The blizzard did not let up until nearly midnight, and by then Kaylee Two Bulls and I had drunk a whole pot of coffee in the church office, with the space heater ticking and the wind howling at the glass. She sat on the edge of the old sofa, twenty three years old, with a picture of her grandmother Mae in her lap and the letter of Frank on her knee. I am Arlene Dahl, seventy six years old, the secretary of Good Shepherd Lutheran for thirty four years. I read the line again aloud. I never told anyone who started it, or why I was there.
I knew my husband, and I knew the hardware store. In the autumn of 1979, Dahl Hardware burned to the foundation on a windy night, and Joseph Two Bulls, the night watchman, was carried out with terrible burns. Frank had paid every hospital bill for Joseph and sent an envelope to the Two Bulls family every month for forty five years. I had always believed it was kindness. Now I understood it had been penance, and that the fire had not been an accident. It had been set by someone, and my husband had known who.
Kaylee opened her backpack and set a small canvas ledger on the desk. “My grandfather kept this,” she said. “Every month you sent, he wrote the amount. And on the last page, he wrote a name. Harold Dahl.” I put my hand over my mouth. Harold was the younger brother of Frank, the charming one, who had sold insurance in Sioux Falls and passed in 2004. The ledger said that Harold had come to the store that night to burn the inventory for the payout, and that Frank had come to stop him, too late.
A letter from a blizzard guest gave one church secretary the length of a long night to bring her son back to the truth in Rapid City.
I gave my terms to my son Craig the next morning, in the church office, with the snow piled against the windows and the plows scraping on Main Street. “Craig, I know that the green Silverado followed that girl from Pine Ridge. I know why. The land you are about to sell, the old Dahl lot on Omaha Street, was bought with the insurance that your uncle Harold collected on a crime. You will stop the sale. You will drive to Pine Ridge with me, and you will sit at the table of Mae Two Bulls, and you will listen.”
Craig stood in the middle of the room in his expensive coat, red faced, melting snow on his boots. “Mom, Dad left me that lot in his will,” he said, in a strangled voice. “I borrowed against it. Two million dollars, from a developer in Denver. When I found the letter in his desk, I knew that if it came out, I would lose everything. I followed her to find out what she knew. I never meant to hurt that girl.” He sank into a chair. “I am so afraid, Mom. I am so afraid of being the man who loses it all.”
But terror makes a man do foolish things. Craig suddenly leaped up, snatched the ledger and the letter from the desk, and ran for the door with both held against his coat, meaning to throw them into the stove of the fellowship hall. He plunged into the corridor. Pastor Nilsen stood outside the sanctuary doors. A big man from the church kitchen, Walt, stepped across the hall. And Kaylee, small and steady in her red parka, stood at the exit with her arms open.
Craig stopped in the long hallway beneath the stained glass window of the Good Shepherd, with the morning sun pouring in violet and gold across his coat and the wind outside still sighing at the glass. Kaylee did not move from her place in front of the door. “Mr. Dahl,” she said, “my grandfather told me before he passed that the man who sent the money was not the man who set the fire. He said somebody would come one day, and he said to be kind.” Craig looked down at the ledger in his hands. His lips trembled. He gave it back to her.
The consequences were careful and complete. Craig canceled the sale, repaid the developer by selling his own lake house, and gave the old Dahl lot to a land trust in the name of Joseph Two Bulls. An investigator confirmed the name of Harold in the old insurance files, and the company, after a letter from our lawyer, paid a settlement of one million, eight hundred thousand dollars to the family. Craig drove with me to Pine Ridge in the snow, and sat at the table of Mae Two Bulls for four hours without once checking his phone.
In the name of my husband Frank, who passed in 2023, I started the Frank Dahl Fund. It pays for heating fuel and winter coats for elders on the reservation and for burn care for families without insurance, in Oglala Lakota, Pennington and Custer counties. In the first year we filled three hundred and twelve fuel tanks and covered the treatment of seventeen burn patients. One was a ninety year old widow in Wanblee who stood at her door, saw the truck, and said, in Lakota, a word I was later told means thank you, grandchild.
On a clear Sunday in March, I sat in the front pew of Good Shepherd Lutheran with Craig on my left and Kaylee on my right, and Mae Two Bulls, ninety years old, in a wheelchair at the end of the row, wrapped in a star quilt. The pastor read from the Psalms, and the choir sang. Mae reached across Craig and took my hand in both of hers, and held it. “Arlene,” she said, in her soft, dry voice, “I have waited a long time to see you.” I wept like a child, right there in the front pew, and I did not care who saw me do it.