Free May Day by Jess Lourey

spear, and an arrow shooting toward a four-legged creature. I rocked back on my heels and ran my eyes over the entire length of the mound, thinking, “If I pulled off all the grass, I bet I could piece together the whole story.” I leaned forward and rubbed my fingers over the rough design, fascinated to feel that it wasn’t a painting but a carving in the stone.
    The Lady of the Lakes article I had written about Battle Lake’s origins again puttered through my head. For me, the interesting part of the article came before the official founding. The Ojibwe had originally named the town Battle Lake in honor of a fierce 1795 battle between their tribe and the Dakota. A party of Ojibwe hunters had left their community at Leech Lake for their annual beaver hunt. When they neared Leaf Lake, they discovered fresh signs of their Dakota enemies. A beaten path led them to the lake, where they were surprised to find long rows of three hundred Dakota lodges on an open prairie.
    The first Ojibwe gun brought down the Dakota leader, but the Ojibwe were terribly outnumbered. They fought on until more than thirty Ojibwe were killed. Less than a third of the original hunting party returned home. The Ojibwe and Dakota had many skirmishes in that area until Indian ownership of the land was “legitimized” with the federal government’s Prairie du Chien peace treaty in the early 1800s. But settlers and more treaties pushed the Indians back until the area was almost totally Norwegian—white people who ate white food.
    Jeff had referred to the battle the town was named after as one of the most famous in Minnesota history. Now I wondered if these carvings were tied into that. Jeff must have found them after he came back on Saturday to do one more visual survey. That explained why it had taken him longer than he expected in the Twin Cities and why he couldn’t make our date last night, but why had he died? It occurred to me then that I had assumed Jeff had been killed recently, either late last night or early this morning. But he may have never reached the Cities, instead decomposing somewhere, his killer waiting to position his body in the back of the library at just the right time. Meanwhile, I had been going about my life thinking he was still alive.
    I felt sick in my blood. It’s an unsettling feeling, the idea of waiting for the dead, believing that they’re alive and thinking of you. It’s mental grave robbery. I needed to find out exactly how long Jeff had been dead before I freaked myself out any more.
    I walked back to my car, my head buzzing with new thoughts. I searched for the roughed-up digital camera the Recall had issued me and returned to snap photographs of the rock carvings from every angle. Then I gently replaced the sod and used a gardener’s touch to blend it back with the other prairie grass.
    I returned to my car again, this time to begin some research. I had enough questions. Now I needed some answers, like what Jeff had found out in this field that was worth killing for. On a hunch, I decided to drive by Kennie’s house. She had the evil eye on me last night in the Stew, and with Jeff dead, I wanted to know why.
    I swerved off the main road and onto the back streets to get to Kennie’s faster. Her house was in the residential area of Battle Lake, close to the base of the water tower. If Tammy Faye Baker made $27,000 a year, she would have a house just like Kennie’s. At some point it had been the standard fifties square, one-story house, but when Kennie moved in, her personality infected the entire quarter-acre lot. Her lawn was immaculately mowed and weed-whacked. The one pine tree in her yard was Christmas-hearth perfect and strung with pink flamingo and chili pepper lights. The bright plastic flowers in her window boxes and tracing her front walk would never die, but they could also never hope to outshine the acid-pink-with-lemon-yellow-trim electric box that was Kennie’s home. If that house had a smell,