Louise had heard from Octave Good Wolf that Dolores was so sick she had collapsed in Mission before they sent her away. Dolores coughed up so much blood it was rumored Mrs. Moniker passed out at the sight of it. Stuffy Mrs. Moniker passed out in front of the Teepee Bar. There was so much blood, Octave said, the dogs licked at the spot for days. So much blood Octave’s mother told him to walk home on a different street.

“She’s afraid I’ll get it,” he said. “Tooberculosis.”

There were stories they put Dolores in bathtubs of ice to keep her blood slow, to keep her lungs from rupturing. In her sleep Louise would see Dolores in a long, white, porcelain tub of clear ice, Dolores’s head resting on the lip of the tub, the shaved crown of her scalp gray with cold. Dolores in a room without windows. Dolores with eyelashes so long she had curled them with a butter knife.

Louise would wake thinking of Dolores and the old white woman from Paradise who had put her newly dead husband in a tin tub of ice in the living room to save herself funeral costs. So many Indians Louise knew were being sent away to hospitals for TB. They disappeared and nobody ever visited them or came back with news of how they were. Her father’s new wife, Loretta, carried a picture of her sister Rosalie in her wallet. The photograph had been pushed and pulled in and out of Loretta’s wallet and touched so many times, you could hold it up to the window and see through the lines and cracks of its finish. It wasn’t an old picture but Rosalie looked far away, the way that people can look distant and dead in a photograph.

All the Indians began wondering why so many of them had the disease. Why so many of them were disappearing. Her grandmother thought they were all being killed off slowly. And there was evidence. Last month the health nurse had brought her grandmother a bottle of iodine and told her to put a drop of it in her drinking water each day. “It’s a good idea,” the nurse had said. “It will keep you healthy.” But her grandmother had looked at the skull and crossbones on the small green bottle.

“These people think we’re not smart,” her grandmother had said.