories. Whenever I was thrown into the Quiet Room, I fed Faria crumbs and imagined tales about him. I looked up rats in the worn Encyclopædia Britannica on the school library shelf and discovered that they were smart and social. Across the years and the many nights...