Starfish_ A Novel - James Crowley [70]
Lionel and Corn Poe rode out of the meadow bareback on Ulysses, the great horse sandwiched between the captain and the rest of the soldiers who had made up the search party. Lionel’s grandfather rode on his mule next to the captain and Brother Finn, but very little was said during the three days that it took them to ride back to the boarding school.
They rode east, parallel to the stream on what Lionel realized must have been the southern border of the Great wood. Lionel noticed that with every step of the horses, the terrain that surrounded them changed. The vastness of the woods soon gave way to rounded foothills with clumps of trees, mostly pine, aspen, and birch; and these foothills soon opened into the endless sea of grass that Lionel and Beatrice had crossed at the start of their journey in the early spring of this year.
When they cleared the last of the wooded hills, they stopped to water the horses, and Lionel stood with the forest to his back, looking out across the plain, half expecting to see Beatrice in her tiny raft navigating the great swell of grass that rose and fell before him.
Sometime during their first night in the vast openness of the plains, Jenkins and Lumpkin escaped, choosing lives on the run rather than face what awaited them when they returned to the outpost. Lionel hoped that he never had to see them again.
The day before they reached the school, Tom Gunn and Barney were taken by a detachment of soldiers back down to their school at Heart Butte. Tom Gunn apologized to Lionel, and gave him his pocketknife before they left. Barney tried to apologize but broke down sobbing instead.
They rode on, and soon the rolling grass hills began to look familiar and Lionel felt as though he was revisiting a distant dream. word arrived at the boarding school before their return, and as they rode into the dusty streets of the outpost, people came out of their shops and businesses to stand and stare as the renegade horsemen slowly passed.
The children of the school were gathered around the cluster of military buildings when the small party arrived. They pushed and pulled at each other trying to get a glimpse of the new boy, Corn Poe, and they reached out to touch Lionel in his buckskins and braided hair as the two boys rode, still on the captain’s horse, past the barracks and the officers’ quarters up to Ulysses’s corral.
The school children spoke in hushed whispers about Beatrice and the men who had killed her, but as the horses passed over the last of the fading green grass of summer, it began to snow, and Lionel knew that no matter what the people said, no matter how the story was told, a simple bullet from a government gun could never kill Beatrice. Beatrice was somewhere and she would live forever.
Epilogue
IN THE END it was decided that Lionel, along now with Corn Poe, should return to school. They were turned over to the boarding school’s administrators who immediately stripped them of their buckskins, issued them uniforms, and took them to the outpost’s barber.
Lionel and Corn Poe sat on rough pine benches in a cold concrete room while their hair was cut away in chunks and scattered on the floor around them. Lionel looked over at Corn Poe and the relatively pale skin of his exposed scalp and couldn’t help, for the first time in days, but smile.
In no time, he and Corn Poe were laughing. They laughed, despite reprimand, both thinking about the lodge in the meadow and their long summer days spent running through the Great Wood. They thought about Mr. Hawkins and Junebug and the sweat lodge with Barney and Tom Gunn from Heart Butte. They thought about the wolverine and the bear and the stories of Napi the Old Man, and they laughed about the infuriated look