The Marsh King's Daughter, page 10
My mother grew lettuce, carrots, peas, squash, corn, cabbage, and tomatoes. I don’t know why she bothered with tomatoes. Our growing season was so short that by the time the first tomatoes started turning red we had to pick off all the fruits no matter how small and green they were so they didn’t get turned to mush by the first frost. My mother wrapped each tomato individually in paper and spread them over the floor of our root cellar to ripen, where nine out of ten immediately started to rot. Corn was also a lost cause. Raccoons have an almost uncanny ability to time their nighttime raids to when the ears are a day or two away from being ripe, and there’s not a fence in the world that can keep them out.
One summer a groundhog burrowed under the chicken wire and wiped out my mother’s entire carrot crop. The way she carried on, you’d have thought someone died. I knew this meant that we would never again enjoy carrots, but there were other root crops we could eat. For instance, arrowroot tubers. The Indians call arrowroot wapatoo. My father told me the Indian method of harvesting wapatoo is to wade barefoot into the mud and pull the tubers from the connecting roots with your toes. I couldn’t always tell when my father was serious and when he was joking, so I never tried it. We used an old four-tined rake like farmers use for pitching hay. My father would strap on his waders and step out into the deep muck near the shore and drag the rake back and forth. My job was to collect the tubers that floated to the surface. The water was so cold, I could barely stand it, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, my father liked to say. My father taught me to swim when I was a toddler by tying a rope around my waist and tossing me in.
After I learned the truth about my father and mother, I used to wonder why my mother didn’t run away. If she hated living in the marsh as much as she later claimed, why didn’t she leave? She could have walked across the marsh when it was frozen while my father and I were running the snare line. Strapped on my father’s waders and slogged her way out while we were fishing in his canoe. Stolen his canoe and paddled away while we were hunting. I understand she was a child when my father brought her to the cabin, so some of these options might not have occurred to her right away. But she had fourteen years to figure something out.
Now that I’ve read accounts of girls who were kidnapped and held captive, I understand more of the psychological factors that were at work. Something breaks in the mind and the will of a person who’s been stripped of autonomy. As much as we might like to think we’d fight like bobcats if we were in a similar situation, odds are we’d give in. Most likely sooner rather than later. When a person is in a position where the more they fight the worse they’re punished, it doesn’t take them long to learn to do exactly what their captor wants. This is not Stockholm syndrome; psychologists call it learned helplessness. If a kidnapped person believes her captor will withhold punishment or even give her a reward such as a blanket or a scrap of food if she does what he wants, she’ll do it, no matter how disgusting or degrading it might be. If the kidnapper is willing to inflict pain, the process goes a lot faster. After a while, as much as she wants to, the captive won’t even try to escape.
It’s like when you catch a mouse or a shrew and you put it in a metal washtub to see what it will do. At first, it hugs the edges of the tub and runs around and around in a circle looking for a way out. After a few days, it gets used to being in the tub and will even come into the middle for food and water, though that goes against its natural instincts. After a few more days, you can make a way out for it by tying a piece of cloth or a rope to one of the handles and draping both ends over the sides, but the mouse will just keep running in circles because that’s all it knows. Eventually, it dies. Some creatures just don’t do well in captivity. If it wasn’t for me, my mother and I would still be living on that ridge.
One other thing stands out about my mother: she always wore long pants and long sleeves when she was working in her garden. Never the shorts and T-shirts my father bought for her. Not even on the hottest days. So different from the Yanomami mothers.
11
Istand at the top of the ravine looking down. The sides are steep, the vegetation sparse. I can clearly see the body at the bottom. The dead officer—buzz-cut brown hair, ruddy cheeks, sunburned neck—looks to be somewhere in his early forties. Reasonably fit, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds—smack-dab in the middle of the weight range I predicted based on his footprints. His head is turned toward me, eyes open in surprise, like he can’t quite comprehend the enormity of the bullet hole in his back.
I think about the dead prison guards, about their families. About the grief that will consume them long after my father is once again behind bars. I think about this man’s family. How they’re going about their day as if it were normal. How they have no idea that their husband and father and brother is gone. I think about how I’d feel if something happened to Stephen.
I scan the area moving only my eyes, looking for activity at the periphery of my vision that would indicate my father is nearby. But when a jay shrieks from the other side of the ravine and a woodpecker starts drilling, I know my father is gone.
I make my way down the hill. There’s no doubt that the officer is dead, but I roll him over anyway, intending to put two fingers to his neck to confirm. When he flops onto his back, I yank my hand away like I’ve been burned. His shirt has been ripped open. Written in blood on his ruined chest is this: For H.
