Hardship, Injustice, and Compassion Theme Analysis

The Windigo, he said, was a terrible giant, a monster that had once been a man but some dark magic had turned him into a cannibal beast with a hunger for human flesh, a hunger that could never be satisfied.

[…]

At length, Mose tapped my shoulder and took my hand. You tell stories but they’re real. There are monsters and they eat the hearts of children.

“You’re saying she’s got some hillbilly in her?”

“Just like us.”

We’d been raised in a little town deep in a hollow of the Missouri Ozarks. When we first came to Lincoln School, we still spoke with a strong Ozark accent. That twang, along with a lot of who we were, had been lost over our years at the school.

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“I’m just saying, Odie, that nobody’s born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.”

Maybe so, but I still hated her little black heart.

“You were talking Indian talk,” DiMarco said.

Which was a terrible transgression at Lincoln School. No kid was allowed to speak his Native tongue. It was a strict tenet of the Indian boarding school philosophy, which was “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Getting caught speaking anything other than English usually resulted, at the very least, in a night in the quiet room. But sometimes, especially when DiMarco did the catching, a strapping was also part of the punishment.

“I’m afraid I’ll get taken from you, and who’d look after you then?”

“Maybe God?”

“God?” He said it is as if I were joking.

“Maybe it really is like it says in the Bible,” I offered. “God’s a shepherd and we’re his flock and he watches over us.”

For a long while, Albert didn’t say anything. I listened to that kid crying in the dark because he felt lost and alone and believed no one cared.

Finally Albert whispered, “Listen, Odie, what does a shepherd eat?”

I didn’t know where he was going with that, so I didn’t reply.

“His flock,” Albert told me. “One by one.”

They walked away, Mose carrying little Emmy, but Brickman lingered a moment and surveyed the destruction. Under his breath he said, “Jesus.”

“You were wrong,” I told him.

He looked at me and squinted. “Wrong?”

“You said God was a shepherd and would take care of us. God’s no shepherd.”

He didn’t respond.

“You know what God is, Mr. Brickman? A goddamn tornado, that’s what he is.”

God be with you. That was the last thing Miss Stratton had said to me. But the God I knew now was not a God I wanted with me. In my experience, he was a God who didn’t give but only took, a God of unpredictable whim and terrible consequence. My anger at him surpassed even my hatred of the Brickmans, because the way they treated me was exactly what I expected. But God? I’d had my hopes once; now I had no idea what to expect.

Albert stopped and turned to me, his face sad and serious. “Listen, Odie, things have happened to you, bad things, and I know I should have done a better job of protecting you. But I don’t want you to turn out like…like…”

“Like Clyde Brickman? Like DiMarco? You think that’s who I am? The hell with you.”

I walked away from his as fast as I could. Not only because I was angry but because I didn’t want him to see how much he’d hurt me.

“Everything’s hard work, Buck. You don’t wrap your thinking around that, life’ll kill you for sure. Me, I love this land, the work. Never was a churchgoer. God all penned up under a roof? I don’t think so. Ask me, God’s right here. In the dirt, the rain, the sky, the trees, the apples, the stars in the cottonwoods. In you and me, too. It’s all connected and it’s all God. Sure this is hard work, but it’s good work because it’s a part of what connects us to this land, Buck. This beautiful, tender land.”

“This land spawned a tornado that killed Emmy’s mother. You call that tender?”

“Tragic, that’s what I call it. But don’t blame the land. […] The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.”

I’d killed Vincent DiMarco, which had done something to me that could not be undone. But if you asked me, even to this day, I would tell you that I’ve never been sorry he was dead. Jack was different. I knew it wasn’t his fault, the rage inside him. I’d seen a different Jack, a Jack I liked and, who knows, given time and other circumstances, a Jack I might have been happy to call my friend. Shooting him was like shooting an animal with rabies. It had to be done. But when I pulled that trigger, I lost something of myself, something even more significant than when I’d killed DiMarco, something I think of now as a sliver of my soul.

There is a deeper hurt than anything sustained by the body, and it’s the wounding of the soul. It’s the feeling that you’ve been abandoned by everyone, even God. It’s the most alone you’ll ever be. A wounded body heals itself, but there is a scar. Watching Emmy weep in Mose’s strong arms, I thought the same must be true for a soul. There was a thick scar on my heart now, but the wound to Emmy’s heart was still so recent that it hadn’t begun to heal. I watched as Mose signed on her palm again and again, Not alone. Not alone.

As the piano player laid down the first few bars, I moved out into the dark of the meadow, sat down, pulled out my mouth organ, and played right along with them. Oh, it was sweet, like being fed after a long hunger, but it filled me in a different way than the free soup and bread earlier that night had. Into every note, I blew out that longing deep inside me. The song was about love, but for me it was about wanting something else. Maybe home. Maybe safety. Maybe certainty. It felt good, in the way I’d sometimes imagined what prayer might feel like if you really believed and poured your heart into it.

