We were spooked, but Frick stayed calm. He went into Mom’s room and brought out a little bag made of deer hide, and he told Paige to go with him.

“Just stay inside,” Frick said to Mom and me. He still only had on his underwear, and I felt the chill come through the open door and nip through my pajamas. Mom and I sat at the kitchen table, and we were both in separate chairs. She was rubbing her head, and I asked her if she had a headache.

“A little bit, gwusis.”

They were gone for a long time, and then Frick opened the back door with Paige following him, the cold following her. Frick held the seashell bowl and smoke was coiling up and it swirled and blew away when he shut the door behind him and Paige. He smudged the whole house—especially Paige’s room—and then he smudged Mom and me.

When he finished, he blessed his seashell and tobacco and put it all back in the deer-hide bag. Mom didn’t say anything. She gave Paige a hug, kissed her good night, and then did the same to me, but told me to get to bed.

But I couldn’t sleep. All night I listened and listened for the knocking, which never came back, and I tried not to think about what it all was. What it all could be. At some point during the quiet night I got up and went to the floor and slid out from under my bed the black plastic tub, and when I pulled it out the medicine pouch Frick had given me dragged underneath the tub. Just in case it would help, I pinned the pouch to my shirt on the inside, and the pin pricked me. In the dark, I didn’t know if I was bleeding. I touched the skin, and it felt bloodless.

I opened the black plastic tub. I didn’t take out the men—I looked at them there, a pile of plastic bodies in the moonlight that shone behind me through the parted black curtains draped over the window. I realized that I’d have to get rid of some of the men, have to make room for new ones. What to do with the old toy men, the ones fading in color, their joints clogged with dried mud and crud? I thought about my father before I closed the black tub quietly and got back in bed. As the hours passed—as I dozed on and off—my room lit up with cold dawn light pouring through my window. I felt for the pouch, but it had fallen off. I flipped my blankets and pillows and looked for it, then I looked between the bed and the wall. It was way back under the bed. I tried to reach for it, yet it was too far down there. I left it, and I went down the hallway and into the kitchen.

Mom usually poured cereal in a bowl for me the night before, and filled a small cup up with milk and put it in the fridge, so that way I didn’t wake her and I could fix breakfast myself. But Mom had forgotten to do it, and instead of trying to dump cereal into a bowl and pour milk from a gallon jug over the food pantry cornflakes, I went straight to the couch and turned the TV on and watched cartoons. The house was cold, and Mom had told me not to touch the thermostat. Frick still hadn’t shown me how to run the woodstove, so I covered up in a blanket and blinked at the television, which was on low, and during commercials I listened for Mom or Frick or Paige to see if they stirred, coughed, flicked their lighters.