When he could speak, he did. “Someone tell a story. I’m not ready to talk just yet.”

They knew it was bad then. It was the twins who stood.

“We’ll tell our story,” Zheegwon said, his hand on Tree’s arm. “Our coming-to story, of how we came to be here. It’s time.”

When they were done, Miigwans would add a new chapter to the bigger tale, the one about their family and the world, a chapter of loss and grief. The part of the tale when they got to the end of Frenchie.

CHAPTER 15

TREE AND ZHEEGWON’S COMING-TO STORY

Tree and Zheegwon

WE LIVED IN A SMALL CITY. NOT ONE OF THE BIG ONES that fell first, but one of the smaller ones that kept on being crappy, sliding from level to level so slow that people forgot it hadn’t always been that way.

We lived with Uncle Tim. Uncle Tim was a pretty small guy with a huge voice. He was known for a two things, hunting and dancing, and he made the gods jealous in both. In both, he moved with silent grace. In both, he was successful in providing for our house. He could catch a rabbit with a shotgun and just nick its neck so the meat was still good. He could spin you in circles to Hank Williams Jr. till you were a blur, and you wouldn’t even be dizzy or nothing. There was never a lack of meat or women to cook it. They stayed for a short time or a long while, dusting the shelves we forgot were on the walls or filling the rooms with new smells and sounds. They also kicked his ass when he needed it and reminded us to bathe more. Some sat in the cracked vinyl kitchen chairs and watched him cook. Others left before the morning school bus arrived.

We were happy. We had enough. There was always enough. Sometimes, if he didn’t time his “friendly visits” right and they overlapped, the windows shook with raised voices and thrown shoes. And at the end of it all, Uncle Tim would sit with us and laugh so that the windows shook again. He was thunder in a flannel jacket.

“Doreen would’ve been proud of you boys,” he’d remind us, always in moments you wouldn’t expect—like when we were shoveling the long driveway to our cabin or at a commercial break during Jeopardy. “All tall and polite. Real proud.”

We lived on the outskirts of the small city, where the farms were cut down and buttoned up into large lots and the houses were wood and not so fancy. Still nice, with big decks and reshingled roofs, but not all braggy about it. We were almost from somewhere else, as far as the city could imagine. Almost invisible. Almost, but not quite. Not enough.

We had this old hound, Max. He lived outside because he was what Tim called “all business.” He hunted birds and wandered off to impregnate the neighbor’s poodle and that was it. Except that he was also an alarm. When we used to have wolves, he’d let us know they were close, and then Tim would go out and shoot off a round and Max would sleep in the mudroom.