“Everything okay, Marshall?”
“Oh, just fine. How about yourself?”
She turned to her salad. “I’m fine. On a deadline, as usual.”
“I know how busy you are, but I got to thinking after we talked last weekend about that Indian case. Maybe I have something that could help.”
“Oh? What’s that?” Vera took a big bite and clicked Pause on her timekeeping software. Might as well eat while Marshall rambled.
“Grandad kept all his records for the old place in that sea trunk I’ve got in the basement. Down there I don’t know how long, but it’d all be from that area you’re talking about, along the Tongue River. That’s right where they homesteaded. Anything happened out there back around the turn of the century, he’d have something on it. Old man was a real pack rat. Guess I got that from him. Can’t stand to get rid of any of this stash I’ve got. Maybe you could help out and go through it to see if there’s anything worth keeping. I’d kind of like to use that trunk. I’ve got a bunch of LPs—”
“Yes, that sounds interesting,” Vera broke in. “What if I stopped by tonight after work?”
“Oh!” Marshall’s voice pitched up with excitement. “Oh, I’d like that. Maybe you can stay and watch the game with me.”
Vera wedged another bite of salad into her cheek. “Let me see how things go this afternoon. There’s something I have to finish before I can relax. But there could be something in the trunk. Maybe he traded with the families or something. It could help prove where they were living.”
This could be the break she needed, Vera thought, as she gently excused herself and clicked the line shut. New evidence from her own family archive had partnership written all over it.
When Kristie poked her head in to say that the elders’ testimony was complete, Vera went to thank them for their efforts and accept the cool press of their hands, not quite handshakes. From the window she watched them file down the street toward the Lucky Quarters just out of sight, where Vera knew the marquee advertised a five-dollar senior meatloaf special and SLOTS! THAT! PAY!
She had walked to work from the bungalow she rented just west of the business district. The early autumn was trying out a new crispness in the evenings. Vera left her office sweater on under her jacket and pulled on running shoes from the selection under her desk for the longer walk to Marshall’s on the near south side. She’d have to pass the rescue mission, but there was nothing dangerous about the route, just a depressing tour of blocks beyond the tracks that resisted gentrification. Her colleagues all lived in thousands of square feet in the western suburbs with garages full of toys and lawns that someone else tended. They drove full-size pickups to work and kept vacation homes in the mountains. Vera could have afforded some version of all that by now but she preferred the feeling of lightness in knowing that she could box up her few possessions, turn in her keys, and walk away. It was worth it to listen to Jimmy Beck give orders like she was a creature he’d personally shaped from clay and think, Maybe I will, and then again, maybe I won’t.
The streets of Billings drew her in as they always had. They were homey small-town streets, even with the population topping a hundred thousand these days, full of people who smiled and said hello even to strangers. Vera had seen cruelty and prejudice here, but surely that was mostly behind them as a city. There had been so much progress since the days when her grandparents, raised on ranches east and south of town, told her mother they’d disown her if she married a black man or a Catholic. When a chronically homeless man died here, a crowd of downtown workers who had been his friends came forward to testify to the value of his life. When a beloved independent bookstore closed, its bereft customers formed a cooperative to open a new one. Artists created their own open studio space. Churches transitioned struggling families from shelters into their own homes. Small businesses were passed down from generation to generation. It was not a town of big money, just small efforts day after day, by people who would never see their names recorded, until it all compounded into a sense of powerful resilience.
Marshall was in a plastic lawn chair on the front steps in his shirtsleeves when she arrived with her briefcase and a canvas bag from the food co-op.
“What are you doing? Aren’t you freezing?” Vera had her hands in her pockets and her collar turned up as the quick fall of night sucked more heat from the air by the minute.
“I was over at the senior center and when I got home it was colder than a witch’s tit inside,” he said as she nudged him to the door. “I went down and lit the furnace and came back out to catch the last of the sun.”
“You’ve got to do something about that furnace. You need one that comes on automatically, and one day the city’s going to crack down on you for burning coal.” Vera followed him in, where the air was indeed no warmer than outside.
“I’ll take care of that out of my trust fund,” Marshall said as he shut the door. “Lucky for me, hay’s doing well this year and I’ve still got a few acres out at the old place. Otherwise it’d be magical fruit out of a can three times a day for me.”
Vera rolled her eyes at Marshall’s habitual exaggeration of his poverty. He wasn’t willing to spend what money he had. Any more would only pad his mattress. She headed for the kitchen.
“I brought groceries.”
“Twinkies?”
“Salad. And ground beef.” She had a frying pan on the stove already for the one meal Marshall would reliably eat: instant mashed potatoes, a hamburger, and a small salad drenched in ranch. She cooked on autopilot while he talked about the Packers, then fed him, like she did several times a week.
“Best meal in town,” Marshall said as he wiped his mouth on a paper towel he’d carefully torn in half to make it go further. Vera smiled. For reasons she couldn’t have articulated, watching the old man eat a good meal satisfied her in a way her crisply written complaint did not.
“Now,” she said while Marshall topped up their Folgers, “show me that trunk. I have to get back to the office tonight.”
“I dragged it out from under the steps and put it under the light.” In the tiny kitchen, Marshall only had to stand up and turn around to hold open the basement door. His silhouette hung in the doorway as Vera descended toward the single bare bulb in the middle of the hand-dug cellar not six feet deep, steps protesting as she went. The furnace was an apparition from her childhood nightmares, exactly as she remembered. Its whooshing, clanking, leering presence could draw her in and consume her whole, like a crematorium, she had always felt sure. It was the fire that burned clean, that consumed all it touched. Nothing it swallowed could survive.
Vera turned her back on the conflagration visible through the isinglass window and kneeled in the dirt. The trunk lid rose with a banging of buckles at her push. Marshall had spoken the truth. From well to arched vault, yellowed papers crammed every available inch. There was no visible mold — not in this climate — but a smell of age emerged, acids breaking down organic compounds. Vera reached for a stack of seed receipts.
The fire was warm at her back and the dirt almost forgiving after she padded it with her sweater and jacket. She grew comfortable as she bent and lifted and read and sorted. There was a whole world here, every little transaction that had made up her ancestors’ days. She felt quite transported by the time she reached the bottom and found a leather binder in among some land documents, deeds for small parcels that had long since passed out of the family’s hands. The binder was so close to disintegration that it looked at least as old as the trunk itself, like it might contain the original owner’s manuaclass="underline" Load up all your belongings. Leave your homeland. Never look back. How had they done it?