Read Trickster's Point for Free Online Page B

old Mide indefinitely in order to learn all she could from him about healing, word had spread across the rez, and folks had gathered in the meadow to give her a little place of her own for privacy.
    By the time Jubal Little was dead, Cork knew the inside of Rainy’s cabin well. She’d furnished it simply: a bed with a small stand next to it where a kerosene lantern sat so that she could read at night before sleeping; a table and two chairs; an open shelving unit of honey-colored maple that Cork had built for her himself and that held her folded clothing; and a small, cast-iron boxwood stove that provided heat. A wealth of books stood stacked knee-high against one wall. (Cork had promised that he would spend some time during the coming winter building her a substantial bookcase.) Above the bed, she’d hung three photographs of herself with her children, who were now grown. The room still smelled as if the pine walls were newly cut and planed, and whenever Cork spent the night with Rainy he went to sleep and woke with a fragrance that was, to him, the breath of heaven.
    They didn’t make love that night but lay together under the soft, heavy quilt and talked.
    “Why would someone kill him?” Rainy asked. Her cheek was against his shoulder, and her warm breath ghosted over his bare skin.
    “You didn’t know him,” Cork said.
    “And if I did, I wouldn’t have to ask?”
    “He was a complicated guy. A lot of good in him, and that’s what he showed most people. But there was a dark side to Jubal he didn’t like people to see.”
    “But you saw it?”
    “Oh yeah.”
    “And yet you were still friends.”
    Cork said, “I don’t know.”
    “You weren’t?”
    “We were best friends when we were kids, but people change. We changed.”
    “I don’t think the essence of who we are changes much, Cork.”
    She was right. Who Jubal was at heart, Jubal had always been. “When we were kids,” Cork said, “it was easy to overlook.”
    “What was he like as a kid?”
    “Like I said, complicated. He had a reputation for not tolerating bullies. He went to the mat for a lot of kids who couldn’t defend themselves.”
    “I heard you were that way, too.” She kissed his shoulder.
    “Yeah, but when Jubal stepped into a situation, he could back it up. Me, as often as not, I got my face pushed in.”
    “It didn’t stop you from trying.”
    “I did it because I thought I had an obligation. It was what I thought my father would have done, or would have wanted me to do. Jubal did it because he could. In a way, it was his form of bullying. He just bullied the bullies.”
    “You’re right,” she said. “Complicated.” A wind had come up, and the cabin creaked, and Rainy listened for a moment. “What else?”
    “You couldn’t always believe what he told you.”
    “He lied?”
    “Not exactly. He was kind of a politician even back then. He said things in a way that led you down one track while the absolute truth lay in the track next to it. You were always going in the right direction, just not necessarily on the right path. Do you see?”
    “Not really.”
    “His father, for example. He told me he’d lost his father, and the way he said it made me believe his father was dead, but that wasn’t true.”
    “We all know about his father.”
    “Sure, now. Jubal’s been trading on what happened for years. But it was a big secret for him then, and you can understand why.”
    Something tapped the window, and they both fell silent.
    “An aspen branch,” Rainy said. “The wind.” Then she said, “Tell me more.”
    *   *   *
    When Cork was fourteen, the summer before he entered high school, he began working for Sam Winter Moon. Sam usually hired high school kids to give him a hand during the season, and Cork became one of them. Because the business Sam ran in the old Quonset hut was not about making a lot of money—he was very Ojibwe in his approach to wealth; what you made you shared—Sam Winter Moon was a