The Marsh King's Daughter, page 11
For H. The words are gone, but the message is burned into my brain. My father’s ability to manipulate any situation to his advantage is almost beyond comprehension. Not only did he anticipate that I would come looking for him along this road, when he saw the cop car and concluded correctly that the driver was a lone searcher who had the right instincts at the wrong time, he drew him out and led him into the ravine for the sole purpose of staging this scene for me to find. I picture him darting across the road in front of the patrol car, letting the officer get a glimpse of the man everyone is seeking so he’d pull over and park. Maybe he stumbled so the officer would think he was wounded and therefore not a threat, then staggered like he was at the limit of his endurance as he led the officer into the bush, letting the man’s head swell with visions of the acclaim he would get for capturing the prisoner single-handedly before my father circled around and shot the officer in the back.
I wonder what else my father has in store for me.
Back at the road, I go straight to my truck. I open the passenger door and slip my hand inside and clip on Rambo’s leash. He whines and pulls. He smells the blood in the air, feels the tension coming off of me. I let him lead me to the bottom of the ravine to get a snoutful of my father’s scent and start back up the hill. I should call in the murder. Let the authorities take up the search for my father while I go home to my husband. But the message my father left on the man he murdered is for me.
I think about my mother, gone and forgotten by most. I think about my daughters. I think about my husband, alone and waiting for me. The killing has to stop. I will find my father. I will capture him. I will return him to prison and make him pay for everything he’s done.
12
THE CABIN
She was, indeed, wild and savage even in those hard, uncultivated times. They had named her Helga, which was rather too soft a name for a child with a temper like hers, although her form was still beautiful.
It was a pleasure to her to splash about with her white hands in the warm blood of the horse which had been slain for sacrifice. In one of her wild moods she bit off the head of the black cock which the priest was about to slay.
To her foster-father she said one day, “If thine enemy were to pull down thine house about thy ears, and thou shouldest be sleeping in unconscious security, I would not wake thee; even if I had the power I would never do it, for my ears still tingle with the blow that thou gavest me years ago. I have never forgotten it.”
But the Viking treated her words as a joke; he was, like everyone else, bewitched with her beauty, and knew nothing of the change in the form and temper of Helga at night.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
I was eight the first time I saw my father’s sadistic side. At the time I didn’t understand that what he did to me was wrong, or that normal fathers don’t treat their offspring the way my father sometimes treated me. I don’t like making my father out to be worse than people already think he is. But I’m trying to be honest in telling about how things were for me when I was growing up, and that has to include both the good parts and the bad.
My father claimed he chose to live in the marsh because he killed a man. He was never accused, and his involvement in the death of the mentally challenged man whose badly decomposed body was found in an empty cabin north of Hulbert, Michigan, was never proven. Sometimes when he told the story, he said he beat the man to death. Other times he said he slit the man’s throat because he didn’t like the way the man drooled and stuttered. Most of the time he was alone when the murder occurred, but in one version his younger brother helped him get rid of the body—even though I later learned my father was an only child. It’s hard to know if anything my father said about the murder was true, or if the tale was just something he made up to pass the time on a long winter’s evening. My father told a lot of stories.
My father saved his best stories for our madoodiswan, our sweat lodge. My mother called the sweat lodge a sauna. My father tore down our front porch the summer I was eight to build it. We didn’t need both a front and a back porch, my father said, and while the cabin looked odd without it, I had to agree.
My father built our sweat lodge because he was tired of bathing standing up. Also because while I could still sit down in the blue enamel washtub I’d been using since I was a baby, it wouldn’t be long before I would have to do the same. My mother never took baths, so her needs didn’t matter. (My mother never took off her clothes in front of my father and me and only wiped herself down with a wet cloth when she needed cleaning, though I saw her swimming in the marsh in her underwear when she thought no one was around.)
This was around late August or early September. I can’t be more specific than that because I didn’t always keep track. Late summer is a good time to tackle an outdoor construction project because the weather is still warm but most of the bugs are gone. My mother was one of those people bugs seemed attracted to. Often she was so covered with bites, she wept with frustration. I’ve read about pioneers in Siberia and Alaska being driven mad by mosquitoes, but generally speaking mosquitoes don’t bother me. Blackflies are a lot worse. Blackflies like to go for the back of your neck or behind your ears, and their bites stay itchy and sore for weeks. A single bite near the corner of your eye can make your whole eyelid swell shut. You can imagine what happens when you get two. Sometimes when we were cutting firewood in the woodlot during June, the blackflies would be so thick, we couldn’t take a breath without swallowing a few. My father used to joke that this only meant we were getting extra protein, but I didn’t like it, even if there was now one less fly to bite me. Horseflies take out a chunk. Deerflies will bite if you let them, but they’re so predictable as they buzz around your head that if you time it right you can clap your hands together when they pass in front of your face, and that’s that. No-see-ums are as tiny as the period at the end of a sentence, but with a bite all out of proportion to their size. If you’re sleeping in a tent and something keeps biting you that feels like a mosquito but you can’t see anything, that will be no-see-ums. There’s nothing you can do against them except burrow into your sleeping bag and pull the covers over your head and stay like that until the morning. People worry about the chemicals in insect repellent causing cancer, but if we’d had bug spray when we lived in the marsh, you can bet we would have used it.
