This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger Read Free Book Online Page A

bleachers. He caught sight of us and came over.
    “Good day, Cora,” he said to Mrs. Frost. “Hey there, little Emmy. You’re looking lovely today.”
    Emmy smiled and her cheeks dimpled.
    “Herman, have you seen Albert?” Mrs. Frost asked.
    He shook his head, then checked the field. “What would keep him from playing?” He looked at me. “Have you seen him, Odie?”
    “Not since last night.”
    “Not good,” Volz said. “Let me see what I can find out. But, Odie, you should get back with the other boys.”
    “Can’t he sit with us? Please?” Emmy said.
    Volz frowned, but I knew he would give in. Nobody could resist little Emmy. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised.
    When Andrew Frost was alive, he’d coached the baseball team and had whipped them into good shape. They had a reputation, and even the lackluster guidance of the current coach, Mr. Freiberg, whose main job was driving the heavy equipment, hadn’t tarnished the efforts of Cora Frost’s late husband. Mose pitched a great game, the fielding was flawless, and we won four to nothing. It would have been fun, except the whole time I was watching for Albert, or for Volz to return with word of Albert. But when the game ended, neither of them had shown.
    After the game, and before dinner, we had an hour of rare free time. I lay on my bed in the dorm, reading a magazine, Amazing Stories, which I’d taken from the school library. Everything in Lincoln School library was donated, and I don’t think Miss Jensen, the librarian, ever really checked the donated magazines carefully. I was always finding interesting publications— Argosy, Adventure Comics, Weird Tales —among the Saturday Evening Post s and Ladies’ Home Journal s. We weren’t supposed to take anything away from the library, but it was easy to sneak a magazine out under my shirt.
    During the school year, the younger boys were in one dormitory and the older boys in another. But in the summer, when so many of the students had gone home, all the boys were herded into a single dorm. While I read, one of the younger kids was sitting alone on his bunk not far from mine, staring at nothing, looking sad and lost, which wasn’t unusual, especially among the newer kids. His name was Billy Red Sleeve. He was Northern Cheyenne from somewhere way west in Nebraska. He’d come to Lincoln School from another Indian school, one in Sisseton that was run by Catholics. We all knew about the Sisseton school. Eddie Wilson, a Sioux kid from Cheyenne River, had cousins who’d been sent to Sisseton. He told us stories his cousins had told him, about beatings worse than anything we got at Lincoln, about nuns and priests who came into the dorms at night and took kids from their beds and made them do unspeakable things. At Lincoln School, there were a couple of staff we all knew sometimes did things to kids, most notable among them Vincent DiMarco, but we did our best to wise up new kids fast, so that they could stay out of harm’s way. Those who came from other schools, like Billy, wouldn’t talk about what had been done to them, but you saw it in their eyes, in the frightened way they regarded everyone and everything, and you felt it every time you tried to reach out to them and met that invisible wall they’d erected in the desperate hope of protecting themselves.
    I was deep into a story about a guy fighting Martians in the Arcticwhen I glanced up and saw DiMarco standing in the doorway. I slid the magazine under my pillow but realized I didn’t need to. He wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was focused on Billy. DiMarco walked down the dormitory, between the rows of bunks. There were a couple of other boys in the dorm, and they sat up straight and were as mute as posts while DiMarco passed them. Billy didn’t notice him at all. He was busy mumbling to himself and fumbling with something he held in his hands. DiMarco stopped a couple of bunks away and just stood there, glaring. He was big and