Next day we feel some remorse about working Winona and John Cole brings her over to a Mr Chesebro and asks him could he take an Indian girl for his school if she be a half-caste and his own blood. The gentleman has a little stone school in a lane the back of Pearl Street. He says to John Cole that the town would not stand for that and so John Cole comes back with Winona and says he would like sometimes to kill just for the sake of making his point plainly. He never had no schooling himself of course. Maybe I was thinking myself a great scholar because I was a few years schooled up in Sligo. I guess I was thinking that. So, says John Cole, do you think you could teach her something that she ain’t learned off Mrs Neale? I said I don’t reckon so. There ain’t no Indian school hereabouts because the Indians were drove out years and years ago. Looks like the Chippewa were the big cheeses round here one time. Goddamn it, he says, how come there ain’t no place for Winona? Then he’s talking about this that night to the elegant Beulah McSweny and he says he’ll teach Winona. He says his nickname is the poet McSweny and he has wrote maybe three songs used in the minstrel shows. No, by God, is that right, says John Cole. Yes, he says, and I can school Winona three mornings a week because I only works evenings. That’s just the best, says John Cole, how did you get to be such a gent, Mr McSweny? My father was a free man, he said, on the Mississippi river. Ferrying every damn thing between the English and the Spanish. Where your father now? says John Cole. My father gone so long, says Beulah, there was a seventeen in the date when he was overground. God Almighty, says John Cole.
Thus we inaugurate the best time in the little kingdom we have pitched up against the darkness. Seems to be a law that if we get a house it’s going to overlook the water. We got a riverside house of four rooms and we got a porch on the street side and it ain’t the best part of town and that’s where we fit like gloves. Like gloves. No one can best imagine the motley crowd that go to make a American town. First you got the have-nothing know-everything goddamn Irish God damn them who will live under leaky steps and count themselves in palaces. Then you got the half-breed Indians mixed with God knows what. Then you got the blacks, maybe they came up from Carolina or them places. Then you got the Chinese and the Spanish families. Where we are is where all these folks come home at night to roost when they’ve done working, mostly at the gypsum mines or doing for the Dutch the other side of town. Our landlord is the poet McSweny. After all he been saving his money for seventy-five years so he got a half dozen properties.
But that ain’t the point. The point is we living like a family. John Cole know he was born in December or seems to remember that month and maybe I remember I was born in June and Winona says she was born during the Full Buck Moon. Anyhow we roll all that into one and on the first of May we have assigned our birthday for the three of us. We say Winona is nine years old and John Cole has settled on twenty-nine. So that must make me twenty-six. Something along those lines. Point is, whatever ages we be, we’re young. John Cole is the best-looking man in Christendom and this is his heyday. Winona is sure the prettiest little daughter ever man had. Goddamned beautiful black hair. Blue eyes like a mackerel’s blue back. Or a duck’s wing feathers. Sweet little face cool as a melon when you hold it in your hands and kiss her forehead. God knows what stories she seen and been part in. Savage murder for sure because we caused it. Walked through the carnage and the slaughter of her own. You could expect a child that has seen all that to wake in the night sweating and she does. Then John Cole is obliged to hold her trembling form against him and soothe her with lullabies. Well he only knows one and he does that over and over. He holds her softly and sings her the lullaby. Where he got that no man knows not even hisself. Like a stray bird from some distant country. Then he lies on her bed and she pushes in tight against him like you might imagine bear cubs do in the winter hide or maybe even wolves. Tight in, like John Cole was that bit of safety she is trying to reach. A harbour. Then her breathing slowly lengthens and then she is snoring a little. Time to come back to bed and in the darkness or the helpful dim of the candle he looks at me and nods his head. Got her sleeping, he says. You sure do, I say.
Not much more than that needed to make men happy.
After a few months of doing our damnedest for Mr Noone it just seems natural to be not always changing garb by the hour and there seems to be greater contentment in it for me to wear a simple-hued housedress and not be always dragging on the trews. Outside is one matter, in another. Winona never does say nothing about it. Never seems to see me only as what I am in my face. Whatever that be. I don’t know then and I don’t know now. But I am easier in the dress, that’s all I can say. Well I would almost attest I say funnier things or things that make my man John Cole laugh like a donkey. Winona makes her plain cooking and we sit the three of us in the dim light and in the summer we have the windows covered against the violent heat and in the winter likewise against the rats of cold that creep in anywhere you leave a finger’s width of a gap. At home Winona don’t sing minstrel songs but those other songs that carry her back to where she begun in the innocence of her youth. We are racked to think we don’t know who even her mother was or maybe it was a woman that we killed. God knows that feels like a colossal-sized crime betimes and if you was counting crimes on a abacus maybe it won’t be the only one we done against her. She could slit our throats in the night with justice, spray out our blood redly on the linen pillows. But she don’t do that. She sings and we listen and all three are returned to the prairie in our heads. She to her guiltless haunts and us to those moments when in truth we stood gazing out onto all that lonesome beauty.