Our sweat lodge was a family project. Picture a hot day with all of us pitching in and doing our part. Sweat rolled down my father’s back and dripped off the end of my nose as we worked. When I lent him the handkerchief I kept in my back pocket to wipe his face and neck, my father joked that it was such a good lodge, it was already making us sweat. My mother sorted and stacked the lumber: floorboards in one pile, floor joists in another, support beams in a third. The joists and beams would become the corner posts and uprights of our sweat lodge, while the floorboards would cover the sides. The porch roof my father took down in one piece. We only needed half, but my father explained that we could stack the firewood for our sweat lodge under the parts that stuck out to protect it from the weather. Our madoodiswan would have a bench along the back wall where we could sit and a circle of stones from the porch’s foundation where my father would build the fire. We burned maple and beech in our kitchen stove, but in the sweat lodge we would burn cedar and pine because we needed a hot, quick fire. It was hard for me to see how sitting in a tiny hot room would make us clean, but if my father said this was how the sweat lodge worked, I believed him.
My job was to straighten the nails he pulled. I liked the way the nails screeched before they let go, like an animal caught in a trap. I balanced the nails on a flat stone with the kinked side pointing up the way my father showed me and tap-tap-tapped with a hammer until the nails were as straight as I could make them. I especially liked the nails with square sides. My father said these nails were made by hand, and this meant our cabin was very old. I wondered how the other nails were made.
I wondered about the people who built our cabin. What would they think if they could see us tearing part of it down? Why did they build the cabin on this ridge instead of the one where the deer liked to gather? Why did they build the cabin with two porches instead of one? I thought I knew some of the answers. I thought they built our cabin with two porches so they could sit on the front porch and watch the sun come up and then sit on the back porch and watch the sun go down. And I thought the reason they built here instead of the ridge with the deer was so the deer would feel safe until the people who built our cabin were ready to hike over and shoot one.
Lately I’d been wondering about a lot of things. Where did my father get the blue pry bar he used to pull nails? Did he bring it with him, or was it already at the cabin? Why didn’t I have brothers and sisters? How would we cut firewood when my father ran out of gas for his chain saw? Why didn’t our cabin have a stove like the pictures in the Geographics? My mother said her family had a big white stove with four burners on top and an oven for baking when she was little, so why didn’t we? Most of the time I kept my wonderings to myself. My father didn’t like it when I asked too many questions.
My father told me to whack the nails with the hammer instead of tapping them to make the job go faster. Not that we were in a hurry, but he would like to use the madoodiswan this winter and not have to wait until the next. He smiled when he said this so I knew he was joking. I also knew he really did want me to work faster, so I swung the hammer harder. I wondered if I could straighten a nail with a single blow. I sorted through the pile looking for a nail that was only slightly bent.
Later, I wondered what made me miss the nail so badly. It’s possible I glanced away when a squirrel dropped a pinecone. Or I could have been distracted by a red-winged blackbird calling. Possibly I blinked when the wind blew a bit of sawdust into my eye. Whatever the reason, when the hammer smashed my thumb, I yelped so loudly, both my father and mother came running. In seconds my thumb turned fat and purple. My father poked my thumb and turned it this way and that and said it wasn’t broken. My mother went into the cabin and came out with a strip of cloth and tied it around my thumb. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to do.
I spent the rest of the afternoon on the big rock in our backyard paging one-handed through the Geographics. When the sun sat like an orange ball on top of the marsh grass, my mother went inside to dish up the rabbit stew I’d been smelling for hours. She called out that supper was ready, and my father put down his tools and quiet settled over the marsh once again.
There were three chairs at our kitchen table. I wondered if the people who built our cabin were also a family of three. No one said anything while we ate because my father didn’t like it when we talked with our mouths full.
When my father finished eating, he pushed back his chair and came around the table to stand beside me. “Let me see your thumb.”
I laid my hand on the table with my fingers spread.
He untied the strip of cloth. “Hurts?”
I nodded. In truth, my thumb didn’t hurt anymore unless I touched it, but I liked being the center of my father’s attention.
“It’s not broken, but it could have been. You understand that, don’t you, Helena?”
I nodded again.
“You have to be more careful. You know there’s no room in the marsh for mistakes.”
I nodded a third time and tried to make my expression as serious as his. My father had told me many times to be careful. If I hurt myself, I’d just have to deal with the consequences, because we weren’t going to leave the marsh no matter what. “I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice, because now I really was. I hated when my father was unhappy with me.
“Saying sorry isn’t enough. Accidents always have consequences. I’m not sure how I can teach you to remember that.”