I shudder, force my breathing to slow. I flash back to the last time my father left a similar message. The Lake Superior agate I found on my bedroom windowsill two years after I left the marsh was a big one, about the size of a baby’s fist: a rich, deep red surrounded by orange and white concentric bands with a cluster of quartz crystals in the center. The kind that would be worth a lot of money after it was cut and polished. When I turned it over, I saw four letters written in black marker on the bottom: For H.
At first I assumed the agate was a prank. By this time I had beaten all of the boys at school who felt compelled to challenge me after the knife incident at my welcome home party, but there were still a handful who couldn’t let it go who had moved on to stupid stuff like putting dead animals in my locker, and some clever guy had once sprayed the words The Marsh King’s Daughter across the front of my grandparents’ house in red paint.
All I did with the agate was put it in a shoe box and put the shoe box under my bed. I didn’t say anything to my mother or my grandparents because I didn’t know what to think. I hoped the agate was from my father, yet I didn’t. I didn’t want to see him, yet I did. I loved my father, but at the same time, I blamed him for my deep unhappiness and for my struggle to fit in. There was so much about the outside world he should have taught me that I didn’t know. What did it matter if I could hunt and fish as well as any man and better than most? To my classmates I was a freak—a know-nothing who thought color television had only recently been invented, had never seen a computer or a cell phone, had no idea that Alaska and Hawaii were now states. I think things would have been different if I had been a blonde. If I had looked like my mother, my grandparents might have loved me. But I was a carbon copy of my father, a daily reminder of what he’d done to their daughter. I thought when I left the marsh that my mother’s parents would be thrilled to get their long-lost daughter back with a bonus. But I was his.
When a second agate appeared on my windowsill tucked inside a sweetgrass basket, I knew the gifts were from my father. My father could make anything out of natural materials: woven baskets, birch-bark boxes decorated with porcupine quills, miniature snowshoes made from willow twigs and rawhide, tiny birch-bark canoes with carved wooden seats and paddles. The mantel above the fireplace at the cabin was lined with his creations. I used to walk its length admiring the things he’d made, hands clasped behind my back because I was allowed to look, but not to touch. My father did most of his craft work during the winter, as there were a lot of empty hours to fill. He tried to teach me more than once, but for some reason when it came to artwork I was all thumbs. A person can’t be good at everything, my father said after I’d mangled yet another attempt at working with porcupine quills—but as far as I could see, that wasn’t true of him.
I knew why my father was leaving me presents. The gifts were his way of telling me that he was close by. That he was watching me, and he would never leave me, even though I’d left him. I knew I shouldn’t keep them. I’d seen enough television cop shows to know that withholding evidence made me an accessory to my father’s crimes. But I liked that this was our secret. My father trusted me to keep quiet. Keeping quiet was something I could do.
The gifts kept coming. Not every day. Not even every week. Sometimes so much time went by between presents, I was sure my father had moved on and forgotten all about me. Then I’d find another. Each went into the box beneath my bed. Whenever I was feeling lonely, I’d take out the box and finger each gift and think about my father.
Then one morning I found a knife. I snatched it off the windowsill before my mother woke up and I hid it in my shoe box. I could hardly believe my father had given this knife to me. My father and I used to sit on my parents’ bed at the cabin with the knife case open between us while he told each knife’s story. This small silver knife shaped like a dagger with the initials G.L.M. etched into the base of the blade was my second favorite, after the knife I chose for myself on my fifth birthday. Whenever I asked my father who G.L.M. was, all he would say was that it was a mystery. I used to make up my own stories. The knife belonged to the man my father murdered. He won it in a bar fight, or in a knife-throwing competition. He stole it when he picked somebody’s pocket. I had no idea if picking pockets was among my father’s many skills, but it served the story.
Later, after my grandmother drove my mother to her therapist and my grandfather finished lunch and went back to his shop, I took out the box and spread my treasures over my bed. Sometimes when I played with my collection I sorted the items into piles according to kind. Other times I arranged them in the order I received them, or from the most-liked to the least, though of course I loved them all. My mother’s appointments normally lasted an hour and sometimes more, so I figured I had forty-five minutes before I had to put them away. I still resisted the idea of carving up a day into hours and minutes, but I could see that there were times when it was useful to know exactly how long a person was going to be gone and when they’d be back.
I was sitting on my bed, pretending my father was sitting beside me at last, telling this knife’s true story, when my mother and grandmother came into the room. They shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on me. All I can think is that I was so caught up in my father’s story, I didn’t hear the car pull in. Later I found out my mother’s therapy session hadn’t gone well, and that’s why they came home early. That part didn’t surprise me. I was supposed to be seeing the same therapist, but I’d stopped going six months before this because the therapist kept pushing me to finish school no matter how miserable I was so I could enroll at Northern Michigan University in Marquette and get a degree in biology or botany and get a job somewhere one day doing field research. I couldn’t see how sitting in a classroom could possibly teach me more about the marsh than I already knew. I didn’t need a book to tell me the difference between a swamp and a marsh and a bog and a fen.
