Free This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger Page A

as flesh and bone. So mostly I just stood numb atop the broken roof beams that had once sheltered Cora and Emmy Frost, and that, for a brief time, I’d let myself believe would shelter me, too.
    I’d lost my mother and my father. I’d been beaten, degraded, thrown into isolation, but until that moment, I’d never lost hope that someday things would be better.
    Then Mose signed, Hear that?
    I listened, and I heard it, too.
    Mose started pulling up boards and broken beams. The rest of us joined in. We worked feverishly, clearing the debris above the little cries we heard. We finally reached the outside entrance to the cellar, where the door was still blocked by two heavy sections of broken joists. We cleared those, and Mose yanked open the door. Staring up at us from the dark inside stood little Emmy Frost, her face and clothing covered in dust, the curls of her hair tangled stiff with grit, her blue eyes blinking at the sudden light. Mose bounded down the stairs and swept her up in his arms and brought her out, and signed to her, Your mother?
    “I don’t know.” Emmy was crying hysterically. She shook her head wildly and said again, “I don’t know.”
    “Was she with you down there?” Volz asked.
    Again the headshake, and dust flew from her hair in a cloud. “She put me there and then she left me all alone.”
    “Where did she go, Emmy?” Albert asked.
    “Big George,” she said. “She was going to let him out of the barn.”
    After her husband died, Cora Frost had chosen to keep the draft horse, though feeding such a great beast was a costly chore. Volz and Albert had already checked the pile of rubble that had been the barn, but they ran back and began going through the debris again.
    “Where’s Mama?” Emmy cried. “Mama?”
    “Hush, girl,” Brickman said. “It does you no good to cry.”
    She paid him no attention. “Mama!”
    Mose sat down on the rubble of the house and took Emmy onto his lap and held her against his chest and she cried and cried. After a while, Albert and Volz returned and simply shook their heads.
    “I will take her back to the school,” Volz said.
    “I’ll go with you,” Brickman said.
    I crossed my arms and stood firm. “I’m not leaving until we find Mrs. Frost.”
    Volz didn’t argue. “All right, Odie. Albert, Mose, will you stay also?”
    They both nodded.
    “I will send someone back for you. Clyde, let’s get this little girl out of here.”
    They tried to pull Emmy away from Mose, but she clung to him fiercely, and finally Volz said, “You come, too, Mose.”
    They walked away, Mose carrying little Emmy, but Brickman lingered a moment and surveyed the destruction. Under his breath he said, “Jesus.”
    “You were wrong,” I told him.
    He looked at me and squinted. “Wrong?”
    “You said God was a shepherd and would take care of us. God’s no shepherd.”
    He didn’t respond.
    “You know what God is, Mr. Brickman? A goddamn tornado, that’s what he is.”
    Brickman simply turned and walked away.
    After they were gone, Albert and I stood alone. The sky above us was clear and blue, as if it had never hurled at us the hell of the last couple of hours. I heard a meadowlark sing.
    “It was going to be perfect,” I said. “Everything was finally going to be perfect.”
    Albert turned in a full circle, taking in the whole of the devastation around us. When he spoke, his voice was as hard as I’d ever heard it. “One by one, Odie,” he said. “One by one.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    THEY FOUND CORA Frost’s body later that day, a mile distant, cradled in the branches of an elm in a farmyard where the tornado had done no damage at all but had, as it dissipated, deposited a lot of debris. Big George, the draft horse, was found unharmed, not far from the destruction of the Frost farm, placidly munching grass along the bank of the Gilead River.
    When she received the report of what had happened, Mrs. Brickman returned from Saint Paul immediately. She magnanimously