Sometimes I wonder if the sounds of fear and anguish, the thunder of the shotgun, is hidden from me somewhere in my brain, the most obscure corner. I might have died of dehydration as I wasn’t found for three days, but I don’t remember that, either — not at all — and have never been abnormally afraid of thirst or obsessed with food or water. Apparently, so I’ve been told, I was fed by one of the Indians later hanged. No, my childhood was very happy and I had everything — a swing, a puppy, doting parents. Nothing but good things happened to me. I loved getting high marks and having friends. I was chosen queen of the prom. I never underwent a shock at the sudden revelation of my origins, for I was told the story early on and came to accept who I was. The only thing is, I was allowed to believe that the lynched Indians had been the ones responsible. I believed that until Neve Harp set me straight — in fact, showed me all the clippings. Told me all the points of view. And now I think that my adopted mother even suspected that somewhere in our area there still might reside the actual killer, not Tobek but another — invisible, remorseful. For we’d find small, carefully folded bills of cash hidden outdoors in places Electa or I would be certain to find them — beneath a flowerpot, in my tree house, in the hollow handles of my bicycle — and we’d always hold the wadded square up and say, “Santa Claus has been here again.” But truly, I am hard-pressed to name more than the predictable sadnesses that pass through one’s life. It is as though the freak of my survival charged my disposition with gratitude. Or as if my family absorbed all of the misfortune that might have come my way. I have loved intensely. I have lived an ordinary and a satisfying life, and I have been privileged to be of service to people. Most people. There is no one I mourn to the point of madness and nothing I would really do over again.
So why when I stroke my sister’s valentine against the side of my face, and why when I touch the folded linen of her vest, and when I reach for my brothers’ overalls and the apron my mother died in on that day, and bundle these things with my father’s ancient, laundered, hay-smelling clothes to my stomach, and press, and why, when I gather my family into my arms, do I catch my breath at the wild upsurge, as if a wind had lifted me, a black wing of air? And why, when that happens, do I fly toward some blurred and ineradicable set of features that seems to rush away from me as stars do? At blinding speeds, never stopping?
When Pluto’s empty at last and this house is reclaimed by earth, when the war memorial is toppled and the bank/caf stripped for its brass and granite, when all that remains of Pluto is our collected historical newsletters bound in volumes donated to the local collections at the University of North Dakota, what then? What shall I have said? How shall I have depicted the truth?
The valentine has always told me that the boy’s name should not have been scratched from the war memorial. Not only were innocent people hanged, unbearably murdered for nobody’s justice, but even that boy was not the killer after all. For my dead sister loved him in return, or she would not have carried his message upon her person. And if he had her love, he probably fled out of grief and despair. Perhaps he’d been there. Perhaps he’d seen her dead. Poor Tobek. But if not the boy, who was it? My father? But no, he was felled from behind. There is no one to accuse. Somewhere in this town or out in the world, then, the being has existed who stalked after my brothers and destroyed them as they fled toward the barn, who saw the beauty of my sister and mother and shot them dead. And to what profit? For nothing was taken. Nothing gained. To what end the mysterious waste?
An extremely touchy case came my way about twenty years ago. The patient was an old farmer who’d lived his life on acreage that abutted the farthest edges of our land. Warren Wolde was a taciturn crank, who nevertheless had a way with animals. He had a number of peculiar beliefs, I am told, regarding the United States government. Certain things were never mentioned around him — Congress being one, and all of the amendments to the Constitution. It got so his opinion was avoided, for fear he would fly into a sick, obliterating rage. Even if one stuck to safe topics with him, he looked at people in a penetrating way they found disquieting. But Warren Wolde was in no condition to disquiet me when I came onto the farm to treat him. Two weeks before, the farm’s expensive blooded bull had hooked then trampled him, concentrating most of the damage on one thigh and leg. He’d absolutely refused to see a doctor and now a feverish infection had set in and the wound was necrotic. He was very strong, and fought being moved to a hospital so violently that his family had decided to call me instead and see whether I could save his leg.
I could, and did, though the means was painful and awful and it meant twice-daily visits, which I could ill afford in my schedule. At each change of the dressing and debridement, I tried to dose Wolde with morphine, but he resisted. He did not trust me yet and feared that if he lost consciousness he’d wake without his leg. Gradually, I managed to heal the wound and also to quiet him. When I first came to treat him, he’d reacted to the sight of me with a horror unprecedented in my medical experience. It was a fear mixed with panic that had only gradually dulled to a silent wariness. As his leg healed, he opened to my visits, and by the time he was hobbling on crutches, he seemed to anticipate my presence with an eager pleasure so tender and pathetic that it startled everyone around him. But he’d shuck off his forbidding and strange persona just for me, they said, and sink back into an immobilizing fury once I’d left. He never quite healed enough to take on all of his old tasks, but lasted pretty well for another few years before he went entirely senile and was sent down to the state hospital. At an advanced age he died naturally, in his sleep, of a thrown blood clot. To my surprise, I was contacted several weeks later by a lawyer.
The man said that his client, Warren Wolde, had left a package for me, which I asked him to send in the mail. When the package arrived, addressed in an awkward script that certainly could have been Wolde’s, I opened the box immediately. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of wadded bills of assorted (mainly small) denominations, and of course I recognized their folded pattern as identical to the bills that had turned up for me all through my childhood. I called the lawyer, who connected me with the nurse who’d found Wolde dead, and I asked if she could shed any light on his state of mind.
It was the music that killed him, she said.
I asked what music and she told me that Wolde had collapsed when a visitor named Peace had played a little violin concert in the common room. He’d died that night. I thanked her. The name Peace upset me. I could perhaps believe that the money gifts and the legacy were only marks of Wolde’s sympathy for the tragic star of my past, and, later, gratitude for what I’d done. I might be inclined to think so, were it not for so many small, strange truths. The name, the violin that belonged to the name, the music that spoke the name. And the first few times I had come to treat Wolde, I remember, he reared from me in a horror that seemed too personal, and pitiable. There had been something of a recalled nightmare in his face — I’d thought so even then — and I’d not been touched later on by the remarkable change in his character. On the contrary, it had given me a chill.