The Marsh King's Daughter, page 12
My father laughed. He sat down beside me and pulled me onto his lap. “Open your eyes, Bangii-Agawaateyaa,” he said, using the pet name he had given me, which meant “Little Shadow.” And so I did.
Wonder of wonders, it was not a wendigo that found its way into our sweat lodge. It was a dog. I knew this was a dog because I’d seen pictures in the Geographics. Also because its coat was short and speckled and nothing like the fur of a coyote or a wolf. Its ears hung down, and its tail lashed from side to side as it pushed its nose against my toes.
“Sit,” my father commanded. I wasn’t sure why, as I was already sitting. Then I realized my father was talking to the dog. Not only that, but the dog understood what my father said and obeyed him. The dog plopped down on its haunches and looked up at my father with its head tipped to the side as if to say, All right. I did as I was told. What next?
My mother stretched out her hand and scratched the dog behind its ears. It was the bravest thing I’d ever seen her do. The dog whined and scooted closer to my mother. She stood up and wrapped a towel around her shoulders. “Come,” she said to the dog. The dog trotted after her. I’d never seen anything like it. All I could think was that my mother had somehow stolen a piece of my father’s shaman magic.
My mother wanted the dog to spend the night with us in the cabin. My father laughed and said that animals belonged outside. He tied a rope around the dog’s neck and led it to the woodshed.
Long after my mother and father stopped making the bedsprings squeak, I stood at my bedroom window, looking out over the yard. The moon reflecting off the snow turned the night as bright as day. Through the gaps in the woodshed I could see the dog moving around. I tapped the window with my fingernail. The dog stopped pacing and looked up at me.
I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and tiptoed down the stairs. Outside, the night was cold and still. I sat down on the steps and pulled on my boots, then crossed the yard to the woodshed. The dog was tied to the iron ring in the back. I stood in the doorway and whispered the Indian name my father had given it. The dog’s tail thumped. I thought about my father’s story about how Dog came to the Ojibwa people. How the giant who sheltered the hunters who got lost in the forest gave them his pet Dog to protect them from the wendigo on their return. How Dog allowed the men to pet it, and took food from their hands, and played with their children.
I went inside and sat down on the dried cattail rushes my mother spread on the floor for bedding. I whispered the Indian name my father had given the dog a second time: “Rambo.” Again the dog’s tail thumped. I scooted closer and stretched out my hand. The dog stretched forward as well and sniffed my fingers. I edged closer still and put my hand on its head. If my mother was brave enough to touch the dog, then so was I. The dog wriggled out from beneath my hand. Before I could pull back, its tongue came out and licked my fingers. The tongue was raspy and soft. I put my hand on its head, and the dog licked my face.
When I woke up, daylight poured through the slats in the woodshed. It was so cold, I could see my breath. Rambo curled against me. I pulled up a corner of my blanket and laid the blanket over the sleeping dog. Rambo sighed.
—
IT HURTS ME PHYSICALLY to think about how much I loved that dog. For the rest of that fall and on into the winter until it got too cold, I slept beside Rambo in the woodshed. The sides of the woodshed were slatted and open to the weather, so I made a shelter out of firewood and hung my blankets over the sides and top, similar to the forts Stephen and the girls build with pillows and couch cushions in our living room.
Rambo had been trained to basic commands like “come” and “sit” and “stay,” but I didn’t know this. So as I gradually learned Rambo’s vocabulary, I thought that he was learning mine. Whenever Rambo would break off in the middle of following a rabbit trail or gnawing on a deer antler or worrying a chipmunk and come or sit at my command, I felt as powerful as a shaman.
My father hated my dog. At the time, I couldn’t understand why. Indians and dogs were supposed to be friends. Yet whenever Rambo tried to follow my father, my father would kick him away or yell at him or hit him with a stick. When he wasn’t beating Rambo, all he did was complain about how Rambo was one more mouth to feed. I couldn’t see where this should be a problem. My father said Rambo was a bear dog who got lost during a hunt. Bear season is in August. This was the middle of November, which meant that Rambo had been feeding himself perfectly well for months. I only gave him the food scraps we didn’t want. Why should my father care if Rambo ate the bones and entrails we were only going to throw away?
Now I know that my father hated my dog because my father is a narcissist. A narcissist is only happy as long as the world runs the way he wants it to. My father’s plan for our life in the marsh didn’t include a dog; therefore he couldn’t see a dog as anything but a problem.
I also think he saw Rambo as a threat. He let me keep Rambo initially as a display of generosity, but when in time I grew to love my dog as purely as I loved my father, he was jealous because he thought my affections were divided. But my affections weren’t divided; they were multiplied. My love for my dog didn’t diminish my love for my father. It’s possible to love more than one person. Rambo taught me that.
