Chapter Text
EPILOGUE
Even though Joe wanted Rosalee to marry him, he hadn't expected to like marriage. It was simply the right thing to do, a responsibility to be shouldered and, well, lust. He was surprised to find that he loved being married, and not just at bedtime. In the summer when it was hot and Rosalee didn't want to heat up the house, she'd cook over a campfire outdoors and they'd eat in the shade of a brush arbor that he built. Winter evenings were spent around the coal stove in the parlor while Rosalee read aloud, or Joe read while she sewed. Playing checkers with Junior, and teaching him to hunt in the river bottom land. Eating Rosalee's Dutch pancakes. Watching her take down her hair before bed. Laughter.
Thinking back on his boyhood home, with its slammed doors and stony silences, and the trips to the woodshed for whippings (though he became adept at avoiding those), it was strange to think that this was the same house. Joe appreciated the peace in their home. Not that Rosalee was a doormat — no sir. When Joe broached separate beds and his reason for wanting them she flat-out refused. "Joe Blocker, I think I know enough not to shake you awake when you’re having a nightmare!" she said. "If it's a bad one I'll get out of bed and throw a pillow at you from across the room," and that was that.
As Rosalee feared, Junior was tormented by the boys at school. Joe didn’t trust himself to deal with the teacher and he was afraid of losing his temper with the boys who were bullying Junior, so he agreed to Rosalee withdrawing the boy from school and teaching him at home.
In spite of Joe's misgivings, he and Rosalee considered Indian boarding school for their son. Their reasoning was that the boy lived in an all-white world and they could sometimes see loneliness in his eyes. It didn't seem fair, him being so cut off from his kind, and they wanted to explore alternatives. They made the short trip to Pipestone to investigate the school, which was close enough that perhaps Junior could come home weekends.
They were shown around by the school administrator, who was plainly proud of the work he was doing and flattered that a white couple was considering his school for their adopted son. Rosalee and Joe were appalled at the sight of Indian children whose long hair had been shorn, wearing what amounted to shabby uniforms. While the administrator bragged about training the boys to do farm work and the girls to work as domestic servants, Joe lost his temper. He shouted to the children in Cheyenne, "Are you here against your will? Do you want to leave?" Poker-faced as Indian children tend to be, they didn’t say a word, but he could see the burning eyes of some of them. Joe repeated the words in Lakota, knowing that the Dakota children could understand that language. Again, there was no response, but the children fairly vibrated with tension. The administrator said curtly, "Stop that right now! We discourage the children from speaking their language so they can adapt to the white world. In fact, I’ll ask you to leave immediately.” He looked at Little Bear with avid eyes. "You can leave the boy if you like.”
"Not on your tintype!” snarled Joe. Rosalee swept from the room, head high and her arm firmly around their son’s shoulders. Joe followed them, but at the doorway, he turned back and said with icy contempt, "You'll never force them into your mold—their spirits are too large. You can only break them." He had a brief vision of staging a jailbreak, freeing the children, then suppressed it. He left before he could clout the fellow. He would be no use to his family in jail.
The ostracism that Rosalee had foreseen didn't only happen at Junior’s school. Neither the church Beth and Ben attended nor the Indian church on the Lower Sioux Reservation panned out for them. At Beth and Ben's church they weren't exactly cut dead, but more than a few of the older parishioners remembered the Sioux Uprising and couldn't seem to meet their eyes.
Joe had high hopes for St. Cornelia's, a church that had been built for the Dakota congregation returning after years of exile following the Uprising. The minister was a good man, and the congregants were the Blockers’ neighbors, living across the Minnesota River just south of their farm. If Little Bear was to have any doings with his people, there was where he’d find it.
Joe warned Rosalee to expect standoffishness and she was not disappointed. She thought that with what Junior endured in school, the catcalls, hair-pulling, and beatings on the playground, she could surely put up with a snub or two. Who could blame them? What she wasn’t prepared for were the coolly polite greetings after their introduction by the minister, and then nothing. It was as though she ceased to exist. They treated Joe the same, and Joe Junior was looked upon with pity, but he was not gathered in and made one of them.
It seemed that their family was destined not to fit in in either world, and she took Joe’s words to heart: Stick with those who accepted them. They had Beth and Ben’s family, their fine son, and their daughters, Grace and Mercy. It had to be enough.
It was enough.