Prudence
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: June 13, 2017 6:26 PM | Last Updated: July 12, 2017
David Treuer
On a sweltering day in August 1942, Frankie Washburn returns to his family's rustic Minnesota resort for one last visit before he joins the war as a bombardier, headed for the darkened skies over Europe. Awaiting him are his hovering mother, his distant father, the Indian caretaker who's been more of a father to him than his own, and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate. But before the homecoming can be celebrated, the search for a German soldier, escaped from the POW camp across the river, explodes in a shocking act of violence, with consequences that will reverberate years into the future for all of them and that will shape how each of them makes sense of their lives. (From Penguin Publishing Group)
From the book
Everyone remembers that day in August 1951 when the Jew arrived on the reservation.
In later years the Indians would sometimes wonder idly at the strange fact of his arrival, and his departure on the first train to Minneapolis the next morning. But the Jew was forgotten that day, until then a day like any other; hot and muggy and filled mostly with the thrum of wind-plucked power lines and the crack of grasshoppers lifting out of the sand and spent grass. The Jew stepped off the train and into the thoughts of the villagers, and he exited the station and their minds just as quickly, because an hour or two after the train groaned to a stop, one of the hotel maids found Prudence's body in the room above the Wigwam Bar. And then there was that. Her poor young body arched and twisted and frozen in the August heat. And Prudence's baby, too, whom no one saw alive, not even Prudence, in its little cathedral of blood. And there was that, too.
Not long after the maid found her, the sheriff had come. After him the coroner. Then Felix and Billy, separately. Soon, everyone in the village, Indian and white and in between, had gathered outside the hotel, and in front of the hardware store, and the grocer's, on the platform that served the depot, and in the Wigwam itself. Since the village didn't consist of more than those small stores and the hundred or so Indians and loggers whose houses clustered around the railroad tracks, the gathering didn't look like much.
From Prudence by David Treuer ©2016. Published by Penguin Publishing Group.