I think Rambo was the reason why the next spring, my father disappeared. One day he was with us at the cabin, and then he wasn’t. My mother and I had no idea where my father had gone or why he left, but we had no reason to think that this time was any different from the other occasions when he’d disappear for hours or even a day or, every once in a while, overnight, so we held to our regular routine as much as possible. My mother hauled water and kept the fire going while I chopped wood and checked the snare line. Most of the time the snares came up empty. Rabbits breed in the spring, so they spend most of their time in their nests and are harder to catch. I would have tried to shoot a deer, except that my father had taken the rifle. Mostly we ate the vegetables that were left in the root cellar. I thought many times about using my father’s ax to chop down the door to the storage room so we could get at the supplies. But then I thought about what he would do to me when he came back and saw it, so I didn’t. When Rambo dug up a nest of rabbits to get at the babies, we ate those, too.
And then two weeks later, as abruptly as he’d disappeared, my father returned, whistling as he strode up the ridge with his rifle over his shoulder and a marsh marigold poking out of his gunnysack as if he had never left. He had a bag of salt for my mother and a Lake Superior agate that was almost identical to the one he wore: a gift for me. He never said where he had been or what he had been doing, and we didn’t ask. We were just glad he came back.
In the weeks that followed, we went about our chores as if nothing had changed. But it had. Because for the first time in my life, I could imagine a world without my father.
13
I’m driving down the road, head swiveling like a barn owl’s as I watch for signs of my father. I don’t know what I’m looking for. Certainly I don’t expect to come around a bend and see my father standing in the middle of the road waving for me to stop. I guess I’ll know it when I see it.
Rambo’s leash is tied to the grab handle above the passenger door. I generally don’t tie him up when he rides with me in the truck, but Rambo is as antsy as I feel, nose twitching, muscles trembling. Every once in a while, he lifts his head and whines like he’s caught a whiff of my father. Every time he does this my hands clench and my stomach gets tight.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Stephen as I drive. About our argument last night. About how he came back this morning. How he wants to support me in spite of everything I’ve done to him. I think about the roles we play in our relationship, me as protector and Stephen as nurturer, and how I used to think this was a problem.
And of course I think about the day we met at the blueberry festival, a day I’m sure the gods arranged. After I set out my jars and hung my sign off the front of my table, I watched Stephen set up his tent directly across from mine. To be honest, I was more impressed with his display than I was with his photos. I understand that lighthouse pictures are popular with tourists because, with more than three thousand miles of coastline, Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state, but still it’s hard for me to see why anyone would want to hang a picture of one on their wall.
I never would have gone into his tent except that when I left my table to use a porta-john and walked past, I happened to look inside and see a photograph of a bear. I’ve seen a lot of bear pictures and postcards in the souvenir shops when I make my rounds, but there was something about this bear that grabbed my attention. Whether it was the lighting when he took the photo or the angle he chose is hard to say. All I know is that there was something about the glint in the bear’s eye and the set of its jaw that caught my eye.
I stopped. Stephen smiled, and I went inside. On the opposite side of the wire framework on which he’d hung his lighthouse photos were the pictures that captured my heart: herons and bitterns, eagles and minks, otters and beavers and martins. All animals from my childhood, all photographed in such a way as to show off their unique characteristics and personalities, as if Stephen could see into their souls. I bought the bear photo, Stephen bought all my remaining jam and jelly, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I know what I saw in Stephen. I’m still not sure what he saw in me, but I try not to think about it too much. Stephen is the only person on the face of the Earth who chose me. Who loves me not because he has to, but because he wants to. My gift from the universe for surviving my past.
I think again about all of the years and all of the chances I had to come clean about who I am but didn’t. The sacrifices I made to keep my secret. Staying away from my father. Wanting to introduce the newborn Iris to my mother but not being able to. The times when I said or did something outside the norm and Stephen looked at me as if I’d lost my mind and I wasn’t able to offer an explanation. Things would have been a lot easier if I’d told the truth.
—
TEN MINUTES LATER, I pull over and park. Rambo puts his paws on the window ledge and presses his nose against the glass like he thinks I’m going to let him out, but this time, it’s me who has to go. I walk a short way into the underbrush and unzip my jeans. There’s hardly any traffic on this road, but you never know. My father and I never worried about privacy when we were hunting or fishing and needed to answer nature’s call, but out here people are a lot more sensitive.
I’m almost finished when Rambo barks the sharp staccato warning that means he’s spotted something. I zip my jeans and grab the Magnum and drop to my belly with the gun in both hands in front of me and peer through the underbrush.
Nothing. I belly-crawl using the wind as cover to a spot where I can see the truck from another angle, thinking there’ll be a pair of legs crouched on the other side, but everything is quiet. I count slowly to twenty, and when nothing changes, I stand up. Rambo sees me and starts barking and scratching to get out. I walk over to the truck and crack the passenger door enough to slip my hand through, then grab him by his collar and untie his leash from the grab handle. If I let Rambo have his way in this condition, I won’t see him again for days. Maybe never. There’s a reason the first Rambo showed up on our ridge.
As soon as he hits the ground, Rambo drags me over to a stump not twenty feet from where I was occupied, barking and running circles around it like he’s treed a squirrel or a raccoon. Only there is no squirrel. Instead, in the exact middle of the stump is a Lake Superior agate.
14
THE CABIN
The wife of the Viking lived in constant pain and sorrow about the child. Her heart clung to the little creature, but she could not explain to her husband the circumstances in which it was placed. If she were to tell him, he would very likely, as was the custom at that time, expose the poor child in the public highway, and let anyone take it away who would.