My stomach got hard when he said this, like I’d swallowed a stone. I hoped I wouldn’t have to spend another night in the well. Before I could tell my father that I was truly, truly sorry, and I would remember to be more careful, and I would never hit my thumb with a hammer ever, ever again, he balled his hand into a fist and smashed it down on my thumb. The room exploded with stars. White-hot pain shot up my arm.
I woke up on the floor. My father was kneeling beside me. He picked me up and sat me down in my chair and handed me my spoon. My hand shook as I took it. My thumb hurt worse than when I smashed it with the hammer. I blinked back tears. My father didn’t like it when I cried.
“Eat.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. I dipped my spoon into my bowl and took a bite. The stew stayed down. My father patted my head. “Again.” I took another bite, and another. My father stood beside me until all of my stew was gone.
I understand now that what my father did was wrong. Still, I don’t think my father wanted to hurt me. He only did what he believed he had to do to teach me a lesson I needed to learn.
What I didn’t understand until much later was how my mother could watch the whole episode from across the table, as small and useless as the rabbit she had served for dinner, without lifting a finger to help me. It was a long time before I could forgive her for that.
—
IN OUR NEW SWEAT LODGE that winter, my father told a story. I was sitting between my father and mother on the narrow bench. My mother was wearing her Hello Kitty T-shirt and underpants. Except for the polished Lake Superior agate my father wore constantly on a leather thong around his neck, my father and I were properly naked. I liked when my father took off his clothes because then I could see all of his tattoos. My father tattooed himself the Indian way, using fish-bone needles and soot. My father had promised that when I was nine, he’d start tattooing me.
“One winter, a newly married couple moved with their entire village to new hunting grounds,” my father’s story began. I snuggled closer. I knew this would be a scary story. Scary stories were the only kind my father told. “There they had a child. One day as they were gazing at their son in his cradleboard, the child spoke. ‘Where is that Manitou?’ the baby asked.”
My father paused his story and looked at me.
“Manitou is the Sky Spirit,” I answered.
“Very good,” he said, and continued. “‘They say he is very powerful,’ the baby said. ‘Someday I am going to visit him.’ ‘Hush,’ said the baby’s mother. ‘You must not talk like that.’ After that, the couple fell asleep with the baby in his cradleboard between them. In the middle of the night, the mother discovered that her baby was gone. She woke her husband. The husband made a fire, and the couple looked all over the wigwam, but they couldn’t find their baby. They searched the neighbor’s wigwam as well, then lit birch-bark torches and searched the snow for tracks. At last they found a row of tiny tracks leading to the lake. They followed the tracks until they found the cradleboard. The tracks leading from the cradle to the lake were far bigger than human feet would make. The horrified parents realized their child had turned into a wendigo, the terrible ice monster who eats people.”
My father dipped a cup into the water bucket and drizzled the water slowly over the tin plate balanced on top of the fire. The drops sizzled and danced. Steam filled the room. Water ran down my face and dripped off my chin.
“Sometime later, a wendigo attacked the village,” my father’s story continued. “The wendigo was very thin and terrible. It smelled of death and decay. Its bones pushed against its skin, and its skin was gray like death. Its lips were tattered and bloody, and its eyes sat deep in their sockets. This wendigo was very large. A wendigo is never satisfied after killing and eating. He searches constantly for new victims. Every time he eats another person, he grows bigger, so he can never be full.”
From outside there came a noise. Scritch-scritch, scritch-scritch. It sounded like a branch brushing against the side of the sweat lodge, except that our madoodiswan sat in the middle of our clearing and there were no branches close enough to touch. My father cocked his head. We waited. The sound didn’t come again.
He leaned forward. The glow from the fire threw the top of his face into shadow as it lit his chin from below.
“As the wendigo approached the village, the little people who protect the manitou ran out to meet it. One threw a rock at the wendigo. The rock became a bolt of lightning that struck the wendigo in the forehead. The wendigo fell down dead with a noise like that of a big tree falling. As the wendigo lay in the snow, he looked like a big Indian. But when the people started to chop him up, they saw that he was really a huge block of ice. They melted the pieces and found in the middle a tiny infant with a hole in his head where the rock had hit him. This was the baby who had turned into a wendigo. If the manidog hadn’t killed it, the wendigo would have eaten up the entire village.”
I shivered. In the flickering firelight I saw the baby with the hole in its forehead, its parents weeping over the terrible fate that befell their too-curious child. Water dripped through the cracks in the roof and drew an icy path down my neck.
From outside the noise came again. Scritch scritch scritch. I heard breathing—uh, uh, uh—as if whatever was outside had arrived on our ridge after a long run. My father stood up. His head almost touched the ceiling. His fire-shadow was even bigger. Surely my shaman of a father was a match for whatever was outside. He stepped around the fire pit and opened the door. I shut my eyes and shrank back against my mother as the cold rushed in.
“Open your eyes, Helena,” my father commanded in a terrible voice. “See! Here is your wendigo!”
I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and drew my feet up onto the bench. The wendigo was in the room—I could feel it. I heard the wendigo panting. Smelled its horrible, foul breath. Something cold and wet touched my foot. I shrieked.