The first thing my grandmother spotted when she came into the room was the knife. She came over to the bed and glared down at me and held out her hand.
“What are you doing with that? Give that to me.”
“It’s mine.” I tossed the knife into the shoe box along with the rest of my things and shoved the box under my bed.
“Did you steal it?”
We both knew I couldn’t have purchased the knife on my own. My grandparents never let me have any money, not even the money people sent after I left the marsh that was supposed to be for me. They said the money had been put into something called a “trust” and that meant they couldn’t touch it. After I turned eighteen, the lawyer I hired to get it for me told me there was no trust and never had been, which went a long way toward explaining the Ford F-350 my grandparents drove, as well as the Lincoln Town Car. I can’t help thinking that if my grandparents had been less concerned about making money from what had happened to my mother and more concerned about helping her get over it, things would have gone a lot better for her.
My grandmother got down on her hands and knees and pulled the box out from under the bed, which wasn’t easy because she was a large woman and her knees were bad. She dumped the contents on my bed and grabbed the knife and started waving it around and yelling like I wasn’t sitting two feet away and couldn’t hear her perfectly well even if she had whispered. I still hate when people yell. Say what you will about my father; he never raised his voice.
The knife was so distinctive, as soon as she saw it, my mother knew right away that it used to belong to my father. She clapped her hand over her mouth and started backing out of the room like the knife was a cobra and it was going to attack her. At least she didn’t scream. My mother still tended to freak whenever anything reminded her of my father or someone said his name, though by this time it had been two years. Maybe her therapist really was helping.
My grandmother took the shoe box to the police. The police found my prints on the knife along with a set that matched the ones they’d taken from the cabin. They still didn’t know my father’s name, but the prints proved he was in the area. The detective promised my grandparents it was only a matter of time before they’d catch my father, and he was right about that. Inquiries about an Indian with a big knife collection led to a remote logging camp north of Tahquamenon Falls, where my father was living with a couple of First Nations men. Back then it wasn’t uncommon for a jobber to hire Indians from Canada to cut the junk wood nobody else wanted. They’d set them up on the job site in a trailer or a camper and bring them gas for their generator and groceries once a week and pay them under the table.
I’ve watched the body cam footage of the FBI raid many times on YouTube. It’s like an episode of Cops or Law & Order starring your very own father, though the uncut version runs a little long. There’s a lot of whispering and odd camera angles as the team sets up behind a log pile and under the skidder and behind the tool trailer and even inside the outhouse because they weren’t taking any chances. Then there’s a long stretch of nothing while they wait for my father and the men he was living with to come back from the day’s cutting. The look on my father’s face as the team swarms out with their weapons drawn, shouting for him to “Get down! Get down!” still makes me laugh. But it goes by so fast, you have to be ready to hit pause or you’ll miss it. I’m sure the jobber was more than a little surprised when he found out he was harboring the top man on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
In theory, my father should have remained a free man forever the first time he was on the run, because back then no one knew who he was. My mother and I always assumed Jacob was his real name, because why would we think otherwise? But that’s all we knew. I always thought the police artist did a decent job of capturing my father’s likeness, but my father must have had one of those faces that looked like a lot of other men’s, because even though you couldn’t turn on the television or pick up a newspaper or drive down the highway without seeing his picture, in the end nothing came of it. You might think my father’s parents would have recognized their son and come forward to identify him, but they must have found it difficult to step up and admit that their child was a kidnapper and a murderer.
People say my father got tired of being on the run and that’s why he reached out to me. I think he got lonely. He missed our life in the marsh. Missed me. Or, I liked to think so.
For a long time, I blamed myself for my father’s capture. My father trusted me, and I let him down. I should have been more careful, hidden the things he gave me in a safer place, fought harder to keep my collection out of the hands of the people who wanted to use it to hurt him.
Later, after I understood the extent of my father’s crimes and their impact on my mother, it didn’t bother me as much that he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, even though I was the one who’d sent him there. I was genuinely sorry that he would never again be allowed to roam the marsh or hunt or fish. But he had his chance to flee the area. He could have gone west to Montana or north into Canada and no one would ever have called him to account. Leaving me the presents that led to his capture was his mistake, not mine.
—
I PULL OUT the officer’s shirttail and wipe away the words my father wrote on his chest, then roll the officer’s body back onto his stomach the way I found him. I realize I’m tampering with a crime scene, but I’m not about to leave the message my father left for me on the dead officer’s chest, considering the police are already looking at me as a possible accomplice. As I climb back up the hill, I feel like I’m going to throw up. My father killed this man because of me. He left the body for me to find the way a cat leaves a dead mouse for its master on the porch.