The good wife of the Viking could not let that happen, and she therefore resolved that the Viking should never see the child excepting by daylight. After a while, the foster-mother began to love the poor frog, with its gentle eyes and its deep sighs, even better than the little beauty who bit and fought with all around her.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
My childhood came to an end the day my father tried to drown my mother. It was my fault. The incident began innocently enough, and while the outcome wasn’t anything I could have foreseen, I can’t change the facts. It’s not the sort of thing you get over quickly. To this day whenever the radio plays that song about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, or I hear a news report about a ferry tipping over or a cruise ship capsizing or a mother pushing a car full of toddlers into a lake, it makes me want to throw up.
“I saw a patch of strawberries on the next ridge,” I told my mother one late June morning. It was the summer I was eleven, after she had complained that the berries I’d picked for her on our ridge weren’t going to be nearly enough to make the quantity of jam she wanted.
The thing you need to know in order to understand what happened next is that when I told my mother I’d seen a patch of strawberries growing on “the next ridge,” she knew exactly which ridge I was talking about. White people tend to name geographic features for themselves, or for other important people, but we followed the Native tradition and named our surroundings according to how we used them, or for their proximity to our own. The next ridge. The cedars where the deer like to gather. The bog where the arrowroot grows. The place where Jacob shot the eagle. The rock where Helena cut her head. Like the Ojibwa word for the Tahquamenon River, Adikamegong-ziibi, “river where the whitefish are found.” I still think the Native way makes more sense.
“Will you pick them for me?” my mother asked. “If I stop stirring now, this batch won’t set.”
And this is why my mother’s near-drowning was my fault: I wanted to say yes. There was nothing I loved better than taking out my father’s canoe, except possibly deer hunting or beaver trapping. Normally I would have jumped at the chance. In hindsight I wish I had. But at eleven I was just getting to that age where I was driven much of the time by the need to assert myself. So I shook my head. “I’m going fishing.”
My mother looked at me for a long time, like there was more she wanted to say but couldn’t. At last she sighed and moved the pot to the back of the stove. She picked up one of the willow twig baskets my father had woven the previous winter and went outside.
As soon as the screen door banged behind her, I drizzled some of the hot strawberry syrup over a plateful of yesterday’s biscuits, poured myself a cup of chicory, and carried my breakfast to the back porch. The day was already warm. In the U.P., winter lasts forever and the spring drags on and on until, suddenly, you wake up one morning in the middle of June—and just like that, it’s summer. I unbuckled my overall straps and took off my shirt, then rolled up my pant legs as high as they would go. I seriously considered using my knife to cut off the legs and make the overalls into shorts, but this was the biggest pair of overalls I owned, and I was going to need those pant legs next winter.
I had almost finished eating and was about to go back into the kitchen to sneak a second helping when my father came over the side of the hill with a water bucket in each hand. He set the buckets on the porch and sat down beside me. I gave him the last biscuit, tossed what was left of my chicory into the dirt, and dipped my cup into one of the buckets. The water was cool and clear. Sometimes mosquito larvae got scooped up with the water. We’d find them swimming in our buckets, twisting and turning in on themselves like fish on dry land. When that happened we dipped our cups around them or flicked them out with a finger. We probably should have boiled the water before we drank it, but you try passing up a nice, cool drink of marsh water on a hot summer day. Anyway, we were never sick. After we left the marsh, my mother and I spent the next two years coughing and sneezing. That was one benefit of our isolation that people never think about: no germs. I always think it’s funny when people say they caught a cold because they went outside without a hat or a jacket. According to that logic, you should catch a fever in the summer if you get too hot.
“Where’s your mother going?” My father’s voice was thick with biscuit and syrup as he chewed. I wanted to ask why he was allowed to talk with his mouth full while my mother and I couldn’t, but I didn’t want to spoil the mood. There wasn’t a lot of physical contact in my family, and I liked sitting next to my father on the top step with our hips and knees pressed together like Siamese twins.
“To pick strawberries,” I told him proudly, pleased that thanks to me, this year we would have plenty of strawberry jam. “I found a patch on the next ridge.”
By this time my mother was almost to the woodlot. Our woodlot was on the low end of our ridge. At the bottom of the woodlot was the V-shaped depression where my father kept his canoe.
My father’s eyes narrowed. He jumped off the porch and took off running down the hill. I’d never seen him move so fast. I still had no idea what was about to happen, why my mother’s taking the canoe could possibly be a problem. I honestly thought my father only wanted to go with her to help, though he always said that picking berries was a job for women and children.
He caught up to her as she was pushing off and splashed into the water. But instead of getting into the canoe as I expected, he grabbed my mother by the hair, yanked her out of the canoe, and dragged her screaming all the way up the hill to our back porch, where he jammed her head into one of the water buckets and held it there while she flailed and clawed. When she went limp, I thought she was dead. The look on her face when he pulled her head out—hair dripping, eyes wild as she choked and coughed and sputtered—said she’d thought so, too.