She laughed and put her arm around my shoulder. “Only God is perfect, Odie. To the rest of us, he gave all kinds of wrinkles and cracks.” She lifted her hair from her cheek, showing me the long scar there. “If we were perfect, the light he shines on us would just bounce right off. But the wrinkles, they catch the light. And the cracks, that’s how the light gets inside us. When I pray, Odie, I never pray for perfection. I pray for forgiveness, because it’s the one prayer I know will always be answered.”

“Sometimes, Odie,” Sister Eve went on, “in order for people to reach up and embrace their most profound belief in God, they need to stand on the shoulders of others. That’s what Jed and Mickey and Lois and Gooch do. Their experiences are the shoulders for others to climb on. And, Odie, it works. People come forward and I take their hands and I can feel how powerful their faith is, and that’s what heals them. Not me. Their faith in a great, divine power.”

The Vagabonds told the woman they were tired of wandering and asked if they could stay with her, but she looked into them, all the way down to their souls, and knew the true reason for their wandering. They were in search of their hearts’ desires, which were different for each of them, and she knew they would never find what they were looking for if they stayed in the safety of her forest.

Instead, she sent them on an odyssey.

“This kid,” I began, “was just like us. He loved the sun on his face, the dew on the morning grass, the song of birds in the trees. He loved to skip stones on the river. At night he liked to lie on the sand and stare up at the stars and dream. Just like us. He had people who loved him. But one day he went away and never came back, and they were heartbroken. They vowed not to speak his name again until the day he returned. That day never came. But every night his mother stood on the riverbank and called his name, and if you listen close at night, you can still hear the wind over the river whisper that name so he will never be forgotten.”

We played some tunes together. My repertoire was broader than his, but we knew a few of the same melodies, and as we played, folks came away from their own little places and gathered around the fire. And a kind of miracle happened, or what I thought of then as a miracle. One man brought out a sack of ginger cookies and passed them around to children who were there. Someone else offered up a jug of cider. Apple slices appeared and some cheese and bread. And while Captain Gray and I played, and a few of the folks who knew the tunes sang along, the people in the gathering, none of whom had much, found a way to feed one another.

“But when I heard the music from your harmonica, it made me want to sing. When I looked out the window, I saw a change in my people. I saw life returning to their faces. I saw fire in their eyes again. I think if you keep playing and I keep singing, we might save them.”

And that’s what they did. He played his magic harmonica and she sang in her beautiful voice, which came from her deep love for her people, and slowly everyone in the castle, everyone who’d lost their souls, woke up, and new souls grew in them and they were whole and happy again.

“Drink’s a tough devil to face down. I seen it lay lots of good men low. But, Buck, here’s the thing. If you never make that kind of bet, you’ll never see the good that might come from it.”

“You think it wasn’t a bad idea?”

“Like your brother said, could turn out you’re throwing good money after bad. But me, I admire your leap of faith.”

Their hands had been tied behind their backs and hoods had been placed over their heads, Mose signed. They couldn’t see one another, so they shouted out their names in order to let the others know they were all there, all together in body and in spirit. They were condemned but not broken. Amdacha was one of these men.

Mose lifted his face, tearstained, to the sky and for a moment could not go on.

We risked a fire that night and sat together, talking quietly around the flames, as we had on many nights since we’d taken to the rivers. It began to feel to me as if what had been broken was coming together again, but I knew it would never be exactly the same. With every turn of the river, we were changing, becoming different people, and for the first time I understood that the journey we were on wasn’t just about getting to Saint Louis.

We did his route together, tramping up one street and down the next, the houses all white columns, gingerbread trim, fancy shutters, and ornate wrought-iron fences, everything screaming wealth, and I thought about the world as I knew it then. There seemed to me two kinds of people—those with and those without. Those with were like the Brickmans, who’d got everything they had by stealing from those without. Were all the people sleeping in the great houses on Cathedral Hill like the Brickmans? If so, I decided I’d rather be one of those without.

This was all my doing, all my fault. This was my curse. I saw now that long before the Tornado God descended and killed Cora Frost and decimated Emmy’s world, that vengeful spirit had attached itself to me and had followed me everywhere. My mother had died. My father had been murdered. I was to blame for all the misery in my life and the lives of everyone I’d ever cared about. Only me. I saw with painful clarity that if I stayed with my brother and Mose and Emmy, I would end up destroying them, too. The realization devastated me, and I stood breathless and alone and terribly afraid.

I fell to my knees and tried to pray to the merciful God Sister Eve had urged me to embrace, prayed desperately for release from this curse, prayed for guidance. But all I felt was my own isolation and an overwhelming sense of helplessness.

“What I’m going to say may sound impossible. But I’ve seen impossible things before, so here goes. Those fits she suffers? I think they may be her attempt at wrestling with what she sees when she looks into the future. I think she might be trying to alter what she sees there.”

That knocked me over. “She changes the future?”

“Maybe just tweaks it a little. Like a good storyteller rewriting the last sentence.”

We are creatures of spirit, I have come to believe, and this spirit runs through us like electricity and can be passed one to another. That’s what I felt coming from my mother’s hand, the spirit of her deep longing. I was her son, her only son, and the photographs in her lap, the money she’d sent, her naïve willingness to believe the lies of the Black Witch, all told me that she’d never stopped loving me.