Chapter Thirty-Six
LEAVING THE MEADOW • JENKINS AND LUMPKIN • GOOD-BYE TO TOM GUNN AND BARNEY LITTLE PLUME • BACK TO BOARDING SCHOOL • INACCURATE WHISPERS • BEATRICE MOVES ON
LIONEL COULD never remember much of the days that followed. They returned to the meadow and gathered their belongings for the journey back to the boarding school. Unlike before, Lionel was anxious to leave the lodge. without Beatrice, the fallen cabin wasn’t the same. Corn Poe was quiet but stayed close to Lionel’s side, offering to help him in any way he could.
Lionel looked around and remembered that when they had arrived, the meadow had been covered with snow. Now, in early autumn, the snows came but melted away with the morning sun. Lionel wondered if someday his people, like the snow, like Beatrice, would also melt away, but then thought that no matter how many times he had seen the snows come and go, they always returned.
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.