David Joseph Charpentier is the director of St. Labre Indian School’s Alumni Support Program and executive director of the Bridge Foundation. His new book The Boy Who Promised Me Horses, was published by Bison Books in May. For more information about the author, visit davidjcharpentier.com.

“He tried to outrun a train,” Theodore Blindwoman told David Joseph Charpentier the night they found out about Maurice Prairie Chief’s death. When Charpentier was a new teacher at St. Labre Indian School in Ashland, Montana, Prairie Chief was the first student he met and the one with whom he formed the closest bonds.

Told through episodic experiences, the story takes a journey back in time as Charpentier searches for answers to Prairie Chief’s life. As he sits on top of the sledding hill near the cemetery where Prairie Chief is buried, Charpentier finds solace in the memories of their shared (mis)adventures and their mutual respect, hard won through the challenges of educational and cultural mistrust.

The place I went in my mind to put myself back together, to figure out the whys, was a door. But it wasn’t the door where our story began, nor was it the place I felt the most hope, certainly not there. If pressed to give some explanation why this was the first memory to surface, I would say it was desperation—I sensed I was running out of time.

I stood on Maurice’s steps, staring at the door until it blurred. I half turned, my mind and body frantic to flee. But I forced myself to stop, to turn back, to face it again. It was scuffed and dented and pale, as if it had long ago quit on being blue. I knocked lightly and was startled by the sharp pain it caused in my knuckles and the resounding echo it sent into the cool air. I wore school clothes—Dockers, Sears dress shirt, cheap tie—and felt out of place when his mother cracked the door open. In the silence that trailed the groan of unoiled hinges, we stood face to face for the first time.

I had become accustomed to hearing Grandma’s soft voice say “Come in” through the closed door. I never saw Grandma leave the kitchen table. The first time I had knocked when I moved to Ashland seven years earlier, I was unsure whether I heard her voice. On subsequent visits, I would hold still, stop my breathing, and lean my ear to the door to be sure I heard her invite me in.

His mother had taken over the house, moved into it like it was hers, shortly after Grandma’s death last year. She didn’t say a word.

“Is Maurice home?” I asked, not having much room between door and frame to direct my question. I couldn’t tell if it got through.

“He’s out runnin’ ’round,” she finally said.

I tried to decide if I should continue. Although these were the first words we had exchanged in person, I had heard a lot about her and not much of it good. I couldn’t get a clear look at her face kept inside the dark house, but even the few times I had seen her walking around uptown, I couldn’t tell how old Estelle was. She seemed short and frail, her cropped hair sparse and graying, revealing her scalp.

How much has she heard about me? I wondered. And more, What does she think?

“Will you please tell him Dave stopped over?” I asked and turned in one motion.

“I’ll tell him,” I heard, followed by a thud.

I stepped off the crooked wheelchair ramp and began my walk home, following a warped chain-link fence along the street. My house was a block away. We both lived in St. Labre Indian School housing, fondly referred to as “The Village,” a neighborhood of beat-up prefab tract houses within eyesight of the school, inhabited by teachers, workers at the Mission, and tribal members. I stopped at the intersection of St. Joe and Drumm Streets, the place I had first met Maurice on his bike seven years earlier.

“What would I have said to him, anyway, if he’d been home?” I surprised myself by asking aloud.

I glanced around to see if anyone had heard me. But no one was nearby, yards empty, the length of both streets meeting there oddly vacant, leaving me on a concrete stage to continue my soliloquy.

“Remember when your biggest concern was just wondering why he didn’t act like he cared if you came back another year? This is serious now. But you shouldn’t be surprised he dropped out of school. He was failing all his classes, including yours. Dave, you failed him.”

I took two steps toward home. Then I turned and walked and searched for the crack in the concrete marking the exact spot I had met him and placed my feet there. The streetlight flickered and blinked on. I resumed my muttering. “Dave, you’ve got to figure this out, okay? Make a list. What are the things you’ve given up on? Okay, so, I’ve given up the idea of adopting him. Ha! That was silly. All right, and like being a Big Brother. What else? I guess, well, I guess I’ve finally given up the notion that I can change his life. Wait. What? Did I really expect to? I mean, that was giving myself a lot of credit. But I could have. I should have.”

Getting this list out slowed my heartbeat, stopped my ranting out loud. The blue overhead had shifted to slate, and the sun had stumbled below the western ridge, now just a glowing halo outlining a stand of ponderosa pine. I thought of the trees Maurice and I found on the steep hillside above Fourth Pond at Crazy Heads that had been torn from the ground by a violent wind. Many still clutched rocks within their roots. That’s a good idea for a poem, I had thought at the time. What a great metaphor, the protective nature, the resiliency. Although even then, I couldn’t figure out who was holding on. A car turned out of Bishop cul-de-sac, headlights blinding me, and I staggered out of the street.

And yet I hadn’t given up. There was something. I hoped there still might be, still might come a moment that I didn’t miss, which is why I forced myself to go to his house and knock on that hard door and leave a message with the woman who couldn’t care for him when he was a child.

I moved again toward my house. In the short distance, I did a quick summary of what I knew. Years earlier, I was always happy when he showed up at my door and asked me to go fishing. I rarely said no. We would stop at the Office Bar for worms and Green’s Grocery for Mountain Dew and Chips Ahoy! and cruise up the Divide with the windows open and the stereo blasting on our way to Crazy Heads. We would fish for a while at First Pond, then move to the next. He would let the little rainbow trout swallow the hook because he wasn’t paying attention. By the time we left, we had each downed three cans of Mountain Dew and half a bag of chocolate chip cookies. When I brought him home, he would get out of the truck practically before it stopped and slip into his house. No goodbye. No thank-you.

When I left for home in Minnesota in June after my first year of teaching, he didn’t even say “see ya,” which is what they say around the rez instead of “goodbye” (because “goodbye” is too permanent). When I arrived back in Ashland in late August for my second year of teaching, he didn’t give me a quick “Hi, Dave,” much less say he was glad I came back. He just showed up on my steps less than an hour after I arrived, his first words said to me through the screen door. “We should go fishing, huh, Dave?”

As if he hadn’t noticed I’d been gone three months.

Hadn’t wondered if I was coming back at all.